“We are alive…. We are alive…. We are alive.”
 
This was the first thing we heard when we arrived at the Water Protectors camp established by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and inhabited by representatives of over 100 Tribal nations. It was sung, in Lakota, by all who knew it at the invitation of a Lakota elder.
 
I had come as a UCC clergyperson with three other non-Native people to be “witnesses and interpreters” at the behest of Rev. Marlene Helgamo, pastor of All Nations Indian Church and Director of the Council on American Indian Ministries in the United Church of Christ to help protect the water....

To read my whole blog, visit: ​http://auburnseminary.org/protecting-the-water-at-standing-rock/

We know that justice work is sacred work. And building intersectional movements for justice that take seriously racial, LGBTQ, economic, climate and food justice all at once is critically important.

But we cannot build justice movements that are populated with broken bodies, traumatized bodies, exhausted bodies. We must find a way to heal, build resiliency and practice new habits… personally, communally and as an earth-body.

The Center for Sustainable Justice will host its first conference this fall featuring skills-building, deep reflection, celebration and ethical spectacle to help us all learn to work religiously for justice. Co-sponsors are the Kaleo Center for Faith, Justice and Social Transformation and Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light.

Presenters include: Lisa Anderson from the Sojourner Truth Healing Circle through Auburn Seminary; Steve Newcom from Kaleo Center for Faith, Justice and Social Transformation; Erin Pratt from Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light; Lena Katherine Gardner from Black Lives Matter Minneapolis and more to come.

Scholarships available upon request. Contact: sustainjustice@gmail.com. Please note that building is fully accessible and gender-neutral bathrooms are available.

WHEN
Friday, September 23, 2016 at 6:30 PM - Saturday, September 24, 2016 at 8:00 PM (CDT) -Add to Calendar

​WHERE
SpringHouse Ministry Center - 610 West 28th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408 - View Map

Register NOW:  ​https://www.eventbrite.com/e/healing-justice-building-a-religious-movement-for-justice-tickets-26306482397

The intersection of sexuality and spirituality is deeply sacred in my life. For many years, I have read, asked questions, danced, played sports, sung, worshiped-- all in exploration of the weaving of sexuality and spirituality. At the beginning of April a dozen of us spent a long weekend sharing this exploration together. This blog post shares some of our ponderings, experiences and joys: ​Sacred Intersextions
​

This past Sunday, in honor of Earth Week, our daughter was asked to preach on why she was a vegetarian. As is so often the case, her words, the way she chose to share them and the wisdom contained, have taught us much. I share them as we, collectively, seek to be better connected to all of Life.

I was born a vegetarian. But sometimes I wonder, “Why do I stay a vegetarian?” I see cookbooks, chicken looks good. I hear my friends saying, “Bacon is so delicious.” But why do I stay a vegetarian? Well, I think for me, it has something to do with the Circle of Life. Because humans, sometimes we get a little too big for our britches and we think we’re smarter than everything else and we overbreed animals we kill for food and we poach the animals that usually would be predators so that the Circle of Life is chopped up and uneven.
 
I feel like being a vegetarian helps because I am not really part of making the Circle of Life uneven. But just because I don’t eat meat, it doesn’t make me automatically not part of making the Circle of Life uneven. But I do believe it also has something to do with the way I live. My moms buy cage-free eggs and we try to grow our own organic food so we help reduce all the shipping fumes and stuff.
 
And I found a story that goes with the theme of the Circle of Life because it tells about how long, long ago, all animals could walk around and talk like humans. I think this story has to do with how God created us all connected to each other in a Circle that never ends.
 
I want to share the story with you now:
 
Long, long ago, the animals and trees could walk around and talk to each other just like we can… Now, gray squirrel was very ungainly and not the sharpest knife in the drawer. One day, she came to be sad about this. She came to sit down undernearth the Cedar Tree. She sighed and said to herself, “I am not good at anything.” The Cedar Tree said, “Why don’t you try to make a basket? Go fetch bear grass and bark and some of my roots.” Gray squirrel went and fetched these things. “Now weave these things together and make a basket,” said Cedar Tree and gray squirrel did it.
 
“Now, go the river and dip the basket into the water. If it holds the water, you’ve made a fine basket.” Gray Squirrel did this but the water rushed through the basket and she started crying.
 
Cedar Tree said, “Go out and ask the animals for ideas, for designs, for materials.” And so Gray Squirrel went out into the world as Cedar Tree had said.
 
Rattle snake gave her the pattern off his back. Peacock gave her the pattern of his tail. Stream gave her the pattern of her waves. Quail gave her the pattern of her footprints. Soon Squirrel had made a basket of all these different designs. It was a beautiful basket and when she tested it, it held all the water.
 
She went to Cedar Tree and said, “I made a basket out of what you told me. And it worked.” Cedar Tree said, “Now, you must give it back to the earth.” 
 
So, Gray Squirrel made four baskets for the animals whose patterns she had used. Then Gray Squirrel went into the forest and put the basket on the forest floor.
 
Then, Coyote came and said, “Humans are coming very quickly.”  Cedar Tree said, “We must give these humans a gift. We will give the women weaving skills like Gray Squirrel has.”
 
For me, this story shows how even though we think we might be very different, we are linked to Gray Squirrel and all the animals in this way.
 
Thank you all for your time.

This morning, I marched in solidarity with Planned Parenthood, as I have each of the last five Good Fridays. And this evening, I gathered with my beloved Lyndale United Church of Christ. In both contexts, I reflected on what Good Friday is and how it's been distorted. During worship, I shared the following words.

Too often, Good Friday in Christian churches have been opportunities to perpetrate crucifixion.  Too many of our Jewish kindred have been murdered in the name of Jesus on this day.  Too many have been abused in a distortion of the “ritual” of Good Friday.  Too often, Good Friday’s remembrance of Jesus’ execution has resulted in the torture of others.
 
But we gather tonight with a radically different understanding of what this night means.  We’ve been taking a journey through Lent, from ashes to the Cross, examining brokenness and what makes for resilience.  We’ve asked the question of how we are able to let go of the toxicity of vengeance and, instead, choose vulnerability. We’ve wrestled with individual, communal and societal brokenness and how we are both perpetrators and targets of oppression.  And, how, amidst it all, we resist the violence, vengeance and oppression through healing and revolutionary joy.
 
But before we can fully claim any joy; before we know resurrection, we must face into the reality of Good Friday. Pain, suffering, abuse, oppression…. These are the all-too-present realities of our day. Crucifixion happened and it continues to happen. But tonight, we name and claim the ways in which Jesus’ crucifixion is a moment of God’s radical solidarity with all who are oppressed, wounded and experience violence.  We name and claim God’s willingness to experience in God’s body what it was to be executed by the Powerful of the world, executed in the same way that countless people and the planet suffer at the hands of Power today.  Good Friday does not valorize crucifixion, it does not celebrate violence.  Good Friday condemns all that would break or injure God’s precious creation.  

I have recently joined the MAM Network, a group of Minister *Activist* Moms. It is a community of folks seeking to work religiously for justice AND raise their children well. It's not an easy balance.

As part of that network, I was asked to reflect on raising a daughter amidst an activist family. Here is what I shared:

The day after Prop 8 passed in California in 2008, I was asked to speak at a local rally in downtown Minneapolis. We made the decision that the whole family would attend. After the speakers finished, we marched through the valleys of skyscrapers chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, discrimination has got to go” and hearing it echo off the glass and metal. Our daughter, Shannon, was not quite two years old at the time and sporting a purple cast on her foot from a misstep on the stairs which broke three bones. She held our hands, walked with an uneven gait and chanted along with us in her fiercest voice.... 

[For the full blog, visit: ​http://www.themamnetwork.org/#!Raising-Shannon/a3xnp/56e8abc00cf282fc9b002ca5 ]

(This is an excerpt from a sermon I preached November 22, 2015. For the full text, see below.)

I love thanksgiving and gratitude and pausing to gather with friends, chosen family and family to return thanks to God.
 
But this past ten days or so has thrown me for a loop, I have to tell you. Beirut, Paris, Jamar Clark, Mali, Transgender Day of Remembrance, to name just a few…. And in response, the rhetoric of vengeance, registering Muslims or reinstating internment camps; the self-proclaimed Christian leaders (ones whose central story starts with migrants seeking a place in the Inn) hatefully rejecting any welcome of today’s migrants.
 
And so I’ve been praying with the Psalmist and reflecting on thanksgiving and gratitude.
 
And my heart keeps coming back to two related pieces.
 
The first is that I realize that many of us have been raised in the midst of unfettered capitalism and its unholy theology of racism, sexism and heterosexism. And in this context, the prayers of thanksgiving that are raised too often sound a lot like prosperity gospel…. Thank you God, for all this stuff I have…. Thank you God for all these clothes, this big house, this ability to consume all I want. Thank you God that my life isn’t like that person who doesn’t have a job.
 
It seems to me that we’ve been taught to confuse privilege that comes from systems of injustice with gifts from God.  

In the face of privilege that comes from the circumstances that systems of oppression create and from which we benefit, it seems to me that the Psalmist and the gospel of the Color Purple remind us of what true gratitude looks like. 
​ 
And I think it might go something like this:
 
If the line between good and evil cuts through each of our hearts…. If we live amidst systems which tempt us to choose complicity with power-over every day--and I believe we do--than the gift of God comes this way:
 
God loves us, not because we are only good. God has a deep, deep love for us which is rooted in a true knowing that the line of good and evil cuts through our hearts. God knows we are capable of complicity and perpetration of evil.
 
But God also knows that we can choose vulnerability… we can choose the foolish, wasteful, patient revolution of love. And God is constantly, persistently calling us to practice this revolutionary love.
 
It is for this relationship with God…. it is for these gifts that we ought be grateful.

(Here is the full text)

Thanksgiving: The Promise and Challenge of Gratitude
Psalm 139: 1-18, portions of The Color Purple
Lyndale UCC—November 22, 2015
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
 
O God, you have searched me and known me. 
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
   you discern my thoughts from far away. 
You search out my path and my lying down,
   and are acquainted with all my ways.
 
It was Monday night, almost 24 hours since the vigil at the 4th Precinct had begun in protest for the police killing of Jamar Clark. I had been there earlier in the day and witnessed the courage of occupying the Precinct vestibule, I’d seen the knitting and singing as women and men and gender queer people from Black Lives Matter put their bodies on the line for what they believed.
 
Now it was Monday evening and organizers asked three of us religious leaders to hold the space as they marched to shut down the highway. Pastor Ashley went with the marchers, I stayed at the Precinct. As most of the folks were marching, the crowd that stayed behind was small. One man, a young African American whose brother had been killed by police about five years earlier, began pacing and screaming at all of us. His rage, his grief, his sense of hopelessness was palpable. But there was something about my white body in a clerical collar and stole that kept drawing him to me. “You’re a snake,” he kept repeating. “What are you doing here?” he accused.
 
And I couldn’t help but think about the centuries of white bodies in clerical collars whose preaching and theologizing had supported the Middle passage and slavery and the brutalization of the ancestors whose blood ran in his veins. And so I stood, trying to embody a different kind of white Christianity, even as I bore witness to the devastation that my people had caused.
 
It was this past Friday night as I sat at Living Table United Church of Christ for the 17th honoring of Transgender Day of Remembrance. Over the course of nearly two hours, members of the gathered body stood and walked to the podium and read the names, causes, locations and dates of death of 85 transgender and gender non-conforming people who’d been murdered in the past year. Then a candle was lit, a bell rung and a collective “We will remember you,” pledged. And I couldn’t help but take in the brutality… the fact that too many were simply known as “unknown transgender woman” and the reality that more than one had been stoned to death. I couldn’t help but think about the Biblical stories the killers had been taught.
 
Where can I go from your spirit?
   Or where can I flee from your presence? 
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 
If I take the wings of the morning
   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 
even there your hand shall lead me,
   and your right hand shall hold me fast. 
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
   and the light around me become night’, 
even the darkness is not dark to you;
   the night is as bright as the day,
   for darkness is as light to you.
 
Psalm 139 is one of my favorite hymns of faith. I return to it time and time again… for my own prayer time, for worship and, especially, when I don’t know where else to go.
 
This week was one of those weeks. I’ve had preaching on my calendar for over a month as Ashley knew she’d be gone for Thanksgiving. And I was very excited to preach on Thanksgiving Sunday because thanksgiving is one of my favorite spiritual disciplines and joys. Maggie and I chose the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2006 for our church wedding and chose as the theme a Dag Hammerskjord quote, “For all that has been, thanks, for all that will be, yes!”
 
I love thanksgiving and gratitude and pausing to gather with friends, chosen family and family to return thanks to God.
 
But this past ten days or so has thrown me for a loop, I have to tell you. Beirut, Paris, Jamar Clark, Mali, Transgender Day of Remembrance, to name just a few…. And in response, the rhetoric of vengeance, registering Muslims or reinstating internment camps; the self-proclaimed Christian leaders (ones whose central story starts with migrants seeking a place in the Inn) hatefully rejecting any welcome of today’s migrants.
 
And so I’ve been praying with the Psalmist and reflecting on thanksgiving and gratitude.
 
And my heart keeps coming back to two related pieces.
 
The first is that I realize that many of us have been raised in the midst of unfettered capitalism and its unholy theology of racism, sexism and heterosexism. And in this context, the prayers of thanksgiving that are raised too often sound a lot like prosperity gospel…. Thank you God, for all this stuff I have…. Thank you God for all these clothes, this big house, this ability to consume all I want. Thank you God that my life isn’t like that person who doesn’t have a job.
 
It seems to me that we’ve been taught to confuse privilege that comes from systems of injustice with gifts from God.  Lorelle Saxena’s words express some of my distress with this kind of thankgiving.
 
"There is no reason, not one single reason, why I deserve shelter, food, stability, safety, health, or your regard any more than any given Syrian refugee. Not one reason. My home, my education, my business; the way I look, the way I talk; the fact that I come home to a safe, whole, healthy family every day--every one of those things is a privilege that I fell into by the random circumstance of being born in this country to parents who valued academic achievement. I, or you, could have just as easily been born in Syria, or Burkina Faso, or Afghanistan. Do you really think that you're a different kind of human being than the refugees? Do you think your privilege is earned?
 
"[She continues], compared to most people in the world, you and I are rich with privilege, much of it just because we were lucky enough to be born in a country fat with it. I woke up early this morning and made organic, whole-grain muffins for my son, then dressed him in warm clothes, put sunscreen on his little face, strapped and buckled him into his bike seat and rode along peaceful streets to deliver him at his warm, nurturing preschool. There were so many levels on which I was able to protect him. Every breath of this morning was a privilege. Meanwhile millions of children who months ago had bedrooms and dinner tables and doctors and schools are sleeping directly on the ground, their parents unable to secure shelter or food for them, much less healthcare or education.
 
"And no, that is not your fault. But that's not the same as it not being our responsibility. We have everything we need and then so much on top of that, and we can choose to exemplify to our own children one of two courses of action: we can open our clutched fists and share with our fellow humans all the abundance that exists here--or we can hoard it, greedy and bloated and fearful.
 
"… there is no such thing as "our own." Every human is our own. Every hungry child, grieving mother, frightened husband, weary grandmother is our own. Nobody gets to pretend our world is a different world from the world that creates civil wars and bombs and hunger. We are all toeing this same precarious, shifting tightrope of a life. Anyone can fall at any time. All there is to catch us is each other."
 
In the face of privilege that comes from the circumstances that systems of oppression create and from which we benefit, it seems to me that the Psalmist and the gospel of the Color Purple remind us of what true gratitude looks like. And I think it looks like some of what Fred Smith has been trying to lift up in his Jung class and some of what we’ve been grappling with with the Green Team and in our work on whiteness.
 
And I think it might go something like this:
 
If the line between good and evil cuts through each of our hearts…. If we live amidst systems which tempt us to choose complicity with power-over every day--and I believe we do--than the gift of God comes this way:
 
God loves us, not because we are only good. God has a deep, deep love for us which is rooted in a true knowing that the line of good and evil cuts through our hearts. God knows we are capable of complicity and perpetration of evil.
 
But God also knows that we can choose vulnerability… we can choose the foolish, wasteful, patient revolution of love. And God is constantly, persistently calling us to practice this revolutionary love.
 
It is for this relationship with God…. it is for these gifts that we ought be grateful.
 
[pause]
 
People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.[1]
 
This week there have also been visions of this gift, this thanksgiving, this color purple… at the 4th Precinct as, after a night of violence most likely caused by infiltrating white supremacists and anarchists and the police’s escalation, we sang and prayed and marched and came together—Jew, Christian, Muslim, pagan, atheist, white, Black, Asian American, Native American in a shared witness for justice…. During the Transgender Day of Remembrance as we claimed the power of life that always rises up… in the widower whose wife was killed at the Bataclan concert hall who made the video entitled, “You will not have my hatred” and in this story:
 
 
After learning [her] flight was detained 4 hours, [Naomi Shihab Nye] heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. [She writes]:
 
"Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
 
"An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.

"Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this.
 
"I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.

"Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee?
 
"The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used--
she stopped crying.
 
"She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,
Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.

"We called her son and I spoke with him in English.

"I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends.
 
"Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.
 
"She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.
 
"She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.
 
"And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
 
"And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands--
had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
 
"And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
this is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.
They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.
Not everything is lost."


 
Thanks be to God for all the purple God has planted…. And for our noticing… and responding.
 
Amen.


 
[1] Alice Walker. The Color Purple. (New York: Pocket Books, 1982).
 

An Invitation to Be Real: A Sermon on the Occasion of the 10th Anniversary of Rev. Catherine MacLean Crooks’ Ministry at Plymouth Congregational Church

John 15: 12-15, “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

Sept 20, 2015

Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel

 

My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation. I hear the real though faroff hymn that hails a new creation. Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear the music ringing. It sounds an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing?

 

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

 

She was one of those people whose brilliance was obvious from the minute you met her. It took a bit longer to see the desire to create beauty and connection and love—through music, art and by acting decently and honestly. But it was all there.

 

She came into the warehouse that served as our sanctuary about once a week for quite a stretch of time because she was looking for a place to be safe as she battled the pain. Some times she’d just sit and pray. Some times I would hear music as she sought to claim beauty amidst too many bad memories that wouldn’t let her go.

 

Every so often, she’d schedule a time to talk and I learned more about the ways in which her body and soul and heart had been violated and how her mind had helped her survive.

 

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine…

 

Mostly, our conversations were opportunities for me to meet the different parts of her and spend time. I could tell she allowed her “multiplicity” to be known to me because she’d had an experience of some pastor who had been worthy of her trust. In some other context, she had learned that it was ok to talk to a pastor about her multiple personalities. And because of some other minister’s gifts, I got to meet and sit with Squirt, Peter, Mark, me inside, Kelldog, Quiet, Arizona, Alex and 489. And I was privileged to hear of how they were trying to help each other heal.

 

I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from God.

 

When I was five or six, my family attended St. John’s United Church of Christ in Dayton, Ohio. As new members, our family was invited to consider the different activities of the church. Since I loved to sing, I was invited to join the children’s choir.

 

It was perfect for me. I got to be with other people singing, I can’t begin to articulate the joy I felt.

 

But it quickly became a bit complicated. The choir director was a woman named Mrs. McCash. I came to know later that order, control, precision and appearance were all very high values for her. She was not unlike some church ladies in any given number of churches around the country. For her, there was a proper way of doing things and an improper way. One of the proper ways had to do with how one dressed for church. Boys and men wore suits or at least pants, a dress shirt and a tie, and girls and women wore dresses and the shoes that matched.

 

Into this well-ordered, gender binary walked my little pant-wearing tomboy girl self. And let’s just say it didn’t go well. On the first Sunday the choir was to perform, Mrs. McCash came up to me and rolled up my pants so you couldn’t tell I was wearing them under my choir robe. My memory isn’t clear but somehow I went to my mom crying before church started and told her what had happened. She rolled down my pants and told me to go up there and sing my heart out. (Thank God for my mom!)

 

I have often reflected on that incident as a microcosm of my life’s journey in relationship with the church, particularly as I later went through the coming out process. The church is at once a place of great joy, of communion with God. It is the sanctuary in which my voice joins with those of others in praise and prayer and adulation. But the church often asks me and us to hide who we really are in order to join the song. It asks us to roll up or cover the unseemly, the improper.

 

It, too often, requires of us a kind of Sophie’s choice between the realness of our lives and the deep connection of community.

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

 

[pause]

 

It was after at least a year of hearing the music coming from our sanctuary and coming to know all of her parts, as she called her different personalities, that Kelly invited me to a special worship service. Her home faith community was baptizing all of her nine parts in an evening service and would I come…

 

[pause]

 

In preparation for today’s sermon, I was looking back at the bulletin from that service and I got tears anew. Gathered together in the sanctuary, rooted in the hymns of the church, communally professing our faith we, together, named out loud that violence and abuse are real, that pain and suffering touch each one of us and it is not seemly or pretty. And we invited each of us and all of us to show up in our fullness and realness to worship a God who knows us.

 

The opening prayer was this:

 

The beauty of the world is created by God.

 

The wonder of the world is blessed by God.

 

The rage of the world is heard by God.

 

The agony of the world is embraced by God.

 

Come, let us worship God—Creator, Christ, Spirit whose loving presence we cannot flee.

 

In the sermon that was preached that night, entitled “A Concerto of Life,” the preacher said outloud words like sexual abuse and multiplicity. And then she professed the depth of our faith, that neither death nor violence nor threat of both is more powerful than the healing, relentless love of God from which all that is beautiful comes. And then we baptized Squirt and Peter, Mark and me inside, Kelldog and Quiet, Arizona and Alex and 489.

 

[pause]

 

In our Scripture for this morning, Jesus is sharing what Biblical scholars refer to as his “Farewell Discourse.” He knows he is soon to face his own crucifixion by those who fear his invitation to put aside power and privilege and appearance of piety. And he is intent upon helping his disciples get the message.

 

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.

 

As you might have guessed, the presider at the baptism that night, the pastor whose impeccable gifts and skills helped remind Kelly that the church was a safe place to be herself; the pastor who challenged us all to remember that the core of our tradition is the call to love one another in real and deep ways and that life and music and healing are always God’s answer to violence and suffering. That pastor was Cath Crooks. In the thank-you section, Kelly wrote, “Thank you to Cathie, the best [freaking] minister I have ever had. You have entered so fully into our lives. You are so real. You are so accepting. Thank you for your faith in me. Thank you for your ministry. Cathie, speaking quite frankly, which I have been known to do from time to time, you rock my world.”

 

Today we mark the tenth anniversary of Rev. Catherine MacLean Crook’s ministry here at Plymouth Congregational Church.  We are also in the 26th year of her ordained ministry (a ministry that is rooted in the soil of Cape Breton and the Maritimes and in the best of our Christian tradition.)

 

 

 

There are many things I could share of the ways in which I’ve learned to be a more faithful, more loving and wiser minister and person because of her. But none seems more important than her tenacious refusal to allow me or those with whom she ministers, to turn away from the invitation to be real.

 

It is this journey: away from whatever lies we’ve been told, away from whatever addictions we’ve been gripped by, away from whatever people we tried to be or thought the church would find proper or seemly, away from all of these…. and toward the fragile but resilient, healed and healing, seeking-to-be-real community of friends that Jesus invites us to be… that’s the invitation.

 

And I believe it is nothing short of our lives, as people and as church, that’s at stake with how we answer the invitation. But we don’t have to take the journey alone. It is none other than God, from whose loving presence we cannot flee, that pours out the nudges and reminders and guideposts along the way.

 

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

 

So let us claim our place.  Let us roll down our pant legs. Let us take up the invitation.

 

Amen.

I grew up the only grandchild of my Scottish immigrant grandmother who took it as her role as my grammie to tell me stories about our family.  She did so, as she always told me, so that I might know who I am and so that I might know better how to live in this world. 

One of those stories was about my grandfather. 

My grandfather was also a Scottish immigrant who came to this country to escape grinding poverty.  He was one of eleven children and he started work in the coal mines of the Lowlands of Scotland when he was ten in order to help support his family.  At fourteen, he was buried alive during a collapse of part of the mine.  Several days later, he was one of only three who made it out alive, but not without both a deep physical scar that ran the length of his back and a profound mental one.

 As my grammie told it, my grandfather immigrated shortly thereafter to escape both the poverty and the absolute disregard for his life and the lives of all the other poor coal-mining families in his small village.  When he came to this country, he brought with him a deep conviction that his life was to be lived so that no one should be faced with dehumanizing disregard. 

 Both of my grandparents were also staunch Scottish Presbyterians.  And part of their legacy to my mother and to me has been the lesson that one’s faith and one’s religious practice should be about making life more just, more equitable and closer to what God would want for all of creation.

 It is precisely this kind of faith that brought me to the Mall of America last December to join with several dozen of my clergy colleagues to stand in prayer and solidarity as Black Lives Matter Minneapolis and about 3000 people of many religious traditions, many family configurations, many racial backgrounds and many political affiliations rallied to affirm that Black lives, Black bodies, Black families, Black communities matter.

 I was part of that peaceful protest and witness because in our country today, Black lives are treated with the same disregard that my grandfather experienced. Too many are killed by police brutality, too many are incarcerated and terrorized, too many are caught in economic systems that oppress. My being at the Mall of America was part of my Advent practice because I understand my call as a Christian pastor to witness to the sacredness of ALL of God’s children and to speak truth to power when power abuses any of God’s children.

 And then Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson chose to use her great power as an officer of the Court to prop up the powerful by pressing bogus charges against the Mall of America protest organizers and the City of Bloomington and Mall of America officials infiltrated meetings and surveilled social media to determine who the organizers of the protest were. And I knew I needed to do something. But I didn’t know exactly what.

Then I was contacted by several religious colleagues—Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and Wiccans from around the country who also believe in the sacredness of Black Lives—asking that I start a petition so that people of faith could stand in solidarity with the Mall of America protest organizers. And I did. And over 3100 people of faith from around the country signed the petition.

In addition to these faith leaders, another petition was circulated by someone else who was at the Mall of America and couldn’t sit idly by as our justice system was used to persecute the less powerful in deference to those who hoard power. Their petition garnered over 42,000 signatures.

And so we are here today, holding in our hands both the names of those who stand with us and candles each representing 1000 people who are with us in solidarity. They know that that this is the day and this is the hour we are delivering them and they are holding us in their prayers as we speak. We are going to take just a moment of silence to join our energy and prayers with theirs that the power of the court is used as it ought to be and that the charges are completely dropped.

Amen. Ashe. Blessed Be.

Thank you.

Sabbath Practice: Thank You for the Body That Loves Us
Song of Songs 2: 8-14, John 20: 19-30
August 30, 2015--Lyndale United Church of Christ
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel

 

The lone wild bird in lofty flight is still with Thee, nor leaves Thy sight. And I am Thine, I rest in Thee. Great Spirit, come, and rest in me. Amen.

 

I love talking with people about bodies. I have spent much of my life drawn toward, curious about, questioning, and exploring this notion that we are spiritual beings having a human, embodied experience. I am fascinated by our bodies and what it means to live in the world as flesh and bones.

 

I just got back from the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit that gathered sexuality educators, sex therapists, queer people, sacred intimates and other advocates for a positive understanding of sexuality and bodies. I was there with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice to lead a three hour session on Sex and the Spirit. The whole thing was a wonderful experience and I had so many fascinating conversations with folks who are hungry to explore these connections between our spirituality and our embodiment. But I have to admit to really struggling with how to preach about Sabbath practice and bodies…. here in a sanctuary….. during church.

 

[pause]

 

Thank you for the body that loves us

 

 8The voice of my beloved! Look, they come, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. 9My beloved is like a gazelle or a young deer. ..10My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; 11for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. 12The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. 13The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. 14O my dove…. let me see your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.

 

When I read these verses which were assigned to today’s lectionary, I was taken aback. I literally have never heard a portion of the Song of Songs read in church. But I love this text…. its lusciousness, its clear sensuality, its embodied delight in love.

 

These are all things that are central to our Christian faith. Indeed, Christianity is the only religious tradition that has the audacity to profess that God took on human form.

Somehow, God saw fit to hallow humanity by pouring all of divinity into a human body and living the life of a radically inclusive, loving, transforming person. For me, this “Incarnation” as they call it, is really important.

 

It is Jesus’ life—and the way he lived in his skin, the people with whom he ate and drank and made loving community, the way he wore his gender identity and his sexuality, the way he touched and resisted power, the way his body was executed by the State—it is to this life and this body that I turn to get guidance about how to life my own life, how to live my little “i” incarnation in relationship with the capitol “I” Incarnation.

 

And, as many of you know, I’ve spent the last year—much of it sitting at the Nokomis Beach Café—writing about these very things. Writing about how bodies—individual bodies, the body of a community, our shared Body of Christ and the planet body are all exquisite blessings from God.

 

Thank You for the bodies that love us. 

 

But, for me, talking about real bodies, real people living in communities and in this world, requires us to hold the Song of Songs in conversation with the gospel of John. We are beloved in the sight of God. We are created for pleasure and beauty and joy in our physical, embodied selves. Bodies are blessed to be a blessing.

 

And this gift is given in the midst of the reality of oppression. The Roman Empire executed Jesus after it had infiltrated and surveilled his community in order to arrest him. Jesus’s body was taunted and tortured because he was Jewish and considered a terrorist in the context of Rome’s occupation. This is the context for our reading from John. The disciples are terrified. They’ve been betrayed by Judas who was one of their own. Their beloved Jesus, whose body they touched and were touched by, with whom they ate and reclined and worshiped and worked, is dead.

 

But suddenly, in our reading for this morning, that beloved body, so brutally broken, is in their midst again.

 

This is the other central affirmation of our faith—Jesus’ body is resurrected. He is visibly wounded but alive. He has endured oppression and all that the Empire sought to throw at him, but his body, he is alive. And Jesus invites Thomas to understand all of the implications of his resurrection by touching his wounded body.

 

Thank you for the body that loves us.

 

There are many other ways that the gift of our bodies is complicated. Our experiences of our bodies happens in a world that makes judgements about our race, our gender identity, our sexual orientation, our ability, our age. Bodies living with disability, Black and brown bodies, queer bodies… those bodies whom the world might denegrate… these are ones whose preciousness, sexiness and beauty must be especially celebrated. These are all ones in whose blessing and resurrection we especially need to rejoice. Black Lives Matter, Trans Bodies Matter—these are theological affirmations from the heart of Christianity.

 

But, in order to re-member the sacredness of Incarnation and incarnations; in order to re-member resurrection and revolutionary sexiness, we need the practices of Sabbath to return us to our own bodies and to the body of community. It is the intentional re-membering of rest and worship, of pause and healing, of blessing that which the world too often demonizes… these are the Sabbath practices that allow us to embody God in our midst….

 

[pause]

 

In describing one of her days last week following the car accident that killed her beloved sister and niece and left her brother-in-law fighting for his life, Lyndale member Sarah Kuhnen posted the following on Facebook:

 

Hitting a wall and Oak Trees rebounding

 

Today I hit a wall. Too many sleepless nights or just plain not enough sleep, along with draining days all caught up with me today. Fred my love and rock was flying home. And so my mind and body just had enough. It is kinda like being under water. Every time someone talked all communication went into a drawn out slow motion garble and I just could not respond appropriately.


Yesterday we started at the hospital to see Don start the process of breathing mostly on his own. When we would talk to him, he would take a deep breath. We knew he heard us. Joy and gratitude lifted us so that we could face the rest of the day….

 

Then we dressed to the nines (Katherine always dressed to the nines) and we headed to the funeral home. Just a private time with Ledell and Katherine’s bodies to give thanks for their beautiful bodies as we sang and danced with their spirits that felt very present among us. We listened to amazing music from Katherine, Ledell and Don as we danced and sang and cried our grieving, wailing tears.

 

We rebounded at the restaurant before heading to the church for a loving vigil at First Congregational Church on the Green. There were stories, and the gospel choir sang, several solos were sung and candles were lit. There were Park Slope, Brooklyn Church family, Silver Lake Church Family, and First Congregational Church family, among other friends. Plenty of hugs all around and at the end of the service our family lit candles and walked down the aisle lighting other peoples’ candles as we all head out the door to luminary splendor and sang one final song. Ledell had co-led many a protest on those front steps. This is the church of my elementary years. A place my family calls home. To call this service a blessing would be an understatement, but it was also draining in all the right ways.

 

Finally after a week of running to get everything in some sort of order, knowing that Don, although not out of the woods, is doing better, the reality and weight of it all settled into my bones. And I am beyond numb. Beyond knowing how to move. And so along with Devan and Lucy, we walked to the park near the hospital and laid under the oaks. The big majestic trees that reach into the sky. My hand lay on one of its sturdy roots and I prayed for it to share its strength and fill me up. And I rested. I fell asleep off and on. But more importantly, I lay in total silence. Just me and the tree.

 

Again, I could re-enter this massive story that is ours now forever…. For another moment. I give thanks for church community that is massive in their love of the Mulvaney-Westphal-Waterman-Kuhnen family, for the countless friends near and far sending their love. And for the grove of oaks sharing their strength.s of breathing mostly on his own. When we would talk to him he would take a deep breath. We knew he heard us. Joy and gratitude lifted us so that we could face the rest of the day...
Then we dressed to the nines (Katherine always dressed to the nines) and we headed to the funeral home. Just a private time with Ledell and Katherine's body to give thanks for there beautiful body's as we sang and danced with their spirits that felt very present among us. We listened to amazing music from Katherine, Ledell and Don, as we danced and sang and cried our grieving wailing tears.
We rebounded at the restaurant before heading to the church for a loving vigil at First Congregational Church on the Green. There we heard stories, and the gospel choir sang, several solos were sung and candles were lit. There were Park Slope, Brooklyn church family, Silver Lake Church family, and First Congregational church family, along with other friends. Plenty of hugs all around and at the end of the service our family lit candles and walked down the isle lighting other people's candles as we all head out the door to luminary spender and sang one final song. Ledell had co-led many a protest on those front steps. This is the church of my elementary years. A place my family calls home. To call this service a blessing would be a understatement, but it was also draining in all the right ways.
Finally after a week of running to get everything in some sort of order, knowing that Don, although not out of the woods, is doing better, the reality and weight of it all settled into my bones. And I am beyond numb. Beyond knowing how to move. And so along with Devan and Lucy we walked to the park near the hospital and lied under the Oaks. The big majestic trees that reach into the sky. My hand lay on one of its sturdy roots and I prayed for it to share its strength and fill me up. And I rested. I fell asleep off and on but more importantly I lay in total silence. Just me and the tree.
Again I could re-enter this massive story that is ours now forever.... for another moment. I give thanks for church community that is massive in their love of the Mulvaney -Westphal-Waterman-Kuhnen family, for the countless friends near and far sending their love. And for the grove of Oaks sharing their strength.

 

Thank you for the Body that loves us.

 

Amen.


29


Finally after a week of running to get everything in some sort of order, knowing that Don, although not out of the woods, is doing better, the reality and weight of it all settled into my bones. And I am beyond numb. Beyond knowing how to move. And so along with Devan and Lucy we walked to the park near the hospital and lied under the Oaks. The big majestic trees that reach into the sky. My hand lay on one of its sturdy roots and I prayed for it to share its strength and fill me up. And I rested. I fell asleep off and on but more importantly I lay in total silence. Just me and the tree.
Again I could re-enter this massive story that is ours now forever.... for another moment. I give thanks for church community that is massive in their love of the Mulvaney -Westphal-Waterman-Kuhnen family, for the countless friends near and far sending their love. And for the grove of Oaks sharing their strength.