2022 Reads in Review

Christian-ish reads of the year and why I liked them, in no particular order:

The Bible with and without Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Brettler – This was my companion during Lent with another colleague

This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley – like drinking a cool glass of water

Inward Apocalypse by Anna Elisabeth Howard – Anna has a gift of finding a turn of phrase that pulls everything into focus. She packs theology neatly but densely through her own story which allows both for rich reading and reflection, the reader’s own Inward Apocalypse.

A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers – a whimsical tale set in a different land of journey and vocation and call and belonging. 

My Body is Not a Prayer Request by Amy Kenny – Please, every church leader and person read this. It is so insightful on how to (and how not to) treat people with dignity and respect. 

Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey – Enough said. Deprogram. Rest. 

Falling Upward by Richard Rohr – Apparently I had read this once before but honestly had not remembered. I think it was more ready to hear it’s message this time as I approached 50. The book is all about the second half of life.

The Bible – I’ve never read the Bible all the way through. Now I have. 

Best Series I had never read: The Anne of Green Gables series

Series I’m Slightly Embarrassed I read: The Bridgerton series

Author I’m thrilled I discovered: Andy Weir (I read Project Hail Mary and Upgrade)

Best madcap novel about a mathematician (ok, only book I read about a mathematician): Dr. No

Best shocking novel exploring motherhood today: Nightbitch

Best Business book: Start with Why by Simon Sinek. Who Do we Choose to Be by Margaret Wheatley – this book keep me up for weeks, wrestling with both her pessimism and optimism over the human condition, state of the world, and ultimate invitation to act incredibly locally.

Best in History: the Sapiens Graphic Novels – there are supposed to ultimately be five of them. I was gifted the “real” book for Christmas. As someone whose education in history was a bit incomplete, I have been educating and re-educating myself over the past couple of decades. This is a great place to start poking around – https://www.ynharari.com/book/graphicnovelsapiens/)

It was the week after Sandy Hook. My students were doing these in-depth presentations about their topic of choice for a good chunk of their grade. More than one was doing a presentation on violence: gun violence, school violence, bullying.

It was after school when some students with grave, serious looks sough me out. They had heard a fellow student talk about bringing a weapon to school the next day. They had gone to the administration. They were concerned they weren’t being heard. They came to me. I went up the chain of command and made some noise, hoping to amplify their voices.

It was in the afternoon when I was driving to my kid’s elementary school when I called a friend, unsure of what I should do next. Do I stay home the next day? I mean, I had three young children? Do I go to school and run through the thousands of scenarios I had drawn up to try to keep students safe? I was shaken up.

It was the next day, after the student had been in my class, that he was expelled. Of course, I never heard exactly what had happened. Rumors of “parts of a gun” found in his backpack and “weapons” in his vehicle were thrown around like a basketball in a gym, but I never actually knew.

But I knew that student. I had worked with them. I wanted them to succeed. I wanted them to thrive. My heart broke.

And I knew the others in my classes and the ones who passed my doorway in between classes. I, too, wanted them to live, thrive.

And I was scared.

Nothing “happened” that week in my class. Yet after every shooting, every intruder drill, every lock-and-bar-the-door procedure, every request that we think of the safest place for our students to be in our classrooms which had me figuring how to get all 35 of the students on the ledge outside of my second floor classroom of windows so they might have a chance of being safe, I think of that week. That week when I was already on high alert for copy cats, that week made even more so with the student who proposed a threat and the reality of what could have happened in my classroom that day.

It again is the day after a mass shooting, the day after a mass school shooting, the day after a mass elementary school shooting. I refuse to believe we can do nothing. My faith compels me to pray, and that prayer includes action, fighting for a world in which swords or automatic weapons are beat into plowshares and tools for building a better world (see Isaiah 2:4 and https://rawtools.org/about/). We do not need these weapons, they are not doing us any good. They cause pain, death, anxiety, mental illness. We need a different way.

Will you forge one with me?

there is always enough time for the right work. -adrienne maree brown

How do we adapt adrienne maree brown‘s emergent strategy book in a church or non-profit context? To explore this, I’ll be walking through nine principles of emergent strategy. (3/9)

Frankly, I don’t know if I believe this. Like several of the aspects of “emergent strategies,” they call me to have a relationship with the concept.

Usually, when I wrestle, I realize I am defining words in ways that aren’t helpful or the concept has operated as a provocation, inviting me to see things differently.

This particular principle makes me realize how much I fall into elevating efficiency as my ultimate goal. If the “right work” means a product created in the least amount of time, then efficiency is the right work.

But what if that’s not it.

Just what is “the right work?”

If the work, in churches, is creating space or containers for people to bring their whole selves, to be known by God and others, to know God and know others, and to bring about goodness. Stated another way, for people to orient themselves around the story of God and to be transformed by the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

This work is not efficient. This work is messy. It ebbs and flows. It is difficult to measure. It requires people interacting with all of their histories, traumas, and connections.

“there is always enough time for the right work.” If this is the right work, the work of coming together with other humans, knowing and being known, transformation of self and our surroundings, then there is always enough time.

Jesus never put out a 5 step plan to get to spiritual maturity. There is no end destination during our lifetime. There is following. There is movement. There is the right work.

That’s what I have loved about the emergent strategy principles – they invite me to reflect on my assumptions and to better define what I am seeing and experiencing. The opportunity is to find places and contexts in which these would be true and helpful.

change is constant. be like water. -adrienne maree brown

How do we adapt adrienne maree brown‘s emergent strategy book in a church or non-profit context? To explore this, I’ll be walking through nine principles of emergent strategy. (2/9)

I’ve been teaching about culture change for well over twenty-five years and I’ve noticed a distinct shift in the past few. My conversations have gone from trying to convince people that life has changed to a more tired but proactive posture that both acknowledges change and responds.

Change truly is constant. There is no place to go back to, no place of comfort to which we can return. If change is constant, then we must shift our relationship to change. We are not trying to find the “next thing” to do, the next program that will help people engage, the next study to help people connect with God, the next way to organize. Rather, we must start to respond to what we see in the “here and now” and put systems in place that will regularly reflect on the change. Instead of static systems that create hierarchies and clear returns, we must create a culture that sees the culture as change and operates like water – moving with the changes that emerge on a regular basis.

The Christian scriptures are full of anecdotes of Jesus telling stories with metaphors from the land. While they might not use water, as brown’s quote does, Jesus’s stories of sowing seeds, cultivating conditions, tending what emerges, and allowing the cycles of life and death to flow calls followers to expect change. We look for conditions, we examine the weather and soil, we discern what needs to be done next, and we reflect on what happens. In it, the miracle of life emerges, and has always emerged, in both seasons of plenty and seasons of want, even in the church throughout the years.

“change is constant. be like water.” reminds us to live expectantly, to notice change, to respond to it, to “be like water.” Even in the church.

Small is good, small is all.-adrienne maree brown

How do we adapt adrienne maree brown‘s emergent strategy book in a church or non-profit context? To explore this, I’ll be walking through nine principles of emergent strategy.

“Small is good. Small is all.”

In a world that prizes bigness, small is good. In a world where shrinking churches fear dying, small is good. In a world in which we consistently want big to offer options, to manage fear, to hold influence, small reminds that change can happen in the small, the seemingly insignificant.

Small gets such a bad rap.

Yet small means people are known. Small invites personal transformation which can lead to corporate societal transformation. Small brings those leading to the same neighborhood and grocery store as everyone else. Small reminds those who have influence how their decisions impact others.

I love the idea of a player/coach, a figure that knows what is happening on the court as well as has the big picture. I dreamt when I taught high school of a principal who taught or co-taught a course so they would keep their pulse on the life of a teacher and the life of a student. In a small church, the pastor/rector has to be the player coach. They put away dishes, visit the sick, bury the dying, celebrate the joys.

How do we apply this strategy, not just in small context but in large ones, especially religious ones? We remember that it is in the small that we are changed and influence change. We allow the small bits, the conversations and relationships that are terribly inefficient and deeply profound, to shape us as we in turn shape our realities. We stop seeking the big, the multiverse, and tend the garden around us, noticing what is thriving and giving attention to what is around us.

Gas Explosions

I was 19 when a gas stove threw a fire ball in my face.

The last thing I remember was a big ball of fire racing toward me. I came to several feet away from the large camp stove I just attempted to light to make breakfast for 100 people as the camp cook. My heart raced and I smelled lots of burnt hair.

I was alone. I had no idea how burnt I was. I walked in slow motion over to the trash can and began touching my face and hair. Burnt pieces flaked off and didn’t seem to stop.

There was no one in the kitchen with me that morning as usual and there was no mirror in the bathroom. I did not know if I had major burns all over my body or if I had just singed a few hairs. The adrenaline was still coursing through my veins as I tried to decide what to do next. 100 hungry campers and staff would be coming through for food in just a little over an hour – what was I going to serve? 

At first I was planning on making the original menu. I mean, the gas stove was already lit and ready to go. But my shaking hands and the stench of burnt hair quelled that idea. I carefully turned off the stove, decided on another menu item, and ran across camp to shower and assess the damage to my own body.

You can imagine the relief I felt when, upon looking in the mirror, I realized that I suffered no major burns, in fact, no burns that I could find. I lost half of an eyebrow and in the years since, that eyebrow has never behaved. I lost some hair at my hairline. I also lost some hair on a digit but since I wasn’t too fond of hairy knuckles, there was no need to grieve.

I returned to the kitchen and my morning volunteers had arrived. I don’t recall the meal that we were scheduled to make nor the meal that we produced that day, only deep, deep gratitude. 

You see, the incident was entirely my fault. I had not grown up around gas appliances. When I hit the button for the gas, I reached up for where we kept the matches. They were not there. I went to the pantry for some more. Instead of turning off the gas, I thought – how much gas could have been released? – I lit the match and was pushed back by a ball of fire. 

Apparently, that much gas. 

I had done a very stupid thing. And it could have had consequences that were much more far reaching than what happened that day. Grateful was an understatement.

Like most people who experience something of that magnitude, I spent the day like I had a new prescription for my glasses. Everything seemed a bit sharper, a bit brighter, a bit more beautiful. With the exception of my left eyebrow, may it rest in peace.

Although I made myself relight the stove when I got back to the kitchen so I would face my fear, I still, thirty years later, avoid lighting gas stoves. I don’t mind using them, just lighting them. 

Today, given the charged events of the week that included an attempted coup in the United States, this memory hits me in the same place, an anxiety burning deep in my chest.  There is way too much gas in the air. All that is needed is some friction to create a ball of fire that may merely singe some hair or destroy life and property. The issues underneath the unrest, the hatred, the fear, float heavy in the air, seemingly unseen but easily detected by anyone who knows it’s properties.

And the horrifying part of this is that it is our making. We have released horror, ignored it’s presence, stoked hate, and hoped it had dissipated while we went about our daily lives. There is no excuse for such behavior, no reason for the surprise expressed by so many. 

I’m holding on to hope – hope that the clarity, the brightness, the sharpness, so many of us saw on Thursday morning will be the next step in the guide to change. Hope that this is not the end. Hope that the dream of a nation such as ours might have a place in the world, where everyone has a chance and everyone can pursue their dream. 

And yet the anxiety persists, knowing what the gas is capable of, wondering what relationships or structures might be left in the wake of destruction.

Way of Love: Learn, Week Two

These weekly posts explore how we are both introducing and living into the Way of Love in our Adult Christian Formation offering. My hope is to provide accessible experiments to live more into this way of following Jesus.

This week’s slideshow

Goal: We will be able to answer, reflect, and experiment with different postures toward scripture. In particular, we will practice asking questions of the text as a different posture from the text as the answer-giver, reflecting on the various literary genres found in Bible and the more long-term meditative approach of reading the scriptures.

Opening

Start with teaching and modeling a round of Questions Only. To see the game in action, check out this video. Play a few rounds as a way to start thinking about asking questions.

Reflection

Ask the following questions, offering especially a specific way something didn’t work as a way to gain data, reflect, and adjust.

• What was your plan to read scripture?
• What was helpful?
• What didn’t work?
• What did you notice?
  • How are you listening to:
    • yourself?
    • God?
    • neighbors?
• How will you adjust for next week?

Content

How do we approach the Bible?

How do we work to ask questions of the scriptures and allow the scriptures to question us?

Learning occurs when we question our assumptions – the problem is many times we do not even know the assumptions we have.

Watch the following videos. As you watch each one, reflect on the following:

1. Name an “ah-ha” moment you had as you watched and
2. Name a moment which made you uncomfortable – it might be a sign that something that was shown/said challenged an assumption you may not even know you hold.

Discuss after each video.

Literary Styles of the Bible

The Bible as Jewish Meditation Literature

Experiment

Today’s scripture experiment is generating questions.

Read the gospel for the day. Set a timer for five minutes and see how many questions the group or small groups can generate.

Reflect on the process. Brainstorming questions generate questions that are really helpful and some which are not connected with the text, some questions are easily answered, other questions caused us to ask more questions, many questions had to do with context.

This week’s experiment is to read scripture daily. On can use apps online or the daily lectionary. Participants have access printed sheets of two-week Bible reading plans based on topics and a low-tech option.

Closing Liturgy

The closing liturgy is based on the We Seek Love page associated with the Way of Love.

Way of Love: Learn, Week One

These weekly posts explore how we are both introducing and living into the Way of Love in our Adult Christian Formation offering. My hope is to provide accessible experiments to live more into this way of following Jesus.

Slideshow

Opening

Learning from the Christian scriptures can be seen as improvising faithfully from what we know (our history) and moving forward to what we see as our preferred future.

The participants played an improv game called “In the beginning…The End.”

The end goal of the game is for everyone to be involved and for the story to somehow make sense. This game can be played with all ages – from children to older adults.

Two volunteers begin as the bookends of the story. The first person says, “In the beginning,” and the last person says, “The End.” They stand with some room in between them.

One by one, people stand and join the story at any place in the story. Every time a new person joins the story, the story is told as is with the new participant saying the line they bring to the story. For example, after one person joined the story the story might sound like, “In the beginning…and the cow jumped over the moon…The End.” Each participant repeats their line each time the story is told. Participants join in the story making before and after to add to and/or change the storyline with the end goal of everyone being in the story and the story making sense.

Why improv? Because improv allows us to start to think about life with God, this way of Jesus, as living improvisationally. NTWright writes in a number of places (but this is a decent article with which to start) about how the invitation of life with God is to improvise faithfully. We know the story. We are in the middle of the final act. Introducing the topic with some improv games, and there are many from which to choose, helps people imagine what improvising means and helps inspire imagination on how to faithfully improvise as a response to the scriptures.

Reflection

Goal: Learning and growth happens through reflection. The goal of this reflection time is to create capacity for experimentation, learn from failure, and reflect to deepen learning.

Check in with last week’s experiment: to say hello to God each day

How did your experiments go?

What did you try?

What didn’t work?

What was the impact?

How do we read the Bible?

The concept of the 5-Act Play, Creation-Conflict-Covenant-Christ-Church from Brian McLaren adapted from the work of NTWright, offers a helpful hermeneutic through which we can see the story of scripture, this narrative which invites us to participate with God in making God’s dreams come true. While it is not the only way of seeing the scriptures, it can be a helpful one for looking at the big picture.

We then watched two Bible Project videos and noticed the categories of the 5-Act Play throughout. A discussion followed.

Dwelling in the Word

We practicing Dwelling in the Word again this week as a way to approach and read scripture.

Experiment and Closing Liturgy

This week’s experiment is to read scripture daily. On can use apps online or the daily lectionary. Participants received printed sheets of two-week Bible reading plans based on topics and a low-tech option.

The closing liturgy is based on the We Seek Love page associated with the Way of Love.

 

 

Way of Love: Introduction

This academic year, our congregation is experimenting with how to live The Way of Love, a Rule of Life introduced to the Episcopal Church by our Presiding Bishop, for one of our options for weekly Adult Christian Formation time. Each week, I will update this space with how we are living out a particular topic.

Way of Love: Introduction

Keynote slides can be found by clicking the above link.

Opening

We opened with viewing Chris Pratt’s rules he gave as he received the MTV Generation Award. We did skip his rule about being at a party.

We all have rules and guidelines, ways we live or attempt to live life. We had some discussion surrounding the following:

What rules do you have for your life?

What rhythms/patterns have you set up?

What have you tried and found wanting?

What has worked for you when you have wanted to introduce something in your life? Change something?

Content

We then watched the Presiding Bishop Michael Curry talk about The Way of Love.

Our discussion afterward focused on

• What aspects of the Way of Love surprise you? What aspects seem predictable?
• Which aspects of the Way of Love seem easier than others?
• Which aspects of the Way of Love challenge you the most?

We had a short content piece on what constitutes a Rule of Life, basic history going back to St. Benedict’s Rule, how following a Rule might aid our current spiritual practices, and how it might help us better live this Way of Jesus.

Practice

Each week we experiment with an aspect of the Way of Love by trying a spiritual practice.

This week we started out with a spiritual practice called Dwelling in the Word.

Weekly Experiment and Liturgy

Each week we offer a spiritual practice as an experiment for the community to try during the week. 

This week’s spiritual practice was saying, “Hi, God.” Put another way, it is intentionally finding a way to notice God at least once a day, much like “shooting arrow prayers” as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing suggests. We brainstormed some ways to remember: using reminders on your phone, sticky notes on the bathroom mirror or in the car, having a bible verse pop up on your phone during the day.

We ended with a call and response liturgy we created from The Way of Love resources around “What do you seek?”

Jesus is Okay with That?

A Sermon on Matthew 20 and the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

I told the parable of the vineyard to one of my kids this week, wondering how they would respond. I told him about the landowner who hired people at different times during the day, promising each group they’d be paid a certain amount. As I got to the punchline, the people who worked all day received the same amount as those hired at the end of the day, I got what I expected – that’s not fair!

But they also said something else, something insightful, something brilliant: Jesus is okay with that?

Yes, my dear. Yes, he is.

We are tempted to think of this story about God’s impartiality, that everyone receives the same no matter what. What if, instead, the story is about God’s abundance, that God’s love can never be extinguished or used up?

It’s the metaphor of the pie – if God’s love is a pie, then there is a finite amount of it. If people who aren’t worthy, who don’t deserve it, get some pie, then there is less for those who are faithful or “right.”

Here’s the problem – God’s love isn’t like pie.

Don’t get me wrong. Pie is pretty great. I feel much like Harold from Harold and the Purple Crayon when he talks about drawing – and eating! – all nine types of pie that he likes. Blueberry, caramel apple, I could go on but this truly is a digression. Because God’s love isn’t finite. It exists. It doesn’t fit in any container – not a pie or bucket. It cannot be measured. It is abundant. Overflowing.

And God’s love – we often talk about it by the word “grace” – is also indiscriminate, gratuitous, offensive.

In the Houston area, St. Isidore’s “church”, (http://isidores.org/) hosts many ministries. Their tagline reads “offensively generous.” St. Isidore, the patron saint of farmers and the internet, seeks to decentralize church and be a church without walls. It has several incarnations: a pub theology group, a food truck, a laundry ministry, house groups, and a taco group – all with a distinct Episcopal liturgy. The Rev. Sean Steele, “seems to want to do away with the idea of ‘doing outreach;’ and instead is seeking to manifest the body of Christ in a way that more fully intertwines mission and sacrament than the traditional parish model with its Sunday services and mission projects that occur separately and often without significant involvement from worshipers.  Steele’s goal is to be ‘offensively generous,’ he says” (https://www.episcopalcafe.com/church-plant-in-texas-seeks-to-do-something-brand-new-in-an-old-way/). Deacon Molly Carr runs the Harvest Food Truck – a place where food is made by volunteers and given away for free. After Hurricane Harvey, I noticed Molly gathering groups together to make casseroles to give away on the truck.

In North Carolina, a small youth group with whom I have worked goes to the local laundromat once a month armed with quarters. They call it “laundry love” and pay for cycle after cycle of laundry to be washed. They don’t check people’s papers or their need level before they pay for what is there, they just offer. They help make dirty things clean again. If that’s not a definition of the good news of Jesus Christ, I’m unsure what is.

Have you been to a laundromat lately? It’s the kind of place Jesus would hang out. People. Waiting. Some worried they might not have enough cash to pay to clean their clothes. Some only wash their clothes hoping they can air dry them at home to save a few bucks. Others spending time there because it’s the best way for them to do the loads they need to do. The laundromat is a cross-section of humanity.

Or perhaps you, too, have seen this happen. You are in the checkout line of the grocery store. The person in front of you is short just a bit and someone pays the difference. Or you’ve been on the receiving end of a Starbucks or fast food pay-it-forward where the person in front of you has paid for your tab, unbeknownst to you. They don’t know you. They don’t know your situation. They just offered something in such a way that you can’t even refuse.

And it’s not just money. Someone mowing your yard without you knowing who it was. Someone offering to take the kids for a little while. Someone texting you and asking if you need anything at Costco. Someone out-of-the-blue making something for the BBQ or offering to volunteer.

It’s this type of generosity. Overwhelming. Seemingly without discretion. Honestly, offensive.

You see, the parable of the workers in the vineyard reminds us that the Kingdom of God, the Dreams of God, is not about a meritocracy. We are enamored with this type of social system in our country. We make all sorts of assumptions about everyone having equal opportunity to succeed or fail and create these narratives about monetary or societal or familial or academic success is about work ethic that is derived from our Puritanical heritage. And, frankly, we mistake this notion of meritocracy with Christianity.

It isn’t.

This love, this grace, in the parable could have been hidden. Jesus could have told the story that everyone gets the same but not everyone knows it. But that’s not the Kingdom of God. As Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas says in his commentary on Matthew, this story “is the grace of truth refusing to hide from us the character of our envy of those whom we think undeserving. The parable of the vineyard exemplifies God’s justice – a justice disciplined by the truth” (177). Many of us are offended by this story – and I think we should be. I am. Jesus refuses to separate us by casts. He refuses to hide. He is a truth teller. And this is how the Kingdom of God works.

In the end of our section of the gospel, Jesus quips: so the last will be first and the first will be last. Jesus talks about this type of Kingdom, an upside-down kingdom, one that operates on different rules from our dominant culture. Just when we think we are “in,” Jesus draws a picture of a Kingdom that exists without those who are “in” and those who are “out.” Just when we think we arrived and are all that, Jesus looks at the world in a different way and offers different rules for a society governed by God.

The Kingdom of God, these Dreams of God, is not everyone getting what they deserve. It’s about everyone receiving love and grace and forgiveness. Period. Because the Kingdom of God is not about pie but about being offensively generous.

I keep remembering my child asking, “And Jesus is okay with this?”

Yes, my dear. Yes, he is.

 

Asking the Wrong Questions

A sermon on Matthew 15

 

death

death. such a strange thing.

it catches me off-guard,
the lack of presence,
combined with the joy in memories of knowing someone,
the gratefulness for the final absence of suffering,
and the sadness they no longer exist in this sphere

sadness tinged with beauty:
beauty of a life well-lived,
of hopes and dreams which lived and died,
of trickles of influence still felt from beyond

memories still live
if only for a little longer while you exist to remember
remind you at the strangest times
the picture of a flower,
the lost conversation,
the look from a friend

death. such a strange, strange thing.

a woman i knew from seminary died today. the anniversary of my uncle’s death was this week as well as the anniversary of a former camp director who deeply influenced my life both in education and ministry. death. it’s such a strange thing.