God messes with our binaries: 23rd after pentecost a

The other reading I reference is 1 Corinthians 1:18-31.

El santo evangelio según San Mateo (25:1-13)

[Jesus said to the disciples:]

¹“Then the dominion of heaven will be likened to this:

      Ten bridesmaids took their lamps

      and went to meet the bridegroom.

            ²Five of them were foolish,

            and five were wise.

                  ³When the foolish took their lamps,

                        they took no oil with them;

                              ⁴but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.

            ⁵As the bridegroom was delayed,

                  all of them became drowsy and slept.

                        ⁶But at midnight there was a shout,

                              ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom!

                              Come out to meet him.’

                  ⁷Then all those bridesmaids got up

                  and trimmed their lamps.

                        ⁸The foolish said to the wise,

                              ‘Give us some of your oil,

                                    for our lamps are going out.’

                        ⁹But the wise replied,

                              ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us;

                                    you had better go to the dealers

                                    and buy some for yourselves.’

                  ¹⁰And while they went to buy it,

                        the bridegroom came,

                        and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet;

                        and the door was shut.

                              ¹¹Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying,

                                    ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’

                              ¹²But he replied,

                                    ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’

                                          ¹³Keep awake therefore,

                                                for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

El evangelio del Señor.

-----

As I was rereading the gospel throughout this week, 1 Corinthians 1 kept popping into my head.  What does it mean for us to call some bridesmaids wise and others foolish when God messes with our understandings of what is wise and what is foolish?

Is it wise to hoard the oil?  Is it foolish to not bring extra just in case?  Is it wise or foolish to leave to buy more?  To leave the lamps lit while they wait?  To show up late to your own wedding celebration?  To arrive so much earlier than the bridegroom?  To go inside and lock people out?  To pretend not to know someone?

Paul writes, “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”

God comes to mess with the good/bad binaries that we create.

We are so disposed to sorting the world into categories, especially binaries.  Good or bad, dark or light, women or men.  But the reality is that, as Sirius tells Harry Potter in the Order of the Phoenix, “The world is not split into good people and death eaters.”  It’s just not that simple.

Throughout the bible and throughout our lives of faith, God calls us deeper into the complexities of the world.  As our faith deepens and we come to understand that "when we recognize that noteverything is black and white, the next step is recognizing that it's not justshades of gray either, but instead that life is a rainbow of shades,highlights, colors, and tones."

The binaries we create do not serve God.  Instead they limit our understanding of God and the world around us.  If everyone has to be either wise or foolish, then what about those who are funny or sad or joyful?

Perhaps today’s parable is really about being prepared or receiving permission not to share, but as likely as not, it’s about wondering how else the story could play out.

What secret option c’s are out there that dance between and beyond the categories of wise and foolish?

Today is an easy day for us to find ourselves in the midst of binaries—good-byes and not hellos, endings, and yet beginnings.  Yesterday was Veteran’s Day and who better knows the value of peace, the danger and pain of war, and the ways it is not nearly that simple than veterans?  We’re even approaching the end of the church year and preparing for Advent, which itself breaks the binary as we live in the space of yearning for God’s reign on earth even as it has already begun in Jesus’ death and resurrection.

This Sunday is my last Sunday with you all and as we say good-bye, we are ending this pastoral relationship that we’ve had.  I won’t keep in touch, so that as you discern your leadership and pastoral needs, you can more fully embrace whoever comes to serve as pastoral leadership.  This is very much an ending.  

But it is also a beginning.  It’s a beginning for me as I move to Des Moines and it’s a beginning for you all as you begin to identify essentials for your community of faith—what is at the heart of your mission and ministry, the heart of your worship.

But even that is work we have already been doing together.  It is the ongoing work that we are always doing as people of faith in an ever-changing world.

You as a community embody a resistance to the binaries we humans like to create.  You are both ELCA and PCUSA in your worship together.  You have a building and yet next Sunday you will worship in a different building and for Thanksgiving you will worship in yet another building.  You care for each other and you also care for the community and the world.

The way you all engage in ministry is creative and visionary.  Investing your time and energy in relationships resists either being patronizing charity givers who keep others at an arms’ length or ignoring those who are different from you.

You are loved by God and you extend that love outward to care about this community and to care about this world instead of holding it in and keeping it just within yourselves.  You are witnesses to God’s transforming love and grace in your commitment to even what is not always popular or comfortable.  You are capable of wrestling with the hard questions of faith.

You wrestle with immigration policies that don’t honor the holiness of humans who immigrate to this country.  You can wrestle with what it means when thoughts and prayers aren’t stopping gun violence.  You can wrestle with what it means to live beyond and between the gender binary.  You wrestle with racism and white privilege and your place in it all.

You have enormous capacity as a community of faith to dwell in the in between.  You can question the text without losing your faith.  To ask if Jesus might not be the bridegroom, but instead a foolish bridesmaid, locked out of our religious celebrations.  You can ask what would have happened if the foolish bridesmaids didn’t leave or if the wise ones insisted on waiting just a little while longer until they returned before they went inside.

You, dear people of God, are vital to the body of Christ throughout the world.  The ministry God does through you in and with this community is vibrant and in whatever form it may take in the coming months and years, I trust that God will continue to work through you.

And even at this ending, I will continue to carry you in my heart.

Thanks be to God.

YAGM Wilderness

This is the manuscript that I preached from for the opening worship at this year's YAGM Re-Entry Retreat.

A reading from Mark (1:9-13).

⁹In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee

      and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

      ¹⁰And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water,

            he saw the heavens torn apart

            and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

      ¹¹And a voice came from heaven,

            “You are my Child,

                  the Beloved;

                        with you I am well pleased.”

      ¹²And the Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness.

            ¹³He was in the wilderness forty days,

                  tempted by Satan;

            and he was with the wild beasts;

            and the angels waited on him.

Word of God, Word of Life.  Thanks be to God.

-----

I grew up in the mountains of Colorado, so I have always loved the Bible passages about the wilderness.  It’s easy to imagine the wilderness, because it was my back yard growing up.  And it’s beautiful and fun—the snow, the aspen leaves in fall, the bluest of blue skies.  I have always had a fondness for the wilderness.

Then, as I was getting ready to graduate from Luther College, I came here for DIP.  From there, I ended up in a different kind of wilderness in a small village in eastern Slovakia.  Sure, there are hills and even a few mountains in Slovakia, and I got to go hiking and enjoy nature, but this was a different kind of wilderness.

Like the wilderness we find throughout the Bible, this wilderness wasn’t familiar to me and it wasn’t always friendly.  You all have spent a year in the wilderness.  And in that year, a lot has changed.  You have changed.  The people who sent you have changed.  The people you encountered have changed.  This country has changed.  That’s what wilderness does.  It changes you.

Whether you’ve heard the distant rumbles of the heavens being torn apart or encountered wild beasts, doves, or angels—or maybe all of them at once.  You spent a year away from your family, your friends, your loved ones, and that is hard.  I can’t help but think of the words from the song, The Summons, “Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?”        

You did.  And you probably will again.  And it will still be hard.               It is hard to be different and an outsider.  I still remember those first months in Slovakia, hearing sermons and Bible studies in which I could only pick out a few of the words.  And the sinking feeling I would get in my stomach every time the word I understood was Sodom or Gomorrah, knowing that there was a part of me as a queer person that would never belong.

Maybe for you it was a racist remark, or the violence you witnessed in words or actions, the access your u.s. passport granted you at checkpoints, the parts of the language that always eluded you, or the customs that never quite got explained so that you could understand and participate.

The wilderness doesn’t always make sense, and sometimes it hurts; but the other thing about the wilderness is that that’s where Jesus goes.  Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan, the heavens are torn apart, God claims Jesus as beloved, and then “the Spirit immediately [drives] Jesus out into the wilderness,” to you.

Because that is what YAGM is about: Jesus finding you—in the hug of your host mom on that extra homesick kind of day, in the kids who are excited about how well they did on the test—or who continue to push your buttons until the day you leave; in the struggles to understand yourself and others, in the quiet moments of just being with another person, drinking mate, talking, singing, laughing, and crying.

We as the church have sent you out into the wilderness and called you back to a new kind of wilderness in this country.  This wilderness is both familiar and foreign, full of love and full of fear and hatred.  The struggles against injustice, the pain of oppression, sorrow, and hardship are not reserved for other countries. They are here, too, as are countless options for which spaghetti sauce or laundry detergent to buy, new and different ways to ride the bus—no longer the crammed rush hour buses of Buenos Aires or the long winding country roads. 

But what may be the hardest about this new wilderness we’ve called you back to is that it seems so much like the land and places and people you called home before; like a place you should know.  Shouldn’t you understand what to do, who and how to be here?  And shouldn’t they understand you?   

But the people, the places, the politics here        have all changed in subtle and obvious ways,                  as have you, so that the ways you seek familiarity and comfort aren’t the same.  The people you are encountering again might not understand why you like different foods, why you need more time to talk or more time to be silent, but together, than you did before. It's wild, this new wilderness.

Your YAGM year may have ended, but this journey in the wilderness has not, and maybe it never will.  Maybe, as you continue to leave your heart in different places, you will always find a wilderness around you—of joyful mountains and snow, of desert and scorching heat, of safety and of danger.  We don’t know.  You can’t know until you get there.

But the promise I have, the promise of God for you, is that Jesus will show up.  In the suffering and struggle as well as the comfort and joy.  Jesus will show up because that’s how the Holy Spirit works—in the most unexpected places and ways—driving Jesus out into the wilderness to meet you.

The Holy Spirit has claimed you.  The voice from heaven claims Jesus and she claims you as well.

You are God’s child, the Beloved, with whom God is well pleased.  And there is no amount of wilderness or struggle or pain or screw up that can make that untrue.  There is no loneliness, isolation, alienation, or oppression that diminishes God’s immense love for you.  And, especially in these days that we have together, there is no questioning, frustration, random burst of laughter or tears, or befuddlement that is more powerful than God’s love for you.  No matter what.

Thanks be to God.

The Holy Spirit Stirs us up: pentecost a

The first reading is Acts 2:1-21.

The second reading is 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13.

The holy gospel according to John (20:19-23)

¹⁹When it was evening on that day,

      the first day of the week,

            and the doors of the house where the disciples had met

                  were locked for fear of the religious authorities,

      Jesus came and stood among them and said,

            “Pokoj vám!”

            “La paz sea con ustedes.”

            “Frieden sei mit euch.”        

            “Peace be with you.” 

            [“Peace be with you.” in ASL]

         ²⁰After Jesus said this,

            he showed them his hands and his side.

                  Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

      ²¹Jesus said to them again,

            “Pokoj vám!”

            “La paz sea con ustedes.”

            “Frieden sei mit euch.”         

            “Peace be with you.”

            [“Peace be with you.” in ASL]

                  As the Father has sent me,

                        so I send you.”

      ²²When he had said this,

            Jesus breathed on them and said to them,

                  “Receive the Holy Spirit.

                        ²³If you forgive the sins of any,

                              they are forgiven them;

                        if you retain the sins of any,

                              they are retained.”

The gospel of the Lord.

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I love birthdays!  They are the one day of the year that a person—unless they’re a twin—gets to be the focus.  For that one day, everybody celebrates this person’s life, the ways they’re meaningful to them, and hopes for their life to come.

I also love the ways that different cultures celebrate birthdays.  Some cultures have unique parts of every birthday celebration.  Growing up, we always sang happy birthday—holding the last note purposefully off-key for as long as we could—the birthday person made a wish, and then attempted to blow out all of the candles on the cake in one breath.

While I was in Slovakia with the ELCA’s Young Adults in Global Mission program, I learned of a tradition that had been lost in my family since my dad’s ancestors came over from Central Europe.  It is a tradition that I have carried with me since my time in Slovakia to varying degrees.  In Slovakia and other Central European countries, it is customary to bless the birthday person.

While I usually leave the shot of palinka or slivovica out of my blessings, with close friends and family, I make a point of blessing them and the new year of life that they are beginning.  I try to be realistic and hopeful in my blessings, so that someone who gave birth or is pregnant might be blessed with new experiences, and also sleep, or that someone who has been at the forefront in work towards a moral and just state budget is blessed with and in the struggle and also with triumph.  Each blessing becomes its own unique celebration.

In some cultures, certain birthdays are particularly important.  In Mexico, quinceañeras, or 15^th birthdays, are a particularly big deal.  As I was reflecting on and reading about Pentecost, which we typically consider the birthday of the church, I was reminded of Korean traditions around first birthdays.  In Korean culture, the first birthday is a big deal.  I’m sure D told many of you about her granddaughter’s first birthday, so I will just mention the thing that most stuck with me, especially as Rev. Theresa Cho wrote about her family’s celebrations in an article in the Christian Century.[i]

One main part of the first birthday dol or doljanchi, “a ceremony in which the child is blessed with a prosperous future,” is a table set out with a variety of different objects.  The objects represent types of prosperity.  The child is then placed before the objects and whichever object the child chooses represents the destiny that child claims.

What captivated me in Rev. Cho’s explanations of the objects was the openness to interpretation: the golf ball her first child chose could be a symbol for athleticism or for being a quick thinker.  When her other child chose grapes instead of any of the items laid out, it could signify a healthy appetite or the self-assuredness to determine their own destiny—to take the less obvious path.

As we celebrate the birthday of the universal church and particularly this year’s momentous 500^th Reformation anniversary and the accidental birth of Protestantism, we too have destinies laid out for us.  And these destinies are the ones that have been laid out for millennia.

In Acts, Peter points back to the prophet Joel, saying, “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your children shall prophesy, and your youth shall see visions, and your elders shall dream dreams. ¹⁸Even upon my slaves of all genders, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”  This destiny is laid out for us and though we may not know what it will look like or what Joel and Peter mean, it is a destiny of new hope, change, and new life.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul sets before us some of the gifts of the Spirit: the utterance of wisdom, utterance of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, working of miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, various kinds of tongues, and interpretation of tongues.

None of us possess all of these.  Many of us possess at least one of these, and some of us possess other gifts that aren’t listed here.  But as we sit with them spread out before us, not knowing quite what they will mean or how the Holy Spirit will use us or our destinies, one thing is certain: the Holy Spirit is at work.  She has come as tongues of fire and rushing wind, she has come in languages we do and do not understand, she has come in water, wine and bread, and she brings with her upheaval of the systems that harm us and all of creation and she brings new life to everyone.

Sometimes the work of the Holy Spirit makes us uncomfortable, sometimes defensive, and sometimes confused.  But these are good things!  They are blessings, because it is in struggling and being uncomfortable that we learn from each other and about ourselves.  The Holy Spirit rarely calls people to what is comfortable, but she does bless us with what is meaningful, which is ultimately life-giving.

The gifts and blessings of the Holy Spirit on this birthday of the church and each day are gifts of diversity and difference—new ways of being and connecting.  The Holy Spirit changes us and gives us new ways to proclaim with Jesus, “Pokoj vám.” “La paz sea con ustedes.” “Frieden sei mit euch.” “Peace be with you.” [Peace be with you in ASL].

Amen.

---

[i] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2015-04/may-24-day-pentecost

International Roma Day

On April 17, 1423 King Sigismund wrote a letter of safe conduct for "Ladislaus, Gyspy Voivode, and those who depend on him."  This is one of many letters and one of the most well-known granting safe travel and autonomy for Roma in Central Europe.  This letter protected Roma, who have lived throughout Central Europe (and the whole world) from even before that time and since.

Today is International Roma Day.  Many people have no idea who Roma are, let alone that this day exists.  If our current administration is any example, they also have absolutely no clue of the difficulties Roma have historically faced and continue to face today.  I was one of those people for a long time.

In 2009 I was accepted to serve with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Young Adults in Global Mission program in Slovakia.  I worked with Phiren Amenca, which meant that I spent much of my time in relationship with Roma in the village of Rankovce.  This year was profoundly formative in my life for many reasons.  The relationships I formed and the people who opened their lives to me, an outsider from the states, continue to impact how I live (and are part of why I am writing this blog today).  Roma have not always been welcomed, valued, or affirmed like they were by King Sigismund.  Their history is much more difficult.

Growing up, the sentence that best sums up what I learned about the Holocaust, or porraimos (the devouring) in Roma was: six million Jews died in the Holocaust.  Since then I have learned better.  I don't know of anyone who "died" in the Holocaust.  People were systematically targeted, tortured, and killed in the Holocaust.  Six million of those targeted, tortured, and killed were Jewish.  Almost five million more were not Jewish.

It is, indeed, vital to recognize the ways that anti-semitism (including anti-semitic writing from the namesake of my faith tradition, Martin Luther) actively targeted and still targets Jewish people.  It is also important to recognize that, by our best estimates from incomplete information, at least half a million, or 500,000 Roma (sometimes known as gypsies, though unless someone is self-identifying, that is generally a derogatory term) were also targeted, tortured, and killed.  This is between one quarter and one half of all Roma living in Europe at the time.

It's harder to know the details about Roma because frequently they were categorized as "social deviants," "tramps," and later "Gypsies," among other terms.  The Romani and Jewish peoples were the two main and largest groups targeted because Nazi Germany categorized them as "racially inferior."  The intentional targeting, torturing, and killing of Roma was not recognized as being racially motivated until the 1970s and most scholars didn't begin to pay attention until the 1980s.

Roma also continued to struggle under communism, which attempted to erase their culture.  After the fall of communism, since the discrimination that Roma have faced for centuries was never addressed, and even the reality of their persecution under the Holocaust has been erased and downplayed for so long, Roma have continued to face discrimination throughout the world, especially in Central Europe.

Roma in Slovakia especially are often placed in schools for children with learning disabilities, hired last for work--if at all--even when they do a better job, and stereotyped as lazy, thieves, or conniving (where do you think the term "gypped" comes from?).  The Roma I encountered cared deeply about me.  They wanted to get to know me and I wanted to get to know them.  We were both outsiders in the dominant culture, which helped us connect.

Whether it was connecting with the children who came to our after school-type program or youth group activities, or the adults who volunteered and worked to help the kids who came or who participated in our bible studies, we took the time to get to know each other.  The friends I made among the Roma were the hardest to say good-bye to.  They taught me (or tried to teach me) to dance.  They stood up for me personally as a queer person and for other lgbtq+ people they didn't even know at bible studies and when I couldn't be there or couldn't stand up for myself.

Today is International Roma Day.  This month is a great month to learn more about Roma, so here are some resources:

Books:
We are Roma: One Thousand Years of Discrimination by Valeriu Nicolae
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca

Links: 
Check out #internationalromaday on social media.
My friend and fellow YAGM, Matt's blog, which includes a paper shared at the European Commission Meeting on Roma in Europe in 2010. 
Phiren Amenca, the European-based organization I worked with as a YAGM.
A Huffington Post article about some of the five million people targeted, tortured, and killed during the Holocaust who were not Jewish, yet were purposefully targeted, including the Roma.