Blessing in the Bullhorns

I missed the NC Gay Pride Festival this year. That was unusual for me since
I consider that to be one of our most significant evangelism events. For years
we have been handing out water bottles wrapped in rainbows and an invitation to
worship with us at Calvary. Open Hearts. Open Minds. Open Doors. Or so the
denominational slogan goes. We are the people of The United Methodist Church.
After the parade recedes from the hot pavement, we retreat to our display table
where we enjoy conversation with passers-by. It's a lovely way to stay in touch
with the world, to discover again the Message so desperately desired by those
outside the church walls.

It was regrettable that I missed all the frivolity here in the Bull City . But worse, it was the first time I recall antagonists showing up with Bibles and bullhorns to bully our faithful outreachers. The pastoral hormones run rampant within me when I think of my lambs being abused yet again by belligerent Bible-thumpers. Too often have they been traumatized by such misguided zeal. I wince to imagine those blaring words of condemnation. So un-Jesus-like.

But maybe I worried overmuch. The church was still the church when the shepherd was away. Didn't the motherbear-of-a-lesbian take on the taunters and scatter them? Didn't the long-married-grandmother who had found her voice speak the truth in love?
Didn't the spunky 15-year-old recently adopted by two moms stand strong with her
gay-straight alliance friends and lead them in singing "Jesus loves me. This I
know for the Bible tells me so!" And didn't the students silently intersperse
themselves among the placard-bearing barkers lining the road to dilute their
raucous racket?

Non-violence well-lived. Christians at work, helping God to heal the world.

Here Phillip Shoe gives testimony. Wish I had been there to witness it!

Recently, many of our members were approached by a group of Christians opposed to our understandings of God and Grace. Their tactics were varied. Some subtly asked questions, all the while becoming stronger and stronger in their challenges to our theology. Others were not so “polite.” They turned to shouts and bullhorns. “God can save you. God can change you!” Those words still ring in the ear. They still ache in the heart.

Fear. Anxiety. Wounds ripped open. Salt poured in. Blessings adorned. We are a people saved by wounds. Crowned head. Nailed feet. Nailed hands. Pierced side. Blessing in the wounds. And as we learned on that sunny September day, there can even be blessing in the bullhorns.

Many Christians comment that they feel lost, even in the midst of their own people and their own sanctuaries. They are adrift. I have talked to other Christians who speak of the need to share themselves more fully, but not having the safety to do so in their own particular communities of faith. There is a longing to go deeper, to relate in new ways to their brothers and sisters, and to know God more fully. Sadly, in countless congregations, admitting pain and suffering is no longer seen as a mark of Christian service, but as a sign of personal failure. Bring in the bullhorns!

Read the Book of Acts! The early church was often attacked. What were those crazy people doing? They were turning against centuries of tradition and proclaiming a new Word. Eating together? Eating unclean food? Eating with those people? Eating the Body and Blood? Cries of cannibalism were launched at the early church. They were accused of the worst kinds of incestuous sins. They stood out and they were misunderstood. Just what were these people up to?

I believe they were circling in, interlocking their arms and uniting as one. In their unity they found the strength to withstand the challenges from outside. They were holding one another up. Through attack, they were able to see their commonalities. Their shared and common woundedness reminded them of the wounded Lord and of their need to heal and be healed. They ate together, sang together, took the Eucharist together, and lived as though their very lives and salvation depended upon the community they were building. Bring in the bullhorns!

I say let the protestors come. When we are attacked, we might just be doing something right. When the church fails to stand out, the church has become society.
There is something about the way in which we are living that is drawing attention. No, its not that we have gay and straight worshipping together. It is not that that
we have red, yellow, brown, black and white worshipping together. It is not that we are old and young. It is not that we ask hard-hitting questions of our faith. What is threatening is that we have been formed as a community. We have found unity. We are united in Christ. United in Christ, yet we still stand out. We are not perfect and there is always work to be done. But what I have witnessed in the weeks following that great September day has reminded me of the blessing of Calvary UMC.

We are a community that makes being Christian life changing and challenging. It is not easy Grace. It is a Grace freely given, but understood through suffering. We are shoulders to cry on. We are hearts that shed tears. But, through all of this, we are smiles and laughter. We are moments of joy and great peace. And in all, we do this in and through Christ. Bring in the Bullhorns and let them remind us again and again who we are, who we are not, and whose we will always be.

Phillip Shoe, M.Div.

Behold, I AM ALIVE!

The past few days have been strangely troubling for me. Mostly it was matters of my own making. Some of them I probably just flat made up. But suffer I have, silly as it may have been. It's one of those times when I just wanted to be invisible awhile. Maybe there's inside work to be done, the kind that can't happen when we're too well connected with the world.

Pastor Pam diagnosed it as tied down, tied up, tied tight. Strung out by idols that bind and strap one intended for flight. We had just shared together in the service of death and resurrection for our beloved brother Rev. Jack Klein. Rick Edens, co-pastor of United Church of Chapel Hill, wove a fascinating sermon about "the tethers being loosened." He reminded us that the waning of the body is also the loosening of the tethers that bind us to earth. Jack, he said, was one who went about un-tying tethers that limit and cripple people: poverty, disgrace, closets, despair. Now his own tethers have been loosened and he is free! The heavens have been torn open to unleash the holy and receive him home.

So here am I, fit as a fiddle (I pray). Yet I'm bound by my own bitter bindings to goals and expectations and assumptions that God never asked of me. Others did. Think Aslan sacrificed on stone table. Only, see that gorgeous beast strategically strapping himself there. Humiliated, he cannot free himself. Only Grace can untie him.

Pam prescribed postrating myself before God, humbly offering up every idol, yet without dramatic fanfare of all my glorious shortcomings. Simply submit to the holy untying of my knotty web.

It's worth a tangled try.

Today is the 53rd anniversary of my birth into this world. I celebrated it by Coming to the Middle, offering up the Body and Blood of Christ, and participating in the dying to new life. I prayed for Ann and her family grieving and letting go of dear Jack. I remembered my brother-in-law John who buried his precious dad yesterday in West Texas. I thanked God for my husband who brought me breakfast in bed -- a tray laden with waffles and sweet peaches, juice, milk, and coffee, and my crystal bud vase (a treasure bought in Waterford, Ireland where Mom and I visited 26 years ago) holding her favorite rose: Tropicana. And I gave thanks for my girly in Costa Rica who sang to me as I sipped OJ. And for my dad who called to tease me about whose birthday this is and when Columbus Day is. And for friends who blessed me, including Mrs. Blackmon in Texas, my 9th-grade homemaking teacher, who never forgets.

In the shower I claimed the blessing of health with true gratitude, receiving again the washing of regeneration, remembering my baptism. While thanking God for conceiving me, I received the gift: I had just outlived my mother!

Exactly two months from mine today will be Mama's birthday. She died four days short of her 53rd birthday. It was a nasty, sneaky, tenacious cancer that drug her down death's cellar door -- the same sneaky demon that took her one sister, taunted the other one most recently, and threatened nine years ago to kidnap me.

But I am not dead. I am here to celebrate my birthday! These four difficult days have been days of grace and promise. I did not die before my birthday. My mother's story is not my story. I am alive!

I believe again: every day is a gift. But these four ... they broke the curse.
Let the tethers be loosened, child, and live! Halleluia!

Let the Amish Wage Our War on Terror

After a month of "Coming to the Middle" to find our common values,
and after a month of training in methods of NonViolence,
I am more fully confident that war is the least creative option possible.
When the Amish Christians of Lancaster, PA experienced their own "9/11" last week,
they showed us an alternative means of dealing with the "suicide-bomber/hijacker/child molesting/crazed killer."

They took up an offering for his surviving family!

Only a people steeped in the practices of nonviolence for a lifetime or two could possibly have responded that imaginatively. Compassionately. Counter-intuitively.

We need not move to Pennsylvania to learn the ways that make for peace.
There's plenty of opportunity to practice here.

Shalom.

Here's how a Detroit columnist narrates the "hard work of healing" happening there.


Metro Detroit
BRIAN DICKERSON:
The power of example: Lessons of 'Amish 9/11'

October 9, 2006

FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Am I the only one who thinks the United States would be safer if the Amish were in charge of the war on terror?

A week has passed since the schoolhouse slaughter in Lancaster County, and while the rest of us continue to shake our heads in horror, the Amish are already bent to the hard work of healing.

The massacre shattered the serenity of southeast Pennsylvania's Amish country. An Amish bishop called it "our 9/11," which captures both the shootings' seismic impact and the degree to which the Amish consider themselves a nation apart.

Now the bodies of five little girls and the madman who killed them are in the ground. But if you are like me, what astonishes you the most isn't what a 32-year-old madman did, but how the community whose children he slaughtered has responded.

Charles Roberts IV, who killed himself after shooting 10 helpless schoolgirls, wasn't Amish himself. But his milk delivery route included the farms of many Amish families, including that of 13-year-old Marian Fisher, one of those killed in Roberts' rampage.

So when the Fisher family made plans for Marian's funeral, they naturally invited her killer's widow and children. It wasn't an impulsive invitation, issued in a moment of vengeful anger -- Come see what that monster did! -- but a reflexive recognition that Roberts' survivors, too, were part of a community in need of healing.

Two days later, when the shooter's body was laid to rest, the mourners included dozens of Amish.

There were other examples of continuity and grace: The Amish community's determination that a fund set up to pay for its own children's funeral and medical expenses would be shared with the shooter's survivors; the delegations, official and informal, that bore messages of forgiveness and condolence to the Roberts' doorstep; the decision that funeral processions for the dead girls would pass by the Roberts' house, not be rerouted around it.

To an outside world that understands recrimination better than redemption, it was a dumbfounding spectacle.

Thirty years ago, when I was attending college in New Jersey, I used to pass through Lancaster County several times each year on my way to my parents' home in western New York. Like most visitors to Amish Country, I marveled at its residents' stubborn resistance to modernity. I also remember thinking, not without sadness, that the secular culture would inevitably overwhelm their way of life.

Now I'm not so sure. And this past weekend, as Amish farming families resumed their harvest routines, I found myself thinking about Dr. Seuss' curmudgeonly Grinch.

You remember the story: The Grinch, who detested Christmas and all it stood for, vowed to stop the holiday once and for all. One Christmas Eve, he and his dog Max descended into the peaceful hamlet of Who-ville for an orgy of pillaging. Then, after relieving the despised Whos of all their worldly goods, the Grinch paused on a nearby hilltop to savor the waking Whos' wails of devastation.

What he heard, you may recall, was singing.

Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or dicker@freepress.com.

An Amish Grandfather's Forgiveness: The Fruit of NonViolence

An Amish grandfather's lesson of forgiveness
Words that seem bizarre to many of us flow from lifetime of nonviolence
L. GREGORY JONES
Special to the Charlotte Observer

Shock, dismay, horror -- words that only barely begin to convey our reactions to the killings of five Amish girls in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse this week. How could such a thing happen? We reel at this stark clash of cultures and images: the eruption of modern America's violence with the non-violent Amish; adult bitterness and youthful innocence.

There is also another story here that we risk missing amid the chaos of the moment -- a tale of two lives, lived over time, with very different implications and lessons for all of us.

The grandfather of one of the slain Amish girls was standing next to his 13-year-old granddaughter's body, preparing her for burial. Less than 48 hours after the killings, he told a group of young boys: "We must not think evil of this man." He went on to urge them to forgive the killer, who had taken his own life as well.

Reflections of a life's work
Such words sound bizarre to many of us.How could a grieving grandfather think such thoughts, much less say them, so soon after the killing? Who among us, we wonder, is not thinking evil of this man?

What we miss is how this grandfather's life has been formed by non-violence, by patterns of prayer and worship and peaceful resolution of differences with others.

His words come naturally to him because they are the reflection of how he has lived over the course of a lifetime. They startle many of us who live in the midst of violence, who tend to harbor desires for vengeance, even if we do not act them out violently.

The grandfather would be the first to admit that it is not "natural" for human beings to embody a commitment to forgiveness, to living non-violently, to learning not to think evil of others. That must be learned over time, with the assistance of a wider community of people who share those commitments.

He would say it is learned by following Jesus.

The noted preacher William Sloane Coffin interpreted the verses Romans 8:14-21 by saying, "If you love good you have to hate evil; otherwise you are sentimental. But if you hate evil more than you love good, you simply become a damn good hater, and of such people the world has enough."

Hatred corrodes life
This grandfather is no hater. As a result of the habits of a lifetime, he is speaking and acting as those who know him would expect him to act: as a peaceful man who embodies the art of living as a forgiven and forgiving person. He undoubtedly hates the evil that was done to his granddaughter, but he also knows the corrosive effect of harboring that hatred and letting it define his life and our world.

By contrast, the killer learned to hate extremely well.

He evidently harbored bitterness for more than two decades, and there were no practices of forgiveness and repentance that would have enabled him to discover a way of letting past brokenness remain in the past.

Instead, bitterness seeped into his soul, and his grudge burdened him until it finally exploded in an outrageous series of actions whose effects go even beyond the horror of the young girls' deaths: the scarring of a community and its fragile peaceable life; the despair that many of us feel, wanting some constructive outlet for our own outrage and grief; the fear that we cannot stop the cycles of violence and the imitative destructiveness we have seen in recent school shootings.

Cultivate forgiveness
Our task is to hope even against hope for communities and practices of forgiveness and repentance that can cultivate a future not bound by the destructiveness of the past.
We need not live like the Amish to learn a powerful lesson from the grandfather's life and witness.

But it will take us becoming focused on a renunciation of the violence and vengeance that haunts our own lives and imaginations, and learning to live in relationships and communities that are marked by the regular, difficult, costly yet life-giving patterns and practices of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Iris Murdoch once wrote that "a saint is someone who absorbs evil without passing it on." If a close relative can do so even in the wake of senseless killing, we ought to be able to find ways to cultivate such saintly practices in our own lives. Whatever it takes to do so.

L. Gregory Jones is dean of Duke Divinity School and author of "Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis." Write him at Duke University Divinity School, Box 90968, Durham NC 27708-0968, or gjones@div.duke.edu.