Holy Spirit Portality

This year's Advent & Christmastide Calendar is here! A short prompt for each day, that requires no complicated props or prep, to help you focus on the soul of the season. I had help with this year's calendar from the amazing Quinn Caldwell!

Pastoral note, to accompany the calendar and give depth to the focus theme: WATCH, is pasted below.

Print it on pretty paper (I love gold vellum) and pop it on your fridge. Use with your congregation or book group. I am happy to share this resource freely, give me and Quinn a nod if you like, and think about buying his fun and wise book, All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas.

Advent and Christmas 2017: WATCH

Beloved, it’s been a YEAR. Inaugurations, investigations, mass protests and counterprotests. Hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires (many of them, metaphorically, at the nation’s capital). Muslim travel bans, transgender rights rollbacks, open assault on the poorest and sickest people in America through cruel legislation. Two of the largest mass shootings our country has ever seen. White supremacists openly on parade, with torches, and without masks. Nuclear holocaust nightmares, redux.

It’s also been the year of: the largest single-day protest (the Women’s March on January 20). The annulment of much of that cruel legislation by an engaged electorate.  The takedown of wealthy and powerful sexual predators, and the unmasking of sexual harassment and assault nationwide, by women on the political left and the right. White people awakening to their privilege and showing up in greater numbers to protest white supremacy (it’s a start). And, momentarily, the seating of newly elected trans folks, women, and people of color in political office throughout the land.

You probably know, because you are church nerds, that Advent is not just about the coming of itty bitty baby Jesus. It is the season of Apocalypse--the second coming of adult Jesus (look busy!) in judgment. Apocalypse means “uncovering.” Put that way, it doesn’t seem so threatening. It may even seem welcome.

As much suffering as we have endured as a nation this year, we are also experiencing an unprecedented uncovering.

We are more deeply aware of the ways in which our culture, society and even & especially our religion (I’m looking at you, Christianity!) have propped up the Powers That Be and condoned violence against black and brown bodies, women’s bodies, queer/trans bodies, immigrant bodies. More, if not all, is being revealed about the way we have failed to live up to Christ’s vision of Kin-dom.

At the same time: we are struggling to articulate a Christianity and a Jesus that doesn’t live in luxury in Herod’s palace but is getting born, born, born into the margins of Bethlehem. In the comments section, they call us snowflakes, for daring to love recklessly and stand with the underdog, always. Well then: let’s embrace snowflake Christianity. Let’s run out into the field with the shepherds, stare up at the sky with the wise ones, and stick our tongues out to catch the next flakes as they fall. Let’s be on the lookout for where Jesus might turn up next--what ways the most vulnerable will turn out to be the supernaturally powerful, after all.

This year’s Advent calendar is about noticing where God is breaking through, bringing attention to the minute and the massive, so-big-we-might-have-missed-it-otherwise hope and holiness in the New Creation. A new thing this year: half the calendar is written by my brilliant friend Rev. Quinn Caldwell! It maps to the UCC Advent Devotional book, Watch (each day, the prompt matches the devo). The print edition is sold out, but you can still buy a Kindle edition if you want to read the devos here (though the calendar works just fine without the book):

https://www.uccresources.com/products/watch-2017-advent-devotional-the-stillspeaking-writers-group

I’m so grateful to still be here, to still know you, to be in this together.

A blessing upon each and every one of you, wherever you are,

My first Easter sermon at First Church Berkeley! It included compulsory group dancing. And I still didn’t get tomatoes thrown at me!

~

Rev. Molly Baskette ~ First Church Berkeley UCC “ResistDance” ~ John 20:1-18 Sunday, April 16, 2017 ~ Easter Sunday

I know a lot of people named Jesus.

There is, obviously, the person who brings us together today:  the radical, brown, refugee, outsider, preacher, prophet, child of God who could not stay dead no matter what they did to him.

But I know others. There is Jesus, our cheerful and capable janitor here at Beth El. And I just met another Jesus, the undocumented man I met at the sherriff’s office on Thursday, when Rev. Rachel and I went to advocate for the rights and dignity of our immigrant neighbors. Jesus is everywhere, if you have eyes to see.

When I graduated from seminary, my husband Peter and I moved to Mexico for a year, to work at an orphanage, the Casa San Jose. As problematic as we now know orphanages to be for child development, the Casa was a pretty happy place, all in all. I’m Facebook friends with many of the kids we tended back then. They are young adults now with families of their own, some of them in LA, with or without documents, making a life. And they unfailingly talk about the joy of that time in their childhood--how much fun they had, how they took care of one another, how in spite of the trauma and burdens they bore, they felt safe and loved.

When we lived there, there were 141 kids on site. And three of them were named Jesus. Clearly, we had a problem. How to differentiate between all the Jesuses? The eldest, a handsome teenager, got to be, simply, Jesus. The next youngest became Chuy, an affectionate nickname for Jesus in Mexican culture. And the youngest of all was 4-year-old Chuyito, little tiny Jesus. Chuyito was a dead ringer, I imagine, for the original model, childhood edition: curly brown hair, winsome brown eyes. He barely ever said a word, and always hung his head to the side, in curiosity or skepticism, as if anticipating the day when he would be debating the Pharisees.

Chuyito loved to crawl into my lap and stay there for hours, and I loved him there, because we were both pretty homesick and lonely, and when life is hard you need a soft place.

My favorite memory of Chuyito is not from that year, but a couple years later. When Peter and I left the Casa to go home to the US, we discovered we were homesick for Mexico, and so we’d travel back with a group from whatever church we were inhabiting, and give them a chance to fall in love with the kids the way we had. On our first trip back, our group brought a backpack for each of the hundred-plus kids, stuffed to the brim with clothes, art supplies and toys, and handed them out on our last night together. The boys, including Chuyito, put their backpackson immediately and refused to take them off. Then we strung Christmas lights, rented a DJ and a speaker, and had a giant dance party on the patio. Bankers and little boys do si doed and swung one another wildly to salsa music and Madonna alike. Chuyito, now a full-on boisterous 7-year-old, danced like a maniac for hours with his backpack on, until his movements finally slowed, until he fell asleep, face down on the tile. With his backpack on. Even Jesus needs to rest.

I have a friend, a UCC minister, who suffers from pretty debilitating depression. You’d never know it. She seems happy enough, and is one of the funniest people I know. But her depression has almost ended her marriage; it has hobbled her parenting; it caused her more than once to reconsider her career as a person who has to be hopeful as a profession.

My friend told me something once I’ll never forget. There are times when medication doesn’t do its job, when prayers fail her, when nothing is working to shift the great gray elephant of depression that sits on her soul. And this is what she does in those moments: she changes one thing. Just one thing. “If I’m lying down, I get up. If I’m standing up, I sit down. If I’m inside, I go outside. If I’m outside, I go inside. If I’m alone, I get with people, if I’m with people, I get alone. If I can change one thing, then I can change more things. If I can change more things, then perhaps I can change everything--or, God working in me can, anyhow.” All she has to do is make one little movement.

I myself have never suffered from a lasting or truly devastating depression. To be perfectly annoying about it, being happy has always come pretty easily to me. But this year has tested me severely. Some mornings, including this week, the news has flattened me to the bed, immobilized me as surely as a deep depression. Pick your poison: Syrian children sarin gassed, America making mushroom clouds in Afghanistan, North Korea testing ICBMs, flying coach while Asian on United. Health care under threat, public schools under threat, the rights and lives of immigrants and refugees, black folks, Muslims, queer and trans under threat. We don’t know who will live and who will die before this bitter cup has passed from us. All this against a backdrop of winter rain, such needed rain but a rain that now feels like it will never end, a perma-rain that chills the soul as well as the body, a new and possibly forever climate-chaos abnormal.

I’m trying to remember that this is an Easter sermon.

If I often feel despair these days, I who have every advantage, how must it be for those who don’t share my privileges? Those who face actual and immediate threats to their lives? The undocumented, the brown-skinned, the broke?  I have my whiteness to shield me from ICE and the cops, my paycheck to shield me from poverty. I even have a faith to shield me from sorrow if I choose it, to hide in a La La Land of Easter joy where everything turns out all right in the end.

And yet I have met so many people, who no matter how systems and circumstances might conspire to kill them, have mastered the art of defiant joy. I guess that’s what you do when people want you dead--staying alive is your only countermove.

And Jesus, himself broke and brown and unhoused, is the best example of living big and beautifully in the face of violence and death. I’m always amazed by his capacity for resurrection. Jesus made a decision. He could have stayed dead. He’d discharged his duty to the human family. He taught us everything he knew, offered us an entirely new way of being human, he loved us hard in spite of our frailties, and in return we rejected, abandoned and crucified him. Who would sign up for more life in the face of that?

I confess that sometimes it just seems like a whole lot less WORK being dead. If you’ve had a near death experience, or even surgery under general anesthesia, you know what I’m talking about. There is something truly compelling and even seductive about the idea of slipping away, into a place beyond pain, beyond suffering. A place of eternal rest that no fear or sarin gas can touch.

Jesus lived through the worst we could do to him; he reached that moment of peaceful surrender, and he made a decision to come back.

And he didn’t do it by half-measures, either. He didn’t shamble out of the grave, explaining himself. He didn’t try to stay under the radar to avoid the authorities. He came back in a BIG way.  We cut him down but he leapt up high. He made resurrection into a Broadway show tune, complete with the choreography of hapless disciples running all over the stage.

The early church fathers came up with a word to describe the Trinity: perichoresis, literally, circle dance. They understood God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit as movement, constant flow from the beginning of Creation. And being dead did not exempt Jesus from his place in the dance.

Did you know that some researchers at Oxford did a study? They taught a group of volunteers, each in private, the same dance moves. Then they taught another group, individually, all different dance moves. They noted everyone’s pain tolerance levels by putting extra-squeezy blood pressure cuffs on them. [who comes up with these studies? I have no idea] Then they set them all free in the same room, on a dance floor, with headphones on.

The ones who had learned the same dance began to sync their movements. The ones who knew different moves, or heard different music, each did their own thing. And when the experiment was over, they measured each one’s pain tolerance again. The ones who had moved in sync were able to stand significantly more pain than before. But the ones who heard different songs, or were taught different dance moves to the same music, experienced either no change in pain perception, or actually felt more pain than they had at the start. Perichoresis, dancing in sync, had legitimately made the synched dancers able to bear more pain.

Of course, they didn’t control for people who find any kind of dancing in public painful. :)

Dance is the body’s jazz hands for the soul. Dance is God on the move. We dance our babies around the kitchen. Practice the moves to Thriller in our bedroom for hours. Dance is the mosh pit, the all night rave, Asian grandmas at Zumba class--all of them just as much church as where we are right now. Dance is the 7-year-old Mexican orphan tearing it up on a tile patio; a 3 year old in the aisles at church who will not be stopped but just HAS to dance to every hymn. Dance is Ghost Ship, the young ones gathering before the fire that night, ready to worship at the altar of joy, and now dancing at home with God; and dance is this community, today on Easter, rising from our own ashes.

Dance is resurrection: the mom in chemo doing a three minute dance party around the living room in defiance of her white blood cell count. Dance is a flash mob practicing for the Climate March, to show how the Earth will rise up against us if we don’t rise up for Her.

Dance is what we do when we have too many feelings and not enough words. Dance don’t cost a thing--it belongs to everybody without regard for ability to pay. To dance is to let God move through us, reanimate us no matter what grim reapers are haunting us, the perichoresis that began before everything, the music still playing, healing us, body and soul.

Dance is THIS GUY. To dance is to laugh in the face of death, and all its minions.  They have not won--whoever “they” are--if we can still dance.

Every day, someone, somewhere, faces the powers of death. But then they change one thing. They make one little move. They put down the bottle. They call the therapist, the DV hotline, the immigration lawyer. They pack a bag. They write their name on the application. If they are lying down, they get up. They join the dance.

Rev. Molly Baskette ~ First Church Berkeley UCC

“Resist+Surrender” Matthew 4:1-11

Sunday, March 5, 2017 ~ Lent I

If there’s one thing the Temptation story teaches us, it’s that Jesus likes to do things the hard way. From the very beginning of his ministry, at least when it comes to his own comfort and survival, he doesn’t take any magical shortcuts. This forty days in the wilderness are his Jedi training--a time of testing and strengthening before the 3 years of ministry that will take him to prix fixe dinners at Chez Panisse with the 1%, but also have him sleeping rough, healing lepers and ultimately dying on a cross. He needs to be ready for anything.

We call this story the Temptation, but it’s not so much a tempting as a testing. Scottish theologian William Barclay said “temptation is not meant to make us sin, it is meant to enable us to conquer sin. It is not meant to make us bad, it is meant to make us good. It is not meant to weaken us, it is meant to make us emerge stronger and finer and purer from the ordeal. Temptation is not the penalty of being human, it is the glory of being human--the test which comes to every human whom God wishes to use.

“So we must think of this whole incident, not as the temptation of Jesus, but as his testing.”

One of the most exciting things about this story is that God is entirely absent, but Satan is there. It’s enough to make me wonder if Satan isn’t actually God’s stand-in--a subcontractor if you will--God’s flunky in making Jesus, into Jesus.

I also wonder--what if Jesus hadn’t passed the test? Would God have moved on to another human, a century or twenty later? Tried again, maybe with a woman next time?

But Jesus did pass the test. The test was to see if he would trivialize the power God gave him by using it for parlor tricks, to turn stones to bread or save his own neck, or if he would go cheap for that power by making himself President of the World, which might seem like a really good idea if you are supposed to be the people’s Savior, but might have unintended consequences.

Let’s be clear, Satan wasn’t offering Jesus bad things. He wasn’t trying to get Jesus to kill for him, steal or lie. Satan was offering him good things. But context matters.

The word of the moment is Resistance. It is the rallying cry for those who believe many of the decisions made by the current regime in power are antithetical to common decency and common sense--and for progressive Christians, they are also opposite to the mandate Jesus gave us. Satan means opposer, and while many of us might hesitate to call any individual person evil, there is a sense that as a whole, this regime is in thrall, actively and passively, to Satanic forces that deny God’s love for all human beings and exploit God’s Creation. For the last few months we have been crying Resistance, but also trying to sort out for ourselves: what do we resist? And to what do we surrender? What is God and what is the opposite of God, and what is my role in it all?

And that is where the question of Jesus’ testing becomes so important, because when he might have grabbed all the power all at once and fixed the world’s problems, presumably, he left power on the table. He did it the hard way, and now, as a consequence, his work is still not done. It is still unfolding. What does all this mean?

The question of what to resist and what to surrender to is the question of every human heart. So many riptides and cross-currents of fear, desire and anger (another form of fear) move through each of us at a core level. We may not even be aware, most of the time, what really motivates us to do and say and think the things we do. And in that mix, there is also God’s movement, God’s desires, God’s will.

We each have our own way of sorting out God’s will from our will. Some of us, like me, find some alone space, get very quiet, and listen. Others, like my husband, use Excel spreadsheets. I was talking to a parishioner recently and she said she thinks that by now God must want her to stand on her own two feet and stop consulting Him all the time. I am curious about this--I don’t want to dismiss any idea that asks us to grow up continually--but I also believe that God is *always* going to know better than I am what I should do, because God sees the whole landscape, without my fear and desire filters muddying the view. That’s what makes God God.

The whole question of God’s will versus our will is about interrogating our desires so we know when to resist, and when to surrender, to choose the right good thing in every decision. It’s a spiritual tug of war. And those who are willing to stay in the game, even if we grow weary, will also grow strong. And if the story is true: before our strength runs out, Satan will scram, and angels will show up.

Thursday did not go how I planned. I planned to meet Doug Lawrence for coffee to talk about God and politics, then go furniture shopping with Kit and Rachel so we’d have a place to sit in our new post-fire offices in Durant House, then have a staff meeting where we would finally and completely work out all the details of everything Church. Forever. And ever. Amen.

Instead, on Thursday at 3pm, I found myself on one side of a suspension footbridge over a distinctly Harry Potter-esque abyss between jagged black rocks, the not-so-Pacific Ocean boiling hundreds of feet below me. On the other side of the footbridge lay 14 5th graders, a glorious vintage lighthouse, and beyond it, eternity.

I was there because the day before, I’d waved my daughter Carmen off on her first ever overnight school trip, to nature camp in the wilderness, with four epipens in hand. But later that evening, in the middle of Ash Wednesday service, I got multiple texts and phone calls from her teacher saying there were only three epipens left, and they were now on their way to the ER. All this transpired as I was saying from dust you came and to dust you shall return while I smeared ashes on the heads of the likes of young Mateo and wise Helen Wadman.

When I got to Marin, Carmen was shaken but OK. This was her 9th or 12th such near-death experience. Mostly she was devastated that she would have to go home and miss the rest of the trip. So I cancelled everything, brought her back to camp, and trailed the class that day to make sure she didn’t have a breakthrough allergic reaction. That’s how I came to be on the edge of a footbridge. She’d faced her death the night before, and today I was facing mine.

One of the gifts of being a cancer survivor is that it puts other fears in perspective, so you are able to do things like saunter across suspension footbridges in earthquake country when you are afraid of heights. Another gift of survivorship is you reserve the right not to do obviously foolish and wanton things, like crossing suspension footbridges in earthquake country. Even if on the other side lies your heart’s other half, and light, light, light.

The other week I preached about conflict, and I was wrong about something. I said that conflict is difference plus tension. I think that is right. But I said that in order to eliminate conflict, we can eliminate difference, or we can eliminate tension. I think that’s right, too, actually.

Where I was wrong was in the assumption that it’s always a good idea to eliminate tension. After all, tension is dynamic. Tension is what literally helps our bodies move, as muscles flex and relax. Tension is what makes any good story worth its salt. And tension is what holds a suspension bridge in place, so we can go from here to there/eternity.

Lent is the time when we enter the wilderness that Jesus sat in for 40 days, hot and hungry and suffering. It is the time when we dig deeper, look into our shadow, interrogate our desires and fears, and risk failure. It is a time we introduce an intentional tension into our lives because we are trying to strengthen our spiritualq muscles. We know life will have trouble of its own, so we don’t normally go looking for it, especially in the form of giving up caffeine or sugar. We know we will fail enough at God’s best hopes for us, so why would we set ourselves to a further test, like taking on a new prayer or social justice practice, in which we will surely fail to get an A?

We do it because it is preparation for the greater challenges that will come from all of God’s Opposers in life, those within us and those without. We do it because tension in our souls, like muscles, a suspension bridge, or a good story, is absolutely necessary to a healthy and strong spiritual life. Tension is what allows us to cross every abyss and move toward the light. Without it, we’re trapped and static. A Christianity without tension, without testing, is a flabby Christianity. It is, to quote James Baldwin speaking of white America and its often false Christianity, “fat and sleek and safe and dead.”

And that’s the real reason Jesus didn’t surrender to Satan’s offer to be President of the World. Where would be the dynamic tension in that?

In case you are wondering, I never did cross that bridge. But there are 36 days to go....

hiya Beloved!

It’s been a while. It’s been quite a year--for you and for me, I don’t doubt. 

Our church burned down earlier this year. Then we elected a sad, shlumpy sack of a demagogue to the highest office in the land. You can’t be both: a sad shlumpy sack, and a demagogue--but somehow Drumpf manages. 

That was the psychic backdrop against which I had to put together a Christmas Eve meditation. Sheesh! This is what I came up with. If you’d rather see/hear it, you can do so here--meditation comes in two parts, the first part starting at 42:35. 

Remember, Beloved: Christmas is fully 12 days long. And we can make it even longer--with a will. Here’s a photo for your day: I took this on Peter’s and my trip to Israel and Palestine earlier this year. This shot is from a cave in Bethlehem, very much like the cave where Jesus is rumored to have been born. They dug a star-shaped hole through the roof. It’s where the light gets in. No matter how dark the place where you might be today, or our nation at this moment--look for the Light. 

~

Good evening, Beloved. Beloved, it’s CHRISTMAS.

Thank God, Beloved. We NEED Christmas. Beloved, it’s been a hard year. Can I get an amen?

Beloved, this year is almost over. Can I get another amen?

We’re hoping and praying that the new year will bring a new energy, a new spirit, a clean slate, a blank canvas on which God will paint a much prettier picture.

But the fact of the matter is: there is nothing magical about the turn of the year. I hate to say this out loud. December 26 or January 1 we could turn on our Twitter and find that nothing has really changed. All the same ugliness is still out there. The death and destruction. The bullying and the threats.

We talk a lot about light and darkness at this time of year. We seem to think the light is good and the darkness is bad. But this just perpetuates the problem, the idea that some are all good and some are all bad and we know who is who.

But darkness is not the problem. So many good things happen in the darkness. Seeds germinate in darkness. We sleep and heal and refresh our bodies in darkness. We cuddle and make love in the darkness. And God made the skin of many of Her children dark and BEAUTIFUL.

Darkness is not the problem. It’s what people sometimes do in the darkness that’s the problem. We say and do hateful and hurtful things, because we have cover.

And lately, some of us, even those of us who bear the name Christian, are doing these things in the light. Painting swastikas in public places. Telling people to go back to Mexico or to Russia. Pulling off hijabs. Putting the N word, the B word, the C word into heavy rotation, trying to cut others down to much themselves up. I heard a story about an interracial couple that couldn’t walk down the street in their town without someone pulling up behind them in a pickup truck, slowing down, menacing, then revving the engine and driving away.

It feels like the clock is being turned back on civil rights. Like there are many pickup trucks slowing to a crawl behind many different kinds of someones.

Jesus once said that salt could lose its saltiness. When people do these things in the light, the light has lost its lightness.

We need a savior for a time like this. We crave a full-on superhero to come and take care of all this mess. Instead, we got a baby! A baby born into a poor family, a brown family, a religious-minority family, a family that immediately became refugees from political violence. How is this baby supposed to save us? That baby needed saving himself.

He only survived by evasive action, and even then not for very long: only 33 years. He got that far by spiritual jiu jitsu: turning the violence of the oppressors back on themselves. But it got him in the end.

And yet And yet Who won after all?

Here’s that baby, 2,000 years later. We’re still singing songs about him, we know them all by heart.

We’re not here singing Caesar’s war marches. We’re not here remembering Herod’s drinking songs. We’re here, singing about THAT baby.

Even if we’re only in church once a year, we come attracted like moths to this light. We come and we sing and we know he’s been with us all along, every one of the last 365 days, he’s with us wherever we go, saving us.

I want to tell you a story.

It’s a story about a fire.

It happened almost forty years ago. Some of you here survived it. Margie, one of our matriarchs, worked in the church then. She remembers going in to the wreck of her office, alongside David the pastor. They had flashlights, because it was so dark, they couldn’t see a thing. Everything was ash and smoke and water and mess.

But there, in the middle of her desk, inexplicably untouched, was this bell. It had survived the fire, perfectly. Though not perfectly, because it had a crack in it. It had a crack in it, but it still could ring

[ring it :)]

She gave it to me last week. She thought maybe I might like it, for the times ahead. To remember that God made us of powerful stuff, and we endure. The hard things that happen to us crack us, but those cracks let the light get in, so there are fewer shadows in our souls, so that all we do, we must do in the light of day and God’s love.

Now listen…

[Ian sings Leonard Cohen’s Anthem]

Yeah the wars they will Be fought again The holy dove She will be caught again Bought and sold And bought again The dove is never free Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That's how the light gets in

Baby Jesus breaks us He cracks us open He lets all the light in

And THIS is Christmas: the light seeping in through every crack

Were we cracked open this year, Beloved? YES! Were you cracked open by fire, and flood? YES! Were you cracked open by sickness, by the deaths of great icons and humble beloveds?  YES Were you cracked open by violence, and baldfaced, bold hatred? YES

You were cracked open, but did it break you? No I can’t hear you! NO!!

Every one of those places where you were cracked open is a place that the light can get in.

Beloved, we’re putting the US back in Jeez-US.

Can I get an amen?

It’s happening everywhere. Do you see it?

Usually we’re just extra kind to each other at Christmas. We think we’re kind all the time but if we were to review the tapes--well.

But since November 8, it’s not just hatred that has been breaking out all over. The kindness has too. It’s breaking out in a thousand ways, in schools, in grocery store lines, walking down the street. We are defending one another. We are befriending one another. We are listening and learning. We are choosing love over hatred, and making that love a verb.

It has already been Christmas every day, somewhere, for the last 7 weeks, because baby Jesus has been shining through YOU. We are weaponizing His love, Beloved.

And this time, Christmas will not be one day long, or 12 days long, it will be four years long, Heaven willing, it’ll be LIFElong, until the shadows come and God takes us home. Because no matter what, no matter what else they come for, even our lives, they can’t take away our conscience. They can’t take away our conviction. They can’t take away our courage. They can’t take away our Love--even our love for our enemies--without our consent. And we will not give that consent.

This will not be a perfect Christmas. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be. This Christmas is a cracked bell, a fired-up people, a wild ringing, a baby savior, a holy mess we’re getting ready to bless. It’s a perfectly imperfect Christmas.

So ring the bells that still can ring!

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

[Ian reprise Anthem]

I can't run no more With that lawless crowd While the killers in high places Say their prayers out loud But they've summoned, they've summoned up A thundercloud And they're going to hear from me Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That's how the light gets in

Shouted: OUR GOD IS WITH US! CHRIST IS BORN!!!! IT IS CHRISTMAS! Have people echo!

[WILD RINGING OF BELLS!!!!]

I wrote this for my national church’s Daily Devotionals, but didn’t get it in in time, so I thought I’d post it here. Hope it brings you a few extra deep breaths today and tomorrow!

“Be not afraid.” ~Deuteronomy 20:1 “Be not afraid.” ~Proverbs 3:25 “Be not afraid.” ~Matthew 17:7 (And at least 22 other places in the Bible)

~

With the fake cobwebs from Halloween still blowing in the breeze, here’s a tidbit for you: last year, horror films in the U.S. grossed about $500m. The movie industry loves to make them because they have a guaranteed profit margin.

Seems we love to be scared, and will in fact pay good money for the pleasure of it--as long as everything turns out all right in the end.

This long presidential election season has been as scary as a horror movie, or worse: because we’re not guaranteed a happy ending. For some, the nightmare will end on the evening of November 9. For others it will continue for years, at least in their imaginations, and possibly in real life. Stone-cold fear that our candidate’s opponent will become president is perhaps the only thing uniting 100% of the electorate.

One side sees: dead babies and former gun owners, victims of a liberal Supreme Court. The other sees: dead refugees denied immigration visas, dead unarmed black and brown men at the hands of militarized police, dead women in back-alley abortions, the dead dreams of a permanently poverty-stricken underclass.

Whose fears are legitimate?

Perhaps: nobody’s.

Not because those scenarios aren’t a possibility. Some of them are painfully, life-threateningly real already.

But God asked us, over and over, not to be afraid. To eschew fear, not drink it down as a potent potion.

What would it look like if we really, really trusted God? Not as an exercise in passivity, but as an act of courage?  Because no matter who wins, God will empower us to act decisively, and without resorting to automatic weapons or chainsaws, to fight the Powers That Be. There are the real supernatural powers at work.

Historically, Christians have been at our best not when we hold secular power (which can corrupt and compromise), but when we are outside the palace demanding justice from those within, living out a benevolent, brave community that stands in stark contrast to the status quo.

So, this Halloween and beyond, let’s try living up to that oft-repeated Biblical exhortation from God: be not afraid.

Last Sunday was an epic day of ministry--both in length and breadth. Sermon-writing started at 5am after a late dinner at a parishioner’s the night before, then I preached Pentecost at the 9am service, mingled at coffee hour, prayed Pentecost at the 11am service, went to the New Members luncheon, went on a brisk drive downtown for a small group with my new church’s amazing “true elders,” made a 911 call outside the senior living center to (hopefully…) support a couple who was fighting on the street (mandatory reporter! And moral obligation), then raced back to church to help the youth cook a lovely vegan dinner for their parents who were attending a talk on teenagers in our chapel, then ate that dinner with all the generations in the chapel as the afternoon sunlight streamed through the stained glass. 

How did I get so lucky?

I seriously feel like I hit the jackpot with church gigs. Twice in a row now. I know it will take time to live into the nuance and depth of this new people, that I can’t have overnight the trust, love, credibility and mutual knowledge it took me years to establish in Somerville, but there are so many signs and wonders already that our life together here is going to be different, but just as beautiful.

I’ve been logging lots of 14 and 16 hour days. Some of that time is in my second job of househunting, but lots of it is straight-up church, and this is actually something I am glad about. I am making a strategic decision to work my butt off right now while the family is far away. If they were newly here and I was out six nights a week--or even three--it wouldn’t take very long before the family system broke down...and, can I say how much EASIER it is to get stuff down without kids?

I feel like Superwoman, suddenly liberated from kryptonite. Lean In, my hiney. No wonder dads (in marriages where they are not the primary parent) get more traction in their careers. When the family gets here in August, I can ease off, knowing First Church Berkeley and I have obtained liftoff and I can ride the thermals for a while.

But the other reason I am happy about this is because for weeks, for months really, or even years, I have been a little worried that my jet engine was slowing down. I spent many years working so, so hard in Somerville. I had finally gotten to a place, after the first 10 years or so, where I could coast a little bit.

And I liked it. I loved my hammock time, loved reading, loved being more engaged with the kids, loved writing books (or at least: having written them), loved learning new skills of talking to strangers and operating presentation software (or at least: having successfully talked to strangers and operated presentation software).

Except that I knew the day would come when I would have to start fresh with a new congregation, have to prove myself, have to work hard to learn a new culture and earn new capital. In other words, start all over again. And I worried I couldn’t do it. I worried I didn’t have the juice. I worried that I’d used all my mojo up on this one extraordinary church.

But the last two weeks have taught me that I still have plenty of mojo, which will be given at the right time and in the right amount, from Above. I’ve learned over 200 names in 18 days. I’ve met with 99 people in 17 small groups. The staff and deacons and I have already made some small but meaningful changes.

It certainly makes it a lot easier that my new church is so healthy and functional. Exhibit A: I asked them to put a lock on my bathroom door, and it was done with alacrity and joy! I asked them to change the communion elements from cubed and diced supermarket bread to whole loaves of fresh bread, and it was done with enthusiasm and warmth! I asked them if we could pray the community prayers “my way,” and they said sure thing! And really prayed with me! And got misty! And let the Spirit move! A trans young adult, a little silent and shaky in themselves as they come into their new expression of gender, let the Holy Spirit lift them right up out of the pew and pray at length, full of power and might! It was what Carmen would call a Golden God Moment.

It was my third Sunday at church, and I *finally* felt like I was maybe-just-a-little-bit able to ease into the flow of worship without wondering that it was time to sit down, stand up, say something or not-say-something and that I was the only person doing the wrong thing. Worship is a strange dance between humans and God, something we’ve invented and keep reinventing, a kind of mating ritual, a kind of lame attempt to harness the fickle, wild Spirit of the divine, a kind of rehearsal of life and attempt to mine meaning if not sense from all that happens to us, and new worship takes a ton of mental energy to learn. I’m so grateful that already it is starting to feel like second nature at Berkeley.

And finally, a word about senior ministers and their preaching role: someone asked me, ahead of Sunday’s Pentecost service (a high holy day in the Church but one that NestleKraftHallmark hasn’t figured out how to market yet, which is why you’ve never heard of it), why I wasn’t preaching the 11am “classic” service in the sanctuary, but ‘only’ the first service.

This is why: because God wanted Laura B., one of our emerging leaders (a sort of student minister role) to preach. And she was extraordinary. She broke us open with her artless, hilarious, poignant words about how fickle and phenomenal the Holy Spirit really is, and how we are called to raise our voices, for God’s sake. Give it a listen. You won’t regret it.

“She wasn’t asking a favor of a child. She was setting an expectation of a peer. ‘Don’t you have something to say, Laura?’ The words came to me the way that tears come.”

And later...“Won’t you be brave, Church? Won’t you preach love with such boldness that some people think you’ve gotten into the wine? Don’t you have something to say? Because we need you to say it. God already sent His son, and He sent His Spirit, and the Spirit sent us.”

There are a few truly great preachers out there--not just entertainers, but people who can talk to your soul week after week, move you to tears, make God real and fill us with that sense of God.

Then there are a whole bunch of us that can reliably deliver something sensible: bread and butter, nourishment for the journe.  

It’s been nearly two weeks of tiny house living in a Berkeley backyard, about halfway through my first month in my new role at First Church Berkeley, and likewise halfway through my experiment in living alone. My family is back East, finishing school/work, while I homestead here in the Bay Area and begin to make things ready for them. I’ll fly home in July and we’ll make a slow migration cross country, but for now: I’m alone for the first time, really, in 24 years.

One of the challenges of living suddenly solo is that I have to figure out what to do with my time. Monday was my sabbath, and I spent the first hour of it looking at sinkhole and tornado videos. To distract myself from thinking about earthquakes, I guess.

I am a hard worker and someone who (before cancer, anyhow) found it hard to stop doing and just be. Cancer, I’m fond of saying, cured me of workaholism. I realized how short life was--however long it turns out to be--and that we’re only here for a little while. I decided I wanted to enjoy the hell out of it, and be intentional about my time.

Problem is, most of my strategies for sabbathing involve my primary people. Cuddling, watching Little House on the Prairie with Carmen or classic movies with Rafe, cooking for throngs, walking the neighborhood with Sue, having a glass of wine on the deck with Peter. Even my alone time, when I’m with family, is time-pressured into shape and purpose: “I only have an hour till the kids get out of school and I want to finish this book/shop for those boots/go to that yoga class!”

But suddenly, ALL my time is my own again (so is all my brain-space: but that’s another post). I could easily just work all the time--and I have been working quite a lot, logging my first 16-hour days in some time. But I’m 45 now, and that wears on the body and spirit faster than it did when I was 25.

One of the gifts of being both a minister AND a mom is that I can always say to myself (or anyone else), “It’s quitting time; the kids need me.” Having kids helped me put a new and natural boundary around my public working life. Sure, on the other side of the boundary was more work, but it was different work, work I could do in yoga pants and while yelling at people or snuggling people, both of which don’t fit the profile of public ministry.

But my kids are with my husband right now, being very well taken care of, 3,000 miles away. Without that natural boundary, I’m faced once more with having to set an artificial one. Not because my congregation or the staff have outsized expectations of how much I will work--rather the opposite, they have been very solicitous of my well-being--but for myself.

What I want to do: make nice meals for myself on my two-burner propane stove, exercise every day, finally finish that online meditation class (I mean, I’m a Californian--hard to believe I made it across state lines without having to take a short quiz on Buddhism), read about 6 books on ministry and management that are idling on my iPad, read a great novel, do a little drawing, pray more, spend time with sister and friends in the area, and make new friends.

But what I actually end up doing is: work all day, cramming names and faces from the pictorial directory, having staff meetings and small group sessions and committee meetings, writing bits and pieces and sermons and answering email (of the writing of emails there is no end, and it is a weariness to the flesh).

Then there is my other full-time job of finding housing in the incredibly competitive Bay Area market: running to real estate open houses, researching earthquake liquefaction zones, researching schools, researching crime maps, refreshing Craigslist every hour, wearing a hole in the keys Z-I-L-L-O-W on my new laptop.

I might try halfheartedly to exercise at some point in the day, only to encounter a locked door at the Zumba place, or find I’ve missed the lap swim hours at the local pool.

By 10 or 10:30 I give up, eat some ice cream and seaweed salad for dinner, and crawl up to the bed loft with a cup of Tension Tamer or a small glass of wine to watch new episodes of The Fosters until I am so exhausted I *know* I will fall asleep (night time is the loneliest and spideriest time). Then I wake up early--too early--about 5am, usually when some marketing person calls me, thinking I am still on East coast time, surf mindlessly until a more reasonable hour, then get up and start it all over again.

I realize I am falling into old bad patterns that I was in when I was 20something and single. Not all the patterns, thank goodness, but some of them: the working too many hours in a row, then with my remaining time not wanting to do anything constructive or wholesome because it seems like it will take too much brain.  

I miss my family, on the whole, less than I thought I would. They seem to be doing pretty well without me, too. I believe this is another case of the  many, many prayers people are praying on our behalf. Prayer changes things.

But what I do really miss is the comfort and quiet companionship (well, sometimes quiet, anyhow:  I do have a 10-year-old girl with a high daily word quota) they provide. I can be wholly myself with them, which allows me to retreat from the world and recharge my extrovert. But they hold me accountable as well:  accountable to them and to the blessing and responsibility of my own body-mind-spirit.  With my primary people I can be alone, together.

Tiny house living has been grand, and someday I may have a greater tolerance or capacity for living alone (hopefully 5 decades from now, for about 3 months after Peter predeceases me, so I can eat cheese puffs for breakfast and ice cream for dinner every night with impunity. Oh, and re-watch every episode of Sex and the City). But for now, I realize what an “alone together” person I am, and how much I am recharged by living in a home with those who know me to my core, with whom I can be totally myself and loved, and yet be challenged by their presence to healthy habits and structures, like sitting down to a dinner table.

I can see, now, why so many people have a companion animal--someone who provides that anchoring presence and warmth in the home, so they’re not truly alone. But animals don’t provide accountability. They don’t care if you eat the whole pint of Haagen Dazs for dinner. They won’t be mad if we come to bed three hours late because we went down the rabbithole of Real Housewives. They love us no matter what (or, if they are cats: ignore us no matter what), happily bear our projections, and weather our eccentricities, compulsions and addictions, as long as we feed and love them.

Of course, there is always God, our best companion animal, the One we can be “alone together” with, and who yet resists our projections. Interesting that these days I feel God very much with me, and yet God doesn’t seem to be doing any gentle correcting of my diet and exercise regime, or luring me off the recesses of Youtube at midnight. Maybe God knows I will get there on my own soon enough (I do, after all, have a family somewhere in the universe, who will presumably want to live with me again before long).

People, it’s been a remarkably full and beautiful 10 days (only 10 days!) since I got to Berkeley, CA to start my new job at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, or First Church Berkeley, or FCCB, depending on who you ask and whether you are using outward-facing media or talking amongst longtime members.

I have been doing the usual: going to every committee meeting at this highly committeed church, learning how to operate all the new technology, recording my outgoing message (was that too squeaky?), re-recording my outgoing voicemail message (did I just say God with a Jersey accent even though I have never lived in Jersey?), re-re-recording my outgoing voicemail message (I give up. Good enough for now). Meeting ALL the people (300-400ish) for about 8 seconds each. Memorizing the Olan Mills directory. Memorizing the giant redwood of a family tree of the matriarch and her generations. Going to staff meetings for pastoral care, staff meetings for facilities and program administration, staff meetings for worship planning, and staff meetings for the Gang of 7 (their term for the pastors, music director and church admin: a lovely group all in joyful cahoots). Writing lots of things, including sermons. Thinking out loud. Thinking to myself. Writing down a million things. Getting lost in the many neighborhoods our community draws from (yes, even with Waze. God bless Waze.)

It is going SO well. The congregation is generous, kind, and enthusiastic. The staff is warm, fun, competent and so supportive. Last week at one of our staff meetings we had a prompt, “what do you love about your job?” and several people answered, “the thing I love about my job is MY JOB.” Liz, our organist, nailed it when she said to me that our staff is “happy and high-functioning.”

Everybody is ready to dive into the big stuff: to talk (and act) about both God and the future. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I don’t think it is. Honestly, I think I have just struck gold. Twice in a row. It doesn’t seem quite fair.

I am seeing lots of things I can help with--help folks to see with my newbie eyes--but there is also so incredibly much that is working. For example, yesterday at “meet in the middle,” intergenerational programming between the two worship services, we had about 30 people age 4 to 80 doing youth-group type get-to-know-you games, Bible skits and forced-choice activities. The leaders were so cued in to physical ability and age distinctions, newbie and veteran, that they deftly flattened out privilege and advantage and really made us feel like equals and partners. It was probably some of the best intergenerational programming I’ve been a part of.

Right now I see my main job as amplifying the signal:  inviting people in the wider community, to whom we are currently invisible, into what we already are and do.

But that’s not why I wanted to write--I wanted to tell you what I am doing with the bulk of my time besides the obvious: I’ve been meeting with people in small groups of 3-6, to learn about them at a deeper level and also about the church: what they value, and what they believe God’s hopes and dreams are for our community (which might be different from what *they* want!).

I came up with the idea from my community organizing training, which taught me about the power of 1:1 meetings, meetings to find out what “makes people tick” and gets at their self-interest so you can turn it to collective interest. In Somerville, I did all my meetings 1:1 or 1:2 (with couples)--it was easy, with 50 or so people. But with 350, I knew I needed to cluster.

Clustering has the happy benefit of not only saving my time and energy (it is much harder to sustain an hour-long conversation with one person than with five); but the folks in each group, who are different ages and stages and tenures, get to “meet each other again for the first time.” If they have different stakes in the church, they get to overhear each other’s spiritual needs and preferences. Already, the 75% rule is at work: in a healthy, vital, heterogeneous church, you are only happy with about 75% of what is going on at any given time, because the other 25% is for someone down the pew who is different from you. When an older person both says “we need more young families” but bemoans the fact that there is not enough organ music, and then a young mom says the folk trio made her weep and convinced her to join, you can see how this is enacted before your eyes.

So far I’ve done 6 small groups with 48 people, ages 7 through 82! They have taken place in cafes, redwood groves and all kinds of homes, from the modest to the affluent. And in every place, we have felt ourselves equals--even the person who came to church for the first time last week, who was bold enough to sign up for a small group. It’s beautiful.

Here’s the format for the gathering: I invite them to do some individual sharing about their personal life, then move into a collective conversation about church, then move back to individual sharing about their spiritual life. Then we take a selfie! We usually eat while we are doing this: anything from brown-bag to light snacks to full dinner. It takes about 2 hours each time.

All the questions are non-shaming, they can choose at what level to disclose, and they are suitable for suitable for grownups and kids, single and partnered, retired, unemployed and working people, people with complicated families and people with superlative families. Here they are:

Individual sharing, about 5 min each:

How do you spend your days? (gets at work history, spiritual gifts, culture/class, health, priorities and problems)

Who are your primary people? (gets at relationships, including enmeshed or severed relationships)

What were you doing the last time you were completely happy? (gets at spiritual life, relationships and spiritual gifts for church vocation)

Collective conversation:

What brought you to our church?  What keeps you there?

Where do you feel God is nudging/luring/dragging us into the future? What are the speedbumps on that road? How do you want to be part of making that road?

Individual sharing:

What is an event that has shaped your faith life? and/or: where do you feel God is moving you to take a risk, let go, move higher?

As an ambivert, having deep, meaningful conversation is my bread and butter. One of the hardest things about resigning from my beloved church in Somerville was letting go of longstanding, carefully curated, deep, loving relationships.

My next home.

In two weeks and one day I am moving to Berkeley to start my new job. I am leaving my kids and husband behind, for two months, while they finish school and work.

I have only lived entirely alone for six months of my life, when I was 22 and just sprung from college, but not yet in the snares of seminary. I was waitressing, making a lot of cash, spending a lot of cash, smoking and drinking a lot. I was very liberated and very lonely, writing a lot of bad poetry and making bad art. I wouldn’t take any of it back. 

May will be my seventh month living alone. I am renting a tiny house (and an even tinier outhouse) in someone's backyard. I range back and forth between low-level panic at not having close contact with my primary companions and chief snugglers, and X-TREEM excitement at all that lies ahead, with a chance to really *focus* on new everything without the impediment (yes, blessing but also impediment) of parenting and running a busy household.

I've always wanted to live in a tiny house. I have a bent (not often expressed...) toward simplicity and, if not asceticism (chocolate! Netflix!), at least a longing to pare way down to the marrow of life. When there's too much going on, when we do too much, have too much, it's hard to see what's really there.

I'm re-reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and she articulates exactly why I can't wait to be sheared of mom-busyness and start this new job & new life in a new place, with new eyes. I am ready to really SEE again.

I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But--and this is the point--who gets excited by a mere penny?

If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way?

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

The only people left who don’t believe that climate change is a real thing, and is caused by human activity, are people who are trying to willfully disbelieve it is not so.  Among them: every single viable Republican presidential candidate. That is, if their skepticism is legitimate: follow the money. The fossil fuel industry is a heavy-hitter, and has a strong vested interest in the status quo. 

Or, you could admit that climate change is a thing, and say: well, there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s all ruined anyhow, so we might as well drive our gas guzzlers/fly off to Fiji/keeping burning that oil and gas and coal.

But the moderate and hopeful modeling says: there is a LOT we can do, and it might not be as hard as we think. Voluntarily cutting carbon (driving less, eating less meat, throwing away less food) and investing in solar and other renewable energies is a great start. 

I am an inveterate optimist and think that time and time again, humans have ingeniously averted disaster with our innovative thinking and inventiveness. And I hope we will this time, too. But we have to accelerate that inventiveness NOW.

Some thought-leaders have said that at our current rate of using up the planet, we have about 20 years of fun left before catastrophe. Do we really want to take that chance? Do we really want to risk saddling our kids and grandkids with catastrophe just so we don’t have to make minimally uncomfortable changes to our lifestyle? 

I almost didn’t include this topic in my encyclopedic apology, because the center has already shifted so much in support of full equality for gay people.

But because I want to be comprehensive, here are my thoughts. I have had profound conversations with literally thousands of gay people in my life. To a one, they tell me the same story: “I always knew I was different, from my earliest memories. I wasn’t sure what that difference was. But when I turned 8/12/16/27, I finally figured it out: I was gay.”

I believe that being gay is an inborn quality, like being left-handed or having brown eyes.

One line I have heard from young evangelical pastors who claim to love gay people too is that it is OK to be gay as long as they don’t act on it. They say that giving up the part of themselves that longs for physical and emotional intimacy is a sacrifice Jesus calls them to. I answer them: I do believe that God calls us to sacrifices, but I didn’t have to sacrifice having sex with my husband, and indeed sexual intimacy is an important way we reconnect in the hurry and chaos of working parenthood; sexual intimacy is an important part of the foundation of our stable and enduring marriage. I believe that consensual, mature human sexuality is a gift from God, and God longs for all of us who are called to it to exercise this gift.

The scriptures that seem to decry homosexuality were written for an entirely different culture (one where women were property and slavery was still the norm). Jesus, in three years of preaching, said not one damn thing about homosexuality—but said quite a lot about the perils of judging others.

I believe who gay people choose as bedmates or lifemates has no adverse effects on my life, and is none of my business. There is zero hard scientific evidence that children born to or adopted into gay marriages suffer psychological harm from their parents being same-gendered. On the contrary, I know many lesbian and gay couples who have adopted children abused or neglected by their birth parents, and given them loving, stable, healing homes.

About the movement for transgender equality:  I confess I am late to the party on trans issues. I remember the first few times trans folks came to church. I am big on welcoming the newcomer at coffee hour, and trans was the next frontier, as far as I was concerned, but I was awkward and overly enthusiastic with them. I wondered privately, “what do we talk about?” Every potential topic of conversation seemed fraught. It wasn’t a surprise when they didn’t come back. We invited a trans woman, a Unitarian laywoman, to come and talk to our church about her experience transitioning: how she knew she was trans, how she began to live it, at first awkwardly and then with more grace, how people responded to it. We asked what we could do to help trans people feel welcome at our church. She said, “just treat us like people.” 

And that’s when I realized: oh. right. I can talk to trans people about the weather, work, or my favorite topic: God. None of these are ‘gendered’ conversation. 

I’ve since had a lot more exposure to trans folks, and, like anything, with more exposure I have gotten a lot more comfortable with myself in relationship to them. Much like the gay, bi and lesbian folks I know, they say they always knew they were different. But because of the overwhelming societal expectation that everyone is straight and cisgendered (when your gender matches the body you were born into), it took a while for them to figure out what was really going on inside of them. There just weren’t words for it, or role models. Until now.

And I’ve come to believe that trans folks are an incredible gift to our society. For millenia we have been locked into two genders, manifest in the Target toy aisle controversy. Blue is for boys, pink is for girls. Boys must be tough, competitive, assertive, strong; girls must be sweet, nurturing, supportive, kind. But that binary is a false one. You know it in your own being. You’ve seen it in your kids. Yes, my (self-declared straight) 13-year-old son wants an air-soft rifle (and is not getting one, ever) but this is the same kid who in kindergarten MADE me buy him a red shirt with a giant sequined heart on it from the girls’ section at Target (until he was teased for wearing it to school). He loves babies and has a thriving babysitting business--he’ll cuddle them for hours.

My 9-year-old daughter will spend hours making up elaborate domestic scenarios for her American Girl dolls, but she is as competitive as they come, and basically refuses to brush her hair, ever. My husband cried at our wedding while I was as cool as a cucumber. Gender is a spectrum. No--gender is a landscape. It’s not this thing or that thing; it’s not a point on a line, it’s a whole dimension of being, polyvalent, dynamic and shifting. 

And trans folks are helping to liberate us from our old ideas of gender. Gender roles served a purpose to organize us socially during a much more perilous time--when we needed the bigger stronger people of the tribe to go on the hunt, and smaller people with good fine motor skills and mammaries to stay home to tend hearth and feed children. 

But we’ve grown so far beyond that survival mode. We don’t NEED the construct anymore. We don’t need to protect our procreative abilities the way 4th-century BC Jews did, eschewing same-sex unions to make sure our DNA would survive to the next generation; and we don’t need to keep our girls out of the Minecraft aisle and our boys away from the sparkly hula hoops.

It says right in scripture: that “there is no longer male or female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

We can all be exactly who God made us to be: as we are, and as we are becoming.

It seems strange to even have to say this out loud: sexism in America is still a thing. Women have gained a lot of ground, but there are still very clear markers of inequality.

Just to name one: women still make only about 79 cents on every dollar for doing the exact same job that a man is doing; and it’s worse for women of color. Even though I currently work for a totally awesome church that loves women, I know this is especially true in my profession, where there is plenty of unconscious and conscious bias at work in salary negotiations (e.g. men are still seen as the “breadwinner who have to provide for a family” even though two working adults is growingly the norm in couples and families).

Another one: Women are 51% percent of the population but only 20% of our representatives in Congress, even though we have been voting for nearly 100 years.

Among those Congressmen—whose salaries you and I are paying—are men who make outrageous statements, like: women’s bodies have a way of shutting down conception when they are being raped, that pregnancy due to incest is rare, that some girls ‘rape easy.’ As long as the most powerful men in our country can make comments like this without retribution, sexism is still a thing.

As long as men are “assertive” and women are “aggressive,” as long as Donald Trump can deflect legitimate questions from his debate moderator Megyn Kelly by trying to embarrass her with references to menstruation, sexism is still a thing.

The mass shooting at Planned Parenthood last month was pitched by the radical right wing as the actions of a deranged loner. I see that shooting not as an isolated incident, but part of a larger pattern to intimidate and control women by controlling their fertility and their sexuality. Robert Lewis Dear listened to the false things men in Congress were saying about Planned Parenthood’s work, and took his and their beliefs to their logical and violent extreme.

A word about abortion, since it is the hot button on the great machine of sexism: I would not, because of my religious beliefs and my personal experience with pregnancy, have an abortion. But because we live in a country that separates church and state, because I believe the life of the mother (and all the lives dependent upon her) takes precedence over the life of the fetus, because no one who has been raped at a frat party or gotten pregnant by her grandfather at age 13 should have to carry that baby to term—I publicly and vociferously believe in abortion. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

If abortion is made illegal, we will still have abortions—they will just be dreadfully dangerous. We will also have more children whose parents are not in a position to care for them, because they are too young, too poor, too disabled. If you think that women who get pregnant when they’re not ready to become parents get what the deserve and should face the consequences: I wish you knew just how many of your female friends and family members have had abortions, and why. I wish you would consider how many women of my mother’s generation made a terrifying decision to get an illegal abortion rather than have their entire future altered by bringing to term a child they were unable to care for. I wish you would consider how little responsibility men have to take, physiologically, emotionally and financially speaking, for their procreative action. 

Unfortunately, there is not a single effective piece of legislation or political action that will bring women and men in this country to parity. It will come about as a result of the slow but inexorable changing of attitudes, as well as the work of women who don’t take no for an answer and male allies who are willing to share power. 

But toward that end: an equal pay for equal work law sure would be a good place to start. So would protection and support for women’s health and reproductive rights. So would holding accountable boys and men for their words and actions in regard to violence against women—especially when their class or political position would normally protect them.

There is so much to say about this, but I’ll keep it (fairly) brief. We don’t mean to be racist (probably). We don’t want to be racist (again, probably). But here’s the thing: there was a profit motive for racism, once upon a time (historians estimate that at the start of the Civil War, black bodies represented $4 billion in wealth, more than all of American industry, all the fields, factories, railroads and workshops combined).

Racism is the easiest, most visible way to create a caste system in a complex society. And it’s helpful to have a caste system because then you have:

1) People to do the worst work (which helps increase profit margins) 2) People to blame when things go wrong (which feels so satisfying)

Poor whites and poor blacks used to have common cause, 350 years ago, when they were all, functionally or legally, slaves. They rose up against the ruling class. The ruling class sought to put an end to this kind of rebellion, permanently, by stoking racial contempt in the white workers.

This is still happening today. And there is still a profit motive for racism today, in multiple ways. Keep the poor whites and the poor blacks blaming each other (or in the case of Chicago’s black-on-black crime rates: blaming themselves), and they are distracted from the real source of their poverty and misery: the wealthy, overwhelmingly white ruling class who in every generation figures out more and better how to keep wealth for themselves.

And: mass incarceration as a piece of institutional racism. The U.S. incarcerates more of its people than any other country, developed or undeveloped. Think about that! Even though we have less crime than poorer or more politically unstable countries.

And even though blacks and whites commit crimes at about equal rates, the prison population is overwhelmingly black and brown (six times more blacks than whites are incarcerated). Inmates aren’t able to provide for their families. They aren’t able to raise their children. When they are released, some are no longer allowed to vote—permanently disenfranchised. They have employment gaps and may find themselves virtually unemployable. They cannot live in public housing, the most affordable housing—even if it means staying with family who are in public housing is their only means to survive.

By imprisoning them, we have taken away their means of self-sufficiency, permanently—and then we wonder why the recidivism rate is so high. We wonder why they turn back to crime as a means of making ends meet.

What in our system is driving so many people into prisons? Is it crime rates? It can’t possibly be. Violent crime rates, and most every other crime rate, has fallen dramatically since the 80s. But more prisons are getting built—and now we have a new entity, the for-profit prison, which brings living-wage jobs to poor communities. You’ve built the prison, now you need to fill it, to justify the expenditure and keep people employed, from the prison guard to the CEO. Follow the money.

Many incarcerated people are imprisoned on nonviolent drug offenses (and again: the law is applied unequally: even though black and white people use drugs at about the same rates, because of aberrations in drug sentencing laws, poor access to good legal representation, and plain old overt racism, blacks are imprisoned on drug charges in much greater numbers).

These are addicts, not criminals. And now we are paying to house and care for people who would be much better off in treatment, and then becoming productive, contributing members of society.

In addition to all of the above, we are racist and don’t even know it!—all of us. A million newscasts, ads, lessons learned at the knee of grandparents, mentors, teachers, coaches, and countless other subliminal signs and symbols have long trained us in racism.  If you don’t believe me, take this test in unconscious bias. It’s a real thing. I know. It’s hard to face that in ourselves. But think how much harder it is for people of color, who bear the brunt of it.

That’s why I believe that:

Every white person should read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Ta Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me

Every white person should practice understanding how white privilege benefits them

Every person who thinks they’re white should begin to consciously practice a favorable bias, as a way of removing the unconscious-bias scales from their eyes

I worked at summer camp as a young adult. Some of my friends were smart funny hicks (I mean that lovingly) from rural Connecticut, who loved to shoot guns at tin cans on the weekends. One time they took me shooting. It was glorious, and just plain fun.

I understand the appeal of guns. I understand how powerful and safe they make us feel when they are in our hands. But I also believe that we’ve tried it the way of the NRA and the Second Amendment wingnuts, and all we’ve gotten is more dead babies, children, high school students, people at Bible Study and holiday parties and shopping at the mall.

We’re not asking for much. Universal background checks so that people who shouldn’t have guns. A ban on assault rifles, which have no logical place in a free and stable society. No more gun shows: weapons shouldn’t be sold in a carnival atmosphere. Require registration, training, and insurance, just like we do for cars, another deadly weapon.

I think the real myth driving our unwillingness to confront gun ‘freedom’ run amok is the myth of redemptive violence: the world can easily be divided into good guys and bad guys. The good guys are entitled to use violence against the bad guys to eliminate them, so there are no more bad guys.

The problem is that, in our heart of hearts, we must know it’s not true. Jesus himself said “why do you call me good? No one is good but God.” New recruits to ISIS think they’re good. Vigilantes think they’re good.

Taken to its illogical extreme, if we were to give the gun nuts what they want, and have a more and not less armed citizenry—if we were to train every kindergarten teacher to be a sharpshooter—do we really imagine that, come the next Adam Lanza, Mrs. Jones would be able to 1) get to her weapon in time 2) take Adam Lanza out, without, in the chaos, accidentally killing one of her own students?

Am I supposed to wear Kevlar under my alb, and open carry in worship? If I even did, what would that do to my attitude toward my fellow human beings, my heightened and false perception of the danger I am in? I might begin to see ‘bad guys’ where there aren’t any. I might make a terrible, life-altering mistake.

We have strong feelings about guns and gun ownership in our society. But feelings are notoriously unreliable. They shouldn’t dictate our policy about something so fatal. I think this is one issue on which we should take a good hard look at statistics and trends—if we even could! The Centers for Disease Control was doing research on gun violence, as one of the greatest threats to public health, until Congress forbade it, under pressure from the NRA—look it up! We’re not even allowed to understand how deadly guns are to our society, because if we did understand what the true cost was, it would mean a sea change in public opinion.

I still think Australia is our closest cousin on this: they had a very similar gun culture until 1996, when a mass shooter in Tasmania killed 35 tourists. In the previous decade, they’d had 11 mass shootings. In the decade after that: they had NONE. In comparison, the United States has had 353 mass shootings in the last 11 months ALONE.  Even controlling for population size, please tell me you don’t think that is scary and nuts.

That’s why I believe in sensible gun reform:

Universal background checks

Ban on assault rifles

End to gun shows

First go read this post and this post about American-style poverty, because income inequity and the repellent cost of health care is the single biggest argument for a single-payer system. Most of us just can’t pay the bills as is. 

I am a cancer survivor. It was a sneaky cancer, and a complete surprise—a bone cancer that was discovered in my lung, of all places (I am not a smoker). An aggressive cancer that was asymptomatic. 

I could have and might have died and orphaned my young children, if not for the better-safe-than-sorry diagnostics that discovered it, and aggressive treatments that cured it. 

I am so grateful for all that private health insurance has been able to do for me. My cancer treatment probably cost nearly a million bucks. If not for Blue Cross Blue Shield paying for my surgery, my many hospitalizations and CT scans and chemo protocols, my family would be bankrupt. We would be toast. And all the good that we are currently able to do, because we are financially stable--well, who knows. 

I want everyone to have this same access to health care. I would like to cut out the layers of fat—middle managers, paperwork, red tape, the entire health insurance industry with its fetching ads and its nice lobby furniture and all the corporate fluff—that is contributing to the cost of health care in our society.

I would like to remove the profit motive from health care as well. One of the arguments against universal (read: single payer, government-sponsored) health care is that it will hurt research and development. But American ingenuity is in our blood and bones, and American innovation will prevail, even if there are not billions of dollars to be bilked from sick people to motivate it. When people are motivated primarily by profit, their ethics suffer.

I don’t understand why small- and mid-sized business owners are not all over the issue of single-payer health care. As the senior pastor of a church with 10 employees, which pays a living wage to all its employees, I would love to be able to offer them all health insurance. But we simply can’t. It’s too damn expensive. With a single-payer system, we can streamline, cut costs, restructure, and reduce waste—and free employers to focus on a living wage, which will make for a happier and more stable workplace, which will in turn save costs in training and employee turnover and lost momentum for our mission and programs.