Anointing - The Blessing We All Need

"Anointing with oil…is a means of God's grace and blessing intended to bring restoration of wholeness and health."

So reads a portion of the For All Who Minister, a Church of the Brethren guidebook for worship. A very clinical definition of what I find to be one of our more embodied and also spiritual rituals of the church. Anointing is one of those times in worship when we are invited to make connections between our physical selves and our own spirit and God's Spirit.

We're heading into the Song of Songs in our next two Sundays, a text that is deeply sensual and very much about embodied love and desire. It's also a text that has been interpreted spiritually about the passionate relationship between God and God's people. In both senses, the body - the human body created by God - is held up as good and beautiful. When we offer anointing this Sunday, that is how we will bless. Your pastors will be present to offer this blessing, not just for "restoration of wholeness" but to affirm the beauty and wholeness that is already present within you.

Biblically, anointing is also about setting something or someone apart for God's purposes. And this sense to is one we bring to our ritual. We are blessed to do God's work in the world with these bodies, and our desires and passions are blessed too.

One of my most precious memories of accompanying youth a Mennonite Youth Convention was when youth were invited to receive anointing during a worship service. I watched as hundreds of young people, at a time in their lives when they may be wrestling the most they ever will with body change and body image, understanding desire, heightened emotions, were blessed with oil and told that they were good. They were and are God's beloved.

At every age we need these messages of blessed goodness and rightness. May we all receive this anointed blessing this week. And whether or not you are with us in worship, know that you too are anointed, good and beautifully made by God

Breath and Bones

Our bodies are pretty amazing. It is a marvel to me when I really reflect on it, that these bags of meat and bones become bodies that breathe and balance upright, never mind do all the beautiful things they can do! The text from Ezekiel that we're hearing in worship this week speaks to specifically to the breath of God enlivening dry, dead bones. His experience with the breath of God got me thinking about a favorite craft from when I was a kid: turning my name into a body of bones.

I'm pretty sure we'd have done it on Halloween, but I like connecting it with this story and the prophecy of Ezekiel to the bones: Let these bones live! It's a fun way to introduce the bonkers story of Ezekiel to someone while getting your fingers a little sticky together.

I put the instructions to the bones craft below. Before you jump there, I want to offer you a moment to breathe. Do it now! Take a deep breath. Now, if you want to keep breathing, you can use these words as a prayer:

Breath in: Breathe upon these bones.
Breath out: Let these bones live.

Repeat as necessary.

It's, like, science or something that when we still ourselves and breathe we decrease our heartrates and reduce our stress. Breath makes space. May this prayer make space for the life of the Divine in you and give your weary bones new life. Now onto the craft...

Here's what you need: A piece of colored paper or construction paper, a have sheet of white paper, scissors, glue and a pencil.

Fold the white paper in half the short way and write your name with the bottom of the letters on the fold. Then fatten out the letters, making sure they touch each other.

Cut around the letters and unfold.

Glue down the unfolded letters to make the rib-cage of the living bones, pencil side down. Use strips cut out from the remaining white paper to make legs and arms and an oval for the head.

Voila! May your bones be enlivened by the Spirit of God within you.

OWL and the Image of God

This week ten youth from SMC and EMC met outside in the rain, sheltering under a beautiful but very soggy canopy tent. We squeezed inside for our first session of Our Whole Lives - a values based human sexuality curriculum that is grounded in justice and inclusivity, responsibility, sexual health and self worth.

Did I speak aloud many synonyms for private parts? Yes. Did I badly draw both an eggplant and peach emoji? Yes. We got all that awkwardness out there so that we can also talk about what makes talking about sex so challenging. And then we made a covenant, committing to respect, confidentiality, openness and tolerance as we explore the vulnerable topic of our sexuality.

As we head into next month, youth will get some of the science-y body-part diagram learning that they may already have encountered in health class. But they'll also begin thinking about body image and how they perceive their own and others' bodies. In OWL, we affirm that each of us is created in God's image. As such, each of us is created good.

Even those of us who have spent years with the idea of our inherent goodness as creatures of God have a hard time remembering that we are made in God's image, that our bodies are something to affirm and love. Teens who are encountering the pressures of social media, and peer expectations are also in the midst of sorting out the feelings and experiences happening in their own brains and bodies. It's a lot.

OWL's approach is to give teens what they need to have both the knowledge about the science-y stuff and the tools to deal with the relational and emotional stuff. Both are important for making healthy, self-affirming choices about sexuality. As a parent I've tried to do those things as my kids are growing: offer the social emotional support and the straightforward facts about bodies without the shame or judgment that often wrapped around anything verging on sexuality. As a pastor I'm grateful to have a curriculum like OWL offer a systematic and comprehensive approach to the topic.

If you are a parent who is looking for resources to talk about sex or bodies or sexuality in an age-appropriate way, you can first check out my MWM from about a year ago on sex, teen and teens to be and scroll the the last half that has some links and suggestions. I'm not an expert, but I so love going down internet rabbit holes, so I welcome that opportunity if you want to be in touch with me and I can help find what's right for your family.
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Photo by Tanto Yensen. The rare small species of owl, known locally in Indonesia as the Celepuk owl, are endemic to the island of Java, Indonesia. But I have a hard time believing they are not Muppets. More photos here.

Covid and Communicating Consent

If there's one thing I'm learning from the recent survey about children's participation in worship and Sunday school (to which you may still respond!) it's that many of you are very hesitant about including children in indoor activities until there is a vaccine available to those under 12. Right now that looks like some point in September.

Until then, we will begin to meet as a congregation, both outdoors and indoors. Many - if not most - of our adults and teens will be vaccinated may be starting to feel pretty okay with closer contact and un-masked interactions (though our current policy will be for everyone to be masked indoors). But children are still vulnerable.

I'm wondering if this is a time to brush up on how we talk about and communicate consent related to our and our kids' space. If you've participated in Zoom worship or listened in afterwards in the past couple of weeks, you'll have heard Pastor Megan preaching the gospel of consent. Because for so long we've been podded with the same folks, we may have grown accustomed to knowing (or thinking we know) the desires and expectations of the people we're with. Now that we're venturing out into the world a little more, we need to negotiate, check in, test assumptions.

Practice helps! The other day on the way to meet up with a friend, my six-year-old was talking about what he was going to tell his friend. While not intentionally hurtful, what he was planning to share might not have gone over that well. I suggested an alternative, so did he. He tried out his new suggestion. We practiced. Having conversations about consent might also look like that: before an encounter, deciding what to say, how to say it in a sensitive way, trying out different ideas. Parents, we might also have to practice how to talk to other parents about our expectations.

Folks, I've shared it before (a long time ago) but it's worth sharing this chart from Liz Kleinrock, an educator and anti-bias, anti-racism trainer. So much of consent is about communication and respect, not just of another person's body but about their autonomy. May we all have both grace and respect for each other. And may this time of increased sensitivity to the vulnerability of others continue to live in us going forward.

Sex, Teens and Teens-to-be

Three years ago I taught the Our Whole Lives curriculum with our high school youth for the first time. OWL is the wholistic sexuality curriculum from the UCC and Unitarian traditions. It's one of the most fun times I've had with teens in our congregation. I was looking forward to having that experience again this year, but COVID got in the way of those plans. However, it's had thinking about teens and sexuality and I thought I'd share some resources for folks with teens or teens-to-be. It's never to early to start conversations about sexuality, bodies and relationships.

In my family we've always been pretty open about talking about sex and bodies with our kids. Sure it leads to slightly embarrassing moments when kids ask openly about body parts or share facts they know about genitals at the wrong time or with the wrong people. But for the most part, the more knowledge, vocabulary and self-awareness a child has the greater their safety and confidence in navigating relationships of all kinds and their ability to protect themself.

Communicating the right names for body parts helps children explain accurately when they've been hurt or are in pain. Communicating without shame or secrecy about body parts can protect children from predators. Communicating the facts about sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy, and the importance of how to have safer sex helps teens make informed decisions about their own bodies and well-being. Communicating to kids and teens the importance of consent and what it is and isn't, as well as the value and beauty of their bodies, creations of a loving God, we hope will help them see themselves as worthy of care and compassion.

You see how often I used the word 'communicating?' That really indicates how key communication is - in an ongoing way, no just as "the talk." So here are some resources. I tried to include a variety of resources that cover littles and middles and also stuff for teens and parents of teens.

The Birds and the Bees for Little Kids - This one is TOMORROW! so act fast if you're interested. There are also many other resources about talking to kids and teens about sexuality at the Birds and Bees and Kids website. Another very cool site with tips and videos and fun animations to help parents process how to talk about sex with kids is Amaze (older kids) and Amaze Junior (little kids)

NPR's Life Kit podcast has a couple of episodes about kids and sex. How to Talk to Children about Sex addresses conversations with kids before the onset of puberty. My biggest take-away (among many) was be brief, factual and loving when talking about sex with kids. What Your Teen Wishes You Knew About Sex Education is (as the title suggests) about the teens in your life. That one features sex educator and advocate Heather Corinna.

Corinna is the author of a couple of books. One is a graphic non-novel called Wait, What? features a group of friends talking to each other and the audience about bodies, sex and sexuality. She also wrote S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties. I haven't read this one yet, but based on the introduction and table of contents alone I'm looking forward to it. (I linked to Amazon so you can look inside, but I got my copy from bookshop.org)

Since you really don't want your tween or teen googling a sex thing they've heard about, I suggest showing them Scarleteen, the website developed by Corinna. It's very teen friendly with tons of articles and FAQ's on a huge variety of topics. Another good one is Sex Etc. I Wanna Know is another that's not quite as visually fun but does have a section specifically for parents. Honestly, as an old person, these websites are helpful just to keep up with what's important to teens and to see what kinds of questions they're asking.

The Great Conversations series of workshops for parents and their tweens about their changing bodies and what to expect from puberty are in person. But they're offered online for now. I found this really helpful a couple of years ago and I look forward to another round with my second kid. There are other great resources on this site as well.

God loves you and your kids and all of the bodies that God made. Whatever these conversations look like for you, may you experience God's presence with you and your children. Good luck!

Body Language

1 Corinthians 12:1-13

Friends! Not only do you get me preaching twice in a row, you once again get Paul talking body talk. Paul really does love the God-bod image. This time though, the body talk is in service of how each of the parts work together, how the community of Christ engages and interacts “For the common good” (as Paul puts it).

This is a Pentecost text because it is about the fullness of the Spirit’s action in the new church. The Spirit is actively filling the members of the church - at Corinth and in every place and time - with gifts to be “activated” in service of the church (and I would say also the world - but that’s me not Paul.) The gifts work together the way a body works together. And they can also work against each other.

When I was seeing a Quaker Spiritual director - someone steeped in the way of presence in Spirit - I was helped to see the spiritual gifts as innate. Our gifts are so a part of ourselves that our gifts become almost our native language. Like language and culture, we might more highly value our own than that of others because we can’t understand it. In addition, when we can’t understand someone else’s gift we may feel it unnecessary. That lack of understanding can be the cause of conflict and misunderstanding.

Language of Enneagram is not a language that I speak but I suspect that those of you who do may be able to translate this to type. I do not know that way of engaging in giftedness but i do have a little bit of insight into love languages. The idea of “Love Languages” was developed by psychologist Gary Chapman and I was introduced to it in couples counseling as a way to help my spouse and me to understand each other and communicate. Each of us has a different “Love language”: Words of affirmation, physical touch, receiving gifts, quality time, acts of service. When we’re “spoken to” in that language we feel loved and connected to our partner.

For example, my primary love language is “acts of service” but my spouse’s is words of affirmation. So we often talk past each other when trying to express our love and appreciation. I’m looking for someone to do the dishes after dinner - that says love to me. I don’t necessarily hear “I love you” in the expressions of gratitude and affirmation for a delicious meal. But also because words of affirmation are not my love language - I forget to articulate my own appreciation and encouragement and gratitude, which is how my spouse feels loved.

This is the passage that leads into the loooove passage to the Corinthians. The one we heard a few weeks ago. Even though we’re not hearing them in order, it seem right that this should be the first step. Before we can learn to love each other - need to speak each other's language - or at least have an appreciation for that language. Someone who does not speak the spiritual gift of prophecy, might find that gift to the church annoying or distracting or troublemaking. But prophecy - the telling of truth to power and naming injustice pushes the church body to be more Christ-like. The body will communicate between its members more fluidly if the hand is learning the language of the eye.

Many years ago I saw a Cirque du Soleil show in which I spent almost all of the show with my mouth agape and gasping in awe at the way the acrobats and dancers engaged their whole bodies in the performance - and at how their bodies worked in concert with each other. Even the musicians and the clowns. There was no part that was not used with intention and beauty and strength and grace. But it takes a lot of training and practice for one of those acrobats to be able to do that - for anyone who is an elite athlete to be able to make their body work in the way that it does. It takes practice for the Body of Christ as well.

This isn’t the usual Pentecost passage. We’re used to focusing on the rush of wind and the tongues of flame. On the crowd, which through the power of the Spirit can understand their kindred from all nations. Here we see that the Spirit continues to give language and the understanding of languages to the church. Paul is extending that into metaphor, in a way. It’s not just gifts that are being doled out, it’s Spiritual gifts. And all the Spirit’s gifts are good, resources that are for the good of the whole body. May we seek to listen for and to understand the language of the Spirit - and in so doing may we strengthen the body.

Turns out I wrote a sermon this week that I didn't end up using because the Spirit called me in a different direction (more on that in a later post, perhaps).  But here's the text of the sermon that would have been...

Why Bodies Matter to God

1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 51-57

When I read texts like this, I remember why I do not gravitate to Paul and why I stay away from the epistles generally. I’d rather stick with Jesus. It’s a struggle sometimes, but What Would Jesus Do? works a lot better for me than What Would Paul Say? Because he says soooo much! In fact I cut out the beginning of the very long reading assigned, which began with a bunch of if-then logic which makes my brain get all twisted up. (but if you follow the scripture link in the chat you can read the whole thing and try to make sense of it yourself).

The fact is, though, the early church only had some oral histories of Jesus and stories like Paul’s of his appearances to the disciples. So they struggled in the same way that we do to understand what it means to be a disciple. That’s the reason Paul went on so long - trying to help them make sense of Jesus. In this passage he’s responding to questions we all have now more than ever: Why do these bodies of ours suffer? What do we do with chaos? How do we deal with death?

This week on a walk, Orie asked if we could look for the dead bird. We’d seen the carcass of a dead robin a couple days previous and he wanted to return to the scene. In fact we have also inspected the bodies of a dead mole and a dead rat on our walks. In our world, death is real. It surrounds us every day in every statistic. And for many of us - for many of you - it is more real and painful and wrenching than the bodies of creatures found in the grass and at the side of the road. It’s family. It’s fearful. Those questions that Paul and the Corinthians had - we have them too.

Paul’s lens of understanding death - and life - is Jesus. He takes the problem of death and remembers his experience of a resurrected Jesus, who appeared to him and so many in a resurrected and transformed body, and applies that understanding to the problem. As I read Pauls’s words over and over this week, at first it seemed to me as if he was trying to deny death, to spiritualize the reality of death: asking rhetorically where is it’s sting? and proclaiming victory through resurrection. Death swallowed up by life? That’s what is hard to swallow.

These verses in 1 Corinthians 15 are a boiling down of Paul’s theology: God cared enough about the stuff of creation - earth and flesh and plants and water - that God became a part of it. In a human body that suffered and died. And that lived again. We’ve all heard of the dad-bod. Jesus had a God-bod. And, in fact we are all God-bods. Cathryn Schifferdecker, a Lutheran Bible scholar, tells her students, “matter matters.” Our bodies and the stuff of this earth is important to God, our creator.

Bodies matter so much to Paul that it is essential to his theology that they not just disintegrate and disappear into the universe. That they don’t, like the mole and rat and robbin, return to the earth. Paul believes our bodies are important and beloved by God. We are not two easily separated halves - body and soul - but whole beings in which both are sacred. So in death, believes Paul, our bodies will be transformed, remaining whole in the presence of God.

We have zero proof of what happens to our bodies or our spirits after death. I expect that we in our congregation believe many different things about that - just like the Corinthian Christians did. But we all have bodies. We love people and creatures who are embodied beings. And if we do believe in a Creator God who was intimately involved in piecing together the cells of leaves and the atoms in microbes and the fur and feathers of rats and robbins, and our own selves and spirits, then we are matter that matters - we have and we are God-bods.

I believe that means where we put our bodies and how we treat our bodies and what we do with our bodies - and the bodies of others - matters to God. Jesus, the original God-bod was our model: beginning from his birth as a fragile infant body, which we can imagine because like little baby Jedidiah, we have been and we have held and cared for bodies like that. And to his teenage body, nurturing his spirit and feeding his intellect in the temple, which we also know through our experience of study and discernment in community. Jesus' body spent years in a ministry of healing and feeding bodies and we follow his example in our care for and relationships with all manner of folks whose bodies and spirits long for wholeness. Jesus allowed his body and spirit rest, and like him we seek solace and sabbath. And finally he submitted his body to a violent and painful death in his dedication to God’s reign over all. But finally finally his body was resurrected.

I do not know where my body will be after death, nor in that coming day, though I want to believe that somehow I will be joined with my creator. I do know where my body is now. It is on the path with the bodies of animals decomposing into soil, and also flying and scurrying and hopping through the grass. It is with my dear ones and it is being broadcast through mystery and science to be beheld by your bodies. Our bodies are beloved. May we love them. May we love the bodies of all God’s creatures.