Happy Birthday Church - a zine

A couple of years ago, during COVID, I made a little zine that I shared in care packages with church kids. I think it still stands up. And I think it's a helpful way of telling the story of Pentecost. Happy birthday, Church!

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Show Your Childfree Friends the Love

I sometimes listen to the podcast "Mom and Dad are Fighting" in which listeners write in to the show's three hosts to answer parenting questions. I subscribe to a few different advice podcasts, though I usually gravitate more toward the comedic. In this case, though, while the hosts Zac, Elizabeth and Jamilah don't take themselves too seriously, (especially when sharing their parenting fails), they do take their listeners seriously. They often agree and support each other but come at parenting with different experiences and perspectives.
In a recent episode, they heard from a person who does not have kids but who wants to support their friends who do. The writer reflected with disappointment and grief their experience of feeling uncared for and unsupported by their friends with children after a big accomplishment in their life. This hurt in a particular way because of the care they have always tried to show their friends and their friends' children. (I mean, this person without kids listens to a parenting podcast!) They wanted to know: is this just their friends? How should they talk to their friends about it?

I immediately thought about the church's history of either wringing out or hanging out to dry people in the church who don't have children. Weird how these two laundry metaphors both get at the way we take our childfree folk for granted, either assuming that because they don't have kids they have all the time and energy in the world for all the church tasks and roles OR planning events and activities only with children and their nuclear families in mind.

I think we do okay in our congregation at not making assumptions about people based on their age and/or life stage. I think we try to be inclusive. But I have had conversations with people in our church who feel like they have not been celebrated in the same way as their peers who are having babies or left out of conversations about aging when their peers are entering empty nest phase. I feel personally implicated. It's too easy to get busy with all the kid stuff and to gravitate to other parent-friends because our paths cross at kids' activities or in the school drop-off line.

If you are a parent, I hope you reach out to someone in your life who doesn't have children to ask what's been up with them lately, celebrate a milestone or offer encouragement. Having people in my own family's life and in our church who do not have kids, whether by choice or by circumstance, is a gift! Beyond the ways these child-free folks share themselves in love and care for us, they model for our children multiple ways of living full, connected, meaningful lives as adults that have nothing to do with raising children. It is so important to name their belovedness.

Elizabeth, Zac and Jamilah of "Mom and Dad" encouraged the letter writer to share their disappointment and hurt directly with their friends. But I hope that our friends and siblings in the church won't have to say something before we let them know how beloved they are in God's eyes and in ours.

Love Is...

"Can I help you?"

"No, I have to work."

A minute later, "Can I help you now?"

"Not really, I'm reading something."

"But what can I help you with?" He is plaintive.

Regardless of my insistence that what would really help the most is putting away the toys in the living room and taking the laundry out of the dryer, the pleas continue. This along with calls to "Look at me" and "Can you do something with me?" and "I'm bored!" are more or less constant throughout the day. I finally gave in.

"Okay, you know what you can help me with? I'm going to write an email to families from our church. What should I say?"

"I love you and Orie loves you." he replies immediately.

My annoyance and impatience melt and think, that even fits with the Bible passage I'm working on!

"Can I write it?"

I sigh but tell him sure and he climbs on my lap to create the screen cap above. It takes a long time.

I'm not sure how y'all are filling your days and caring for your kids, but this is pretty much what work looks like for me right now. Except most of the time I'm not a lot less understanding and probably more often than not I snap, "Just go to your room!" or "Can you just stop asking for snacks for FIVE MINUTES so I can finish a thought!?"

Yesterday both my kids helped me with a project that some of y'all and your kids are contributing to as well. We recorded some short sections of the passage from 1 Corinthians 13 which you'll most often hear at weddings: Love is patient, love is kind, it isn't jealous, it doesn't brag, etc. All these attributes of love which are so often virtues extolled when celebrating a romantic relationship didn't have romance in mind at all when they were written.

Paul wrote to a church where people were having trouble getting on the same page about what it meant to follow Jesus. Not unlike the church today! In Corinth these Jesus-followers might not have chosen to be a faith family but they were stuck with each other because as disciples of Jesus they were the church.

These days the people we're stuck with are our own family members. You may not all have active and insistent five-year-olds in your homes, but possibly you do have people at home who take work to love sometimes.

When Paul says, "Love is patient" or "Love does not make lists of complaints." or "Love trusts" I think of all the ways that in my relationships with my family members I am impatient, that I let the complaints stack up, that I am suspicious or untrusting. Now, everything has changed. JK, reflecting on this passage hasn't put an end to my impatience. I am failing constantly. But maybe a little less constantly? I did let the kid sit on my lap instead of putting him off for the thousandth time.

But I have hope! When we were working on our videos and I was inviting Orie to say "Love never fails," into the camera. His sister in classic teen says, "Uh, yeah it does." The thing is, though, God's love doesn't. That's where I get my hope. My love will probably fail a million times. But as I try and fail, God's love will not end.

It was a joy for me to record my kids speak (and shout and giggle) Paul's words of love with enthusiasm (a little too much enthusiasm maybe - tune in Sunday to see) and I was overjoyed with all the kids also interested in taking part. I'm really looking forward to seeing and hearing them and to figuring out how to put all these words about God's love together in the video for our scripture reading in Zoom church.

Folks, we're figuring out news ways to love each other and our families. We're figuring out new ways to be together all the time. But thanks be to God, who is also here and loving us all the time.

You're doing a great job!

My Patronus is a Snow Leopard

This weekend in our congregation we are going to host an event in which we hear the story of the relationship between Lakota folks and white descendants of settlers in Minnesota.  A part of that will include the story of land return and will challenge us in the Northwest consider what our responsibility is to the First Nations of Washington.  For us in Seattle, that means the Duwamish.  The elementary children will have the opportunity to learn from a Duwamish teacher, experiencing songs, stories and even learning to dance. It's going to be pretty great. 

Even after living in Seattle for more than a decade, I've had few opportunities (largely because I haven't gone out of my way to find them) to learn about or expose myself to local indigenous culture.  I want to change that. I'm noticing that, like the cultural shift in awareness of the way white folks are blind to our privilege with respect to black folks, there's an increased understanding that we can easily commit micro-aggressions even in some common english expressions.

For example, consider, "So and so is the low man on the totem pole," or "let's pow-pow" or "such and such is my spirit animal." These take cultural, possibly sacred, images, appropriate them and trivialize them.  A totem poll has no hierarchy; there is no 'bottom'.  A pow-wow is a social and ceremonial gathering not a quick meeting in the break-room. And isn't it just so much cooler to say "My patronus is a snow leopard"? (Actually my patronus is probably a house cat.  Anyway, you can read more here, here and here).

It's exciting to me that our congregation want to be challenged to examine our whiteness - including the kind of language we use about and originating in indigenous culture - and I've go a few more resources for adults and children to help us learn and become more culturally sensitive.

The Seattle Public Library has great recommendations for books from toddler through Young Adult.  Also, at the Central Library location there is currently an exhibit of photography highlighting local First Nations.  I always find going to the downtown library a fun outing.  Another local resource with permanent exhibits highlighting indigenous culture is the Burke Museum.  Go for the dinosaurs stay for the basketry, beading and kayaks.  And finally, a built-in opportunity to be hosted in a Duwamish space is the Sunday afternoon portion of our event at their longhouse.
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Photo: Haida bentwood chest. Burke Museum cat. no. #2291.

Since We Were Babies

The picture above was taken just over a decade ago.  It's still one of my favorites.  In part because it very much captures the personalities of the kids in the picture, even to this day.  And also because I love being reminded of a very unique thing about bringing children into church community: these children are not related to each other, they aren't  close - although they are friends - but they have been know and loved and cared for by this family of faith since the days they crawled around on the floor.  Like cousins or siblings in a for-real family they have this experience of church community - their family of faith - that only they and their peers share.

In the high school youth Sunday school class exploring baptism and belonging we are heading in a couple weeks into a session on the story of The Church and specifically of Our Church.  We will talk about the stories and values and culture that we have in our congregation.  We'll talk about  what it means to follow Jesus as a community in this time and place, and what it has meant for the last 50 years. Many of these same young people were at camp this past weekend.  I saw them being community to each other, laughing and enjoying being each other around a card table, and I saw them being embraced into the community of our church of all ages as they - yes - played games and also cared for smaller children and made meals together and played ping-pong and skied and sledded.

Some of those teens also crawled around with each other on the floor and some have only been here a little while.  But being in this family of faith is unique thing that only they share in the world.  I pray that the little ones in the picture will in a few years be the teens competing at Rook, that the children who have recently joined our community, and babies yet to be born will be folded into this cloud of witnesses.  It is precious to me to observe that that even long after the children of this faith family are grown, the love that they have known here continues to be a connection to each other and to the love of God.

In a recent conversation with my child in the picture, she confirmed that I still had it on my bulletin board.  I nodded and she went on a little incredulous, "So we've know each other since we were babies?"  Yup.  They have been known to each other and known to their church and known and loved by their Creator.  Thanks be to God!

We Had Hoped...

image: Daniel Bonnell, script: Amy Marie Epp

I am back from sabbatical and grateful to be in the pulpit again.  So this is a "What is In the Sermon" edition of the Pastor Amy blog.
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Last Sunday on the way home from church I was listening to The Moth Story Hour on KUOW and one of the storytellers was an Irish woman who came from a family of 6 sisters.  Sisters who had learned how to be strong and courageous and connected to each other by their father.  When their dad died suddenly in his early seventies and they were all in middle adulthood, the bond that they thought was so strong between them began to unravel.  Each of them wondered how they were to go on being family, even being in the world without the one who was always encouraging, teaching, leading, connecting them - even as adults.

When I heard that story on The Moth, I thought of the disciples on the road.  These two friends and followers who had lost a beloved.  And not only a beloved, but the one who tied their group together.  The one who showed them what it meant to be God’s children, who told them they were beloved, who healed and served and ate with them, who was the center of their community.  And not only that - the one in whom they had hoped.  A people under occupation, they had a very real hope that Jesus was the leader that would liberate them - finally - from occupying forces.  Jesus’ leadership and charisma tied the disparate and diverse group of disciples together

When we read this story in Sunday school last week Madeleine suggested the image of a bracelet in which the knot that holds everything together has come undone.  I saw it immediately.  Each of the friend, followers, disciples a bead or a knot held together by their beloved Jesus. And once his binding presence is missing, they begin to scatter.  Cleopas and his wife are headed back home to Emmaus.  They’ve left others in Jerusalem, confused by a story of an empty tomb, a missing body and angels.

They are bitterly disappointed.  They grieve.  They had hoped…

And don’t we all.  This is a beloved Easter story, I think in part because of the details that allow us to identify with the disciples on the road.  We too have hoped. I’ve heard people experiencing infertility talk about the bitterness of hoping and longing for a child only to be disappointed - not just once but again and again.  Perhaps a disease or mental illness we thought we had seen the end of returns.  We had hoped…  Or the hope and disappointment of broken relationship.  Of love and trust betrayed.  It is kind of hope is the kind that comes with deep and long-lived yearning.  Perhaps - as in this case - even generations.  

As Jesus’ companions had hoped, we too place our hopes for political change in individuals to see those hopes dashed.

Then they meet Jesus on the road.  But of course they don’t know it’s Jesus.  But as they tell him of their broken hope and he retells the story of God’s people to them their hope begins to be re-woven.  Story by story from the torah and the prophets, he ties them back into the fabric of their community.  When, at the end they realize at the table that it is Jesus who has been with them all along, they say to each other, “Were not our hearts burning inside us when he was opening scripture to us on the road.”  These stories remind them of who and whose they are.  Not a nation’s or a leader’s but God’s.

In the Moth story about the sisters and their father, months after the funeral at which the sisters have carried their father’s coffin together and put his body to rest, one of the sisters gets a text message.  It’s from her dad.  Or at least it’s from her dad’s number.  It says, “I’m home now.  You can call on me any time.”  Honestly, I get a little weepy just thinking of it again, it was such a sweet story.  The text was (probably) some kind of glitch in the system, re-sending the last thing that her dad had texted to her.  But she took it as a prompt to connect again with her sisters, to recount the message from beyond, to wonder together and remember together whose they were and be reminded that the bonds of family could be re-knotted in a way that had their father woven into the whole fabric.

Cleopas and the other disciple, their hope for a Messiah has been disappointed.  Bitterly so. They will always be disappointed if they seek escape from the tyrany of political oppression.  Particularly if they’re waiting for some kind of a political leader to overthrow or rebel against or out-politic their occupiers.  Their hope for a Messiah who walks along with them, though, who explores God’s word together with them, who sits at a table with them, though.  That Messiah is totally present.  And that Messiah is present every time God’s people are gathered - walking, serving each other, eating together, opening scripture with each other.

Our experience of Jesus may most often happen in retrospect.  It can be very hard to see Jesus walking along beside us on the road when we are in the midst of the grief and disappointment of hopes lost.  And I don’t want to get all “footprints” on you, but it is often when we reflect back on an experience that we can say, “Didn’t my heart burn within me when such and such a thing happened?”

The two are compelled, when they realize who their walking buddy has been to turn back to community.  They realize that they have a hope of a different nature. Hope for a different kind of freedom - and into an urgency to run back to community and learn how to witness to each other, to continue the work of the loving, healing, proclaiming Jesus, to weave themselves into a community that makes Jesus presence known everywhere.   I wonder if in our disappointed hopes - particularly when they are hope tied up in political figures or aspirations - we might do well to be reminded that we are knots more securely tied into a string that God is continuing to weave together.

The eye opening, get-back-on-the-road moment for the disciples came at the table.  A table, maybe something like this one before us.  It came when Jesus broke the bread and they shared it.  Jesus known through a physical, tangible thing like bread.  In those look-back moments when we say, “Yes, that way Jesus with me.” how often are they moments that a friend or companion shared a meal, a kind word, a token of encouragement.  Maybe they are when reconciliation is found after a rift, in community gathered, in renewed physical health or a new understanding and peace with physical decline.  Around a table.

Some of you may have seen the Heineken ad that’s circulating on social media.  It’s meant to tug at your heartstrings and tear-ducts at it does.  People ideologically opposite are tasked with several challenges that they must complete together, then given a short survey in which they describe themselves to the other person.  Then they each watch a video in which this partner whom they’ve been laboring and intimately talking with talks candidly about their ideology.

Then they’re given an option - they can go on their way, or they can sit down at the bar (which they’ve just put together) and talk about their differences over a beer.  A Heineken, of course.  

Community built at a table.  And in common work.  And in shared life.  That sounds a lot like the body of Christ to me.

I invite you to join me at the table as we begin communion.  I invite you to join me the the hope that is in Jesus and in the people of God.  I invite you to join me in tying yourself into the care of community and love of God.  I invite you into hope renewed.

Deeper (and Broader) Than I Expected: Reflections on a Faith Formation Conference

Because of the subtitle of this conference, “Deep Faith: Faith Formation for All Ages” I went with a pretty narrow expectation.  It’s one I was looking forward to, but narrow nonetheless.  I hoped to engage the question of how to work at education and formation intergenerationally.  How does one shape a Sunday school class or worship service such that it appeals and genuinely connects with people from toddler to senior and allows folk of all ages to learn with and from each other?  I did come away with a few ideas.  Ideas I hope to work at and explore more in the future, including an understanding that building bridges of learning and connection intended to meet the particular challenges of, for example, a four-year-old in worship, may might also be wide enough to include others with different demographics but similar needs.  Wide enough to welcome many into an experience of God.

What I came to experience in this conference was not wholly what I expected but was still pretty exciting. Two workshops in particular had me excited to come home and think about how we implement elements in my context.  The first, led by Carrie Martens, was a workshop about marking faith and milestone moments across the life span.  Like most congregations we offer some ritual life-marking moments in worship, like infant dedication and baptism.  We also offer young adults hand-made comforters when they are ready to move on after high school.  But I was challenged to think about the many other ways to mark life-moments as sacred through adulthood and at points throughout childhood: the beginning of school for a child, consecration of singleness for adults who remain unmarried, blessing on retirement when adults complete work marking a ‘fruitful past and fruitful future.’* Since there is no beginning or ending to the formation of our identity in Christ, ritual markers along the journey give us a vocabulary to name that identity.  Being able to name our identity allows us to further deepen and claim it.

One of the areas we Mennonites have claimed as central to our identity is that of peace-makers.  Yet it seems to me that it’s rare for a congregation to actively engage in educating and forming members (young and old) in practices of engaging conflict in healthy and transformative ways.  I have certainly heard many stories of unhealthy and passive aggressive ways that churches have dealt (or not) with conflict. That’s why Rachel Miller Jacobs’ concept of ‘Ordinary Time Forgiveness’ seems both so simple and so radical. 

Rachel introduced those who participated in her workshop to some tools of non-violent communication and in particular we had fun with her deck of ‘Feelings and Needs’ cards.**  These cards, as the name suggests, each name either a feeling or a need.  When confronted with a conflict or situation in which discernment or transformation is necessary, one may use these cards, either alone or with another, to identify the two or three feelings that are primarily evoked.  This allows a listener to use empathetic responding when choosing cards for the story-teller to test if the feeling is right and for teller to respond.  Once primary emotions are identified, the needs cards come into play.  It is the met or unmet needs that evoke those feelings and when identified, we can so much more easily communicate – the first step in moving toward resolution and forgiveness. 

It's more complex than that, of course.  And conflicts, like people, may be much more multi-layered, but because this is about the every-day, ‘ordinary time’ conflict, each of us being formed with the useful tools of engagement is so important to confronting the really fraught and complicated stuff.  It makes so much sense to begin engaging the notion of conflict as normal and forgiveness as central in childhood, then to continue to deepen our understanding of self and other as we mature, growing in faith and experience.  I am looking forward to trying testing these and many of the ideas I encountered at Deep Faith and I’m very grateful to have been able to participate.

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* Carrie Martens, “Faith Markers at Stirling Avenue Mennonite Church (in worship),” table.

** Rachel received her cards from Malinda Berry, Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary.  They were developed based on the Non-Violent Communication practices and principles of Marshall Rosenberg and much more can be found at Malinda’s website here.

Parenting in the Pews (or on the chairs, as the case may be)

My mama and me when I was
about the same age as my
littlest one is now.

It is family lore that when I was about three, and my family was sitting in our usual spot on the front pew in the balcony of our church, that I was (as usual) fidgeting and talking out loud. So my mom tried to put her hand over my mouth to keep me quiet. Instead it had the opposite effect. I wriggled away screaming, “Mommy don’t hit me! Mommy, don’t hit me!” This, to the extreme embarrassment of my mother (my distress about being struck was completely unfounded) caused heads and eyes below to swivel immediately to the commotion above.

Now, as a parent of vocal, wiggly, strong-willed children I can see where it might have been a mistake to try to physically restrain a child whose first response is defiance. And as a parent I understand the struggle of trying to help my children understand that there’s a time and place for moving around and being loud and there’s a time to do quiet activities. As a pastor I want church to be a place where both are okay. As a pastor I want other parents to know that their children will be not just tolerated but loved in their loud questions, their running around the altar, their inattention, their stomping across the mezzanine floor and down the ramp, in addition to their quiet coloring or precocious scripture readings.

I am proud to be a part of a congregation that boldly and warmly welcomes little ones into the faith family with a commitment to their formation and care throughout their growing years and to supporting families. I encourage us to be visible and proactive in that support. On a Sunday morning, this could mean sitting beside a family with children and quietly talking with a toddler about what you notice happening in worship or what’s in the bag they brought. It might be engaging with the teenager next to you during the passing of the peace to ask about school. It could mean volunteering for the next Parent’s Night Out or bringing a snack to Sunday school. For 20 or more of you it could be adopting a family with kids as their prayer partner (that’s how many families there are with kids under 12), checking in regularly and bringing them into God’s light as a spiritual discipline.

I thank God for you when I think of you, Seattle Mennonite Church people. You care deeply for our families with children. May we welcome and bless them just as Jesus did.

I can barely handle it

I spent too much time looking at pictures this morning. I found I could not stop gazing at the joy and beauty and tenderness captured by Jim of our blessing service for the children of the congregation. They are indeed all of our children. My absolute favorite pictures are those of people delighting in the children in their arms who are not their own. I can barely handle it, you guys. This is what I’m talking about when I say you are saints! We bear this beautiful gift and joy together.

Yet even as we dwelled in and cradled the sweetness of new life, we began to understand that we are also holding the tenderness of great pain and grief. Lives have been lost this year, my friends. People we love are no longer with us. It broke my heart. You broke my heart. Each poem, each name, each candle and the knowledge that there were poems, names and candles unread, unsaid and unlit in folks who stayed seated. I can barely handle it. We bear this terrible weight and sorrow together.

I am so grateful I can barely handle it. I bless you. I bless you. You have blessed me so much.

A (Mostly) White Congregation and Conversations about Race

We are a (mostly) white congregation.  Individually and as a group we have for the most part been insulated from experiences of discrimination, violence or even the ‘micro-aggressions’ which face people of color face regularly.  I’m encouraged that we are trying to raise our awareness of this in a variety of ways, including our recent worship series on the Doctrine of Discovery and how the last 500 years in its wake have led Europeans and their descendants to treat all non-white persons and the lands on which they’ve lived as individuals and spaces to be either colonized, subjugated or ‘civilized’ by any means necessary.  Although the Doctrine of Discovery is no longer something the majority of the population knows about, its impact continues to be lived and experienced both by people of color and by white folks.

The violence against African Americans by police in high profile events recently and the subsequent vigils, protests and campaigns for justice are a result of the last half millennia of this subjugation and internalized understanding of who we are in relation to each other.  I am left wondering about a) how to talk about these events, about this injustice with my child and b)how to respond and enact a lived justice that I believe I’m called to.

During the Loss of Turtle Island exercise, I experienced the visceral grief of my child when she learned about the way white settler Christian soldiers knowingly and systematically gave small pox blankets to indigenous people in order to infect (and kill) them.  We have taught our children that God loves everyone and that Jesus came to show God’s love to the whole world.  It is easy to believe this when your family looks like mine does - white, hetero-parented, middle class, educated - and our experience is not one of discrimination.

When confronted by the horrible injustice of small pox blankets, or of white police officers who are seemingly free to do violence to black people, the reality of the world collides with the reality of God’s world, that is the kin-dom which we are trying to teach our children is here and which we are a part of.  There is a collision and somehow at the same time a disconnect with what we – and God – long for and what is.

A couple weeks ago I shared an article by Peggy McIntosh about the ‘invisible backpack’ of white privilege.  The invisible backpack is all the ways that I don’t even realize that I benefit from systems that prefer light over dark skin, from knowing that I’ll be able to find books with characters that reflect me to not having to question whether the non-response to my resume was because of an ‘ethnic’ name.  Because of my own hope live in a community that is not all just like me, our family made a choice to live in a diverse neighborhood and enroll in a school that is highly diverse.  Our school is intentional about teaching respect for a multiplicity of cultures, focuses on peace heroes as a part of its yearly curriculum and approaches history from a variety of perspectives.  Right now a song about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott is being sung at my house and I am amazed and grateful.

I am also very aware of Peggy McIntosh’s point that even in this diverse school, I can count on most of my child’s teachers – even those who are teaching immersion Spanish – to looking like her.  I wonder what it’s like for a native Spanish speaking family from Mexico or El Salvador to have their child taught in Spanish by a blond, blue-eyed American.  In a way that her peers are not, my daughter can be blithely unaware of her color and even of theirs.  It takes me actively engaging the question of how I look different than many of my neighbors and may be treated differently because of it to raise that kind of awareness. 

That’s where I’m starting for now.  I’m not going out of my way to start conversations about Ferguson or about death, but sometimes I do encourage noticing.  When we’re reading a book about Ruby Bridges, I ask, what did you learn about Ruby?  Why do you think those people were so angry?  And when I’m asked questions about how I feel and why I try to be honest.  Here’s an approximation of a conversation that happened at my house last week.

“Mama, why were you crying at church this morning?” 

“Well, I was sad and frustrated.  In summer a young man who was black was shot by a police officer who was white and we found out this week that it doesn’t seem like there are going to be any consequences for the police officer.”

“Did he die?”

“Yes, he was shot and he died.”

“That’s not fair.  We’re not supposed to use guns.  He shouldn’t have done that.”

“You’re right.  It’s really not fair.  It’s also not fair that people who have white skin like us get treated different – better – than people who have brown skin like the person who was killed.  And that’s why I’m so sad and frustrated.”

We have often talked about guns in our family as not being okay.  We stress that Jesus wants us to be peace makers.  Why do the police have guns and but other people aren’t allowed to?  Not a question I can answer to my own satisfaction.

                                                                                                                                  

I am still sad and frustrated.  But I’m also determined to continue to re-examine my own attitudes, to listen to the experiences of people of color, and for the most part to keep my own mouth shut when in the context of people are sharing their experiences and to encourage other white people to do the same.  It’s not my experience that the world needs to hear.  For those of you in our congregation who identify as people of color, I am grateful for you and that you continue to walk with this congregation. I think a lot of what I can do is about acknowledging the power and privilege that I have and letting those who are giving voice to experience of discrimination or violence speak and, if I can, amplifying their voices.  That’s why I’ll be wearing black in worship this week at the invitation of Christian leaders and congregations of color to be in solidarity with the message, "Black lives matter."

I trust in the God, in whose image we are all made.  I trust that God is walking with the pray-ers and protesters and who is grieving with those who grieve.  I trust that God’s dream is for a kin-dom in which we are not blind to color but that we see it and value it.  When we are wearing black to proclaim that black lives matter, may we more and more internalize what we proclaim, that God’s dream may be realized.

Worshiping at Grace and Peace Church

For the past few months Joe and I have been trying to go more regularly to Grace and Peace Mennonite Church in Hongdae in Seoul. It’s an hour commute by subway, we always seem to drag our feet getting there and we’re always late. But without fail, the commute is worth it.

Since we always arrive late, we always arrive during the singing. This past Sunday one of the song was to the tune of ‘God Save the King’ but some of the lyrics were as follows (there is usually a translation printed in English):

…He makes wars rage no more
sword, spear, the tools of war
we shall not fear…

It choked me up. In the several times that I have worshipped with other Mennonites in a language that is unfamiliar to me, it is sentiments like these that speak most powerfully to me. I am so profoundly grateful and humbled by my God who works and moves and is petitioned for peace by Christians all over the world in many tongues and traditions.

Themes of peace are powerfully woven into the worship of this congregation. Here in the music, and later on during the time of prayer, when we learned more about the village in Jeju island that is resisting the construction of a naval base on it’s shores. Grace and Peace will send envoys to stand with the villages in solidarity and protest. When we pray together, regardless of the language, I know that all of these voices are being raised in a petition for peace and justice, and I experience the feeling of joy in belonging to the ‘people of God’s peace.’

That same feeling of gratitude and belonging infuses my experience of Communion. As pastor Nam says the words of institution in Korean, I can whisper a translation of both words and ritual to Naomi, not because I understand but because I know. The knowing and participating in this community ritual is awesome. I find myself hungry for it, eager to get to this part of worship as soon as we walk through the door. Grace and Peace celebrates every Sunday and with all comers. It is a celebration to which all are welcome: children, guests, seekers, foreigners like me.

I think it is no coincidence that it is these two parts of this worshiping community, the commitment to peace and celebrating the Lord’s Supper, which touch me so deeply. Among so many other thematic threads, peacemaking and non-violence is woven into the celebration of Communion, and following and remembering the non-violent Christ is at the heart of my faith and that of the Anabaptist Community. Alan and Eleanor Kreider with Paula Widjaja, remind us in their book A Culture of Peace, that the Lord’s Supper forms us a people of equality, non-violence and reconciliation. At God’s table we are all equals, sharing the memory of Jesus, who’s life and death were the example of non-violence love. We come confessing our wrongs and making right our relationships with each other and our God. The early Anabaptist recognized this and celebrated the Lord’s supper as often as they gathered for worship.

I am grateful that I have been able to participate in this community. In a few weeks I will post more about Grace and Peace along with some pictures of me preaching there July 10. Thanks be to God!