Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

Jesus

5 Reasons Jesus Would Ask You to Un-Sign the Nashville Statement

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After the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood issued their Nashville Statement on gender and sexuality this week, I tried not to care. Don’t we already know where they stand on these issues?

But I couldn’t let it go, if only because so many of my own friends carefully follow CBMW or John Piper.  They are people who truly want more than anything to be faithful and loving. They don’t know or care much about the politically correct ways to say things; they might even read the statement as many commenters did—”compassionate,” “gracious.”

It was CBMW’s insistence that their position is central to the Gospel, I realized, that took my breath away with shock and a little fear. Do my friends think I oppose the Gospel? Will they think so after their spiritual heroes sign on to this sweeping declaration?

Whenever I have questions about the Gospel, I ask Jesus. Here are five things I could imagine him saying to those who signed.

  1. The Nashville Statement is hurting people.

I know many people who might sign on to the statement with some sorrow. They worry about the state of world. They wish others didn’t have to struggle with their sexual identities. They want to have LGBT friends and serve them meals and “do life with them” until the day the friends realize how terrible their lives are and repent.

That is well-intentioned in a way, but it’s not compassionate. “Com + passion” equals suffering with. You are not with someone as long as you are drawing a line between sexual morality and sexual immorality with yourself squarely on the opposite side from the other person. You are not with someone as long as opposing a fundamental aspect of their self remains a fundamental aspect of your theology.

Instead, the language and tone of the Nashville Statement reveals that it was not written by people in real relationships with queer people. If it had, it wouldn’t use the made-up word “transgenderism” or insist at so very many points that people can change to fit “God’s design.” It would acknowledge the church’s utter failure of queer people, evident in the prevalence of depression, suicide, and self-harm among queer Christians.

  1. It’s not Biblical.

The Nashville Statement’s conflation of beliefs about sexuality with salvific belief in the Gospel (Article X) is utterly unsupported by Scripture. Jesus never preached that fulfillment of narrow gender roles would signal the arrival of the kingdom of God.

  1. It’s not holistic.

Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t make statements about gender and sexual identity in isolation from an understanding of sex and sexuality for straight people. In particular, it’s tone-deaf to trumpet the urgency of these issues for the Evangelical church, the vast majority of whose queer members have left, while ignoring the fact that rape culture, pornography, and abuse continue in the pews (and in the clergy) daily. This is the epitome of a plank-and-speck situation.

Likewise, a church that demands lifelong celibacy of its members is also rejecting the gospel if it does not expect to sacrifice just as heavily as the celibate members to support and include them in its life. Jesus said his followers would hate their mothers and brothers; perhaps he meant to suggest that there is no place in his kingdom for those who idolize the nuclear family.

  1. It makes you look silly.

The Nashville Statement will not go down in history as a defining moment on par with the Nicene Creed. It may someday be a footnote illustrating how conservative evangelicalism died orchestrating a series of exercises in missing the point. The grandiosity of the name points to the hubris of the whole thing.

  1. It reveals more about you than about God.

The fact is, no one reading the Bible—and especially the Gospels—for the first time would put it down and say, “that was a fascinating book about sex.” You’re revealing your own obsession with sex and the status quo. The Nashville Statement itself makes an attempt to look strong and decisive, but the preamble reveals that that attempt is just an impulse driven by fear—fear of change, fear of humanity, and most importantly, fear of those who are different.

I think if Jesus were here, he’d ask you about your own nuclear family. He would sit and his eyes would glow with yours as you told about the passion and steadfastness your spouse has shown you, the incomparable joy of raising children, how the best nights of your life were just all of you piled on a couch. Maybe he’d chime in—I have always loved how her hair catches the sun, too.

Jesus would ask you about sex. About what it meant to you to share all of yourself with someone; about what you learned about God and yourself in your own celibate seasons; about how your gender makes you who you are, places you on a team, invites and challenges you to be fully yourself.

Jesus would listen and listen and when you were done, when you had told all that made your own experience precious to you, he would wait a while. And I think he’d ask you to let go of the Nashville Statement. I think he’d say, here, let me hold that for you, and he’d promise to keep it safe.

I think if you were so sure of your beliefs and so close to Jesus, you’d be able to set them aside for a bit and listen, instead of alternately clutching them to your chest and brandishing them about. And Jesus might say:

Your love for your family is a beautiful and holy thing, a thing that makes you who you are. And my queer friends? Their gender identities and romantic relationships make them who they are, too. Precious, thrilling, and a little bit odd, with histories of mistakes and triumphs—just like everyone else.

Maybe you feel the need to police all of this precisely because your own identities mean so much to you. Is it so hard to believe that the people they love and the genders they express mean this much to others as well? That they are integral to their very being? That I made them that way?

Your family doesn’t need to be protected by rules and declarations. They need to see you model the servant leadership you talk about sometimes. They need you to wash the feet of your transgender neighbor and really hear the stories, start to finish, of the queer people who have quietly slipped out of your life. They need to see that you know how to repent and to make amends. That’s what would take courage. That’s how you would display integrity. That’s how you would be changed by imitating my love.

How to fail at social media

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Yesterday I had an idea, and I wrote a blog post. It took me many hours. When I finished it, I thought, this is weird and cheesy. But this morning, I gave it some edits and decided I needed to get on with my life. I took a calculated risk. I published it.

Two hours later, no one had liked it and A PERSON HAD UNFOLLOWED ME on Facebook. I am not exaggerating. A PERSON. HAD. UNFOLLOWED ME.

I continue to not-exaggerate when I tell you that I considered quitting everything. I could go back to dashing things off every few months when the spirit seizes me. I prayed a sad prayer about whether I should give up my professional-writing dreams and just be content brightening one person’s day, every once in a while, like I used to do.

And God was like, uh, no. Get a grip.

So I did some chores so I could think.

Had I ruined my blog by publishing a weird, cheesy post? Of course not. I’m damn proud of my blog. And someone, somewhere will like my little story. But it felt like I had failed in some really important way. Maybe I’m a little too used to people telling me how great my writing is. Maybe in a year of transition, of identity shift, I’ve staked a little too much on all those compliments. Maybe this is a tiny, tiny dose of that humility I, you know, prayed for earlier this week.

But even if I had actually failed, even if everyone stopped pity-following me, even if I never publish a book—wouldn’t that sort of be the definition of “calculated risk?” You might fail. Actually, if you practice a craft, you will fail. That is part of the whole thing. If you want to never fail, Being A Creative should be last on your list.

Here is another thing. I am an unfollower. It’s my phone and I only let a few things on it and I unfollow people every day. So if my thoughtless click caused this reaction in someone else? I would be super annoyed. DON’T PUT THAT ON ME, I would think. Your happiness, neurotic stranger, is 100% not my responsibility.

I’ve been thinking every day for the past few weeks about what it means to serve as a writer, as someone who has to try to make a living by trying to become a public speaker. What can I give? How can I help? But today it hit me that as long as I’m fixated on likes, hearts, and thumbs-ups, I’ll always be taking more than I give. I’ll always be operating out of fear. I’ll always be trying to reflect some audience back at itself instead of offering something unique—and maybe even giving someone else permission to be weird and cheesy.

It’s a weird way to relate to ourselves: by broadcasting things. It used to scare me to death; our devices and apps weren’t designed to make us better people. But I’m finally seeing hope. We don’t have to do what the devices and apps tell us: check them constantly, obsess over our stats, build our lives around our feeds. We just have to be good people, which has honestly never been easy. Or safe. Or un-cheesy.

But it’s worth it.

Likes and ♥♥♥,

Lyndsey

This Clueless Teacher

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I am no expert on daily life for first-century Jews in Palestine, but if you are, I’d love to hear from you!

Martha had never told anyone how much she liked rocks. No one had ever asked, for one thing. But the older she got, the more special the secret seemed. She knew, even if she didn’t understand, that the adults would laugh if she tried to point out the beauty in each one, the intricacies of pattern, color, and even weight that distinguished them from each other. And now that she was approaching ten years old, the other kids would laugh, too.

Today, Martha’s hands and eyes inspected the bit of limestone in her hand while her ears strained to listen to the men’s conversation. Silly as it was to care so much about rocks, trying to learn about the intricacies of the Law was even more futile, but Martha couldn’t help it; the wisest of the men could discover such great truths in even the smallest sentence of scripture. Whenever she got the chance to listen and understand, Martha felt for the rest of the week like she could see farther. It felt like she was storing up more secrets, even more beautiful than her stones.

“Martha. MARTHA!” She spun around at the edge in her mother’s voice and hurried toward her, framed in the door of the house. In a few steps, Martha had the baby on her hip, but she knew she deserved the scolding that came anyway: “Are Mary and I supposed to play patty-cake until you’re good and ready to wander back inside? Are you going to explain to your father why supper’s not ready?” Martha’s mother turned to light a fire, still muttering about chores that hadn’t been done, as Lazarus and Gideon nearly bowled Martha over. They were so engrossed in their swordfight that Martha didn’t bother to yell at them; she picked up a piece of string from the floor and sat Mary on a chair instead. Martha pretended to tie the rock onto Mary’s wrist. “It’s so you’ll remember the scriptures,” she whispered. Mary seemed to consider this for a moment. “Spitchers!” she replied, throwing the rock on the floor with gusto. Martha moved to throw it back outside before anyone could accuse her of bringing in more dirt.

Martha had dumped out her rock collection many years later when her husband moved to the family home, but she had never stopped straining to hear the religious teachers—and no one had stopped doting on Mary. They had all indulged her fantasy of never marrying for so long that they hardly noticed as Mary actually became an old maid. When Martha’s own husband died, she mourned him dutifully, but soon found her life with Mary and Lazarus quite cozy.

Everyone in the village had expected her to invite the traveling teacher to lodge with them. Martha had a knack for concocting huge meals out of thin air and an infamously immaculate house. Still, she had heard her heart beating in her ears as she awaited Jesus’s reply; when he spoke, it was as if every glimpse of beauty she’d ever gotten from the Torah readings suddenly coalesced into a pattern, simple but captivating—one that she knew had always been there, but never quite believed she’d understand, let alone see, on earth. This man didn’t just theorize about Shalom. He described the Kingdom of God. He was the Kingdom of God.

Of course Martha had started preparing before she’d even asked, but at his acceptance of her invitation all the tasks before her became suffused with joy. Never before had she been so proud of her talent for hospitality or so excited to share it. She sang as she dusted and scrubbed, and tried to appear modest but terribly busy in her conversations at the market. She tried, too, not to mind as she caught glimpses of Lazarus and Mary listening to the teacher in the square while she hurried home, arms loaded with produce.

By the time the whole group bustled in the front door, the realities of pulling off a dinner party had overtaken the thrill. Martha had been hoping for Mary’s return for hours. No matter how many eggplants she chopped, it seemed she still needed more. Her feet ached and her back was in knots.
“Thank God you’re here,” she breathed, grabbing Mary’s arm when she walked in after the guests. “We missed you!” Mary said with bright eyes.
“Well, that’s nice, but I need…” Martha trailed off as Mary returned her attention to Jesus and walked away.

It doesn’t matter she thought,  the plan will work well enough without help. Mary has never been very attentive to household things, and it’s my own fault for spoiling the girl. Martha thumped a bowl of nuts onto a table and checked the lamb: right on schedule. Mary just doesn’t understand how the world works. She’s making a fool of herself, as if she thought she belonged in the middle of that group of men. She found herself setting dishes on the table a little more loudly than normal. How can Mary sit there, seeing how many people they had to feed, and act so entitled? Martha moved the lentils off the fire. The bottom layer had burned; that would mean a lot of scrubbing later tonight. The thought of cleaning up after all this made her want to cry. Why had she invited Jesus here in the first place?

Jesus. She knew what to do. Grabbing a wine glass, she walked out of the kitchen and offered it to the first person she saw. Then she leaned down next to Mary, who sat at Jesus’s feet. “Lord,” she said, certain that he would make Mary see sense, “Don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” Martha moved to take away a hand-washing bowl, pretending not to see Mary’s shocked expression.

“Martha…” His voice was calm and inviting, but she was already scanning the room for tasks that needed to be done. “Martha!” She turned back around and made eye contact with the teacher for the first time. The kindness in his face made her want to cry again. Here would come his thanks, his recognition of her work.
“You are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” Martha stared from Jesus to Mary for a minute, both of them appearing to genuinely hope that she would plop down next to Mary on the floor. Then she swept back into the kitchen.

Only one thing is needed! All that is needed is for everyone to sit around playing patty-cake until dinner magically appears! Later she would think that Jesus himself had inadvertently helped her, because she was so angry she hardly noticed her hands making the rest of the preparations. Once they all made their way to dinner, though, she was so relieved to have a seat and a glass of wine that her frustration quickly dissipated. In Jesus’ company, the group was lighthearted but sincere. At his words, they felt for the first time that they could be good, as the teachers had always admonished, and that it would be a joy to do so.

The food was impeccably done, and compliments abounded. Once Jesus even asked for her opinion on a theological matter, with such simplicity that she answered frankly before she even had the sense to demur. She blushed deeply, but Jesus’s friends seemed unfazed. “Yes, I think you are right there,” Jesus answered, and carried on. Martha vaguely knew that water and wine glasses were sitting empty, that the bread was gone and the centerpiece was askew. But the words that had continued to ring in her ears no longer galled her; she felt the truth of them. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. So perfection had been taken away from Martha just as it always was. Didn’t Jesus care more about her than about her napkin folds?

A couple of hours had passed when Martha felt a hand on her shoulder. “Hey Martha,” Mary whispered, “Where’s the baklava? I’ll bring it out.”

For a moment panic seized her. Utter despair followed, but just as quickly came resignation. She had forgotten to make dessert. Martha glanced around at all the contented faces, chattering but always with Jesus in view. She stood up and pulled Mary into the kitchen. “This is it,” she said, scooping some dried dates into two bowls.
“Oh, Martha…” Mary said.

“What’s done is done,” Martha said quickly. The women made no grand entrance, but simply returned to their seats and offered the dates to their neighbors.

They were the best dates Martha had ever eaten. Juicy and sweet, winey but bright, the best of the summery fruit remaining alongside the deep caramels of aged sugars. In a blink, across the table, Martha could have sworn Jesus raised a date to her in a toast for just a second before attending to another guest’s earnest question

“Martha, it was an honor to sit with you at your table today,” Jesus said as they filed out the door.
“I hope I will see you again soon,” Martha replied.

Later, cleaning up, Martha noticed something odd on the table. There, at Jesus’s place, was a beautiful rock, not exactly unusual but with a pattern and a heft she thought she recognized. Mary glanced over, too.

“Inconsiderate of people to bring extra dirt inside, don’t you think?”

Martha only smiled.

Where were you on the night he was betrayed?

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I am not at all convinced that I won’t become Catholic or Orthodox someday. I love the Great Feast of Eucharist; the sense of tradition that connects us to so many places and times; the seasons, feasts, and fasts that we Episcopals are a bit lax about keeping. But if I do stay Anglican, it will be because Communion was enough. I need—I believe we all need—faith to come to us in bread and wine.

Because I love Eucharist so, much of the more terrible church-related pain in my life has been Communion-related: people denying one another Eucharist for reasons I saw as unfair. But through these great hurts, because I love Eucharist so, I understood, too: not the desire to become a gatekeeper, exactly, but to protect something sacred from a flippant and entitled world.

In my first year after college, I worked for a beautiful and holy and love-dealing church who taught me very much by being Christ to me, My main complaint was that this church did not have Communion near often enough, and when they did there was something I found disturbing. The ten or so kids in the congregation went zooming around the church whenever any activity took place, which was fine, except that it was the same during Communion—and they would sort of rip off hunks of bread as they passed by. They seemed to have no sense at all that this was special bread, and something inside me felt a physical jab whenever a piece was hacked off, crumbs flying. I wanted them to care about Jesus’s body. I think there is much to be gained by receiving something as a gift, in both hands; by learning solemnity.

I think of those kids when we have debates about who can be a part of church. It seems keeping people out often comes with good intentions, the desire to do things “decently and in order.” And even when you understand why people want to invoke grace, you also want to protest—in one sense, I know that it is silly to believe the attitude, knowledge, holiness with which I approach the Lord’s table each week is so very much greater than those kids’. Still, that seems like no reason to do nothing. Shouldn’t the church at least try to offer our best when we obey Jesus’ commandment to remember him?

Remember me, Jesus would whisper when those kids made me anxious. It is a gift. It was a gift even on that night when he was betrayed, offered to the clueless, the halfhearted, the sleepy, the deniers and the betrayer. He did not say take a decorous amount and eat, only Take, eat; this is my body. Did one of them giggle at the strangeness of these words, the nervousness of hearing him insist he would soon die? Did the servants, perhaps, gather up the remnants like the unbaptized do after Orthodox service—and was it not life to them as well?

When I remember Jesus, I am compelled to take this bread with fear and trembling; and whatever children are in my charge will be taught to do the same. But when we remember Jesus, we are also steered firmly into the grace business, into giving even when giving is indecorous. On the night when he was betrayed, Jesus said, over and over, keep my commands and my command is this: that you love one another. And he washed feet. And he did not want to be honored or protected.

So  when it comes to impertinent children, sinners and doubters and outsiders, I am hard pressed to say we should not err on the side of take and eat. If it makes us wince to have our sense of ceremony violated; even if we want to cry don’t do it! when the chief of sinners reaches out to touch his body, let us not take up swords of defense but instead go with that offender a second mile. Let us take hands, ask questions, and find in the end that (of course) the chief of sinners is us. We do not remember Jesus best by limiting our tables; we meet the humble Lord every time he is broken and shared again. Here is a debt that cannot be repaid by respectability, but might be honored by scandal. Here is Eucharist: given to us in our unworthiness, reawakening us to thanksgiving.

Sexual Harassment for International Women’s Day

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It may be a failing of mine that I don’t like to feel as though I’m on a bandwagon; so I’m not always keen on celebrating things that hardly seemed to exist before social media, like International Women’s Day. A certain amount of naivete, too, has in the past made me wonder how much we still really need to celebrate women, at least in the developed world. I thought, a year or two ago, that “feminist” wasn’t such a radical label.

Today, though, I was followed by a man in a car for two blocks on my walk. “Be my friend,” he said. “I like that. You’re cute. Princess. I like that.”
“I’m married,” I said.
“You sure?” he replied. He knew it didn’t really matter. He knew it was a calculation, the way of saying please go away that usually seems least likely to incite physical violence.
“I’m sure,” I said. If you don’t respect the demands of civility, of humanity, please at least follow property law.

Last week my neighbor was suspended from her high school for reporting sexual harassment.

Our president has bragged about sexual assault.

I wish that feminism were just a matter of working for equal pay, or for the rights of transgender people to exist.

Instead, feminism is still fighting for women’s physical safety in broad daylight. At school. In the office. Women are still waiting for the day we do not go outside expecting to be demeaned, intimidated, or attacked for sport or spite.

The book of Luke passes the Bechdel test* right away.  I’ve been reading and rereading the beginning of this book for a few days now, enthralled most by its celebration of the rich and joyful friendship between Mary and Elizabeth. The two women are prophets before they are mothers, secret bearers of a wide and deep vision of the future. They have been faithful where Zechariah, the priest, was unfaithful, and they see now beyond a doubt that the Lord lifts up the humble. I can’t stop thinking about them, the older woman and the younger, preparing together for the births of their new boys, marveling at the work of God.

We are not allowed to forget, in this gospel, that every moment of Jesus’s ministry is borne up by women, women who bear and maintain life, women who offer financial assistance, women who do not abandon him at the cross and women, again, who are the first to believe in his new birth out of death. He insists on naming those unnoticed roles that sustain all of us with their everyday faithfulness: they who cook, clean, tend, mend, and bury, holding up the world in these tasks we deem small only because they are so ubiquitous. So necessary and precious.

The Christian doctrine of creation tells us that God is the sustainer of the universe, in some sense recreating us all at every moment. Creation is not an event about which we must decide whether it happened thousands or millions or billions of years ago. It is an intimate, involved embrace of all that is at once beautiful, mundane, and yucky in this world. It is a recurring yes, an ongoing artwork—and, perhaps, a tedious, exacting, unappreciated one. God is at work in the splashy sunsets and the wild-eyed desert prophet. God is also at work in the clouds drifting overhead at night, and through the prophet’s ungloried mother. Women and servants meet this humble God in our own work. She sees us and we see Her, different than do the powerful and celebrated.

*The Bechdel test is a cultural barometer asking whether two female characters in a work talk to each other about something other than a man.

We say that feminism is the belief that women are equal to men. This has come to be parsed in many ways, but I think one that is often overlooked is the belief that traditionally feminine ways of being in the world are equal to traditionally masculine ones. I think we fear putting women on a pedestal; the pedestal doesn’t have to be so high, after all, before it becomes a prison of its own. But launching certain women into the C-suite shouldn’t come at the expense of the women who will never have the money for childcare, the education, or the social clout to climb the corporate ladder. Or, for that matter, the expense of men who want to go into caring professions, but fear losing prestige. Moreover, we must recognize that many women who succeed in the C-suite do so precisely because they lead distinctively: seeking consensus, drawing connections, and caring for whole people, rather than defaulting to a top-down model or convincing employees to ram their way to success by sheer willpower.

Christian feminism, in particular, should recognize that part of our duty is to follow our servant-leader, Jesus, in a way that leads downward. Many men have worked hard to pull the heart of our faith away from service, humility, simplicity, and sharing; but they are ultimately inescapable. To celebrate International Women’s Day, for me, is to celebrate these virtues, not to mirror the patriarchy’s contempt of them. Some of us, it’s true, have lost ourselves in them, and have not much reflected Christ until we recovered other virtues like rest, self-love (dignity), confidence. Still, I do not think women’s safety or equality will be achieved until society recognizes, not only that women can be as stoic, as strategic, as strong and unflagging and dogged as men, but also that emotion, intuition, and human connection are themselves sources of strength worthy of reverence. Let us not rest until men have begun to learn, too, from us. May we assert our rights to live without fear, to take up space without reprisal, to have our gifts and talents not only used but recognized, and may we do so for the sake of the world. May we make a place that is better for caretakers and maintainers, for the weak and the vulnerable, for bodies and babies; and may we do so for the sake of the God who is incompletely imagined until we see her laboring in their midst.

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How to stand tall in the noise of these days

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I am reluctant to speak into the din of these days.

An observation: we have reached a point where the two major sides in our debates are both driven by fear. Our president was elected for his projections of strength: for promising to protect us from bad hombre immigrants, from the globalized market, from terrorists, from the pace of social change. And now his policies have stricken terror into the hearts of his opponents—worried for themselves, for minority friends, worried about international relations or about creeping authoritarianism.

Though the cacophony appears to address many issues, in the end we are mostly responding to threats. We all perceive our particular threats to be very real, while dismissing others’ fears and blazing with disbelieving outrage when they dismiss ours. In our anger we cannot see how lonely this has made us. We feel the loneliness, but not consciously; the ache only fuels our outrage.

The Ph.D. in political science whom I keep on retainer who is my dear friend tells me that the biggest protests work, even when they’re not supposed to, even when no one expects it. So I will go to the protests. But I won’t be outraged; it’s not in my nature. With Paul I will proclaim that we all have gifts differing and I will thank God for those who do outrage well and righteously. I’ll be the one giving out water bottles, or crying. You’re probably not supposed to cry at a protest, but I’m mostly sure that’s what I’ll do.

What is in my nature is to passionately declare the extreme urgency of everyone sitting down and thinking some more. This is an unglamorous and unpopular vocation. Thinking sells best when paired with a vice—traditionally pipe tobacco or whiskey. Outrage is brighter, the work of a moment, and pairs well with that comfort food, superiority.

Still, even the most active of activists is already acknowledging that our task won’t be over for a long time, and we’re going to need something that burns a bit slower. I hasten to add that, while we must equip ourselves for a long-haul future, we have a yet lengthier past with which we must also deal. This crisis did not develop overnight, as if caused by some particular genius of Trump’s for villainy. This is the overflow of ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years. If we accomplish political goals without any mention of these things, they will only fester. The colonization of rural places, for instance: extracting resources from a place while systematizing contempt for its people. The abandonment of national politics to lobbyists and of local politics to the dogs. The abandonment of our minds to our screens. The utter lack of restraint on our consumerist desires, so that each side accuses the other of entitlement with great accuracy and total hypocrisy. And an extreme failure, on all sides, to know the oppressed, to sit with them in their pain, to share bread with them.

These things, of course, cost more than five minutes and 1000 words. These things rarely go viral.

But perhaps, I concede, the past is a discussion for another time. Perhaps what is before us, just today, is to excavate and banish our fear. If you are a Christian, you have no excuse for it; if you are not, let me assure you fear remains a hindrance to you. It is not naive to resist fear. You may be aware of a danger without giving that thing power over you. To the contrary, once fear is acknowledged and set aside, you are more agile, more perceptive, less prone to mistakes. Once fear is set aside, it clears the way for that most searing weapon: love.

I read an article several days ago about what to do, the basic actions that would be essential to resisting the extremism we’re witnessing. I found it wise and compelling in its simplicity—things like interacting with your representatives; seeking out reliable news sources; taking care of yourself (in the long term, going to bed on time and eating your vegetables); learning about privilege and oppression; getting to know the people in your community who stand to lose the most. And as the list went on, I realized that these were all things a truly excellent citizen would be doing regardless of who was in power. It was comforting and intimidating, I suppose, to realize that all anyone needs to do to stand up against a bullying President is become a truly excellent citizen.

What was, for me, conspicuously absent from the list was becoming aware of any new development within ten minutes of its occurrence; scrolling through Twitter with increasing indignation and despair; firing one-liners or articles at people on Facebook who would then be compelled to recognize the error of their ways. As the days have gone by, I’ve felt more and more antipathy towards the hot takes and the outrage machines and even the copied-and-pasted Bible verses. So much blame for our situation goes, in my mind, to our penchant for preferring the viral to the true; to our self-righteous armchair activism; to our willing deliverance of our attention to the antics of national figures, at the expense of understanding the goings-on in our own cities and states.

Do you want to drive out fear? It doesn’t happen when you get a good grasp of the situation from twitter or even from the news. It happens with love. Have the courage to love yourself without the safety blanket of self-righteousness. Have the courage to love someone else without assuming you already know who they are. Walk around your neighborhood and talk to the people you meet. Plan an uncomfortable dinner party: invite someone different from you. (Have lots of comfort food.) Call your representatives on behalf of someone else even though it inconveniences or terrifies you. Read about an issue you don’t want to face. Take up that habit you know you’re supposed to do—riding your bike places, donating to charity, praying for your enemies.

Pray. Pray more than you tweet. Pray before your political calls. Pray for the country. Pray for refugees. Pray before you eat. Pray before you buy. Pray with other people.

Read books. Gather with friends. Don’t think about doing good deeds; do them. Be aggressively present to your own life, your place and time.

Be still. The Lord will fight for you. The noise will take care of itself.

when being white hurts for once

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It’s possible I didn’t get into a Ph.D. program because I’m white.

I don’t mean that as an excuse or a complaint or really even a literal statement. In reality, there are lots of reasons I didn’t get into a Ph.D. program, and my race isn’t among the top five you’d hear if I told you the story. But it was something I had to think about both during and after the application process: If it came down to a choice between me and someone of a minority race, all other things being exactly equal, the other person would “win.”

In theory, I think this is absolutely good and fitting for any academic program, especially in the liberal arts, and especially at the highest levels. In these fields, our personal backgrounds and perspectives influence our work even more than in others. Because of that, the academy is much, much poorer if it fails to cultivate a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. And the world is much, much poorer if it’s not represented well in academic and theological circles; people who can’t see themselves in the thinkers they’re hearing about often aren’t going to connect with the ideas. There’s really no one sitting around saying, “I can’t relate to this theology; I wish another wealthy white lady would write one.”

In theory, that makes sense. In practice, it’s not just nerve-wracking or hard to swallow. It hurts. It hurts, on a personal level, to hear that your perspective is valued less than someone else’s; and it hurts very practically, when you’re forced to compete for your dream, to know there is the potential that it will come down to something so far outside your control.

But just because it hurts me doesn’t make it any less right.

I’ve listened to the academic arguments and the personal pleas of my minority classmates and friends enough to know that they feel that same hurt every day of their lives. They don’t blame me as an individual and they certainly don’t revel in my pain, but they do ask me to see affirmative action as a conscious effort to reshape a world whose culture—whose unconscious efforts—often discount, demean, and defeat them.

This all came to mind when I read Dr. Christena Cleveland’s latest blog post, “How to be last: A practical theology for privileged people.” Of course, you should read it and then read it again, but here is the synopsis: Dr. Cleveland gives a brilliant retelling of the parable of the workers in the field—the one where some people work all day, and some work for only an hour, but everyone gets paid a full day’s wages. She points out that this parable illustrates that saying of Jesus: the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This isn’t just a saying; it’s a vision of God’s kingdom. The Bible says (and social psychology happens to confirm) that in our sin-stricken world, where history and culture have conspired to place some people’s value, opportunities, lives, and comfort so far ahead of others’, putting everyone on a level playing field isn’t enough to bring about equality and justice. As she puts it,

We experience the kin-dom of heaven when people from oppressed groups lead and people from privileged groups follow…If you’re a privileged person, here’s what I have to say to you: You have an invaluable role to play — and that role is last. When you inhabit your role as last, you play a crucial part in forging and maintaining the equitable balance of the kin-dom of heaven. Furthermore, your freedom is in being last. Your pathway to a more just world is in being last. Your liberation from the shackles, alienation and dehumanization of privilege is in being last.

When someone says the first shall be last and the last shall be first it sounds like a nice saying. When someone says your place is to be last, you realize it’s not nice at all. It’s far more than nice; it’s redemptive, and redemption is a purifying fire, and it’s hard, and it hurts.

Some of the comments on the post reflect this hurt. There’s defensiveness, anger, and dismissal: running away from the fire. There’s calm debate: seeking to get around the fire. And there’s this:

My brain says This is absolutely what needs to take place.
My emotions say This is undignifying.

I think that’s a guy walking through the fire.

It sounds like this guy knows that what our culture calls “dignity” isn’t what the kingdom calls blessed. But we rarely know in our bones those conclusions we mentally assent to, no matter how firmly we think we believe them. We know in our bones what we experience. That’s why Jesus demands obedience: sometimes you can only learn the truth of something by doing it.When you’re used to measuring value and accomplishment in status, money, and power, it can take a long time to know the joy of undignity. When you’ve spent all your life being told you were meant to lead, it’s not immediately apparent how there could be freedom in following.

Since Trump was elected, the same word has been on a loop in my mind: humility, humility, humility. When someone becomes the leader of a country by bragging about wealth, power, deceit, and violence, humility has become a foreign concept. I can’t get away from that this Advent: they will know you are an alien when you worship a peasant baby as king. They will laugh at you when you pursue humility. They will despise you even as they secretly respect you when you begin to attain it.

Some of us get into the “social justice” game or “kingdom of God” talk because we think it will make us heroes. But God gets us into the game so it will make us humble, and so it will make us free. Work to free others long enough, you discover just how many of their iron chains are matched with your own invisible spider-web chains, chains you never noticed before you learned how to see. Clinging to “dignity” and even to dreams that revolve around achievement and status are two of those chains. Jesus, the teacher of hard sayings, is the one who frees us all from them; there are no other heroes, and that is good news.

when singing is hard

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Dear bestfriend,

I knew that you knew that I knew that I failed to call you after the election out of nothing but sadness. Acedia, the desert monks called it, and later sloth: when you know what needs to be done and you just don’t. You wake up sad and let the long day ahead flatten you before it even really gets going. Most pitiful and boring of the seven deadly sins.

A tiny part of me tried not to think about you for too long, in the week after the election, because your work with refugees has always overwhelmed me with a fierce protective pride and I knew and I saw on facebook how deeply sad you were. You go every day and you chip away at the mortar between bricks and you slowly bring down the walls between these fleeing people and their new lives. We sat on the phone this weekend and wondered without saying it how so many could choose fear and blame and walls. We mourned for what our nation loses by rejecting refugees. And we fought down panic for those living in tents somewhere in between the loneliness of no country, in between a past of rubble and a future of more tents and more waiting.

We shared the little things we’ve done to try and move forward in the past month, but underneath all that, a terrible sense of smallness. Don’t just blame it on Trump, either; call it a quarter-life crisis. We have been doing our little things for a while now, and so much has only gotten worse. Maybe we should just acknowledge that we are suckers for trying to triage a world that seems bent on destroying itself. Maybe all we’ve been doing is making ourselves feel better about, or more righteous than, an objectively shitty place. We could be excused for deciding to leave behind our idealistic youth, over time knowing less and caring less and just donating a comfortable amount to charities that flatter us in their promotional materials.

Some days that seems like the only sane way out of despair. And here it is, the darkest time of the year, when it feels like we have more obligations than ever to people who don’t make us less lonely. How do you catch your breath when you can’t stop, and when every quiet moment threatens to drown you in visions of walls and wars?

I think what you do is you go see Messiah. It is one thing to be spiritual and go for walks or pray or bake things and try to meditatively get through whatever next thing. It is a more important thing right now to seize upon the miracle that Advent is here in a great grab at the most tangible celebration you can find, namely a three-hour symphony performance that you don’t get away from without worshiping Jesus. I can say nice things that you already know about Jesus coming as a baby, but what you really need is to sit yourself down to hear the angels proclaim the damn fool’s truth that that baby is the King.

This is no longer the time for a subtle piety, my darling. This is the time to declare ourselves the fools, the poor, the babes. This is the time to give out money to people on street corners, to spend an evening wrestling Christmas Snoopy onto the lawn, to stand still and weep at carols we’ve always known. Maybe in the past, those little things we did felt like nice auxiliary ways to be faithful alongside the real work of the important people and pragmatic programs that would ultimately make the world measurably better. Now that they might be all we have, we find out whether we ever really believed those acts of madness meant anything. Whether, really, we ever believed this ridiculous manger-story. Did we really think the Redemption of the world and the cosmic defeat of the Roman empire came as a wrinkly red baby to a teenage girl, his “reign” announced to farm hands and the bumbling old mystics of some sketchy-ass religion?

You go see Messiah, friend, you will believe. When someone sings you half the Bible you sit up and notice that we’re still in that story. Fill up with music and take heart, let yourself imagine that we really are halfway through one of the tales Sam asked Frodo to remember. If God came as a baby then the greatest lie is that the humble unnoticed doesn’t matter. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. And that is all that matters in the end. Go hear the story. Go as a child who never thought it audacious to cast themselves as Frodo. Go as a weary idealistic-but-cynical sucker. Go as the one who hungers to hear the prophet in that opening line, comfort ye my people. Sing through it, cry through it, hug the person next to you; remember that every time you waste your time in worship, give without getting, and let your heart crack open a little further, you are doing the holiest world-changing things that can be done.

When the powers that be declare war on the stranger and the least of these, the only way out of despair is to go a little mad. Look, love, this Christmas we could burrow into the comforting familiar and pretend like that will protect us from these long, long odds we face. But let’s not miss the chance to tell things on mountains, kiss the feet of peasant children, and thunder out like Zechariah, Who DARES despise the day of small things? He is coming, He is coming, He is coming.