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Worship as protest

Worship as protest

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For many years, it was my job to go to church. But now that I am retired from active ministry, I still make the choice to get up on a Sunday morning, as many of you do, put on some decent clothes, as many of you do, and go to church, as many of you do.

There are a variety of reasons we choose to go: for the experience of community, to see friends, for comfort, for edification, out of a sense of duty, out of a desire to express to God, to demonstrate to God, our gratitude. And by going, we serve a variety of purposes: maintaining an institution that serves us and the public, nurturing and strengthening that sense of community that we desire and so many need, helping to motivate and mobilize our communal mission, and honoring God, simply honoring God by our worship.

But as I drove home from church on Deer Isle a couple of Sundays ago, I thought that, regardless of what I might get or of what I might give, the simple act of going to church, by itself, is a powerful act, an act of protest.

Worship is an act of protest, an act of civil disobedience, protesting, disobeying, defying the “rules,” the laws, written and unwritten, that form the basis of accepted social norms and expectations: more is better, stronger is safer, the will of the majority is primary.

When we go to church, we go to hear and to declare allegiance to a gospel that turns these norms upside down! We declare that our love for God, our allegiance to God, supersedes all other loves, all other allegiances: to party, to creed, to nation, and even to family. We will do will of God, not the will of the people, not bend to the pressure of popular opinion or pledge allegiance before all else to a flag or a president.

We declare that one matters, any one, even the tiniest, weakest, poorest, sickest, “most expendable,” even the one who is our enemy. Especially the tiniest, weakest, poorest, sickest, “most expendable.” Especially the one who is our enemy.

And we declare that power, true power, is manifested, not by overcoming, but by serving, not by securing borders, but by welcoming the stranger, not by protecting our future (as if we could!) but by taking risks to live fully in the present.

We live in a tumultuous and perplexing and scary time, in a world torn apart by division and conflict, by accusation and recrimination, by bitterness and fear, all seemingly ruled by the law of self-protection, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement, self-entitlement. When we go to church, we register our protest. We say, “No!” There is a better way to be. There is a better world, envisioned in God’s imagination and now in ours, a world that not only could be, but will be.

Your will be done! Your kingdom come!

everyone loves a parade

everyone loves a parade

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Last Friday evening, I rode in a parade through the streets of downtown Waterloo. I saw some of you along the route: Lee Jensen and all the Prescotts, Kurt Kaliban, and Grant and Klara Hornung. It was a beautiful early summer evening, a great night for a parade.

It was, of course, the My Waterloo Days parade. I rode in a black Toyota convertible with Frieda and Anna Mae Weems, invited to join them as a board member of the Cedar Valley Civil Rights Peace Walk Memorial Committee. This committee exists to promote the development of a Peace Walk memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington Park, to commemorate Dr. King’s visit to Waterloo in 1959 and to serve as a symbol of our community’s commitment to peace in the midst of an often fragmented and divisive society.

Thousands of Waterloo’s residents lined the streets of the parade route, watching and waving and cheering, and it was a thrill for us in the car, having the advantage of moving among all of them, to appreciate the scope and diversity of the crowd. We have a beautiful city! We are an emblem, a case in point, of the melting pot that is our nation. The parade brought together, side-by-side, rich and poor, mayors and street people, young children and old men, African-Americans and Bosnians and Africans and Hispanics and European-Americans. For a few moments, we existed, not in our isolated and separated neighborhoods and working places, but together, all of us sharing a parade, all of us sharing this beautiful summer evening.

It was a glimpse of what we are, as a community, as a people, a glimpse that convinces me all the more of the appropriate purpose of a memorial, a peace memorial to Martin Luther King, and of the honor it would be to have it here, in our neighborhood. Don Damon said he saw me that night in a TV report about the parade. He scolded me because I wasn’t smiling. Sorry, Don! But I am smiling now as I think about that parade and about all the people, all God’s beautiful children, I saw along the way …

conflict and community

conflict and community

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Conflict and community are not mutually exclusive. Violence and community are mutually exclusive.

Rachel Simons is a member of a Word Made Flesh team serving God by working with children in Moldova. In her May 2102 newsletter, she suggests that conflict is in fact “a starting point for community, rather than the ingredient that destroys it,” quoting an excerpt from a blog written by psychologist, Kelly Flanagan:

I think we assume communities are comprised of like-minded people, so we believe in order to preserve community — a marriage, a friendship, a collegiality, a church — we must be like putty, changing our beliefs to match the beliefs of others, or conversely, convincing everyone to believe what we believe. But perhaps an authentic community is a group of people with a vast array of opinions and differences that range from semantics to fundamental incompatibilities in worldview. Yet they are a people commmited to living in the tension, refusing the tempation to do violence to the other’s philosophy or worldview. They have decided they will value people and the stories those people are telling, above feeling perfectly at ease, or right, or validated.

We need to hear such words in a world where we so easily divide into camps and where hostility has become the norm in any kind of dialogue between camps. We must choose another way. We must live another way.

We live with each other, refusing to do violence to each other. We choose to value people, to value each other’s stories, not at the expense of our own stories, but alongside our own stories. We are validated not by common consent, but by Christ. Christ brings us together. Christ holds us together. Nothing else. Nothing else can!