"Revolutionary Love: Grieve"

Genesis 28:10-17

Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS

September 26, 2021

Sometimes I like to read the book of Genesis because it makes me feel better about my own life, you know? No matter how much drama most of us have in our own families, we can turn to the book of Genesis and say, “You know, at least I’m not telling my younger kid to dress up in animal fur so they can go in and trick their dying father into giving them the best blessing that’s supposed to be going to our older child.”

We can all be so hard on ourselves. Most of us want to be better friends, partners, children. Being in long-term loving relationships with other humans is wild, wonderful, rewarding, and ridiculous….sometimes all before breakfast. And so, there’s something so very comforting about turning to these ancient stories and seeing messy families. 

By the time we journey with Jacob to Bethel and rest our weary heads on a rock, there has been so much loss and pain. It can be hard to find ourselves in this story because the cultural rules at play are so very different from our own. But if we allow ourselves to inhabit this family’s world, we can get in touch with the pain they are bearing. 

You know, the experts say it’s not a great idea to cement our kids into specific roles, but poor Jacob was literally named, “the supplanter.” What does it do to a kid to come up knowing that your role is to be the one who steals your brother’s thunder? Like Jacob, we are no strangers to feeling trapped by the expectations of everyone around us. 

And Rebekah. We sometimes get grumpy with her because she plays the role of the trickster in this story - playing favorites and working behind the scenes to deceive Isaac. But Rebekah is the only one who is told that it’s meant to be this way. While she is pregnant, she receives a word from the Lord. And this prophecy is hers alone to bear. She carries it to full term and does her part in the cosmic drama unfolding through her own family. 

Like Rebekah, we are no strangers to bearing the weight of secrets.

And Isaac. He’s got this one good blessing to give. It is supposed to be his gift to his eldest son. But he is deceived and messes up. And when he realizes what he’s done, there’s simply no way to undo it. It is what it is. Like Isaac, we are no strangers to the shame we feel when we miss the mark, wish we could have a redo. 

These ancient, messy stories invite us to pull up a chair and sit a spell. They invite us to more fully inhabit our modern, messy world, too - don’t they? When we practice sitting with the discomfort of these long-ago-and-far away people, I think we’re building up our compassion muscles so we can also sit with here-and-now people in their own pain. Sometimes those pained people are family, friends, neighbors, strangers. Sometimes those pained people are us. 

Having a place to share painful stories is fundamentally a part of what it means to be human. One of our kids recently had a classmate go through a traumatic experience. They came home and told us about it and we explained how we were very proud of them for listening to their classmate’s story. We talked about how, often, when we go through something really painful, it can be so healing just to have a place to talk about it. A container for the grief and anger and fear. 

That’s one of the things that has made the past year and a half so challenging, I think. Typically, ourr family might be experiencing something awful, but our friends and family are in a better place. They can make a big, wide, welcoming container to hold our pain. We lean into their strength and they help us carry our grief together. 

But when the whole entire world is struggling? When literally every single person is dealing with loss upon loss, grief upon grief? It gets harder to find those containers, doesn’t it? Especially when so many of us are prone to comparing grief. Sure, we say, I’m grieving the loss of my favorite exercise class or a little stressed out because I’m worried about catching a deadly virus at the dentist BUT IT COULD BE SO MUCH WORSE. Sure, we say, my grandma died alone in a hospital while we facetimed BUT AT LEAST SHE LIVED A FULL LIFE. 

We could go on and on, right? Grief upon grief. Loss upon loss. And we look at everyone else around us and think, “Oh, gosh. I don’t want to bother them with my sad story. Everyone is struggling right now.”

As we walk with Valarie Kaur into the second chapter of See No Stranger this week, she takes us back to another time when grief piled upon grief and our containers stretched to try and hold it all. Everyone who was alive on September 11, 2001 can probably remember the way they felt shock and loss and fear and grief explode beyond what all our containers could hold on that day. 

Our friends and neighbors who are Muslim or Middle Eastern or brown carry extra layers of pain. One of my friends who is Muslim was 18 in the fall of 2001 - away at college as a first-year student. That morning, she was the only person wearing hijab in her class and her professor asked her to leave class so that the other students could “safely process” their grief. [1] She was later screamed at, spat on, harassed just for existing on campus. Eventually, the university assigned her a security escort and she was followed everywhere by photographers. A photo of her ended up in Time magazine and her first thought upon seeing it was terror because she was caught smiling after 9-11. [2] 

The grief and pain of September 11th hit Muslim and brown folks differently. Kaur writes about this extensively in her chapter on grief as she describes what it was like for her, as a young Sikh student, to discern how to respond to the waves of violence that shattered her community. On September 15, a close family friend, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was murdered in Phoenix in an act of white-and-Christian-supremacist hate. This murder changed the course of Kaur’s life, as she and a cousin began to travel all over the country to sit with friends and strangers who were grieving. Together, they created a container for these sacred stories of pain and fear and loss. Kaur writes candidly about how difficult it is to sit with others who are suffering. 

Nothing about what she describes sounds easy and yet, she invites us into the work with her. Kaur says, “Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guard rails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. It is an act of surrender. . . . When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.” [3]

Grief is the price of love, Kaur reminds us. Being with another in their grief - tenderly being with our own selves - doing this hard thing is only possible because of love. Kaur says that when we’re not sure how to care for another who is grieving, especially for someone who may feel like a stranger, the first step is simply to show up. She reminds us that love is not necessarily something we always feel. Instead, Kaur says, “The good news is, you don’t have to feel empathy all the time [to show up]. Love is not a rush of feeling. Love is sweet labor.” [4]

And so we keep showing up. And sweetly laboring together. We do so because the Spirit of Revolutionary Love lives and breathes within us. 

God, be with us as we create containers for all the grief in your beautiful, hurting world. Together. 

NOTES:

[1] https://twitter.com/SexProfSofia/status/1436688537005461512?s=20 

[2] https://twitter.com/SexProfSofia/status/1436732993784229891?s=20 

[3] Kaur, Valarie. See No Stranger. Chapter 2.

[4] Kaur, Valarie. See No Stranger. Chapter 2.

“Revolutionary Love: Wonder”

Genesis 1:1-5, 31-2:4a

Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS

September 19, 2021

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth….” begins our sacred story. And we are invited into wonder. 

We wonder: why are there two creation stories, anyway? In Genesis 1, God creates the heaven and the earth in a litany of seven days. And then in Genesis 2, we start all over again with another origin story. This time in a garden. Two stories. Hmmm.

We wonder: if there was NOTHING when it all began, then what, exactly are “the face of the deep” and “the waters”? Hmmm. 

We wonder: so God creates a great dome and separates water from waters - creating the sky and the waters below. And THEN! God gathers together the water below even further and dry land appears. But the text says nothing of God creating the land. It was already there? Just waiting to be uncovered? Perhaps from the beginning, God is in partnership with creation, calling it forth to co-create with God. What a wonder-full realization. 

We wonder: when God creates humans, God says, “Let us make humankind in our own image.” Us? Our? Instead of me, my? Hmmm. 

And when the light and dark and sky and sea and land and sun and moon and stars and creeping things and bugs and birds and plants and trees and humans are created (whew!) God tells humans that we have dominion over it all. And, boy, as humans continue to rampantly abuse and degrade creation, we wonder - surely, God did not intend for us to exercise our dominion like THIS, right? Hmmm. 

We could go on and on. Our creation stories invite us into wonder. 

We are invited into wonder today, not only by our sacred stories but also by Valarie Kaur as we begin our fall series on her book See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. 

Kaur’s origin story begins in Clovis, California where she grew up on forty acres where “the land stretched on all sides of us like an open palm.” [1] Her family had farmed the land for almost 100 years. Her description of her childhood, exploring the fields and ditches, drinking from a water pump, would probably resonate with many of us who also grew up in rural areas. She says, simply: “We belonged to the land.”

Kaur also belongs to the Sikh faith. And she grew up learning her faith’s stories and values from a whole community, including her grandfather. Of all of Papa Ji’s stories, her favorite was their origin story: the story of Guru Nanak, the first Sikh teacher. 

Kaur tells the story:

Five centuries ago, the story goes, halfway around the world in a village in Punjab...there lived a young man named Nanak. He was deeply troubled by the violence around him, Hindus and Muslims in turmoil. One day, he disappeared on the bank of a river for three days. People thought he was dead, drowned. But Nanak emerged on the third day with a vision of Oneness: Ik Onkar, the Oneness of humanity and of the world. This vision threw him into a state of ecstatic wonder - vismaad - and he began singing songs of devotion called shabads, praising the divine within him and around him. In other words, he was in love. Love made him see with new eyes: Everyone around him was a part of him that he did not yet know. “I see no stranger,” said Guru Nanak, “I see no enemy.” [2] 

Two origin stories. Two different faiths, born centuries apart.  And yet both are inviting us into wonder. And both are inviting us to see and feel the ways we are all connected. And to see that separateness is only an illusion. 

This invitation to wonder and see that we are all One is not unique to Christianity or Sikhism, of course. Kaur points out that it exists in many faiths. “Buddha [called us] to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, Mirabai to love without limit. They all expanded the circle of who counts as one of us, and therefore who is worthy of our care and concern.” [3] 

This invitation to wonder may seem insignificant, but it is actually so very life-altering. Kaur says that wonder isn’t secondary, it’s fundamental. Because wonder is the building block for love. [4]

It comes quite naturally to us as children. We wonder about everything. We stare up at birds flying high in the sky and wonder. We look down at a caterpillar slowly crossing the sidewalk and wonder. And we wonder about the people around us. We find that we are curious about what’s going on inside of them, what motivates them, why they do the things they do and on and on. 

Kaur says that when we wonder about others in this way, we honor them because we recognize their full humanity. We realize that they are as complex as we are. Entire universes to be explored - just like us. Full, messy, wonderful humans - just like us. And, in our faith tradition as Christians, this all seems quite natural because flows from our own origin story. In the beginning, we are created in God’s image - children of the One who is vast, infinite, unknowable, complex, messy, complicated, wonderful….no wonder we humans are how we are. It is our birthright. 

Too often, though, we forget that we were born for wonder. And we turn away from the invitation to Oneness. We begin to see others as strangers - different, other, not worthy of our curiosity. Kaur has a story about this and it’s an important one for the Church to hear. 

When Kaur was in the 8th grade, she was working on a project in the library with her best friend, Lisa. Out of the blue, Lisa said, “Valarie, I can’t wait until Judgment Day. Just think, it will only be you and me and all the good people.”

After some careful probing, Kaur discovered that Lisa hadn’t actually realized that Sikhism was a different religion than Christianity. And when Lisa learned that Valarie wasn’t Christian, she was heartbroken because she had been taught there was no hope for people like Valarie. And Kaur was heartbroken because she lost her best friend. They couldn’t find their way through this divide. 

Kaur reflects, “As long as Lisa believed I was going to hell, she could not love me as before. Wonder is an admission you don’t know everything about another. Lisa had stopped wondering about me. She had decided she knew my fate and had no more to learn.” [5]

We, as Christians, need to sit with this heartbreaking story for a moment. To bear witness to the violence done to Kaur and so very many others. To confess the sin of how our faith has been wrongly used to condemn others. Kaur reminds us that in the U.S. white supremacy is bound up with Christian supremacy. And that “any theology that teaches that God will torture people in the afterlife creates the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth.” [6] 

Kyrie eleison, Christ have mercy. Forgive us for the ways we have used your life of love to prop up hate. 

(pause)

Kaur wonders: “what if first contact in the Americas had been marked not by violence but by wonder? If the first Europeans who arrived here had looked into the faces of the indigenous people they  met and thought not savage but sister and brother.” [7] She invites us to imagine what our nation might be like today if those already here had been seen as equals. What if our institutions were built upon a basic respect for the equality of all rather than white supremacy, Christian supremacy? 

We are left wondering. And dreaming. And trying to figure out how to build a future together where we see each and every person and all of creation with that same sense of wonder we felt as young children when we watched an ant scurry through blades of grass. The world that Guru Nanak saw when he emerged with that vision of Oneness - a world where there is no separation from one another. A world where every person we encounter is a part of us that we simply don’t know yet. A world that God invites us to co-create even now. A world that God looks at and calls good, very good. 

I want to invite you into a simple practice this week. Simple, but I can’t promise it will be easy. 

Kaur teaches, when we encounter others, we should say to ourselves, “Sister. Brother. Sibling. Aunt. Uncle. Cousin.” Start to see them as a part of us rather than them. We say to ourselves “You are a part of me I don’t yet know.” Kaura says we can orient ourselves to the world around us with wonder and in this way we prepare ourselves for the possibility of connection. [8]

We can do this with nature, as well. My sense is that it’s actually easier to do with a tree than, some humans. It’s certainly much easier to do with friends, family, and people who seem to be “like us.” If you really want to level-up (and I hope you will) try this: try saying to yourself “Sister. Brother. Sibling. Aunt. Uncle. Cousin.” when you encounter other humans on Facebook or Twitter. Before judging, before assuming, before rushing to tippity-tappity-type your response or re-posting in outrage - pause in wonder. See if you can say to yourself, “You’re a part of me that I don’t yet know.” 

Let’s say it together now to practice, “You’re a part of me that I don’t yet know.” 

“You’re a part of me that I don’t yet know.”

Approach in wonder. 

As it was in the beginning: wonder. 

Is now and ever shall be: wonder. 

Love without end.  Amen and amen. 

NOTES:

[1] See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur. p. 7

[2] Ibid.,  p. 8-9

[3] Ibid., p. 11

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRVMvY7e5mo 

[5] Ibid.,  p. 18-19

[6] Ibid.,  p. 22

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid. 

“Teach Us to Pray: We Still Have Questions”

Matthew 6:9-13

Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS

September 5, 2021

All over the world, children and parents kneel beside beds every evening and recite a litany that might sound like this: “Bless mommy. Bless daddy. Bless Fido. Bless my teacher. Bless people who don’t have homes.”

It’s a lovely way to teach children to pray. The chorus of “bless, bless, bless” helps children feel connected not only to God but to a wider community of saints. Children learn to set aside time for prayer. They learn that posture and place can be an important part of prayer. They learn that God listens and cares about the same things that matter to them. And they do all of this with someone who loves them. 

By the time most of us enter our teenage years or early adulthood, though, we’re finding we need more. We often discover we have more questions than answers. And the simple litany of bless, bless, bless just isn’t cutting it anymore. Lucy Abbott Tucker, one of my teachers in the Souljourners program,  says that most of us have “skinny” definitions of God and “skinny” definitions of prayer. We need to fatten them up, expand them, blow them wide open to make space for the Spirit to live and move within us. 

I find it somewhat comforting that even Jesus’s best friends had to ask how to pray. Maybe they had skinny definitions, too. Jesus taught them one prayer - the one we’ve been studying together for the past month. But we know that prayer is not like a scouting badge. We don’t learn it one time and then check it off - done. Instead, we learn and relearn it throughout our lives. 

Last week, I asked for your questions about prayer and you delivered. Thank you. Before we start talking about some of the things you brought up, I want to say one important thing about prayer and that’s this: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You might hear me say some things today that don’t resonate with you. That’s just peachy. Take what might be helpful and leave the rest. 

Since we won’t have time to get to every single question today, I am going to focus on the questions that were asked by more than one person. Like this one:  why do we pray? 

Though I’m sure we each have our own answer for this, one of my favorite answers comes from my teacher Lucy Abbott Tucker again. Lucy says, “prayer is as natural to us as breathing.” Those of us who worry about doing it “right,” probably only do so because somewhere along the way, someone mistakenly taught us that there was one (or two or three) proper ways to pray. But there, again, we are with the skinny definitions of prayer that don’t serve us well. My ever-evolving definition of prayer is “orienting ourselves towards God” and we were MADE to do this as humans. Created in God’s image, loved beyond our wildest dreaming, made to be in deep relationship with the Divine - we were made to bask in God’s presence. 

Wise folks over the centuries have even observed that the very sound of our breath - inhale, exhale - sounds an awful lot like God’s given name in the First Testament. YAH-WEH. In this way, with every breath, God’s name is on our lips. It’s not something we have to learn to do or figure out how to do “right.” It’s simply who we are as humans.

I have a personal story about this because I was not taught to pray as a young child. My family didn’t start going to church until I was much older and we didn’t kneel down beside my bed at night to pray. But I still remember praying when I was maybe 3 or so years old. When I was worried or scared at night, I could feel myself being protected somehow - held in a warm, soft light that surrounded me and kept me in a safe bubble. I didn’t have language to call that light God, but looking back on it now, I can see that I was orienting myself towards God even without being taught. It was a need and response that came naturally.

This isn’t to say that prayer always FEELS natural to us. Quite a few of you had questions about the nitty-gritty of praying. Is it okay to not use so many words? How can I stay focused? How can I find the energy for prayer? (And, while you’re at it, can you also inspire me to exercise on a regular basis?) 

This, my friends, is why I really appreciate the definition of prayer as an orientation toward God. It’s not so much about what we do or how we do it...it’s a way of being in the world. In this way, anything can become prayer if we’re doing it “towards God.” My number one tip for HOW to pray is this: if what you’re doing isn’t working, try something else. If talking doesn’t work, try listening. If words aren’t your thing, try images. If silence feels dry, try music. If being still doesn’t inspire you, move your body. If your thoughts wander and won’t stay focused, just follow them where they lead and don’t beat yourself up. The possibilities are endless, truly. 

Another thing I’ve learned lately about HOW to pray that has been enormously helpful in my own prayer life is the idea that prayer is something we join. It’s something already happening in every corner of the universe - a song already being sung - and we are simply invited into it. We don’t have to create prayer  ourselves. We just have to join in the prayer already happening.

Accepting that invitation can recalibrate, reorient, recenter us by somehow drawing us deeper within ourselves AND pulling us beyond ourselves. 

Now….a LOT of questions, probably more than half of the questions you submitted, were about “praying for stuff.” More specifically “praying for stuff that doesn’t come to pass.” What do we make of this? Do we think God is up there making tick marks, granting wishes for the people with the most prayers? Do we think God is weak and can’t fix things the way we would like? Do we think God’s ways are not our own and so God answers prayer but maybe not the way we would have hoped and that’s okay? Or do we think “God never comes through so what’s the point in praying anyway,” and stop? Praying? Believing in God? 

Friends, anyone who gives you a pat answer to these questions is just blowing smoke. We all have to wrestle with these questions and find a path that makes sense for us. Some of us will choose not to ask God for things. Others of us will. 

One of you said, wisely, “I can’t figure out whether God really acts in our lives because some people have horrible things happen and others don’t. So does it make sense to ask God to save people from a catastrophe? Or do we ask for all to know that they are loved through everything that happens to them?”

And another wise person wrote, “I pray and I deeply want to believe in prayer. Yet we know so many things we pray for do not come to pass - people die, hunger persists, injustice continues. It’s hard, then, to maintain a belief in the efficacy of prayer. Yet I pray. And I ask others for prayers. Is it, in the end, community? I don’t know.”

And yet another, “Since God already has a plan for us and for everything in life, is it right for us to ask for anything to happen or not? Shouldn’t we just ask for the faith and serenity to accept whatever happens?”

I have, at various points in my life answered every single one of those quesetions with yes….and no. I believe in the power of prayer. And when I tell you I am praying for you, I am. I don’t personally believe God is up in heaven making tally marks. I don’t think of God as a fairy godmother these days, though I certainly have at other points in my life. 

Instead, I keep praying becuase of something the great Ted Lasso illustrated in a locker room talk at the end of Season One. In case you haven’t seen the show, it follows a football coach from Kansas who finds himself in London coaching European football. At the end of the first season, the team has lost a critically important match and they are in the lockerroom, just sitting there in shocked silence. They are just a sad, sad looking bunch. 

And Coach Lasso says this to them:

This is a sad moment right now for all of us. There’s nothing I can say or do, standing here in front of you right now to take that way. 

But, please, do me this favor, okay? Lift your heads up and look around this locker room. Yup. Look at everybody in here. And I want you to be grateful that you’re going through this sad moment with all these other folks. 

Because I promise you there is something worse out there than being sad. And that is being alone. And being sad. Ain’t nobody in this room alone.

That’s why I keep praying for other people. I don’t understand how it works but I know that when I do it, it feels right. I pray that people will know they are surrounded by God’s love and care and that they will know they are not alone. I pray they will find peace and joy in the midst of hardship. And on and on...and through those prayers, I feel drawn closer to them and I know that people going through difficulties have said again and again that they feel strengthened knowing they are held in prayer. 

Sometimes life is just sad. But it would be sadder if we were alone. 

When we orient ourselves towards God in prayer, we remember we are not alone. 

Thanks be to God.