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by Ken Sehested
Circle of Mercy Congregation, 20 May 2007

        Ever since Easter the principal lectionary readings have been excerpts from the books of Acts which records the story of the birth of the church after Jesus’ resurrection and then the subsequent missionary journeys of Paul and other church leaders.

        Today’s story is actually two stories: a short one, which I just read—about Paul healing a “slave girl”—which sets up a longer one, which Nancy told to the children—when Paul and Silas are dragged into the marketplace of the city of Philippi, A city on the Aegean Sea coast of what is now the modern country of Bulgaria, in what was then a Roman colonial region. There they are accused by the slave girl’s owners of unlawful activity, and the city magistrates convict them toss them into prison.

        There aren’t many biblical stories that have fired the imagination of protestors (like those of the Civil Rights Movement) more than the memory of Paul and Silas . . . sitting in a squalid prison cell, no one to make their bail . . . and singing. The practice of singing in prison dates to this story from Acts.

        I didn’t catch many of the details, but a recent NPR program interviewed a man imprisoned in a small town in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement. The small group of activists were singing away, and it was driving the prison guards crazy. After much harassment, the guards finally unleashed water hoses on the group. People in jail cells aren’t supposed to act like they’re free!

        And the truth is, this entire narrative is a stunning commentary on who’s really free and who’s really a slave. The slave girl’s owners, the city magistrates and the jailer—these are apparently living in liberty. The slave herself, along with Paul and Silas—these are supposed the ones under bondage. But the Gospel message turns this around. The text is urging us to ask deeper questions about freedom and bondage. We think we know which is which. But do we?

        For today, though, I’m especially intrigued by the first part of this story, the one that sets the stage for Paul and Silas’ conviction.

        The text says that the “slave girl” had “a spirit of divination” and could tell people’s fortunes. And for days she would follow the missionaries around town, crying out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”

        The woman’s words were probably more like a taunt than an introduction. And Paul finally got tired of it. So he performed an exorcism: “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And,” the text continues, “it came out that very hour.”

        That’s when the two traveling preachers were “dragged into the marketplace before the authorities” and soon thereafter stripped, beaten and tossed into the deepest recesses of the prison, feet bound in stocks so they couldn’t even move around. All because the slave girl’s owners “saw that their hope of making money was gone” after Paul healed her.

        Scripture scholars aren’t entirely clear exactly what it was that ailed the woman. Probably some kind of mental illness, and probably some ability as a ventriloquist. The closest analogy that comes to mind is to think of how, years ago, traveling circuses had their “freak shows”—bearded women, dwarfed people and the like—people who were exploited for their very unusual physical appearance.

        And when Paul and Silas disrupted this exploitation, they were dragged into the marketplace where they were sentenced to prison. The lesson is: You don’t go messin’ with people’s livelihood. That kind of freedom is strictly sanctioned.

        It reminds me of that 17th century legal statute in the State of New York: "It is hereby Enacted by the authority of the same, That the Baptizing of any Negro, Indian or Mulatto Slave shall not be the Cause or reason for setting them or any of that at Liberty."

        That law is one small example, among many, of the state’s consistent pattern of defining the legitimate authority of religious practice. It’s OK to baptize those slaves. You just can’t set them free. (And you thought our nation was founded on religious freedom?!)

        It’s interesting how an emphasis on economics—thinking about money—has emerged in our Circle this year. Neither the pastoral team nor the church council planned it this way. It just happened.

        Counter-cultural economic practice has always been a significant part of our vision, of course. Nearly four year ago we first began asking members to make financial pledges for the support of our common life (which is a small form of “holding things in common,” one of the defining characteristics of the first Christian community). Nearly three years ago we made the decision to create our own “contingency fund” for emergencies; but instead of putting it the money into Exxon stock, we chose to put it in microlending institutions and community development banks, at 0% interest, so that capital could be circulated in places which mainstream financial institutions won’t go.

        I’m not one to boast, but I confess it does please me to think that we were the first congregational supporter of Christians for a United Community, one of whose goals is addressing economic disparity. And more recently, we were among the first to make a congregational contribution to the Living Wage campaign here in Asheville.

        This past February, at our annual planning day, the agenda was given over to discussing ways to implement parts of our mission. You remember—we took a list of “Pentecost Power” questions first put on the table on Pentecost Sunday in 2006. Everyone present at the planning day got to vote on their top three priorities. One of those three was the topic of economics, and it evoked a great deal of discussion and ideas.

        The following month, Andy Loving happened to be coming through Asheville over a weekend and we invited him to lead the adult education hour on social responsible investing and then to preach in worship. His sermon title was, “The Common Purse and the God of Maximum Return.” He reinvigorated our thinking about alternative economic practices and really challenged the way we take for granted the values of our economic system. In fact, his presence was so stimulating that several people asked if we could get him back again. [details]

        (By the way, going back to the thing about religious freedom, one of the things Andy has taught me is that denominational pension funds are prohibited by law against investing in capital markets that do not produce the highest interest return. In other words, the United Church of Christ pension board can’t invest in Oikocredit, where part of our contingency fund is invested. The legal provision is called “fiduciary responsibility.” This is what Andy meant in his sermon title when he used the phrase “the God of maximum return.”)

        As the council began discussing possible resource leaders for our August family retreat, Dr. Michelle Tooley’s name came to the front. Michelle, a religion professor at Berea College in Kentucky, is a friend of several in this Circle, and one of her passions is the economic teaching in Scripture, particularly the legacy of what’s called the “jubilee” tradition, which first appears in the book of Leviticus, reappears elsewhere in the Torah, is picked up again by the Prophets and is put at the center of Jesus’ mission. The “jubilee” tradition for ancient Israel demanded that every 50th year that all land be returned to original owners, that slaves be freed and that debts be canceled. It is a stunning piece of social legislation which has no parallels in the ancient world.

        All of you are familiar with Jesus’ inaugural sermon, the one where he says “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed . . . AND TO PROCLAIM THE YEAR OF THE LORD’S FAVOR.” That last phrase—“the year of the Lord’s favor”—is a direct reference to the Jubilee Year in Hebrew Scripture.

        I’m pleased to tell you that Michelle has agreed to come do Bible study for us on the jubilee theme during our family retreat. And the church council has approved plans to follow up that event with some related Christian education themes. Mahan Siler has agreed to lead several sessions on a curriculum which used family systems theory to help individuals understand the values and habits they inherited from their parents in how decisions about money are made. And we’re making plans to study Ched Myers’ Sabbath Economics, the best concise summary of biblical teachings about wealth.

        Maybe this focus on economics might lead us to put the topic of tithing on the table for discussion. “Tithing” is one of those traditional religious words we don’t use around here, mostly, I think, because its use in mainstream churches is simply a form of financial development to support the congregational budget. What if we began thinking about tithing as one of the spiritual disciplines of membership in the Circle of Mercy—not as requirement that you give 10% of your earning to support our church budget, but as a commitment to directing financial support to places and people and movements that the dominant values of our economic institutions ignore?

        And what if, next year, we began talking more broadly about the purpose and values of common disciplines of various sorts? “Discipline” is another of those traditional religious words we don’t like to use. Mostly, I think, because the word “discipline” has come to imply punishment. All through my public school years, the vice principal of the schools I attended served as the “disciplinary” officers of the school. Which meant, that’s where you went to get scolded or paddled or even expelled—as part of your “discipline.”

        But the word “discipline” comes from the Latin word discere, which means “to learn.” A discipline is something you undertake because there’s something you want to learn. That doesn’t mean disciplines are easy to undertake; but it does mean that you are the one who decides, and the motivation for learning something important provides the stimulus for making such commitments. (“Discipline” is the root from which the word “disciple” is taken.)

        I happen to think that the struggle over economic values and practices and habits is the fundamental place where wheels of spirituality meet the road. We tend to forget that though Civil Rights leaders got into trouble for protesting segregation, it was when they began developing a sharp economic analysis of injustice that the threats became deadly. Dr. King was not assassinated for trying to integrate the sanitation department in Memphis. He was supporting the workers’ demand for economic justice, and he went to Memphis in the midst of planning a Poor People’s Campaign march on Washington—not a Black People’s Campaign. The people at Koinonia Farm in South Georgia got into trouble for letting white and black people eat at the same table. But it was their practice of paying everyone the same wage that brought provoked deadly threats against them.

        Like Paul and Silas, when we start exorcising the spirit of economic bondage, we will likely get dragged into the marketplace to face the authorities.

        Paul and Silas, bound in jail
        Had no money for to go their bail
        Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on
        Paul and Silas thought they was lost
        Dungeon shook and the chains come off
        Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on
        I got my hand on the gospel plow
        Won’t take nothing for my journey now
        Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on

        Sisters and brothers, hold on, hold on, Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on.

©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested

Texts: Isaiah 5:7-8; Luke 24:44-53; 1 Peter 3:13-22
Circle of Mercy Congregation, Sunday, 5 May 2002

        Before I begin, permit me one brief aside. It was on this day—5 May 1773—that Baptists in Boston agreed to refuse payment of taxes due to support the state-sponsored pilgrim-puritan church of the region. Such historical memories help us remember who we are and thus more able to account for the hope that is within us.

§  §  §

        As you know, I’ve recently returned from a trip to the Occupied Territories of the West Bank of Israel. The opportunity to go on this trip came up very quickly—barely a week before I actually left, which is why you probably didn’t know I was going until I actually was gone. The invitation to which I responded was from an organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) whose goal is to organize and mobilize a nonviolent army, one that is as well-trained and disciplined and willing to go into harm’s way as any conventional army—the crucial difference being that this militant force goes unarmed, save for the power of the Gospel to disarm hearts as well as nations.

        “Getting in the way” is CPT’s motto: getting in the way of the powers of domination and oppression, in a self-risking way that does not require the injury or the death or even the humiliation of the enemy. This way of fighting, of combat, of waging peace, is the way heralded by people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi and a host of others, some whose names we know, most we do not. A poster on the wall of CPT’s office in Hebron, south of Jerusalem, speaks these familiar words of Dr. King:

        “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.”

        As e.e. cummings wrote, “Hatred bounces.” And every war, every act of violence and humiliation sows the seeds of the next antagonism, forming a perpetual motion machine of hatred and death, a downward spiral driven by its own internal logic of revenge. No one remembers who struck first; but only this: every provocation becomes justification for retaliation. And so it is in the modern land of Israel, between Jews and Palestinians, in the seemingly endless cycle where perceived security needs justify the violence of domination, which prompts revolutionary violence in response, which in turn provokes repressive violence. Both peoples have legitimate claims to the land and both of can muster historic collective memories of abuse to justify getting even against the other.

        Where does it end? Who can stop the bouncing, the ricocheting cycle of bloodletting? Does the human capacity to inflict death signify the final authority in creation? Or, as Chairman Mao once asserted (and US foreign policy confirms): Lasting power flows through the barrel of a gun?

        More than a decade ago, during the Persian Gulf War, a letter to the editor in the New York Times told this remarkable story by one living in a Middle Eastern city:

        “I watched as a man who was riding slowly through the crowd on a bicycle with a basket of oranges precariously balanced on the handlebars was bumped by a porter so bent by a heavy burden that he had not seen him. The burden was dropped, the oranges scattered and a bitter altercation broke out between the two men.

        “After an angry exchange of shouted insults, as the bicyclist moved toward the porter with a clenched fist, a tattered little man slipped from the crowd, took the raised fist in his hands and kissed it. A murmur of approval ran through the watchers, the antagonists relaxed, then the people began picking up the oranges and the little man drifted away.

        “Now that our American bicycle has been bumped and oil supplies are spilled, and angry, unseemly insults and threats have been exchanged, and war has broken out with the possibility of the loss of myriad lives while millions stand by in horror, when and where can we turn for someone to kiss the American fist?”

        Or, in our present focus, who will kiss the Palestinian fist, the Israeli fist? It requires more than being nice, more than counsel to patience (or even sermons denouncing violence). Sometimes it involves getting in the way, of stepping from the crowd and risking taking a fist to the face, or arrest and imprisonment, or even a bullet to the body. Or maybe a straightforward word of opposition to the bully in your office or your neighborhood or your family, or an unpopular and uncomfortable stand of dissent in your school or circle of friends.

        Our vocation as believers involves on occasion a certain militancy, even aggressiveness, in confronting evil, a willingness to get in the way of those whose blind security needs give birth to personal or public policies of domination and hoarding, of what the prophet Isaiah called “adding house to house, field to field.”

        The ministry of reconciliation, of seeking peace and pursuing justice, is not just about being nice. Sometimes it has a martial quality. Which reminds me of my favorite poem by my good friend, Walker Knight:

        Peace plans its strategy and encircles the enemy.
        Peace marshals its forces and storms the gates.
        Peace gathers its weapons and pierces the defense.
        Peace, like war, is waged.
        But Christ has turned it all around:
        the weapons of peace are love, joy, goodness, longsuffering;
        the arms of peace are justice, truth, patience, prayer;
        the strategy of peace brings safety, welfare, happiness;
        the forces of peace are the sons and daughters of God.

      These are the kinds of peace we waged while in the West Bank: we were among those who attempted to get food and medicines to those trapped in the besieged Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; we accompanied Palestinian children to and from school in Hebron, to protect them from harassment from soldiers and stone-throwing Jewish settler children; we provided a human shield for a welding crew in Dura, sent to repair the water pipe leading into the city which had been damaged by Israeli bulldozers building a road block; we helped Palestinian farmers in Yatta harvest a barley crop, providing a protective presence against random shooting by soldiers and Jewish settlers; and we surveyed the damage in several cities caused not only by the fighting but also by deliberate acts of vandalism by Israeli soldiers, providing a vitally important listening ear and documenting presence to the groans and complaints of violated people who experience this loss of safety as an abandonment by God.

        If I could script the baptismal or confirmation policies of Christian communities, it would require every new believer to participate in such militancy as a prerequisite to their membership—simply as a matter of encouraging each to count the cost, to know what she or he is signing on to.

        Several years ago I spent a week lecturing at the Oriental Theological Seminary in northeast India, ancestral home to the Naga people who have been in a war of independence with the Indian government ever since the British left in 1947. Never in my life have I experienced such intense, intelligent and vital dialogue with theological students. I think it’s because, in that conflicted region, what you believe about the Bible can get you killed.

        But you don’t have to go to Nagaland, or the Occupied West Bank, to confront the rupture of life by hatred and animosity. We know it in our own neighborhoods, in our communities, even in our families. Violence doesn’t explode only through the barrel of a gun, or from the carriage of an Apache attack helicopter, or from a suicide bomber. It comes in far more ordinary ways, in the temptation to use language designed to pierce and humiliate, in aggressive driving habits, in choices involving career enhancement and making names for ourselves, in a myriad of ways when we choose to remain silent in the face of discrimination, in succumbing to the exaggerated security needs which our culture insists must be met in order to be safe.

        All acts of physical violence—however subtle or overt, whether wielding an assault rifle or merely an assaulting tongue—are the mirror reflection of spiritual corruption. In terms of formal theological categories, such acts are forms of idolatry, meaning: we lack confidence in Yahweh God to secure the future; we must turn to the gods made from our own hands—the gods of superior economic performance, of military strength, our own ingenuity and competence and intelligence. We come to believe in what Walter Wink calls the “myth of redemptive violence.” Since the Abba of Jesus cannot be trusted to insure justice and establish peace—whether for our personal lives or the lives of our race or political party or nation—we must take on the task ourselves. And we comfort ourselves with the self-serving, idolatrous pieties of justification: “It’s a nasty business, but somebody’s gotta’ do it,” or “That’s how the real world operates.”

        But, you may be asking yourself, who can do this? Who can live a consistent life of nonviolence? Where does the courage to “get in the way of oppression” come from? Where does one find the capacity to give without promise of return, to share without guarantee of profit, to abandon security without assurance of safety, to fight hatred with suffering love?

        Indeed, upon what certain basis do we actually confess with the substance of our very lives—and not just with our pious words or ritualized creeds—the power of the resurrection? For, indeed, the addiction to violence is the most damning contradiction to our professed belief in the resurrection of Jesus.

        Is the very heart of Jesus’ message, the command to love enemies, an unattainable standard, an unrealistic goal, a hard and even hideously cruel responsibility?

        Thomas Merton poses the question very clearly:

        “The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian answer to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible. It is a prior commandment, to believe.  The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God although unworthy—or, rather, irrespective of one's worth!”

        It is the experience of grace, not the exertion of heroic willfullness, which unlocks the redemptive power of God’s love in our lives, Our capacity to forgive—to live disarmed lives—grows in proportion to our capacity to be forgiven, in relation to the depth to which we have experienced the disarming love of God.  “The one who is forgiven little loves little,” is the striking way Jesus says it.

        The call to faith is not the demand of heroic willfulness or moral worthiness; rather, the experience of grace is the acknowledgment of gift, which prepares us to be light in the darkness, yeast in the loaf—to be heralds of life in the midst of suffering and death; to engender the capacity to turn the other cheek rather than extend the cycle of vengeance.

        In the story of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to his disciples recorded in Luke 24, Jesus provides a rather surprising instruction. Instead of saying: “O.K., you guys get moving. There’s lots of work to be done. Get out there and get busy,” he cautioned them to wait, to stay in Jerusalem, to idle a bit before putting their mission in gear. “Stay here,” he cautioned, “Until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

        Liturgically, this is where we are: in the transition from Easter to Pentecost. The resurrection moment has occurred; now we wait for the resurrection movement to be founded.

        Before leaving for the Middle East I wrote a note to our board of directors with these thoughts:

        “A good friend recently reminded me of the quote from Shakespeare—"All is lost! To prayers, to prayers. All is lost!"—which sums up the too-commonplace notion of prayer as resignation, as retreat. Maybe it should be revised: "There is hope! To prayer, to prayer! There is hope!" That's why I'm going to Hebron: to pray. That is, to get clear again about the Promise (constantly obscured by violent headlines) by immediate contact with people who keep getting in the way of death's herald. I fully expect to have my comfortable cynicism and leisurely despair overturned yet again. To get saved one more time.

        “Oh, we'll be plenty busy, of course, and may face threats to physical safety. Surely our presence will provide a meager measure of protection to the bloodied and battered. Ah, but what we will be provided in return—the prospect of clarified vision—is surely the greater gift.

        “That is our evangelical calling, is it not? Whether far away or in our own neighborhoods, to see and to say: Look here, dry bones still walk!"

        There is a seamless thread which connects the work of prayer, like what we do here in this Circle of Mercy, and our work of getting in the way of hatred and violence, whether on Patton Avenue or in Manger Square at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where the Israeli Defense Force continues even now its deadly siege.

        Among the most consistent experiences of my life is this one: It is when I position myself in situations of despair that I discover people who know the most about hope. Such experiences erode my doubts that a different future is possible, sustain my impulse to resist the enveloping darkness, enliven my imagination with creative strategies to heal and to mend—all of this rooted in my most immediate context but also expanding out to far distances when larger relational webs make a way.

        Being able to tell stories about hopeful response to despair, however small or large the context, is one of my greatest joys, a joy which is compounded with every repetition, and with it the planting in listeners of new seeds suffused with fertile soil, creating new and renewed communities of hope.

        The hope that is within us is not self-generated, and we make no proprietary claims. But there is still much work, hard work, disciplined work, to be done: by cooperating with the Spirit in allowing our cluttered, anxious and self-possessed lives to be purged; and in locating ourselves in those places, and with those people—with as much intelligence and attention as we can muster—where hope is likely to break out.

        This is our calling—an often difficult and occasionally dangerous calling, but ultimately a life-giving and joyful one.

#  #  #

©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested

         It’s daunting to sit on this stage alongside the talent assembled for this presentation. Obviously I cannot speak of women’s experiences from the inside; but I have consciously, most of my life, attempted to stay close to both the pain and the promise of women’s voices. Not as a moral gesture or generous heart, but for the sake of my own soul. In the end, this is our mandate as followers of the Way, to locate ourselves in compassion proximity to the cracks, attentive to wherever life is unraveled. In the prophetic words of Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in every thing. That’s how the light get in.”

         Over the course of my life I’ve frequently been asked how I ended up where I am. Raised in a small West Texas town, then in South Louisiana, in traditional Southern Baptist congregations shaped by pietist-revivalist religious currents (which is very different from fundamentalism), to then evolve into a career as an outspoken advocate for justice, peace and human rights.

         I don’t have a simple answer to explain that evolution, but I do recall a series of small moments when—partly from choice, partly from circumstances—I crossed inherited boundaries to be exposed to the ruptures in our social fabric.

         At age 14 I had a powerful religious experience, one that continues to serve as the fount of my calling. When I talked about the experience with my pastor, he said “You’ve been call to preach.” And since the most adventurous kind of preacher in my world was the traveling evangelist, I decided that’s my direction. For a brief two years I was a traveling teenage youth evangelist. Providentially, when I went to college, accepting a football scholarship at Baylor University, our evangelistic team dissolved. And I was secretly grateful, because of the mounting suspicion of the emotionally manipulative habits I was forming.

         Long story short, in my junior year I fled my religious and emotional culture for the freedom of New York University. By then my theological deconstruction was in high gear. Though I had no desire to re-embrace the church, I went to Union Seminary because the God question wouldn’t go away. That’s where I had a fresh encounter with my Baptist and Anabaptist heritage and the scriptural themes which fed it. During that period my sense of theological schizophrenia began to heal. One line from the novelist Flannery O’Connor was pivotal. Reframing a verse from John’s Gospel, O’Connor wrote “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.”

         This line—affirming our oddness—is the first of ten pastoral suggestions for how we wrestle with this Convocation’s theme, “Bearing Courage: Rooted in Hope.”

         2. Turbulence is the Holy Spirit’s middle name. The “perfect peace” which believers are promised is not that of serene meadows, sunny skies, and gently gurgling streams. Rather, it is sustainability given in the midst of things falling apart. It’s why Annie Dillard suggested worshipers should be given crash helmets, life preservers and signal flares. It’s why Clarence Jordan insisted that “The dove doesn't roost on a person who is scared to get hurt.”

         3. God is more taken with the agony of the earth than the ecstasy of heaven. This, in fact, is the meaning of our distinctive vision of God’s atoning work. Salvation is for the world, not from it.

         4. The French poet and essayist Charles Pegúy wrote, “Everything begins in mysticism and ends up in politics.” Not the politics of electoral polling we now endure (giving the pretense of democracy while largely directed by moneyed interests). Politics derives from polis, meaning the complex network of relations governing common life.

         On more than one occasion I’ve told my congregation that if I had the desire and the ability to unilaterally change them, the first thing I’d do is have them bring their bodies to worship; the second, I would induce them into mysticism. Without the root source of a beatific vision—of confidently affirming with the psalmist, “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (27:13)—then our work will be in vain.

         5. My fifth recommendation: Don’t get worked up over the fact that sewers stink. I’m thinking here, especially, of our relationships with institutions. Yes, many institutions—ecclesial bodies included—stink to high heaven. And every institution suffers entropy, which means, in common language, every institution wants your soul. This is not news to you: don’t give in, and for goodness’ sake don’t confuse your calling with your job.

         Change does not happen in general but always in particular, which means via particular institutions. An institution, however informal and short-lived or formal and long-lived, is a community with substance—as opposed to the dreamy kind we conjure up late at night around a bottle of wine. Chances are good you will need to take your leave from one or more communities in your lifetime. In my experience, it is never pleasant. (Remember what I said earlier about turbulence being the Holy Spirit’s middle name.) Get over yourself, roll up your sleeves, and get on with reweaving life’s social fabric. None of us get to heaven on our own.

         6. Another warning: Don’t go autographing snowballs. Fact is, we will rarely, if ever, get the credit we “deserve” for our accomplishments, the vast majority of which are small and incremental. Remember: You can get things done, or you can get credit for getting things done. Rarely both. (A related pastoral hint: The Holy Spirit is the only one with any real copyright authority.)

         7. Among the discarded practices the church most needs to reclaim is the capacity for lament—and I’m not talking about poor-talking about ourselves. I’m talking about body-wrenching, sob-inducing grief. Our capacity to grieve and lament is directly related to our capacity for hope, much like a tree’s canopy is proportionate to its root system.

         8. In February 2003 I was in Iraq with a Christian Peacemaker Team, shortly before the U.S. “shock and awe” invasion. My roommate Ed actually stayed in Baghdad through the invasion, holed up in a hotel basement with 14 others. We’ve stayed in touch since then. In one note a few years ago, during another tragedy, I wrote Ed, concluding “There is agony in the air, and we must listen for the sounds of angels’ wings.” In his response, Ed said “Nor, alas, dare we ignore the flailing of devils’ tails.” Both of these disciplines are central to our discernment process of what the Spirit is saying to the church at any given moment.

         9. There’s no getting right with God; there’s only getting soaked. Particularly given our culture’s economic structures and values, there is an urgency to our work as pastoral agents (and I think of every one of you as a pastoral agent, regardless of your ordination status or professional career) to clarify that the salvation proffered from God through Jesus Christ our Sovereign is not an economic transaction designed for mutual benefit for seller and buyer. The baptismal confession we made, and continue to make every time we come to the Table, is a death-defying promise. It has an all-or-nothing character. Faith, Clarence Jordan wrote, is not belief in spite of the evidence but life lived in scorn of the consequences.

         10. Finally, let me close with four brief testimonies of women’s voices that have been personally significant to me in recent times.

         First: One of the boldest, most innovation exegetical commentaries I’ve ever read comes from Rabbi Naamah Kelman about two of the first women’s stories in recorded history, the story of the daughter (Jewish Midrash names her Bithiah) of Egypt’s Pharaoh and Miriam, Moses’ sister. You know the story in Exodus, when Moses’ mother seeks to hide her infant son from Pharaoh’s jealous rage by putting him in a basket in the Nile. Rabbi Kelman writes,

            “When Pharaoh’s daughter goes to bathe in the Nile, she hears the cries of the infant, is filled with compassion, and seizes the moment to act. Some verses later, when Moses is already grown and God reveals God’s self to Moses, God uses the same words: ‘I heard the cries of my people.’ So what we have here is not imitatio Dei. Here we have a story where God imitates us, a woman, no less, and an Egyptian daughter of a tyrant.”

         Second: One of Nancy’s and my seminary teachers was German theologian Dorothee Sölle (blessed be her memory). She wrote, “We want to bathe in the blood of the dragon and drink from the blood of the Lamb at the same time. But the truth is we have to choose.” This is especially important given the fact that our country is very nearly on a permanent war footing.

         Third: Hear this urgent pastoral reminder from Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, a young activist and member of the Catholic Worker House in Detroit. Writing in an issue of Geez Magazine, she said:

         “Know your history. Walk it. Breathe it. Build deep relationships with the elders in your circles. Listen to their stories. Let the listening and retelling become resistance. Remember you ancestors. Say their names out loud and often. Give thanks that you are not alone. You are not creating this movement out of nothing. It’s been done over and over again. Know it. Honor it. Your work is simply to offer new gifts to old work.”

         Fourth: And finally, in one short sentence Zora Neal Hurston, an African-American novelist and folklorist (and daughter of a Baptist preacher), speaks to what it means to bear courage. “I shall wrassle [sic] me up a future or die trying.” And Maya Angelou (also of blessed memory) speaks of hope: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

         Sisters and brothers, heed the advice of Peter’s his first epistle, where he encourages all to be prepared to give account of the courage-rooted “hope that is within you” (3:15). But—here I’m speaking directly to you sisters—don’t obsess over doing so “with gentleness” (v. 16). Save your humility for God, as my wife’s spiritual director once told her, because well-behaved women rarely make history.

[This is the full text, which I edited for presentation to meet time constraints.]
Friday morning 8 April 2016
St. Louis, Missouri

Ken Sehested, founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America and founding co-pastor of Circle of Mercy Congregation, Asheville, N.C., is the author and editor of prayer&politiks <prayerandpolitiks.org>, an online journal “at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action.”

©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org