Locutions: Words When Everything Else Fails Us

Teresa of Ávila called locutions the single words that “contain a world of meaning such as the understanding alone could never put rapidly into human language.”

Everything is heavy right now. It has been so for some time and, somehow, it’s heavier still. Find a locution to center your soul and keep you awake when despair intends to lull you to sleep. This is vital to the mind, body, and spirit, individuals and communities. In seasons when suffering and sorrow tempt us to see only a barren present, locutions are mindful lifelines that help us take that next breath...and the next...and the next...

words

phrases

safety nets

in prose

or poetry

carbon ink

etched into the dermis

γρηγορεῖτε

stay awake

one liners

the unintelligible

spoken under our breath

screams into silence

cliche prayers

maybe

except when they

spare your life

or anxious mind

then locutions are

sacred

mystical

verbal narcan

that rescue

you

me

us

from an overdose

of this rat race

war-crazed

marginalizing

ridiculousness

called modern

less-than-life

Sunday Mornings Are for Everything and Nothing

Sunday mornings are for 
scrambling eggs
or puzzling 
sitting with a good book
by an ancient mystic 
whose words are maddening and mindful
calling you to the center of life’s castle 
and ponder the silkworm

Sunday mornings are for breaking bread
and sipping juice
gathering around a table 
to color 
maybe pray 
and listen to littles share their favorite story
from the Good Book 
or last night’s animated film

Sunday mornings are for sleeping in
or rising early 
to walk or run longer and slower 
to grab the favorite blanket 
or kneel in front of lacquered pew
or sit beneath a tree
with feet kissing the ground 
to anchor the spirit in its earthen origins 
and eternal endings 

Sunday mornings are for everything
and nothing 
gathering and resting 
in liturgy wherever you might find it 
able to carry you into renewed meaning 
for the Mondays ahead 

On Coaching, Parenting, and Holding Space So Others Can Fly: Learnings from Teresa of Ávila

Teresa of Ávila is the kind of mystic that can make you both misty and mad.  One page she pens words to her beloved Carmelite "daughters" about their value and worth, leaving me in a meditative puddle:

this true Lover never leaves [the willful soul], but goes with it everywhere and gives it life and being."  

The next page, the first woman honored as Doctor of the Church, elicits self-deprecating language as reminder that even the most sacred of saints were products of their times laden with patriarchal language and debilitating religiosity. 

I may have thrown the book across the room a time or two.

But I am so glad I continually pick the book up off the floor and read more of Teresa's pilgrimage through mystical mansions.  As someone who values both the practice of coaching and the wild world of parenting, I cannot think of a more beautiful litany than what she offered those under her tender care:

"It is a great advantage for us to be able to consult someone who knows us, so that we may learn to know ourselves. And it is a great encouragement to see that things which we thought impossible are possible to others, and how easily these others do them. It makes us feel that we may emulate their flights and venture to fly ourselves, as the young birds do when their parents teach them; they are not yet ready for great flights but they gradually learn to imitate their parents. This is a great advantage, as I know" (Interior Castle, 49).

In our own world, ripe with absurdity related to our worth and potential, Teresa reminds us of the timeless call to have space held for us to see what we may not be able to see for ourselves. This can be the most sacred of work- as the Spirit awakens us, through the compassionate curiosity of another, to our capacity for beauty and possibility in the most turbulent times. We are nudged and empowered to take flight when everything around us demands we ground ourselves in cynicism, despair, and trauma-induced idleness.

This is the empathetic work of coach and parent. It is the gift and call of each of us as young and old(er) birds, to consult and be consoled so to learn ourselves best and love others just as well.

This is a great advantage Teresa Ávila invites us all to know.

----

Here is the quote adapted into a litany for whatever purposes meaningful to you; 

maybe a personal meditation or call and response.

One: It is a great advantage for us to be able to consult someone who knows us,

Many: so that we may learn to know ourselves.

One:  It is a great encouragement to see that things which we thought impossible are possible to others, how easily these others do them...so it seems.

Many: It makes us feel that we may emulate their flights and venture to fly ourselves, as the young birds do when their parents teach them;

One: They are not yet ready, we are not ready, for great flights

Many: yet, as they gradually learn to imitate their parents, so we learn to fly by watching others soar. 

One: This is a great advantage, as I know.

Many: This is a great advantage, yes, we know. 

On Our Concern for When the Wine Runs Out: A Poem

 

When the wine gave out

celebration was at risk

joy vulnerable

abundance on the brink of scarcity

this she knew

more than he

among a people whose sorrow

lingered in the shadows

strangers in their own land

many hired hands

so they needed this day

a sabbath from suffering

yes

this was her concern

they were her concern

now

to make a way to dance

to laugh

to eat, drink, and be merry

become inebriated by the absurdity

of a new love consummated

that subverted their fear

and awakened them

to dreams of the better

to come

yet stewarded now

still we wonder

in our time

if the wine has run out

when will our jubilee ferment

to dance and drink

and taste of love overflowing

once more

for all

like her

this is our concern

*based on the lectionary text from John 2:1-11

Star-Lit Hope: January 6th Is Always Epiphany

We usually leave up our decorations through the 12 days of Christmas. We embrace the whole liturgical season, even as our tree starts to brown, decorations are more found on the floor than their proper place, and the Christ candle at the center of the Advent wreath begins to wear down. The last thing to pack away is the star. We hold onto that sacred symbol longer than anything else.

January 6th is always Epiphany, a story of a universal chasing after star-lit hope in the midst of royal fragility, oppressive empire, and isolation, fear, and the vulnerable agency of children at the center of deliverance.

Epiphany has always been mixed with narratives of tyrannical rulers, violent insurrections, and maniacal manipulations. To expect the American experience to be different is #exceptionalism. Still, the hope of the magi is ours, too. And we can choose alternate routes to those laced in what the powers that be, regardless of partisan affiliation, sell us. We may need to cling to Epiphany and its lingering liturgical illumination even longer than Christmas.

What’s your subversive hope?

How might you change routes as you live into star-lit hope this year?

Still We Must Dream: Butterflies as Persistent and Prophetic Poets for a New Year

**Original piece above created from ripped portions of various periodicals overlaid with stanzas from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, "The Dreamers Pass from One Sky to Another."**

Art is therapy. So is poetry.

Then there are butterflies.

“The butterfly is what the poem doesn't say.

Her very lightness breaks words,

as dreams break dreamers.” 

Mahmoud Darwish.

If the last two years have taught us anything, it is to dismiss romanticized expectations and let go of lofty resolutions. Just be. Just love. Just aim to live another day and seek the common good.

Still, we must dream.

"From one sky to another the dreamers pass-

the butterfly's attendants carry mirrors of water.

We could be what we should be.

From one sky to another the dreamers pass.

The butterfly spins her garment on a needle of light, to decorate her comedy.

The butterfly is born of herself and dances in the flame of her tragedy."

In the midst of perpetual trauma and never-ending grief and loss, we must not relinquish our imaginations. Keep spinning resilient garments of hope even on the thinnest needles of light that decorate our comedy. And just maybe, like the butterfly, we can dance out of the flames of our tragedy.

May 2022 bring healing to pain, joy where sadness has lingered long enough, compassion to the silently suffering, and truth telling able to set each other free.

And when stuck, create something. Borrow the poetic words, colorful images, and stubborn resilience of prophetic artists past and present who have fluttered freely out of their stories and into our own, like dreamers who pass from one sky to another.

** Complete poem found in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish. 

Gladness: AdventWord Day 18

 

This is one of my favorite James Baldwin exchanges. Written as a part of a letter to his nephew, “My Dungeon Shook” (1963), Baldwin reminds his namesake that love is the only power able to sustain survival in the bleakest of days, systems, human experiences, and oppressive run-ins with the powers that be. When everything swirls around in the attempts to crush your dignity and worth there is a love that centers the soul and eases trembling even if it does not eliminate it with immediacy and totality. This love is where we find a sensual gladness when common sense and convention nudge us to surrender, “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to breaking of bread” (Baldwin,”Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind”). 

I think prophets like Zephaniah and Mary, John the Baptist and Elizabeth, and all those ancient voices we read this Advent would have loved James Baldwin.  They would have found solidarity in his gladness rooted in a deeper force of life that shaped their valued existence and dreams of a better day to come. They trusted it the same even when all the odds and favors were stacked against them and fear caused great trembling.

“The Lord, your God, will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love.” (Zephaniah 3:17)

Stir: AdventWord Day 17

Stir. Mix. Whisk.

The aim is to bring together. Every morning I do that with my four cups of bold brew, freshly ground coffee and four teaspoons of organic sugar in the raw. This bringing together is vital to my day’s beginning…middle…and end.

Stirring can also be agitation, a necessary shaking and disturbance of what is settled to bring about something new and better. Organizer and strategist, Priya Parker, says hosts need to stir up with intentionality our social and professional gatherings so to create beautiful intersections and relational bonds that would not happen on their own. You know, work the room with what Parker calls “generous authority.” This mixing risks aggravation and breaks up comfortable conventions; gracious disturbance also results in new relational networks able to bear fruit of generative and expansive community. Theologian Karl Barth calls this work “priestly agitation,” a candid and thorough task that curates varied expressions of God’s hope for the world.

This has been increasingly difficult in the midst of the last two years. Working from home, quarantines, social distancing, and the limitations of the size of social gatherings has reduced our willingness to create these diverse connections in the pursuits of health and safety. We need to get creative so our isolation does not breed separation and the perpetuation of biases that were already at oppressive levels. We all-the-more need to embrace healthy stirrings and holy agitations so we remember the world is better, we are better, when we welcome, pursue, advocate for, and even convene these unsettlings.

This was Jesus’ whole mission and ambition. Maybe this is why Immanuel is also known by another name- host. Jesus worked and unsettled the rooms of the world and made a way for the adventing of the better.

Compassion: AdventWord Day 14

We are one of those families now with a doorbell camera. This isn’t because we are overly anxious about safety- although life with four kids does put a parent on edge- or someone sniping a Target package from our front steps during the holidays.

Well maybe. Amber does love her deliveries of chai tea.

We really got it because we enjoy seeing the silly reactions of neighborhood kids as they come to our porch looking to play with one of our maniacs. The conversations we have with them through the microphone when not home are equally entertaining.

Most times we know who is at the door with no need for the camera. We have learned neighborhood kids have unique patterns of ringing that sucker that leads our spawns to barrel off the couch and run ready to make some mischief. They know who is there with impeccable accuracy.

But it is nice, when we do not know, to be able to see who is on the porch. Especially at night. Or when someone is home alone. We can feel more at ease about opening the door.

Poet and mystic, Thich Nhat Hanh, writes,

Please call me by my true names

So I can wake up

and the door of my heart

could be left open

the door of compassion

Compassion, which means to suffer with someone, requires we know the truth of another and their pain. This helps us know how and if we are even to be invited into their struggle. Compassion also demands a tougher task, to know ourselves. To confront the truths, even the most brash and brutal ones, about who we are. Then we can know how we can respond to the suffering of a friend or stranger. We can also know how and who we risk vulnerability to let through the doors of our hearts.

Either way, the call of compassion is to openness and truth telling. Only then can we be awakened to God with us and for us and among us, in friends and strangers alike. Only then can we be those who enter into the suffering of others…or let others into our own.

Path: AdventWord Day 4

I tried. Really, I did my best. But I could not stop looking up and out at the beauty around to focus on the labyrinth’s path. Wandering in circles felt trivial, minimalist, even time wasted when there was so much to explore outside this sacred and ancient maze.

Also, there were others who felt differently and moved at a snails pace through the discipline; I just can’t do labyrinths when people are there so close and passing me by on repeat. Maybe it’s too vulnerable and intimate.

Instead, in the mountains of Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM, I went for a four hour solo hike. I allowed my curiosity to take me off path of that cyclical earthen chapel.

And I felt so very small. Not insignificant, but right sized.

Contrary to the pressure we may feel heaped upon us by whatever or whomever, our individual selves are not the center of God’s universe- we are a collaborative part of it. A holy, hopeful, fragile, blessed, mysterious, perfectly imperfect part. And the aim of our movement in this world is not to strain and stress to find that one path, but to remain curious and embrace possibility in any and every path- even those off course. The world is much too vast to walk in confined circles.

I think that’s at least a part of the curious #Advent pilgrimage.

Soul: AdventWord Day 3

Every morning death is at our door in the form of a six-foot pile of deflated penguin. The older kids call him Peter. Our youngest prefers Snowflake. Either way, each morning Peter/Snowflake is lifeless nylon.

I used to snark at families with morning graveyards of Christmas characters. Now we are one of those families. And while the mornings are a bit apocalyptic (okay, that’s an exaggeration), at night Peter/Snowflake comes alive (zombie?). The evenings are when Peter/Snowflake is infused with life and light and all the things Christmas.

Also an overstatement.

I wonder if that is what we mean when we speak of a person’s soul- what makes someone come alive and light up. A soul is what infuses someone with energy and possibility, beauty and playful zest. Our soul is the divine breath within us that awakens us to a world and our call to dance within it. #Advent is as good a time as any to contemplate the health and wellness of our soul- our sacred center. Advent is also when we recognize, maybe even confess, when and how we have felt so very deflated as we wait for love to come down again. Then we dare to let others help us seek and find whatever might restore us to who we have been created to be in the midst of it all. To come alive once more.

May you find your soul this season. #adventword #christmasinflatables

Strength: AdventWord Day 2

Where are you finding #strength and a sacred uplift? For me, #poetry. Also, the gym. Sometimes these worlds collide between sets.

Anonymity

here you can hide

behind headphones and curls

bench presses and extensions

fist bumps come your way

from strangers

carrying their own weight

of storied struggle

in this judgment free zone

where posturing is prohibited

bodies are celebrated

and we can be alone in a crowd

or befriended by the one

on the machine next door

you got this

they say with a smile

and they don’t know

the strength of their words

thank you, my spotter,

whose name I’ve forgotten

(Thank You, Spotter; 2021, gklimovitz) #advent AdventWord

Promise: AdventWord Day 1

This time of year is about traditions and rituals, rehearsing familiar practices that remind us of all we love and who we love.

This time last year, those traditions were cruelly and terrifyingly disrupted, as isolation lingered longer than ever imagined. So we wrote little notes like this one after we put the tree topper away. More than a reminder of whose turn it would be to place the star on our festive ficus, it was a prayer for something better to greet us when we hauled the decorations out after the world made a full cyclical ritual around the sun.

Yet, masks we still wear and Covid still hovers over this holy season like a new traumatic tradition. And the promise of “God with us,” which centers the stories we recite these next four weeks, can feel both distant and broken still. So the waiting of #Advent once again is trivial and tired.

But it’s what we have. It’s what those who first conjured up these stories, maybe even lived them, had. As poet Nadia Shihab Nye wrote, these stories keep us warm in the cold, when #promise and pain are familiar ritual.

Also, a year later, four of six in our house are vaccinated, with the other two ready to be poked by year end. That keeps me a bit warm, too. It’s somewhat promising. 

---

This annual discipline is spurred by the good people at AdventWord.

New Olive Tree Ink and the Color of Peace: Another Tattoo for the Rev

“We believe in justice. One day we will see the Son of Justice rise again.”

I’ll never forget hearing these words from Daoud Nassar, a Palestinian Christian whose family lives in the West Bank on an olive tree farm called Tent of Nations. After sharing stories of peaceful resistance in the midst of occupation and terror, including one about Jewish partners who helped replant over 250 trees after they were burned down as an act of Israeli intimidation, our group of pilgrims was invited to purchase one of our own in solidarity.

So I sponsored two. 

And the olive tree, for me, became a favorite symbol of resilience and resurrection, courage and care, hope and redemptive love.  

Olive trees can grow in uncommonly dry spaces and are known for their longevity of life, some say these trees never die but are eternally reborn out of the same root systems. Olive trees are the first named arbors in Scripture, whose leaves were plucked by the dove as symbol of new life after the flood. Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish writes, “The Olive Tree is the color of peace, if peace needed a color,” calling to mind the interfaith stories past and present that have leaned on the witness of these trees as they resist violence and pursue a better way.  Olive trees are also responsible for one of the most vital harvests in the Mediterranean, olive oil, made from a process of repeated pressing that is sacred imagery across faith traditions and an invitation to endure the struggle. Olive trees in Gethsemene, meaning “oil press,” even served as sanctuary as Jesus prayed with persistence and his disciples slept on assignment, only for the Messiah to call them thrice to “keep awake” and remain vigilant. γρηγορεῖτε (gregorēite) in Greek; my name thrice spoken among the olive trees where I pilgrimaged in 2019.

Now, every time I look down at my right arm, thanks to @billyhaines, I see not only my invitational name, but also the stubborn yet beautiful tree whose fruit will be pressed but not overcome. I will remember a rootedness that endures forever and nudges us to color the world justly and peacefully as we wait for the Son to rise again. We certainly need all of this and more in these pressing days. 

Shake It Off? Rejecting Anti-Welcome and Moving Towards Liberation

Greg Klimovitz · Shake It Off: Sermon on Mark 6:1-13

A sermon delivered on July 4, 2011

"Just shake it off."  I remember hearing these words often as a kid. And it was before Taylor Swift was born...literally. I was an avid baseball player from the time I was four through my freshman year of college. Predominantly a catcher, I was prone to getting hit by a foul ball, wild pitch, or a hitter’s looping backswing. I have many scars and sore joints from those sixteen years.

But where did this phrase come from? Do we believe the movement of "shaking it off" can distribute blood flow and reduce swelling? Does shaking it off ease pain? Or is shaking it off yet another way we teach young people, especially boys, to suppress their emotional responses and just move on without showing that something truly hurts and a wound has been inflicted?

 

Just shake it off. As a little league coach these days, I have committed not to use this phrase with kids, whose bodies and brains and minds and emotions are changing as designed. Suppressing natural and healthy reactions to pain is not my MO on or off the field. Sometimes there are injuries to the body and spirit that cannot simply be shaken off. 

And they shouldn't be. 

God knows, for real, the many traumas endured these last eighteen months, whether the pandemic or the endless social ills, cannot merely be shaken off. The pain experienced is a signal that something is not right and aid and relief is needed. To say shake it off in the American cliched verbiage only buries hurt, leads to neglect, and delays healing. Shaking it off is not equivalent to resilience; it can be damaging denial.

 

So why does Jesus go there? Shake it off, Jesus? Surely the Messiah had more compassion, empathy, and concern for those wounded by others and the oppressive systems of the day. But before we lean in, let's pray.

 

We come to today's text and Jesus gives the disciples a packing list.  How I wish this was all I needed to bring whenever loading up our four children into our minivan and traveling even for a single night at the grandparents. 

Staff. Sandals. Clothes on your back. 

No iPads, device chargers, stuffed animals, or pillows. Not a single suitcase. It is simple, quick, and warrants a dependency on the community care provided by those soon visited.  It prevents being burdened by too much stuff and assumes welcome and having enough at destination. A parent can dream, right? But, is there more to Mark's incorporation of this Messianic and Apostolic packing list than merely the reduction of stuff so the hatchback will close and whoever is riding passenger can actually put their feet on the floor? If you are familiar with Mark, you know that there is always something more.  

 

Mark 6 is right on the heals of two significant stories interwoven together: Jesus' healing of a woman plagued by hemorrhage for 12 years and a 12 year-old girl resurrected from the dead. But this all happened in a neighboring town.  Mark 6 begins in Jesus' village and among Jesus' people of Nazareth. They have known him since he was a boy...and they liked him...until now. Jesus is in the local synagogue, where he grew up and studied under local rabbis, and on the sabbath.  In this sacred space on a sacred day they take offense to his teachings.  We know why, too.  Jesus is breaking sabbath, his disciples are not fasting, he is touching the untouchables, and welcoming the unclean.  Jesus is traveling back and forth across the sea (hold that reference), casting out demons and sending them into swine in Gentile land.  Even more, Jesus has a following of fishermen, tax collectors, and sinners called disciples.  Jesus has spent much of his young life shaking off convention to make room for those often excluded from sacred centers and, ultimately, pushed out of Nazareth as a "prophet without honor" as an echo of Ezekiel 2. So Jesus shakes off their anti-welcome and heads elsewhere to come alongside others shaken off and dishonored by religious and political communities alike.

 

But that is only the beginning. Packing lists. Take nothing with you except your staff.  No bread. No bag. No money. Staff. Sandals. Clothes on your back. Twelve of them, sent out with little to nothing to take with them. Twelve of them with a packing list of immediacy. If you have the eyes to see and ears to hear, you will notice Mark's echo of Exodus.  Remember the mountain? Remember the sea?  Remember the wandering in wilderness before entering strange lands? Remember the 12 tribes? And it began with a newly liberated Hebrew people with a rather short packing list, eating unleavened bread with staff in hand, sandals on their feet, ready to pick up and go at a moments notice as they leave captivity and venture towards freedom, "This is how you shall eat [the Passover lamb]: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly” (Exodus 12:1). Is Jesus provoking a new exodus?  Is Jesus calling out a new people of God to pursue liberation in a new land, to shake off the manifestations of Egypt and anti-welcome in their time and place?  YES.

 

Jesus calls and sends out his disciples, again an echo of Ezekiel, into the neighborhoods of Israel that had rebelled from God’s story of liberation, to cast out demons and heal the sick not to prove divine status but to send away old lines of exclusion and draw the circle wider...as wide as the infinite love of God.  And if they and their new way of being in the world are not received well among a rebellious people, shake your sandals and leave that place in the same sort of prophetic dust that covered Pharaoh's chariots as they crossed the sea and towards a new life of freedom.

 

Jesus' hometown in dust?  Sacred space, place, and rituals in dust? Tradition and law in dust? Conventional wisdom and all you once believed to be true in dust? If it holds people captive...yes. If it wreaks of Egypt and Pharaoh...yes. The Jesus movement and those who follow the Way, are to be all about exodus. Everything else is dust. And if we pay attention to the parables of Jesus throughout the gospels, they are all about dusting off from Pharaoh's empire in temple and town. It is shaking off the shackles of captivity and anti-welcome.  So, yes, Jesus said, "shake it off," as in be liberated from oppression and rejection and find renewed belonging in the kindom of God, where we hold all things in common and all people called beloved.  

 

Still, what does this all have to say to us in our time and our place? I believe, in essence, it hinges on discipleship. Are we as individuals and communities of faith, even on “sacred” national days of supposed independence, willing to shake off the dust of anti-welcome and long-histories of oppression and move into real and localized expressions of inclusion and concern for the common good?

 

To shake off oppression, injustice, and isolation from community.

To shake off economic systems that perpetuate poverty and homelessness.

To shake off prison systems bent on racial biases and propped up by corporations.

To shake off unclean spirits of violence and the idolatry of weapons and war.

To shake off narratives of acquisition and never having enough.

To shake off white supremacy, homophobia, racism, and the characterizing of Indigenous peoples.

To shake off ableism and ways society excludes people of various physical, social, and mental abilities.

To shake off all that exploits creation and the earth God so loves and calls good.

To shake off myths of achievement that teach our children what matters most is climbing to the top.

To shake off toxic relationships and those bent on bullying behaviors.

To shake off resentment and hatred that only poison our mind, body, spirit, families, and neighborhoods.

To shake off anything that infringes on the foundational truth that each person is a beloved child of God and beautiful reflection of the Divine. To shake off pre-pandemic patterns of existence as individuals and communities that were never healthy and whole.

 

As Octavius Catto, 19th Century African-American martyred civil rights activist, child of a Philly Presbyterian minister, and one of the greatest baseball players of his era, once said as he shook off anti-welcome in his day and pressed for a more just world, “There must come a change which shall force upon this nation that course which providence seems wisely to be directing for the mutual benefit of peoples.”

 

Friends, as disciples of Jesus gathered and scattered, we have been sent by Jesus to liberate and heal in strange places and in unconventional ways. There are sure to be detractors and fair amounts of rejection along the way.  It will be uncomfortable and require dependency on more than your own efforts. So pack lightly and when tempted to quit or return to the privileged norms of Pharaoh's empire, shake it off. Shake it off not as a means to dismiss pain or suppress hurt, but to be released of the power anti-welcome may have over you, your neighbor, and the divine belovedness you both bear, which can never be shaken off. Yes, shake off the dust of this not-love, leave Pharaoh's chariots behind, and move towards a new kind of exodus found in the gospel of justice, peace, and joyful welcome in Spirit-filled community.

O how I love how churches in Greater Philadelphia and beyond have lived into this exodus-laced change and worked to shake of the dust of anti-welcome through collective work and witness: gardens cultivated to provide nutrition alongside neighbors in Chester to shake off food apartheid in that city; collaborations with local networks formed to extend inclusive coffeehouses for youth and adults of various ability levels to shake of the ableism in Delaware County and beyond; kitchens have been flipped into food pantries for those battling hunger and poverty; grants secured to construct tiny homes for those vulnerable to housing insecurity; Clergy have linked arms in protests and marches and committed to courageous conversations on anti-racism in both their communities and congregations and presbyteries; Pride festivals sponsored and hosted in parking lots; after-school programs offered in the midst of a pandemic so children do not fall too far beyond and yet stay safe; faith communities have continued to adapt mediums for worship and fellowship gatherings, leveraging digital platforms and technologies to shake off the isolation so many have felt in the midst of this pandemic. The list goes on as we live into what it means to be a Matthew 25 people.

 

My kids and I recently have found a new love in the music of Jon Batiste, jazz musician who wrote the score for Disney's Soul and the band leader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. On his latest album, We Are, Batiste has a song, “Freedom,” appropriate for today's text and the recent national holidays of Juneteenth and July 4^th : 

When I move my body just like this

I don't know why but I feel like freedom (freedom)

I hear a song that takes me back

And I let go with so much freedom (freedom)

Free to live (how I wanna live)

I'm gon' get (what I'm gonna get)

'Cause it's my freedom (freedom)

The reason we get down, is to get back up

If someone's around, go on let them look

You can't stand still

This ain't no drill

More than cheap thrills 

 

Faithful friends, we have endured much as a people these last 18 months. We have also had our eyes and ears opened to so many cries for justice and deliverance from generations of anti-welcome. May we hear Jesus' call to shake off this dust as an invitation to reach back to that ancient song of freedom God's people have been singing throughout the ages and in empires past and present- including this one. This song invites all people to move their bodies, imaginations, and faith communities in such a way that lets go of shackling systems, stories, and old patterns of existence. No, we cannot stand still. This ain't no drill. We cannot stay the same. Discipleship demands we embrace redemptive change and move towards welcome and mutual care. So what needs to be shaken off in your life and in the church for this to happen?  What is weighing you down from hearing of your belovedness or leaning into proclaiming and extending it to others?  Let go and dance ‘cause it’s not only your liberation, but also that of your community and the world God so very much loves.

 

A Benediction in Poetry

  

shake it off

we tell young ones

send away the pain

subtly

dust yourself off

wipe away the tears

and press on

as an image of strength

as though unharmed

unfazed

by injury or trauma

but what if it hurts

what if the wound cannot be shaken

what if you are not ready to get up

to move on

maybe shaking it off is not resilience

maybe it is damaging denial

suppressing reality

burying emotions

neglecting what makes each of us

human

 

what if

 

yes, what if we do not have to shake off

the pain

but what caused it

to reject anti-welcome

to send away not-love

and linger longer in dreams

for something better

and move towards

in time

our time

a new reality altogether

May we do so in the name of the Creator, Savior, and Sustainer. Amen.