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This week I had a thought-provoking conversation with a member of our congregation, Lance, who gave me permission to share this with you. We were talking about finding purpose and making goals towards that purpose, and how so often we think we know where we are going until God shows us otherwise. Lance loves sailing, and he likens the journey of life to the course of a sailboat. We set our eyes on the horizon, and then we set our sails to shorter distances as we mind the wind and the sand bars, the currents and the eddies. There are aspects of the journey we can control, like the rudder, and there are aspects of the journey we cannot control, like the direction of the wind. Sometimes, we sail away from the horizon because that is the way the wind pushes us, but that does not mean we have changed course entirely. Often moving with the wind, even when it feels like it’s blowing us backwards, is a better choice than fighting against it.
I know that God has a unique plan for each and every one of us. As God said through Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11, NIV). I also know that our purpose is not always clear. Some know their purpose when they are very young. These are the people who tell us they’re going to be astronauts when they’re five-years-old and that is exactly what they grow up to be. Most of us, however, take some time to develop our purpose. Our answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” changes throughout our lives and may still be changing into our 30s, 40s, and even 80s! I know this because I have a classmate in seminary who answered his call to ministry as an octogenarian; and you know what, God formed him in his first 80s years to do something remarkable that he could not have done prior to that. It is okay to still be seeking your purpose. I promise you—and more importantly, God promises you—that it does not mean you don’t have one. It just means that God has not yet revealed it to you. When we board our sailboat, we start to move, whether we’re ready to or not. When we have not yet determined our horizon, we go with the wind as it blows—the Spirit filling our sails and moving us onward. We have our hand on the tiller to change course as we encounter obstacles. We sometimes have a fleeting idea of the horizon we’re aiming for and direct our sailboat accordingly…until we determine another horizon is our aim. Your sailing is not purposeless if you don’t know your horizon. Every new water you traverse and fellow sailor you encounter is all part of the plan. So enjoy the journey. Continue taking that next right movement. Listen to the wind. Attend to the water when it creates obstacles in eddies or streamlines your journey with a fortuitous current. Mind the storms. These are all part of the journey and are overseen by a Sovereign God who reminds us through Isaiah, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you” (Isaiah 43:2, ESV). Likewise, do not get overconfident if you are one of those who have set their eyes on their horizon immediately. Yes, continue the path that God has laid out for you, but be open to the change in the Divine Wind. God may set you on a path towards a horizon, and as you near it, God may set your course anew. It does not mean you went the wrong way. It means that you have “fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7), and now you have another race to sail. Whether you know your purpose or are still finding it, whether your purpose changes or stays steady throughout the course of your life, the best horizon to set your eyes upon is Jesus. The author of Hebrews tells us, “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1-2). In this we can never go wrong. May you find comfort in knowing that wherever you are sailing, you are exactly where you are meant to be. God’s got you right here and through your horizon.
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On Tuesday evening I had the immense pleasure of attending my very first Sukkot, which is the Jewish holiday of the Feast of Tabernacles. This 7-day holiday celebrates the harvest season as well as God’s protection of the Israelites during their 40 day sojourn in the wilderness after leaving Egypt. Part of Sukkot is building a temporary outdoor shelter called a sukkah, which reminds participants of the fragile dwellings used by their ancestors as they traveled.
Under the shelter of the sukkah erected at the Congregation of Reformed Judaism, our gracious host, Rabbi Rachael Jackson, explained to us that the sukkah can be built from any material as long as you can see the stars from within. And sure enough, when we looked above through the palm frond roof of the sukkah, I was mindful of our ancestors who once navigated the wilderness by the stars, seeking the promised land. Rabbi Jackson taught us that during Sukkot, families will eat, pray, and sometimes sleep in their sukkah. One of the prayers of Sukkot involves the waving of the lulav and etrog (palm, Myrtle, willow, and citron), which symbolizes unity among all people and connection to the earth. This mitzvah, or blessing, is practiced each day of Sukkot, and we were honored to take part in this blessing on Tuesday. Rabbi Jackson explained that a large part of Sukkot is the practice of hospitality. When Jews build their sukkah it is with the intention of hosting others within its shelter. So, in the spirit of hospitality and unity, she gathered a small group of interfaith leaders in Central Florida to share dinner, blessings, and fellowship with one another, and it was an absolutely beautiful night. Often in our world today we are so focused on our differences that we miss the blessing of unity and sharing. Learning about the holidays and festivals that are important to our Jewish siblings helps us better understand and honor our history as Christians. These holidays and traditions are ones that Jesus’ family would have practiced; and being a carpenter family, I’m sure Jesus’ sukkah was pretty amazing. There is much to learn from Sukkot, and although we do not have a similar holiday in the Christian faith, we are called to be radically hospitable and strive to be peacemakers on the path to unity. May we continue to accept invitations into spaces we have not journeyed and invite into our spaces those with whom we have not journeyed. It is only in these shared experiences that we will find the unity that lays the foundation for shalom--the peace and wholeness God promises. During my time at school in St. Paul this past week, I attended a Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History traveling exhibit hosted by Luther Seminary. It was an exhibit on human evolution called Exploring Human Origins: What does it mean to be human? The theory of evolution has been a thorn in the side of science and religion relations for over a century, beginning with Charles Darwin’s paramount work, On the Origin of Species, and continuing with the infamous Scopes Trial of 1925. And who could forget the spectacle that was the 2014 Evolution vs. Creation debate between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum and The Ark Encounter? Like every polarizing issue, there are individuals pitted against each other on both sides, finding it next to impossible to reach middle ground.
Personally, I find the issue fascinating. I have long been a believer in the theory of evolution and have not found it to discredit or threaten my faith in God as the Creator of all things. If anything, I am filled with wonder at God’s intelligent design of evolution that has resulted in an insurmountably vast array of living organisms that somehow share an absurd amount of genetic material. Did you know humans share about 60% of their DNA with chickens and 50% of their DNA with bananas? For comparison, we share about 98.8% with our closest non-human relatives, the chimpanzee, and 99.9% with other Homo sapiens, or modern humans. This means that we are all truly connected at a molecular level, yet we are so very different. I personally find a God that can make this happen far more interesting and awe-inspiring than a God speaking everything into existence in the matter of a few days. However, this was not really the point of the Smithsonian Exhibit. The docents were not necessarily interested in debating evolution vs. creation because, to them, this debate is already settled. Many of the scholars who presented at this exhibit have devoted their entire lives to the discovery and study of paleontological evidence (including fossilized bones of over 6,000 hominin individuals) of an evolutionary family tree spanning over 6 million years. What they were more interested in was what distinguished our human ancestors from their non-human primate ancestors. In other words, what does it mean to be human? Before I continue, I want to break down a few of the “vocabulary” words because it gets confusing. I took an entire course on biological anthropology (i.e. human evolution) in college and spent a day at this Smithsonian exhibit and still had to do my research to make sure I was using the right terminology in this newsletter! In the field of biological anthropology, human is considered any of the 15 to 20 extinct and extant species of bipedal primates that evolved over 6 million years after breaking off from its non-human primate ancestors. These humans include familiar ancestors like the Neanderthals and Homo Erectus, along with some not-so-familiar ancestors, as well as Homo sapiens, which refers to our species—modern humans. Human will be used interchangeably with hominin in this blog to refer to the multiple species in this lineage that branched off over 6 million years ago from the ancestor whose lineage resulted in modern apes. Ok, back to the newsletter. What does it mean to be human? Two of my favorite audience answers to this question were, “Humans are made in the image of God” and “Humans are storytellers.” To me, these two answers go hand in hand. We were made in the image of God, the great storyteller, whose Word breathed all things into existence; and when God invited us to name all things (Genesis 2:19), God invited us to be co-creators of the story. This is what it means to be human. The scientists’ answers to what it means to be human were a little more, well, scientific; but still they held traces of Divine image-bearing and storytelling. Dr. Rick Potts, the paleoanthropologist in charge of the exhibit told us that what it means to be human falls into three categories—sharing and caring; brain, babies, and parenting; and innovation and social networking. Unlike other animals and even other primates, early hominins began sharing resources across distances to other tribal groups around 2.8 million years ago. Even more striking is evidence that early hominin species took care of their ailing and injured as early as 1.85 million years ago. Our God is not an individualistic God, but exists in the social network of the Trinity—Creator, Savior, and Holy Spirit. Like the God whose image we bear, we were created to be in community with one another, sharing and caring for mutual survival. As evolution advanced, brain size in hominis increased. There are clear benefits to bigger brains, but also disadvantages. It takes a long time for a larger brain to develop, extending the length of a human’s childhood and adolescence, time when they would need to be cared for by a parent in order to survive. This resulted in family units that formed to care for their young into adulthood. It is around this time in the evolutionary process that hearths first appear—790,000 years ago. The hearth became the epicenter of family life. It was a place to gather for warmth, to cook, and to tell stories—engaging the developing brains of the young and old alike. Through stories, the reality of our ancestors came to life, and they began to co-create alongside the Divine Storyteller, God. Then, 320,000 years ago, early hominins developed the first pigments, allowing them to record their stories in paintings and carvings. This innovation arose after the innovation of practical tools—blunt rocks to arrowheads and harpoons. The emergence of art into the world brought with it an aspect of being human that is incredibly unique—the ability to use symbolic language through words, pictures, dance, and music. Art allows us to both communicate what is and to imagine something that does not yet exist—to form something meaningful from a formless void (Genesis 1:2). Art captures the complexity of who we are as humans, our emotions and varying ways we see and experience God, ourselves, others, and all of creation. So, what does it mean to be human? It means we are divine image-bearers of a complex, social, loving, creative, and innovative God, who tell stories as co-creators with the Divine in order to care and connect with one another and bring meaning to our lives. Whether we were formed this way from dust or formed this way from dust and a long evolutionary process, what it means to be human is not a question of how, but rather a question of who and whose. I believe it is less important to our faith to dwell on the question of how we came to be, and more important to our faith to remember who created us and whose image we bear. The Hearth is a place for “religious refugees”—those folks who carry religious, spiritual, or church abuse and trauma. I have often been told by congregants that it is the last church they’re going to try before they give up on church altogether, which is why I take my job so seriously in terms of creating a trauma-informed worship experience and cultivating a healing community. As I was discerning my call to ministry, I originally thought I was called to be a Deacon so that I could use my therapy background to work with people who have religious trauma through their healing, deconstruction, and reconstruction. However, as my calling clarified, I realized that God could provide much more healing through me if I shepherded a church that did not cause the trauma in the first place and encouraged a community that provided a different kind of healing than anything I could provide one-on-one in a therapy office.
I’ve been leading The Hearth now for almost three years; and although I maintain my original call, I have grown into the wisdom that while we can do our best, we will still make mistakes and people will sometimes still get hurt. More importantly, though, I have learned that not all mistakes have to lead to religious trauma because profound healing can come from mistakes that are handled with humility, accountability, and grace. I also believe that hurt may be mitigated when we hold our expectations of what church is “supposed” to be in an open hand. I think many people approach church as a representation of God on earth when in actuality it is a community of messy people who love God and are doing their best to love each other. This distinction is important because when messy people at church mess up and hurt us, it will cut deeper if we expect them to be acting on behalf of a perfect God. You see, the simplest definition of trauma is when something happens to us that differs drastically from our expectation about how the world is supposed to work, how people are supposed to behave, and who God is supposed to be. When something like this happens, the memory of the experience does not have a place to land inside our brains because it is such an outlier, so it bounces around in our minds and disturbs us in unexpected ways until we are able to sort through it and find a filing cabinet in our brains to store it. This is why if you have church trauma and a particular song comes on, you may have a primal trauma response because that experience is at the forefront of your brain and will be triggered into active memory much more easily than if it was healthily stored away. So, the first step in healing from trauma and preventing trauma is to shift our perspective about church. For many people with church trauma, they have been told that the leader of the church is somehow closer to God or that what that leader says and does is infallible because of their Divine call. This is fundamentally untrue. Leaders of churches are just as human as the rest of the community. They are fully capable of making mistakes and should be held accountable for their words and actions. Yes, church leaders have a call to be teachers and healers, and their leadership should be respected as we respect any leader in our lives, but that does not mean that they are any closer to God or that they represent God in some fundamentally different way than the rest of us. It does mean that they have a responsibility to ensure they are healthy so that they reduce the chances of harm. Likewise, just because people call themselves Christ followers and belong to a church does not mean that they are any better than people who do not. I have known some lovely atheists who would blow some Christians out of the water in terms of general moral goodness if it was a competition (which it is not). The reality is, though, the person who is going to be most hurt by this expectation is you. If in your mind someone needs to live up to an expectation that you or they have, they have much farther to fall and the hurt will be much deeper. I get the frustration of hypocrisy—of watching someone act like they are holier than thou and then royally mess up. However, grace for messiness heals us as much as it heals them. Taking a posture of forgiveness can go a long way in maintaining your own peace. The next step in healing is a bit more difficult. For those of us who have done our fair share of church shopping, we have learned to run at the first sign of unpleasantness, conflict, messiness, or theology/politics that may be different from our own. Church is like any relationship, though. No person and no church is going to perfectly align with every one of your desires. The best relationship advice I ever heard was to choose your partner not based on all the things you want, but rather on all the things you don’t want but can live with. Every person is going to have faults, so imagining you’re going to end up with someone who doesn’t is silly. Figure out what faults are ones you are okay with, and choose a partner based on that. Church is the same way. Determine what faults in a church are ones for which you can have grace, and choose your church based on that—with eyes wide open that no church is perfect and we have a responsibility for our own experiences. And then stick it out. Trauma is about unresolved conflict. Remember when I said trauma happens when our expectations are challenged and experiences rattle around in our heads? We have a responsibility for doing the work to sort those things into filing cabinets. Healing is not a passive process. Often, healing means facing the issue and seeking reconciliation through accountability and grace. You cannot heal if you run before the reconciliation can happen. Obviously, there are situations where this is not applicable. For example, this is not applicable to severe and repeated abuse with no accountability. This is applicable to those faults that you have already predetermined are ones you are okay living with—and severe and repeated abuse is not one in which any of us should be okay living. That being said, if you identify with this, please come and talk with me so I can help you find the resources you need for healing and removing yourself from whatever situation has made this feel normal for you. No one deserves to live in fear including you. We have all heard and experienced the epidemic of loneliness in our world today. There are so many things that contribute to this state of being, but one that I think stands out is our intolerance for working through hard things. It is no longer true that most people live within 5 miles of their neighborhood church, and that this church has been their home church for generations because it was unheard of to seek out a church farther away if things went south. Now, we can jump ship and drive across town if we want. But a pattern of church shopping and severed relationships contribute to loneliness. I say this not to shame anyone who has needed to find a new church because I can deeply relate to this and have done my fair share of church hopping before I found The Hearth. I say this to encourage you to engage differently with community now. When someone says something or does something you don’t like, resist the urge to immediately wash your hands of the community and choose instead to do the difficult work of dealing with it head-on. Have that hard conversation, work through the conflict, admit when you’ve been hurt or when you’ve hurt someone. It is uncomfortable in the moment, but it builds deep and lasting relationships. This is the antidote to loneliness. This is how we heal. There is no perfect community that will be comfortable to be a part of all the time. There are just messy communities of messy people that get by with a LOT of grace and a LOT of love and a LOT of humility, who are willing to have some hard conversations, grow and stretch, and lean on the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. I no longer believe I can create a community free of hurt, but I do believe that when we all are willing to work at it, we can create a community of healing. Did you know that contrary to popular belief, not all Christians read the same Bible? In fact, some denominations like Catholic and Eastern Orthodox include 14 more books in their Bible. These books are called the Apocrypha and were removed during the Protestant Reformation, so you will not find these books in a standard Protestant Bible. However, to the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox believers, these books are just as sacred as the rest of the Bible.
In addition, there are other books that never made it into anyone’s Canon (a fancy word for the accepted books in the Bible) but are still studied as a means of understanding early Christian thought as people were forming their communal beliefs about Jesus. These include the Gnostic Gospels and Apocryphal Acts, which were deemed heretical and therefore not included in the Bible as we know it today. One such book is the Acts of John, which has been a part of Christian thought for centuries, mentioned (and rejected as heretical) by prominent figures like St. Augustine. One of the main reasons that the Acts of John was deemed heretical is because it seemed to deny the humanity and suffering of Jesus. However, despite its rejection as Holy Scripture, there is one story in this book that catches my attention, and it seems to have caught the attention of many other scholars as well. It is often called The Hymn and Dance of Jesus and recounts Jesus leading His disciplines in a dance in the round while singing a hymn. Although not explicitly said, we can infer from the context that this dance likely occurred in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus agonizingly prayed the night he was betrayed by Judas and arrested by the Roman Soldiers. Thus, we would consider this a dance of Lament, an early example of communal healing through collective, rhythmic movement. Dance is an important aspect of many rituals and religions around the world. In some overlooked stories in the Bible we see glimpses of Divinely inspired dancing, like Miriam’s dance as the Israelites cleared the Red Sea into freedom (Exodus 15:20) and David’s controversial dance in his underwear to celebrate the return of the Ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6:14). However, dance is not a large part of Christianity any longer, and in some circles, it is deemed improper for Christians to dance at all. As someone who enjoys dancing, I find this to be incredibly sad. As someone who has dedicated my life to professions of healing, I find this to be devastating. Dance is a powerful healer. In Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal work on trauma and healing, The Body Keeps the Score, he argues that “collective movement and music create a larger context for our lives, a meaning beyond our individual fate, [which is why] religious rituals universally involve rhythmic movements.” Later, he writes, “Along with language, dancing, marching, and singing are uniquely human ways to install a sense of hope and courage.” Dance helps us metabolize big emotions and encourages them to move through us. We dance through our grief and our rage and our fear until they dissipate. Dance connects us with each other and with the Divine. We dance when we do not have the words but seek the relationships that are formed without them. Dance reminds us where we came from. Many cultures have been dancing the same steps for generations, and it roots them in the legacy of their past. In the Dance of Jesus, all these elements come together in a crescendo right before Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. It is a dance of hopeful defiance as much as it is a dance of lament. It acknowledges that death is near and yet there is time still to be with one another and praise God. This story in the Acts of John catches my attention because even if the Dance of Jesus didn’t happen, it is still beautiful to imagine a God who dances, and I think it encourages us to dance as well. Besides, if singing is praying twice (St. Augustine), then I believe dancing is praying thrice. In my class this semester, Hope and Despair, one of the common threads throughout our reading has been the importance of art in the process of hope building. Art is the lament through which our pain is exposed and witnessed. Art is the protest through which we stand up against injustice. Art is the ritual through which we heal. These three artistic elements—lament, protest, and ritual—are the building blocks of sustainable hope. The Bible, in its entirety, is a masterpiece—poetry and prose, parables and prophecy—that paints the hopeful story of humanity’s relationship with and redemption by the Divine. It is the oral tradition that enraptured the Israelites around campfires in the desert. It is the lament in harrowing cries as the walls of Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. It is the Odyssey of wandering and the Epic of unlikely heroes. And its message is hope and a demand for change. This week, right here in Orlando, we witnessed the use of art as protest and promise. Sometime overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, Florida Department of Transportation painted over the rainbow crosswalk that stretched across the street in front of Pulse Nightclub. The rainbow crosswalk was a vibrant memorial and lament to the souls of 49 victims who lost their lives in 2016; and overnight it was shrouded in funereal black. The Department has vocalized its disapproval of rainbow crosswalks in the past few months, even threatening to pull transportation funding if they are not removed, citing safety concerns and inappropriateness of political messaging. When Orlando officials chose not to paint over the crosswalk, the state officials did. The outcry was immediate, with Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and State Senator Carlos Guillermo Smith both taking to social media to voice their dissent. Meanwhile, the community was taking to the streets armed with sidewalk chalk and rainbow signs—to paint their protest in a rainbow of rectangles, promising to continue to color love over hate. Art, even in its simplest form, is powerful. It speaks when there are no words and fights without weapons. It is a peaceful protest that demands to be seen. It is a chorus of voices who will not be silenced. It is as moving and scandalous as the dance of David. It is as soul-wrenching as the poetic questions of Job. And I deeply believe that it is holy work. So, let us continue to paint love over hate and gather in the joy that is birthed from the courage to take a stand.
Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are merely princesses waiting to see us act once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet As I interact with people in my world, I am mindful that I am not just interacting with the person standing in front of me; I am interacting with every other person and relationship that has been a part of this individual’s life. I am interacting with memories—positive and horrible; and this individual is interacting with all of those aspects of me as well. We bring our experiences into present interactions and relationships, both consciously and subconsciously. It may be something as simple as an individual bearing a resemblance to a parent figure who abandoned you that brings on what seems like an illogical distrust that this person will leave you too. In counseling, we call this transference—any cue experienced sensorily that impacts our perspective of and interaction with another. Within the counseling relationship, transference can be an incredibly useful jumping off point to identify lingering feelings that are currently clouding someone’s ability to show up as their best selves within all sorts of relationships. Perhaps it causes them to shut down, act out, or trust too early. This can impact dating, friendships, and employment. And we will continue to live in this dysfunction in order not to face whatever is lurking behind this transference—the dragons in our lives. These razor-toothed, fire-breathing giants that have hatched from experiences in our lives and grown into the monsters behind our pain and resulting behavior. But what do we do with the dragons? When I worked with children, one of my favorite therapeutic activities was called “slay the dragon.” I often used this activity with children who had been abused and had a difficult time talking about it or had trouble remembering the abuse itself. In this activity, I would ask the child to draw a dragon on a piece of paper and then tell me about their picture. This dragon was invariably a depiction of their abuser in dragon-form—terrifying and vicious, often with too many talons and ominous colors. Then I would tell the child that we were going on a quest to slay the dragon. The child could choose whoever they would like to join them on this quest—safe adults, friends, imaginary friends, whoever—and what weapons they would like to bring with them to slay the dragon. When we got to the dragon’s lair, I would give the child a black crayon and allow them to completely blot out the image of the dragon on their paper with the crayon while telling me the story of how she slayed her dragon. After nothing was left of the dragon, I would invite the child to turn her paper over and draw what the dragon looked like now. Invariably, the dragon was much smaller, less powerful, and no longer had a hold on the child’s life. Behavior improved, relationships healed, and forgiveness happened. During one session with a child who had survived severe physical abuse from his mother, we got to the end of the session where I invited him to draw the dragon after it had been slayed. He drew a princess. When I asked about the beautiful princess with pink gown and flowing locks, the child said, “I think she’s lonely. I think she turned into a dragon so people couldn’t hurt her. But she doesn’t have to be a dragon anymore. She can be a princess again and make new friends.” This child had, before my eyes, slayed the monstrous dragon that was the memory and trauma of his mother’s abuse, and found a way to empathize with that part of himself, shed the scales, and be open to being loved again. When was the last time you even acknowledged the dragon inside of you? Have you ever been brave enough to go on that quest to find the dragon within you to see what lurks behind those impenetrable scales, that forked tongue? Perhaps your dragon is merely a princess waiting to see you act once beautiful and brave. When we face our fears, when we seek within ourselves where our anger, sadness, despair, and dysfunctional behaviors are coming from, more often than not it is something within us that just wants to be loved. The invitation is not to turn away from the dragon, but to turn towards. Like so many things that seem ugly, dangerous, and repulsive, what this dragon is really craving is to be seen. My favorite psalm captures this desire and God’s response: “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and night wraps itself around me,’ even the darkness is not dark to You; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to You.” ~Psalm 139:11-12 Oh, to see and know and love ourselves as God does—perceiving the light behind the darkness and the princess behind the dragon. Healing the wounds within us through the knowledge that with God, we can slay any dragon because even dragons are not dragons to God—our God sees the princess within and invites us on a quest to beckon her to come into the light. A few weeks ago during our conversation series on Hope in Unexpected Places, we read a portion of Lamentations 3. Lamentations, found in the Old Testament, is a five-part lament poem, most likely written by Jeremiah, that recounts the horrors of the Fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. The imagery in Lamentations is pretty horrific, and it is one of those texts that we would rather skip over when we crack open our Bibles for a message of hope. However, in order to truly experience hope, we must first acknowledge and embrace the despair that evokes a need for hope.
Lament is a cry to be seen. In Lamentations, we hear Daughter Zion (the symbolic embodiment of Jerusalem) cry out, “Is it nothing to you, all who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,” (Lamentations 1:12). Lament is a cry to be seen by those privileged enough to continue their lives in ignorance of the horrors that are happening to someone or to some community of which they are not a part. In our world, there are abject horrors happening right now—in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Yemen, and in other places we don’t even hear about. We have the luxury of turning off the news when we don’t want to be exposed to such suffering; but those who live in these places do not, and they deserve to be seen. In January of 2024, the BBC ran a story about The University of Exeter’s attempts to bring the lament poems of Ukraine to an English-speaking audience. The leader of the project, Professor Hugh Roberts is quoted in the article: “The trauma that the people of Ukraine are enduring is beyond comprehension, but these poems make it tangible and visceral in a way that is scarcely metaphorical.” The poems make a demand for suffering to be seen because through witness, comes empathy and change. In Lamentations, we see this change in the Narrator when he finally stops observing Daughter Zion from some remote place and actually enters into her space of horror. In so doing, he changes his tune from one of blaming her to one of accusation against all who had a part in the violence inflicted upon her. He accuses the religious leaders, the prophets, the passerby, the enemies, and even God. His heart was changed when he truly saw Daughter Zion’s suffering. This is what art does—it helps us see. Art is the tool of the prophets to give voice to God. Art breaks through our logic and our excuses and places us directly into the trenches of another. And who, in this visceral experience, can ignore the suffering and not wish to do something about it? This is where hope emerges. Lament is an art form that builds a relationship between the suffering poet and her witness, without the two ever needing to personally meet. Christian ethicist Ellen Ott Marshall points to relationality as the impetus towards transformation and hope. Marshall argues that being in relationship with those who suffer causes us to be transformed by their suffering and moved to act. I think this is why Mission trips are often less about what volunteers can accomplish in one week, and more about how the experience changes them and inspires them to do more for the people they encounter—more to bring hope. And so, Lament is both for the sufferer to metabolize their own pain as well as for the hearer to inspire them to change. In Scripture, often Lament is directed at God, and there is a plea for God to see the poet’s suffering and do something about it. It is a plea for God, who feels so far away, to come near. There is nothing blasphemous about crying out to God, about voicing our anger and frustrations, about asking God to see us and do something about it. We are actually in good company when we lament, joining with so many scripture writers like David, Jeremiah, Job, Moses, Mary and Martha, and even Jesus. Lamenting is a trust in the relationship we have with a God who wants to see and hold us through all that we experience, and perhaps especially in the darkness. This semester I am taking a course entitled Hope and Despair with Rev. Dr. Cody Sanders, a leading Pastoral Theologian in LGBTQ spiritual care and former chaplain at Harvard University. A voracious reader himself, he assigns at least a book a week throughout the course semester. Although learning by drinking from a fire hose means that many of the books begin to blend together and admittedly I forget all about some of them, it also means that the most striking texts rise to the surface fairly prominently. One such text is Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear, which we are reading this week. Lear’s book is a philosophical reflection around the prophetic words of Crow Chief Many Coups as his people were pushed into reservation life in the mid to late 1800s, forced to leave everything they knew behind. Many Coups said, “when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened” (emphasis mine).
“After this nothing happened.” These are words of despair—an observation that everything thereafter was so meaningless, it was as though nothing happened at all. Lear goes on to explain that the Crow way of life was centered around their nomadic, tribal lifestyle. Every single thing done within tribal life supported hunting buffalo and tribal warfare. Boys were raised playing with weapons to be used in hunting and skirmishes; girls were raised cooking for and caring for the men in the tribe so they could hunt and fight. So when the Crow people were pushed into a reservation—nullifying their territorial tribal warfare—and when the buffalo began to be exterminated—nullifying their nomadic hunting—everything that revolved around these purposes became meaningless. It brings to mind the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes 1: “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” The words of a great leader who spent the entirety of his life accruing wives, concubines, riches, and power just to near the end of his days and realize none of these things would be coming with him when he died. Lear describes this experience of meaninglessness as a result of our life’s purpose suddenly being turned upside down by a new reality into which we are thrust. For the Crow, their new reality was reservation life. For the teacher of Ecclesiastes, his new reality was death. And for us? This despair can result from any number of things that cause a break in our understanding of ourselves, our world, and our God. In our world today, there is a deep chasm growing between supporters of LGBTQ rights and inclusion and their opponents. I believe that people’s strong feelings about this issue, whether for or against, has everything to do with their understanding of themselves, the world, and God. Imagining a world where gender and sexuality is fluid means imagining a world where either one’s purpose and understanding is validated or nullified. For those who embrace this change, there is potential for them to live into their fullest understanding of who they are and who they love. Suddenly, in living into this reality, everything in their lives becomes meaningful. They understand themselves in their fullest expression for the first time ever. They view the world in all its multi-faceted brilliance that had once been truncated into a false binary in which they could not find a place. They relate to God, perhaps for the first time ever, as a God who loves them and not as a God who cruelly created them to be something that God abhors. However, for those who do not embrace this change and hold fast to a rigid view of gender and sexuality, this change nullifies everything they understand about themselves, the world, and their God. It renders so much of what they know as meaningless. This is why it is scary. This is why people hold on to these views—because the alternative is the possibility of meaninglessness. Their world is orderly, binary, simple. Everything and everyone has their place in this world, and there is safety in the certainty of it all. The upending of this certainty demands an entire reimagining of who they are, what the world is like, and who God is. And the transition from point A to point B is mediated by a period of meaninglessness—a wilderness. This is the wilderness of growth. The wilderness in which the Israelites found themselves between the certainty of slave life and the hope intermixed with fear in the uncertainty of the Promised Land. The wilderness of the Teacher who began to experience the first throes of transition from this life to eternity. The wilderness of the Crow people who faced a decision point of how they would acclimate (or not) to their lives on the reservation. This is real fear. Any transition, whether positive or negative, brings the possibility of hope or despair depending on how one chooses to engage it. Many Coup, the Crow Chief with whom we opened this blog, had a decision to make that would not only impact his experience of this transition but that of his entire tribe. Hope or despair trickles from the top down. It is a question of resilience and flexibility that us Floridians understand all too well when a hurricane comes and tears apart a strong oak tree but leaves a seemingly delicate palm tree intact. Can we weather the storm of transition by moving with it instead of against it? Can we find hope and meaning in a new reality? Many Coup did. Many Coup led his tribe to redefine meaning when their reality was completely torn asunder. While some younger men in the tribe were attempting to salvage their warrior status by continuing a violence that was now meaningless, Many Coup laid down the symbol of tribal warfare, not as an act of surrender but rather as an act of reclamation and survival. We do not get to choose how and when our world changes, but we do get to choose how we respond to it. Many Coup loved his people enough to help them adapt to an ever-changing reality. Do we love each other enough to adapt to a new reality where people can live fully into who they are? Do we love ourselves enough to trust in our own courage and resilience to change our minds? Do we love God enough to embrace the possibility that God does not make mistakes and actually does create and embrace fluidity and love in all its manifestations? For a society that valued all things masculine, the Romans sure did build a lot of grand temples for their goddesses. It surprised me when I learned that in Asia Minor, where we spent much of our time on our study abroad to Türkiye, that the majority of the cities were built around two prominent deities. Not two gods like Jupiter (Zeus) and Neptune (Poseidon) or Apollo and Ares (Mars), but two goddesses—Artemis (Diana), the maternal goddess of the moon, and Athena (Minerva), goddess of wisdom and warfare. The reason this surprised me is because everything else within the language and culture of the Roman Empire was discernibly masculine. Value was placed on competition and athleticism, with community members vying for the identity of victor in all aspects of life. This language bleeds into our Biblical texts as well, particularly in the New Testament, which was written in the first century Roman Empire and influenced by the culture in which it was steeped. Paul, a Roman citizen and therefore raised within this culture, often used athletic metaphors that are clearly influenced by the Roman gymnasiums, which were formative places for young men in the empire. One of the most striking examples of this language is in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27:
“Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air, but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.” The gymnasiums were huge structures that often included a facade that could rival the nearby temples, with pillars and carvings and giant archway entrances. Inside these gymnasiums, boys and men would receive both mental and physical training in the libraries, bathhouses, pools, and training yards. These structures also became centers of social and political gatherings. In many ways, the gymnasiums and temples had a lot in common as centers for intellectual, social, and political discourse as well as having their distinction as places of physical exercise in the gymnasiums and worship in the temples. The other stark difference between the two is that the gymnasiums were distinctly masculine spaces and the goddess temples were decidedly feminine. I do not believe it to be too much of a stretch to assume that in writing to the Christians embedded in these cultures of goddess worship, Paul would have leaned into the masculine, gymnasium metaphors of discipline and training and condemned the activities common in temple worship—namely those listed in the epistles like Galatians: “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery…, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these” (Galatians 5:19-21). This is not because Paul was a misogynist. In fact, Paul highly respected women like Junia, who Paul calls “prominent among the Apostles” (Romans 16:7); Prisca, who Paul notably names ahead of her husband and commends for her house church and for risking her life for him (Romans 16:3-5); and Phoebe, who Paul names as a minister and benefactor (Romans 16:1-2). Instead, Paul uses “victor” language because he had the near impossible task of bringing together a diverse group of people—geographically, religiously, sociopolitically—and setting them apart as followers of the one true God when all around them other idols—or “opponents” (gods and goddesses, political power, wealth, etc.)— competed for their attention. Athleticism and competition were the most appropriate and relatable metaphors Paul had in his arsenal. In addition, it is quite possible that Paul was attempting to create as much distance as possible from metaphors that even hinted at the prevalent, feminine goddess worship so popular in that region. Therefore, even though this language may feel exclusionary to people who are not athletes and especially people who identity as female, Paul’s message was not intended to exclude people based on gender or physical prowess. Rather, Paul is calling all people—Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28)—to “press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called [us]” (Philippians 3:14). Today, we are also called into this same discipline of focus, self-control, and teamwork that continues to be an important aspect of our athletic culture as well as our religious culture. For the prize we seek is not a worldly prize, not a perishable wreath or tarnishable gold medal, but rather the imperishable promise of eternal life with God (1 Corinthians 9:25). |
Kaylee Vance LMFT, LMHC
Worship Leader |
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