The Klezmatics Sing Woody Guthrie's Holy Ground | Community Organizing
Friends,
I have the great pleasure of working for one of students! Lydia, our guest writer today, took my Theology of Ministry in Small Churches and Evangelism for Liberation courses. She is a great collaborator and has supported my ministry of facilitator and workshop leader over the years. And I am excited to now work for her at Episcopal Divinity School.
-Liz
Moral Courage
Today we have the words of The Very Rev. Lydia Kelsey Bucklin, the president of the newest form of Episcopal Divinity School. She is giving the Residential Week College Lecture at Emmanuel Theological College in Warrington, UK. This is a small piece of that talk.
[H]ow do each of us in all of our varying calls, whether it’s in a traditional parish, a church planter, a children and youth minister, how do we equip and form our communities to be morally courageous?
Ordinary people are bearing witness to awful things every day and are confronted, in real time, with a choice of how they will respond. How do we prepare everyday, ordinary followers of Jesus to act as Christ in this broken, beautiful world? Because our efforts whether large or small will help bend the arc of our universe.
[Listen to] the words of Verna Dozier, “What happens on Sunday morning is not half so important as what happens on Monday morning. In fact, what happens on Sunday morning is judged by what happens on Monday morning. If the people who gather for word and sacrament go back into the world unchanged and unchanging, they have participated in empty ritual.”
I don’t know about you, but as a cradle Episcopalian, I have to admit I may have participated in some empty ritual. And I hate to admit this, but I think we’ve been so focused on maintaining an old model of church that is so obsessed with its own existence that we’ve forgotten our true call might instead be to serve as midwives to the Holy that is already present, already present in all of our communities. The creative, redeeming power of the Spirit invites us to have the moral courage to lay down our false sense of power and control and instead welcome our community members to come together to rediscover our core identity and purpose as a church.
In the U.S., we are inundated with reports of measurements and talk about success and church growth, average Sunday attendance, and the number of pledging members. There are countless organizations and publishing companies that will sell us curricula and formulas for successful church growth. It's a panic brought on in part by the assumption that the definition of church is a paid full-time priest doing ministry to a full congregation.
This seems a little silly when we reflect on Jesus' own ministry. Jesus was born in a stable, not a palace. His focus was never on quantity but on the quality of his relationships. He empowered seventy-to go out and do the same healing he was doing.And his biggest concern was always the least among us. His disciples created a church where the most important task was eating together, with good conversation over scriptures.
[A] story to share..
In the summer of 1940, Hendrik Kraemer, a missionary to Indonesia, spoke at a Sunday night church service in the Netherlands. Rev. Kraemer was in his native Holland when World War Two began. He, along with others, was deeply troubled because the Nazis had begun arresting their Jewish neighbors and shipping them out of the country. They had even heard rumors that the Nazis were transporting them to concentration camps.
After the church meeting ended, several people from the congregation asked to speak with Rev. Kraemer in private. They said, “Sir, what should we do? Our Jewish neighbors are in great danger.” Kramer answered, “I cannot tell you what to do, but I can tell you who you are. And if you know who you are, then you’ll know what to do.”
He opened his Bible to 1 Peter 2:9 and began to read:
“You are a chosen people,
a royal priesthood,
a holy nation,
God’s special possession,
that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”
If you know who you are, you’ll know what to do. That night, it is said, they formed the Dutch resistance. By 1944, up to 300,000 people were hidden from German authorities, including Jews, Dutch men avoiding forced labor, and Allied airmen.
If you know who you are, you will know what to do.
We often refer back to Matthew chapter 16, Jesus asking Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” But this is kind of play on that question, isn’t it? “Not who do you say that I am,” but rather, “Who are you, because of who I am?”
What does it mean to be a chosen people? From my US perspective, to be honest, that phrase kind of makes me cringe. Because I’m taken back to that Manifest Destiny piece of art, this idea that a chosen race is white European descendant, English-speaking.
Surely, the way white Christian nationalists have defined this term is not how Peter intended it to be read?
It helps, I think, to recognize that Peter’s first epistle was written during the reign of the Emperor Nero, likely in the years 62-64, and was addressed to very early followers of Jesus in the area now known as modern Turkey.
To follow Jesus in this time was counter-cultural. It meant abandoning the social, religious, and cultural norms of the day. Being a Christian at that time required moral courage, standing against others who discriminated based on race (gentile/jew), class (slave or free) and gender. It meant eating together with people who were "not like us."
This was a time of the Roman persecution of Christians, and Nero was beginning to target followers of Jesus. To read this scripture through a liberation lens is to recognize that Peter is addressing a community on the margins of society. They are vulnerable and at risk.
He is emboldening them, building them up, saying those with power and control may tell you that you are nothing, that you are not worthy of mercy, that you are not even a people, but you are. In fact, you are chosen, and God is with you.
You are chosen, not in this self-centered understanding of “chosen people,” meaning elite, superior, or better than, but rather chosen as in beloved children of God worthy of protection and care.
You see, to be chosen doesn’t mean to be better than or set apart; it means to belong.
This shifts things, doesn’t it? From understanding “chosen people” as elite or superior, to instead understanding it as worthiness and belonging.
It is not hard to draw a connection between Peter's time and our own. For those of us who have been dehumanized because of race, or gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, or sexuality, we are recognized as God’s own, God’s beloved, brought into the light of justice.
And Peter’s Epistle doesn’t stop there in terms of affirming our worthiness. It is an ecclesiological call for how to be the church in the world. It compels us to see our chosenness not as a reward for merit, but rather a call to mission. And crucial to this missional call is that we are called together as a community, and as a community we find strengthened moral courage.
The rest of this passage, we know, calls us together, as "living stones," built together into a spiritual house. Reminding us that the church is not a static building or rigid institution, but a living community engaged in the world. ‘
And with Jesus as our cornerstone, Jesus, the one who was rejected and persecuted, Jesus, the one who lived his life poor and humble. With Jesus as the solid rock on which we situate ourselves, we are reminded that the foundation of the church is not built on power, but on the margins.
The good news is that despite all of the damage that harmful theology, corrupt leadership, and greed have caused our communities around the globe, our shared legacy is also full of inspiring Christian leaders and Christian communities who have consistently aligned themselves with the liberating, self-giving love of Jesus, not the power structures of the world.
As in Peter’s time, we will, unfortunately, continue to encounter forces of the world that will be hard at work doing all they can to break the wholeness that God intends for the world.
What is also true is that our local communities have always shown resilience, resistance, resourcefulness, and the power of solidarity.
Following Jesus in this time comes with real responsibility and duty to represent God’s character of justice, loving kindness, and mercy in the world.
As we work to leave a legacy that breaks the chains of injustice, how do we walk together, side by side, with those communities that our Christian faith and tradition have harmed?
In Northern Michigan, [where I am from] it meant using our endowment to hire an Indigenous Director of Justice and Reparations. It meant showing up when invited for gatherings to advocate for clean water and environmental justice. It meant investing in new expressions of church like UP Wild Church, which meets outdoors and commits every time it gathers to live intentionally with creation and those who have been harmed by the institutional church.
In Minnesota, it has meant putting clergy bodies on the line to protest ICE activity. More quietly, it has meant neighbors walking immigrant children to school to keep them safe. Members of congregations waiting outside a detention center so that when someone who has been wrongfully detained is released out into the cold winter weather with no transportation back home, they are offered a coat, a meal, and a ride.
Elsewhere in the US: along the border of Mexico, a group of folks go out on search and recovery efforts to offer support to refugees along the way, and sadly, recover the remains of those who did not make the journey.
There are so many examples I could continue to offer. And not all examples of moral courage are this dramatic. Long before the Episcopal Church supported gay rights a tiny congregation in Wyoming simply agreed to a funeral for a gay man named Matthew Shephard who was beaten to death.
Street churches throughout the United States, and a few in England, gather to worship where people without homes gather, eat together, and pray together. A retired elementary school teacher offers morning prayer at a micro-congregation whose outreach is being crossing guards for the kids walking to school. An accountant takes a course in pastoral care and visits people in prison. A congregation sells its building to an arts center.
What would that look like in the Church of England? What does that look like in your community?
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The Klezmatics sing Woody Guthrie's Holy Ground. (4:20)
People join people, not ideas. Community Organizing starts by offering your name. Sean Neil-Barron offers advice at UU World.
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