Category: Ordinary Days of the Spirit

Grace and Peace to you in the name of Jesus,

So often, we learn from physicians the practices in our lives that are death producing. Smoking can damage our airways causing lung disease, eating too much sugar enlarges our waste line which can lead to heart problems, eating too much salt can increase our blood pressure which if gone unchecked can lead to a stroke. Dr. Gary Gunderson, over the course of his career became frustrated with so much of his conversations with his patients relating to death that he set out to research the leading causes not of death, but of life.

In his book, The Leading Causes of Life, he reveals that: connection, coherence, agency, generativity, and hope are some of the common factors that lead to life. Connection, he names is a sense of knowing others and being known in return. Coherence, he explains as a deep gut level feeling that things somehow make sense. We might find sense of the world through our faith tradition, art, or even poetry. Agency, is our ability to make choices that move us forward in our lives. Generativity, is our awareness of being a part of something greater than ourselves, a concern for that which extends to the generations that will carry on in years to come. Hope, he names as the “easiest and best documented cause…It is the future and possibilities you see clearly enough that you can take risks to make it happen.”

Researchers are finding that loneliness is more harmful to health than smoking even. According to University of Chicago social neuroscientist John Cacioppo, the effects of social isolation or rejection are as real as thirst, hunger, or pain. “For a social species, to be on the edge of the social perimeter is to be in a dangerous position,” says Cacioppo. In the Christian faith, there is no longer an edge of the social perimeter, there is no hierarchy of human value. To think that circling people into community, something as simple as that, is a thing that gives connection–life even. This is something for us to consider in our one on one relationships and on a larger scale.

The days and nights have been cold and wet this past week. So many in this city live huddled under partial shelter on the streets. While one could argue they are not circled into community, sometimes those on the street have a better understanding of community among themselves. Yet, they are held as low on a scale of hierarchy in our greater understanding of community, walked by quickly, gazes not held, and words left hanging in the air. Contained within each huddled person we know is gift, for those on the street are a part of the human family.

Each of us during one time in our life or another have known what it has felt like to be ostracized. We can imagine then what it might feel like to live each day of our lives walking down the streets, but for all intents and purposes unseen. There is a woman who walks the streets who was given a jacket one day. She told me the jacket was too light, so she traded it for some alcohol to help her to stay warm. She helped me to think differently about the bartering that goes on, I wondered whether I would last one night huddled next to her on the street? There is a resiliency and strength one must actually have to survive on the streets.

Keep your eyes open in your relationships this week. Look for the moments when you might be intentionally or unintentionally casting someone out. Consider spending time on Sunday afternoons at the Service Dining Rooms here in the city as our community provides a meal for many who live on the street. Reflect with others about these leading causes of life: connection, cohesion, agency, generativity, and hope, what they might mean in your own life and in the life of the different spaces that are your community.

With you on the journey,
Michelle

Grace and peace to you and through you

This week marked the 5th year since the Marikana Massacre and still no one who made the murderous decisions on that day has been held to account. Over the last couple of months, we have witnessed the email evidence of State Capture yet to be investigated by the National Director of Public Prosecutions “for a lack of evidence”. In the last few weeks we have seen those who stand up for truth and integrity being intimidated and threatened with disciplinary action and even death, while those who mismanage and lie are protected or even promoted. In the last few days we have seen racist attacks outside a KFC and again after a rugby match with people using the K-word. A woman is beaten up by the Deputy Minister of Higher Education who continues to hold office despite it being on video. A young woman is beaten by the “First Lady” of Zimbabwe. Nazis march openly in the USA and President Trump struggles to out-rightly condemn them. The president of the Philippines says “it is good” in relation to the news that 60 people have been killed in 3 days of the government’s continued “war on drugs”. These stories and more can be found in a single edition of our daily newspaper. Right and wrong have traded places*(see Holy War by Alicia Keys below) and it’s not clear where the reset button is – at least that is what it feels like. Despair is always within easy reach and so is denial.

The question we all need to wrestle with was raised this week by Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer (32) who was killed while resisting the racist protests in Charlottesville last weekend. At Heather’s memorial service, Susan concluded: “If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention. Make a point to look at it. That’s how you make her death worthwhile. I’d rather have my child, but if I can’t have her, by golly we’re going to make it count. Say to yourself ‘What can I do to make a difference? And that’s how you gonna make my child’s death worthwhile.”

Grace, Alan

Holy War

by Alicia Keys

If war is holy and sex is obscene
We’ve got it twisted in this lucid dream
Baptized in boundaries, schooled in sin
Divided by difference, sexuality and skin

Oh so we can hate each other and fear each other
We can build these walls between each other
Baby, blow by blow and brick by brick0
Keep yourself locked in, yourself locked in
Yeah we can hate each other and fear each other
We can build these walls between each other
Baby, blow by blow and brick by brick
Keep yourself locked in, yourself locked

Oh maybe we should love somebody
Oh maybe we could care a little more
So maybe we should love somebody
Instead of polishing the bombs of holy war
What if sex was holy and war was obscene
And it wasn’t twisted, what a wonderful dream
Living for love, unafraid of the end
Forgiveness is the only real revenge

Oh so we can heal each other and feel each other
We can break these walls between each other
Baby, blow by blow and brick by brick
Keep yourself open, yourself open
Yeah we can heal each other and feel each other
We can break these walls between each other
Baby, blow by blow and brick by brick
Keep yourself open, you’re open

So maybe we should love somebody
Maybe we could care a little more
So maybe we should love somebody
Instead of polishing the bombs of holy war

What if love was holy and hate obscene
We should give life to this beautiful dream
Cause peace and love ain’t so far
If we nurse our wounds before they scar
Nurse our wounds before they scar

If you are neutral in situations of injustice,
you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse
and you say that you are neutral,
the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

~ Desmond Tutu

Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus

There is a psychological phenomenon known as the bystander effect, where it has been found to be less likely for an individual to offer help to another with others standing around. It is as if there is a pause in the moment and if no one steps in, everyone simply watches on. Desmond Tutu would describe this to be a state of neutrality. “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse” he names, “and you say that you are neutral, the elephant will not appreciate your neutrality.”

God’s grace alive in the world and in our lives, should evoke within us a response. Randy Maddox calls this, “responsible grace”—grace that is so fully realized that all we know to do then is to respond to it with the way we live our lives. With the state of the world today, it is important for people of faith to pray about the response they will offer to the grace of God at work in their lives. It is about the orientation of our life and neutrality is not an orientation that brings movement or change.

Phyllis Tickle has shared that every 500 years or so, the Church should have a rummage sale, assessing what needs to be kept and what needs to be thrown out. This year marks the 500^th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation of the Church, where leaders like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Methodists own John Wesley struggled with the way the Church was leading and began movements for change. If Phyllis Tickle was right, we are in the years of the great rummage sale, where much of our life together needs to be assessed and all of us need to ready ourselves for great change.

With so many issues to respond to, we can easily be swallowed up in too much movement and lose sight of the rhythmic quality of being that when we find our way in it highlights God’s grace alive in who we are.

The life of grace is a life of finding ourselves in step with the unfolding realities around us that are making way for change. Not all of us are called to lead in these unfolding realities, but we are to have eyes to see, ears to hear, and feet that help us to move. May we find ourselves inspired by the movement for change around us and surprised by the ways we can be utilized as instruments simply by the response of our lives. These are days for people of faith to becoming more and more fully alive.

With you on the journey,
Michelle

#UNITEBEHIND

A large coalition of civil society organisations under the banner #UniteBehind—
have appealed to Faith Communities to support the march to
Parliament on 7 August at 3 p.m. The march takes place the day before
the “vote of no confidence” in parliament and its aim is to add pressure to
recall the President. The march is not aligned to any political party.

Grace and peace to you and through you

Each time Jesus encounters a woman in scripture, he breaches social convention. For instance, Jesus crosses boundaries of race, class, religion, purity, and ethnicity when he meets the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:4-26), the bleeding woman (Mark 5:25–34), and the Syrophoenician woman (Matthew 15:21–28, Mark 7:24–30). Even the fact that women were among the followers of Jesus, and he seriously taught them, is a break with tradition unprecedented in [then] contemporary Judaism.

In Jesus’ time a woman’s identity was determined by her marital status and if she had produced male children. Although valued for this function, women were perceived as less capable and weaker than men. The philosophy of the day placed humanity on a spectrum, with women as less-complete versions of men. Jesus’ actions are radical because he treats women as being valuable in-and-of themselves, not in relation to men.

Some things have changed since Jesus’ time, but how we think about women continues to shape how we treat others. High rates of violence against women and children in SA indicate that women are still not valued as equal to males. According to the Saartjie Bartman Centre for Women and Children, as of 2015, a woman is either raped or battered every four minutes in South Africa. Violence against women transcends race and class but just because an individual isn’t physically abusive doesn’t mean they are not contributing to the violence. Violence is rooted in women’s lack of power relative to men in society: it is an outgrowth of the idea that women are less than men. Now, all of us have ideas in our head implanted by our culture. Most of these concepts just float around in our head without attracting much attention or getting in the way of who we want to be, but sometimes the ideas we’ve absorbed undermine the people we are trying to be, or run counter to the world we want to help build.

Jesus understood that the subjugation of women thwarts their dreams and aspirations, as they grow up being told that they are less valuable and able than their male counterparts. The domination of women instils feelings of entitlement to respect, sex, and control in men: control over households, businesses, political systems or even countries. It also burdens young boys with expectations to fulfil, including an ill-conceived and misdirected ‘machoness’ which results in men exercising power (sometimes physically), over both women and children. Jesus’ actions are just as radical today as they were 2000 years ago because they speak to an underlying belief about women that harms not only women and children, but men as well.

What Jesus’ actions, and our reading from today, show is that the way things have always been done, is not the way things have to be. Just because a particular way of being has become tradition, and embedded within a culture, does not mean it is part of the relational and mutually beneficial abundant life to which Jesus calls us. Instead, Jesus’ teaching indicates that Jesus forbids any hierarchy in Christian relationships (Mt 20:25–26a, Mk 10:42, Lk 22:25); and scripture invites us to live into a way of life beyond what we currently experience but which Jesus has already proclaimed: a world in which “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, [and we] are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

Grace,
Mia

If you or someone you know is the victim of gender based violence (physically, emotionally, sexually, financially) you can call the free Stop Gender Violence Helpline 24hrs/7days per week for more information and counselling: 0800-150-150.

Grace and Peace to each of you in the life-giving name of Jesus,

It was fifty-five years ago today that Bob Dylan wrote the song, “Blowing in the wind.” This song in its history was a movement song. It was sung during a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi by Dylan himself. Peter, Paul, and Mary sang their version of it just before MLK Jr. gave his famous “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and streams of people sang it on the march from Selma to Montgomery.
It is as if Dylan imbibed the anguish of the psalmist who cries, “How Long O Lord?”

Blowing in the Wind

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand
Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

Yes, ‘n’ how many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea
Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free
Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

Yes, ‘n’ how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky
Yes, ‘n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry
Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
Bob Dylan

Over the years, people have asked Bob Dylan his meaning behind the line, “the answer is blowin’ in the wind.” He never seemed to provide a definitive interpretation. So, the interpretation is left to the listener.

“Wind,” for people of faith, holds an important role. The wind of the Holy Spirit hovered over the waters of creation and new life was breathed into being. The Holy Spirit like winds of flame settled over the disciples during the days of Pentecost inspiring within them the power they would need to walk in the ways that lead to life. One way of interpreting Bob Dylan’s song might be for us to be in search of the winds of change that are blowing in the world today and finding ways to allow ourselves to be caught up in them. I encourage you to listen to Bob Dylan’s,“Blowin’ in the Wind” this week and consider the message it has for us in this day.

With you on the journey,
Michelle

Grace and peace to you and through you

Jesus’ first sermon is a list of the areas God declares freedom from oppression, including freedom from poverty, ill health, and economic injustice (Luke 4:16–21). Within this passage, Jesus specifically states “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners.” Jesus is not only saying prisoners should be free; he is declaring that prisoners already are free and that it is not God but humankind who tries to deny this freedom through imprisonment. Yet, when people first hear about efforts to abolish the prison systems around the world, they commonly respond by writing it off as a utopian fantasy. There is a belief that we need prisons and the suggestion that we do not need systems to confine or punish people seems too far-fetched, and in general, people aim lower than the call of freedom Christ issued.

At times in history, the church has even reinforced the idea that some people need to be removed from society; it was Quaker and Methodist penitentiary models that birthed solitary confinement from a belief that those convicted would be humanly rehabilitated through “penance” for their crime. But such a perspective reinforces the view of empire which tries to designate some as “good” and others as “bad,” some as “worthy” and others as “undeserving” be it of freedom, housing, health care, or even another chance. In her fantastic book, Are Prisons Obsolete Angela Davis reminds us that prisons also serve an ideological function, relieving communities of their responsibility to address the problems of society by scapegoating particular people as the cause problem and then isolating them from society.

If we find our self asking “but what is the alternative to prisons?” then we have yet to escape the belief that the world cannot operate without punishment and isolation. We see this at a social level but also within our relationships. How often have we said relationships with those unlike us are too hard or that we don’t want to be associated with that person who is “nothing but trouble”? Often it is easier to isolate ourselves from, or punish others, rather than do the hard work of addressing problems of society or relationships. What we are saying in these actions is that institutions, relationships, and people are beyond God’s redemptive reach. We sell God short, not because God cannot, but because we have trouble imagining beyond the possibilities currently before us.

We lack a long-term imagination, but throughout scripture, we are invited to see the world beyond what we are currently experiencing. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The biblical call is to love ones’ neighbors (Mark 31), free the captives, care for the oppressed (Luke 4:8, James 1:27). The disciples did not live in a world where each of these calls were lived out by the entire community. But the vision scripture puts forth is one they could, and we may, participate in when we can imagine life being different than how we currently experience it — not in the afterlife or a different place, but here on earth within our and future generations.

A handbook, Instead of Prisons explains that abolitionists believe “Imprisonment is morally reprehensible and indefensible and must be abolished. In an enlightened free society, prison cannot endure for it to prevail. Abolition is a long term goal; an ideal. The eradication of any oppressive system is not an easy task. But it is realizable, like the abolition of slavery or any liberation, so long as there is the will to engage in the struggle.”

Be it the struggle for prison abolition, or imagining a world without anxiety, unemployment, or relational breakdown, faithfulness is a willingness to engage in the struggle for the world Jesus has already proclaimed, with an assurance that one day a freedom we can currently only imagine will be our experienced reality.

Grace, Mia