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—a portion of the sermon by Jaime Bonney on August 20, 2017
Matthew 16:30-20

Like the Pharisees today, the Canaanites were seen as foreigners with dubious traits. The Canaanite woman’s shouts for mercy have to overcome obstacles of prejudice and perceived superiority that would separate her from Jesus. The hardest part of the story is that Jesus himself confronts her with those divisions. What the woman seeks is healing for her daughter, and in light of that, it stings especially that Jesus compares the disciples to children, while the Canaanite woman he likens to a dog. For me, the fact the Jesus himself says these words is chilling: Jesus is the Word made flesh, so when he says these words, they become real. It reminds me that none of us can discount when we hear expressions of prejudice in our own culture by thinking that the speaker doesn’t have the power or authority to wield such words. Speech has power. Only the power of our words can make us unclean.

There is a reckoning in the interplay of Jesus and the Canaanite woman—and how many of us, if we thought that it was God who was telling us something that made us feel hopeless would have the fortitude to keep shouting? But out of the depth of love, we can.

I find myself thinking of the power of the antisemitic words spoken in Charlottesville, said to Jews; or what confederate statues say to African Americans without using any words at all—and using my voice to shout to God about it. Each of us has a shout for mercy that we can keep shouting as long as it takes, and each of us has the will to know when it is ours to take up, just by hearing which cries rise from our own lips.

What upends injustice is only the willingness to shout, persistence and fierceness, clear-eyed perspective, and the ecstatic love of God working in us and through us.

The work of reconciliation and justice is hard and ongoing; one of the blessings for today is to rejoice along with Isaiah in the imagery of the world reconciled to God and with the Canaanite woman in her child’s restoration to health. And I would like to share with you another piece that brought me comfort from an unexpected place: an excerpt from a letter written by two great-great-grandsons of Stonewall Jackson to the mayor of Richmond, VA, requesting the removal of a monument for Jackson. They write:

Dear Mayor of Richmond,
As two of the closest living relatives to Stonewall, we are
writing today to ask for the removal of his statue….
Through our upbringing and education, we have learned
much about Stonewall Jackson. We have learned about his
reluctance to fight and his teaching of Sunday School to
enslaved peoples–in Lexington, Virginia, a potentially
criminal activity at the time. We have learned how
thoughtful and loving he was toward his family. But we
cannot ignore his decision to own slaves, his decision to go
to war for the Confederacy, and, ultimately, the fact that he
was a white man fighting on the side of white supremacy.
While we are not ashamed of our great-great-grandfather,
we are ashamed to benefit from white supremacy while our
black family and friends suffer. We are ashamed of the
monument.
In fact, instead of lauding Jackson’s violence, we choose to
celebrate Stonewall’s sister—our great-great-grandaunt—
Laura Jackson Arnold. As an adult Laura became a
staunch Unionist and abolitionist. Though she and
Stonewall were incredibly close through childhood,
she never spoke to Stonewall after his decision to support
the Confederacy. We choose to stand on the right side of
history with Laura Jackson Arnold….
One thing that bonds our extended family, besides our
common ancestor, is that many have worked, often as
clergy and as educators, for justice in their communities.
While we do not purport to speak for all of Stonewall’s kin,
our sense of justice leads us to believe that removing the
Stonewall statue and other monuments should be part of a
larger project of actively mending the racial disparities
that hundreds of years of white supremacy have wrought.
Respectfully,
William Jackson Christian
Warren Edmund Christian
Great-great-grandsons of “Stonewall” Jackson

Like the great-great grandsons of Stonewall Jackson, each of us has a message born from our experience and our pain, and a voice to speak it, of the love of God and the deliverance of all people. God bless each of us to its use. AMEN.

To see the full sermon preached that day, click here.

Moving On…A Story by Jaime Bonney

Dear People of Christ Church,
Many of you have now heard that I will be moving on at the end of the summer. Come Labor Day, I will begin a residency at MGH, where I will serve as a chaplain throughout the year. I anticipate that my last day at Christ Church will be August 30.

I have been so fortunate to get to know many of you in the course of supporting the ministries of the church, some in person, and many just by email or phone! In looking back at the past three years, I have been taking stock of all the changes in the office and the church. But for me, what’s most remarkable is the stability, continuity, and care that have caused me to feel grounded in my work with the parish.

I have joyfully felt and responded especially to the pastoral dimension of my role here at Christ Church. Good administration is pastorally sensitive, and here at CCW, that dimension of my work has been nourished. It was a pleasure to work with Rev. Sara and learn from her, and it has been important to me to be able to stay until Rev. Rebecca’s arrival as the interim priest. Both have helped me to grow in my pastoral calling. Now I will be continuing to grow my pastoral skills by serving as a hospital chaplain for an academic year at MGH! While I have no idea where God may be leading me in this next journey, I am grateful to be bringing with me the experiences and connections that have been a blessing to me in my time at Christ Church. I am so excited to be transformed again in that work and to experience the presence of God in that place.

I see in the timing of these changes, a strong sense of God’s timing. Much of what I hoped to accomplish when I took on the challenges of managing the office at Christ Church is now done. We have laid down many systems that will continue to serve the parish after my departure, and my leaving now opens the door to bring a new person who can see the parish through the next phase of welcoming a new rector, responding freshly to the ongoing transformations unfolding now.

I am excited to see where the future will take Christ Church! I will continue to be a friend to the parish, and a nearby resource. Please do be in touch!

Warmly,
Jaime

Dear People of Christ Church,

This week, our Advent series on Biblical values continued on the topic of justice. Last week we talked about non-judgment, and next week we tackle inclusion. One of our Scripture texts was a foundational one for me in how I try to live my life: “As you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25). Those who are suffering demand our attention not as if Christ were with them, but because Christ is there. I’m all for reading Scripture awake and searching for metaphor, but this isn’t one of those times. Matthew 25 calls for more literalist Bible thumping.

Last weekend I was with our bishops and the Commission on Ministry, of which I’m a member (it’s the team that helps interview and support people for the ordination process who want to be priests or deacons). In a serendipitous turn someone forwarded me a daily Advent meditation on the spiritual dimensions of anti racist work from one of the people we spoke to, Olivia Hamilton, who’s working with the Harvard Episcopal Chaplaincy. She shares this from Anne Braden, a white southern Episcopalian who lived in the Jim Crow south and came to devote her life to ending the culture of white supremacy she grew up in.

Braden writes:
The passage from the Bible that impressed me the most deeply in my early religious training was the one from Christ’s story of the Last Judgement: ‘ for I was hungered, and ye gave me no meat, I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not…Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.’ I thought about that passage a great deal; it worried me almost constantly. And it would have been hard not to worry about it in those days, for this was the 1930s and there was hunger everywhere. The people I knew tried, I think, according to their lights to practice what Christ taught. My family did. They fed many people who were hungry. Sometimes my mother, growing weary of it, would turn away one of the beggars who came to our door, and that would cause me a sleepless night worrying for fear she was going to hell; but most generally she fed them. Especially, she and my father made sure that the Negro family who worked for us from time to time were not hungry or shelterless or naked. If they were short on money to pay the rent, my father provided the money. The family was always clothed because they got our cast off clothes after they were too faded and old for us to want them any more. But something happened to me each time I looked at the Negro girl who always inherited my clothes. Sometimes she would come to our house with her mother, wearing one of the dresses I had discarded. The dresses never fit her because she was fatter than I was. She would sit in a straight chair in our kitchen waiting for her mother, because of course she could not sit in one of our comfortable chairs in the living room. She would sit there looking uncomfortable, my old faded dress binding her at the waist and throat. And someway I knew that this was not what Jesus meant when he said ‘clothe the naked.’ I recalled that Jesus had also said, ‘therefore all things whatsoever ye would that man should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ And I knew that if I were in her place, if I had no clothes, I would not want the old abandoned dresses of a person who would not even invite me to come into her living room to sit down. And I could not talk to her because I felt ashamed. And as I watched her, I would feel a binding sensation around my own throat. And I would feel to see if my own dress was too tight. But of course it was not. My clothes were always well-cut and perfectly fitted. Instead there was a small straightjacket around my soul. (Anne Braden, The Wall Between, 1958)

Braden goes on to talk about how she began to understand how the racism she lived in was damaging to those who perpetuated it as well as to those who experienced the more severe oppression. “Racial bars built walls…around the white people as well, cramping their spirits and causing them to grow in distorted shapes.” In our conversation about Matthew 25, we talked about the shame of living in plenty when others are suffering; the Gospel tells us that meeting the needs of others is for their material need, but it’s also for our own souls. Or, as a quote from Nicolai Berdyaev has it that José Borrás shared with me a number of years ago has it, “Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.”

Where are you finding bread of all kinds these days?
Who’s sharing with you, and who are you sharing with?

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, so much on my mind. My husband, Noah Evans, left with a group of 12 Episcopal clergy and lay people for North Dakota yesterday morning to be part of an action to be held tomorrow to stand in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe over an oil pipeline that is slated to be built through sacred lands and that would jeopardize the safety of their water. (Theirs, and everyone else who lives below them on the Missouri River.) Approved by the Army Corps of Engineers without due consultation with the tribe, the pipeline is troubling for lots of reasons—it’s not just the climate change question of pipeline vs not-pipeline. Standing Rock has a long relationship to the Episcopal Church; rather than “evangelizing” from the outside as though Native people could be forcibly claimed for the church, the Episcopal Church was actually invited to be part of the reservation by Chief Gall. So their call to Episcopal clergy has some deeper resonance. A mentor of ours in seminary worked on the reservation for a number of years and we visited several times—it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. They’ll pray and listen and support. More about their trip is on Noah’s blog. So there’s that, not to mention the presidential election and 4 important ballot questions. I voted early last night and was pleasantly surprised to see the diversity of the city and patience of those gathered—it took about an hour, possibly even more than if I’d waited for Tuesday! But I’m grateful.

Fortunately, the All Saints jazz mass is on Sunday so we remember that we are not in charge over everything. As we celebrate and sing with drums and saxophone, God’s sovereignty over life and death invites us to center in the fact that even as the stakes are high, God can still work through whatever cataclysms we bring about ourselves. Whether political or environmental or otherwise, it will work itself out. My friend David from our “Two Priests and a Rabbi” interfaith open office hours had this phrase from Mishnah Avot posted on his facebook page yesterday after he voted: “It is not on you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

In my sermon on Sunday I was thinking in a similar vein, about how we don’t have to have everything completely figured out in order for Jesus to come and be with us. He called Zacchaeus the tax collector out of a tree and told him he was coming to his house before Zacchaeus set himself straight, before promises were made to repay extorted funds and commitments made to give half what he owned to the poor. The point is this: we don’t have to have it all figured out before Jesus will have anything to do with us. God wants our open hearts, not perfectly balanced moral checkbooks.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
Last week I was out of the office to attend the Wild Goose Festival, a gathering in the mountains of North Carolina my family and I have attended for the last four years. My shorthand description of it is “Progressive Christians in the mud”—speakers come from all over the map from self-titled “recovering evangelicals” to pacifist Roman Catholics to anti-racist suburban mom bloggers. And folk music rock stars Dar Williams and the Indigo Girls!

The workshops I attended were all over the map—I went to one talk by a lay friend of a silent order of Cistercian monks about meditation, one about pilgrimage and laying down your metaphorical and literal baggage, and several talks by the womanist ethicist scholar Emilie Townes (womanism is a politics centered in the experiences of black women). Jim Wallis, founder of the social justice group Sojourners and author of a whole slew of books about American society and Christian faith and politics, was there this year, speaking again about Racism as America’s Original Sin (also his latest book). What I love about Wild Goose is the sense of community that emerges—I can tell our kids to disappear for an hour and they’ll come back jubilant and covered in dirt, along with a new best friend and an invitation for lunch at someone’s campsite. That doesn’t work in metro Boston.

Backgrounded in all of the beauty, of course, was pain—at this moment the pain of racism in this country and the pain that it is a system that we are all enmeshed in, like a spider web that clings to our bodies and won’t let us free. If everybody believed that black lives matter, we wouldn’t have to say it. The “All lives” of contemporary America does not, when the rubber hits the road, actually include “all.” The Black Lives Matter movement is about changing that.

It is a lifelong task to be aware of how racism works in America and how those of us who are white benefit from that system. We are never finished. We will never have done enough. But it’s not about guilt or innocence, not about being paralyzed by shame or longing for exoneration. It’s a journey. Step by step, thought by thought, day after day paying attention. The way we interact with the racism of contemporary America is a moral and political question. That sounds very “exterior,” but it’s also a spiritual journey. We are called to pay attention to white privilege and racial discrimination because where discrimination happens Jesus is present. Jesus is always present where there is suffering. And white people—we are not suffering in contemporary America in the same way that people of color are suffering. We are not. Jesus is on the other side of that. Always. With Philando Castile and Alton Sterling AND with the Dallas police officers who were murdered. In the same way that the assassin at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando didn’t represent Islam, the shooter in Dallas didn’t represent the Black Lives Matter movement.

Writing about our trip to Wild Goose Festival last year I shared a quote from a talk I attended that year with Paul Fromberg, a priest in San Francisco. He said “I don’t believe in progress. I believe in salvation.” I don’t know if I am making much progress in my own journey around race. Am I doing the best I can? Most of the time. I will pray for salvation, too.

Blessings,
Sara+

PS—Please keep my husband, Noah, and me in your prayers as we travel to Central New York next week for the series of meetings leading up to the bishop election on August 6. I’ll be out of the office from July 19-24. Thanks to the Rev. Thea Keith-Lucas, Episcopal Chaplain at MIT, who will be guest celebrant and preacher on July 24. In case of a pastoral emergency, the clergy from Redeemer Lexington will be on call.

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, our Episcopal Church Class will take on “Contemporary Moral Issues,” and wow, there seem to be a lot of them swirling around. On Sunday in my sermon I mentioned how God had “shown up” in a powerful (and surprising to all of us, I think) way at a conference I attended in Portland, OR the week before. What was going to be a fun and creative time for a group of Millennial and Generation X clergy to hang out and talk shop became a revelatory witnessing about sexism in the church. Sexism is a moral issue.

On Sunday, I, along with many clergy across the country, will wear orange stoles to remember victims of gun violence. Why orange? It’s the color hunters wear for safety. The idea came about from friends of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15 year old high school student who was shot to death on the south side of Chicago a week after marching in President Obama’s second inaugural parade in 2013. June 2 is her birthday. Gun violence is a moral issue.

Today, Charlie Baker has announced that law enforcement will be permitted to be detain undocumented immigrants on behalf of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority. How we treat “the alien who resides with you…as a citizen” (Leviticus 19:34) is a moral issue.

This week, the MA house and senate voted on bills to protect the right of public accommodations access for transgendered persons. How we respect the dignity of every human being, of every gender identity, is a moral issue.

The Boston anti defamation league announced today that just halfway into the year, Massachusetts has already seen almost as many anti Semitic acts (56) as in all of last year (61). Such events were reported at 23 schools and colleges. How we treat those of other faiths is a moral issue.

All of these are moral issues, yet we live in a world that so often tramples the bodies of the oppressed and seduces us into the lie that who we are is determined by how much we have. In baptism we make all kinds of promises about how we’ll engage the world and each other. We study a Bible that’s full of stories of Jesus Christ going toward the margins of society and toward people in need. What happens next?

The “next” is our whole lives. The “next” is how we go, day by day, examining how we treat others and how we create communities of care, concern, and hospitality. We are also called into lives in which we “love our neighbors as ourselves”… sometimes the “love yourself” part of the equation is the one that comes out with the shorter stick. Sometimes we internalize the false stories of our broken-yet-precious world, and oppression turns inward. I came out of last week’s conversation about discrimination against women last week with some critical questions for the wider church. I came out with some critical questions for myself, too (and will hopefully have something on my own blog about it in the next few days).

What moral issues are you struggling with these days?
How can this Christian community help you to find your footing in responding to them?
What issues aren’t we seeing?

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
I’ve written several versions of this post trying to get to the bottom of what, exactly, I was doing for my time at Wild Goose Festival last week. Part of the standard clergy employment agreement is to have two weeks of “continuing education” time. I’ve gone to Wild Goose Festival now three times as part of that, and also used the time for retreats and conferences. So there is a sense of accountability around it—our parishes generously provide for this (and offer some funding!) in addition to vacation, so I want to try to share this with you.

I’m glad to include links of everything I saw—a lot of the presentations were things the presenters have offered before, so information is easy to convey. I will be glad to send you links. But the experience isn’t about data. What it is about is the amazing sense of how God was working in the lives of the people I met and listened to. Almost every person I heard had a deep sense of Scripture. I did the math and I’ve preached at least 400 sermons. I know some things about the Bible. But the way that Mark Charles, a Navajo activist and educator, talked about how white settlers in the Americas lacked a “land covenant” with God to guide our relationship, or the way Bree Newsome talked about how Jesus worked for peace, not order, or how Tony Campolo talked about the love of Jesus moved in his heart to advocate for GLBT persons in the evangelical movement—literally, OMG.

I have heretical moments, but by and large I think my theology about Jesus is pretty sound. But that’s my theology. My passion for Jesus is more in sacrament and symbol and church and service. It’s more intellection and less clear than “Ok, Lord, I’ll climb that pole.” I’d be afraid to climb a flag pole just for the sake of the height, much less risking arrest and the legitimate possibility of being shot. But Bree Newsome pointed out that Jesus was mostly just in the Temple when he was knocking things over. He was out in the world doing his ministry where God called him to be.

So that’s my real invitation from Wild Goose Festival. Where am I muting the invitation of the Holy Spirit because of fear? Where am I unfree from a disordered attachment to comfort? In church, in my family, in my prayer? How often am I willing to do the hard work for genuine, holy, peace? To learn from marginalized voices, not because it’s my “duty,” but because Jesus is there. It’s very comfortable to say that “education” is the key to success and social mobility, and that’s often true. But where we need to lean harder on education is for people like me who don’t get arrested for failing to use a turn signal, to learn what we don’t know. As a person of privilege in this country I can be like a fish in water and not have to understand what water is. But that is not the way of Jesus.

A white anti-racist response has to come from humility. This country was founded on the theft of land and came to economic dominance through slavery. It is coming toward democracy, and is founded on some amazing ideals of freedom and equality that are coming toward being for all people. But those ideals aren’t a reality for all of its people. The inspiring part, though, is that if the truth really will set us free—and I think we have to believe it does—is that we are all on our way to the vineyard. Some will be on time, some will be late, and some will be really, really late. But as Episcopal priest Paul Fromberg said in his talk on “An apocalyptic of peace:” I don’t believe in progress. I believe in salvation.”

As a Christian I, too, believe in salvation.

Blessings,
Sara+

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week, I had the privilege to sit next to Sister Simone Campbell, keynote speaker at the Episcopal City Mission Annual Dinner. She is the executive director of the Roman Catholic Sisters’ social justice advocacy organization, NETWORK. I first heard about Sisters Simone’s work in 2012, when she and her sisters began the “Nuns on the Bus” tour and offered their critique of the much-discussed Ryan budget, a budget passed by the US House that would have gutted safety net provisions for poor Americans nationwide. Subsequent trips have promoted support for new immigrants and their 2014 “We the People” tour encouraged voters to step up and claim their place at the table. I bought her book and would be interested in talking about it with a group—please let me know if you’d be up for some light summer reading! (It really is light—she’s charming and totally conversational).

One of the things that Sister Simone talked about was the image of the Body of Christ—I know, I know, you’ve thought about it before. But she didn’t talk poetically about how she thought she was the feet or the hands of Christ. She said she thought her ministry was in being the stomach acid. Yes, the stomach acid. To digest and process and get the protein and nutrients broken down and sent to where they need to go. All you need to do, she said, is find your part to play in the world—you don’t have to fix every problem, you need to find the one thing you are called to.

The other fantastic part of the evening was watching this video about the Burgess Urban Fund. The fund was started 40 years ago as the Joint Urban Fund between the diocese and Episcopal City Mission. The seeds for it were planted in 1968, when Bishop Anson Stokes offered $10,000 in response to activists’ demands to build affordable housing on a vacant lot at Dartmouth and Columbus Streets in Boston. That action set the tone for what would become the Burgess Urban Fund, named for John Burgess, the first African American diocesan bishop in the Episcopal Church. The fund grew, supported by every parish, and over the years has given five million dollars to community organizations (including our local partner WATCH!). Our own Rev Norm Faramelli has long been affiliated with ECM and tells much of the story. Watch it here! (no, really. Watch it. It’s 8 minutes, and totally worth it).

Bishop Burgess said that he wanted to show how the Episcopal Church could be relevant to the lives of the poor. That was his “one thing,” as Sister Simone said. Not a small thing, but one thing. What’s your thing? Where are you called to meet God working in the world? Are you a hand, a foot, a heart? Or maybe something more specific, like stomach acid or blood or veins? A whole body needs every part.

Blessings,
Sara+

P.S.—for another thing I wrote this week…check out my reply to a recent New York Times article on feminism and transgender rights on my blog—”Why politics needs theology: or why feminism and trans rights are part of the same train.”

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week I was out of the office for a few days at the Making Excellent Disciples conference, a program of the diocese. The aim is to support mentoring and leadership training for newer ordinands, and I’ve had the privilege to journey as a mentor to Jack Clark, the assistant rector in Sudbury, over the last two years. One of our workshops today was on how the church is called to be prophetic. What does it mean to tell the truth when truth telling virtually ensures not everyone will be on board with you? How do you make room for conversation and mutual discernment? As we sat down one of the participants asked where our stones were—I thought he was talking about some crafty project with rocks or something—but he was really joking about whether we were going to stone our presenter, a fate met by many a prophet either literally or metaphorically.

We like when truth is spoken to power…as long as it’s our truth. There is always a fine line in finding the right way to bring politics in. Anything that has to do with power is political—it’s just part of life. On the one hand, if you sincerely want to lead on an issue, you have to actually think about how effective your proclamation is going to be. On the other—sometimes you just need to SPEAK and let the chips fall where they may. Jumping into the pulpit or your staff meeting and letting loose on what you think about Guantanamo, however, just may not be a great strategy to try to advocate for recognizing the dignity of every human being. Silence, though, also doesn’t seem to be the answer. Jesus had plenty to say about who had what and how people cared for each other in in real life—real cities and communities and families—not just in the abstract. He taught in a world not so different from our own, in that respect.

Our workshop leader on prophetic ministry was Cameron Partridge, a good friend of mine and, though he wouldn’t claim the mantle of “prophet” for himself, he has had a goodly prophetic ministry for our diocese and the wider church in advocacy for the concerns and inclusion of transgendered people. Cameron and I were ordained together in 2004, he the first trans man to be a priest in our diocese—Christ Churchers may also remember him as being here for Adah’s baptism as her godfather. He’s also filled in for me on a Sunday at least once or twice! Part of our conversation included a reading of the book of the prophet Jonah. If you haven’t read the book of Jonah lately, please do yourself a favor now and read the whole thing (it will take five minutes). One of the more resonant things about Jonah is that, while he grudgingly calls Nineveh to repentance, he totally doesn’t want to. Jonah argues with God, throwing tantrum after tantrum. But God stays in relationship, loves Jonah, and loves Nineveh. They work it out. Once he’s called to be a prophet, Jonah doesn’t straighten up and obey God—he wrestles and argues and wonders and sighs. He’s real. He trusts God with his whole self, and God trusts him. I think the wholehearted relationship between God and Jonah is a good model for what it is for parish ministry to grapple with the prophetic. They have a real relationship. They listen to each other. They’re safe.

Who challenges you in your life to think like a prophet? When have you had the courage to speak? Where do you think this community is called to do that work?

Blessings,
Sara+