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Lay Reflections and Sermons
At Bethel, reflections and sermons come from our pastor, but they also come from our members and various guest speakers.
On this page you will find some of these offerings! They are reprinted here by permission of the author. Copyrights are held by the authors. Lay Reflection Authors
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YHWY: Changing Images of God By Stephen M Lusk
August 24, 2014
We are living in a time where the nature of consciousness is changing again. Human history has recorded the dark ages, the middle ages, and The Reformation as periods of major change. We saw the movement from hunting and gathering, to the agriculture, to printing press consciousness, to the age of reason, to industrialization, to nuclear war, to the rise of digital consciousness that globally links us all who have mobile devices. The present the shift in global weather is just one of the indicators that humans live in a life system that is larger than this planet. I want to explore the images of G-o-d in order to see if we can get a bigger picture
I will briefly start with the Hebrew names for God as growing images. These are English translations of the Hebrew.
El simply means God. EL -
Bethel, the name of our church is two Hebrew characters. One is Beth and the second is El. It means House of God. Bethel was a mountain where God was experienced. Abraham was in Hebron near Mt. Bethel. Jacob had visions. Moses saw the burning bush. Jesus had a vision at the Jordan River. Thus home or house, in these cases, often refer to sacred places, often mountains, where the Spirit was experienced, changing the lives of individuals and cultures.
El Shaddai is another word for God, whose popular translation means God Almighty. We are not totally sure what the word Shaddai means. It evolved out of the Canaanite culture that was polytheistic. One of the root words is Shadad that means to destroy. The word Shada means to nurture. In the plural the word shadayim means breasts. There is a place where Abraham had a vision and there were twin peaks near that looked like breasts. Thus the phrases El Bethel and El Shaddai refer to the Spirit that spoke and was experienced at a particular sacred space. Some theologians say El Shaddai means “my ultimate sustainer and/or my ultimate destroyer.” Again, the English words God Almighty for the Hebrew El Shaddai is one of the predominate translations for G-o-d in the Bible.
Elohim is a fourth word used as an image of God. It is the plural of El and means God above all Gods. It is a phrase in the Hebrew scripture that evolved out of conflicts with the Babylonians, Assyrians, Maccabees, clear up to the Romans, all of whom were polytheists. The struggle between monotheism and polytheism is evident in the name of Elohim as one god that is more powerful than the other gods.
I would add that the Jewish custom was the rabbi was to make love with his wife during Sabbath. Before commencing to make love they were to say, “For the Lord and his Shekinah.” The reference was to the days after David when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. When the Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, the resident Jews were exiled to Babylon. The belief was that the masculine spirit of God remained in the temple ruins and his Shekina, the nurturing side of God, journeyed with the exiles. Whenever the rabbi and his wife made love with this ritual, the spirit of God was made whole and was no longer lonely. I’m not sure I believe that, but I love the story and it is a better theological principal and practice, in my opinion, than celibacy.
With Moses there comes a major shift in the images of God. Here God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, telling Moses to return to his people, talk with the Pharaoh, and help free them. Moses asks, “Who shall I say sent me.” The belief was that if you knew God’s name and spoke it, the Spirit would have to respond. One would not be able to control how God would respond. The release of power from God speaking could kill you. God spoke his name and that gave Moses the courage to return to the people where he could be killed for his slaying of a guard – even though he was a ward of the Pharaoh’s house.
This name of G-o-d gets special treatment. The name is a called the “tetragram” because it has four consonants. Ancient Hebrew was written as a script of consonants. The Torah was written by hand and has to be read, so you had to memorize the words. Later little letters were written that would be like vowels so one could know which word was being spoken. In English letters the word is YHWH. The word Jehovah is an English mispronunciation of the "tetragram." Yahweh is the popular pronunciation. In most Bibles you will see the word LORD in capital letters for God in the Old Testament. In a French translation called the Jerusalem Bible, you will see the words Elohim and Yahweh used as reflections of who wrote the passage. The book of Genesis is a collection of four to five sources where different sources were put together to make a canonized version of the Bible. From what little Hebrew I know, the pronunciation Yahweh and Jehovah is not close to the original, so we don’t have to worry to much about being blown out of the sanctuary.
Its meaning is much more important. The name of God is “I am.” The difficult part is that it’s a verb of being. Furthermore, it is a verb conjugated. I was what I was, I am that I am, and I will be what I will be. It is not a noun. We speak of God the Father. In the Lord’s Prayer today we translate it as Mother, Father God because the Lord and his Shekina even in tradition carry both nourishment and destruction. It carries both masculine and feminine attributes because real wholeness is in the union and integration of opposites. Yet G-o-d is a verb not a thing. It is more like the hyphen between I and Thou. It is like a relationship or idea or consciousness that emerges in the mind.
If God is the verb, “to be,” then all the opposites are in God. We often freeze the image of God into a personification. This diminishes the image of the reality. The essence of God is a form of presence and consciousness in motion. I like the word Spirit. I prefer, in my prayers, to imagine the nature of a Holy Spirit that is present in all things. G-o-d is an energy that is manifest in everything, yet is not a thing. My awareness of it comes in sounds, music, images, feelings, relationships, dreams, art, imagination and thoughts.
The monotheisms are based in law. It is a perception of what is right and what is wrong. Yet laws are sets of rules to enable us to understand what is fair, just, and good behavior. It tends to split good and evil. In English, evil is the word “live” spelled backwards. Spiritually, we are called to turn around, change our behavior, so wholeness can be returned. We need laws, courts, rules, teachings about what is good behavior, fair, and just. We teach these things in developmental stages until our children internalize them in their behaviors. Yet, I have to add that as an adult, I sometimes have difficulty discerning what is the just thing to do in the midst of conflict. In the court system, justice is often blind because we can’t put human subjective experience into an objective framework of laws smoothly and easily.
Thus the image of God in G-o-d’s name is the conjugated verb “I am,” thus “I exist” in the past, the present and the future, thus in time. Another word for G-o-d we use is Love. Love is a verb. We know it when we experience it in our lives, yet we can’t adequately describe it. Its essence is a mystery.
People experience the divine in a variety of ways. Gandhi inspired me. I met and was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and I would put our David Duncan along side of them. None of them were perfect, but each in their own way helped change the world. Some of them were more visible, but their lives made a difference. How they influenced us was to help us see differently.
How we interpret the divine should be diverse. I know many who say they don’t believe in G-o-d. I can’t tell anyone what to believe. There are a lot of images of God being taught that I feel are outright wrong and I wouldn’t believe in them either. I have sat with people in Hospice, whose beliefs and images of “Jesus” were not mine, but I heard their “Jesus” tell them just what they needed to hear to deal with their family, find peace in their soul, and prepare them for dying in peace. I worked with a Native American who struggled with loneliness and we prayed. I saw the deer, squirrels, and quail come down the hill to his apartment and comfort him. His images of G-o-d were closer to nature and nature responded bringing calmness to him. The images and connection to nature are deeper in many people whose faith is grounded in nature. The images of the feminine in Greek, Celtic, Norse, and Hinduism are more diverse and have more depth than in any of the Monotheisms.
Finding the tools to discover the images of the divine that will speak to you requires searching and discipline. I start with the word Psyche. Psyche is the root of the word psychology that is translated as the study of the mind. The word psyche is Greek and means soul. For me it is the mental place where spirit and mind come together. Brain research shows there is a portion of the brain where the neurons light up when one is practicing spiritual practices of prayer, meditation, Tai Chi, chanting, etc. This says the brain fires up during spiritual activity. One can’t argue that nothing is happening. Something is happening. Is it G-o-d? There is no proof, but can you measure a verb? You might measure the result of what a verb activated, but not the verb itself? I remember a researcher who was depressed because in his test he found he had seven variables instead of three. His research was going to take 4 or more years than he had planned.
Carl Jung, in his book Answer to Job, said, “In God all the opposites are there with tremendous display, but they do not get into one another’s way. There has to be some obstacle in order to get the split and to get observation.” (He meant as a therapist and as a person to be able to see it.) “This (he says) is the struggle between Spirit and substance.”
“God (or our image of God) has become split. All opposites are of God, thus we are vessels incarnated with a split divine spirit and thus we are filled with divine conflicts. “
Some of the deepest spiritual places are addiction groups. Whether is alcohol, drugs, food, sex, or gambling (to name a few), the 12-step program starts where Jesus started with his confession to John at his baptism. This is my obstacle that I need to face and be honest about. It is bigger than I am. It is a process where the ego lets go. Secrets are revealed in a safe community of people with similar struggles. And as one works through their issues a side of themselves they couldn’t see before is revealed and a higher power in life becomes visible. It is a power that is in us and can speak to us as clearly as it did to Jesus if our psyche is open to listening.
The late Dr. Elizabeth Howes was a Jungian Psychologist. In reality she studied under Kunkle, but had therapy with both Carl and Emma Jung. She was a spiritual guide for my parents. Walter Wink and I attended many of her seminars. Walter Wink’s book The Bible in Human Trans-formation: toward a new Paradigm for Biblical Study, 1973 Fortress Press is a summary of some of her work. Her work came from Sharman’s work with the Bible and both were fore runners to the over 200 scholars that began the Jesus Seminars. (Walter Wink was one of those scholars.)
Elizabeth wrote about Jung’s struggle in his book Answer to Job about experiencing the conflicts of opposites within you. “When you really know that what is psychically going on in you is a divine conflict – It makes all the difference in the process. – Can we temper our will with the resources of love, mercy, & wisdom, to refrain from using the forces of the dark side?”
Soon after I heard Elizabeth share these thoughts, I was talking with a woman in our group who shared that she struggled with episodes of chronic depression. She had moments where therapy, and medications were deep parts of her struggle. Moments of depression had been part of her life for a long time.
She said to me, “It has made a difference when I am in the dark depression of hell to know that my depression is not just my depression. It is God’s depression and God is struggling with me. I also feel that my struggle is not just my struggle. It is the struggle of depressed people everywhere; it is God’s struggle and my struggling and not giving up, helps God. Now even in my deepest darkness, there is a pale light and I am not alone.”
Well, these are some of my images of the verb I call spiritually divine. I increasingly cannot find adequate words to describe G-o-d. Increasingly I cannot find adequate words to describe my experience of love in its many forms. I can only say I experience a deep mystery. I am thankful for Bethel because for a while it has become a place where people have shared their stories, intimate conflicts, struggles, and understanding. I believe in learning from one another. Affirming our differences and that we are not the same as we explore and open ourselves to a deeper understanding of a reality that goes beyond specific traditions to the reality that we experience in ourselves . . .. We bring that wisdom to a world that needs it.
You who have ears let them hear,
Share your doubts and struggles as well as your insights, so the Spirit can grow in us and between us.
August 24, 2014
We are living in a time where the nature of consciousness is changing again. Human history has recorded the dark ages, the middle ages, and The Reformation as periods of major change. We saw the movement from hunting and gathering, to the agriculture, to printing press consciousness, to the age of reason, to industrialization, to nuclear war, to the rise of digital consciousness that globally links us all who have mobile devices. The present the shift in global weather is just one of the indicators that humans live in a life system that is larger than this planet. I want to explore the images of G-o-d in order to see if we can get a bigger picture
I will briefly start with the Hebrew names for God as growing images. These are English translations of the Hebrew.
El simply means God. EL -
Bethel, the name of our church is two Hebrew characters. One is Beth and the second is El. It means House of God. Bethel was a mountain where God was experienced. Abraham was in Hebron near Mt. Bethel. Jacob had visions. Moses saw the burning bush. Jesus had a vision at the Jordan River. Thus home or house, in these cases, often refer to sacred places, often mountains, where the Spirit was experienced, changing the lives of individuals and cultures.
El Shaddai is another word for God, whose popular translation means God Almighty. We are not totally sure what the word Shaddai means. It evolved out of the Canaanite culture that was polytheistic. One of the root words is Shadad that means to destroy. The word Shada means to nurture. In the plural the word shadayim means breasts. There is a place where Abraham had a vision and there were twin peaks near that looked like breasts. Thus the phrases El Bethel and El Shaddai refer to the Spirit that spoke and was experienced at a particular sacred space. Some theologians say El Shaddai means “my ultimate sustainer and/or my ultimate destroyer.” Again, the English words God Almighty for the Hebrew El Shaddai is one of the predominate translations for G-o-d in the Bible.
Elohim is a fourth word used as an image of God. It is the plural of El and means God above all Gods. It is a phrase in the Hebrew scripture that evolved out of conflicts with the Babylonians, Assyrians, Maccabees, clear up to the Romans, all of whom were polytheists. The struggle between monotheism and polytheism is evident in the name of Elohim as one god that is more powerful than the other gods.
I would add that the Jewish custom was the rabbi was to make love with his wife during Sabbath. Before commencing to make love they were to say, “For the Lord and his Shekinah.” The reference was to the days after David when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. When the Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, the resident Jews were exiled to Babylon. The belief was that the masculine spirit of God remained in the temple ruins and his Shekina, the nurturing side of God, journeyed with the exiles. Whenever the rabbi and his wife made love with this ritual, the spirit of God was made whole and was no longer lonely. I’m not sure I believe that, but I love the story and it is a better theological principal and practice, in my opinion, than celibacy.
With Moses there comes a major shift in the images of God. Here God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, telling Moses to return to his people, talk with the Pharaoh, and help free them. Moses asks, “Who shall I say sent me.” The belief was that if you knew God’s name and spoke it, the Spirit would have to respond. One would not be able to control how God would respond. The release of power from God speaking could kill you. God spoke his name and that gave Moses the courage to return to the people where he could be killed for his slaying of a guard – even though he was a ward of the Pharaoh’s house.
This name of G-o-d gets special treatment. The name is a called the “tetragram” because it has four consonants. Ancient Hebrew was written as a script of consonants. The Torah was written by hand and has to be read, so you had to memorize the words. Later little letters were written that would be like vowels so one could know which word was being spoken. In English letters the word is YHWH. The word Jehovah is an English mispronunciation of the "tetragram." Yahweh is the popular pronunciation. In most Bibles you will see the word LORD in capital letters for God in the Old Testament. In a French translation called the Jerusalem Bible, you will see the words Elohim and Yahweh used as reflections of who wrote the passage. The book of Genesis is a collection of four to five sources where different sources were put together to make a canonized version of the Bible. From what little Hebrew I know, the pronunciation Yahweh and Jehovah is not close to the original, so we don’t have to worry to much about being blown out of the sanctuary.
Its meaning is much more important. The name of God is “I am.” The difficult part is that it’s a verb of being. Furthermore, it is a verb conjugated. I was what I was, I am that I am, and I will be what I will be. It is not a noun. We speak of God the Father. In the Lord’s Prayer today we translate it as Mother, Father God because the Lord and his Shekina even in tradition carry both nourishment and destruction. It carries both masculine and feminine attributes because real wholeness is in the union and integration of opposites. Yet G-o-d is a verb not a thing. It is more like the hyphen between I and Thou. It is like a relationship or idea or consciousness that emerges in the mind.
If God is the verb, “to be,” then all the opposites are in God. We often freeze the image of God into a personification. This diminishes the image of the reality. The essence of God is a form of presence and consciousness in motion. I like the word Spirit. I prefer, in my prayers, to imagine the nature of a Holy Spirit that is present in all things. G-o-d is an energy that is manifest in everything, yet is not a thing. My awareness of it comes in sounds, music, images, feelings, relationships, dreams, art, imagination and thoughts.
The monotheisms are based in law. It is a perception of what is right and what is wrong. Yet laws are sets of rules to enable us to understand what is fair, just, and good behavior. It tends to split good and evil. In English, evil is the word “live” spelled backwards. Spiritually, we are called to turn around, change our behavior, so wholeness can be returned. We need laws, courts, rules, teachings about what is good behavior, fair, and just. We teach these things in developmental stages until our children internalize them in their behaviors. Yet, I have to add that as an adult, I sometimes have difficulty discerning what is the just thing to do in the midst of conflict. In the court system, justice is often blind because we can’t put human subjective experience into an objective framework of laws smoothly and easily.
Thus the image of God in G-o-d’s name is the conjugated verb “I am,” thus “I exist” in the past, the present and the future, thus in time. Another word for G-o-d we use is Love. Love is a verb. We know it when we experience it in our lives, yet we can’t adequately describe it. Its essence is a mystery.
People experience the divine in a variety of ways. Gandhi inspired me. I met and was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and I would put our David Duncan along side of them. None of them were perfect, but each in their own way helped change the world. Some of them were more visible, but their lives made a difference. How they influenced us was to help us see differently.
How we interpret the divine should be diverse. I know many who say they don’t believe in G-o-d. I can’t tell anyone what to believe. There are a lot of images of God being taught that I feel are outright wrong and I wouldn’t believe in them either. I have sat with people in Hospice, whose beliefs and images of “Jesus” were not mine, but I heard their “Jesus” tell them just what they needed to hear to deal with their family, find peace in their soul, and prepare them for dying in peace. I worked with a Native American who struggled with loneliness and we prayed. I saw the deer, squirrels, and quail come down the hill to his apartment and comfort him. His images of G-o-d were closer to nature and nature responded bringing calmness to him. The images and connection to nature are deeper in many people whose faith is grounded in nature. The images of the feminine in Greek, Celtic, Norse, and Hinduism are more diverse and have more depth than in any of the Monotheisms.
Finding the tools to discover the images of the divine that will speak to you requires searching and discipline. I start with the word Psyche. Psyche is the root of the word psychology that is translated as the study of the mind. The word psyche is Greek and means soul. For me it is the mental place where spirit and mind come together. Brain research shows there is a portion of the brain where the neurons light up when one is practicing spiritual practices of prayer, meditation, Tai Chi, chanting, etc. This says the brain fires up during spiritual activity. One can’t argue that nothing is happening. Something is happening. Is it G-o-d? There is no proof, but can you measure a verb? You might measure the result of what a verb activated, but not the verb itself? I remember a researcher who was depressed because in his test he found he had seven variables instead of three. His research was going to take 4 or more years than he had planned.
Carl Jung, in his book Answer to Job, said, “In God all the opposites are there with tremendous display, but they do not get into one another’s way. There has to be some obstacle in order to get the split and to get observation.” (He meant as a therapist and as a person to be able to see it.) “This (he says) is the struggle between Spirit and substance.”
“God (or our image of God) has become split. All opposites are of God, thus we are vessels incarnated with a split divine spirit and thus we are filled with divine conflicts. “
Some of the deepest spiritual places are addiction groups. Whether is alcohol, drugs, food, sex, or gambling (to name a few), the 12-step program starts where Jesus started with his confession to John at his baptism. This is my obstacle that I need to face and be honest about. It is bigger than I am. It is a process where the ego lets go. Secrets are revealed in a safe community of people with similar struggles. And as one works through their issues a side of themselves they couldn’t see before is revealed and a higher power in life becomes visible. It is a power that is in us and can speak to us as clearly as it did to Jesus if our psyche is open to listening.
The late Dr. Elizabeth Howes was a Jungian Psychologist. In reality she studied under Kunkle, but had therapy with both Carl and Emma Jung. She was a spiritual guide for my parents. Walter Wink and I attended many of her seminars. Walter Wink’s book The Bible in Human Trans-formation: toward a new Paradigm for Biblical Study, 1973 Fortress Press is a summary of some of her work. Her work came from Sharman’s work with the Bible and both were fore runners to the over 200 scholars that began the Jesus Seminars. (Walter Wink was one of those scholars.)
Elizabeth wrote about Jung’s struggle in his book Answer to Job about experiencing the conflicts of opposites within you. “When you really know that what is psychically going on in you is a divine conflict – It makes all the difference in the process. – Can we temper our will with the resources of love, mercy, & wisdom, to refrain from using the forces of the dark side?”
Soon after I heard Elizabeth share these thoughts, I was talking with a woman in our group who shared that she struggled with episodes of chronic depression. She had moments where therapy, and medications were deep parts of her struggle. Moments of depression had been part of her life for a long time.
She said to me, “It has made a difference when I am in the dark depression of hell to know that my depression is not just my depression. It is God’s depression and God is struggling with me. I also feel that my struggle is not just my struggle. It is the struggle of depressed people everywhere; it is God’s struggle and my struggling and not giving up, helps God. Now even in my deepest darkness, there is a pale light and I am not alone.”
Well, these are some of my images of the verb I call spiritually divine. I increasingly cannot find adequate words to describe G-o-d. Increasingly I cannot find adequate words to describe my experience of love in its many forms. I can only say I experience a deep mystery. I am thankful for Bethel because for a while it has become a place where people have shared their stories, intimate conflicts, struggles, and understanding. I believe in learning from one another. Affirming our differences and that we are not the same as we explore and open ourselves to a deeper understanding of a reality that goes beyond specific traditions to the reality that we experience in ourselves . . .. We bring that wisdom to a world that needs it.
You who have ears let them hear,
Share your doubts and struggles as well as your insights, so the Spirit can grow in us and between us.
Love Thine Enemy by John Metta (10/5/14)
When I was in high school, there was a boy who hated me.
Now this wasn’t anything special. By the time I got into high school, I was well acquainted with hate. I’d seen hate in the eyes of many people who lived in The Projects, and I was even hated myself. I was hated by people for being Black, I was hated by some Black folk for not being Black enough. I was hated by kids who picked on me because I was too weak. Nearly every day, I was up against the fence behind the dugout at public school 81 being slapped in the face and punched in the stomach because of one reason or another.
Even by middle school, Hate and me were old friends. In fact, we were so well acquainted that I remember in thinking in seventh grade and realizing that I couldn’t change it while in the same school, but that I could go to high school and decide to not get beaten up.
And that’s what I did. On the first day of high school, I walked in with a swagger– all ripped jeans and attitude. I had all the confidence in the world.
It was a lie, of course, but I held it up, pretending to be something that I clearly wasn’t. Throughout high school, I was the guy wearing the crazy Sex Pistols T-shirts, or a T-shirt with “Adolf Hitler’s (canceled) European Tour,” or the big happy face with a bullet hole in it’s head.
“I’m gonna be whatever I want to be,” I was saying. “You don’t have to like me, but if you don’t, you’d better just leave me the hell alone.”
Turns out fake confidence can breed real confidence, and I ended up one of the popular kids. I was one of 6 members of The Zöo Cröo– the most popular “clique” in the school.1. We literally had the parties that you see in movies2. Our parties were so popular that we even had groupies, and kids still talked about The Zöo Cröo years after we’d graduated. I’d gone from hated nerd to, strangely, popular pillar. Everyone liked me.
Everyone except Brent Billingsley.3
Now, as I said, I was well versed in hate, but what I couldn’t figure out about this guy was why he hated me. It wasn’t because of my race, or my friends– hell, my best friends and my cousins were close friends with him. They all said we’d really like each other. There was nothing I could pin it to. It was the first time I experienced someone hating me for no reason at all. That’s a tough place to live.
And this wasn’t a quiet hate. Third day of school sophomore year and Brent storms into chemistry class and announces it. Here I am, happy little me with my ripped jeans and silly T-shirt minding my own business, and he walks in, slams his book down on the desk and shouts to everyone in the room that I’m a fucking asshole. Seriously. The teacher was there and everything. This dude hated me with a vengeance. And I had not said one single word to him– ever.
I thought about Brent more than I needed to– in high school and after– and it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that I figured out what the deal was.
You see, I wasn’t a dumb kid, but let’s say that I didn’t always think everything through. Now a days , if I saw an Adolf Hitler’s European Tour T-shirt, it would give me pause, and probably make me angry. But then it made me laugh: “Ha, look! The Russian and Brittish dates are all cancelled! That’s funny!”
Here’s the thing: Brent was gay.
That didn’t mean anything to me. I literally couldn’t care less at the time if someone was gay or not– what business is that of mine? But here I am, walking around with a smiley face on a T-shirt– a very open symbol of the Gay Pride movement at the time– and I choose to wear the one with a bullet hole in its forehead.
Again, I just thought it was funny. I didn’t give two seconds to the thought that it would have meaning. But it had a very violent meaning to Brent. That’s what Brent thought about me: Violently anti-gay messages, Sex Pistols and other punk T-shirts, probably borderline skinhead since he’s wearing Adolf Hitler T-shirts, too.
Brent hated me because I told the entire world that I hated him and everyone like him.
Looking back, I have to say that I’d probably be on Brent’s side about this. I didn’t know it at the time, but man was I a fucking asshole!
This is where Jesus steps in to say a few words. Those words are “Love Thine Enemy.”
Now, when I first heard this saying as a child, I have to admit that it was one more piece of proof that you Christians are all bat-shit crazy. Love your enemy? What? Like just let anyone walk all over you anytime they want? Good luck with that, crazy-ass people.
But the older I got, the more I thought about things in context. If I think back to what Jesus might have been saying in the context of his time, his statement of “love thine enemy” makes all the sense in the world.
If you look at it from a certain perspective, I was a Roman Centurion in high school. I was just some punk kid trying to act cool and not get beat up, wearing clothes that I thought made me look tough, and toeing the line of the cultural (punk) standards of the time.
Brent, meanwhile, was an occupied Jew.
The Romans weren’t doing anything wrong– most were very thoughtfully and conscientiously obeying the laws and social codes of their time. The Romans were just being good people. They didn’t hate the Jews. Most didn’t even think about the Jews, let alone hate them.
I had nothing at all against Brent. I just didn’t have to think about what my choice of shirt meant to the guy– in fact, I didn’t have to think of that guy at all. That was my ability as a Roman.
As a Roman, I lived in a position of privilege.
This points to something I’ve started calling Institutional Oppression,4 and I’d bet every single one of us has been on both sides of this.
I’m reminded of Institutional Oppression all the time. Hearing people belittle someone because of darker skin, hearing Barbara talk about her time as a female aviation engineer in the Navy– having men treat her like crap. Even walking down the street at night and not thinking about what I look like, or how a woman might feel if I happen to be walking behind her.
I’m just walking down the street. I’m not thinking about that woman at all.
Because I’m in a position of privilege.
I’ve been both the Roman and the Jew, and that makes me think Jesus wasn’t saying “Love your enemy. Just give up and let the enemy win.” What Jesus was saying is that The Roman is just as oppressed by his system as we are– he is just too blind to see it.
I think about this when I think about Brent. I was living in an oppressive world that even pushed ME for being different– yet I was too blind to see the world for what it was. Brent, meanwhile, could see. He was outside the system of oppression. In a strange sense, he was looking in. I ask you: Who is the truly oppressed here? Even under assault, Brent could see the truth, he could walk with open eyes and lived with a moral awareness.
I, meanwhile, was just a clueless Roman.
Love Thine Enemy. It means help them, teach them, show them. You don’t teach people you hate, you avoid or you kill them. That only leads to more hate, more oppression. But if you can bring yourself to love them, if you can show them their world. If you can teach them, then real peace can happen.
Not always, of course. Some people really are just complete fucking assholes. Some people even really deserve to die.5 But I think more often than not we hold anger and animosity against those who simply don’t know any better– and perhaps many of them would want to know.
I know it was my fault for being an idiot in high school, I’d never blame Brent for that. But I do wish that he had opened my eyes then. I wish he hadn’t hated me. I wish he’d loved me, and tried to teach me. I would’ve apologized, and been embarrassed. I’m sure we could’ve been really good friends.
I didn’t ask to be a Roman back then. I would’ve tried to be more Jewish if I’d known.
Here’s the thing: We all live on both sides of Institutional Oppression– I’m a minority, but I’m also man. You might feel oppressed as a woman, but might also be white and relatively well off. We all live in a world where others are oppressed, and we all live in a world where we– intentionally or not– oppress others.
I think Jesus realized this. He might have been saying Love Thine Enemy because he knew that, sometimes– often when we don’t even realize it– we are the enemy.
So the question I leave you today with is this: What if you are the Roman?
Now this wasn’t anything special. By the time I got into high school, I was well acquainted with hate. I’d seen hate in the eyes of many people who lived in The Projects, and I was even hated myself. I was hated by people for being Black, I was hated by some Black folk for not being Black enough. I was hated by kids who picked on me because I was too weak. Nearly every day, I was up against the fence behind the dugout at public school 81 being slapped in the face and punched in the stomach because of one reason or another.
Even by middle school, Hate and me were old friends. In fact, we were so well acquainted that I remember in thinking in seventh grade and realizing that I couldn’t change it while in the same school, but that I could go to high school and decide to not get beaten up.
And that’s what I did. On the first day of high school, I walked in with a swagger– all ripped jeans and attitude. I had all the confidence in the world.
It was a lie, of course, but I held it up, pretending to be something that I clearly wasn’t. Throughout high school, I was the guy wearing the crazy Sex Pistols T-shirts, or a T-shirt with “Adolf Hitler’s (canceled) European Tour,” or the big happy face with a bullet hole in it’s head.
“I’m gonna be whatever I want to be,” I was saying. “You don’t have to like me, but if you don’t, you’d better just leave me the hell alone.”
Turns out fake confidence can breed real confidence, and I ended up one of the popular kids. I was one of 6 members of The Zöo Cröo– the most popular “clique” in the school.1. We literally had the parties that you see in movies2. Our parties were so popular that we even had groupies, and kids still talked about The Zöo Cröo years after we’d graduated. I’d gone from hated nerd to, strangely, popular pillar. Everyone liked me.
Everyone except Brent Billingsley.3
Now, as I said, I was well versed in hate, but what I couldn’t figure out about this guy was why he hated me. It wasn’t because of my race, or my friends– hell, my best friends and my cousins were close friends with him. They all said we’d really like each other. There was nothing I could pin it to. It was the first time I experienced someone hating me for no reason at all. That’s a tough place to live.
And this wasn’t a quiet hate. Third day of school sophomore year and Brent storms into chemistry class and announces it. Here I am, happy little me with my ripped jeans and silly T-shirt minding my own business, and he walks in, slams his book down on the desk and shouts to everyone in the room that I’m a fucking asshole. Seriously. The teacher was there and everything. This dude hated me with a vengeance. And I had not said one single word to him– ever.
I thought about Brent more than I needed to– in high school and after– and it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that I figured out what the deal was.
You see, I wasn’t a dumb kid, but let’s say that I didn’t always think everything through. Now a days , if I saw an Adolf Hitler’s European Tour T-shirt, it would give me pause, and probably make me angry. But then it made me laugh: “Ha, look! The Russian and Brittish dates are all cancelled! That’s funny!”
Here’s the thing: Brent was gay.
That didn’t mean anything to me. I literally couldn’t care less at the time if someone was gay or not– what business is that of mine? But here I am, walking around with a smiley face on a T-shirt– a very open symbol of the Gay Pride movement at the time– and I choose to wear the one with a bullet hole in its forehead.
Again, I just thought it was funny. I didn’t give two seconds to the thought that it would have meaning. But it had a very violent meaning to Brent. That’s what Brent thought about me: Violently anti-gay messages, Sex Pistols and other punk T-shirts, probably borderline skinhead since he’s wearing Adolf Hitler T-shirts, too.
Brent hated me because I told the entire world that I hated him and everyone like him.
Looking back, I have to say that I’d probably be on Brent’s side about this. I didn’t know it at the time, but man was I a fucking asshole!
This is where Jesus steps in to say a few words. Those words are “Love Thine Enemy.”
Now, when I first heard this saying as a child, I have to admit that it was one more piece of proof that you Christians are all bat-shit crazy. Love your enemy? What? Like just let anyone walk all over you anytime they want? Good luck with that, crazy-ass people.
But the older I got, the more I thought about things in context. If I think back to what Jesus might have been saying in the context of his time, his statement of “love thine enemy” makes all the sense in the world.
If you look at it from a certain perspective, I was a Roman Centurion in high school. I was just some punk kid trying to act cool and not get beat up, wearing clothes that I thought made me look tough, and toeing the line of the cultural (punk) standards of the time.
Brent, meanwhile, was an occupied Jew.
The Romans weren’t doing anything wrong– most were very thoughtfully and conscientiously obeying the laws and social codes of their time. The Romans were just being good people. They didn’t hate the Jews. Most didn’t even think about the Jews, let alone hate them.
I had nothing at all against Brent. I just didn’t have to think about what my choice of shirt meant to the guy– in fact, I didn’t have to think of that guy at all. That was my ability as a Roman.
As a Roman, I lived in a position of privilege.
This points to something I’ve started calling Institutional Oppression,4 and I’d bet every single one of us has been on both sides of this.
I’m reminded of Institutional Oppression all the time. Hearing people belittle someone because of darker skin, hearing Barbara talk about her time as a female aviation engineer in the Navy– having men treat her like crap. Even walking down the street at night and not thinking about what I look like, or how a woman might feel if I happen to be walking behind her.
I’m just walking down the street. I’m not thinking about that woman at all.
Because I’m in a position of privilege.
I’ve been both the Roman and the Jew, and that makes me think Jesus wasn’t saying “Love your enemy. Just give up and let the enemy win.” What Jesus was saying is that The Roman is just as oppressed by his system as we are– he is just too blind to see it.
I think about this when I think about Brent. I was living in an oppressive world that even pushed ME for being different– yet I was too blind to see the world for what it was. Brent, meanwhile, could see. He was outside the system of oppression. In a strange sense, he was looking in. I ask you: Who is the truly oppressed here? Even under assault, Brent could see the truth, he could walk with open eyes and lived with a moral awareness.
I, meanwhile, was just a clueless Roman.
Love Thine Enemy. It means help them, teach them, show them. You don’t teach people you hate, you avoid or you kill them. That only leads to more hate, more oppression. But if you can bring yourself to love them, if you can show them their world. If you can teach them, then real peace can happen.
Not always, of course. Some people really are just complete fucking assholes. Some people even really deserve to die.5 But I think more often than not we hold anger and animosity against those who simply don’t know any better– and perhaps many of them would want to know.
I know it was my fault for being an idiot in high school, I’d never blame Brent for that. But I do wish that he had opened my eyes then. I wish he hadn’t hated me. I wish he’d loved me, and tried to teach me. I would’ve apologized, and been embarrassed. I’m sure we could’ve been really good friends.
I didn’t ask to be a Roman back then. I would’ve tried to be more Jewish if I’d known.
Here’s the thing: We all live on both sides of Institutional Oppression– I’m a minority, but I’m also man. You might feel oppressed as a woman, but might also be white and relatively well off. We all live in a world where others are oppressed, and we all live in a world where we– intentionally or not– oppress others.
I think Jesus realized this. He might have been saying Love Thine Enemy because he knew that, sometimes– often when we don’t even realize it– we are the enemy.
So the question I leave you today with is this: What if you are the Roman?
- I use quotes around ‘clique’ because, strangely, The Zöo Cröo actually had one (and only one) member from almost every real clique in the school– it was sort of a meta clique
- We actually modeled a KeyMaster– the person responsible for making sure no-one drove home drunk– based on the movie Say Anything
- The name has been changed, the story remains the same
- One of my friends points out that this concept is called Kyriarchy– a term dubbed in 1992 by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. There’s a very interesting Wikipedia article about it
- Hitler? Yeah, let’s go back in time and just put a bullet in his head and be done with it
Seeking a New Foundation by John Metta
I don’t usually speak out during the discussion portion of our reflections. Rather, I jot notes in my journal. I need more time to process things, and I process by writing, so I take the thoughts home and write about them later. I’ve had some incredible things to write about, here. One of the most moving was how stories are important to us (A subject that I have written on myself). But also talks on how church is the guardian of our culture, and how each of us are responsible for the environment in which we live. Such great things to write about, I’m humbled to be standing here following such speakers.
I’ll start with a bit of my story, so we can place me within a context. I got a dual bachelors in Cultural Anthropology and Geology studying our relationship to the environment, specifically river systems. My master’s is also a dual degree, in Water Resources Geography and Ecological Engineering. I am simultaneously a “soft” scientist, a “hard” scientist, and an engineer, and my work was at the junction of planning, resource management, and environmental protection.
There’s a lot of really positive work going on out there. For instance, a rancher in Eastern Oregon who spent 20 years using grazing to restore a stream. Sometimes, we push things so far that Mother Nature can’t actually get back herself. If humans disappeared, the system would never restore itself to a pre-human state. This rancher knew that it would take humans to fix the stream. What he did is graze his cows early, when the pioneering weedy species tried to establish, and then moved his cows to let the native grasses overtake them. He did a lot more, of course, but over two decades of slow, hard work, this super-conservative, right-wing rancher managed to restore this formerly fetid pool to a clear, cold, salmon bearing stream. That’s the kind of work I wanted to do, and this is the context from which I come.
When I decided to speak, I worried about finding an appropriate topic, one that I truly believed in, but that was appropriate to a church audience. I went to my journal and found notes from one of our first visits here. Pastor John said “Bet on the hen because the fox is on the prowl.” Using an analogy from Jesus that was unfamiliar to me, he said that our legislators in Salem and Washington are foxes and hungry wolves because they won’t address climate change. This resonated with me, so I got fired up about a good environmental speech filled with piss and vinegar. After all, I know how much there is to be done, and how little they are doing about it.
At the same time, I was writing an unrelated essay and came across some notes I had about Robin Dunbar. It’s funny how something can sit in the back of your mind, unconsidered and forgotten, but fermenting away, until a forgotten note about a completely different topic causes a click in your brain and makes you change your perspective.
Robin Dunbar was an Anthropologist who studied human social cohesion (primate cohesion, actually). He noticed that the social group size of primates is a function of biology. There is a cognitive limit to the size of our stable social relationships, and that number is a result of the size of this part of our brain called the neocortex. He gave a range for this size in humans: 100 to 230, commonly seen as the rough average of 150. This size is used now in everything from Economics to Game Theory and from Governance Policy to Education.
Think about that for a moment. We can only maintain social cohesion with this very tiny number of individuals, yet we manage to have cities, states, regional cooperative organizations, countries, multi-country trade agreements, The Eurozone, etc.
Social cohesion is a big topic. It involves social management, social welfare and protection, social promotion. It really underlies everything we do. We, the human species, had a restriction, and we came up with language and culture to break those boundaries of Mother Nature. But the fundamental restriction is still there: About 150 people. After that, the signals that bind us are weaker and weaker.
I was thinking about Dunbar’s number and playing a thought experiment with myself. Do I think like that? I have all these degrees about saving the environment, so surely not. Even assuming that the number is an order of magnitude higher– two even. At 10,000 people– basically the part of The Gorge that I live in. Am I so limited? Surely I think larger than that.
As I write my angry letters to Salem about coal trains passing through my home, however, I have to realize that it really is just my home I care about. My core social sphere. If the trains hit the coast at San Francisco, I really wouldn’t care at all– I wouldn’t even know about them. It’s not about The Environment, it’s about MY environment.
I’m not arguing about China actually burning the coal (so much worse than “dust”), because if I were, I’d be a hypocrite. We should fight China burning what we burn here in the US? (Not in the PNW. We stand proud with renewable power and blame salmon numbers on sea lions).
I’m writing not as moral superior, but as moral hypocrite. Because if I truly were to argue that everything and anything should be done to stop global warming (and make no mistake, my arguments about coal– or anything– always come back to climate change), I wouldn’t come to Bethel, since I pass a dozen churches that I could walk to before I even get to the bridge that I have to drive across to come here. If I thought everything should be done, I would not own a house, or have a 401(k) plan. Because my retirement and the value of my house both rest on a premise that the economy will grow- and a constantly growing economy is a cancer to The Earth. I have investments, I drive around in my really walkable town. The more I look at my moral highground, the lower it seems.
And what about those foxes? I’m allowed to limit my argument about coal trains to my backyard, they don’t have that luxury. I don’t have to think about the people or the economy in Wyoming. I don’t have to concern myself with the living standards of people in China. And I really don’t have to care about Wyoming’s effect on the ongoing political and trade relationships between China and the US.
They have to think about those things. And the more I think about what they have to think about, the more I realize that those foxes are doing a really amazing job.
Because they really are breaking the boundaries of Dunbar’s number. They’re thinking about the social stability of millions– and they are balancing the conflicting demands that we put on them. “Hey, make damn sure you keep those coal trains out of my Gorge– but keep the US economy strong, because it better not effect my retirement plan!” Is it any wonder they don’t get everything right?
Just before I got to OSU for grad school, the rancher that I mentioned worked with the engineering department, the state, and the BLM to try to get his radical new ranching practices adopted as the standard. He wanted to try to bring back the streams of Eastern Oregon– because it’s stream health that helps his ranch be successful. In some places, there would actually be increases in ranching, which (counter-intuitively) would help restore salmon bearing watersheds that were too trashed even to have cows live there. It was a really good plan, a win-win that pleased both sides of the political aisle. It was also a plan that was fought, and ultimately defeated, by an environmental organization.
Gathering signatures and support, they fought “over-grazing Oregon’s watersheds.” That’s something we can all agree is bad, right? “Stop over-grazing!” They fought what could have been one of the most positive salmon restoration project in Eastern Oregon. Why? The organization in question actually increased their numbers during this battle, because it mobilized a lot of people’s anger. Sadly, Oregon streams lost out. They are now worse off because an environmental organization chose mobilizing people’s anger and getting new signups (and thus dollars). It could have been a great, a magical, cooperation between formerly competing stakeholders who would both get what they want. The environmental organizations called it “selling out.”
I saw this a lot while working at Oregon Department of Environmental Quality as a Water Quality Analyst. Centered downtown at Pioneer Square, I’d work all day trying to make Oregon’s watersheds better. Then at lunch, I’d battle my way through petition-holders who were often fighting the same collaborative efforts we were trying to move forward. There’s so much resentment that any cooperation with “the other side” is a sign of weakness, of failure. And nothing motivates people to sign up and donate money like weakness, failure, and a good fight. Time and again, really great environmental plans were shot down in favor of member signups by environmental organizations.
So, I wonder: Who are the foxes, here?
Anger, resentment, frustration, and animosity. This is the foundation that our environmental movement rests upon. And this brings me back to Dunbar’s Number, and our need for a new foundation.
If we extend our arms, and think of this as the entire history of the Earth, then humans have existed as a species for the barest fraction of my fingertip. Think of what our species has accomplished in that time. Now, if we expand that barest fraction outward to the length of our arms again, we can say that it is only in the end of our finger that we’ve been communicating with other humans in any real sense, in any real numbers.
We get angry and frustrated at our legislators and governments at their failures. Things like The Kyoto Protocol are held up as proof that our governments just don’t care, and are not willing to do what needs to be done. The foxes, we say, are on the prowl.
Never do we stop to consider that for greater than 99% of our existence as a species we have only been communicating with 150 other people! That is the extent of our biological and cultural experience. Never has our species, or any species, broken this barrier. The Kyoto Protocol, global cooperation between countries, is amazing! We are witnessing the first time ever that an entire species is coming together to communicate and create unified decisions effecting the government of an entire planet.
We argue and we complain and we protest and we never stop for six bloody seconds to think about how absolutely incredible this is. We are barely newborns as a species, and yet we are cooperating to orchestrate our interactions over an entire planet! Of course the Kyoto Protocol failed! It was bound to “fail!” What truly and utterly astounds me is that we got as far as we did!
The greatest failure of the environmental movement over the past 50 years is that it has utterly failed to recognize the wonder and beauty of our human accomplishments. We have built the roof of our movement on faulty pillars, and created a house in which no-one wants to live. Anger, frustration, resentment, animosity, these are emotions that pop into our head quickly, taking neither thought nor consideration. These are easy emotions, unconscious emotions. These are a child’s emotions. Are these the emotions we want to found our actions upon?
Think of your best friend, the closest person you have in the entire world, now think about how hard that person would be around if the four dominant emotions they possessed were anger, resentment, frustration, and animosity. Now think of how hard it would be to relate to that person if they were not your friend. You would avoid them at best, and shun and dehumanize them at worst. Is it any surprise that the environmental movement is shunned by others? Even I, with advanced degrees in environmental protection, shut myself to my own movement at times.
Now, think about what could be accomplished if we had built environmentalism’s roof with pillars of optimism, cooperation, empathy, and compassion. Think of what we could accomplish if we did not focus on the battle, but on joining forces. If we pointed out not the failures, but the great successes. If we looked at people with different viewpoints not with anger, but with compassion and empathy.
We are to the world what we show. Until we look to the world with optimism and compassion, the world will look to us with the anger and animosity we show it.
We must build a new foundation.
I reject any environmental message that rests on the pillars of anger, resentment, frustration, and animosity. Such a message coming to me will fall upon deaf ears. The Mahatma said that we should be the change we wish to see in the world. I do not wish to live in an angry world. I do not wish to live in a frustrated world. And I will accept no environmental message that founds itself in such, because negativity cannot end in a positive outcome.
I present to the world my sincere attempt at understanding for the change that has to be done, but also for the challenges and great strides we are already making. I present to the world compassion for all of humanity as we struggle to make such great strides. I present myself to the world as a person seeking cooperation from those who would make me an enemy, in that I may learn something of our world from them.
I present this optimistic view of our world, our situation, as we embark on this absolutely beautiful reality of an entire species communicating and cooperating across an entire planet.
This is the world I want to live in.
I don’t usually speak out during the discussion portion of our reflections. Rather, I jot notes in my journal. I need more time to process things, and I process by writing, so I take the thoughts home and write about them later. I’ve had some incredible things to write about, here. One of the most moving was how stories are important to us (A subject that I have written on myself). But also talks on how church is the guardian of our culture, and how each of us are responsible for the environment in which we live. Such great things to write about, I’m humbled to be standing here following such speakers.
I’ll start with a bit of my story, so we can place me within a context. I got a dual bachelors in Cultural Anthropology and Geology studying our relationship to the environment, specifically river systems. My master’s is also a dual degree, in Water Resources Geography and Ecological Engineering. I am simultaneously a “soft” scientist, a “hard” scientist, and an engineer, and my work was at the junction of planning, resource management, and environmental protection.
There’s a lot of really positive work going on out there. For instance, a rancher in Eastern Oregon who spent 20 years using grazing to restore a stream. Sometimes, we push things so far that Mother Nature can’t actually get back herself. If humans disappeared, the system would never restore itself to a pre-human state. This rancher knew that it would take humans to fix the stream. What he did is graze his cows early, when the pioneering weedy species tried to establish, and then moved his cows to let the native grasses overtake them. He did a lot more, of course, but over two decades of slow, hard work, this super-conservative, right-wing rancher managed to restore this formerly fetid pool to a clear, cold, salmon bearing stream. That’s the kind of work I wanted to do, and this is the context from which I come.
When I decided to speak, I worried about finding an appropriate topic, one that I truly believed in, but that was appropriate to a church audience. I went to my journal and found notes from one of our first visits here. Pastor John said “Bet on the hen because the fox is on the prowl.” Using an analogy from Jesus that was unfamiliar to me, he said that our legislators in Salem and Washington are foxes and hungry wolves because they won’t address climate change. This resonated with me, so I got fired up about a good environmental speech filled with piss and vinegar. After all, I know how much there is to be done, and how little they are doing about it.
At the same time, I was writing an unrelated essay and came across some notes I had about Robin Dunbar. It’s funny how something can sit in the back of your mind, unconsidered and forgotten, but fermenting away, until a forgotten note about a completely different topic causes a click in your brain and makes you change your perspective.
Robin Dunbar was an Anthropologist who studied human social cohesion (primate cohesion, actually). He noticed that the social group size of primates is a function of biology. There is a cognitive limit to the size of our stable social relationships, and that number is a result of the size of this part of our brain called the neocortex. He gave a range for this size in humans: 100 to 230, commonly seen as the rough average of 150. This size is used now in everything from Economics to Game Theory and from Governance Policy to Education.
Think about that for a moment. We can only maintain social cohesion with this very tiny number of individuals, yet we manage to have cities, states, regional cooperative organizations, countries, multi-country trade agreements, The Eurozone, etc.
Social cohesion is a big topic. It involves social management, social welfare and protection, social promotion. It really underlies everything we do. We, the human species, had a restriction, and we came up with language and culture to break those boundaries of Mother Nature. But the fundamental restriction is still there: About 150 people. After that, the signals that bind us are weaker and weaker.
I was thinking about Dunbar’s number and playing a thought experiment with myself. Do I think like that? I have all these degrees about saving the environment, so surely not. Even assuming that the number is an order of magnitude higher– two even. At 10,000 people– basically the part of The Gorge that I live in. Am I so limited? Surely I think larger than that.
As I write my angry letters to Salem about coal trains passing through my home, however, I have to realize that it really is just my home I care about. My core social sphere. If the trains hit the coast at San Francisco, I really wouldn’t care at all– I wouldn’t even know about them. It’s not about The Environment, it’s about MY environment.
I’m not arguing about China actually burning the coal (so much worse than “dust”), because if I were, I’d be a hypocrite. We should fight China burning what we burn here in the US? (Not in the PNW. We stand proud with renewable power and blame salmon numbers on sea lions).
I’m writing not as moral superior, but as moral hypocrite. Because if I truly were to argue that everything and anything should be done to stop global warming (and make no mistake, my arguments about coal– or anything– always come back to climate change), I wouldn’t come to Bethel, since I pass a dozen churches that I could walk to before I even get to the bridge that I have to drive across to come here. If I thought everything should be done, I would not own a house, or have a 401(k) plan. Because my retirement and the value of my house both rest on a premise that the economy will grow- and a constantly growing economy is a cancer to The Earth. I have investments, I drive around in my really walkable town. The more I look at my moral highground, the lower it seems.
And what about those foxes? I’m allowed to limit my argument about coal trains to my backyard, they don’t have that luxury. I don’t have to think about the people or the economy in Wyoming. I don’t have to concern myself with the living standards of people in China. And I really don’t have to care about Wyoming’s effect on the ongoing political and trade relationships between China and the US.
They have to think about those things. And the more I think about what they have to think about, the more I realize that those foxes are doing a really amazing job.
Because they really are breaking the boundaries of Dunbar’s number. They’re thinking about the social stability of millions– and they are balancing the conflicting demands that we put on them. “Hey, make damn sure you keep those coal trains out of my Gorge– but keep the US economy strong, because it better not effect my retirement plan!” Is it any wonder they don’t get everything right?
Just before I got to OSU for grad school, the rancher that I mentioned worked with the engineering department, the state, and the BLM to try to get his radical new ranching practices adopted as the standard. He wanted to try to bring back the streams of Eastern Oregon– because it’s stream health that helps his ranch be successful. In some places, there would actually be increases in ranching, which (counter-intuitively) would help restore salmon bearing watersheds that were too trashed even to have cows live there. It was a really good plan, a win-win that pleased both sides of the political aisle. It was also a plan that was fought, and ultimately defeated, by an environmental organization.
Gathering signatures and support, they fought “over-grazing Oregon’s watersheds.” That’s something we can all agree is bad, right? “Stop over-grazing!” They fought what could have been one of the most positive salmon restoration project in Eastern Oregon. Why? The organization in question actually increased their numbers during this battle, because it mobilized a lot of people’s anger. Sadly, Oregon streams lost out. They are now worse off because an environmental organization chose mobilizing people’s anger and getting new signups (and thus dollars). It could have been a great, a magical, cooperation between formerly competing stakeholders who would both get what they want. The environmental organizations called it “selling out.”
I saw this a lot while working at Oregon Department of Environmental Quality as a Water Quality Analyst. Centered downtown at Pioneer Square, I’d work all day trying to make Oregon’s watersheds better. Then at lunch, I’d battle my way through petition-holders who were often fighting the same collaborative efforts we were trying to move forward. There’s so much resentment that any cooperation with “the other side” is a sign of weakness, of failure. And nothing motivates people to sign up and donate money like weakness, failure, and a good fight. Time and again, really great environmental plans were shot down in favor of member signups by environmental organizations.
So, I wonder: Who are the foxes, here?
Anger, resentment, frustration, and animosity. This is the foundation that our environmental movement rests upon. And this brings me back to Dunbar’s Number, and our need for a new foundation.
If we extend our arms, and think of this as the entire history of the Earth, then humans have existed as a species for the barest fraction of my fingertip. Think of what our species has accomplished in that time. Now, if we expand that barest fraction outward to the length of our arms again, we can say that it is only in the end of our finger that we’ve been communicating with other humans in any real sense, in any real numbers.
We get angry and frustrated at our legislators and governments at their failures. Things like The Kyoto Protocol are held up as proof that our governments just don’t care, and are not willing to do what needs to be done. The foxes, we say, are on the prowl.
Never do we stop to consider that for greater than 99% of our existence as a species we have only been communicating with 150 other people! That is the extent of our biological and cultural experience. Never has our species, or any species, broken this barrier. The Kyoto Protocol, global cooperation between countries, is amazing! We are witnessing the first time ever that an entire species is coming together to communicate and create unified decisions effecting the government of an entire planet.
We argue and we complain and we protest and we never stop for six bloody seconds to think about how absolutely incredible this is. We are barely newborns as a species, and yet we are cooperating to orchestrate our interactions over an entire planet! Of course the Kyoto Protocol failed! It was bound to “fail!” What truly and utterly astounds me is that we got as far as we did!
The greatest failure of the environmental movement over the past 50 years is that it has utterly failed to recognize the wonder and beauty of our human accomplishments. We have built the roof of our movement on faulty pillars, and created a house in which no-one wants to live. Anger, frustration, resentment, animosity, these are emotions that pop into our head quickly, taking neither thought nor consideration. These are easy emotions, unconscious emotions. These are a child’s emotions. Are these the emotions we want to found our actions upon?
Think of your best friend, the closest person you have in the entire world, now think about how hard that person would be around if the four dominant emotions they possessed were anger, resentment, frustration, and animosity. Now think of how hard it would be to relate to that person if they were not your friend. You would avoid them at best, and shun and dehumanize them at worst. Is it any surprise that the environmental movement is shunned by others? Even I, with advanced degrees in environmental protection, shut myself to my own movement at times.
Now, think about what could be accomplished if we had built environmentalism’s roof with pillars of optimism, cooperation, empathy, and compassion. Think of what we could accomplish if we did not focus on the battle, but on joining forces. If we pointed out not the failures, but the great successes. If we looked at people with different viewpoints not with anger, but with compassion and empathy.
We are to the world what we show. Until we look to the world with optimism and compassion, the world will look to us with the anger and animosity we show it.
We must build a new foundation.
I reject any environmental message that rests on the pillars of anger, resentment, frustration, and animosity. Such a message coming to me will fall upon deaf ears. The Mahatma said that we should be the change we wish to see in the world. I do not wish to live in an angry world. I do not wish to live in a frustrated world. And I will accept no environmental message that founds itself in such, because negativity cannot end in a positive outcome.
I present to the world my sincere attempt at understanding for the change that has to be done, but also for the challenges and great strides we are already making. I present to the world compassion for all of humanity as we struggle to make such great strides. I present myself to the world as a person seeking cooperation from those who would make me an enemy, in that I may learn something of our world from them.
I present this optimistic view of our world, our situation, as we embark on this absolutely beautiful reality of an entire species communicating and cooperating across an entire planet.
This is the world I want to live in.
Sabbath......Is it really important? by Tom Pierson
September 28, 2014
By way of introduction, I would like to say that
This is a message that I really need to hear at regular intervals.
It borrows heavily from the book Sabbath by Wayne Muller, a book that bowled me over when I first read it about 12 years ago and has again upon rereading.
Sabbath: The Commandment
- First, is it a stern order from a judgmental old man with a long white beard who demands we do this to honor him, as I imagined when I was in Sunday school many years ago (perhaps helping that image was my Sunday school teacher, an unsmiling older lady who wore her hair in a tight bun and did not tolerate nonsense from wiggly little boys). . . . Or is it something else?
- Instead of an order. . . . . could it be an invitation? Instead of a demand by God for something from us . . . . . could it possibly be a gift of something to us from God?
- If we take seriously the idea that God is love—the penetrating, encompassing, nourishing kind of love we can hardly even imagine—perhaps it has to be the latter in each case . . . . an invitation and a gift.
- Jesus says (Mk 2:27): The Sabbath was made for the good of man; man was not made for the Sabbath.
But what could be so important about remembering the Sabbath then, if it is not a demand but rather a gift and an invitation?
- The introduction of Wayne Muller’s book, for me, answers this question beautifully: (Read parts of pp 1-3, and short paragraph on p. 5)
We probably all recognize the truths in this passage for our own lives. . . but what does Sabbath have to offer as a solution? And exactly what IS Sabbath? (Definitions from the book)
- Sabbath is one day of the week, yes, but it may also be a Sabbath afternoon, a Sabbath hour, a Sabbath walk; a hot, luxurious Sabbath bath; a Sabbath breath or even a Sabbath moment . . . .
- Sabbath is a way of being in time where we remember who we are, remember what we know, and taste the gifts of spirit and eternity.
- Sabbath is like a path through the forest—a marked trail for ourselves, so if we are lost, we can find our way back to our center.
- Sabbath honors the necessary wisdom of dormancy—without dormancy, plants will die; without sleep, we will die physically. Yet if we get enough sleep physically but fail to take enough conscious rest from our work mentally, however good and worthwhile the work, we can end up dying spiritually.
- Sabbath time is not spiritually superior to our work. The practice is rather to find that balance point at which, having rested, we do our work with greater ease and joy, and bring healing and delight to our endeavors.
- Sabbath is more than the absence of work; it is not just a day off, when we catch up on television or errands. It is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is time consecrated with our attention and our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us. It allows us to hear the still small voice that God uses to speak to us.
So why don’t we rest?
- We confuse physical inactivity with real rest that allows the frantic hamster wheel in our brains to come to a stop.
- We are afraid to rest.
- We fear that not working to the max will reflect badly on our careers or on the responsibilities we have been given—we don’t want to look like we’re lazy, irresponsible, uncaring, or untrustworthy.
- We fear not making enough money to meet our obligations and fulfill our desires.
- We feel empty inside, and because it is scary to explore why that is, we fill our lives with busyness so that we don’t have to face the roots of those feelings.
- Like skipping stones on a lake, if we don’t go fast enough we might sink into the unknown darkness below.
Let’s look more deeply at what happens when we don’t rest. . . . .
· We are not good at solving problems: “Without the essential nutrients of rest, wisdom, and delight embedded in the problem-solving process itself, the solution we patch together is likely to be an obstacle to genuine relief. Born of desperation, it often contains enough fundamental inaccuracy to guarantee an equally perplexing problem will emerge as soon as it is put into place. In the soil of the quick fix is the seed of a new problem, because our quiet wisdom is unavailable.”
· We lose proper perspective. When we move through life too fast, unexpected little things can throw us off track and derail our desired outcomes. Muller uses the analogy of riding a motorcycle: “When we are driving a motorcycle at high speed, even a small stone in the road can be a deadly threat.” Likewise, when our lives are speeding, “every detail inflates in importance, everything seems more urgent than it really is, and we react with sloppy desperation.”
· We tend to use people. If we become so caught up in striving and grasping, we tend to see others as tools for leveraging our time and getting us to where we think we want to go. We become brittle and hard. We tend to see them as a means to an end, rather than as human beings deserving of our love and compassion.
· We lose touch with those who matter most in our lives.
- We are too tired to read a story to our daughter or listen deeply when she shares about something she’s afraid of.
- We don’t have the time to have a game of catch with our son before dinner, or the wisdom to encourage him when he is struggling.
- We don’t have time to eat dinner as a family and hear about how each person’s day went.
- We don’t have time to really listen to our spouses, to go on dates, or to give each other the gift of being fully present.
· We miss out on much of what makes life good.
- Like savoring our food and appreciating the love with which it was prepared.
- Like really noticing a fragrance, or allowing it to evoke cherished memories.
- Like being so preoccupied that we miss out on the humor in many situations and on the refreshing laughter that could come with seeing it.
- We tend to see only the lacks, needs, and problems in our lives; we have trouble seeing the abundance and blessing that is already there.
How then do we create the time and space needed?
- Jesus’s example—he just stopped working and did it. Note that he did not wait until everyone had been healed or cared for before stopping. He would simply stop, go off to a quiet place to be by himself, and pray. He didn’t even always let his disciples know where he was going.
- Matthew 5:15–16-- And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone.
- Luke 5:15-16-- But the news about Jesus spread all the more widely, and crowds of people came to hear him and be healed from their diseases. But he would go away to lonely places, where he prayed.
- Mark 1:33-38-- All the people of the town gathered in front of the house. Jesus healed many who were sick with all kinds of diseases and drove out many demons. . . . Very early the next morning, long before daylight, Jesus got up and left the house. We went out of town to a lonely place, where he prayed. But Simon and his companions went out searching for him, and when they found him, they said, “Everyone is looking for you.” But Jesus answered, “We must go on to the other villages around here. I have to preach in them also, because that is why I came.”
Practical possibilities for creating Sabbath—most require time and space to be alone for a while.
- Go for a slow, silent walk or stroll (without trying to get anywhere), on which you simply notice the smells, sounds, patterns, or colors; the breeze on your skins; or your breath. Don’t use the time to problem solve; it fact try not to think at all.
- Take the time to leisurely prepare a meal with fresh ingredients, and then savor the result.
- Sit back in a chair, put on your headphones, close your eyes, and listen to music for a full 30 minutes (or longer).
- Watch a spider weave a web, noting just how it does it.
- Do what it takes to get at least 7 hours of sleep per night.
- Practice yoga, tai chi, and/or some form of meditation.
- Build a fire in the fireplace or stove, pull up a comfortable chair, and curl up with a good book.
- Make music, draw or paint, write in your journal, or do whatever creative activity you are drawn to—carve out time to be creative. Schedule it in your calendar.
- Get down on the floor and play with a child.
- Create a “family time” or your own personal time one evening per week, during which time the phone is not answered, the TV remains off, and you play games, talk, or read.
- Construct a small alter somewhere in your home—a space apart—where you place photographs of loved ones or things having special meaning. Go and sit there in the evening once a week with your children, light a candle, and allow each person to share about something meaningful from the past week. It can also be a place to go for prayer and meditation.
- Give away stuff that you can live without, and have your children help decide what to give and to whom. Storing, protecting, maintaining, and even using physical possessions takes time, space, worry, money, and mental energy. (NOTE: I find this really hard to do).
- When you’re feeling burdened, find a trusted friend to confess to and pray with.
- Bless someone. Recount story of blessing the upset woman on the plane with a version of the Buddhist blessing, May you be happy, May you be at peace. What I found was that I stopped being annoyed and judgmental—I was feeling more at peace . . . . and five minutes later she was resting her head on her husband’s shoulder.
In the end. . .
· Remember that nothing lives without the rhythm of rest. It is a law firmly embedded in the fabric of nature. Life is governed by rhythms: circadian rhythms, seasons and hormonal cycles, sunsets and moonrises, the tides, and great movements of the planets and the stars.
· “Sabbath says, Be Still. Stop. There is no rush to get to the end, because we are never finished. Take time to rest, and eat, and drink, and be refreshed. And in the gentle rhythm of that refreshment, listen to the sound the heart makes as it speaks the quiet truth of what is needed [for finding peace].”
OMG! I’m having an Epiphany! by Pam Tindall
January 11, 2015 – Epiphany
Epiphany, which means “Vision of God,” traditionally falls on January 6.
“Epiphany” – you know, like “I just had an epiphany!” Really!
Epiphany means a revelation. So what is “revealed” at Epiphany? God is revealed – in human form, as Jesus. And it means that Jesus is both God and human at the same time, a challenging concept for most of us to get our heads around.
Western Christians have traditionally focused on the Visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus as the visible sign that God has entered human form. Eastern Christians take the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River as that sign. So, we commemorate both events at Epiphany.
Last week Kelly reflected on the visit of the magi to the baby Jesus. This morning I’ll share with you some things I learned as I was reading about Jesus’ baptism and what it might mean to us today as Christians and as people of faith.
Here’s where the disclaimer comes – I am not, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be, a Biblical scholar, a scholar of antiquities, a theologian, or any other kind of expert on this topic. I’m simply a woman of faith seeking to understand these challenging concepts and what God is calling me to be and do through them.
So, when I was researching the baptism of Jesus, one of the things I learned is that the Eastern Orthodox Churches perform what’s called the “Great Blessing of Waters” on Epiphany. The clergy and the people go in a procession with the cross to the nearest body of water, and the priest blesses the waters. In the Greek practice, he does this by casting a cross into the water. If swimming is feasible on the spot, any number of volunteers may try to recover the cross. The person who gets the cross first swims back and returns it to the priest, who then delivers a special blessing to the swimmer and their household. I briefly considered a reenactment of this practice, but decided this should really only be attempted in the Southern Hemisphere where it is now summer!
A fact that really got my attention is that most modern scholars view Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist as an historical event to which a high degree of certainty can be assigned. In fact, along with the crucifixion of Jesus, most scholars view it as one of the two historically certain facts about him.
So this is a real event at a real place. Jim and I have been to the place on the River Jordan where Jesus is said to have been baptized. In some ways, it is nothing very special. It’s a muddy bank on a slow-moving stretch of the Jordan, in kind of an out-of-the-way place. There are no monuments, there is no hoopla to this place. But there is incredible awe and power there. Being present there, witnessing people being quietly baptized, hearing soft voices joined in song, was a very sacred and moving experience.
I often have a hard time bridging spiritual experiences like this and the scriptures. I find the scriptures pretty challenging. I often don’t understand them, and am never quite sure how much is intended to be literal, what’s metaphorical, and how they connect to my own life in this specific time and place. This is what I love so much about our worship services at Bethel – they are intentionally designed for people like me. I love our contemporary readings, because they really help me understand the scriptures and what I’m called to, as a person of faith.
But the scriptures are the starting place, so I started my exploration of baptism there. I found that the story of the baptism of Jesus by John is told in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Gospel of John (not the same John as John the Baptist) talks about the baptism, but in a little different way. Three main things are the same in Matthew, Mark and Luke:
· The heavens open
· A thundering voice comes from the clouds, and
· The spirit of God descends on Jesus in the form of a dove.
So I was really curious to learn what scholars think these symbols mean. Scholars tell us that Jesus was baptized to, as we heard in the reading of Matthew this morning, “fulfill all righteousness,” and that Jesus consented to be baptized by John for that purpose.
“Righteousness” is an interesting word. It means morally right or justifiable. One definition I found defined righteousness as “arising from an outraged sense of justice or morality” – of doing right – “right action”. Hmmm! Maybe this is why Jesus’ baptism is considered not only an anointing, but the beginning of His ministry. His was definitely a ministry of justice, and he often spoke of right action in regards to our fellow human beings.
The opening of the heavens and the voice coming from heaven has been viewed as evidence that the Spirit of God was everywhere present – in the heavens, on earth, and in the human person of Jesus at the same time. The voice and the dove were expressions of the omni-presence of God that were suitable for humans- they could be experienced through the senses – the people could see them and hear them.
The message was that it would be no problem for God to speak from heaven, to reveal Jesus as the Messiah (the “Anointed One”), and send a manifestation of his Spirit in the form of a dove, while his human body stood in the Jordan River. My brain does a little cramp here.
But this is a little easier for me to comprehend when I reflect that God did this through hundreds of Spirit filled believers at the same time on the day of Pentecost. This omni-presence of God assures us that it is not difficult for God to commune with all of us at the same time – I like knowing that. And, in fact, it is in the opening of the heavens, the voice, and the dove descending on Jesus that John the Baptist recognizes Jesus as the Messiah. This is what the Gospel of John tells us.
So, having dealt with the symbols in the baptism story a little, I re-read the scriptures and readings for today to see if I could understand this whole Baptism thing better and find its relevance for my life today. And I could! This is how the pieces came together for me:
· Isaiah prophesies John the Baptist and Jesus.
o He describes Jesus as “God’s servant upon whom He has put his Spirit”
o And that God also puts His spirit and breath on all the people – that’s us!
o That Jesus – and we – are called to justice and right action
o That God will take Jesus – and us – by the hand and guide us in this work, and
o That “He will give us strength for it.”
· Then Walter Brueggmann assures us that:
o Although “we are still people in the dark (beset by fear, anxiety, brutality, violence and loss), we are – we could be – people of the light,”
o And so we “pray for the energy to overcome our weariness;
o And for the courage to “submit our day to God’s visions for justice” – to put our hearts, our hands and our feet into right action to bring about God’s vision for our world.
· And that beautiful writing by Macrina Wiederkehr
o Acknowledges that we struggle with faithfulness; that we don’t know what to do with such demand or such love
o But that once we accept the invitation and say yes to everything God asks of us…
o We find we have our calling – and God’s visions for the world are stronger than our fear
o And that we have the strength to live it out
So in our baptism, we, like Jesus, are anointed. First we are loved by God – not as an abstraction, but as a real individual with our individual strengths, weaknesses, habits, customs, pleasant and unpleasant sides. And God is delighted in us.
Then we are called by name, invited to, like Jesus, “submit our days to God’s visions, with deep joy and high hope,” to love others as unique, irreplaceable, finite human beings, just as God loves us.
We are called:
· To work for justice
· To take right action
· To depend on God’s everywhere-presence, and
· To claim God’s strength for the energy and courage to bring God’s vision to our world.
Maybe baptism awakens us – to our purpose and gives us what we need to live into it.
In baptism God embraces us — no matter who we are — and brings us into a family of believers. We become vital not only to our local church, but to the wider Church. We work for justice and take right action with others in our small places (our own thoughts, our individual lives, our families, our friends, our businesses, our church) and in the big places (our communities, the halls of justice, and our world). And we are promised that God – and this body of God’s faithful – will love, support and care for us as we do this – and throughout our whole lives.
So, I’m having these thoughts, and I’m getting all excited, and I’m kind of “getting it,” I think. But I’m also thinking, “Ok, so my brain is getting it a little, but I’m not feeling terribly inspired or on fire over it.”
So, I turned to Isaiah again – I really do like Isaiah. I appreciate the enormous gulf he sees between God’s holiness and human pettiness (sin). I can relate to the struggle I often hear in his poetry of trying to figure out and be true to God’s visions.
So the very next verse after the one we read today, Isaiah 43, says
1 Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are mine. (I get choked up every time I read that. That’s what God’s done in my baptism; He’s called me by name; He’s said I am HIS!)
Then Isaiah goes on to say (if I may be so bold as to paraphrase him):
You don’t have to be perfect
When you fall, you are precious to me
You are mine, no matter what
Don’t ever forget whose you are (for I claimed you at your baptism)
And I’ll be with you no matter what happens to you
I’ll be with you when you think you can’t possibly do what you think I’m calling you to do
I’ll be with you when the waters cover you, and the fires rage, and you are in the wilderness
I will give you strength
Wow.
So, each of us has been given a manifestation of God. The scriptures seem to suggest that we are given this manifestation at our baptism.
But maybe we are a manifestation of God already, just by being born as humans, like Jesus was.
· And maybe baptism is a confirmation of that manifestation and an invitation to accept our purpose for coming into human form, like Jesus – to advance God’s visions for our world.
· And maybe baptism connects us to a community of faithful to be with on our path through this life to make our purpose easier to fulfill.
· And maybe, we have a charge associated with all this blessing – to manifest the Spirit which has been given to us.
So, here’s the crux – how do I DO that?
I’m reading a book by Henri Nouwen from David Duncombe’s library. I picked it up by “accident” one day. It’s his diary from 7 months he spent in a Trappist Monastery in New York in the early 1970’s.
In one section, he reflects on the many invitations for speaking engagements that he gets, and the number he turns down with the excuse that he has no time to prepare. He became aware that he was seeing every lecture, sermon or commencement address as a new performance that called for new preparation. He said, “No wonder this attitude leads to fatigue and exhaustion. Even small daily tasks, such as talking with my own students, become anxiety-provoking burdens.”
So, he started wondering… What if he stopped fragmenting his life into a bunch of independent things that didn’t really form a unity? The question then becomes not, “Do I have time to prepare?” but, “Do I live in a state of preparedness?” Trust me, this connects to baptism.
So, that’s a very profound question to me! And it’s mighty lucky for Rick that I’d been cultivating this attitude for a couple months when he asked me to do this reflection, because I didn’t hesitate when he asked me.
Nouwen goes on to wonder that if God is his only concern, if God is the center of his interest, if all his prayers, reading, studying, speaking, and writing serve only to advance God’s visions for our world, would that be living in a state of preparedness and trust? And what would that be like?
Maybe anxiety and exhaustion is the result of a lack of single-mindedness, a lack of simplicity. He says, “I want to love God, but also to make a career. I want to be a good Christian, but also be successful. I want to be like Christ, but also popular and liked by many people. I want to be a saint, but also enjoy my sins.”
If we could live, “setting our hearts on His kingdom first,” wouldn’t many of our worries and anxieties fall away? Wouldn’t this lead to simpler living? Wouldn’t everything we do become different parts of a unified life, rather than a bunch of fragmented and competing demands?
Applied to me own life…
· Wouldn’t I know much better what is worth doing and what is not?
· What tasks & invitations I should accept and which I should refuse?
· What is mine to do and what is someone else’s?
No doubt I would have more time to pray and meditate and to be in closer contact with the Source of my strength. Surely, I’d feel less irritated, restless and stressed. I’d be a lot more present in the here and now because I’d be more certain that it’s where God wants me to be.
How does this living a life of unity connect to baptism? Well, I know through my baptism:
· That I am loved
· That God is delighted in me
· That I am a manifestation of God in human form
· That my sole purpose for being in human form is to advance God’s vision for our world
· That God is everywhere and always with me
· That I am in all this with you, my community of faith
· That I have everything I need to be successful
Reflecting on my baptism and these truths makes me realize that:
· I can live a life of unity, a life of preparedness…
· Always ready to advance God’s visions for our world…
· Sure what is mine to do…
· Trusting in God’s presence, guidance and strength…
· Relying on you to help, and
· Getting on with it.
I’d be living out my baptismal promises and charges.
Amen?
Epiphany, which means “Vision of God,” traditionally falls on January 6.
“Epiphany” – you know, like “I just had an epiphany!” Really!
Epiphany means a revelation. So what is “revealed” at Epiphany? God is revealed – in human form, as Jesus. And it means that Jesus is both God and human at the same time, a challenging concept for most of us to get our heads around.
Western Christians have traditionally focused on the Visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus as the visible sign that God has entered human form. Eastern Christians take the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River as that sign. So, we commemorate both events at Epiphany.
Last week Kelly reflected on the visit of the magi to the baby Jesus. This morning I’ll share with you some things I learned as I was reading about Jesus’ baptism and what it might mean to us today as Christians and as people of faith.
Here’s where the disclaimer comes – I am not, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be, a Biblical scholar, a scholar of antiquities, a theologian, or any other kind of expert on this topic. I’m simply a woman of faith seeking to understand these challenging concepts and what God is calling me to be and do through them.
So, when I was researching the baptism of Jesus, one of the things I learned is that the Eastern Orthodox Churches perform what’s called the “Great Blessing of Waters” on Epiphany. The clergy and the people go in a procession with the cross to the nearest body of water, and the priest blesses the waters. In the Greek practice, he does this by casting a cross into the water. If swimming is feasible on the spot, any number of volunteers may try to recover the cross. The person who gets the cross first swims back and returns it to the priest, who then delivers a special blessing to the swimmer and their household. I briefly considered a reenactment of this practice, but decided this should really only be attempted in the Southern Hemisphere where it is now summer!
A fact that really got my attention is that most modern scholars view Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist as an historical event to which a high degree of certainty can be assigned. In fact, along with the crucifixion of Jesus, most scholars view it as one of the two historically certain facts about him.
So this is a real event at a real place. Jim and I have been to the place on the River Jordan where Jesus is said to have been baptized. In some ways, it is nothing very special. It’s a muddy bank on a slow-moving stretch of the Jordan, in kind of an out-of-the-way place. There are no monuments, there is no hoopla to this place. But there is incredible awe and power there. Being present there, witnessing people being quietly baptized, hearing soft voices joined in song, was a very sacred and moving experience.
I often have a hard time bridging spiritual experiences like this and the scriptures. I find the scriptures pretty challenging. I often don’t understand them, and am never quite sure how much is intended to be literal, what’s metaphorical, and how they connect to my own life in this specific time and place. This is what I love so much about our worship services at Bethel – they are intentionally designed for people like me. I love our contemporary readings, because they really help me understand the scriptures and what I’m called to, as a person of faith.
But the scriptures are the starting place, so I started my exploration of baptism there. I found that the story of the baptism of Jesus by John is told in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Gospel of John (not the same John as John the Baptist) talks about the baptism, but in a little different way. Three main things are the same in Matthew, Mark and Luke:
· The heavens open
· A thundering voice comes from the clouds, and
· The spirit of God descends on Jesus in the form of a dove.
So I was really curious to learn what scholars think these symbols mean. Scholars tell us that Jesus was baptized to, as we heard in the reading of Matthew this morning, “fulfill all righteousness,” and that Jesus consented to be baptized by John for that purpose.
“Righteousness” is an interesting word. It means morally right or justifiable. One definition I found defined righteousness as “arising from an outraged sense of justice or morality” – of doing right – “right action”. Hmmm! Maybe this is why Jesus’ baptism is considered not only an anointing, but the beginning of His ministry. His was definitely a ministry of justice, and he often spoke of right action in regards to our fellow human beings.
The opening of the heavens and the voice coming from heaven has been viewed as evidence that the Spirit of God was everywhere present – in the heavens, on earth, and in the human person of Jesus at the same time. The voice and the dove were expressions of the omni-presence of God that were suitable for humans- they could be experienced through the senses – the people could see them and hear them.
The message was that it would be no problem for God to speak from heaven, to reveal Jesus as the Messiah (the “Anointed One”), and send a manifestation of his Spirit in the form of a dove, while his human body stood in the Jordan River. My brain does a little cramp here.
But this is a little easier for me to comprehend when I reflect that God did this through hundreds of Spirit filled believers at the same time on the day of Pentecost. This omni-presence of God assures us that it is not difficult for God to commune with all of us at the same time – I like knowing that. And, in fact, it is in the opening of the heavens, the voice, and the dove descending on Jesus that John the Baptist recognizes Jesus as the Messiah. This is what the Gospel of John tells us.
So, having dealt with the symbols in the baptism story a little, I re-read the scriptures and readings for today to see if I could understand this whole Baptism thing better and find its relevance for my life today. And I could! This is how the pieces came together for me:
· Isaiah prophesies John the Baptist and Jesus.
o He describes Jesus as “God’s servant upon whom He has put his Spirit”
o And that God also puts His spirit and breath on all the people – that’s us!
o That Jesus – and we – are called to justice and right action
o That God will take Jesus – and us – by the hand and guide us in this work, and
o That “He will give us strength for it.”
· Then Walter Brueggmann assures us that:
o Although “we are still people in the dark (beset by fear, anxiety, brutality, violence and loss), we are – we could be – people of the light,”
o And so we “pray for the energy to overcome our weariness;
o And for the courage to “submit our day to God’s visions for justice” – to put our hearts, our hands and our feet into right action to bring about God’s vision for our world.
· And that beautiful writing by Macrina Wiederkehr
o Acknowledges that we struggle with faithfulness; that we don’t know what to do with such demand or such love
o But that once we accept the invitation and say yes to everything God asks of us…
o We find we have our calling – and God’s visions for the world are stronger than our fear
o And that we have the strength to live it out
So in our baptism, we, like Jesus, are anointed. First we are loved by God – not as an abstraction, but as a real individual with our individual strengths, weaknesses, habits, customs, pleasant and unpleasant sides. And God is delighted in us.
Then we are called by name, invited to, like Jesus, “submit our days to God’s visions, with deep joy and high hope,” to love others as unique, irreplaceable, finite human beings, just as God loves us.
We are called:
· To work for justice
· To take right action
· To depend on God’s everywhere-presence, and
· To claim God’s strength for the energy and courage to bring God’s vision to our world.
Maybe baptism awakens us – to our purpose and gives us what we need to live into it.
In baptism God embraces us — no matter who we are — and brings us into a family of believers. We become vital not only to our local church, but to the wider Church. We work for justice and take right action with others in our small places (our own thoughts, our individual lives, our families, our friends, our businesses, our church) and in the big places (our communities, the halls of justice, and our world). And we are promised that God – and this body of God’s faithful – will love, support and care for us as we do this – and throughout our whole lives.
So, I’m having these thoughts, and I’m getting all excited, and I’m kind of “getting it,” I think. But I’m also thinking, “Ok, so my brain is getting it a little, but I’m not feeling terribly inspired or on fire over it.”
So, I turned to Isaiah again – I really do like Isaiah. I appreciate the enormous gulf he sees between God’s holiness and human pettiness (sin). I can relate to the struggle I often hear in his poetry of trying to figure out and be true to God’s visions.
So the very next verse after the one we read today, Isaiah 43, says
1 Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are mine. (I get choked up every time I read that. That’s what God’s done in my baptism; He’s called me by name; He’s said I am HIS!)
Then Isaiah goes on to say (if I may be so bold as to paraphrase him):
You don’t have to be perfect
When you fall, you are precious to me
You are mine, no matter what
Don’t ever forget whose you are (for I claimed you at your baptism)
And I’ll be with you no matter what happens to you
I’ll be with you when you think you can’t possibly do what you think I’m calling you to do
I’ll be with you when the waters cover you, and the fires rage, and you are in the wilderness
I will give you strength
Wow.
So, each of us has been given a manifestation of God. The scriptures seem to suggest that we are given this manifestation at our baptism.
But maybe we are a manifestation of God already, just by being born as humans, like Jesus was.
· And maybe baptism is a confirmation of that manifestation and an invitation to accept our purpose for coming into human form, like Jesus – to advance God’s visions for our world.
· And maybe baptism connects us to a community of faithful to be with on our path through this life to make our purpose easier to fulfill.
· And maybe, we have a charge associated with all this blessing – to manifest the Spirit which has been given to us.
So, here’s the crux – how do I DO that?
I’m reading a book by Henri Nouwen from David Duncombe’s library. I picked it up by “accident” one day. It’s his diary from 7 months he spent in a Trappist Monastery in New York in the early 1970’s.
In one section, he reflects on the many invitations for speaking engagements that he gets, and the number he turns down with the excuse that he has no time to prepare. He became aware that he was seeing every lecture, sermon or commencement address as a new performance that called for new preparation. He said, “No wonder this attitude leads to fatigue and exhaustion. Even small daily tasks, such as talking with my own students, become anxiety-provoking burdens.”
So, he started wondering… What if he stopped fragmenting his life into a bunch of independent things that didn’t really form a unity? The question then becomes not, “Do I have time to prepare?” but, “Do I live in a state of preparedness?” Trust me, this connects to baptism.
So, that’s a very profound question to me! And it’s mighty lucky for Rick that I’d been cultivating this attitude for a couple months when he asked me to do this reflection, because I didn’t hesitate when he asked me.
Nouwen goes on to wonder that if God is his only concern, if God is the center of his interest, if all his prayers, reading, studying, speaking, and writing serve only to advance God’s visions for our world, would that be living in a state of preparedness and trust? And what would that be like?
Maybe anxiety and exhaustion is the result of a lack of single-mindedness, a lack of simplicity. He says, “I want to love God, but also to make a career. I want to be a good Christian, but also be successful. I want to be like Christ, but also popular and liked by many people. I want to be a saint, but also enjoy my sins.”
If we could live, “setting our hearts on His kingdom first,” wouldn’t many of our worries and anxieties fall away? Wouldn’t this lead to simpler living? Wouldn’t everything we do become different parts of a unified life, rather than a bunch of fragmented and competing demands?
Applied to me own life…
· Wouldn’t I know much better what is worth doing and what is not?
· What tasks & invitations I should accept and which I should refuse?
· What is mine to do and what is someone else’s?
No doubt I would have more time to pray and meditate and to be in closer contact with the Source of my strength. Surely, I’d feel less irritated, restless and stressed. I’d be a lot more present in the here and now because I’d be more certain that it’s where God wants me to be.
How does this living a life of unity connect to baptism? Well, I know through my baptism:
· That I am loved
· That God is delighted in me
· That I am a manifestation of God in human form
· That my sole purpose for being in human form is to advance God’s vision for our world
· That God is everywhere and always with me
· That I am in all this with you, my community of faith
· That I have everything I need to be successful
Reflecting on my baptism and these truths makes me realize that:
· I can live a life of unity, a life of preparedness…
· Always ready to advance God’s visions for our world…
· Sure what is mine to do…
· Trusting in God’s presence, guidance and strength…
· Relying on you to help, and
· Getting on with it.
I’d be living out my baptismal promises and charges.
Amen?
Buck Up, Show Up and Speak Up -- Becky Williams
Lessons Learned So Far From My Personal Life and My Modest Life of Activism
October 19, 2014
First, I'd like to begin by lifting up those who are no longer with us who have shaped our community here with their presence and their voice. There are so many I don't know, but those I'm thinking of are Josie, Barbara, Frank and David.
I have been hesitant about giving a reflection here because the thought of doing this makes me so incredibly nervous. But here I am. I've so enjoyed those of you who have gone before me- your courage and insight have been inspirational. Rick asked me to do this back in early August, I think. I had been meaning to do a Making a Difference Moment with a similar topic to today's reflection, so I agreed. I spent the next six weeks carrying my notebook to beautiful places to write ideas. I wrote on the shores of both Bird Lake and Chain of Lakes on Mt. Adams, outside on my back deck, and on a rock outcropping overlooking the Columbia River. I was feeling good about how it was all coming together, and then I lost the notebook- nowhere to be found. So if you're not impressed with today's message, please tell yourself that my original draft was better.
I probably won't be sharing any thoughts this morning you haven't already had. My reflection will simply serve to bring ideas to the surface for you to consider. I don't pretend to be actually living, each day, the ideals I'm espousing. I have begun to view them as a goal for me, a constant source of direction, as I grow to discover and define myself more with each year that passes.
Buck up, show up and speak up is my call to action, for myself and for all of us. I was born and raised in Wyoming, so this could just as easily be said as, “Cowboy up and get 'er done!” But the feminist in me chose against that phrase.
Buck up, to me, means to put your life, with all of its annoyances, frustrations, disagreements and concerns in perspective a bit. I mean, really. We shower each day in steaming hot drinking water, while millions around the world walk for miles, in dusty heat, only to arrive at filthy, undrinkable water. My family and I often joke about “middle class problems.” When one of us is lamenting about how long we were on hold with the credit card company, or how long it takes to properly research what type of refrigerator we should buy, or complain about the busy schedule our childrens' play dates, sports events or enrichment activities leave us, another one of us will sing, “middle class problems.” Worrying about whether we upset somebody at a dinner party drains valuable energy from us, giving us the perception that we're too busy or too tired to tackle anything greater than just making it through our day, never able to look up and see beyond the end of our nose on our own face. Anna and I saw a speaker at CAST on Monday night. She was an extreme mountain climber who had miraculously survived an incredible fall. As she was waiting to be rescued, sure that she wouldn't make it through the night (for three nights in a row), she noticed how brilliant the stars were in the sky and was awestruck by their beauty. My mom's reading is about a woman with a debilitating illness who experiences love by just giving a prayer of thanks each day. Both of these examples show the incredible resilience of the human spirit in the face of difficult times. Why is it that we only seem to put life into perspective when we're faced with death? Imagine how amazing we could be if we did it earlier? Are you able to put your problems, possibly perceived problems, aside, so you can dedicate that unused emotional and mental energy to those who are struggling to get by? Children, immigrants, animals, the earth?
Once you decide to buck up, it's time to show up. Frank Hunsaker showed us all what that looks like here at Bethel. He was here for every event, with a smile on his face and a hug for anybody who was willing. And I think most of us were. He didn't talk much, but his presence alone gave us all strength. In the activism and advocacy work I've done, just showing up is crucial. I might not know what I'll say, or have the greatest ideas about how to accomplish our mission. But, together with others in the room, we can come up with a plan. When I'm trying to work on a solution or protest a practice or policy, it gives me courage to have others in the room with me. Others' presence is affirmation enough, and the synergy of the group takes over.
In my personal life, there are several times when just showing up made a huge difference to me. The one I remember best is a backpacking trip with my friend, Mo. She had wanted to have a “Women in the Woods” outing. Probably fifteen women she talked to were enthusiastic and said they wanted to go. But when it came down to actually showing up with our backpacks packed and ready to go, I was the only other woman besides Mo. We hiked into Elk Meadows on Mt. Hood and had a wonderful time. Two weeks later, she discovered that her cancerous tumor on her tailbone had come back, and a year and a half after that, she passed away. I will forever be grateful for that time with Mo, in a beautiful place, before she got terminally ill. If that trip had been planned after her second diagnosis, I'm sure all fifteen women would have turned up with their backpacks packed. Once again, we need to be faced with the worst possible scenario before we can put aside our busy lives. My challenge to you is to not wait for the last possible minute, or until times are dire, to show up on behalf of something greater than yourself.
Speak up means planting the seeds from Jim's reading. Believe in the power of your voice. In a small community such as ours, there is incredible potential for your voice to be heard, and for changes to happen because of it. When a well-intentioned, elderly neighbor gave the kids live chicks for a gift, I wrote a proposal to the White Salmon City Council asking that residents be allowed to have poultry on City property, and it passed (including rabbits!). When I heard about an obscure pot of money with the Country reserved for public safety, I requested funding for three sets of solar pedestrian crossing beacons for tricky intersections in White Salmon, which they approved. I'm sure we all have examples from our own life when we found the courage and initiative to speak out for a cause we believed in. It's a challenge to silence the doubting voices in your head, and possibly the doubters around you, but nothing will ever happen if the idea or plan isn't first spoken aloud. One of my favorite quotes is by cultural anthropologist, Margaret Mead, when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” Have faith in yourself and in your ideas. Your voice matters.
Tom' reflection a couple of weeks ago was a powerful and persuasive reminder to keep Sabbath days, or even Sabbath moments, in our life. His message serves as a balance to mine; his is the yin (for which the Chinese characters denote the “shady side of the hill; shelter,”) and mine is the yang (the “sunny side of the hill; rising”). Together, these concepts illustrate the balance of a healthy life. All of us need time to recharge our battery by reading, knitting, biking, and so on. But we have a responsibility to share some of that energy we replenish with others who need it. Whatever it looks like for you, whoever benefits from it, I challenge you to buck up, show up and speak up this week, this month, and this year. You'll be glad you did!
An activist is a person who makes an intentional action to bring about social or political change.
Example: Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who challenged racial segregation in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a bus for a white man.
An advocate is one who speaks on behalf of another person or group.
Example: Angelina Jolie is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador (UNHCR) who uses her talent and fame to advocate for refugees.
Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action to bring about social change, political change, economic justice, or environmental well being. This action is in support of, or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument.
The word "activism" is often used synonymously with protest or dissent, but activism can stem from any number of political orientations and take a wide range of forms, from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism (such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing preferred businesses), rallies, blogging and street marches, strikes, both work stoppages and hunger strikes, or even guerrilla tactics.
An advocate can also be involved in controversial activities or issues, but because they are speaking on behalf of a group, they tend to be more likely to follow the paths of lobbying and legislation. They are also often part of a bigger group, such as Angelina Jolie speaking on behalf of the UN, or Don Cheadle speaking on behalf of Save Darfur. This is of course not always the case, but these distinctions are sometimes defined in such ways.
First, I'd like to begin by lifting up those who are no longer with us who have shaped our community here with their presence and their voice. There are so many I don't know, but those I'm thinking of are Josie, Barbara, Frank and David.
I have been hesitant about giving a reflection here because the thought of doing this makes me so incredibly nervous. But here I am. I've so enjoyed those of you who have gone before me- your courage and insight have been inspirational. Rick asked me to do this back in early August, I think. I had been meaning to do a Making a Difference Moment with a similar topic to today's reflection, so I agreed. I spent the next six weeks carrying my notebook to beautiful places to write ideas. I wrote on the shores of both Bird Lake and Chain of Lakes on Mt. Adams, outside on my back deck, and on a rock outcropping overlooking the Columbia River. I was feeling good about how it was all coming together, and then I lost the notebook- nowhere to be found. So if you're not impressed with today's message, please tell yourself that my original draft was better.
I probably won't be sharing any thoughts this morning you haven't already had. My reflection will simply serve to bring ideas to the surface for you to consider. I don't pretend to be actually living, each day, the ideals I'm espousing. I have begun to view them as a goal for me, a constant source of direction, as I grow to discover and define myself more with each year that passes.
Buck up, show up and speak up is my call to action, for myself and for all of us. I was born and raised in Wyoming, so this could just as easily be said as, “Cowboy up and get 'er done!” But the feminist in me chose against that phrase.
Buck up, to me, means to put your life, with all of its annoyances, frustrations, disagreements and concerns in perspective a bit. I mean, really. We shower each day in steaming hot drinking water, while millions around the world walk for miles, in dusty heat, only to arrive at filthy, undrinkable water. My family and I often joke about “middle class problems.” When one of us is lamenting about how long we were on hold with the credit card company, or how long it takes to properly research what type of refrigerator we should buy, or complain about the busy schedule our childrens' play dates, sports events or enrichment activities leave us, another one of us will sing, “middle class problems.” Worrying about whether we upset somebody at a dinner party drains valuable energy from us, giving us the perception that we're too busy or too tired to tackle anything greater than just making it through our day, never able to look up and see beyond the end of our nose on our own face. Anna and I saw a speaker at CAST on Monday night. She was an extreme mountain climber who had miraculously survived an incredible fall. As she was waiting to be rescued, sure that she wouldn't make it through the night (for three nights in a row), she noticed how brilliant the stars were in the sky and was awestruck by their beauty. My mom's reading is about a woman with a debilitating illness who experiences love by just giving a prayer of thanks each day. Both of these examples show the incredible resilience of the human spirit in the face of difficult times. Why is it that we only seem to put life into perspective when we're faced with death? Imagine how amazing we could be if we did it earlier? Are you able to put your problems, possibly perceived problems, aside, so you can dedicate that unused emotional and mental energy to those who are struggling to get by? Children, immigrants, animals, the earth?
Once you decide to buck up, it's time to show up. Frank Hunsaker showed us all what that looks like here at Bethel. He was here for every event, with a smile on his face and a hug for anybody who was willing. And I think most of us were. He didn't talk much, but his presence alone gave us all strength. In the activism and advocacy work I've done, just showing up is crucial. I might not know what I'll say, or have the greatest ideas about how to accomplish our mission. But, together with others in the room, we can come up with a plan. When I'm trying to work on a solution or protest a practice or policy, it gives me courage to have others in the room with me. Others' presence is affirmation enough, and the synergy of the group takes over.
In my personal life, there are several times when just showing up made a huge difference to me. The one I remember best is a backpacking trip with my friend, Mo. She had wanted to have a “Women in the Woods” outing. Probably fifteen women she talked to were enthusiastic and said they wanted to go. But when it came down to actually showing up with our backpacks packed and ready to go, I was the only other woman besides Mo. We hiked into Elk Meadows on Mt. Hood and had a wonderful time. Two weeks later, she discovered that her cancerous tumor on her tailbone had come back, and a year and a half after that, she passed away. I will forever be grateful for that time with Mo, in a beautiful place, before she got terminally ill. If that trip had been planned after her second diagnosis, I'm sure all fifteen women would have turned up with their backpacks packed. Once again, we need to be faced with the worst possible scenario before we can put aside our busy lives. My challenge to you is to not wait for the last possible minute, or until times are dire, to show up on behalf of something greater than yourself.
Speak up means planting the seeds from Jim's reading. Believe in the power of your voice. In a small community such as ours, there is incredible potential for your voice to be heard, and for changes to happen because of it. When a well-intentioned, elderly neighbor gave the kids live chicks for a gift, I wrote a proposal to the White Salmon City Council asking that residents be allowed to have poultry on City property, and it passed (including rabbits!). When I heard about an obscure pot of money with the Country reserved for public safety, I requested funding for three sets of solar pedestrian crossing beacons for tricky intersections in White Salmon, which they approved. I'm sure we all have examples from our own life when we found the courage and initiative to speak out for a cause we believed in. It's a challenge to silence the doubting voices in your head, and possibly the doubters around you, but nothing will ever happen if the idea or plan isn't first spoken aloud. One of my favorite quotes is by cultural anthropologist, Margaret Mead, when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” Have faith in yourself and in your ideas. Your voice matters.
Tom' reflection a couple of weeks ago was a powerful and persuasive reminder to keep Sabbath days, or even Sabbath moments, in our life. His message serves as a balance to mine; his is the yin (for which the Chinese characters denote the “shady side of the hill; shelter,”) and mine is the yang (the “sunny side of the hill; rising”). Together, these concepts illustrate the balance of a healthy life. All of us need time to recharge our battery by reading, knitting, biking, and so on. But we have a responsibility to share some of that energy we replenish with others who need it. Whatever it looks like for you, whoever benefits from it, I challenge you to buck up, show up and speak up this week, this month, and this year. You'll be glad you did!
An activist is a person who makes an intentional action to bring about social or political change.
Example: Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who challenged racial segregation in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a bus for a white man.
An advocate is one who speaks on behalf of another person or group.
Example: Angelina Jolie is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador (UNHCR) who uses her talent and fame to advocate for refugees.
Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action to bring about social change, political change, economic justice, or environmental well being. This action is in support of, or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument.
The word "activism" is often used synonymously with protest or dissent, but activism can stem from any number of political orientations and take a wide range of forms, from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism (such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing preferred businesses), rallies, blogging and street marches, strikes, both work stoppages and hunger strikes, or even guerrilla tactics.
An advocate can also be involved in controversial activities or issues, but because they are speaking on behalf of a group, they tend to be more likely to follow the paths of lobbying and legislation. They are also often part of a bigger group, such as Angelina Jolie speaking on behalf of the UN, or Don Cheadle speaking on behalf of Save Darfur. This is of course not always the case, but these distinctions are sometimes defined in such ways.