For worship on Sunday, January 10, 2021, we pre-recorded a prayer service to take the place of our usual livestream. Here’s the written version of Katie’s opening remarks and communion devotional, along with the scriptures and songs we engaged.
Opening remarks:
Hey church. I’m Katie, she/her, the lead evangelist at Galileo Church. Tonight’s service of worship is not like most others for us. For ten months the human family has endured escalating trauma, and in the week just past the cacophony of multiple crises we are trying to survive rose to a deafening crescendo.
Not least is that the skeleton crew that produces worship from the Big Red Barn each week was exposed to Covid last Sunday (yes, the whole crew), and our own policy states that after a known exposure, pastoral staff and volunteers alike cannot return to the Big Red Barn for two weeks.
So we’re producing worship from our homes, and changing the format significantly to make sure our God is honored by beauty and intentionality, even while we are seeking company for our lamentation. Tonight will be more like a prayer service, with the prayers of our ancestors and our songs mingling together as a fragrant offering to the God with whom we have to do.
We’re hopeful that this hour will engage your body and mind, heart and soul, in worship – including communion, near the end, for which you will need a bite to eat and something to drink.
I went to Chuck E. Cheese to play Whack-a-Mole and get a doctorate. That is, I was working on my doctorate on Long Island when my kids were little, and with stacks of reading to do, more than I could finish during Lance’s turn in our brand of tag-team parenting, I found refuge at Chuck E. Cheese. It was so noisy that all the sounds blurred together and I could read in peace, comforted by the knowledge that my kids couldn’t escape and the supply of diet Coke would never run out.
Every half-hour or so, I’d leave my books, take a token from our family stash, and slip it into the Whack-a-Mole game. You remember: that big, fuzzy mallet tethered to the box; those tricky, plastic moles popping up at random. I gleefully bopped their sinister, smiling heads, winning tickets to trade for plastic trinkets that made my kids happy-ish. Truth is, it made me feel better – like I could conquer obstacles, complete my task, solve problems.
Church – humans – we’ve been playing Whack-a-Mole for a really long time here. It’s a pandemic – no, now it’s systemic racism and white supremacy – no, now it’s political turmoil – no, now it’s the rollback of protections for queer folx – no, now it’s the pandemic again! Whack! Whack! Whack!
Only, it turns out, this game never ends; the wicked little moles hiding just under our feet are never truly subdued; we cannot mark any of these things off our list. The annus horribilus called 2020 is over, but we have not solved any of the problems that matter.
And what happened last week – I’m speaking now of the breach of the U.S. capitol building during the certification of the presidential election, by people who are variously called insurrectionists, rioters, criminals, terrorists, protesters, patriots – they go by many names, depending on the heart of the witness – what happened last week has shown us the folly of the Whack-a-Mole approach to humanity’s brokenness. Or shown us again.
Because one understanding that’s surely growing in us in these days is the interconnectedness of all the miseries. “Interlocking injustices” is what Rev. Dr. William Barber said last week, and it’s becoming clearer all the time.
So we watched the scene unfolding in Washington last week, our minds cycling rapidly between shock and “Of course,” this being the inevitable clash between pedantic factuality (i.e. votes cast and counted) and the repetition of the One Big Lie that feeds the politics of resentment.
And who among us did not think, “If these people were Black…” I mean, if it did not rise to consciousness that the seriously inadequate security measures and remarkably hands-off law enforcement were due to the insurgents’ whiteness – well, we’ll keep working on that together.
And not just the fact of their whiteness, but white supremacist ideology on display throughout, from the announcements about the event by its white nationalist organizers to the Confederate flags flying over the crowds. And let us not forget the crosses they carried, and the “Jesus Saves” banners, and the prayers that were led on the capitol steps as the violence began.
Whack, whack, whack – How many moles are we up to, now?
And the politicians and staffers and journalists huddled together in tight quarters, destined to become a super-spreader event as clouds of tear gas and corona virus mingled in the air – the roiling chaos pushing the escalating national daily death toll below the fold in the nation’s newspapers – hovering around 4,000 a day, hospitals all over the country full to overflowing, ICU beds and equipment and medical staff in the richest country in the world stretched too thin, all of it preventable if leaders with power and influence could get, as our series song last season said, “free from the lies.” Whack, whack, whack.
What I found myself thinking about this week, trying to choose psalms for our prayers tonight, is the power and problem of pronouns. I now understand, thanks to my beloveds on the queer rainbow, that I grew up taking the pronouns that signal a person’s identity for granted, which is itself a privilege. “She/her” always applied to me, even when it was not to my advantage.
Likewise, and more problematic by far, “we/us” and “they/them” were also clear-cut for me, until they weren’t. “We” were Christians, and Americans, and white – and as such we were good, and trustworthy, and hard-working, and deserved every advantage we got, and etc. “They” were – well, “they” were everybody else, not like us, and we were suspicious of them at best, antagonistic toward them at worst.
When I read the psalms these days, some of that old us/them distinction comes out in a way that makes my stomach churn. “God is on our side, not theirs,” the psalms are bold to assert; and for our ancestors in faith, we should remember that most of us were not included in their “we,” disallowed inside their tight circle, excluded from their sense of collective camaraderie with the God of the universe.
It feels to me like everything that’s happening in our world right now – everything on the news, everything in our hometowns and our families, everything in our church and in the continuing evolution of global Christianity – it’s all calling on us to rethink our pronouns. Who are “we,” really? And who are “they”?
Can I actually put distance between myself and the swarming insurrectionists at the capitol, if they and I both believe that Jesus Saves? Can I truly declare myself unaffected by the white supremacy that manifests as white privilege in my little life? Can I genuinely grieve the loss of life each day from the lofty, lucky position I occupy, where I’ve just had my first known exposure to the virus in the last week, when so many more, indeed so many of you, have endured far greater risk for a far longer time? Who are “we”? Who are “they”? Where am I? Where are you?
It feels right, somehow, for all of this to be jumbled up right now. And it feels right to confess the jumbling of it to God, using the prayers of our ancestors as best we can. Their faithful prayers, after all, eventually made room for all of us, in the heart of Jesus who prayed them, and in the heart of those who came after him.
So maybe our own faithful prayers in this season, even when they are confused as hell, can do what they’ve done before – form us into people who stay connected to the God who is asking us to consider anew how God is at work among “us,” and “them,” and the whole wide world. Maybe if we remain attentive to all the interlocking injustices of every news cycle, finding old language for every new catastrophe, God will show us again how to open our hearts to each other, to our beloveds and our enemies and our frenemies, sorting out all the “we’s” and all the “they’s” until there really is just us – all of us, together, healthy and whole, loved and loving.
Anyway, that’s what we’re gonna try tonight. We’ll let God work out the pronouns; we’ll let God work on our hearts.
Whoever you are, I’m glad you’re here.
Communion:
If pronouns are problematic (because they are so powerful), they are also filled with possibility.
Consider Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of an enslaved person, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (So said the apostle Paul in Philippians 2.)
All that is to say, Jesus became like us so he could be “us.” In all the confusion of his time, all the violence, and all the exclusionary, supremacist ideology, even in a culture of death that would claim his own life – he aligned himself with us, with humanity, with all our brokenness and all our burdens.
When we eat and drink this meal – make no mistake – our pronouns are being realigned. We join with Jesus in the formation of a new, inclusive “us” where the broken and burdened are exalted, where the One Big Lie is exposed and the politics of resentment is crucified, and where death, even as loudly as it shouts as it storms up the steps and breaches the barriers, does not get the last word.
