This is my speech from the BLM protest in Ashburnham, MA put on by students of Oakmont High School.

In Isaiah 58:6 God speaks
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,        
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,   
and to break every yoke?

Jesus quotes this in Luke 4:18-20
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,     
because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,  to set the oppressed free,
     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Among the many fundamentals to the Christian faith are two ideas--one that God's rule was begun with Jesus's life here on earth, and secondly that we are called to proclaim good news to the poor and to set the oppressed free.
Jesus, a brown, Jewish man, learned this from the Jewish scriptures.

It doesn't feel much like the kingdom of God, this time we are living in now. It doesn't feel much like the oppressed have been set free. With the death of George Floyd--after many deaths that were not enough to make us all rise up--with the death of George Floyd we are faced with the tragedy of our nation. Our nation was created with the idea that all of us are created equal, that all of us can pursue life, liberty, and happiness, that together we can make decisions about our common life in a democratic process. Today, as patriots of this nation, we are called together to help our nation be more explicit about what we mean by ALL.

We make ALL lives matter by naming explicitly that queer lives matter.
We make ALL lives matter by naming explicitly that trans lives matter.
We make ALL lives matter by naming explicitly that women's lives matter.
We make ALL lives matter by naming explicitly that disabled lives matter.
We make ALL lives matter by naming explicitly that immigrant lives matter.
We make ALL lives matter by naming explicitly that Muslim and Jewish lives matter.                      
Today we proclaim explicitly that Black Lives Matter.

It is easy to get caught up in the individual nature of the deaths we have seen. We are angry at particular cops that have killed particular men, women, and children. We are angry at particular politicians that block action on particular bills.
 
Yet any one of us, with a gun, in a difficult situation, might find our internalized biases driving our actions. Anyone of us, without a gun, certainly have found ourselves acting with less kindness and compassion than we want to share. When Isaiah predicts the release of the captives he is not arguing for a list of particular people to be granted clemency. Isaiah shows us God is speaking to the nation, God is demanding a national response.

At the same time, we cannot create a culture of caring for the oppressed by being hateful to those who refuse to understand. Those of us who are white here today must find a way to communicate with other white people the importance of this work. Do not allow your passion to turn into hatred.

We must continue to love and support individual police officers as we demand that the system for policing changes.
We must continue to love and support teachers and administration in our local schools as we demand that oppressive curricula are changed.
We must continue to love and support elected officials as we demand structural changes to our laws.

Racism is part of our culture. Racism is something that we have caught from society more than something we were taught by our parents or our schools. We must love and support people who are afraid of the changes that we are calling for, as we reach across differences, speak lovingly, while insisting that we find ways fight the oppressive ways we have learned.

The goal of the day of the Lord, of the Kingdom of God, the goal of a free nation is to overcome all oppression, that we will end laws and customs promote racism, classism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and more.

We are gathered here to start on that work. Many of us have done much work before, some of us are new to these ideas, but all of us are at the start of this newest effort to make our town, our state, our nation the best that it can be.

It is our patriotism that brings us here, it is our faith that brings us here, it is our hearts that bring us here to this space declaring that for now on, in every way we can, we will declare that Black Lives Matter and that the oppressed must be set free.

Please join me in prayer: Holy God of many names, be with us in the work. Keep us strong against the powers that want to stay the same, and keep us loving against the powers that want us to hate. Amen.

One of the questions our community support team helps to discern is whether an issue is a community issue or a personal issue. While in many cases this is a straightforward, sometimes extra investigating will reveal which type of a challenge we are facing.
When Ricardo always parks in the handicap space, without a handicap tag, the firs step is to find out what is going on. While instinct identifies this an individual issue—Ricardo doesn’t follow the rules—it is possibly something else. Perhaps when he gets home at midnight there are not any other available parking spaces. The problem may be a community issue: not enough parking.

See the rest of the article at cohousing.org 

Here is the Massachusetts Conference UCC article about being arrested for the poor people's campaign.
https://www.macucc.org/newsdetail/five-from-conference-arrested-at-poor-peoples-campaign-action-11412890

What shall we discuss as we are forming our communities? Every forming community (I hope!) asks this question and communities that have already moved in give lots of different answers. Many of those answers are in the form of "I wish we'd resolved this" and "we decided x which was irrelevant and should have decided y which was important." All of those reflections are completely true, of course, but I don't think they get at the purpose for deciding things prior to move-in.
The purpose of discussing policies before move-in is to resolve as much as you can about your values before getting so many new members you can never agree on values.
Read the rest at http://www.cohousing.org/node/5975

You remember, perhaps, the story that Jesus told of the sheep and the goats. The nations are being judged, divided into right or left, sheep or goat, eternal life or eternal suffering and everyone is equally surprised by where they end up. The unexpected test is whether you provided food, drink, or clothing to those who have none, whether you have welcomed the stranger, cared for the sick, or visited those in prison. (You can look it up in Matthew 25:31-46.)
 
It is clear that Jesus wants us to care for those who have limited access to material resources.
 
But we live in an age where many of us, even people who are not very wealthy, have an excess of things. Individually, most of us in the U.S. have more food, drink, and clothing than we need to get by. We all have excess that we want to get rid of.
 
My question is this: are we giving in order to get rid of our excess? Or to help people in need?
We certainly long for both to be true!! But is it?
 
It’s tempting to take a diversion and tell you a story you may know about government cheese. In the United States our food programs were developed to take care of excess, rather than to feed hungry people. In the 80s, the US government was buying cheese in order to keep dairy prices high. When faced with huge quantities of cheese, we created a program to give poor people cheese from our excess.
 
In their book When Helping Hurts Corbett and Fikkert argue that getting rid of our excess creates a “God Complex” in the giver—we think we are special to have been able to give things away. I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that giving away things you don’t need is not exactly painful. In fact, I find that people feel pain at *not* being able to give away things they don’t need. Giving from our excess is for our own benefit. It makes us feel better.
 
Its not necessarily bad to feel better, I don’t love everything about Corbett and Fikkert’s arguments. My DMin project argues with their book, and with Lupton’s Toxic Charity, that they are overly concerned with the poor people developing dependency, and not concerned enough with making sure people have what they need to get ahead. Independence is not a Christian value.
 
But there is something to the question of whether getting rid of what we have, but don’t need, is actually covered by Jesus telling us to offer food, drink, and clothes. It’s certainly not the point with welcoming strangers, healing the sick, or visiting people in prison. The point of the last three is relationship. Shouldn’t that be the point of the first three?
 
Early on in my ministry at Worcester Fellowship I was recruiting a church in the wider Worcester Area. I met with the pastor in early spring. (This pastor is long gone from the area, so you don’t have to try and figure out who it was.) Pastor Mary and I met and talked about Worcester Fellowship, hoping to get support. At the end of the meeting he offered us three expensive fur coats from people in his congregation.
 
I don’t know if this pastor didn’t get what we are doing at Worcester Fellowship, or perhaps the pastor was stuck, maybe some members of the congregation had this excess and pressured the pastor to get it to a “good cause”.
 
As soon as he offered the coats I knew for sure this meant that the church wasn’t going to make a financial donation. I was thinking in my head about whether there was some way to sell the coats when Mary spoke up.
“Oh, we can’t take these. Our ministry is about building relationships, not about giving things.” With practice I learned to say the same thing when the situation called for it.
 
Outdoor church is based on relationships. We teach all the outdoor church leaders that if your aim is to be church, you can’t give away stuff. Things are transactional. Once you create a transactional connection, it’s hard to build a relationship. People know the rules for getting stuff—what to say, how to say it, how to pass the test as “worthy” in order to qualify for the thing being given away. People learn to say what is required.
 
Relationships are built as we learn to say what is true. Transactions—saying things to qualify for getting things—reduce relationships. If we go the other way, if we build relationships first, we will learn enough about one another to give out of knowledge. A person we know may tell us what they really need. They may tell us something they can give to us. The giving becomes a small part of a mutual sharing.
 
Recent research points to the likelihood that early church worship was gathering every day, people with means and people with few means, eating together. People were confident that the kingdom of God had actually begun. Jesus tells us the kingdom is at hand. Can you imagine being a person who survived by begging in the first century, or being a day laborer, and suddenly joining a community where you get to eat every single day? It is Isaiah 55 come true:
“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters;
and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.”
 
The meal is an example of community sharing. For sure, those with plenty are bringing from their excess, and those with little are bringing only a little. But they are all volunteering. They are all working together (That is a little plug for my upcoming book Five Loaves, Two Fishes, Twelve Volunteers). The sharing creates relationship, so the giving is to people we know.
 
Returning to the story of the sheep and the goats, we find that the surprised sheep and goats ask what they did to deserve this judgement. Jesus’s answer is “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
 
Jesus actually is the person who needs food, drink, clothes, healing, welcome, and prison visits. Chrysostom, an early Christian theologian, says that the resurrected body of Christ is two places—in the church, and in the poor. He goes on to critique the one for not letting the other inside.
 
So what does all this tell us to do? I certainly am not arguing for not giving things away. Worcester Fellowship could not build the relationships it has without the churches that bring lunch and socks. But I am saying to ask organizations what they need. Ask individuals what they need. Listen to the answers. In general you can trust that organizations need most of all three things: your money, your time as a volunteer, and your prayers.
 
In the book The Homeless by Jenkins, he comes to the unexpected conclusion that people who are homeless want three things: housing, work, and love. Interestingly, that’s exactly what I want! Get to know people. When you are in relationship, what you give is like giving to Jesus. Get to know organizations. When you are in a relationship, you care about what they ask for. Give because its needed by someone, not because its not needed by you.

Yesterday morning I awoke to a shock. I often wake to shocks—my dreams are full of fear and chasing and my first thoughts of the morning are similarly painful, usually a sudden remembering that I have a paper due, that I didn't remember to call someone, that I was supposed to be somewhere early in the morning. Even the more pleasant remembering is sudden and somewhat shocking to me, that I am married, that I own this beautiful house, that I am a pastor—and wait, do I have to preach today? Have I written a sermon?
 
Thus my mornings generally start with a shock. This morning’s shock was quite different as I raised my hand to adjust the covers and saw bright red—no I’m pretty sure it is coral shrimp—on my normally naked fingernails. My slow morning mind struggled to bring back what has happened.
 
First I remembered the painting time—the giggling and yet focused energy as each of us slowly realized that the little brush was not going to do what we asked of it. I had red streaks on both sides of my fingers, and when I touched things it spread. Our little gang passed around a cue tip to remove the excess strokes, when what I really needed was a sponge. In bed I look more closely at my thumbs where the polish goes from cuticle to cuticle, and up over and onto the finger, and my pointer where I seem to have forgotten the right half of the nail. The lumps on several fingers, the chip already started on one.
 
This is not a skill I have developed over time, this painting of one’s own appendages. This is not a skill I want to develop. But it is fun for a small group of women to have a project we do together, marking ourselves as a team. Marking ourselves because….the morning haze is starting to lift and I remember the story that started this pre-ritual ritual.
 
The stories started with the evaluations we have received about our clothes, our hose, our jewelry, the evaluations of our choices for dress. One of us remembered a liturgics class and an off-hand comment that one of them, was it the professor? One of them would refuse communion hands with inappropriate nail polish. Although I wanted to care for this man's suffering—really, he would deny himself the central element of his faith with such pettiness? How painful his life of faith must be.
 
But of course we are group of women, and we know that this was not a lecture about his concern for the recipients of the sacrament. His intent was not to be sure that that the full diversity of people  experience the fullness of eating together with Jesus.
 
We know that he would not make the same comment about a man who has an odd ring, or perhaps gnarled fingers, or a dusky voice, or doesn’t hold his hands precisely in the right way, or breaks the bread awkwardly. This was not in fact, about the sacrament, and the liturgical ways of executing the sacrament, at all.
 
This was about women’s hands, with women’s markings, and the fact that men have used naked fingers for centuries, and so then, why should a woman’s fingers not be naked as well? As if he would also say that no one should wear socks, or ties, or for that matter pants, because our savior himself never wore such things.
 
There are many ways to react to oppression, even those little tiny oppressions, the micro-aggressions, as we call them today. We can blog and rant and complain to our friends, we can, and we do, ignore them, hide them away, we can, and we do, often, make light of them.
 
And sometimes we bring them to the light with a group of friends, colleagues, sisters, using laughter, and nail polish, and cue tips to make the point that these hands are qualified to run liturgy, to hold sacrament, these hands can connect us to one another, and these hands connect us to God in the world. Ugly nail polish cannot stop God’s powerful communion.

I marched in Washington DC Saturday with the Women’s March. I marched because I am a white, evangelical, progressive Christian. I marched to worship God.
 
What on earth, you may be asking, is an “evangelical, progressive, Christian”? And what does being white, being evangelical, being progressive, or being Christian have to do with marching in response to a presidential election?
 
Certainly the news has made it clear that most white evangelical conservative Christians chose to put this new administration into office. What moves a white, evangelical, progressive Christian to march against the same administration?
 
As a white person I marched because I’m obligated to use my privilege to support black and brown people’s rights. I am unlikely to get pulled over as I drive, I am unlikely to get arrested, I am unlikely to have my arguments seen as uncontrolled anger. Privilege is a gift I can use to speak out. I marched to use my privilege for the benefit of our nation.
 
As an evangelical, I marched because I’ve got good news, and it is important to share it. I know God is on the side of the poor, I know God is working toward justice, I know God loves all of creation. (As an aside “evangelism” means sharing good news—it isn’t about conversion of anyone.) I marched to proclaim good news.
 
As a progressive Christian, I marched because Jesus calls me to follow him. Progressives, in general, put more emphasis on following Jesus than on worshiping him. Christians believe that Jesus was fully God and fully human; progressives work to be like the human Jesus, and worship the divine Jesus with our work. Like Jesus we heal the sick, like Jesus we provide food to the hungry, like Jesus we welcome the stranger, the immigrant, the refugee. I marched to follow Jesus, and to worship God.
 
Of course conservative evangelicals also want to stand with those who are left behind in society, want to proclaim good news, and want to follow Jesus. What is going on when we have such divergent views of the world?
 
One difference is whether Christianity calls us to individual or corporate action. All Christians know Jesus’s story of sheep and goats, and that the sheep were called into God’s embrace because they choose to provide food, drink, clothes, welcome to the stranger, healing to the sick, and visits to those in prison. (Google “Matthew 25:31-46” to read the story.)  
 
To make a huge generalization, more conservative Christians interpret this story as about what individual Christians should do. More progressive Christians use it as guidance for what we as a people should do. For some Christians this as an individual mandate, for others this is a community mandate. To further divide us, if it’s a community mandate, is Jesus challenging the church, or challenging the nation?
 
Evangelical progressive Christians read this text as a call to our nation to care for those who do not have the material resources they need.
 
In a democracy the government represents me, and carries out what I ask it to carry out. I cannot plead innocence at the judgment; this is my government. As such, I must ask, no, I must demand, that my nation provide food and drink and clothing to those who need it. I must ask, no, I must demand, that my nation welcome strangers, heal the sick, and visit those in prison.
 
If we, as a nation, want to be among the sheep, SNAP benefits must not be cut, indeed they should be increased. If we, as a nation, want to be among the sheep, we must welcome immigrants, Muslims, anyone we do not yet know. If we, as a nation, want to be among the sheep, we must provide healthcare to all. If we, as a nation, want to be among the sheep, we must know, and care for, and love those in our prisons.
 
To be clear, I celebrate Christians who feed and clothe people in need, who welcome strangers individually, who provide healthcare and prison care as individuals. If Christians come up with a plan to care for all those in need, I wouldn’t need our government to represent us by doing it. Right now we, as Christians, and as a nation, are not adequately meeting those needs.
 
And so I am marching, and making phone calls, and standing up; I am working to make this government my government. I am a white, evangelical, progressive Christian working to make God’s justice real in the world. I welcome you, whoever you are, whatever you believe, to walk along with me as I follow Jesus.

Part 2 of 3

Acts 6:1-7[1] is about cultural conflictBut the story is not just about providing food for another person; it is about caring for someone from another culture. Hansung Kim in “Rereading Acts 6:1-7” and Justo L. Gonzalez in “Reading from my bicultural place: Acts 6:1-7” focus their interpretation on the cultural clash between the Hebrew leadership and the Hellenists. Kim suggests this story is the church’s first struggle with intercultural conflict (Kim 57). He finds it interesting that biblical scholars are thinking of the administrative issues, while mission scholars are focusing on what is a cultural and political conflict  (Kim 58). Gonzalez identifies his Cuban heritage, and Spanish accent as fundamental to his reading and understanding of this scripture (Gonzalez 140).

From a cultural standpoint Kim notes that the Hellenists and Hebrews may have had different rituals and the Hellenists may have been denied table fellowship because of that  (Kim 59). While the Hebrews would know Greek, the language of the empire, the Hellenists would not know Aramaic, the local language  (Kim 58). Gonzalez suggests “[t]he Hellenists are looked upon with suspicion by many of the more orthodox Jews. Their faith and religious practices may not be entirely orthodox” (Gonzalez 142). Kim notices “the Hebrews were likely to have greater access to the decision-making process than the Hellenists” (Kim 60). The result was unequal treatment. In Kim’s experience Western missionaries generally speak the organizational language as a first language, know the decision making ins and outs, and engage in organizations that are designed around western cultural sensibilities (Kim 60). Similarly Gonzalez notes that even today churches create structures that unintentionally block access to people of different cultures than that of those in power (Gonzalez 141). The selection of Matthias in Acts 2—and the rule that the new apostle must have known Jesus—limited the twelve to only Hebrews (Gonzalez 143). And yet the twelve were Galilean—outsiders to the Jerusalem community—that may have made them more understanding of the Hellenist’s complaint (Gonzalez 143).

Gonzalez is impressed that the early church did not put a token minority into a position of authority, but rather changed the structure of the leadership, with the seven now in charge of all the resources of the growing church, a position that is administrative, but with great authority (Gonzalez 144). Still more remarkable, these seven administrators are then filled with the Holy Spirit to become significant preachers of the word (Gonzalez 145). Kim is equally empowered, finding the story will lead members to speak out and encouraging leaders to make a space for people from other cultures to speak (Kim 61). He notes that this will require people with authority to recognize what they don’t know about other cultures and that the right response to grievances is to change the systems (Kim 61). Kim argues this text calls for existing leadership to recognize and listen to other cultural voices, and make a place for leadership alongside, rather than under, the western leadership (Kim 62). Read as a story of cultural clash, Acts 6:1-6 suggests that the people who have been neglected must be part of the resolution, not simply allocated an equal share of the resources, but also encouraged to be part of the leadership. In the cultural divide between people who have enough food, and those who need more food, the response that Acts 6:1-6 offers is to put the people who need food in charge.

Kim, Hansung “Rereading Acts 6:1-7: Lessons for multicultural mission organizations” in Evangelical Mission Quarterly January 2009 Vol 45, no. 1 pp 56-63.

Gonzalez, Justo L., “Readings from my bicultural place: Acts 6:1-7”, in Reading from this Place Vol 1: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States  Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995.

[1] While traditionally this pericope goes through verse 6, both Kim and Gonzalez include verse 7 which describes the continued growth of the community.