Category Archives: Theology

These posts explore our attempts to talk about God, who is beyond our understanding.

Belonging Before Believing

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I’m all set up to teach an intensive 3 week class at McCormick Theological Seminary this May with my colleague Pastor Alise Barrymore from The Emmaus Community in Chicago Heights.

It’s called Belonging Before Believing: New Communities and Emerging Forms of Church. The class will run from May 13-June 3 if we get at least 6 students registered.

Week 0ne: History and Development
Week Two: Theology and Practices
Week Three: Strategies, Preaching and Worship

And here’s the full syllabus, in case you’re interested! This is a nearly complete draft, with the final syllabus being passed out at the first class: Belonging Before Believing Syllabus.

What I Want to Say

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pastor-catThere’s a saying that pastors have about five sermons that they preach again and again throughout their careers. It’s the core message that you want to get across to the world.

As I’ve been preaching weekly sermons for two months now, and weekly teachings and reflections for 10 years, I took a moment to list out what I think my top five are. Here’s what I came up with.

My core 5 sermons:

1. Be here now. It’s where everything is, including God.

2. God loves you and you are precious, exactly as you are.

3. Take Sabbath (honor it). It’s one of the 10 commandments.

4. God works through you, filling you with love and power. (And let God help you through others, too.)

5. God is a process, in process, transforming everything.

If these messages are helpful to you, (as they are to me), stay tuned here, because I think I’ll be looking for new ways to say these things in as many different and creative ways as I can. Hopefully the repetition will help it sink it–both to me and to you!

—

The drawing on this post was made by Julia at the celebration of my 10-year anniversary as a pastor. It’s a picture of me as a Pastor Cat. (love it!)

My Lunch with John Cobb

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John B. Cobb

I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Well, and I was brave. I was attending the Emergent Village Theological Conversation a few weeks ago and just loving the conversation about Process Theology.

On several occasions I was hovering around waiting for a chance to talk to John Cobb, a well-known process theologian who has now been retired for 20 years. I wanted to thank him for his thought-provoking presentations and to ask him a question or two.

But of course many people wanted to do the same thing. I gave up several times, told myself it wasn’t important, walked away and circled back, hung around while someone else video-taped him, then had my opportunity.

After thanking him for his presentations I said that I would love to ask him a few questions at some point. (That was the brave part.) He said, “How about now? I’m about to have some lunch.” I felt like the luckiest person in the world.

That meal was like sitting down for a lunch-time chat with Jimmy Carter about world politics. Let’s just say, John Cobb has thought through a few issues. I came away from that lunch with a great deal of admiration for him as a thinker and tremendous respect for him as a kind and generous human being.

The thing that was most moving and helpful for me, though, was the depth of his Christian faith. He spoke with conviction about the importance of Christ, even while he described an openness to learning about God through the insights of non-Christians. Dr. Cobb affirmed certain core convictions of Christianity, but reframed them in such a way that I felt liberated.

It was as though he was pointing to a window looking out onto a landscape I had never seen. What process theology has given him, he said, is a language with which to speak about God and Christ which doesn’t require him to hand over his rationality. And yet, his “rationality” is not limited by old categories.

Everything he spoke of, he presented with humility, acknowledging the imperfection of his knowing, but never hesitating to seek a greater understanding of God. He said that all of us who speak about God are merely speculating, but he believes that we are called to speculate!

After lunch, as I listened to more presentations and began reading his books, I saw that all my questions have been asked many times before. I was right on track with the questions so many people have.

I asked some big questions like: How do you understand the incarnation? How was God present in Jesus? How does what Jesus did then relate to us now? To answer them, he always began by reframing the question and undoing my entire (unconscious) metaphysics. What is the world made of? What is existence? What makes a human being?

I won’t be able to even list all the questions here, but I highly recommend that you check out Dr. Cobb’s comments in his “Ask Dr. Cobb” column over at the Process and Faith website.

Right now I am reading The Process Perspective II. (It’s okay to skip the first one and go right to this one, which is also available digitally.) It gives a simple introduction to Christian process theology and covers basic metaphysics, the nature of God, science, evolution and ecology, the nature of Christ, the problem of evil, and religious pluralism. These are collections of pieces from the “Ask Dr. Cobb” column. He is so conversational in his answers that reading them feels like sitting down for lunch with him.

I only wish I had some of that great bok choy and rice we had that day in early February.

Joy ~ Consenting to Worthiness

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This is the third week of Advent, and at Grace Commons we have a tradition of honoring Mary on this week. In the past we’ve used the theme of Courage and Action, contemplating how much courage it takes sometimes to move into action.

Mary, the mother of God, is such a great, courageous example for us. She steps into her destiny. That’s so courageous. She agrees to do something that won’t be easy or simple–but it’s right for her. She has the capacity to temporarily contain the uncontainable; to hold divinity within her body. And she chooses to do so!

This year we are using the more traditional weekly themes of Hope, Love, Joy (and next week, Peace.)

I’m thinking about the kind of steady, deep (different from cheery) joy that a person has when they are doing what they are meant to do–when they feel they are being useful in the world, and using their gifts well.

The Annunciation is the announcement of the angel telling Mary what is about to happen to her through her pregnancy. It seems it would be easier if God would announce as clearly what is to happen to each of us, but we are left to discern it, to seek out our vocations, our callings, our purposes, and our capacities.

Annunciation by Denise Levertov is one of my all-time favorite poems. You can read the full poem here.  Here’s a part of it:

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

“Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives?” We have that moment when we’re confronted with the opportunity to be authentic, to believe in ourselves, to tell the truth, to take a risk for love or justice, to do something for the ones who are looking to us, relying on us to use our gifts and skills and be strong, beautiful, compassionate, steady, protective, creative.

Some moments of potential we walk into. Other times we let the gates of possibility close because of our dread, our weakness, our despair. In those moments, not only does God not smite us, but God also does not abandon us. There is always a path before us, always a next step to take, and always God is near us, God-with-us, hoping we will have the courage to let go of our own sense of unworthiness.

It’s easy to think of the Virgin Mary as demure, as quiet and obedient, submissive–it’s easy, because we’ve been trained to think that way, about Mary, about the ideal woman, or the ideal Christian. Submit, obey, demure, sacrifice, deny yourself.

But I think Mary’s example and the teaching she offers us is exactly the opposite of that. To fulfill her destiny, she had to step into herself, embody herself, and realize her own capacity. By joining herself with God, she had the capacity to carry God within her and bring God into the world.

She did not cry, “I cannot, I am not worthy,”
nor “I have not the strength.”
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

She was worthy. She was worthy to meet the task that was put before her. And so are you, and so am I.

Mary did not submit, but she gave consent. Think about the difference between those two words. To submit to coercion, or to consent to possibility. I love the idea that consent illumined her.

But to what was she consenting? What I love about this poem is that Mary consents to her own worthiness. She was worthy of being loved by God, “favored” the biblical text says. And I believe that God favors each and every one of us.

This is God’s omni-partiality (a word I got from Process Theologians); being partial to, or loving intensely and distinctly, every being. God waits for us to realize that God loves us. God waits for our consent to our own worthiness before we can be filled with luminosity.

But when we do consent to that worthiness, we are strengthened with courage. And, I would suggest, we open ourselves to the possibility of a deep and abiding joy.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The image of the Spanish Our Lady of Guadalupe in Loboc, the Philippines, is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:La_Guadalupana_Loboquena.jpg

Life

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I just found out that a dear friend has stage 3 cancer. I don’t even know what that means, except that she had surgery yesterday, and I was told by another friend to pray, pray, pray.(For privacy I am not putting her name, but she doesn’t live in Chicago.)

I used to live with her in a farmhouse in Hatfield, Massachusetts, and it just so happens that another friend, Ani, just emailed me a picture of sunset from her porch tonight in Hatfield, where Ani still lives.

The earth is such a beautiful place, filled with life. And life is impermanent.That is so scary, in part because of all we love and don’t want to lose.

I had a cancer scare myself a couple years ago. It didn’t turn out to be cancer, but it sure generated some serious thought about the nature of my life. Would I change it if I knew I had a very limited time to live? Usually I think I have another 40 or 50 years to live, and a person can get a lot done in 40 to 50 years. That feels so abundant! But what if I don’t have that long?

I want to say this out loud, (or write it down, as it were), that the big fear that rises up in me is that I would lose her, my friend. Of course that is the biggest and first fear. But that may not happen at all. It is entirely possible that she heal from this surgery and from this cancer. I know that many of my readers have also experienced cancer in your own bodies, or in the bodies of your loved ones. So this prayer is also for all of you and all those you love.

I imagine my friend strong and whole and healed, and pray for that, imagining life, and sodzo (healing, salvation, rescue, wholeness), and shalom (peace, well-being, completeness, safety.) This is my prayer.

I am going to do yoga now, and dedicate it to my friend’s sodzo and shalom. I know that we are each part of something so much larger than our-selves. And that large something is the wholeness of God. We cannot escape from it. We are safe in it. Embraced in the sunset pictured here. Embraced in the arms of God.

Looking for the Evil Within Us

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In my book on Hospitality-the sacred art, I have a chapter devoted to hospitality to our enemies. These are two words we don’t put together in our heads (or our practice) very often. Hospitality. Enemies.

The idea is very akin to the Jesus concepts of “Love your enemies,” “pray for those who persecute you.” When Jesus cried out from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” it’s a similar thing.

In the chapter, I outline a spiritual practice of Self-Examination because transformative spiritual hospitality is based, I believe, on honest self-awareness. This is especially important when we are faced with adversarial or hostile situations.

I rely a lot on the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in this chapter, as they were brilliant theologians and practitioners of “loving” “enemies.” Rev. King has a great sermon called Loving Your Enemies that he preached in 1957, before I was born. I relied on his sermon for inspiration and courage in writing my chapter about hospitality to enemies. Read his full sermon here.

Here is a short piece from my book:

Dr. King’s second step toward loving enemies invites us to look within for a very specific purpose. He suggested that we look for the good in our enemies and look for the evil that is in us. Dr. King described us as being split up and divided against ourselves as though a civil war were raging inside us. It is the “isness” of our present nature being out of harmony with the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts us, Dr King said. In other words, we’re not as completely good as we would like to be.

If we can recognize that this is true within ourselves as well as within our adversaries, then we can no longer see ourselves as entirely innocent, or our adversaries as entirely guilty, or evil. There is no wholly good person, just as there is no wholly bad person. There are only human beings. When we can realize and remember our shared humanity with our adversaires, our attitude can shift, and a little compassion may even rise up within us.

If you would like to explore this particular practice, you can simply add a new step or focus to the earlier exercise of self-examination. Work your way through the same steps of imagining your adversary, and this time look for signs within yourself of hostility, hatred, disrespect, disdain, or anything that undermines the humanity of your adversary by seeing him or her as all bad. Also notice that seeing yourself as all good undermines your own humanity too, because that belief is not based in the complex reality of what it means to be human.

Restorative Justice

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This is the sermon I preached on Sunday morning, Sept 11, 2011, at Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church. I gave a shorter version at Wicker Park Grace that evening.

Click the audio icon at the end of this post to listen in.

You can also right click here and “save link as” to download the mp3 file to your iTunes:

Restorative Justice download (mp3)

And here is a pdf transcript of what I said: Restorative Justice–Rev.Nanette.Sawyer

I approached the task of writing and preaching this sermon with fear and trembling. There is so much emotion surrounding 9/11 and all that has happened since, related to it.

Of course, the lectionary reading that came up was the Red Sea incident, in which the Israelite slaves cross over the sea to freedom, and their oppressors perish as the waters crash back down on them.

Is this a story about Justice, or about Liberation? Is it a story about Punishment, or about Salvation? Is there a difference?

What does “Justice” look like to God? I suggest that God’s justice is a Restorative Justice, and not a Retributive Justice.

One additional and important point I make is that we must think carefully about who “we are” in the story–are we the oppressed, or are we the oppressors? How does this story relate to our current world situation?

Listen in…

Communion Means Loving Across Barriers

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I wrote about communion in the Wicker Park Grace e-newsletter this week. It’s so important that I want to repeat it here.

As a pastor, I have struggled with how to interpret communion and how to practice it in a community deeply committed to radical inclusion. In many times and places, communion has been interpreted as a boundary-marker between insiders and outsiders: those who are invited to eat the bread, and those who are not invited.

This is deeply ironic, given Jesus’s boundary-breaking meal practices for which he took so much flack. Insider/outside status was not a boundary that Jesus respected. He shared his table with anyone who would come and eat with him.

At the same time, I realize that the communion ritual has come to be an identity-marker for Christians. It’s something that Christians do. It’s a Christian practice. It ties us to a history, a lineage of people (some of whom we’d rather not be associated with, but that’s another story.)

How can we affirm, embrace, reclaim, reframe, the positive meanings of communion without reinforcing the negative ways it has been experienced? Unfortunately, the whole time we’re reclaiming and reframing, others continue to use communion as a marker of insider/outsider.

I can only hope that more and more communities will reframe and reclaim–that all of us will get better at articulating the intentional inclusivity of Jesus–in all that we do.

Here’s what I wrote in the e-notes:

Not everyone who participates at Wicker Park Grace
is a Christian, and we love that.
We are a community of learning, relationship, and hospitality.
At the same time, the spiritual practices we do
are Christian ones, and communion is a prime example.

We pass the bread from one to another
as a sign of how God moves among us,
and to experience serving one another.
We share communion often so that we can build up
memories and patterns and symbolic resonances.

Our communion table is open
to all who seek to be nourished by
the presence of God in this
communal meal practice begun by Jesus.

There are many signs of our unity in community and this ritual meal is only one of them. The Latin etymology of the word communion means “fellowship, mutual participation, a sharing.”

In that sense, our community meal that we share every week after our spiritual practice is another form of “communion.” Our conversations, our book groups, our dinners at one another’s homes, these are all ways we practice communion.

Eating the communion bread
is not a sign of our separation from
those who do not eat it.

Eating the communion bread
is a sign of our commitment to love,
as Jesus did, across all barriers.

So if you eat it, love, and be loved.
If you don’t eat it, love! And be loved!

Catching the Light

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When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

Psalm 8:3-4

While I was on retreat in Maine this June, I did some experimenting with my camera. I aimed it toward the sky, which was filled with more stars than I ever see in Chicago. I tried to photograph them in the dark. I have a good camera, which I can manually control to hold open the aperture and expose the image for a long time.

The stars without the camera were incredible, but once I got the knack of photographing them, even more stars became visible. The camera allowed me to see further, and more deeply, than my bare eyes could.

Metaphorically, what are the lenses that help us to see more light? How long do we have to look, before the stars shine through?

Seeing these stars appear through the camera made me think about how much bigger than me everything is. My body, my eyes, (my mind) don’t have the capacity to stay open long enough to take in enough light to be able to see what is really there.

The psalm I included above asks, “what are human beings”, but the stars made me think, “what is God?” God, like the stars, is so far beyond my capacity to see.

Click on the image below to see more clearly the photo I took.

Disarming the Clobber Passages, #3

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In the final discussion of the movie Fish Out of Water, we moved on the three new testament passages used in discussions about the lgbtq community: Romans 1: 26-37, 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10.

I touched upon Romans 1 in my recent post #2 on the Clobber Passages (July 24), so I’ll focus here on Corinthians and Timothy, which both include lists of people who are “wrong-doers.” At issue in these two texts are the Greek words malakoi and arsenokoitai. Both words appear in 1 Corinthians, and arsenokoitai appears in 1 Timothy.

Who are these wrong-doers? Malakoi is a word which means “soft.” The King James Version of the bible translated it as “effeminate.” Early church interpreters suggested this referred to masturbation. As social mores shifted, the interpretation also shifted to apply this term to gay men.

Arsenokoitai is a compound word that means men-who-bed-(men?). It does not appear in other contexts in Greek literature and it’s unclear what kind of specific activity was being referred to in this list of wrong-doings. It’s possible it referred to male temple prostitution or to sex with slaves or young boys which were abuses of unequal power. The King James Version translated this word as “abusers of themselves with mankind.” The Revised version translated malakoi and arsenokoitai together as “homosexual” and the second edition translated them together as “sexual pervert.”

Rev. Lindsey Biddle provides an in-depth and readable study of these words in her paper, “Translations with a Soft Touch (Word Studies on 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, 1 Timothy 1:9-10).”

Upon reading these and other commentaries, in my mind it is clear that these words do not refer to loving same-gender couples who are seeking to live a life of integrity, commitment, love, and family with each other and their neighbors.

Let’s all have ethics, yes. But let’s not target whole populations of people based on their identity. Let’s not clobber people with the bible. In fact, let’s make that one of our ethical commitments, k?