Kyle Matthew Oliver

Dancing with the Word (John 1 sermon)

December 29, 2019February 25, 2022 Kyle

A sermon for the First Sunday of Christmas (Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147; Galatians 3:23-25 & 4:4-7; John 1 :1-18)

Our Christian Feast of the Incarnation is twelve days long. So no matter how things fall in the December calendar, we always have at least one Sunday in this short liturgical season.

And that means we will always hear those majestic verses from the prologue of John’s gospel. The lectionary asks us every year to make sense of John 1 as a kind of nativity story.

It’s a funny pairing: On the first day of Christmas, “shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night … go with haste and find Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.” And then on the first Sunday of Christmas, “the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.” Same message, very different style.

Luke’s Christmas story is full of charming, down-to-earth details. There’s plenty that we can easily get our heads around in his account, even if we don’t keep livestock. The challenge is for us to remember that many of those details derive from the political context of empire and the disadvantaged social positioning of the Holy Family.

Still I’m usually up to that challenge much more enthusiastically. It’s strange to be celebrating the birth of a baby, a tiny human, with such mystic and even cosmic poetry and theology as we’ve heard this morning.

John 1 tells us the Word came to dwell in “the [very] world that had come into being through him.” God becomes part of God’s creation. And probably we need this sense of the cosmic stakes and connections, because by verse twelve the prelude is already telling us that this Word “who is close to the Father’s heart” has come to make God known to us, and still more audaciously to “g[i]ve [us] power to become children of God.”

It’s worth accepting the challenge to reckon in some way with John’s prologue in the midst of our dazed holiday fatigue. John needs us to know that there is a connection between the baby in the manger and the creation of the universe, between a human infant’s frail vulnerability and our startling capacity to become God’s friends and co-creators.

Jesus was born to show us God. Or is it better to say “to show us God’s love”? Is there any difference in those two ways of putting it? And if the Word was with God and was God and is the one through whom all things come into being, how do we understand whatever or whoever else was there in the beginning?

We can derive plenty of intellectual benefit for our faith by putting this and other passages under the microscope, studying the Greek, studying the philosophy of the day, studying what sense the church has made of all this since. That would be a good response on any given Sunday.

But our celebration of God’s Incarnation at Christmas is an especially sensory feast, with a baby at the center, getting glamorous and pungent presents and probably crying a bit more than the hymns would have us believe. So let me make a different suggestion.

If we want to experience John’s prologue and its proclamation in a more accessible and embodied and maybe Christmasy way, we might consider the metaphor that means so much to us here at St. Gregory’s.

I’m sure someone had remarked from this seat that when one looks up at Jesus on the Cross, one also sees him directly behind as the leader of the dance of saints. What if we see him in similar fashion behind the manger as we read from John 1:

In the beginning was the Word: the Word danced with God and the Word and the Dance were God. God danced in the beginning. Through the Dance all things came into being, invited to join another circle, invited to get in formation.
The Dance brought form and movement to the world, showed creation how to participate and also how to resist. But no wallflower could bring the Dance to a halt.

You get the idea. In Christ, the Word stepped aside from the transcendent but exclusive choreography of eternity and into the studio or the club where we enthusiastic amateurs mostly pull hamstrings and embarrass ourselves.

Jesus enters the created circle and teaches us, reminds us, of the beauty and simplicity of the Dance.

He shows us it is no less sacred if we sometimes step behind the beat or on our partner’s toes or even unexpectedly in a pile of manure. Even a baby can join the circle strapped to mom or dad’s torso, which, by the way, is how I invite you to look at the next Madonna and Child icon you encounter.

So, if you’re feeling lost in the cosmos upon hearing today’s peculiar Christmas gospel, it might be that the most faithful words from and to the preacher are something like, “shut up and dance.”

Merry Christmas: The Word has been made flesh and dances among us.

Image: “Andes Virgin & Child” by Artemio Coanqui via Enchanted Booklet (CC BY SA 2.0)

Holding tension with the Root of Jesse (Isaiah 11)

December 9, 2019February 25, 2022 Kyle

A sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent in Lectionary Year A (O Root of Jesse; Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12)

I have some deep, visceral, and thoroughly mixed emotions associated with this Root of Jesse text from the Prophet Isaiah.

This year in our repeating lectionary cycle was also the year I took my first preaching class. One of the first sermons I ever gave—it must have been nine years ago now—was on this text.

As part of our preparation, we had to memorize and perform our chosen passages for our classmates. And here is where the trouble began for me. Hebrew poetry is both lovely and often extremely repetitive.

[sing]
The beginning of a verse sets out and feeling or idea *
   the conclusion repeats or expands the message.
The wolf shall live with the lamb * 
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid
the calf and the lion and the fatling together *
   and a little child shall lead them

This poem is a beautiful but detailed list of messianic virtues and clothing, followed by another list of improbable animal and behavior pairings. It was a disaster to try to memorize, at least for me: counsel and might *then* knowledge and fear; cow, bear, lion, ox; child, asp, child, adder.

I remember, I can feel, the tense muscles and the pounding heart and eventually the watery eyes that accompanied my shameful attempted recitation. I won’t soon forget what it felt like to fail to speak the words of perhaps our most treasured prophet to a room full of eager disciples who had had no difficulty embodying their own proclamation.

A part of me would like to unambiguously loathe this text, and that assignment. But the story is more complicated.

A couple weeks later, I got to preach. I’d been assigned the short message at our delightfully informal family service, and that meant sitting in the aisle with the children of the parish and playing with the biblical passage together.

I knew we would be sitting down, so it had occurred to me that we could embody this text by each becoming one of the animals in Isaiah’s imaginative tableau. I spent the evening before making oversized animal ears for us to wear while we chatted about God’s hope for creation: cotton ball sheep ears, Sharpie-spotted leopard and cow ears, pointy gray upright wolf ears.

It was a bit of a gimmick. But it worked, and it was fun, and I remember it fondly.

In fact, it helped redeem the ordeal I’d been through a few weeks earlier. Both stories are now a part of my story. Both moments exist together in my body’s experience of this text: terror and humiliation, joy and playfulness.

Deep, visceral, and thoroughly mixed emotions are also part and parcel of the Advent experience:

the excitement of anticipation and the tedium of waiting;
our longing for God’s deliverance and our anxiety about God’s judgment;
our unambiguous experience of the Good News of Jesus’s first coming on the one hand (the star! the manger! three gifts! more cute animals!) and on the other hand our confusion and dread at being asked to take as Good News the apocalyptic announcements of Christ’s impending return. Here there is mostly ominous symbolism and decidedly un-cute animals and other beasts.

Isaiah’s portrait of the promised messiah and messianic age captures this tension really well: “the Root of Jesse,” as the prophet calls this messiah, will tend to poor people and put an end to inequity, and will strike the earth with an iron rod, putting the wicked to death entirely. I’m not so sure I’m not among the wicked.

John the Baptist, in pointing to the coming of Christ and its implications for the weak and for the powerful, puts on the hairy mantle of that earlier prophetic tradition.

In the gospel story we heard at daybreak, what looks like a kind of riverside hippy renewal gathering quickly sours, at least for some. John calls out the hypocritical religious authorities who show up, calls them a brood of vipers, implies God is standing ready to chop them down at the roots. I’m not so sure I’m not among the vipers.

The spiritual challenge of Advent is learning to hold *all* the Good News of our experience of God’s good creation and message of love and redemption: abiding promise alongside temporary disappointment, boundless mercy alongside ample capacity for evil, a peaceable kingdom of safety and reciprocity just beyond the painful transformation we must pass through together in order to see and embody such a world.

How do we find our way to this holy even-handedness? I believe part of the picture is by reflecting faithfully and often on the ups and downs of our own experience and of our shared lives. We find wholeness and clarity through integrating our many pleasurable and painful experiences of life abundant:

Here is my story so far. Here’s where I’ve followed Jesus’s leading. Here’s where I’ve missed the mark. Here’s what I still can’t understand or accept, at least for now. I will with God’s help.

Through grace and Jesus’s presence with us, this honestly about the truth of our lives and of the world can help us heed our prophets’ calls.

O Root of Jesse, rallying your people around God’s banners and bringing leaders everywhere up short: Come without delay and deliver us. Amen.

Image credit: “Rambling Roots” by judy dean via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

#ThankYouPatrons! – Meet Erin

November 19, 2019November 17, 2019 Erin

Today, November 19th, is #ThankYouPatrons Day. I wanted to take the chance to express my gratitude to my Patreon supporters, newsletter subscribers, and everyone who takes the time to check out the faith-filled media I make.

I also wanted to use #ThankYouPatrons day to introduce you to Erin Wiens St. John—in case you don’t know her already. Erin has been working with me over the past few months on scheduling, drafting, editing, social media management, and content creation.

I invited Erin to collaborate so I could be more faithful to my commitment to send regular newsletters, post weekly prayer and study prompts, and generally get more of the stuff I think you’re seeking here out into the world. I hope you’ve been noticing the difference.

So thank you, Patrons, for the gift of your attention and support—and for helping fund a collaboration that has already been a blessing to me and, I hope, to you.

Now I’ll hand it over to Erin to tell you a little bit about herself . . .

Hi! My name is Erin, and I’m a recent college graduate and nominee for ordination in the Episcopal Church. I wrote my senior thesis on thriving, progressive churches around the country–and how their success can be replicated in other places.

I’ve just launched a website and blog to share my research and bring a Millennial perspective to the conversation on the Church’s future.

Work like Kyle’s is a huge piece of that, bridging the gap between the Church and the digital sphere. It’s been a privilege to help bring these ideas to life.

#ThankYouPatrons for supporting him so that I can do that!

Renewal amid desolation (Joel 2)

October 29, 2019October 28, 2019 Kyle

A sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C): Joel 2 :23-32; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; Luke 18:9-14.

The Book of the Prophet Joel begins with bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

It can honestly feel a little amusing to read about swarms of locust in scripture. It turns out there are various locust roles or specialities, at least in the biblical imagination: cutting locusts, swarming locusts, etc.

My favorite is the “hopping locust,” which I always picture jumping along accompanied by a cartoon “boing boing boing.”

Things get funnier still when, if you are a non-native Spanish speaker, you encounter locusts in the scripture for the first time.

Because a third or fourth year Spanish student may well know the word for locust, langosta. But that’s because langosta is also the word for a creature more commonly found at a seafood purveyor or on fancy restaurant menus.

You can perhaps imagine the confusion that ensues when such students first read in Exodus about the eighth Plague of Egypt, the Plague of Lobsters. Oh to be so stricken…

Of course, in biblical times as in ours, plagues of locusts are no laughing matter. They are a natural, economic, and often humanitarian disaster. Indeed, the closing verses of Joel Chapter 1 hit a little close to home as they describe the plague and its apparent aftermath:

The seed shrivels under the clods,
   the storehouses are desolate;
the granaries are ruined
   because the grain has failed …
To you, O Lord, I cry.
For fire has devoured
   the pastures of the wilderness,
and flames have burned
   all the trees of the field.
Joel 1:17,19 (NRSV)

The historical backdrop for today’s lesson is desolation. And perhaps we can relate.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in a funeral sermon that in the midst of housing crises and wage crises and rolling blackouts and ecological disasters we all need to be making more room to honestly grieve. It may well be that we are seeing entire ways of life passing away.

But that is not the whole story, and not our whole call.

Forces are at work changing our world not just for the worse but for the better, even now, even now.

This too was the case in Joel’s day. Scholars believe this book was written in the midst of the Judeans’ gradual return to their land, and to the city of Jerusalem, after their Babylonian captivity. Joel seems to be familiar with the rebuilding of the temple, and the restoration of the priestly traditions there.

It was not an easy time. There were labor shortages. There was opposition from neighboring communities. Long days, short nights, tight belts, sore backs.

Especially after the locusts showed up, I have no doubt that, like the Hebrews in the desert remembering their fleshpots in Egypt, some Judeans probably looked back with fond longing on the houses they’d built in Babylon, now furnished and lived in, and to the gardens they’d planted, now lush and fruitful.

How do you simultaneously grieve the loss of one way of life and build a new and sustaining one together? This is the spiritual question for our times, and not just for Christians, and not just for Americans.

Hope and trust are the twin pillars that support the gateway to this path, and they are the paving stones that will mark each footstep. Hope and trust in God, for those of us who have received these gifts, but also hope and trust in each other. These days that feels like an even bigger spiritual challenge.

Our hope and our trust require inspiration, and nurture.

The prophet Joel understood that, full of a word from the LORD, the God of Israel. The Apostle Peter understood that, drunk on the Spirit and quoting from Joel on a momentous day in the life of the early church, the Day of Pentecost.

You will know that I am with you, says the Lord.
And that I love you.
I will breathe my enlivening spirit onto and into and through you.
I will make you prophets.
I will make you dreamers.
I will make you visionaries.
Not only the powerful but also all you who are in bondage.
(Joel 2 :27–29, my paraphrase)

These familiar words from Joel 2 do not an easy prophecy make.

It’s hard to trust that we’re Beloved as we reckon with the consequences of how we have been treating each other, and our planet.

But Beloved we are. All of us. Still.

It’s hard to hope that we can make a difference for others when we are tempted to look out only for ourselves, to protect whatever nest egg we might have socked away.

But Powerful we are. Together, with and for each other.

God in Christ is healing and rejuvenating and forming us for mission in the midst of our confusion, in the midst of our anxiety, in the midst of our anger both righteous and resentful.

You will catch glimpses of this sacred presence: this morning, and this week, and in the weeks to come.

Tell each other about your glimpses. Ask each other about your glimpses.

There is more than desolation and despair in our fields and forests, and in our future. There is passion, and compassion, and resilience, and the joy of both resistance and celebration.

All who cry out will receive solace, and renewal, says the Lord.

Image credit: “Foggy Dreamscape” by Mike Behnken via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Digital Ministry: Intro resource overview

October 28, 2019May 19, 2022 Kyle

When you hear “digital ministry,” what do you feel? Excitement? Terror? Apprehension?

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the thought of “reproducing” your vocation on an entirely different platform. After all, online ministry encompasses so much, from mission work to pastoral care, from liturgy to Christian education and formation. And the potential audience is so much broader, far beyond the congregation that shows up each Sunday.

What could go wrong?

Today we’re kicking off a series of curated collections aimed at provide you with inspiration and resources for digital ministry in your church or other ministry.

Each week, you’ll find articles and tools that will help you bring your liturgy, online presence, and pastoral care into online and hybrid spaces.

Our theme this week? An intro to media-savvy ministry, what it entails, and what kind of boundaries to draw.

Digital Ministry Has a New Name: Ministry: In today’s world, digital ministry isn’t a separate task or category, and it certainly isn’t optional. In this post, we take a look at what it means to be a minister in the digital age–and how to integrate digital ministry seamlessly into what you’re already doing.

Woman on phone engaging in digital ministry

You already have everything you need to be a digital media minister. No, really! It’s easy to be intimidated by technology. But technological skills aren’t the most important part of online ministry. Instead, it’s about letting the Holy Spirit funnel your pastoral instincts into a new medium. Check out my piece in Faith & Leadership for a confidence booster.

Members in Digital Ministry: Okay, so you’ve become a digital minister. But what about the members of your congregation, especially the ones less comfortable with technology? Keith Anderson explores how they can become confidently involved in your congregation’s online outreach.

Pastoral Care in a Digital Age: Seminary taught you how to visit parishioners in the hospital and how to respond when you encountered depression in your pews. But what about a cry for help on Facebook? Or how to care for someone who’s never set foot in a church? Sally Coleman lays out the basics of digital pastoral care.

Healthy Boundaries for Ministry: It’s hard enough to draw good boundaries when you’re physically in the church building. But what about when you’re involved in your church’s social media platforms and digital outreach? Lisa Brown helps draw some boundaries to prevent burn-out for the digital pastor.

Bonus Content! Interested in even more resources? Check out Kyle Oliver and Lisa Kimball’s chapters on digital media for ministry in The Study of Ministry. (Disclosure: Amazon affiliate link.)

Next in our Digital Ministry series: liturgy! Check back soon for a resource guide on digitizing your worship services, sermons, online giving, and more.

Interpreting Luke 16 with The Muppet Christmas Carol

September 29, 2019October 28, 2019 Kyle

A sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (Proper 21: Jeremiah 32:1-3a; 6-15, Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31)

Of all the genius bits of casting in The Muppet Christmas Carol, my favorite comes in the very first scene.

“The Marleys were dead to begin with,” says Gonzo as Charles Dickens, though that’s not my pick.

I was too young to spot the change back in 1992. But I can imagine Dickens fans in the theater being both GRATEFUL for the direct reference to the first line of the book, and also CONFUSED about Marley suddenly becoming plural.

My friends, it had to be thus. Because Jacob Marley—and now also Robert Marley—simply had to be played by Statler and Waldorf.

If you’re not a Muppets fan and need the wikipedia summary for these two, this excerpt should do it:

Species: Muppet humans

Occupations: Hecklers, curmudgeons, comic relief

How else could the Muppets tackle A Christmas Carol and its bizarre premise and intense social commentary? How else could you make a kid-friendly movie of what seems to have been a Dickensian remix of today’s parable.

I mean, within moments of coming on screen, these two puppets are singing “You’re DOOMED, Scrooge. You’re doomed for all time. / Your future is a HORROR STORY written by your crimes.”

This is not usual Muppets territory. But because it’s Statler and Waldorf, we’re still chuckling at their last grandpa joke.

And we’re unsurprised and even charmed when “the chains the Marleys forged in life” turn out to be binding them to adorably animate little Muppet treasure chests. In fact, those boxes themselves float up to finish the song’s final verse.

The prospect of eternal torment was never so funny and so cute.
**
The Muppets succeed in SIDELINING a distracting detail in the premise of today’s gospel story, which some believe to be the inspiration for A Christmas Carol: Through humorous misdirection, they help us see past the somewhat grisley frame of this parable and look instead at the challenging picture inside it.

It’s easy to fixate on the detail of “the chasm” that separates the Rich Man from Lazarus in death, the great dividing line in this apparent afterlife.

But this is not a parable about if Hell exists, who might go there, or for how long. The imaginative setting is just the backdrop for the conversation Jesus wants his characters to have.

The striking detail of “the chasm” IS meant to catch our attention, but in order to point back to another detail: the Rich Man’s SECURITY GATE in life.

It’s as if Abraham is saying, “You isolated yourself then. So too are you isolated from us now.”

The Rich Man wanted to keep Lazarus at a safe distance: off his doorstep and out of his neighborhood. He didn’t want to have to see a poor and hungry man covered in sores as he took his own sumptuous feasts with wealthy friends in their fine clothes.

Marginalized people from every generation and era have had to grapple with going not just ignored but sometimes literally unseen. Upstairs/downstairs, front-of-house/back-of-house, one side or the other of the tracks or the river—

In Jesus’s day, in Dickens’s day, and in ours, the rich and powerful concoct ways to separate themselves from the people who make it possible for them to be rich and powerful. And then to varying degrees they ignore, rationalize, or even forget that they have done so—at least until they run out of space on the picturesque side side of the tracks, or the Lazaruses run out of space or patience on the run down and polluted side.

Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley of Westminster Abbey, who preached there on the Sunday after Charles Dickens death, certainly believed that this social dynamic motivated both Dickens’s and Jesus’s stories: He said, “By [Dickens] that veil was rent asunder which parts the various classes of society. Through his genius the rich man … was made to see and feel the presence of Lazarus at his gate.”
**
I sometimes get frustrated that this parable is cited by fundamentalists in support of common discourses around Hell and our need to shape up, lest we get sent there.

But try as I might this week, I wasn’t able to think of a more appropriate way for Jesus to make his point about the cruel and calcified ways we literally separate one life from another. Where else but on the very threshold between life and death could so important a conversation take place?

So although the fire and brimstone folks are unlikely to take their moral theology from Dickens’ Christmas Carol—let alone The Great Gonzo’s—I’d simply want to point out one last thing: At least in my reading and viewing, it wasn’t fear that ultimately brought Scrooge around to the need to turn from his Marley-esque ways.

It was love, and laughter, and compassion. It was the obvious and abundant joy he witnessed in places he’d never bothered to look.

So if you think Dickens was at all on the right track in reimagining Jesus’s parable to give the Rich Man half a chance, here’s my Cliff’s Notes on the meaning of both.

Don’t fear the chasm that might separate us from each other in some unknown great beyond. Fear the chasms that separate us from each other’s love and friendship right here, right now.

New publication: ‘Faith Leaders Developing Digital Literacies’

September 3, 2019February 15, 2023 Kyle

Great news! My collaborator Stacy Williams-Duncan and I have a new article out in the interdisciplinary Journal of Media Literacy Education! It’s called “Faith Leaders Developing Digital Literacies: Demands and Resources across Career Stages According to Theological Educators.”

The article was inspired by the call for papers for this special issue on media literacy education for all ages.

What is media literacy education?

Theological education is an especially rich context in which to investigate this topic, because the age range of students preparing for religious leadership is unusually broad compared to the student bodies in other, mostly much younger fields of professional study:

This one was significantly easier, but I was still surprised something like it didn’t exist in graphic form.

The backstory here is that while we were working to find the right home for the “foundations paper” about our first-of-its-kind study of digital literacy instruction in theological education (we’re revising that manuscript in light of reviewer comments as I write this), this special issue came along and inspired a re-analysis of our data with special attention to what participants told us about the ages and career stages of their students and what, if any, patterns they noticed about the kinds of tasks students excelled in or struggled with.

For me, the exciting takeaway of the piece is the way it challenges us to think more critically about who’s “good at” (or not) using new media in ministry. Our findings suggest it’s complicated and nuanced.

Yes, there are skills many younger students seem to to excel in and older students tend to struggle with, as the popular imagination might suggest. But the opposite is also true. There seem to be skills for which older students’ personal and professional experience effectively prepares them (think later-in-life “funds of knowledge“), skills that younger students are more likely to struggle with.

That this is the case in general won’t be a surprise to theological educators. But as developing digital literacies becomes a more important part of the explicit curriculum in theological education, we agree with one study participant “that instructors need to ‘complexify’ their understanding of … early-career students and ‘not to romanticize that they [always] understand what they’re doing [online]” (p. 138). The same goes for the tired and false assumption that older students generally don’t.

Of course, we’re still chewing on some of what this might mean:

as this article has occasioned our re-immersion in colleagues’ reflections on their teaching practice, we have become increasingly intrigued by the question of what it means for adult practitioners in any field to be socialized into online communities popularly understood as youth- and young adult-oriented or -dominated. As reported above, many of the transcript excerpts Oliver originally coded as age-related focused on learning to reach a younger audience online. To the extent that this framing is accurate, it raises the question of how mid- and late-career professionals participate authentically in digital cultures. And since we know the youth-oriented framing is reductive, it also raises the trickier question of how older students—and the older educators teaching in professional schools—can claim the DLM insight and authority their experiences have given them.
(p. 140–141)

(It would be gross professional negligence at this point for me to fail to mention #hotpriestsummer as a wonderful example of these tensions and overturned stereotypes in action.)

JMLE is open access, so you can read the article for free—forever, unlike my piece in Teaching Theology & Religion, which goes behind a pay wall next year.

Have a look and let us know what you think!

Download the research

And if you’re dying to know more about the research that this particular analysis revisits as we wait on peer review, you can check out the original poster or this summary over on the website we built to help support the teaching of the literacies our research participants identified.

Photo by NEC Corporation of America, via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

A sermon for when the bells stop ringing (1619 Commemoration)

August 25, 2019February 25, 2022 Kyle 1 Comment

Today at 12 pm Pacific Time we will take part in a nationwide 1619 Commemoration sponsored by the National Park Service and endorsed by Presiding Bishop Curry.

We’re remembering that, 400 years ago today, the first enslaved Africans who were brought to “English North America” landed at Point Comfort in Hampton, VA.

We will participate by ringing our bell for one minute. The Park Service website gives this rationale in their invitation:

Bells are symbols of freedom.

They are rung for joy, sorrow, alarm, and celebration…universal concepts in each of our lives. This symbolic gesture will enable Americans from all walks of life … to capture the spirit of healing and reconciliation while honoring the significance of 400 years of African American history and culture.

As it often does, our lectionary has cooperated.

We just heard Luke’s tale of “a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.” She was “bent over and … quite unable to stand up straight.”

And so Jesus does what Jesus does.

He liberates. He heals.

And he stands up to the authorities when they question his tactics:

You hypocrites! [he says.] Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?

The sabbath is for freedom, he says, and even one day more of bondage in the name of a selectively enforced rule of law is at odds with God’s liberating imperative.

Still, neither the press releases nor the scripture study, the bell ringing nor the singing of spirituals—not even the trust in “a spirit of healing and reconciliation”—in isolation, none of these actions will help or heal. None of them will make an immediate and concrete difference for the plight of black people in the U.S. None of them are enough to help us glimpse or realize the Dream of God.

One of my mentors has a ministry motto that she shares often. To church audiences around the country who invite her to speak, she issues this threefold challenge: “Show up. Listen. Tell the truth.”\

By agreeing to ring our bell at noon today, and to make some stylistic changes to our usual worship choices, I think we have met that first challenge, as well as we can meet it in this time and place. We’re here, together, and that is a start.

Step 2 is trickier, firstly because I’m certainly not suggesting that you listen to me.

I am a halting and unreliable anti-racist—too timid, too willfully ignorant, too addicted to the privileges of my status as a young, fairly-compensated, able-bodied, over-educated straight white male priest. My job is to do my best to get out of the way.

I invite you to listen to the voices of experts on race and social change, and of African Americans willing to tell their stories of life in this nation, despite owing no one such an account.

If, like me, you are a white person, listening and being changed is especially important, because white privilege insulates us from these important stories. It teaches us to avoid at all costs the discomfort of hearing, acknowledging, and engaging with experiences of racial inequity and oppression.

Right now we have what I see as an unparalleled opportunity to hear these stories from willing and wise storytellers. This is thanks to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which I highly recommend.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, this package of extensively reported economic, social, and cultural analyses aims to [quote] “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

Contrary to some of the pushback I read this week, the point of this reframing is not to raise and settle some non-existent argument about when America officially became a separate nation-state.

The point is that this land had slavery for 250 of the last 400 years, not just 90 out of 250. We’ve had slavery or Jim Crow for almost 350 of the last 400.

And for fully 400 years we’ve had slavery, official and de facto Jim Crow, or their variously “legal” modern descendants, which affect many marginalized groups but hit black people hardest:

a vast and devastatingly unequal prison-industrial complex;
shockingly unaccountable police brutality;
unequal political power and representation;
unequal access to quality education and healthcare;
unequal unemployment rates, wages and salaries, and advancement opportunities;
predatory lending and other means of targeted financial exploitation; and
urban neglect followed by rapid displacement through gentrification.

This nation has never dealt honestly with these realities.

Today we remember Jesus’s controversial healing of a woman in bondage, on the sabbath, a day set aside to recognize the end of generations of slavery in Egypt.

We also pray on this our Christian sabbath for the healing of an entire people in bondage, on a day set aside to recognize the beginning of generations of slavery in America.

We can picture a woman standing upright in the synagogue. We can imagine the Hebrews singing songs of gratitude on the far side of the Red Sea.

It is harder to form a fully comprehensible mental picture of what liberation will look like in this country.

But we have an abundance of evidence—stories, photos, films, statistics—that we are far from the promised land. The work was not fully accomplished in the mid 1860s, nor in the mid 1960s, nor in the years that have past since.

As I took stock of the signs of white supremacy manifesting in our national discourse this week, and in our city, and in my own consciousness, I came to a new appreciation of how Jesus describes the woman he heals: “a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound.”

Systemic racism is truly demonic: slippery, seductive, opportunistic, invisible to those unwilling to see it.

Jesus doesn’t sugarcoat his diagnosis, and he doesn’t sugarcoat his rebuke of the people who disapprove of his liberating work.

He tells the truth. He is the Truth.

If it’s really the case that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, I believe it is the very force of truth that in every moment is straining to bend and displace the arrow-straight status quo.

By itself, ringing our bell today will not bend the arc. Thoughts and prayers won’t get the job done.

But if anything we receive or offer in this place helps us tell the truth more often, to more people, to greater effect, with more courage and more conviction, then we will glimpse the promise of the Dream of God becoming a waking reality for all of God’s children.

We have what it takes. God is giving us what we need. I’m amazed and inspired by the financial commitments The Episcopal Church as a whole and individual congregations and dioceses are making to the work of racial healing and reconciliation. We’re showing up, listening, telling the truth.

The educational and liturgical resources, the study groups and pilgrimages, the local partnerships and coalition building, increasingly good faith conversations about the need for reparations—these efforts are mostly in their infancy, but they are growing. The “[S]pirit of healing & reconciliation” moves.

Whatever the catalyst, I urge us all not just to examine our own roles in systemic racism, especially anti-black racism, but to dig deep and explore our motivation for ending it.

For some of us that will involve grappling with our own demons and inner conflict. I am deadly serious when I say that Jesus can help us, is longing to help us, to lift us up together to our full dignity and full integrity.

Whoever we are, we can learn to help God realize the liberation of those in bondage.

So in the months and years to come, at Trinity+St. Peter’s, around the city of San Francisco, across the Diocese of California, along the entirety of the Golden State, and throughout a nation that believes in spite of itself that all persons are created equal: as we will at noon Pacific time today, let us continue to choose to let freedom ring.

Demo video screenshot - reading more with Kindle accessibility features

How I’m reading more – and maybe better

August 6, 2019May 19, 2022 Kyle

I read a paper in my cognition class a couple years back that kinda blew my mind.

In “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds,” Edwin Hutchins makes the argument that a whole bunch of representational technology helps a flight crew “think” as a single system. The cognition in this system is socially shared and spatially distributed across the roles and procedures of pilot and copilot as well as the dials, displays, and other controls that they work with.

That’s an idea that would appeal, I think, to Bruno Latour, the theorist whose book Reassembling the Social* has more recently been rocking my world. Like Hutchins, Latour believes it’s silly to talk about human agency in a way that robs the objects we create, think with, and increasingly depend on of the significant part they play in our lives.

As a researcher studying religious meaning-making, I find these thinkers’ ways of looking at artifacts appealing. Bibles, icons, prayer beads, bread and wine—the role they play in our spiritual lives is really powerful and has the mark of a kind of presence that, like Latour, I don’t want to dismiss:

In addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop for human action,’ things [i.e., objects] might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on. (p. 71)

My ongoing dissertation study of a faith-adjacent nonprofit whose foster youth mentor teams gather each week in parks and coffee shops all around a large metropolitan area is helping me see this point even more clearly. Basketballs, Uno cards, and cute animals all play a part in this organization, as do the Instagram posts and newsletter reflections that tell the stories of how teams use these physical objects—and so many more—to practice and signify unconditional love.

Tapestry, as I call them, is changing a lot of lives, including mine. In my case, how could they not be, given how much of my time and energy is devoted to thinking and theorizing about them?

I’ve been spending some of that time and energy a little differently, lately. And that, dear reader, is why I have a recommendation for you, plus a technology hack that makes my new practice a little easier and cheaper.

I’m a pretty slow and undisciplined reader, which is a major liability when you’re working on a dissertation. I know I need to be reading more.

But I am a very attentive and agile listener: hence the pastoring, and also the podcasting.

Thus, it has totally revolutionized my reading and research life to get the hell away from my “desk,” i.e., wherever I’m sitting with my laptop checking my email too often, and learn by listening. (I’m just realizing that I’ve talked about this “lace up and listen” approach before).

I’ve been doing serious miles reading more while walking and running around the beautiful city of San Francisco, much of which I still haven’t explored (despite ample inspiration from the likes of a writer who’s walked every neighborhood*, plus delightful albeit fictitious characters like this programmer-turned-baker* and this designer-turned-decoder*). And since I’ve also started surfing, I now have added time for reading more on my once- or twice-weekly round trip to Pacifica (where these adorable surfers were back out in force on Saturday).

You probably know there are decent apps out there for reading PDFs aloud. These have been pretty helpful for me on this journey.

I ended up going with Voice Dream, which has good tools for keeping files organized. I also like that you can double tap on the text to move the “voice cursor” directly to a section where you want the narration to recommence. Unfortunately, it’s only available on iOS. Looks like NaturalReader, another pretty well rated one, is available for iOS and Android.

A tool I’d already been using for listening to long reads from online publications is Pocket, which as a bonus is now owned by Internet do-gooders Mozilla. Pocket’s a great tool even if you don’t have this eccentric desire to have someone else read to you.

Here’s the trouble: in my field, I need to be reading more actual books. I read almost exclusively on Kindle, though I’ve been delighted to discover the occasional book I need available as an audiobook. (I recommended the excellent audiobook of For White Folks Who Teach In The Hood* a couple newsletters ago.)

The problem is, audiobooks are rare in both academia and in mainline protestant religious publishing, plus when they do exist they’re understandably expensive—good audio is hard to make. So to really get the most out of learning by listening, I finally had to figure out how to get my iPhone’s accessibility features to read from me directly from the Kindle app.

It is not a super pleasant experience, as I suspect anyone who reads with a screen reader surely knows. I’m sure some of this also has to do with Amazon not wanting to discourage us from buying content on Audible.

(If you create online content, I hope this post will double as a call to attend to your content’s accessibility features.)

In any event, it is indeed possible to get your Kindle to read books to you. And it is possible to get used to the experience, even if the book you’re reading is full of pull quotes (as in Dear Church*), tables (as in Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event*), and citations/footnotes (as especially in the writing of my new BFF, Latour). I know I’m dropping a lot of book links here, but I’m reading more than I have since seminary, y’all!

Let me walk you through it:

I’d love to hear from folks who find this possibility exciting, or who have similar reading/listening workflows. Perhaps I’m even weirder than usual in my willingness to slog through academic texts via robot voice and a finicky interface. Please don’t hesitate to tell me if you think that’s the case and I’ll just move the hell along.

What I know is that the need to be reading more books has been holding back my scholarship and probably my religious leadership for a long time. (For example, I listened to big chunks of Battered Love* preparing for my recent sermon on Hosea 1; I’m not sure I’d have read as much of it without this new technique.)

I also know that Hutchins and probably even Latour would probably believe me when I say that I think I’m remembering what I hear at least as well as what I read, especially when I’m walking around San Francisco. I can remember the neighborhood I was jogging in when I had a breakthrough in understanding Latour, the same neighborhood (though running in the other direction) as when I heard Renita Weems on the marriage metaphor in a way that went on to inform my sermon.

There’s something about mapping the books I’m reading onto the geography of the city that is helping me make connections I’m not sure I otherwise would have.

Plus it feels good to “read” with my whole body and not exclusively with my eyes and my note-taking fingers, especially as I continue to study religious organizations who stress getting out of their buildings and out into their neighborhoods.

* Disclosure: Affiliate links.

The rich man’s folly—and ours

August 4, 2019August 25, 2019 Kyle

A sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (Proper 13: Hosea 11:1-11; Psalm 107:1-9, 43; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21)

As some of you know, my day job is as an educational media producer and researcher. My main interest has always been in how people make meaning of and with various kinds of objects and experiences.

Take, for example, a vacation photo of a remote mountain path, or a t-shirt some industrious aunt made for a family reunion. Perhaps you can imagine the hiking photo repurposed for a social media post about some big life decision. Perhaps you can imagine the t-shirt repurposed as a cleaning rag, so that whenever you dust your bookshelf you find yourself thinking of that time your 12-year-old cousin went mad with power during an epic game of Monopoly.

I never get tired of hearing people trace these webs of meaning.

Stories from scripture can have this kind of power for meaning making. In particular, I think Jesus knew that parables would be a rich source of reflection and what we would call remixing for his immediate audience and for generations to come.

Stories invite us to bring our own experience to bear on the speaker’s ideas and accounts.

Jesus taps into a lot of gut and heart and soul stuff when he says a simple phrase like “a rich man” or “ample goods” or “eat, drink, be merry.”

I recently had a conversation with a community organizer who works on police accountability and racial wealth disparities in the Bayview. She said something like, “You know, our economic system has taught us to divide our time between working for our livelihood and trying to relax enough to be able to get back to working for our livelihood. If we have a partner, or children, or parents who need our help, we might carve out some space for working and/or relaxing with them.

“But life is about so much more than this,” she said passionately, “and the dimension I’m trying to help people recover is their connection and responsibility to their community.”

I’ve been playing back that conversation in my head for weeks now, and the experience returned to me unbidden as I spent time with this particular parable of the rich man.

I think we do a pretty good job of reminding each other of our interdependence, of how much we need each other and our wider communities, of how much our neighbors and our world need the radical message of love and grace with which Jesus has entrusted us. We received yet another heartbreaking reminder of that need yesterday.

And yet I know all too well what my calendar looks like from week to week. Devoid of, say, the chance to break bread with some of you or the other disciples in my life, or the chance to pitch in at an event my organizer friend is leading, or the tragic necessity for prayer and lament when innocent people are gunned down—without these prompts, as often as not I revert to precisely the kind of thinking the rich man exemplifies.

I may not be building warehouses or renting storage units, but I am nevertheless primarily occupied with my stuff: my possessions and paycheck, my research, my list of responsibilities, my carefully guarded hours to eat, drink, be merry. Even my attention to spiritual or emotional growth, when I have such attention, can be a form of idolatry, a way of focusing overmuch on the created rather than the creator. Of focusing on me.

Where does the rich man go wrong? Where do I? Where do we? And how can we live differently—in ways that grow community and rejoice in human dignity?

What I’m about to say is gonna sound like just “one weird trick,” but it’s actually a window into a deep and life-giving would-be reality:

This week, pay attention to the pronouns you use when you speak. As you’re writing emails or chatting with friends or making plans with a significant other, listen for the pronouns we hear an absurd number of times in this parable: I and my.

For example: How often am I talking about “my ideas” that are really our, or her, or their ideas?

Of course, this exercise in turning from selfishness toward relationships can go the other way too. When am I verbally collectivizing our action in situations where perhaps I am actually shirking my responsibility.

Or when does my “us” also exclude, creating a “them” I can avoid, or blame, or worse.

If the rich man had this particular filter running on his internal monologue, he might have paused to ponder some new possibilities. A larger barn to store crops would make a love-spreading difference if it belonged to the rich man and his workers. “Relax, eat, drink, be merry” is good news bearing good fruit, for a time and for a community. But when he says it only to himself and for many years, that fruit withers on the vine.

In so many ways, too many of God’s children are withering on the vine.

If we allow her, the Holy Spirit will teach us to ask who’s missing from a particular photograph, who is object rather than subject in a particular narrative.

When we slow down and pay attention, perhaps even just to the words we use, the meaning we make from these new perspectives will sometimes surprise us. Sometimes what we discover will tempt us toward shame or disengagement. In one way or another, we will all fall into the rich man’s selfish predicament.

But thanks be to God, Jesus also assures us that, if we let it, what we learn when we turn back outward can transform and deliver us instead.

Faith-Adjacent Spaces Are Where Religion Intersects Everything Else