Friends,

Last Sunday, I preached about pottery, about the fact that, until it's fired, the clay is infinitely re-shapeable. Our Scripture texts spoke of God as the potter, as Jesus invited people to reshape their stories, to rewrite who they could become. These earliest Christians had to overcome broken stories defined by enslaver/enslaved relationships, as they moved toward healthy stories of respectful friendships. God can do that reshaping work with us and with our stories, if we pause to remember what stories we've been telling ourselves. You can listen to the sermon here.

Money is one thing about which we tell ourselves a lot of—mostly unconscious—stories. And as Grace Episcopal Church looks to discern who God is calling us to be in the coming years, we are going to need to be able to remember and perhaps release some of our stories about money. Read on below to connect with reflections we're inviting everyone to engage this week and next, unearthing the story of your relationship with money.

We will spend the coming weeks engaging in four practices: Remember, Release, Reimagine, and Restore.

This season will be about asking: What stories about money have we learned and told, as individuals and as a congregation? Stories of scarcity, abundance, fear, joy, misuse, regret, shame, anxiety, deserving, grace, service, generosity, freedom? What parts of those stories are we still telling ourselves? If we’re willing to unearth these stories, we could let God heal them.

This is not about telling each other how much more you should be giving or what your money story should be. We hope it will be a season of openness, curiosity and healing, remembering the best of who we are and asking God to restore us into who we are called to be.

As you work through these spiritual practices, there will be opportunities to gather and talk with others. All the details are at the link below, and I hope you’ll join us for some or all of those gatherings.

With love,
Susan+

Tags: Rev Susan, Money, stories, Remember, Healing

Friends,

On Sunday morning, some of you heard an NPR Weekend Edition piece that included interviews with clergy serving near Annunciation. I was honored to be interviewed. You can listen to it here.

Last Sunday's sermon focused on the text from the prophet Isaiah -- and on God's bewilderment, in Isaiah's words: “My people have committed two evils – they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” I spoke about the ways our culture, like Isaiah's society, has traded in the wild, living God for the small, broken gods. The idol of personal safety and personal wealth instead of God's dream of a society based in equity and care. You can watch the sermon here.

After twenty-five years of school shootings, our country's inability to make progress in mental health care, common-sense gun policy feels not just tragic nor like a mere failure of will. It feels insane. Like a collective choice not to make progress on mass shootings. How long, O Lord?

I feel bewildered. I know so many of you do too. Why have we traded in our sacred spaces - schools and churches and neighborhood streets - for pop-up war zones?

As we send our kids back to schools that regularly have to do lockdown drills, as we metabolize this latest violation, as we try to care for our neighbors, I hope you will be exquisitely gentle with yourselves and each other.

And I hope you will take to heart the words I shared from Bishop Loya on Sunday:
"Now is the time for us to show up looking, sounding, and acting like the real Jesus in the world. Now is the time for us to remember that the stakes of the gospel are high, and that following Jesus asks something big of each of us. Now is the time to remember that the Eucharistic communities we serve are not nice gatherings offering maudlin spiritual comfort, but are in the business of subverting the world’s violence with God’s irresistible love."

Some of you have already shared ways you're showing up for healing and peace. (Members of Grace have gone to the memorial site at Annunciation with peace flags—in the photo at the top of this article—and offered bagpipe music there!)

How are you taking action to show up looking, sounding, and acting like the real Jesus in the world? I'd love to share your responses in my email next week. Your small steps will be courage for someone else to take their own.

With love and bewilderment,
Susan+

Tags: Violence, Healing, Rev Susan

Friends:

Last night, we opened our doors for a vigil. Members, neighbors, and friends came and sat together in candlelight and silence.

The violence in our city in the past few days—gun violence incidents in South Minneapolis and at Annunciation Church and School in particular—hit close to many of us. I offer these prayers below, as you navigate exhaustion and fear and numbness and rage and grief, holding tight to a defiant hope in God's dream for the world: a life of safety and abundance, in right relationship with all our neighbors and the earth. We practice Jesus' way of defiant, embodied, joyful love, even and especially in the wake of profound violence.

Susan+

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Prayers in the Wake of Violence

Adapted from prayers by Bishop Deon Johnson of Missouri
bishopsagainstgunviolence.org

For Victims of Gun Violence
We pray as we as we call to mind the many victims of gun violence, those who have lost their lives, those who have lost their livelihood, and those who have lost life’s passion. We pray for those who have been killed here in Minneapolis, especially at Annunciation Church and School, and we hold their stories and their memories dear. May their loss not be in vain, and may we shape a new story of hope from the broken pieces of grief. Amen.

For Friends & Family of Gun Violence Victims
We pray with those who have been left behind, the families, friends, and loves ones of those taken by gun violence. We pray that in this time of heartbreak, grief, and loss that they might find comfort and hope to face the days ahead, and that their tears may be turned into songs of joy. Amen.

For Communities Torn by Gun Violence
We pray in hope as we tell the story of homes, communities, neighborhoods, cities and town shattered by gun violence. We call to mind the sacred ground around our nation that has been watered with the blood of loss and the tears of grief. Grant that we may work tirelessly towards a vision where all may sit under their own vine and fig tree in safety and security. Amen.

For First Responders
We pray for first responders, those who live with the horror of gun violence in service to the common good. We stand with them and their families as they heal from bearing witness to the aftermath of lives ended in violence. Grant that we, with them, may create a world where all are protected, all are honored and all are seen, valued and beloved. Amen.

For Schools
We pray for our school communities, for teachers and administrators who offer their energy and love for teaching the next generation, and who now also must safeguard the lives of young people with emergency protocols. We pray with them that our young people, growing up in an unpredictable and fearful world, will meet the challenges of violence with the courage to practice peace and reconciliation. Amen.

For Those Demonized in the Wake of Violence
We pray for our queer and trans friends and neighbors, for immigrants, and for all whose identities are weaponized as scapegoats in the wake of violence. Move our society to see the ways division and fear are leveraged for profit, and help us to reject the politics of hatred and fear, so that all can live with dignity and peace. Amen.

For The Perpetrators of Gun Violence
We pray for perpetrators of violence. We pray for their families, their friends, and those who love them. We pray for those who see no other way than violence. We pray for those who suffer from mental illness, social isolation, loneliness, and debilitating fear. Grant that we may reach out in love and transform anger into friendship and fear into hope. Amen.

For those who feel helpless in the face of Gun Violence
We pray in solidarity with those who feel helpless, dejected, or powerless in the face of the gun violence epidemic. We know that gun violence touches all cultures, classes, genders, races, tribes, and nations. We pray that we may not be overwhelmed by gun violence but that we may overwhelm the world with the strength of love. Amen.

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Spiritual Practice

Honoring the Ache | from The Rev. Cameron Trimble at Piloting Faith

This week, choose one grief you’re carrying for the world. Name it clearly. Then, without trying to solve it or suppress it, spend 5–10 minutes each day simply sitting with it.

Place your hand on your heart. Breathe into the ache. Ask: What does this pain teach me about what I love?

Then, write one sentence each day that affirms that love—something you want to protect, preserve, or praise in this world.

Let your heartbreak become a compass.

Tags: Violence, Hope, Prayer, Rev Susan

Friends,

Yesterday, I preached on a difficult text in the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus says, "I came not to bring peace, but division." His exasperation, anger, and impatience are on display. We often have strong reactions to texts in which God/Jesus seem angry or judgmental -- many of us have been taught to internalize those words as shame. Many of us have been taught that those words are precisely why you shouldn't bother with Christianity anyway. In the sermon, I asked listeners to consider why Jesus was so frustrated, why people seemed to react with division to his message of peace, and how we let our own frustration and anger be a guide for our participation in the way of love. I shared a spiritual practice (hat tip to David O'Fallon, who shared it with me a few weeks ago) that can help us connect with those feelings and perhaps use them as a compass. You can find it below.

To catch up on that and other recent sermons, click here.

Along with that practice of entering our impatience and anger, people of the way of Jesus get to claim a radical hope. As our bishop put it recently:

"As followers of Jesus and heirs of God’s promise to Abraham, our call in this moment is to stand in the face of that cynicism as people of outrageous, even laughable, hope. Our call is to help lift heads hung heavy by the weight of death, injustice, and suffering, that we might all consider the stars, and make a choice to cling to nothing more, and nothing less, than the promise, most fully revealed in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, that love’s power to bring in God’s perfect reign exceeds even their seemingly endless number. Can we live in this moment with Sarah’s defiant joy, Abraham’s absurd hope, and a fierce commitment to God’s better way, anchored in an unimaginably vast horizon of hope?"

You can read the rest of his message here.

Susan+

—Spiritual Practice
Honoring the Ache | from The Rev. Cameron Trimble at Piloting Faith

This week, choose one grief you’re carrying for the world. Name it clearly. Then, without trying to solve it or suppress it, spend 5–10 minutes each day simply sitting with it.

Place your hand on your heart. Breathe into the ache. Ask: What does this pain teach me about what I love?

Then, write one sentence each day that affirms that love—something you want to protect, preserve, or praise in this world.

Let your heartbreak become a compass.

Tags: anger, Judgement, Rev Susan

Friends,

Last Sunday, I preached on Jesus' story of the lucky farmer whose grain harvest exceeds his ability to store it. He decides to build bigger barns, store his harvest, and then kick back, relax, and enjoy life. "You fool!" God says to him, in Jesus' parable. Real security is not about our wealth or our possessions. Real security is to be found in God and in the webs of interdependence, of trust and reciprocal giving, that we find in generous community. Real security is “what we long for but cannot ever purchase – being valued for your own unique gifts, earning the regard of your neighbors for the quality of your character not the quantity of your possessions, what you give, not what you have." (Robin Wall Kimmerer, in The Serviceberry) You can read more about this book in a MPR interview with the author.

Jesus invites us out of the economy of scarcity and competition and into an economy of gift and celebration (check out the parables about the lost coin, the dinner party with guests from the highways and hedges...). We told a story from Robin Wall Kimmerer's latest book, The Serviceberry, to illustrate the different mindset that gift economy offers.

To catch up on that and other recent sermons, click here.

Susan+

Tags: scarcity, abundance, God's Economy, Rev Susan