Church on Morgan
Keri Ladouceur
[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings inspired by the revised Common Lectionary and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Good morning, Church on Morgan family. It's so great to be with you this morning. I actually can't think of anywhere on a holiday weekend. I would rather be than to get to be here with my Church family truly. I know some of my friends are at the beach right now. But when Justin asked me to teach this morning, I was delighted to. My kids and I moved to the Raleigh area about a year ago. And Church on Morgan was actually a big part of that decision for us. I had gotten to be sort of an aunt to the church, as Justin would say. My kids have a real actual aunt here. One of my sisters lives here. But getting to be a part of this community is part of what shaped our decision to move here. So I'm thrilled to be with you this morning. As we dive into the text, I want to share with you one of my favorite translations of the text right now. Essentially, I don't know, my sort of faith-shattering journey happened about eight or 10 years ago. And as I was sort of mining through the pieces of the shattering, is there anything here worth holding onto? Is there anything here that I can put back together? One of the scholars that I was sort of fascinated with, the New Testament scholar who's big in the UMC world, talked about the faith that we had purported sort of into America. And he talked a lot about the colonizing Christ. In fact, he has this line that we learned in seminary. He talked about sort of the colonizer's version of faith, had the holy trinity of the military, the merchant, and the missionary. So it's interesting to sort of dive into taking apart part of the faith tradition that I had been handed, and trying to put something back together. And this first nation's version of the text was really critical part of me putting something back together. And so it might sound a little bit different for you this morning, but our passage comes from James, chapter 1, verses 17 through 27. Again, it's the first nation's version that I'm going to read for you. Every good and perfect gift comes down from the father above who gave us the sun, moon, and stars. But unlike them, the light that comes from the great spirit never dims, flickers, or casts a shadow. Creator is the one who chose to birth us into being by his word of truth so that we would be the first of all creation to truly be who he made us to be. Knowing this, my much-loved family members, we must all be quick to listen slow to speak and slow to become angry. For human anger will not take us down the path of Creator's right ways. So scrape off all the mud of your evil ways and humbly receive the message that the great spirit has planted deep within you. This will set your heart free and make your mind whole. Make sure you do not fool yourselves. You must not only hear this message. You must also walk in its truth. For if you only hear but fail to walk true to the message, you are like a man who sees his own face reflected in a pool of water, then right after looking at himself, he walks away and forgets what he looks like. But take a good long look into the perfect way of life, the law of love that sets people free. Stay true to its message, not forgetting what you've heard, but walking in all its ways and Creator's blessing will rest on all you do. All who represent themselves as spiritual but do not keep their tongue under control are only fooling themselves with their spirituality is worthless. But the one whose spirituality is pure and spotless before our father, the great spirit, takes care of widows and orphans and keeps himself free from the evil ways of this world. This original community that James is writing to, sort of the context of the community, what they found themselves in, was rife with conflict. It was a faith community of sort of Christian Jews that were living under persecution, that were facing lots of different challenges within the community. There were people being objectified, being sort of prophet, being built off of their backs. The ways that there were teachers coming into this faith community teaching very polarizing messages. And so there was a lot of disunity among what do we believe? And this teacher says one thing. And this teacher says another thing. They were struggling spiritually and psychologically to believe that God was good or generous or could provide for their needs. One scholar said, perhaps anxiety for personal safety prompts some believers to suppose that a glib confession of orthodox faith is sufficient for God's approval, substituting that for a morally rigorous life that responds in mercy to the poor and powerless when they are exploited. I think it's really interesting that the book of James is often overlooked. Sort of our faith tradition is shaped a lot by the words of Paul, hopefully by the words and life and teaching of Jesus. But James was rather inconvenient. So Luther, during the Reformation, really wanted to sort of do away with the book of James because it flies in the face of a lot of what we have been handed. James is talking about works. And Paul talks so much about grace. It was hard to reconcile these words for the church. We love our sort of systematized, theologized, intellectualized belief statements. And it's almost like James is saying, whoa, whoa. It doesn't actually matter all that much what you believe. How you behave shows what you believe. Most scholars think that the book of James was written by Jacob, Jesus' little brother, sort of little half-brother. And I don't know what you think about this, but I have a 15-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son, and I can tell you nobody could tell you how my daughter lives better than her little brother, right? This is a book sort of given to us written by the little brother of Jesus. And it's inviting us to think about the implications of what we say we believe, to believe and allow our behavior to match what we believe. And I think this is tricky, right? This invites us to sort of excavate some things, perhaps that we were handed. Within the post-evangelical collective that Justin mentioned, I get to serve as the executive director of this sort of movement that's happening. And a lot of people have asked over the last couple years, when are you going to have a statement of faith? Where is the belief statement that holds it together? And I learned in my sort of reconstruction journey that indigenous theology would say, well, you can tell what you believe by how you behave. So we're asking the question, is it possible that we could sort of gather or convene or covenant together to submit ourselves to a set of values and trust that our values, our beliefs would guide our behaviors. Rather than sort of an intellectualized belief statement, what if we sought to embody values and the implication and application of that is quite wide for the churches within this space? And it's been tricky to work on how do we not just outline new belief statements or new boundary lines in this space? What would it look like for us to be people who embody what we believe? Which we're finding invites quite a reorientation from the things that many of us were handed, the systems and structures that many of us were formed by. It's almost like Paul is telling us, listen, this is not about keeping the right rules or having the right beliefs. It's less about pursuing wholeness and perhaps our holiness. It's less about pursuing holiness. Perhaps it's more about pursuing wholeness. And I would guess many of us sit here today feeling that sort of disintegration in our own lives in all sorts of ways. And I want us to actually look at for a few minutes. This text that is predominantly informed through James, Jacob, Jesus little brother, through the teaching and the life and the ministry of Jesus, particularly if you wanted to go to sort of a source text, the sermon on the Mount and the book of Proverbs would have been some of the primary things that James is pulling from as he's offering us this practical wisdom to live out what we say we believe. He's saying that whether we realize it or not, you can tell what we believe by how we behave. And as I was thinking about some of the challenges around how do we integrate? How are we living and behaving in ways that we truly believe? I think there's lots of things that form what we believe. Perhaps like me, you came from a faith tradition that was handed to you that maybe it was this sort of fear based shame oriented behavior modification, right? Like hell avoidance, something for the afterlife later, but you were given a list, right? Of rules and do's and don'ts and perhaps like me, there were parts of yourself that you had to sort of lob off for the sake of belonging in a space like this. Maybe you have wrestled with some of these ideas of things like total depravity, like you were born, broken. There was already no hope before you came out. Maybe some of these orienting stories of a previous faith tradition still shape how you believe, what you believe about yourself, what you believe about God, what you believe about the world around you and your part to play in it. As I was wrestling through sort of picking up those pieces, I went back to the very beginning of the text. And do you know before it talks about our brokenness, it talks about how God created us, saw everything God created and they said that it was good, that there's original goodness in the design and each and every one of us. If we look at even God's design of all of creation, there's this mutuality, this reciprocity, this sort of generative nature of how God made the world around us. And we actually see the character and nature of God baked into that first incarnation of God in creation. And we see part of God's original good, good intentions for us. And maybe for you, it's not the faith paradigm that you were handed, maybe for you it's messages about your own sort of family of origin. Maybe there were messages that you were handed as you grew up that would show you what it looks like to survive or to thrive in life. Maybe message is about success. Someone I love grew up with this message of no one is gonna look out for you but you. And this consistent way that he's showing up living, just looking out for number one. I mean, all of us have these messages, right? Pete Scazero wrote a book called Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. And he talks about you might have Jesus in your heart, but you have grandpa in your bones. All of us have inherited these messages, these beliefs from our family of origin. And perhaps these are showing up in some of the ways that you behave and engage in relationships in family today. Maybe for you, it's messages about how we are socialized and cultured, right? We are picking up on these all the time. We are saturated with messages about what it looks like to have arrived in our culture. These are ways that we were socialized as young men or young women from a very early age ways that we participate in the classroom. All of this, the ways that we're cultured and socialized shape the things that we believe about ourselves, about God, about the world around us. I had lunch with a friend last week who does cybersecurity work. This has been his vocation for many, many years. And I have this thing about me. I'm sort of insatiable curious. So I know nothing about cybersecurity but I had so many questions for him across the table. And I was asking, are the threats increasing? And he's like, this kind of stuff has always been around. We're just seeing it more and we're talking about AI and unpacking the cybersecurity world. And then I was like, hey, tell me, are you on social media? Like this was like a pretty relevant sort of factor. And he said, I get on there from time to time and I get off social media as soon as I realize I'm starting to believe lies about myself. Because of the images or the messages or whatever it is he's perceiving. He said, I often actually think about social media as a sort of psychological warfare. I have a 15 year old daughter and I think about what am I exposing her to with these sort of messages that are gonna shape how she believes about herself, about God, about the world. And then I'm like, okay, if I could be honest with you, I can't try to get her social media engagement under control until I have done that for myself, right? These messages, these things that shape how we believe often impact how we behave, how we show up to the world around us. And so I think one of the questions for us then is, what is it that we believe about ourselves? What is it that we believe about our own belonging to ourselves, to the divine, to one another? And what is it that we believe about God? What are some of the even unintentional sort of toxic messages that we have taken on, even well-intentioned? How are we shaping relationships and finances and all of the things that we're engaged in? What are the beliefs that are intentionally or unintentionally shaping and framing the ways that we behave with one another? During my sort of faith shattering experience, I wasn't sure that I wanted to have anything to do with God on the other side of that. I had experienced some betrayal in the church and was doing some work around trauma and trauma healing. And so as I was engaging in like EMDR work and different neural pathway sort of reframing work, I wanted nothing to do with God, but what I kept finding over and over and over again, almost at the cellular level in my body was this natural way that the creator, the sort of imprints of the divine had shaped our lives, had shaped the way our brains work, had shaped my body there. We are wired with neuroplasticity. We can like change our mind about what we believe about things. I was blown away and in this season of my journey, I couldn't really use the word God or the language for God, but I would talk about the algorithm of the universe because I just kept finding this sort of algorithm of the universe at work outside in creation, to work in my own life, at work in doing this healing work. I have a friend now who refers to God. He's a post-eventual collective pastor. I learned so much from him. He talks about maybe for you, God is the algorithm of the universe or he talks about God as the loving mystery that holds it all together. What are the things that you believe about God that show up and shape the ways that you behave? James is talking about we shouldn't just be hearers of the word, but the word should shape what we believe and we should be doers of the word. And then James has a word here about anger. And the faith tradition I grew up in didn't really talk about anger and James is essentially saying, how we handle our anger is an indicator of what we believe. And I don't wanna suggest that we spiritually bypass anger and some of these intense emotions. I read recently that 70 to 80% of Americans are living in what's called a adrenal fatigue right now, which means you're sort of living in fight or flight, disconnected from self, disconnected from God, disconnected from one another. And what happens is we end up living with this massive reactivity. Part of my healing journey was working with an organization called Onsite and they do different sort of intensive work and trauma work and they have this phrase that really drove me nuts the first time I heard it and the phrase is if it's hysterical, it's historical. And they were talking about anger and that sort of the hysterical anger that comes up but I realized how often that word hysterical can be used to sort of diminish women or invalidate women and kind of call them emotional and write them off. And so I added to their phrase I also will now say if it's hostile, it's historical. Because that's how I see a lot of men that I love reactivate or the reactivity of their anger play out in relationships. Again, intentionally or unintentionally and what they're saying by the historical nature of this is that for each of us, the things that we have experienced, the pain, the trauma, the wounds of some of the messages that we hold on to that we believe if we are not tending to those things inside of us, they're gonna come out as anger and reactivity, right? Anger is actually a secondary emotion. For me, it usually comes out when I am experiencing or witnessing injustice around me or when I feel misunderstood. For me, anger, the hysterical or hostile part comes out in a way that it feels like the Hulk is going to sort of come out of my chest in a conversation, are you familiar with this? And what they're talking about is how often what's playing out in front of us is something historical that's been untended to. It's not actually about what's happening or the person in front of us, right? And so there's this invitation for us to be people who are attentive to these beliefs that we hold in our bodies. And to do a little bit of work here, I perceive to reorient these things because do you know what happens? James then goes into this part of the text where he says true religion is caring for widows and orphans. True religion means being attentive to those who are overlooked or run over by the things that we believe, by the systems and structures outside of the church and inside of the church by the things that shape and form us. And I don't know if this has been your experience but a lot of people that I interact with, particularly in faith spaces who are engaged in justice work, a lot of them are quite angry. And I think there's some good, holy beauty to that anger of when there's something that's not the way it should be and you see people being harmed, wanting to respond to that in ways, but if we're not doing the internal work to tend to that reactivity, we may actually unintentionally inflict that reactivity onto the world, right? When we're driven by our pain instead of metabolizing our pain and reorienting how we show up, there's an invitation here to not just engage the system but the soul. And that's where this imagination for justice comes in, this sort of kingdom-minded, Jesus-oriented sermon on the mound, upside down, subversive vision for what justice is, it's not just retributive, it's not just you hurt me so I'm gonna hurt you back. We talk a lot in this space about how do we create a space of mutuality within the post-evangelical collective because it could be quite easy and I've had this phrase said to me a lot, I don't know Carrie, there's a whole lot of straight white guys involved in that and look what they've gotten us into, I don't really know if I wanna be a part of it. And my response tends to be yes, but I don't wanna create the same systems and structures that sidelined me and so many of my siblings. So what does it look like for us to show up to the table in a different way? And what that's forcing me to do is be attentive to that reactivity inside of me when I sit across the table from a white guy and I'm projecting my own stuff, my own wounds from other people onto the person in front of me. I'm not doing any service to them either, right? This vision for widows and orphans, this vision for caring for and walking with those who have been overlooked and run over by our systems and structures, it's an invitation for a restorative justice. This begs the question, what is it that Jesus came to do? And is it this fear-based, shame-oriented, hell avoidance or did Jesus come to unleash a different metaphysical reality in the world that invites us to do healing work and to purely and be a part of the loving presence in the world, right? We talk about this as sort of a different eschatological imagination for the church to not just kinda keep people from hell, but to invite people to live under the rule and reign of Christ now, to be a part of the kingdom of heaven that's active and invites our active participation here and now. One of my mentors, Pastor and Bible scholar, former Dean and Professor of Missional and Pastoral Theology at Duke Divinity School, says we are at the forefront of a new Reformation, one that is freeing the Christian faith from the sinful structures of patriarchy, racism, classism, many phobias and exploitative forms of mission and evangelism. The new Reformation is all about the emergence of a generous, hospitable, equitable form of Christianity that heals the wounds of the world. I believe much of the work for the church in the years ahead, she says, is that we must focus on healing the wounds inflicted by Christendom so that the beauty and inclusive goodness of the gospel can be heard and seen and experienced. And this text is challenging us, rather than just pursuing holiness and right belief, it's about pursuing wholeness and being a people who embody what we believe by how we behave. It's about integrating and remembering the parts of ourselves that we have cut off and exiled for the sake of belonging. It's about showing up in our whole full selves, to belonging to ourselves, to belonging to the divine, to belonging to one another and the flourishing of the world around us. It's an invitation to integration of these parts of our stories and these things that we believe. Practically speaking, to live our lives as if we truly belong to one another, as if the Spirit of God is already actively working in and around us right now, about integrating ourselves and being a part of the interconnectedness of one another. When we embody what we believe and how we behave, we can see our faces reflected in the mirror. We can see the divine image reflected in one another and saying we are incomplete without the fullness of you. We become agents and ambassadors for the more beautiful way, engaging in the work of the kingdom of God here and now. May it be so. Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you, would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community, visit us at churchonmorgan.org. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]