Purging

This post may seem a little scattered and random, but stay with me.  I do have a point about the current condition of our country, and maybe it's a point you need to consider.

One of my goals for this sabbatical time was to do some purging of "stuff" from my home.  I had read Marie Kondo's book on the "Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up" and I knew several people who had successfully de-cluttered their homes using her methods.  One of those people was my sister-in-law Jennifer.  Since she is a teacher and is out of school for the summer, she agreed to come over every day last week to help me start my de-cluttering process.

But it was hard.  I knew going into it that it would be hard.  I could already feel emotions starting to well up in me as I thought about going through every piece of clothing I owned and deciding whether it "sparked joy" in me or not.  It wasn't that I was emotionally attached to all my clothing; it was more that I knew I had lots of clothes that I bought for the wrong reasons - they were on sale or I was starting a new diet and I just knew I'd fit into them soon.  Many of those clothes still had the original tags, never worn.  Which created a lot of guilt in me - even some shame.  So as Jennifer helped me sort through the shirts and pants and dresses, she also helped me sort through the negative emotions I was feeling. 

"Do you want to keep this?"

"Yes."

"Do you wear it?"

"Well, no, but I spent a lot of money on it and I can't just give it away."

"Does it spark joy?"

"No, mostly it makes me feel guilty."

"Can you donate it to someone else so that they might enjoy it?"

(After a few moments) "Yes, I can."

This was repeated several times.  That's what purging is, whether it's purging stuff from your house or purging bad food from your body, it's hard to let go.  We fight it.  We hang on to things that don't serve us or help us or give us joy. We even hang on to things that strangle life from us.


This morning I woke up with many options for attending church.  I have many talented pastor friends in local churches and I knew that they would all be delivering passionate and powerful sermons in the wake of the violence and deaths of two more black men at the hands of police and five police officers by a lone gunman.  There are a lot of emotions running high in our country.  We clergy believe that God has something to say about this.  But as I sat wondering which friend I would go hear preach, I realized that I pretty much knew what all of them would say.  I had been reading their Facebook posts all week.  I knew where their hearts were.  I knew that they would be saying things very similar to what I would say if I were preaching this morning.  I wanted to hear a different voice.  Glennon Doyle Melton reminded me this morning:

"When someone says: I'm hurting.

Let's say: "Tell me more" instead of: "No, you're not."

I wanted to sit with the hurting voices of the African American community and say, "Tell me more."  So I decided to go to a predominantly African American church in my denomination, Swope Parkway United Christian Church.  The service had many lovely moments that spoke to my heart, but it was the message by Rev. Dr. Rodney E. Williams that really blew open my heart.  He began by expressing his grief at all the violence of the past week, noting that his own son, his namesake, is a police detective.  But he spent most of his time addressing what his community can do in the face of continuing deaths at the hands of police officers.  I wish I could just give you the manuscript of his sermon, but here are some points that struck me most deeply:

There is a difference between being enslaved and being a slave.  Being enslaved means that someone else has control over your body.  But being a slave means that you allow someone else control over your mind.  The ancestors of the black community may have been enslaved, but they were not slaves.  In their minds, they remained free.  Are our minds still free today to dream God's future plans?

He recounted that, upon seeing the flags at half-mast for the victims of the Pulse shootings and now for the Dallas police officers, he commented to a friend, "Maybe we should just keep our flags at half-mast."  It is symbolic of our sickness as a nation. We are not getting well.

He told us of a new idea he is formulating, something he called Fusion Activism.  It is based on the story of the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37.  Ezekiel hears the bones begin to connect, to fuse back together.  As God starts reconnecting the bones, they make a racket that can't be ignored.  Dr. Williams said that he thinks we need to reconnect with other bones to build the body back up.  He said that one bone is the LGBT community and one bone is the NAACP and one bone is the Latino community and one bone is the Methodists and one bone is the Baptists and we're all gonna start coming together for God's justice and making a racket!  (As he's casting this magnificent vision, his voice gets louder and louder and the congregation is on their feet clapping and shouting "AMEN!")

He spoke about the evil that has been with us from the founding of this nation.  And that's where my experience with purging comes in.  This country was built on the lie that some lives matter more than others.  We swallowed that poison pill that allowed us to build and prosper and grow into one of the greatest nations in the world.  But our stomach has been sour this whole time because of that poison pill.  We have tried antacids and other over-the-counter solutions to just get things to settle down. But they can't because we've never purged that poison pill from our system.  We fight it.  We make excuses for why it's still there and why we need it or how it's not really bothering anyone.  But we can't heal, we won't heal until we finally purge that poison pill and repent for all the lives it has destroyed.

At the end of the service this morning, Dr. Williams issued an altar call.  It began as the usual church type - if you want to know Jesus or move your membership. But then he said he had an additional call.  If we would commit ourselves to the fight for justice, would we come forward?  I cannot tell you how badly I wanted to stay in my seat.  But the Holy Spirit would not allow it.  So I went forward at the church that didn't know me, the visiting white woman standing up front with the saints of the congregation. We grabbed hold of one another's hands and Dr. Williams prayed over us.

I don't know what God is doing in me, but I have felt it stirring over the past month.  If you read any of my blogs from Guadeloupe, you know that learning more about slavery was a theme of my time there.  I'm trying to pray through this, even while I feel physically nauseous.  But I know this poison pill has got to go.