When God is not Angry AT you but WITH you

Hello Dear Ones!

A warm welcome for Rachel Weasley!

Rachael Weasley (she/her) is the pastor and church planter at Community of Hope Mennonite Church, which gathers online with members in four time zones, as well as in-person for Wild Church in Bellingham, WA. From their website:

“Whatever your constellation of identities, whether or not you identify as queer, every part of you is precious to God, and all of who you are is welcome at Community of Hope.”

Rachel studied music at Oberlin College and did the MDiv program at Chicago Theological Seminary. She is passionate about cooperatives, science fiction, ritual design, community organizing, and church music. Her most recent album is on bandcamp: https://rachaelweasley.bandcamp.com

We are absolutely delighted that Rachel could be with us today!

Today’s Text:

Luke 22:8-13

The Preparation of the Passover

⁷ Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. ⁸ So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it.” ⁹ They asked him, “Where do you want us to make preparations for it?” ¹⁰ “Listen,” he said to them, “when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house he enters ¹¹ and say to the owner of the house, ‘The teacher asks you, “Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?” ’ ¹² He will show you a large room upstairs, already furnished. Make preparations for us there.” ¹³ So they went and found everything as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover meal.

Songs

This song is perfect for after the message. Rachel’s powerful reminder that sometimes God is not angry AT us, but WITH us. And this “O Love that Will Not Let Me Go” is such a beautiful reminder. Let it soak deep in your spirit. Lyrics are included in the video.

This is an incredible invitation song to the Three. “Come my Way, my Truth, My Life”. The lyrics are in the description of the video. Absolutely gorgeous!

Rachel Weasley is a musician and song writer. Here’s a contemplative song by Rachel that can help us embrace the anger at injustice that can be a powerful fuel toward, as Rachel puts it: “the glorious symphony of Justice.” Lean into the exploration of what Mama Bear God may be generously sharing with you as you experience this contemplative song.

Here’s another song by Rachel: “Wild Tenderness of My Body, Love what you Love.” And while you’re there, consider subscribing to Rachel’s YouTube channel called “Songs of Contemplation by Rachel Weasley”.

Questions for Discussion:

• What does carrying water look like in your life?

• When you pray, do you picture God? What does God look like in your imagination or experience?

• What kind of rest do you need?

• How does one follow the ones who have been and are carrying water for Jesus? How do we know who they are (since we can’t always tell by appearances). And how do we further develop our skills of following and listening well?

In your group:

I would suggest offering each person an agreed upon amount of time to answer this question, with someone working as a timekeeper. It is important that this time of conversation reflects the entire gathered community - even those who don’t usually share very often.

And as you close your time together:

I leave you with this blessing:

I release you in the power of the Holy Spirit into the world God so loves, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with the God, who sees the goodness and grace in you and walks proudly with you.

Many blessings,

Carmen

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Notes:

Hello and welcome!

I’m Rachel Weasley and I’m the pastor and church planter at Community of Hope Mennonite Church, where we center queer theology, work for just peace, and create family of choice. Together, we gather online with members around the country as well as in person for wild church in Bellingham, Washington. My pronouns are she and her, and I am grateful today for the miracle of technology that is allowing us to share this holy time together today, across both time and distance. Um, I grew up in the Liberal Bay area. I attended inclusive churches. I saw many women in ministry. Despite all this, I read enough illustrated preschool Sunday school books in the nineties as a child to unconsciously develop the idea of God as a man, as a white man, as a white man in charge.

I developed this idea of God against my will, really just absorbing thousands of years of church tradition. I absorbed the idea of God as a rule maker, a perfectionist, someone uncompromising with a linear plan, like a linear authority with a single plan, a patriarch black and white thinker at the top of the hierarchy with the white beard up there in the clouds. I think this is probably familiar to many of us. And somehow through all my experiences of the Holy Spirit, which in contrast I feel like stirrings of mischievous energy, creative joy, resolute solidarity, and compassionate love, this other image of God, the stuck in a rut, rule maker has persisted even though that image is at odds with my sense of who the divine is in my actual prayer life.

And at times this inner dissonance has led to some self-doubt. During seminary, I had an experience of sexism in the classroom and I was walking to the dean’s office to tell him about it. And I was feeling nervous and scared then, like noticing those feelings and wondering about them. Like, why do I feel like I’m breaking the rules? Um, is it because I’m thinking of God as the rule maker? So if God is a rule maker, I’m breaking God’s rules. And some part of me went… “wait, wait a minute.” That doesn’t quite seem right. So I stopped walking and looked up. I still have this really clear memory of looking up through this window at some tree branches against a blue and windy sky. And this is one of my most visceral prayer experiences of my life. This like swirl of the Holy Spirit washed over me. And it was a powerful feeling of presence and a accompaniment. And what it felt like really deeply in that moment, like really with like, I don’t know, like sort of a visceral clarity, is that God wasn’t angry at me for complaining about sexism. God was angry with me at sexism. God was an intimate presence of strength and love and mother bear anger. And God was saying, continue down that hall, daughter. ‘cause this is b*****t.

That is a God that feels true to me, intimately stick it on my life. True. And my ever-loving, committed, faithful companion. When I have felt alone or abandoned by God, I believe God was actually right there despairing alongside me in pain, beside me, feeling alone, feeling my aloneness. This God who has never abandoned me is an unsanctioned illicit God who breaks the rules, who shows me a new way to go God who understands me better than I understand myself.

Mary Daley wrote, if God is male, then the male is God. This is partly why I went to seminary to sort of notice what implicit, you know, paradigms we don’t even notice are inside of, um, you know, our thoughts and prayer like hymn lyrics and everything because we all grew up in capitalism, in heteropatriarchy, in a society of racism and white binary thinking.

And there are going to be times when we have trouble hearing God’s voice in the midst of all these systems that masquerade as God. When we follow our prayer answers from our Mother Bear God who’s feisty and gentle and relentless and full of complexity and possibilities and creativity. When we follow her, I think many of us still sometimes feel like we’re going against that other rule, making one true God that sunk its claws into our subconscious imagery growing up. It’s a God concept kept alive today in white Christian nationalism, one that sanctions violence when many of us grow up female in a society suspicious of women’s wisdom. When many of us grow up in a society threatened by queerness, it’s easy at times to not believe that God could look like us, that God could speak through me, especially if what that inner voice is telling us contradicts the heteropatriarchy all around us.

I’m gonna go ahead and read the Bible passage in Luke 22. Uh, Jesus tells the disciples to look for a place to celebrate Passover, to eat that famous meal that we remember in our ritual of communion. So this is just, uh, verses 8 through 13 of chapter 22.

So Jesus sent Peter and John saying, go and prepare the Passover meal for us, that we may eat it. And they asked him, where do you want us to make preparations for it? Listen, he said to them, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house he enters and say to the owner of the house, the teacher asks you, where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples? He will show you a large room upstairs already furnished, make preparations for us there. So they went and found everything as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover meal.

In my own journey of publicly identifying and internally identifying as queer, part of what I’ve had to anchor myself with is this idea that Jesus is about freedom. That Jesus loves me for who I am. Because logically that probably means that Jesus would want me to be free to do a gender performance that feels true to who I am if I want that. But there’s still, I think, always going to be that untrustworthy little part of me. I think from, you know, outside conditioning that worries about that. And I haven’t even been like super hurt by the church. I don’t have some of the stories people have. I was taught like with words that women and people belonged fully and were beloved. But we also receive other types of messages that are sometimes, um, more about like behavior and nonverbal cues. Mm-hmm. And so I still worry at times. I’ve experienced it to be a little less and less true over time, um, in this journey of mine. But at times I still worry that my true self is only tolerated by God.

Surely I would belong more fully or be more beloved if I wasn’t queer. Right? And then of course, um, other days I worry I’m not queer enough.

The thing about this Luke passage is that in this time and place carrying water was women’s work. So the man they meet in the city carrying a jar of water was sort of like Jesus saying, go into the city and find a man wearing a dress and then still like that little voice. You know, I’m sure many of us have this little voice, scared voice that expects Jesus to say and then skirt around that man carrying water. Don’t make eye contact. Be polite, be tolerant. Nope. That’s not what Jesus says. Jesus doesn’t even say treat that guy like normal, like any other person. No. Jesus says, when you see that man carrying a jar of water, follow him. This man isn’t just being included by the majority. He knows the way to the upper room. If I’m only showing up for justice because of my anxiety or fear or guilt or obligation, if I feel ashamed to be white, to be a citizen, to be middle class, my work will fizzle out and even harm me and others. But if I have a stake in the struggle for my own freedom, if we are not free until all of us are free…

If we cast off the shackles of white supremacy and leverage our citizenship for the work of justice, if we have a stake in building a future where we can be an authentic relationship with our neighbors of all documentation, statuses and races, then that love for self and others can be a fuel that replenishes itself and burns for a long time.

I’ve heard it said that every lament is a love song, and I’ve experienced that my anger at injustice can be an arrow pointing to what and who I love. And loving anger can be a powerful fuel source to work for change.

Our Mama Bear God isn’t condescending to allow us a place in the church despite us being queer, you know, or whatever it is about us that makes us feel like we don’t fully belong. In my case, she is calling me to be queer, to claim that the stake I have and the collective work of freedom to make possible the authentic relationships that are the backbone of any movement that has ever thrown off authoritarianism. Because fascism doesn’t want us to trust each other and God needs us real enough to trust each other. She wants us to delight in ourselves the way she delights in us, to let that be the way we arrive in circles of solidarity.

God loves our full fabulous selves free to follow their calls. And I do wanna say, living within so many interlocking oppressions, God knows it isn’t always safe for us to reveal ourselves fully. And I do think we are called to wisdom, um, in, in being discerning about where we show up with, you know, how much of ourselves we reveal. Sometimes we’re called to survival, but we are also called to the work of liberation, of creating a world where each of us can show up safely as our realist, most grounded selves. Maybe it was dangerous to be that man carrying water. If he hadn’t been out in public. I wonder how the disciples could have found him.

And I believe, you know, in the ways that scripture calls to us across time and space, God is telling us to find the man carrying a jar of water and follow him. He knows things that we need. He knows things that can help us. He’s carrying water which makes life possible. He’s carrying it towards a safe place for plotting revolution because he knows the way towards the room where we eat at together at the table with Jesus.

There are so many examples of Jesus making sure his own ministry was sustainable like him. We can’t sustain our work for justice through guilt or anxiety. We need our love and our anger to guide us. Maybe it’s anger at capitalism for making you think that you’re being lazy when really it’s your body’s way of saying you need to, you need to take a break.

One of the ways our love, our self-love can, can be a holy guide because we do need to take breaks from our work to rest and recharge, to find our mountain like Jesus did. A mountain where we can let our guard down and love ourselves and find nourishment, to have leisure to eat, to dress the way that feels joyful and authentic and grounding, to hear God and our close friends call us by the name and pronouns we recognize ourselves by. We are not called to or working towards a future of burnout or a pretending, but to a future of life, of abundance where everyone can find a quiet center and hear God’s nourishing voice. I imagine the disciples wondering, where can we gather safely and then finding themselves together in that upper room, the smell of the bread, the taste of the wine, hearing one another’s voices raised in the song together, in the hymns and in the conversation some time to just be together. It’s not all up to us. We don’t have to hold ourselves fast.

We worship a nimble God who’s working everywhere at once to inspire, guide, nudge us to rest, nudge us to take action.

When we get quiet, when we can center in our bodies, we can hear a call of the Holy Spirit speaking to each one of us with a unique invitation to be part of the glorious symphony of justice network after network of interlacing cooperatively, to create a future of beauty and justice. Each of us has a part to play. What does carrying water look like in your life? Just as with any form of music, sometimes our time comes to rest. Those pauses are a part of the music, part of the song. Silence is an important aspect of the whole sound. There’s a lot going on right now. Lots of reasons to be tired. You don’t have to push through all the time. I imagine Jesus standing on the shore gesturing to a boat full of snacks, inviting us to rest, to bundle away from the crowds and just hear the wind for a while out on the water with leisure to eat.

Jesus, like the Mama Bear God, wanting to see us more and more ourselves (as his delightfully unique creation) every day.

So I pray that each of you will hear the spirit’s voice guiding you in your role, in building freedom, guiding you towards the rest you need. I pray that you’ll know as Jesus did, when to work hard and when to come away, whether to an upper room with your team or just you in the mountain, but you will find those places where you can rest in the lap of our non-binary parent, our mother God.

You’re never alone.

Amen.