'Songs Of Salvation': Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer's Music 18JUL15

WHAT a glorious voice from a beautiful, inspirational woman who refused to be beaten down by the hate, bigotry, prejudice and ignorance of her time. Thank you Fannie Lou Hamer, I wish you were here to sing us through today's trying times. From +NPR .....

'Songs Of Salvation': Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer's Music

July 18, 2015 7:43 AM ET

NPR Staff

Listen to the Story

Weekend Edition Saturday

6:11

From left, Guy Carawan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Len Chandler perform Civil Rights songs at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Diana Davies/Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections

There was a voice during the civil rights movement of the 1960s that soothed and inspired those who marched on Southern streets and tried to sit at segregated lunch counters.
Fannie Lou Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper's daughter who grew up to become an activist and a musician. She registered black voters, stood up to bigotry, and was beaten by the police for her heroism. In 1983, Worth Long of the Smithsonian Institution put together a cassette recording of Hamer's music and recollections. That collection has just been reissued.
"Ms. Hamer sang songs of salvation, songs of redemption, songs of struggle," Long says, "and it calmed the people as they sat there on the bus, being intimidated because they wanted to be citizens of this great country."
Hear more from Long's conversation with NPR' Scott Simon at the audio link.

Sermon on the Parameters We Prefer For Jesus to Work Under 25AUG13

I have been listening to Rev Bolz-Webber's sermons for a few years now, and this, in my opinion, is one of her best. There is a lesson in it for her (as she readily admits) as well as for believers, non-believers, and all those who judge others on matters of faith. Thank you for a valuable lesson for me Rev Bolz-Webber.

August 27, 2013 By Nadia Bolz Weber 

You gotta love Dan Erlander’s drawings.

2013-08-25 NBW HFASS Sermon<—–Click here to listen along (and delight yourself with how much I botched one of the paragraphs)
I have to say, one of my very favorite things about Jesus is how he does whatever he wants to and could really give a hell about how other people feel about it. Yeah.  I just find that endearing. Especially when he irritates the nice religious people. That’s secretly my favorite.
In our Gospel text for today Jesus is teaching in the synagogue on a Sabbath when he sees a woman with a crippled back. He saw her, called her over and said “Woman you are set free from your ailment” He reached out and touched her and she stood upright for the first time in 18 years and praised God. Which seems like a win.  Except for that then the leader of the synagogue throws a little tizzy about how that kind of thing should not be happening on the Sabbath.  Further proof that super religious people can just be so helpful, can’t they?
Especially when they seem to value parameters over people – which should sound like a familiar story…
Stories of churches denying your call to ministry because you fall outside the parameters of which gender is allowed to be ordained and stories of churches denying you the Eucharist because you fall outside the parameters of what kind of sexual orientation is allowed to receive the means of grace and stories of churches denying you a place in community because you just weren’t sure if you believed in God and that falls outside the parameters of doctrinal purity – well, these kind of stories are sadly bordering on cliché around here. We hear them all the time.
So I’m really grateful that Jesus has always tended to disregard people’s preferred parameters for how he should do things, and that he always just seems to keep seeing people, touching them, healing them and then thumbing his nose at anyone who says he really should be more discerning about his clientele and his tactics.
Because I, like many of you, relate to the woman with the crippled back. We who have, at times in our lives, felt crippled by spirits that weaken us, that keep us from standing upright as children of God. And I, like many of you, are happy to have a space like this where we have pretty loosy goosey parameters for who gets access to what…where we, despite the parameters so much of the church wants to place around Jesus, can still experience divine love and healing and grace.
Which is why this week when I was invited to a dinner at the house of a church leader I just felt so uncomfortable.
The invitation came from a group of Evangelical pastors here in Denver who have invited me to be part of various conversations on several occasions.  I believe in that kind of cross-pollination even though it’s not easy for me.  And it’s mainly not easy for me because of the extreme effort it takes for me to get over my indignation at being the only female clergy person in a room full of hip young evangelical pastors and their pretty wives.  This discomfort only grew Monday night as I thought about my fancy seminary education and ordination and the fact that my denomination had, the week before, elected a woman to be our presiding bishop and yet not a single one of the churches represented had a female pastor. Add to this the fact that, the dinner with the Evangelicals was in Highlands Ranch of all places so of course I couldn’t help but mention what a Loooong drive it had been from the city.
I finally started talking to one of the wives and immediately liked her because she said something snarky and I’m a sucker for that.  And I eventually told her how hard these kind of events are for me and why – and she very kindly asked “but don’t you still think we are all on the same team?”
Before I knew what I was saying I said “Oh my gosh, of course not”
And then when I came to my senses, I answered that personally it doesn’t always feel that way but that in terms of the Body of Christ maybe she’s right.
Which is why this week:
when I had such a hard time having an open heart with my Evangelical colleagues
and when I struggled I with how divine love or healing or redemption could possibly happen in Christian communities where there is so little concern for equality and  inclusion and the celebration of all God’s children,
as I studied this story of Jesus and the woman and the religious leader
that struggle I was having felt less like a criticism of them and more like a confession about me.
Because that’s when I stopped relating to the woman who was healed and started relating more to the hypocritical Sabbath-keeping religious leader calling foul.
Because I noticed that in the text, Jesus rebuked the religious leader for valuing parameters more than people – not for defending the practice of Sabbath-keeping.  Sabbath was still a valid way in which divine love, and healing and grace happened. The leader of the synagogue was not wrong in his love for keeping Sabbath. He was wrong in assuming that if God works within the parameters of Sabbath keeping that God cannot also work outside the parameters of Sabbath keeping.
I think what we are so prone to do is to think that if there is an experience of the Gospel within a particular set of circumstances, that means that only under that particular set of circumstances can the Gospel be experienced.  As though God’s agency is limited to the ways in which we happen to experience God.
And I wonder about the ways I might do the same thing. I wondered if for me this week, I wasn’t guilty of valuing parameters more than people when my heart was not open to the Evangelicals who invited me to dinner.  To be clear: This is not to say that gender equality and inclusion of all God’s children is not important, or that many of you don’t legitimately have a right to be upset with how you have been treated by those who say they follow Jesus, it’s just that we have to allow that God might actually be powerful enough to work outside of the parameters of how we attempt to live out the Gospel in this community.
Because in the end, faith is so much more about this kind of freedom – this kind of resting in the power of God’s love than it is about defending positions and monitoring parameters.
Because I suspect that God does God’s redeeming work in ways and through means with which I disagree.  And yes, I find this endlessly irritating, but I think more is to be had by relaxing and seeing that this might very well be true than there is to be had through pretending it’s not.
A couple weeks ago I got to hear Catholic theologian James Allison talk about how we think faith is about striving – keeping parameters, calling people out for not having it right, spiritual practices, doctrinal purity… whatever – but that really faith is about relaxing. Specifically, relaxing in the way we do when we are with a friend who we know for certain is fond of us.  We don’t have to strive around them and we somehow still become our best self – funny, spontaneous, free. Allison suggests that faith is trusting so much that God is fond of us that we just fricken relax.
I think that is what Jesus was saying to the religious leader, not that there is anything wrong with Sabbath keeping, but that Oh my gosh, just relax.
And if that’s true…if faith is akin to relaxing and if relaxing about stuff is hard for us, I wonder if on some level that’s because It’s hard to relax when we think that grace is limited, or there is only so much divine love to go around. Which is when we should remind each other that divine love, healing, grace….. these are not economic categories.
Divine love is simply not a limited resource and it is most certainly not something that happens only here or only in this way or only among us or and… I can’t wait to see the blog comments on this one…only among Christians.
And if the divine love of Christ is powerful enough to heal outside our parameters for how we believe that happens then the divine love of Christ is also powerful enough to heal outside the parameters of how others think that should happen.  Which also is perhaps grounds to relax.
Because if Sabbath is about rest and relaxing it means that there is Grace enough for all of us. Grace enough for the homophobes and the queers.  Grace enough for the Sabbath keepers and the Sabbath breakers. Grace enough for me and for the people who don’t think I deserve grace.  Grace enough for the Evangelicals and the Lutherans. There’s enough. Thanks be to God. There is enough.

Amen.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2013/08/sermon-on-the-parameter-we-prefer-for-jesus-to-work-under/

Sermon on Pirates in the Nativity and How God Incarnates the Impossible Among the Unlikely 26DEZ12

A good Christmas sermon on the birth of Christ and the true story of Christmas and what it means for us.....

By Nadia Bolz Weber 

And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.’ Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ Then the angel departed from her. In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country. (Luke 1)

One of the parishes my husband Matthew served always had a living nativity one day a year during Advent … it was a little manger scene in their parking lot you could drive by that was filled with straw and live animals and people dressed as Mary and Joseph and the other typical nativity characters.  It was usually pretty cold so the shifts only lasted 20 minutes before new folks would step in.  One year I was helping the different folks get dressed when a 7 year old boy came in from his shift and I asked him how he had liked being a shepherd in the nativity scene? “It was ok” he answered “but I think next year I think I wanna to be a pirate”.  You know…the pirate that was at the birth of our lord.
Which of course is absurd…but let’s be honest, a pirate was just about as likely as a Drummer boy.  Anyone who knows me well can tell you how much I hate that Christmas song the Little Drummer Boy.  It’s like, the perfect example of weird things creeping into Nativity scenes.  Like when along with the sheep and goats you occasionally see a pig in a crèche scene as though there were swine at the birth of our Jewish Lord.   or the worst…those insuffereable Nativities that include a pius little santa claus  kneeling at the manger.
Placing drummers and pigs and pirates and Santas in nativity scenes is obviously inappropriate if not just Biblically illiterate, but this week in one of my countless attempts to just get over myself, I had to admit that a drummer is not any less weird than a magi – those pagan Tarot card reading gypsie dudes from St. Matthew’s Gospel.  All that is to say, I wonder if our over-familiarity with the Christmas story gets in the way of us understanding how weird it really was… I mean, if it involves pregnancies by virgins and old ladies from the hill country and soothsaying magi and rank shepherds and fearsome angels and God being born as a refugee in straw and mud then who’s to say a pirate or a drummer is so weird?
In a way, the story of Jesus’ birth is about God redeeming the whole world through making the impossible happen to the unlikely.  Which is important to remember since within the first few hundred years, Christianity had lost it’s original dinginess, it’s origins of marginalized people and out-of-wedlock pregnancies and beloved prostitutes and dinner parties with all the wrong people and loving the enemy which all quickly gave way to respectability and fancy robes and emperors and pageantry.
But if you really look at the story of God coming to us in Jesus, how it involved such people of low-estate and scandalous circumstances it starts to not make a whole lot of sense that today being part of church so often means checking at the door any part of you that may have perfectly fit in at the weird birth of our lord.  The parts of you that smell like they live outside or the parts of your story that seem scandalous like Mary’s pregnancy or kind of disturbing like Elizabeth’s pregnancy. It’s weird how much we’ve sanitized this Christianity thing Because anyone who thinks that respectability and status and being nice is what the Gospel is about never really listened closely to the original cast recording.  Which includes songs sung by pregnant teenagers and pagan magicians and pregnant old women. Songs of pulling tyrants down from their thrones.
See, I think that if we were deciding the respectable and church-y way for God to come among us it would have been for God to appear already powerful as a grown human in raiment and glory in some place really impressive, like Rome.  Or, like, at the White House prayer breakfast.  And at our version of God’s great appearance on earth would be all the important people with titles like emperor and king and Chief Executive Officer and they would dress really fancy with those amazing sash things. And if we were choosing who should to bear the message about God’s coming it wouldn’t be John the Baptist, it would be like, Ted Koppel.  Or someone with a low authoritative voice, a strong jaw, and a neck-tie.  And then God would come to dwell with us surrounded with all the people worthy to be a part of such an impressive event.
But that’s not what we get in the story of Jesus.  Because if God just acted in ways we thought made sense or that were respectable and predictable to us we could all just be our own Gods.  Maybe even take 20 minute shifts at it out in the cold, wishing we could be a pirate instead..
But here’s the thing: God didn’t come to us telling our story.  God came to us telling God’s story and God has always chosen the weirdest and most subversive ways of doing that.
I mention all of this because right about now that sounds like good news, because I am tired of our story.  I’m tired of rationality and political posturing and over consumption and a world in which the tyrants seem to still be on those thrones. I’m tired of my own self-righteous notion that I am not one of those same tyrants. I’m tired of shootings and culture wars and genetically modified food.  I’m ready for God to show up with God’s impossible story.  I’m ready for some magic.  To be enchanted again.
But this week I started to wonder if I miss noticing God’s reality of the impossible and the unlikely because instead I’m focusing on the important.
Because I think we often miss that God is incarnating the impossible among the unlikely because we are busy with whatever seems important to us instead.  And I wonder if this is the same way people missed it in first century Palestine.  Perhaps they were so busy at their prayers, that no one noticed God walking among them because God was inside the womb of an insignificant peasant girl rushing to the hills to visit her kinswoman and that’s not the kind of thing you pay attention to when you have important things to do.
But this is how God moves through the world – like how Mary is making haste.  She is quickly walking by us still.  Hastily passing us disguised as our children asking us to play and in the street worn man on the corner whose eyes I am trying to avoid and in the woman who just made my coffee and Mary is walking briskly carrying the Christ within her in more impossible and unlikely ways than we can possibly take in.  This is God’s story. And it is all around us. And the impossibility of it all is exactly what continues to enchant this world of ours in things we think are just ordinary.
We see the impossible all the time, you know,  we just think that if we can come up with a suitable and rational explanation: scientifically, psychologically or sociologically then it’s not really something God is doing.  But that is just the hubris of a modern age.
So I dare to say this as this is the only Christmas sermon I get to preach this year:  you brothers and sisters, you are an unlikely people of the impossible.  We see the impossible work of God all around us.
For starters, take the fact that I, of all people, am a Lutheran pastor
And that having no religious background Kate Cash is part of a church and has now become our parish yoga teacher.
And that Quin born 1# 6oz just celebrated his 3^rd birthday
And that another church would open their building and their hearts to us in the way St Thomas has
And, not to put too fine a point on it, but that a black man is the president of the united states.
And that Asher is a student at Luther Seminary
And that Rick has been sober for over a year
And that in this day and age despite every reason not to that people still gather and greet each other in the name of Jesus and pray and sing our hearts to God.
We are so surrounded by miracles from God that we name them as ordinary, ordinary and not worth noticing…kind of like an unwed teenage mother.
If we think this miraculous and unlikely thing of Christ being born into the world simply cannot happen again then think again.  It happens all the time.
AMEN.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/12/sermon-on-pirates-in-the-nativity-and/

Sermon on Eternal Life and Living Like Liberace With Your Mom and Her Friends Forever 12AUG12

Here is a beautiful life lesson, one that reaffirms hope and faith and life now and forever. From Rev Nadia Bolz-Weber...

Liberace in his heavenly palace. (not really)

Jesus said to them, ⁷Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸I am the bread of life.

When I was in my twenties and totally out of control and pretty much estranged from my conservative Christian parents I used to joke about how my mom would try and guilt me into connecting with them more often by saying in her Kentucky accent “Nadia, the least you could do is come visit us more often…since we won’t be spending eternity together”. Which made me wonder if the church she went to realized that the promise of spending eternity with my mom and her friends wasn’t exactly the best selling point.  At least not for a 21 year old.[1]
But that’s kind of what I was taught: that being a Christian was all about where you will spend eternity after you die – kind of like purchasing a life-insurance plan for the hereafter. And if you manage to be good enough here on earth then when you die you get to go to heaven and be like the spiritual 1% for eternity and live in big mansions with Jesus and wear awesome jewels and walk streets of gold.  Which made it sound like eternal life is basically about getting to live like Liberace Forever.
So even now when I hear the phrase “eternal life” it’s hard to not just think of it as life after death.  Don’t get me wrong, it is true that to have eternal life means that death is not the final word…that beyond the death of these human bodies is a life with God everlasting,  That’s beautiful, and yes, it is good news.  But I dare say that it’s not the whole picture.
Because I need eternal life to be about more than just what happens after I die.  I need eternal life to also be about life before death.  Eternal life can’t just be about time that never ends – because my relationship to time is in some ways, the very source of a lot of fear and anxiety in my life.  The philosopher Kierkegaard knew about this.  He wrote about how our anxieties are about how we relate to time – See, The fixed nature of what has already happened can feel terrifyingly final.   But the unknowable and vast nature of what can happen in the future is also frightening. It seems a simple enough truth – that we can’t change the past and we can’t control the future. Yet this is what haunts so many of us.
So, too often we spend our time, our present time, the actual moments we will never get back again, and we squander them regretting what we’ve done or what’s been done to us in the past, or fearing what will or won’t happen to us in the future. And seriously, we might as well just take all those present moments we spend doing that and just throw them in a dumpster instead because in effect that’s what we are doing anyhow.
So this week I started to feel that if the promise of eternal life that Jesus speaks of in our reading for today is only something that happens after we die, then it just doesn’t feel like good enough news to me.  But then I realized, that if eternal life is related to the imperishable truth of Who God is in Jesus, then this does actually have something to say about our resentment about the past and our anxiety about the future.  Because when it comes down to it, all our regrets and fears that rob us of the present moment …all of them when it comes down to it are actually about the fear of death. Whether it’s a conservative Christian mother who fears the loss of her wayward daughter and wishes she’d call more, or a desperate housewife in Orange County who is injecting Botox into her poor forehead. All fear is fear of death.
So if fear and regret are the things that rob us of the present moment then when Jesus speaks of eternal life, it isn’t just about what happens when we die.  Eternal life is life that is available now and it’s life that comes from knowing that death has finally been put in it’s place. Everlasting life is available now to those who believe that the God of the universe whose love we are drawn into in Christ – that this God is the source and ground of what is more real than any mistake or mistreatment of the past and more real than any hypothetical possibility in the future.  This isn’t about just when we die… because this God is present to you most especially – not in the past or future – but in the present moment. Jesus said I AM the bread of life not I was or I will be but I AM and that I AMness of Jesus transcends time so that his I Amness is available to us in the present moment. Kierkegaard was right when he said that Christ’s presence on Earth is never a bygone event.  The IAmness of Christ is not something that we remember from ancient history –it is always a present reality.
Life everlasting is always about the present. It’s about a promise in Christ made in the past, which continues in the future but is most especially for right now in the present.
I think this is why all the great spiritual leaders teach mindfulness. Because  the gift of the present is the only thing that is real.
This is how the great saints and martyrs of the church survived whatever came their way.  They weren’t saints because they didn’t have the same amount of things in their past to resent or regret as you do…it’s not because they didn’t have the same number of possible bad things that could happen in the future…. I think they knew the imperishable truth of Christ in the real and present moments of their lives and they trusted this more than they trusted all other competing ideas. They trusted this more than they feared death.
I think the saints of the church have always known that I AMness of Christ as the way, the truth and the bread of life is about NOW. This is why every week when we introduce the peace at House for all Sinners and Saints we do so by saying Christ is among us making peace right here, right now.  The peace of Christ be with you.
Maybe you live in a place of resentment or regret for what has happened in the past.  Or maybe you live in anxiety or fear of the future, and if so, please know that this imperishable truth of the I Amness of Christ is present to you.  Right here.  Right now.
So I’ll take a page out of our contemplative-in-residence James Wall’s book and invite you to mindfulness.  I invite you into the reality of this very moment.  God is here. The eternal imperishable truth is found in the way God is present to us in each moment. This present moment is a gift to you from God. Because here’s the thing: God has already redeemed your past and is already present in the future that you keep worrying about.  And the life that God brings us is life eternal. It is happening right now and it is more real and more powerful and more eternal than anything you have to fear or resent or regret.  So welcome to life eternal. Amen

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[1] Peggy is awesome and loves me and my church and yes, is quite grateful I came back to Jesus
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2012/08/sermon-on-eternal-life-and-living-like-liberace-with-your-mom-and-her-friends-forever/