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“Can I get an ‘Amen’ up in here?” (Gen. 1.1-13, 26-28)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church
March 27, 2022
I find that in midlife I cry more than I used to. I don’t know why this is unless it is the gaining awareness that life is short, its moments pass quickly, and we should notice how beautiful it is while we can.
More and more I think that people are beautiful. I want to know who they are and hear their stories. I have never got to know someone who I then took to be ordinary. Everyone I have ever known takes my breath away, and each for their own different reasons.
So it is probably no surprise that I sometimes cry while watching “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which on the surface is a rather bawdy and irreverent reality television show that pits drag queens in a competition with each other. I mean, if I cry more than I used to, then why not cry watching television? But I don’t cry watching it because I’m just an old softy. I cry because its message is so powerful.
The contestants on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” have all had to find their way into safe, inclusive, and accepting community. On the show they sit in front of the makeup mirror and talk about their experiences. Many were rejected at home or in church. Some suffered physical and emotional abuse. All struggled to find their true selves, often with the help of drag, which allowed them to dress and dance and lip-sync without feeling constricted or held back.
To listen to the drag queens on the show is to hear the universal in their particular experience. As they share their struggles, they are there for each other. They listen. They cry. They cheer each other on. So much so that the show often feels more like a community than a competition. And it’s all done under the watchful eye of RuPaul, affectionately known by the contestants as Mama Ru, who ends every show with a powerful and uplifting word. No matter who wins or loses, Mama Ru looks at the contestants and then the camera and asks the rhetorical question: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the world you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an ‘Amen’ up in here?” Her question is followed by a chorus of Amens and then an impromptu dance party.
Of course, this would make a preacher cry. Because RuPaul is offering a benediction. She never lets the contestants or the audience go without affirming us all. Love yourself, she is saying. And then maybe you can go and love somebody else. Whoever they are. Wherever they are on the journey. Am I right?
As we continue to think about how to expand our circle of welcome and inclusion here at Circular Church, it seems good to remember RuPaul. Because her show represents an extraordinary change that has been happening in all our lifetimes as we have begun to widen our understanding of identity and the many ways gender, sexual orientation, and our ways of being human are experienced and expressed. What drag does particularly well is celebrate what makes a person uniquely beautiful without any reservations or apologies for that uniqueness. And it implicitly asks us, our culture and institutions, why we are so slow to do the same.
To be fair, we have made real progress. The fact that I graduated from a high school in 1989 where not a single student was out and I can now watch “RuPaul’s Drag Race” with my own son, whose high school has a Gender and Sexuality Alliance club is tangible evidence that we have made more space than there used to be. Yet the backlash we now face is forceful and relentless. Across the country we are seeing the most bigoted legislation of our lifetimes from the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida to the targeting of transgender kids, families, and their medical caregivers in Texas to the ongoing attempts in our own state to single out transgender kids for discrimination. Just this week, the South Carolina legislature fast-tracked a bill to ban trans students from participating in sports. They attempted this twice in last year’s legislative session and were defeated both times, but the haters just keep coming back, singling out kids to browbeat and bully instead of doing anything to support them. Celebrating people for who they are is apparently out of the question for our legislators.
This is the other reason I cry during “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” It does a better job at making a place for people than our politics does. Which is to say nothing of religion. Do I even really need to explain that most of the contestants on drag race have been harmed by religion? They have been shamed. They have been shunned. They have been condemned. Many were forced to leave religion for their own physical and emotional well-being. They had to look elsewhere in order to find a community of acceptance and belonging.
Yet there may still be a kind of religion that can help. It’s the kind we aspire to practice here at Circular Church, the kind that recognizes and celebrates every person and the spectrum of human experience and expression. It’s the kind of religion that is less binary and more broad in its understanding, the kind of religion that is less literal and more figurative in its view, the kind of religion that is less constricted and more creative in its living. And we might illustrate this kind of religion in the way we interpret our sacred stories.
You may wonder why we read from the old Hebrew creation story today. After all, it sounds quite binary on first reading. In the beginning, it says, when the Mystery, the Creativity, the Love we call God was bringing everything into being, there was light and dark, there was sky and water, there was land and sea, and so on. Yet these pairs of opposites are not meant to be taken literally, as the only options. As Methodist theologian M Barclay points out, the text talks about night and day, but we also have dusk; the text talks about land and water, but we also have marsh. The verses don’t mean there is only night and day and nothing in between. Rather, there is a beautiful spectrum in between, all of which, according to the story of creation, is understood to be good. These images resonate here in the Lowcountry where our sunrises and sunsets are so breathtaking and where the marsh teems with life as the tides ebb and flow each day. There is a spectrum of light and dark. There is a spectrum of land and sea. Just as there is a spectrum of gender identity and sexual orientation.
Theologian Austen Hartke reminds us that the ancient Hebrews knew this. The Mishnah and the Talmud, Jewish interpretive texts dating to between 200 and 500 of the Common Era, include examples of people who don’t fit male or female categories. These include, in Hartke’s words, “those whose sex is indeterminable, those who have characteristics of more than one sex, and those whose characteristics change over time.” So the Hebrew readers of Genesis would have understood the creation account as more poetic, its named pairs were simply meant as bookends to a great spectrum. Light, dark, and all in between. Land, sea, and all in between. Man, woman, and all in between. With the understanding that the in between spaces may be the richest and most beautiful of all.
I’m mindful of this church and our long commitment to making room for all and addressing some of the harm religion has done. So many have worked so hard to make this church welcoming and affirming, to organize our participation in the Pride Parade and festival, to work for marriage equality and celebrate when it finally got here, and to continue growing together as we share our pronouns and respectfully learn the pronouns of friends and church members. We have not done these things in order to check off the boxes of liberal theology and politics. Rather, we have done them in order to know and be known, to share in the beauty of who we truly are, and to create a space for that beauty to flourish and grow.
We still have a lot of work to do, but as we move into the future as a church, I have no doubt that we will continue to expand our circle of welcome. In this congregation, that welcome is not meant to be binary. Whoever you are, and wherever you are on the beautiful spectrum of human identity, you are not only welcome here, but you are loved here, cared for here, and celebrated here. Put another way, you belong here. It’s not unlike one of the better episodes of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Maybe that’s the real reason I cry when I watch it.
Friends, I’m so deeply grateful for the spaces where people are made welcome, not in spite of who they are, but because of it. I’m grateful for the guiding affirmation of RuPaul’s benediction:
“If you can’t love yourself, how in the world you gonna love anybody else? Can I get an ‘Amen’ up in here?”
(See M Barclay and Austen Hartke in Hartke’s article, “Nonbinary Gender and the Diverse Beauty of Creation” in The Christian Century, April 16, 2018, accessed online at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/nonbinary-gender-and-diverse-beauty-creation)
When the Plan is the Prayer (Jer. 29.10-14)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church
March 20, 2022
When I first visited Meadville, it was a white institution. When I last visited, it was profoundly multicultural. What happened in between the two visits was Sharon Welch.
I had gone to Meadville for its commitments to liberal religion and intellectual rigor. As a training ground for Unitarian Universalist ministers affiliated with the University of Chicago, it had everything I was looking for. Books and people who loved them. Conscience and people who were haunted by it. Gothic buildings and stone stairwells with a passing resemblance to Hogwarts.
Yet Meadville was strangely white in a way that the surrounding neighborhood of Hyde Park was not. Despite its commitments to racial justice, which were strongly held and substantive, Meadville was mostly made of white people. I was accustomed to such environments, having spent my life in white religious institutions that dreamed of being different but didn’t really know how. I didn’t understand, until after I met Sharon Welch, what had been missing.
Every religious institution I had ever been a part of, with the single exception of my boyhood church in Hawai‘i, was made of mostly white people who dreamed of a church that was less homogenous. Racial justice was preached, beloved community was dreamed, and good programs were put on, but the culture never changed. I was always in groups of white people talking with each other. It felt small and unimaginative. That is, until Sharon Welch.
What Sharon Welch had that no one else had was a plan. When she arrived at Meadville as provost, she had a plan for how to slowly transform it from a white institution into a multicultural one. She knew it would take years. She knew she would face resistance, even from the well-meaning. She didn’t know if it would work. But she did know it was work worth giving her life to, a dream worth taking risks for. If you’ve ever read Sharon Welch, then you know about her ethic of risk and the way it is grounded in beauty, respect, and joy more than the assurance of any particular outcome. She worked tirelessly at Meadville with a vision of beloved community in mind. And I think I learned more from her example than I did from all the books I read or lectures I attended.
There were many parts to Sharon’s plan, and it took years to begin to shift the institution and then change the culture, but it began with a great deal of intentional groundwork. In order to transform a white institution into a multicultural one, there were bias assessments, including among the leadership and in the hiring process, there were shifts in curricula and teaching models, additions to reading lists, and careful discussions of how change was achieved and where and how it was most often resisted.
Sharon brought social science to bear and shared with the school the research showing that before a racial or ethnic group reaches 15% of a community (meaning before there were 15% people of color at Meadville), then members of that racial or ethnic group may be made to feel as token representatives. Yet once a racial or ethnic group reached 15% or more (meaning once there were 15% people of color at Meadville), then members of that racial or ethnic group would become more fully and authentically incorporated into the group. Put another way, Meadville needed at least 15% of its community to be people of color if it wanted to begin changing the culture.
Everyone aspired to this, yet Sharon shared further research. Once a racial or ethnic group reached 30% of a community, then the previously dominant members of the community (read: the white members) would often feel threatened, as if they were somehow being taken over. Sharon walked the community through the research so they, especially the white members, would understand what they were likely to feel and experience and where the challenges would be in the work. We want to be multicultural, she said. And we have a plan. But we should also know that it will take time. We’ll encounter hidden biases. We’ll be surprised by our own resistance. We’ll make mistakes. Many, many mistakes. And yet we’ll still find the joy in the work. We’ll still hold out the vision of who we want to become. We’ll still give ourselves to the steps that are required to slowly realize the dream of a multiracial community, knowing that what we gain will be far greater than anything we leave behind.
Over the years I spent at Meadville, I watched the faculty and staff change to include many more people of color. I watched the reading lists and theological voices change. I watched the student body begin to change. And then at some point the magnitude of it came into focus. Meadville was no longer a white institution at all; it was a multicultural one.
I hold up the story as a model for us. For as we continue to think about how to widen our circle of welcome at Circular Church, I continue to dream of a church that is one day more deeply multiracial and multicultural. I know many of you share this dream, though, like so many other institutions and groups, we feel unclear on how to get from here to there. We might begin by simply naming our dream — what it is and is not — and then including the dream in our plans for the future just as Sharon did.
I think many of us dream of a church that is more than simply a white church that welcomes people of color. We dream of a church that is no longer a white church at all, but a multiracial one. We dream of a church where each of us can know and be known, where our cultures and experiences are shared and valued, where the truth is told and we actively work against oppression in all its forms. We dream of a church that looks like all of greater Charleston, a true Everybody Club. We dream of a church where wisdom is found in the extraordinary variety and diversity of the group.
Yet we should also say what we do not dream. We do not dream of a church where people of color attend in order to make white people feel better. We do not dream of a church of performative gestures or easy platitudes. We do not dream of a church that pulls people away from other wondeful churches, including especially the vital cultural spaces of Black churches in the Lowcountry. No, we dream of a church where people will come in good conscience, because they have sought and chosen to join a community like this one. And, friends, you know there are a lot of people from every background who would be drawn to a community like this one because we have room for questions as part of faith, because we are welcoming and affirming to our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ family, because we speak not of a heaven far away but of the miracle of the natural world here and now, because we truly care for each other and have people to move through the seasons of life with in an increasingly lonely world. . .
Our church has such a long history, and thankfully we have changed many times. It bears repeating that we once held other people in bondage, then we became civil rights activists. We were once led only by men, then we were led by men, women, and nonbinary members. We were once not welcoming at all to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ community, then we began marching in the Pride Parade. Can you imagine if one day it was said that we were once a white church that became a multicultural one? I know it’s a bit difficult to imagine it, and all the steps to get from here to there. Like Sharon Welch, I know it would take years. I know we would face resistance, even from the well-meaning. And I don’t even know if it would work. But it does seem like work worth giving our lives to, a dream worth taking risks for.
It would all start, of course, with a plan. Every prophetic vision starts with a plan. It reminds me of the words we heard earlier from the Book of Jeremiah. In his writing, the prophet envisioned a God that spoke of plans. For I know the plans I have for you, the book says, and then goes on to speak hopefully about the future. Jeremiah was thinking of a return from exile, but isn’t that really what we’re thinking about? The prophet imagined that the Divine would bring the people back home to the place they truly belonged. And it seems to me that the place we truly belong is the place where everybody is.
I’ll be honest. I have no idea if we can get there. This is the hardest problem in American religion. But I do have an idea that if we really wanted to, and if we made a plan, then transforming ourselves from a white institution into a multicultural one is possible. I know this because I once saw it happen with my own eyes.
And in gratitude for Sharon Welch, I say,
Amen,
Which means,
May it be so.
The Particular and the Universal (1 Cor. 12.14-27)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church
March 13, 2022
These words are written in the spirit of something the late James Cone said. Cone, the founder of Black liberation theology, and a friend of this church, said that the universal was revealed in the particular. He encouraged us to tell our particular stories as a path toward something greater. So I offer this:
I had been going to Green Gulch Farm for years. I had meditated in the zendo before sunrise. I had washed dishes in the kitchen. I had hoed rows of beans. With time, the valley felt like a second home. It smelled of turned earth and eucalyptus leaves. When we visited family in California, I would arrange for a few days at Green Gulch.
The first time I visited, I stayed for a week. Every day we rose before sunrise for two periods of zazen (silent meditation) before breakfast. The zendo was a converted horse barn, spacious and spare with cushions laid out around the edges. We bowed and sat, held silence together, then chanted our intention as the abbot burned incense. Afterwards, we ate in silence, washed dishes, farmed organic produce, and walked down to Muir Beach to watch the sunset. I thought it would always be like that.
The onset of my lung disease was a very difficult time for our family. I could not breathe well. I coughed uncontrollably. I underwent a course of chemotherapy in an attempt to slow the fibrosis in my lungs. It worked, but the physical and emotional costs were high. I was eager to get back to Green Gulch to sit quietly, breathe the fresh air, and rest. Yet the first day back I realized something was wrong.
The incense in the zendo was too strong for my lungs. I began coughing and had to excuse myself. I was not able to sit inside with the smoke and the scent. So I sat outside. Every morning as the sangha gathered in the zendo, I bowed at the door and then took my seat on the wooden terrace overlooking the valley. It was dark and cold. I could see my breath. I sat quietly for each session of zazen, everyone inside except me.
I didn’t realize the effect that had on me until years later. I was taking a course in Berkeley and we were visiting zendos all around the East Bay. I had become accustomed to excusing myself and waiting outside when incense was burned. Until one evening we visited the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland. Our teacher let us know that it was a radically inclusive place, known for reaching out to the Black community, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ community, and the differently-abled community, in order to expand the circle of mindfulness practice. I liked the sound of that, but honestly I had no idea how it would feel.
Walking up to the zendo, it wasn’t much to look at. Storefront glass panes greeted a downtown Oakland street. Later I would learn they had chosen the site on purpose in order to be accessible to bus routes. The zendo was clearly Buddhist given its lotus logo and prayer flags, but they had decided to call it a meditation center in order to make it more inviting. In addition to offering meditation, the center offered yoga and qi gong body movement. They held classes for many different groups, providing safe and affirming spaces for all. In short, the East Bay Meditation Center wanted to be a place that contributed to the health of the whole community, whether those who came to the center were Buddhist or not. When our class walked in, we were greeted and made to feel welcome. And then something happened that I had not expected.
A woman approached me and said there was a special place for people with breathing difficulty. She explained that the whole center was scent-free and so there would be no incense used and people were encouraged not to wear strong perfumes or oils. Then she walked me to a section of the meditation hall. This is for anyone who needs it, she said. I looked around and saw a series of air purifiers and small fans carefully placed around sets of round zafu cushions. The air here is very clean, she said, and we hope it will be good for you.
I was so moved by this gesture that I could not speak for a moment. I had assumed I would have to sit outside again. By myself, only this time on a city sidewalk. I had no expectation there would be a place for me. I had never guessed that a group of people might have thought about it in advance, prepared a space, then waited for anyone with such a need to show up. I think I remember putting my hand over my heart in a gesture of gratitude. Thank you, I said. This means so much. As the meditation session began, I took my seat inside with everyone else. We sat in silence together, quietly breathing in and out. Only once or twice did I have to lift a hand to wipe my eyes. I hadn’t really known how shut out I felt until the East Bay Meditation Center welcomed me in.
Before that moment, I had felt like something was wrong with me. My diagnosis, my illness, my chronic condition, were all perceived deficits. Even though no one ever said it out loud, I could feel the societal assumptions that my bodily vulnerability was a problem. People and places chose whether they would accommodate me, which meant that more often than I realized I ended up doing things like sitting by myself outside in the cold. Mostly no one ever asked how I understood my body. They didn’t seem curious about what I might know or have learned. They couldn’t move past the idea of disability to see that I might simply have a different kind of ability. It would take a long time before I learned that I had something to offer — not a disability or a lack of ability, but a different kind ability, something hard won through a struggle with a serious illness. Sitting in the East Bay Meditation Center was the first time I felt welcomed not in spite of my particular experience, but because of it. And you know who else was sitting around me? Other people who also had trouble breathing.
I hold that story up as a model of what religious community can be. And I hold it up as a vision for our church. For when we say, whoever you are, and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here, it is good for us to look to places that are leading the way in terms of radical welcome and inclusion. We have done a great deal of work in our church in order to make space for everybody and every kind of body, including especially all that has been done over the past two years to be and bring church to each other during a dangerous pandemic. We have tried to make a place for people with different bodies, experiences, and needs. This runs the gamut from wheelchair accessible spaces to gluten-free communion elements to assistant listening devices to the sharing of our preferred pronouns, all of which are wonderful practices. And I must say that as a person living with lung disease, the only place I have ever felt as welcome as the East Bay Meditation Center is here at Circular Church. Yet I hope this will drive us to continue the work.
Our job is to expand the circle of welcome and inclusion. Week by week. Month by month. Year by year. The beloved community we are trying to create only expands; it never contracts. But it requires work of us. People at the East Bay Meditation Center had put a lot of work into their space, making it ready for someone like me. In our church, we join in the same spirit as we do our work. The work in Oakland and Charleston is particular, but we are each getting at something universal. What we’re after is the sense of belonging.
The scripture we heard a moment ago considered the particular and the universal through the use of a bodily metaphor. The old letter to the church at Corinth spoke of the mystical body of Christ, the body of the church or the beloved community, as one body with many parts. In its time, the letter was quite radical for its emphasis on mutuality. Whereas ancient political rhetoric was hierarchical, often stressing the head and the stomach as superior to the other parts, this early Christian letter refuses to rank any one part over another. Every part is necessary, it says, and all work together. In fact, to the extent that a preference is shown, it is given to the parts that have previously been overlooked like the feet and hands. Those members who have been treated less than honorably, it says, we now clothe with greater honor. And that sounds very much like the kind of liberation theology Jesus was teaching. Lifting up the lowly. Including the left out or left behind. Seeing everyone as a beloved and beautiful member of the family or a part of the metaphorical body.
And the invitation to us is to do the same. In the spirit of James Cone. In the spirit of the East Bay Meditation Center. In the spirit of Jesus and his earliest followers. Let us embrace everybody and make a place for everybody. Every particular body. Every particular story. Every particular experience and need. And let us find in this particular embrace that we are universally held. Let us find that every one of us belongs.
Amen.
It doesn’t have to be depressing. (Psalm 90.1-10,12)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church
March 6, 2022
Last Sunday the New York Times printed a wonderful op-ed by Tim Urban. The essay was entitled, rather innocently, “How Covid Stole Our Time and How We Can Get it Back.” Yet it began like a punch to the chest. “Let’s start with the bad news,” Urban wrote. “I call it ‘Depressing Math.’”
What followed was a visual illustration. Urban laid out a grid of boxes, one for each week in the life of a person who would live to be 90 years old. It was a surprisingly small grid. If you live to be 90, Urban was saying, this is it. This is your life. It is irrevocably finite.
I spent a long time looking at the boxes, mesmerized by the simple truth they were trying to tell me. Given that I have lung disease, I have no expectation of living to be 90. I squinted my eyes at the grid and wondered how far I’d get.
Urban maintained that this was depressing math, but I was one step ahead of him. He spent the body of the essay explaining that if we understand our time as limited — our visits with our parents, say, dinners with friends, or nights quizzing our children on their homework — then we become aware that the ways we spend it are of utmost importance. If we think our weeks will never run out, we can fritter them away, assuming there will always be another. But if we’re checking them off a grid, we should really make them count. He was trying to make the case that this math didn’t have to be depressing at all; rather, it could be deeply empowering. That is, so long as we are honest about our mortality.
I think I was ahead of Urban because I’d been reading someone else for a long time. A favorite columnist for the Guardian newspaper named Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman put out a very tender and funny book last year called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. In it, Burkeman reckons that, barring tragedy, most of us have about four thousand weeks in our lifetimes. Similar to Urban, he challenges us to think about this and decide how we’d like to spend our time. Yet Burkeman digs a bit deeper. The ways we spend our time, he says, and the things and people we give our attention actually make us who we are. Put another way, what we pay attention to is our life. For Burkeman there’s really no such thing as time management at all, there’s just focus, attention, and experience. These are the things we’re trying to manage.
Burkeman doesn’t really offer much advice; casting his book as self-help is a joke because he distrusts self help books. He does, however, encourage us to accept our limits. If we have four thousand weeks (or less), then there’s no way we’ll be able to do everything we’d like. We won’t make every deadline, won’t take every trip, won’t read every book, or reach every goal. The sooner we accept this, the happier we’ll be. That is, if we use the realization to really savor the things we can do — the birthday party we do make, the letter we are able to write, the dinner we can sit down to, and so on.
Of course, Tim Urban and Oliver Burkeman know why we find their ideas depressing or unsettling. This is because we won’t sit with our mortality. We often refuse to think about it. We keep moving, we occupy our minds, we click and scroll and tweet and binge. But is this what we really want? Are these the places we most need to give our attention, the things we mean to constitute our lives? Or is there more? And now we’ve arrived at Lent.
These are perfectly Lenten questions. We begin the season every Ash Wednesday by asking each other to remember our mortality. More than asking, we smudge it on our foreheads with soil and ash. We name it in our prayers for living mindfully and spending our days in love. We feel it in our bones as we gather onsite and online in a community that has suffered the deaths of four beloved church members already this year. They spent so many of their weeks with us. Then they reached the end of their graphs, the last box checked. And here we are, so grateful to have spent that time together, and so broken and undone that they are gone.
So we are ready for Lent. We are feeling its truths and holding its questions. And we’re not the only ones. The psalmist didn’t publish op-eds or write columns, but Psalm 90 sounds very much like an existential summons of its own. Its verses speak of the generations, they note the passing of time, and they look through G-d’s eyes, taking a more-than-human view. It’s really all just the blink of an eye, says the psalmist. And while he includes some questionable theology, imagining a wrathful G-d, we can acknowledge that in this place we have come to a different understanding of G-d; G-d as Mystery, Creativity, and Love, less anthropocentric and all the more timeless for it. But the psalmist’s words about time do resonate. Our days are fast and fleeting. And the best thing we can do is to count them, to be mindful of how limited our lives are so that we may spend them meaningfully and well.
Friends, this is Lent’s invitation to us. To consider where we’ve come from and where we’re going in light of the questions: How shall we spend our limited time? To what, or whom, shall we give our focus, our attention, our lives?
We ask these questions not because they are depressing or scary, but because answering them could bring us authenticallyto life.
Amen.
Leaving church to find it.
Jeremy Rutledge, Conversations in Theology and Ethics, March 3, 2022
It’s been two years since we left church behind. At least the church we knew.
It was encouraging at first, how quickly we began to film and post, getting church to everyone, or most everyone, in order to slow the spread of the new and deadly virus. Those first services, filmed with iPhones and shaky hands, received eight or nine hundred views.
Over time, the energy faded. The pandemic wore on. We saw no end in sight. I had a tired joke about how I had never liked television preachers and had now become one. Each week, I wrote a sermon and preached it alone in a room to my iPhone, now perched on a tripod. It was miserable.
We went through the ups and downs of starting a hybrid service, onsite and online, then curtailing it during the Delta and Omicron spikes. People worked so hard, beyond the point of exhaustion, to make these things happen.
Church was changing in real-time and we knew it. We were changing as well. But none of us knew which changes were superficial and which were deeper. As the church has begun to come out of what we all hope was the worst of the pandemic, we are only beginning to understand what has happened to us. We are now, two years later, a church that is onsite and online. We are now a church with members and participants in South Carolina and also outside South Carolina. We are now a church that is known for its commitment to strong health guidelines and care for the vulnerable in a way that stands in contrast to many other religious institutions in our area. We have widened the circle of welcome and inclusion these past two years. And the question is not whether we can keep it this way, the question is whether we can expand the circle even further?
To be sure, there are some who would very much like to go back to the way things were in 2019. I think most of us are sympathetic to that desire. We wish for a simpler time. No masks, no worries. Just coffee in Keller Hall. Kids on the steps for children’s time. A hug. God, what we wouldn’t give for a hug. Yet we’ve learned that those times didn’t actually include everybody. I think, in particular, of our differently-abled members, one of whom expressed after we had gone online that it was the first time they had been able to attend church regularly for years. A transportation issue had made getting downtown very difficult, but church on YouTube was easy to get to. I also think of how people were left out if they were sick or out of town. In the before times, we privileged one form of church; namely, being physically present in a downtown sanctuary for an hour a week. At the time, that seemed perfectly normal to me. Looking back, it seems almost inconceivably narrow.
There is now a great debate raging among churches nationally. The debate has to do with whether or not to go back. Many now say that being together in person is the real way of doing church, suggesting that online or virtual connections are less real or significant. And while we, at Circular, know something about this as our physical space resonates so deeply and is so powerfully felt by all who visit, we also know something about the theology of welcome and inclusion. It’s our mantra. Whoever you are, we say every week. Wherever you are, we say. You are welcome here. Only now our whoever and wherever have expanded to encompass a fuller meaning. We are no longer limited in the ways we were two years ago, by which I mean we are no longer limited in our imaginations.
Diana Butler Bass wrote about this in her column, “Welcome to the Mystical Body of Zoom.” She talked about a different understanding of bodies, moving beyond the narrow, flesh and bone, body of the sarx to the broader, metaphorical body of the church and community, the soma. And she asked how the church could learn to be for every body without privileging one body over another, one way of being church over another. We were, of course, trying to be such a church. But even as we expanded the circle, our language betrayed us. We spoke of in-person church and online church, as if they were different. The truth was that everybody was in-person, just joining in different ways. So we changed our language to on-site and online, acknowledging that we are just one church. All of us in-person, all of us embodied, whether that embodiment takes the form of sitting in a pew or looking through a laptop. Church is just church. And church has always been changing.
This is something that Circular knows as well as anyone. After nearly three and a half centuries, we’re more than a little different than when we first began. Can you imagine a church member from the early 18th Century trying to make sense of our current churchyard with its trans flag and Blue Line Project or our normal practices of naming our pronouns or using Gluten-free bread? Truly, Circular members from previous generations wouldn’t have recognized any of these things. But one wonders if they may have understood. After all, every generation here has made substantial changes to the church and has grown in its understanding of what it means to be church.
The challenge for us remains an imaginative one. As we move through a third year of pandemic, it will be a year whose questions are much more complex and ambiguous – Will more variants arrive? Have our most vulnerable members got what they need? How shall we rebuild our children’s program after a long layoff for our youngest? In what ways will we safely welcome guests and friends? What does it mean to expand our church body in onsite and online ways, embracing the larger soma that Diana wrote about? And how will we bear witness to the fact that our society continues to deem some lives less valuable than others? (I ask as a member of the immunosuppressed community, who feel that our needs have often been a societal afterthought. Ask me later about how it feels and how one begins to process the anger that comes when you realize just how many people can’t be bothered with your health even though your health is, in many ways, in their hands.)
Many of these questions can be vital and life-giving for the church. And if we are faithful to them, then we may find that the rarest of things happens – the thing that religion promises but so rarely delivers: transformation. My prayer is that we might be transformed, and that our church might, into a real Everybody Club, where all are truly and deeply celebrated and included and none are left out, marginalized, or forgotten.
We’ve left the old way of doing church behind. In so doing, we may have found church anew.
I hope so.
(Here are the questions we considered Thursday evening:
How do you see church differently now?
How are you changed/being changed by what we’ve experienced?
How do you understand bodies/embodied theology now?
What are the obstacles to change/transformation?
What are the possibilities?)
charleston kahu 