tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55650983407443071652024-03-13T16:31:54.691-07:00A Good Christian Woman ... Not That OneI'm Angela. I've been a sportswriter, a Lutheran pastor, a faith blogger, a mom, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend ... I've also worked retail and swiped cards at a health club. More than my career and even my family, I'm defined by a God who died and rose again. A God who loved me before I knew how to love. Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.comBlogger189125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-23303889071571068422022-05-26T06:50:00.007-07:002022-05-26T06:59:33.688-07:00A Little Life: A Mother’s Prayer after a school shooting<p> <span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-size: 17px; font-style: italic;">A Little Life</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-style: italic;">After a school shooting, a mother’s prayer</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-style: italic;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Uvalde-texas-school-shooting-victims.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="267" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Uvalde-texas-school-shooting-victims.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-style: italic;">Photo Credit: Jae C. Hong / AP<br /></span><p></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">God,</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He came from you to me.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Tiny, writhing, mouth open wide in a primal scream.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I remember the first time he blinked.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Eyes staring up into mine.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">“I’m here.”</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">“I need you.”</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Instinct merged with anxiety</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Those first long hours</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Then days</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">And chaotic, screaming nights</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Exhaustion curled up together on the dark green couch</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He fit next to me cozily, molded against my stomach like clay</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Where he once had all he needed</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I couldn’t put him back in</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He got bigger</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Huge</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">2 then 4 then 6 then 8</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Big snow boots stomping off</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Kindergarten and recess</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">And COVID lockdowns</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He gave me morning hugs</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He ate so many little bags of Goldfish crackers</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I sent him back gingerly</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He leapt onto the football field</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He dashed around the playground</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He laughed uproariously with his friends</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He ate three pieces of pizza</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">The torn-up toes of his worn shoes flapped in the wind</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">The snow melted and the rain fell</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He pulled up his hood and walked to school, unafraid</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">He’s only 21 inches taller</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Than an AR-15, stood on its end</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">A little life can’t outlast</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">A little bullet</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Propelled by the latest technology</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">And a country’s bloodlust</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">And our leaders’ cold calculations</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Of little lobbyists and big donations</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">So many little bullets</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Sprayed out over little lives</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Little lives that are no more</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">No more backpacks or books</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">No more school drop offs or pickups</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Just casings on the ground</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">All we have left</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Of little lives</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I wanted him to make 3-pointers</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I wanted to go to his piano recital</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I wanted to send him to college</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">And cry alone under the covers when he was gone</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Proud. So proud.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I wanted to dance with him, poorly, on his wedding day.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">To music I didn’t know.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">And smile as he laughed again.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Mostly, though.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I wanted the little things.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">End-of-school picnics.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Slip-n-slides.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Popsicles melting down his chin.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Letting me smooth petroleum jelly on his scrapes.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Hugging me.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">With two arms.</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Ma .. ma</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Mama</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Mommy</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Mom</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Mom</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Mom</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">I wanted so much for him</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">And so little</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">A childhood</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Books</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Games</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Gloves</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Tests</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Tennis shoes</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Lemonade</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Long legs</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">A little life</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">A little boy</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Please, God</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Let him grow old</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">Let him have</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">His little life</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;">AMEN</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-style: italic;">Poem inspired by John 10:10</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody;"> </span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-style: italic;">“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”</span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-style: italic;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s1" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleItalicBody; font-style: italic;">Published originally at </span><a href="https://churchanew.org/blog/posts/uvalde-church-anew-writers-respond">https://churchanew.org/blog/posts/uvalde-church-anew-writers-respond</a></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-4323150502312076892021-04-14T16:27:00.001-07:002021-04-15T13:42:33.037-07:00All I Did Not See: Daunte Wright<p>In Junior High my church youth group took a trip to the Brooklyn Center Community Center. At that time, it was the coolest pool around. They had multiple waterslides and a huge area for swimming, with big windows you could see from the nearby highway. </p><p>At that time, Brooklyn Center was more than 70 percent white, a blip on the map between Brooklyn Park, where my mom taught school and I went to the dentist and the pediatrician, and the state's largest city, Minneapolis.</p><p>Time and places and demographics shift over the years in America, and with them our cultural consciousness shifts. My dad told me that when he was growing up, North Minneapolis was where all the "rich people" lived, while his dad returned from World War II, and his parents got a little house in the suburbs.</p><p>When I was growing up, the <i>New York Times</i> called North Minneapolis "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/us/nice-city-s-nasty-distinction-murders-soar-in-minneapolis.html" target="_blank">Murderapolis</a>," which may as well have been code for saying "where the Black people lived" in this majority White metro area. I grew up in Maple Grove, then an outer ring suburb surrounded by cornfields and gravel pits, bordering Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center to the west. </p><p>My young mind couldn't comprehend nuance, then. Later on, I worked for a Congressman and was shocked to see he lived in Minneapolis, which I thought of as downtown office buildings or neighborhoods full of small, older, run-down homes. I didn't know then how close extreme wealth and poverty lived to each other, how one made the other possible. </p><p>I didn't see then, when I rode the church van to slide down waterslides at Brooklyn Center Community Center, how the world around me was changing all the time. How Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center were rapidly becoming majority-minority suburbs, and Maple Grove was increasingly filled with shopping, restaurants, and new schools - and upper-middle-class White people. My school district split on racial lines. The East side of the district, where my mom taught, was mostly students of color. Lots of recent immigrant families and families living in poverty attended schools in Brooklyn Park, while I open-enrolled to a brand-new high school on the far west side of Maple Grove.</p><p>Back then when people talked about "good schools" and "good neighborhoods," I didn't realize we were talking about racism and redlining. When the DARE officer visited my school to teach us about drugs, and I later found out he went to my church, or his wife knew my mom, I didn't realize that on the other side of my school district Black parents were having "the talk" with their teenage kids and younger, afraid of their Black sons being killed by police during a routine traffic stop.</p><p>My parents never told me that I had to put my hands on the steering wheel and say "yes sir," if I got pulled over. I was so naive the first time I did get pulled over for speeding, during high school, that I pulled to the left side of the highway. The officer got out, saw a blonde white girl behind the steering wheel, and calmly told me I had better get back on the road and pull back off to the right.</p><p>I've been pulled over a number of times since then in Minnesota. I've gotten speeding tickets and once a ticket from looking at my phone. One time, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't have my license with me, and the officer took my word for it and gave me a small ticket for something else. </p><p>American Christians talk a lot about grace, me included, but we don't seem to have the same grace for every American. People talk about how sick they feel for former Brooklyn Center Police Officer Kim Potter, who despite 26 years on the police force claimed she grabbed her gun by mistake instead of her Taser, killing Daunte Wright just 2.5 miles from the Brooklyn Center Community Center where I swam with my church youth group in the 90s.</p><p>Kim Potter seems to automatically get a lot of grace from the same people who say that Daunte Wright should have done everything different. He shouldn't have "resisted arrest," he shouldn't have had a lapsed car registration, he should have showed up for his hearing, even if the notice was mailed to the wrong address. He shouldn't have moved addresses, even if a global pandemic hit people living in poverty hardest. He shouldn't have had a child at a young age, even though American health coverage disparities too often deny birth control and sex education to people living in poverty. In a lot of conversations among white American Christians, Daunte Wright gets very little grace, as did his parents before him, an interracial couple without a lot of money raising a Black son in Brooklyn Center.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Al8BDz28e_w/YHd4prOdJ7I/AAAAAAAAdMg/pnn44SqlinEf5Lk3Vw-uMgxLGx-S1KRVwCLcBGAsYHQ/2021-04-13T020955Z_511136203_RC2OUM91D4VY_RTRMADP_3_USA-MINNESOTA-SHOOTING.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="513" data-original-width="770" height="426" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Al8BDz28e_w/YHd4prOdJ7I/AAAAAAAAdMg/pnn44SqlinEf5Lk3Vw-uMgxLGx-S1KRVwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h426/2021-04-13T020955Z_511136203_RC2OUM91D4VY_RTRMADP_3_USA-MINNESOTA-SHOOTING.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Daunte Wright's mom, Katie, speaks at a vigil in his honor in Brooklyn Center, comforted by a clergywoman. Photo Credit: <i>Reuters</i></div><br /><span style="text-align: left;">When I grew up I thought that in America all it took was hard work and doing the right thing in order to succeed. I didn't see the layers and layers of inequity that my whiteness rendered invisible, making it easy for me to point to individual decisions and think that someone's misfortune was somehow their fault. Surely, I had nothing to do with racism in Minnesota - even when I heard people in my hometown call Brooklyn Park "Brooklyn Dark."</span><p></p><p>I thought doing things like giving to the food shelf or volunteering at a shelter would mean I was making all the difference I needed to make. I saw white high school-aged volunteers from church playing with kids of color at the shelter in Minneapolis, and I thought we were so great: earning all of these community service hours for our college applications. I didn't see or understand what these kids' parents were going through and why they weren't there.</p><p>I learned about slavery and the Civil War and the Underground Railroad and abolitionism and Civil Rights in school and at church, and I assumed that because I grew up in a northern state, and my ancestors weren't Confederates, that I could somehow situate myself on the "right" side of American history, ignoring the Indigenous people my ancestors killed and displaced in Minnesota. I didn't see that the stories of slavery and the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement continued on today, and that in his time Martin Luther King, Jr., was tracked by the FBI, hated by most white Americans, and called a Communist sympathizer, just as leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are called today.</p><p>I believe that part of the experience of faith is that of ongoing revelation, and that as God continues to reveal truth to each of us, sometimes growing in faith resembles fumbling around in a dark and shadowy room, unable to decipher what is right in front of our eyes. I have felt this way often over the past five years or so, as Hope and Change faded into Blood and Soil - and American Christians worshiped at a golden altar of power, money, and hatred.</p><p>After George Floyd was killed under Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin's knee last year on May 25, just 5 miles from my house, I attended a protest march for clergy members, and another one in downtown Minneapolis. I learned about a training in civil disobedience that was being put on by a national leader in the movement. On a hot June Saturday in a church parking lot in South Minneapolis, I learned about the intricate strategy and organization behind peaceful protest and civil disobedience. There was purpose and order and instruction and rules.</p><p>Revelation means confusion and shadows and uncertainty and then sometimes seeing, clearly, what you once did not see. After attending that training, when I see Black Lives Matter protests, like the ones happening in Brooklyn Center this past week, I see strategy and engagement. I see two opposing sides attempting to spread their narrative. I see law enforcement resistance to the protesters' narrative, which holds law enforcement culpable for playing its part in violence against Black Americans, and unlawful use of force resulting in deaths of unarmed Black Americans in encounters with police. The tear gas and flash bombs tell a narrative story of chaos and violence. Whose violence do we notice? Who do we hold responsible? Who gets grace and forgiveness? Who is the threat? Ask yourself these questions - and then imagine the answers are the opposite of what you think. See how your understanding shifts. Ask yourself who you imagine "rioters" to be, and wonder why you think this and if it's really true.</p><p>Growing up White in Minnesota, there was so much I did not see. There is so much I do not see. Ensconced in my quiet neighborhood in a corner of Southwest Minneapolis, I have ample opportunity to willfully close my eyes and tell myself the same stories I once naively accepted as fact, about the story and the narrative and the violence and the actors and their race -- while at the same time pretending that I could live in a post-race America.</p><p>What a lie. </p><p>Daunte Wright is dead. George Floyd is dead. Another grieving mother. Another grieving daughter. </p><p>I cannot see with anyone else's eyes. Only my own limited vision. But with humility and resignation, I can begin to chop down the logs in my own eyes, to see in front of me all the things I never saw before, the stories I wasn't told, the tears shed in silence, the videos of arrests and deaths the White public never got to see that replayed themselves in generational trauma for Black and Indigenous Minnesota families.</p><p>White America is seeing anew in Minnesota what Black America has lived for far too long. Shattering of illusions always feels devastating for those who've built stories of ourselves around those illusions: land of the free, home of the Brave, the American Dream. </p><p>Many White Americans want to know the facts. The "whole story." We want to believe it's only about interactions of individuals: Daunte, the 20-year-old who resisted arrest; Kim, the longtime officer who made a mistake. It has nothing to do with us. I still feel that way when I first hear another awful story. I have to fight against my own selfish stories of self-preservation.</p><p>Just as the rain falls and the sun shines upon us all, no matter who we are, so too are we all inextricably connected in the human family. It's about us, whether we believe it or not. Maybe before we can see the truth of America's racist past and present, White Americans have to first grow comfortable with all we see when we look in the mirror. When we admit to the racism in our own life story, when we feel the pain in the depths of our souls that comes from this deep, entrenched national sickness and sin, only then can we begin to submit to change the story of America's future.</p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-2306174699079296032021-04-07T15:17:00.001-07:002021-04-07T15:17:33.280-07:00The Winning in the Losing<p> This week I had the opportunity to recapture my former career as a sportswriter and attend the Minnesota State High School girls basketball tournament. Maybe I wasn't so much recapturing my former career though, as recapturing my youth. Basketball was a huge part of my life growing up. I spent countless hours practicing lay-ups in the driveway, being driven to basketball camps on hot summer afternoons across the metro, and long winter afternoons in the high school gym running "killers" at the end of an already long practice.</p><p>I even met my husband playing basketball, in endless pickup games at the University of Missouri Rec Center. He could dunk; it was love.</p><p>I came to the state high school basketball tournament this year to cheer on a team in the Class 2A semifinals, Glencoe Silver Lake, a team that happened to include two of my church members (one of them a confirmation student and the other a sister and cousin to two current confirmation students) and a longtime assistant coach who's been a lay leader in our rural congregation for many years. The GSL Panthers weren't expected to make the state tournament, but they won an improbable, almost miracle-like upset during the final week of March Madness and the transition from Lent into Holy Week. They won again in the first round of the state tournament, advancing to the semis, when I got the chance to login early that weekend and score a coveted ticket.</p><p>Like everything else in 2020-2021, COVID impacted the state tournament. Only a few fans were able to come, there were no bands or cheerleaders or raucous student sections. Fans were required to sit spaced apart, two by two, wearing face masks. The players wore face masks too, pulling them up when they fell down after a tough play, continuing to play nonetheless, the indomitable spirit and persistence of life even in the midst of a pandemic.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-xtbH5OnG3lI/YG4uyuXCYrI/AAAAAAAAdIY/wijLj0Uolzw-Xc6w7B94Wwdxsh3APAJ-gCLcBGAsYHQ/169399454_10109701532647760_5137241334572931682_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="480" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-xtbH5OnG3lI/YG4uyuXCYrI/AAAAAAAAdIY/wijLj0Uolzw-Xc6w7B94Wwdxsh3APAJ-gCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/169399454_10109701532647760_5137241334572931682_n.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="text-align: left;">They played at a time when the UK coronavirus variant B117 was ravaging Minnesota, particularly in the county next door to Glencoe-Silver Lake High School. Recently, a young high school hockey referee had died of COVID. The state and high school sports and school leaders engaged in a consistent balancing act: taking precautions, worrying about students missing the rhythms of high school life and sports, worrying that any decision they made would have irreversible and awful consequences. We had confronted these same impossible and difficult choices in the church, too. And yet we persevered, masked and distanced, in the midst of the irrepressible Holy Spirit.</span><p></p><p>Watching the girls begin to play, I was immediately taken back to the joy and the pain of high school athletics. The way it felt when you were sitting on the end of the bench, just waiting for the coach to call your name to go into the game. The way it felt to drive hard to the basket and draw a foul, and then stand on the free-throw line and take a deep breath with everyone watching you. The way it felt to gather in a huddle while the coach drew up an out-of-bounds play. The way it felt when the buzzer expired at the end of the game, and you wished you could have done more.</p><p>Unfortunately, the GSL girls team likely had all of those moments and many more this week in the state tournament. The overwhelming joy and excitement to be playing at Target Center. The frustration over how different everything was in the time of COVID. The worry in the back of your mind about the COVID variants. The feeling that you wanted to leave everything on the floor. That feeling when, at the end of the game and the score didn't go your way, you were tormented by thinking of all the things you wished you would have done differently. The sadness for seniors, at the final buzzer of their final high school game.</p><p>I wish I could have seen our local team win and win again, all the way to the state championship. But as I watched them from the top row of the socially distanced arena, all of us wearing masks and cheering as loud as we could, I realized that much more of what they'd experienced - and we'd all experienced through them - had to do with winning rather than losing. Regardless of the final score, they'd kept playing and fighting hard for their school and for each other. They'd overcome tough times and relied on one other, practicing offenses and defenses and press-break plans, trusting that their teammates would be where they needed them to be at all times. They'd had to be resilient and patient and adaptable. All of these traits would serve them well in the rest of their lives. As female high school athletes, they'd learned that their bodies were meant to be strong as well as beautiful -- and that they could rely on their own physical strength and, together with the rest of their teammates, achieve amazing accomplishments against all odds.</p><p>In a year of unimaginable global loss, what I saw on the court that day was a lot of winning: winning for the human spirit, winning for the power of team above self, winning for memories, winning for skills and fortitude that would last a lifetime. I'm grateful again to sports for reminding of this same lesson that I'd learned anew the week before during Holy Week. Jesus' amazing power is always in transforming the losing into the winning: of taking challenges and meeting them with life, love and forgiveness rather than rage and resignation. There is so much winning even in the greatest of life's losses, and it is those wins that pull us through into new life, each and every day.</p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-34216121635486765542021-03-31T13:17:00.001-07:002021-03-31T16:54:36.397-07:00Holy Week in Minneapolis<p>It's almost Easter.</p><p>In a courthouse 6.5 miles from my house, a White police officer is on trial for the killing of a Black man just 4.5 miles from my house. The White officer knelt on the Black man's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, until breath would never again fill his lungs. </p><p>The sun is shining today in Minneapolis, but the weather is deceptive - like assurances of justice or of healing that will come without requisite pain. It's 30 degrees outside but feels like 18, with 17 mph winds blowing to the northwest.</p><p>If only that wind would blow it all away, the decades of entrenched racism buried under White Minnesota Nice; the fat virus particles carrying COVID-19 and its variants, stubbornly refusing to leave our youth sports leagues and college campuses and rural bars and restaurants. </p><p>Blow it all away. The memories of the past year: empty shelves of toilet paper, lonely and quiet elementary school playgrounds, masks and gloves piling up next to restaurant dumpsters in the alley behind our house.</p><p>We are smack in the middle of what Christians call Holy Week, and I wonder what is Holy in this land anymore.</p><p>On Monday morning a 65-year-old Asian American woman was brutally attacked on the streets of New York City, by a man who kicked her in the stomach over and over again. This in a country whose former President blamed the COVID-19 pandemic on China, alternately calling it the "Chinavirus" or "Kung Flu." He would say he was just having fun, or that China's authoritarian government had repressed information about the origins of the virus. But China's Communist leaders were safely ensconced in their mansions overseas. Those who would pay the rhetorical price were defenseless Asian Americans. This in the wake of a deadly mass shooting in Atlanta that targeted Asian women who worked in massage parlors and spas that advertised their Asian identity.</p><p>Reports about the attack in New York City revealed that video footage showed at least three people in a nearby luxury apartment complex stood by and watched while the attack took place. I couldn't help but wonder what I would have done. Would I be frozen in place? On the sidelines of history? Afraid? Indifferent? </p><p>What would I have done if I were walking down Chicago Avenue past Phelps Field Park on May 25, 2020, at 8:17 p.m., when Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin pulled George Floyd to the ground. Still handcuffed, Floyd's cheek rested on the pavement, and Chauvin knelt on his neck. George Floyd couldn't breathe.</p><p>I don't know what I would have done if I was there, because I was 4.5 miles and several worlds removed from George Floyd that night in Minneapolis. On May 25, the sun didn't set until 8:47 p.m., so at 8 p.m. my family and I might have still been at the neighborhood park, happy to be outside and alive after months of quarantine. Maybe we were walking the block back home to our house, where each of my boys has a bed to sleep in, food to eat, and a clean bathroom to wash off the sand of the park.</p><p>I wasn't doing anything important that night, I know that. Maybe I was walking into the basement to finish the day's last load of laundry, or rinsing off dinner plates to put in the dishwasher, or standing in front of my sink and washing my face. Changing out of that day's sweatpants into another pair of elastic waist pants for the evening. Telling the kids to brush their teeth. Watching something on TV. Putting in a mouthguard to keep from grinding my teeth all night long. Going to sleep without the sound of sirens or gunshots.</p><p>May 26 was a Tuesday. We printed off assignments for online first grade. I recorded a video about "Hope in Trying Times." And slowly, the video of George Floyd's death made its way around our city and our world.</p><p>I did not watch the whole thing. I don't think I've ever been able to. I reasoned that if George Floyd were my son, I wouldn't want the world watching him die. But George Floyd wasn't my son. The video desperately needed to exist, if only to force people like me to stop averting our eyes.</p><p>The next Sunday after May 26 was May 31, Pentecost Sunday, the least known Christian high holiday in America, after Christmas and Easter. You know that because Reese's doesn't even sell chocolate Reeses flames for Pentecost, the day on which the Holy Spirit released its power on earth, after Jesus' death and resurrection, and all the believers gathered in one place had tongues of fire on their heads, and they could suddenly understand one another despite speaking and knowing all kinds of different languages.</p><p>Pentecost was the day of fire and truth, the coming of a Holy Spirit that brought fire and understanding to a world and a people who would rather ghettoize ourselves and sort ourselves out according to perceived righteousness. Pentecost is a Biblical reversal of the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, when people tried to climb up a tower to reach God themselves, so God divided us into different languages, and we could no longer work together to try and become gods ourselves. God would instead come to us, and even then we'd kill him.</p><p>Despite Babel and Pentecost, Americans are still trying to make ourselves gods, with money, power, and hatred of others. And we're still determined to speak different languages, refusing to consider another person's viewpoint, refusing to imagine that white Americans' "land of the free and home of the brave" is Black Americans' evil slaveholder, the nation that bound Africans in chains and condemned them to a life of involuntary servitude, then hundreds of years later would still claim to be benevolent and righteous in its discrimination.</p><p>On Pentecost 2020, the Holy Spirit came again, even in America. White Christians were forced to look into a mirror and see our own racism. We recognized the dual pandemics of COVID and racism, both targeting our country's most vulnerable people, both illuminating the ways the wealthy and powerful enriched themselves at the literal cost of other Americans' very lives.</p><p>On June 2 Minneapolis clergy marched silently toward Cup Foods and back. Occasionally, people who didn't already know each other talked to each other for the very first time. Behind our masks, we glimpsed a common humanity. </p><p>People joined book clubs and made art: music, painting, videos, memes. I rode my bike to protest marches around the city. I felt like I was flying, even as my legs grew wobbly.</p><p>Hope and love cannot sustain themselves forever. They never die but in America too quickly they sink beneath the surface, when something else, like hatred or nihilism, becomes more profitable or entertaining. The hot summer went on in Minneapolis. The MN State Fair was canceled. Target Field stood empty during Twins games. We went camping at a dusty site in Southwestern Minnesota, while COVID traveled from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally across state lines during the month of August. I was frustrated when my son's school stayed online, while I had to return to work in-person. Then, people close to me got COVID - more and more each day it seemed for awhile that November. We held Christmas Eve services outside in Below 0 temperatures. People wore orange snowsuits and warmed up frozen Communion grape juice between their legs. We held candles and sang Silent Night, and the light was bright but small and under assault from the frigid wind.</p><p>Now, it is Holy Week 2021 in Minneapolis. Vaccines are providing hope for tomorrow. My son is back in school in-person. We will be able to sing Easter hymns on Sunday. And the long shadow of George Floyd's violent death stretches over the city.</p><p>You might think that a week is far too long to be Holy. Too much is happening. On Palm Sunday the weather was in the 60s and five kids took their First Communion at church, wearing specially made white masks - that the bread of life might not be the bread of COVID.</p><p>Holy Week Monday was the first day of opening statements in the trial against former Officer Chauvin. Witnesses who likely spent much of the past 10 months trying to recover from the trauma of May 25 and what they saw were forced to come face to face with it all again. Many of them were wracked with guilt.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4RMcMAoV0us/YGTWnJuhKfI/AAAAAAAAdEs/V9xWJW5MJ4UntbCopBCE-RlApAcYYeWCgCLcBGAsYHQ/AP21090559179867.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="575" data-original-width="886" height="416" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4RMcMAoV0us/YGTWnJuhKfI/AAAAAAAAdEs/V9xWJW5MJ4UntbCopBCE-RlApAcYYeWCgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h416/AP21090559179867.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>Witness Chris Martin, photo credit: <i>St. Paul Pioneer Press</i><br /><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Nineteen-year-old Cup Foods cashier Chris Martin expressed regret over his call to the police. </span></p><p>"If I would have just not taken the bill, this could have been avoided, Martin said.</p><p>Darnella Frazier, who was just 17 when she made the video documenting Floyd's death, said, "I stay up nights apologizing to George Floyd."</p><p>Early Wednesday, eyewitness Charles McMillian testified through tears and said, "I feel helpless. I understand him."</p><p>The youngest eyewitness, a 9-year-old girl, said she felt, "sad and kind of mad."</p><p>Off-duty firefighter and EMT Genevieve Hansen said she was "desperate to help," and provide Floyd with medical attention, but police officers waved her off. </p><p>At one time in America's history, it's likely that most of these voices never would have been heard from in a court of law usually limited to witnesses who were White men only. The voices of Black Americans, women, and children have typically been dismissed or ignored. But this Holy Week, it was these voices desperately reclaiming a too easily lost American humanity. </p><p>"Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs."</p><p>Jesus said this, admonishing his disciples who would turn away the children from approaching him, thinking them useless or disposable.</p><p>To think of trial witnesses as children talking to Jesus is not to suggest they are weak or immature, as for too long America has dismissed voices of those who are not white men. Instead this comparison is meant to illustrate that children are born honest, with an inborn sense of truth and justice, and a keen eye for the inherent value of every single human life; and what our American society too often does is teach children that it's facile to lie, that the one with the most toys wins in the end, and that some lives simply matter less than others.</p><p>For those who have been taught these lessons, a shout that attempts to reclaim this humanity -- to say in the face of violent and unjustified killing: Black Lives Matter -- this shout becomes a threat to the established order of death. It must be discredited and dismissed. Anything to obscure the truth carried by women and children and people of color. They must be communists and socialists and Antifa, whatever that is. </p><p>Still, these are the voices Jesus longs to hear - the voices that speak truth.</p><p>Still, the truth-tellers stuck to their story in the face of a forgetful and impetuous nation, desperate to return to its heedless consumption and white-washed history.</p><p>"I don't know if you've ever seen anyone be killed," Hansen said. "But it's upsetting."</p><p>Her words ran and bled over Holy Week, running into the story of Good Friday, the day on which American Christians too often avert our eyes from the Cross, where the ruling Romans and religious elite watched Jesus be killed. </p><p>I keep wanting to turn my own page in my calendar. The Monday after Easter, when I'll pick up long-neglected projects, and prepare an agenda for that week's board meeting. We'll be left with the memory of pink-cheeked children delightedly picking up plastic eggs and finding chocolate inside, the magic of a giant bunny. If Holy Week was only Easter, we could continue to pretend that 9-year-olds didn't have to bear witness to our injustice, and America really was free and brave for all. Happy Easter! No guilt. Cheap grace.</p><p>But Holy Week is an entire week. It contains multitudes, like a nation of freedom and slavery, of justice and segregation, of universal suffrage and the world's largest prison population. It contains multitudes, like a God of creation and destruction, of life and death, a God who became human out of an unimaginable excess of divine love and grace for people who didn't deserve it.</p><p>Somehow, even - especially? - this year in Minneapolis, it all had to be holy - from Sunday to Sunday. The voices of the ones who finally got the chance to be heard. The churches filled with masked and spaced parishioners. The courts and justice system too often prone to corruption, rising above a racist lineage that enabled violent police, reasserting themselves as hospitable to truth.</p><p>Once I would have told you a whole week cannot be holy. It's impossible. Holy is entirely other, a God beyond ourselves, another world of light and pure perfection.</p><p>Now I know better. The holy is found when the sacred dwells amongst the profane, when violent death elicits screams of justice and truth, and God's resurrection resurrects the promise of a flawed but ever-aspiring nation, lifted up by those whom it would have rather silenced and destroyed.</p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-36066641687015589102021-03-24T14:46:00.002-07:002021-03-24T15:02:54.827-07:00Land of Death and Hope<p>I've had one of those weeks where a lot of new information is flying my way, all at once. One of those weeks when your brain starts to feel overwhelmed by all the information. And you start to wonder, how can all these things be true at one time? Doesn't one cancel out the other?</p><p>Doesn't all this fear, hatred, and death snuff out the hope and love that refuse to go away? And if not - why? Because it doesn't make any sense.</p><p>***</p><p>I can't stop thinking about a story I read this morning about the "other" river migrants are crossing to come to the United States from Central America.</p><p>It's hard to imagine on a gray, blustery, 40-degree day in the Midwest, but most journeys to America begin near the equator, in a humid, sweltering jungle.</p><p>Their journey is still early, and their faces are still shiny with hope and promise.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-aqaALuJcUuY/YFumIgLIYfI/AAAAAAAAdDo/qizBhZtCcmcW7xmId2FehU7PoJJ0k8BhQCLcBGAsYHQ/90-1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="560" data-original-width="840" height="426" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-aqaALuJcUuY/YFumIgLIYfI/AAAAAAAAdDo/qizBhZtCcmcW7xmId2FehU7PoJJ0k8BhQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h426/90-1.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Photo by Liliana Nieto del Rio, <i>Los Angeles Times</i></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-O2Fn0F4bzAw/YFumKhJhcVI/AAAAAAAAdDs/OxAbEjb_hG8zlqgw_p90Prv7vG-Eefd6wCLcBGAsYHQ/90.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="560" data-original-width="840" height="426" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-O2Fn0F4bzAw/YFumKhJhcVI/AAAAAAAAdDs/OxAbEjb_hG8zlqgw_p90Prv7vG-Eefd6wCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h426/90.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div>Photo by Liliana Nieto del Rio, <i>Los Angeles Times</i><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">I look at these photos, taken by Liliana Nieto del Rio of the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>, and I see myself and my children. There I am, holding my 5-year-old son's hand as he traverses the playground, his other hand clutching a bag of snacks.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I see the expectant eyes of a child as she sits on her mother's lap. They have set out believing that something better awaits to the North -- something so valuable that they will leave everything and everyone they know behind, and travel to a brand new place.</p><p style="text-align: left;">At some point, my ancestors chose to do the same. They boarded rickety steamships in the late 19th Century. Their old country was rife with war and violence, often rooted in religion and ethnic dissent. They didn't know English. They heard about places called<i> Minnesota</i>, but they knew little beyond that.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The eyes of the adults in the photos from Nieto del Rio are more resigned. This is only the first great river crossing, on the river Usamacinta separating Guatemala from Mexico. I don't know for sure, but many of these travelers likely learned a language other than Spanish growing up, one of the indigenous languages common across Central America. They know that life is filled with struggle. Maybe their family members have died in gang and gun violence, battles over scarce resources in the face of corrupt national governments. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I do not know their stories. I know only that they have resignedly and courageously chosen hope and love over hatred and fear, and so they have decided to cross this first river, without the naivete of childhood to protect them from what lies ahead.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Patrick O'Donnell of the <i>L.A. Times</i>' Mexico City bureau traveled to the Usamacinta River, to the porous border separating Guatemala and Mexico. <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-03-23/mexico-guatemala-migrants-lacondon-jungle" target="_blank">He writes that a steady stream of wooden boats carrying migrants constantly traverses the river.</a> He writes of howler monkeys and crocodiles and jaguars, animals who would never survive in the desert climate of Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, the next river these migrants hope to cross into the United States. But animals do not carry passports, and neither is their life's value determined by the nation in which their citizenship lies. So perhaps the monkeys would have a better shot on this journey than these migrant parents and children.</p><p style="text-align: left;">For students, like me, taught in American classrooms about the Oregon Trail and European immigration to America, journeys like these migrants are taking today too often seem rooted in the distant past. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Why wouldn't they just take an airplane?</i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Couldn't they drive their car?</i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Why do they need boats to cross the river?Aren't there bridges?</i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Where are they putting their luggage?</i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Don't they need a moving truck?</i></p><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Where are their clothes? Their toiletries? Their toys? </i></p><p style="text-align: left;">The idea of leaving everything behind to move to a new place - to many Americans this plan seems unbelievably risky and preposterous. How could it be so bad where you are? Can't you wait until you get enough money saved? Can't you do it legally? Make a few phone calls?</p><p style="text-align: left;">And then I see the mother's hand clutching her child's and realize that parental love is nothing if not universal, but our options are very, very different.</p><p style="text-align: left;">***</p><p style="text-align: left;">Maybe the idea of risking so much simply to come to the United States seems dubious or unfathomable because it hasn't exactly been an easy year in America. Armed citizens stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, while lawmakers huddled in their offices, fearing a hostile government takeover.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Millions of Americans lost their jobs in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and as of today, nearly 550 thousand Americans lost their lives to COVID. </p><p style="text-align: left;">And just when vaccination rates are picking up and children are finally returning to school, mass shooting events have returned to the headlines in America again, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shootings/" target="_blank">notwithstanding the fact that more Americans died of gun violence in 2020 than any other year in at least two decades.</a></p><p style="text-align: left;">Last week, eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed by a mass shooter in the Atlanta area who traveled to three different spas and massage parlors with signage indicating that Asian women worked there.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And on Monday, just six days later, ten people were killed at a Boulder, Colo., grocery store, where a mass shooter carrying an assault rifle opened fire in the parking lot and inside the store.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Grocery store workers have been among the most heroic and most poorly treated Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their so-called "hero pay" was short-lived, and many of these essential workers were not given easily accessible vaccine priority. Yet they continued going to work each day so that Americans could feed their families, facing in some cases angry anti-mask protesters, and fearful elderly customers.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Now, grocery store workers have literally been fired upon and gunned down. A police officer and father of seven was among those killed in Colorado. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I read that President Joe Biden had ordered flags to be flown at half-mast due to the Atlanta shootings through Monday morning. As the news of the Colorado shootings moved across the nation, the flags were hurriedly lowered again. Will we ever escape this mourning and death spiral of anger, violence, and hate?</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Jd7j21o8sNo/YFutAvUkccI/AAAAAAAAdD4/FqaSQbC4cJAz9YJh6dU5Y9eNNXlnRKFpACLcBGAsYHQ/IMG_2657.HEIC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Jd7j21o8sNo/YFutAvUkccI/AAAAAAAAdD4/FqaSQbC4cJAz9YJh6dU5Y9eNNXlnRKFpACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_2657.HEIC" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Flags flying at half-mast in a Midwestern town</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So we have two stories, you see. A story of American despair and decline, of the killing machines that have terrorized too many of us in schools, movie theaters, concerts, and even churches. A story of death and division. Of a certain kind of male anger. Of unimaginable loss. A story of heroism that ends in tragedy. Children who lost their father. Husbands who lost their wives. Friends who would never talk to their friend again. Futures snuffed out. All in a matter of moments. The flags that seemed stuck at half-mast.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And the other story. The story of desperate parents and hope-filled children, crossing the first of many rivers and roads on a journey to a land they still believed was filled with hope, promise, freedom, and peace. A land where their families could live and love and thrive. Where their hard work would pay off. Where their children could attend school without being afraid. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The country they dream of is the same one I dream of, this shining land of promise is the same place I drove through today, where the Stars and Stripes hung at half-mast underneath a gray sky.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">We do not share the same language or currency. We are likely very, very different. Perhaps we cannot understand each other. I feel lacking and incomplete, at times overcome by despair. Our lives are incomprehensible to each other in many ways.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But we are drawn together in a common dream, and they have the most important currency which I and my fellow countrymen and women so desperately need. They have the currency of hope. They can still envision the place that has become broken in too many of our eyes. What they have to offer me is likely more valuable than what I can ever offer them. But am I unwilling to offer even that, my tepid sympathy? My muted understanding? A tiny piece of this land that we've brutalized too long? This land that perhaps their ancestors wandered centuries before mine? </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>Usamacinta </i>is far away from <i>Mississippi. </i>But like the water that flows through the rivers, life itself slips through my fingers, until I see my reflection in unfamiliar waters.</div><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-73566027272895882552021-03-03T15:40:00.002-08:002021-03-03T15:49:21.356-08:00Melting.<p> This may be one of the toughest blogs I've ever written. Not for any serious reason, but for the reason that it's 45 degrees and sunny right now on March 3 in Minnesota, and all around me the world is finally bright again and everything green is waking up. And all I want to do is stand there, feeling the hotness of the spring sun on my back, and drink in the air - without it burning my lungs or my warm breath hanging in the cold air.</p><p>Yesterday when we walked outside to drive to school, no small blessing in this year of COVID-19, my 8-year-old son said: "Mom! I can see grass again! Do you see it!"</p><p>Our lawn has been mostly covered in snow for around four months now, due to some unexpected October snowfall and frigid February temperatures. March is ordinarily the snowiest month in Minnesota, and I'm certain today is merely what we call "false spring" around here, but nonetheless I'm uncertain if we've ever needed spring quite so badly.</p><p>I am a person who loves to make lists of things I need to do each day, and then sometimes I get to cross them off, and that is a wonderful feeling. I'm still clinging to my paper day planner, a custom I think I started in junior high, when I'd write my outfits down each day Monday - Friday. Is it too embarrassing to tell you I developed a pattern that initially included the same outfit each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday?</p><p>I was raised with the very American idea that rest is something you earn: like a Sabbath rest on Sunday after my ancestors worked in the fields or the factories the rest of the week. </p><p>I kept hearing this whole year from lots of very wise people that the wise thing to do in this year of pandemic and stress and staying home is to get outside and go for walks. My mom and dad have been going for walks almost every single day, even in 0-degree temperatures.</p><p>I read in a very wise book, <i><a href="https://12tinythings.com" target="_blank">12 Tiny Things</a>, </i>that just getting outside really is important to how the rest of our lives go. And that we should take time to watch a sunset or a sunrise. Or we should pay attention to the outdoors from the moment we wake up.</p><p>And every morning I turn first to my phone, and I read about global or national turmoil, or corrupt politicians, or which bills are due again this month.</p><p>For lots of days now I've thought that maybe I will take a walk. But first I needed to read and to work. And even though I've been able to exercise in the basement, I hadn't felt the glow of the sun upon my face. My mom is my usual walking partner, but due to some increased exposure from me and Jacob being back at school, we hadn't walked in awhile. And so I kept finding other things to do, like laundry or chopping vegetables or preparing Lenten services or calling someone on the phone who needed prayer and care.</p><p>It's not that the things I was doing weren't valuable or important. But it's that the problem with using relaxation or outdoor time as a reward at the end of your to-do list list is that by the time your to-do list is done it's usually way too late for a walk. The sunset does not cooperate with our modern idolatry of busyness. It rises and sets when it pleases. For this reason I am grateful I don't have blackout blinds or San Diego weather: I am reminded that nature is not adaptable to my schedule.</p><p>And so finally today: I finished my reading early and did the laundry and made lunch and miraculously I still had an hour or so before I had to drive to church for Lenten services. I had some errands to run and items to return and a book to mail at the post office, but I had time. I persuaded my 5-year-old son to pull on his socks by himself (a new skill!) and get his coat and boots on and we opened the door and the sun was waiting for us to walk to the park. Then, my husband had a rare break from online meetings and work, and he put on his boots and joined us later at the park, where we'd recovered from an early mishap involving an ice ball thrown at my face from close proximity.</p><p>We stood there while our son played at the park, and I felt the heat of the sun on my back, and then we walked around the block. It wasn't enough time. Is it ever enough time? But it was enough time to see the rivulets of water pouring over the street and the pathways near the park, with one large tree encircled in a whole pond of water. The football field was mud. Our back door had become a moat. My husband was worried about re-grading the lawn. I am lucky he worries about those things, because I think only of the world changing and melting before my eyes.</p><p>Today melting is a sign of new life: a much-needed thaw in the coldness and anger and fear that we've layered onto ourselves and one another in America in 2021. I watched it melt away before my eyes. We gingerly stepped onto the melting icebergs, and they crunched and collapsed. New life. Tree buds. The inevitable false spring. April blizzards. Teeming new life: squirrels darting out from underneath the deck, worms unearthing themselves, larvae thinking about hatching beneath the lake ice.</p><p>For me today melting was joy and happiness and opportunity and change. Even as I know that melting is not always good: on the polar ice caps, the destruction of climate change, the rise in sea levels. When you'd say the word melting when I lived in Las Vegas, I imagined sweaty legs stuck to burning carseats, hot air hitting your face when you opened your car door like a hair dryer blowing arid dust into your face. Condensation covering your cupholder from your iced coffee. The feeling of your entire body melting into the metal bleachers at a Little League game I once covered in July in Southwest Florida.</p><p>Melting, like anything or anyone else is relative. It is what we bring to our surroundings and what we know of our context that makes the melting meaningful. Today, melting meant opportunity and sunshine. And I didn't miss it. What did you see today that gave you hope?</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-eqLghitIsls/YEAeBlx_dNI/AAAAAAAAdB8/Xewkqd6uwFgzlcE6GAvecB9ML27AOPR_wCLcBGAsYHQ/IMG_2519.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-eqLghitIsls/YEAeBlx_dNI/AAAAAAAAdB8/Xewkqd6uwFgzlcE6GAvecB9ML27AOPR_wCLcBGAsYHQ/IMG_2519.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-24863199147976310332021-02-24T15:45:00.000-08:002021-02-24T15:45:37.034-08:00Finding Grace<p> Sometimes it is really strange to be the Pastor of an actual church in 2021.</p><p>Our entire country (and world) is under onslaught from a global pandemic, and even as vaccinations and falling case numbers provide a brief glimmer of hope, there's this underlying cynicism and negativity surrounding American Christianity, all of it earned.</p><p>In the past few weeks, sharing headline space with COVID-19, presidential Cabinet nominations, and Tiger Woods' car crash, the Christian world has been rocked with <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/february/ravi-zacharias-rzim-investigation-sexual-abuse-sexting-rape.html" target="_blank">yet another example of sexual abuse and coverup from a prominent Christian leader</a>. I read the headlines about the abuse and coverup of abuse within Ravi Zacharias Ministries, but I'll admit I didn't read most of the articles. Maybe it felt too dispiriting: another famous, bestselling, widely esteemed Pastor -- revealed to be a hypocrite of the worst sort, surrounded by an entire apparatus of Christian leadership in America who would rather defend his behavior than risk losing some of their own money and power.</p><p>I've also been re-reading Kristin Kobes DuMez' expansive tour de force of American Christian sin, hypocrisy, and myopic masculinity, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-John-Wayne-Evangelicals-Corrupted/dp/1631495739" target="_blank">Jesus and John Wayne</a>. </i>I'm reading it this time via Kindle, which means when I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, I lull myself back into peaceful slumber with nightmarish tales about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Driscoll" target="_blank">Mark Driscoll</a>, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_at_Heart_(book)" target="_blank">Wild at Heart</a></i>, and the underbelly of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_Keepers" target="_blank">Promise Keepers</a> ... leading all of us together to the nightmare of QAnon and Jan. 6 and the clergy abuse crisis that American Christians for too long pretended only existed in the Roman Catholic Church.</p><p>Today I remember that my own congregation, the one that grew to be one of my hometown's largest and most financially successful Lutheran congregations, and forever shaped my own faith and belief, began its history with its own scandal and coverup, the founding pastor ushered out the door with a party when I was just a baby. He'd go on to serve other large suburban churches to much acclaim before dying by suicide a few years ago.</p><p>That's the thing about sin, especially the sin of hypocrisy among American Christians. Whenever you think it exists only "out there," you find it in your story. You find it in yourself. </p><p>Ugh. Does this make you want to take some sort of cleansing shower? To, as the Baptists do, be fully immersed and cleansed of your sin by a full immersion baptism? During book research I visited Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Southern California. I think they were celebrating something like 50,000 baptisms. People were standing in line in pools all over the manicured Orange County campus. It felt so good to think that our collective sin could so easily be washed away, even if many of the folks being dunked and wearing t-shirts had already been baptized as infants in Catholic or mainline congregations.</p><p>I wish it would be that simple for American Christianity to shake all of this off our backs. Because as I claim Jesus, I stand in these shadows, too. The sin, as the Apostle Paul wrote, clings so tightly.</p><p>Maybe, as opposed to a cleansing dunk in the Saddleback baptismal tank, hearing all this news of Christian bad behavior and sin just makes you want to leave all of it behind. Run away as far as you can. Spend Sunday mornings at brunch (er, ordering take-out), going to the gym (er, exercising via video), or at your kids' sporting events (er, watching them tear apart your couch cushions and wrestle each other in your kitchen). Because I mean who <i>needs </i>all that stuff? You read <i>Jesus and John Wayne </i>and see just how deep the muck goes down. We can't even smell ourselves anymore because we're surrounded by it. It just seems normal: the hypocrisy and sin and hatred of others; the refusal to remove this gigantic log while prattling on and on about our neighbor's speck; the pointing to all the other people and groups who are supposedly so terrible, so antithetical to the Gospel, while meanwhile Christians ourselves distort and tear the Gospel to shreds, leaving nothing behind but ourselves and our shameful need to climb the Tower of Babel and eat the poisoned fruit and become gods ourselves, boasting like Dave Ramsey in his $16 million mansion, all of which he says God gave him to manage. These men have become our heroes.</p><p>Jesus, his life, his death, his ministry, his sermons, even his resurrection: he's just so absent from so much of what passes for Christianity in America today. I had the great blessing to visit Israel while I was in seminary in 2010. I'm still paying off the trip in the form of student loans, but that's another story. </p><p>Anyway, what I remember from the trip partially is being so floored, so moved, that <i>Jesus actually walked here</i>. He lived here. He died here. He rose again here.</p><p>And I realized that so much of what I'd been taught about Jesus: his Americanization, his white skin and flowing blonde locks, made him anything other than truly human, which is what teaches us who God really is. And when you miss Jesus' humanity, you miss the love and grace and forgiveness of God. You're left with an otherworldly Christ, stripped of his reality and existent only in an academic theological dialogue, or you're left with John Wayne Jesus, blonde and strapping and carrying a gun (Read the "Holy Balls" chapter of <i>Jesus and John Wayne </i>for more on this).</p><p>It shouldn't have taken going to Israel for me to realize how much of the boat I'd missed, despite going to church and being confirmed and going to church camp and attending a purity retreat and Campus Crusades for Christ and FCA and youth group and all the trappings of Christian Culture and DC Talk and Hillsong and David Crowder Band. My faith was like water running through my hands, held up by culture and history and whiteness and power.</p><p>So I get it if maybe all these news stories about the underbelly of American Christianity make you cynical or frustrated, because I'm there, too. And that's why it's weird and also wonderful to be the Pastor of an actual church right now 2021.</p><p>While people debate on Twitter about if Christians are "too woke," and who's just jealous of Ravi Zacharias and what did Jesus and the Apostle Paul really say about gender roles anyway, I am rooted in an actual place with an actual community and even an actual church building. People have lived and died in this year of COVID-19 and American upheaval, and each week we've had to figure out what we're going to preach or read from the Bible or (just recently) sing, behind our masks. We've had to come up with new bulletins and an annual budget and the thing is, every single week has a Sunday. And now too a Wednesday. And we're moving on with Lent. We put ashy crosses on our foreheads last week on a frigid February day. Last Sunday, as more and more of our vulnerable folks are receiving vaccines and COVID numbers are moving toward very low rates in our county, I got to do a children's sermon with actual kids sitting in front of the sanctuary with me. </p><p>Then we found out that -- I'm going to do my best to explain this -- our water pipes underground froze during a stretch of bitter cold earlier in the month. We use well water and we didn't realize this happened until Sunday morning when someone flushed the toilet and the water started coming ... up ...</p><p>So I told everyone the property committee was working on it (God love a church full of folks who know exactly what to do in this type of situation) but that no one could use the bathroom that morning. And we all survived and I dashed out quick to someone's house in town to use the restroom right after service, and we all kind of made do. And one of our Council leaders called the chief of police who knew a guy, and he came out Tuesday during Bible Study and about 90 minutes later, our bathrooms were fixed, and he couldn't have been nicer about it.</p><p>The other thing you should know about the actual church where I serve is that we don't have any paid cleaning staff or service. Families from the church volunteer throughout the year as "ushers," which means much more than simply handing out bulletins on Sunday mornings. They also clean the church and, in non-pandemic times, provide post-worship refreshments. </p><p>I couldn't imagine how this would work when I first came, because in all my previous churches the cleaning of the church had either been a big headache or a big expense. But people here take pride in it. And even after months of pandemic uncertainty and online only or outdoor-only worship services, when it came time to return to in-person worship with restrictions, the ushers started again. I noticed today when I came in that not only did the bathrooms work again, they were also sparkling clean.</p><p>So when you or I get discouraged with the church or with Christians or with all the terrible things that people have done in America in the name of Jesus, I want to remind us of Grace, which happens to be the name of the actual church where I sit right now, where we somehow carry on in this year of ups and downs. And when I wonder how Jesus might find a way to redeem us and save us anyway, with all our sin and brokenness and coverups and misconducts as American Christians, I think Jesus will help us find our redemption not in sweeping statements or news stories or celebrity Christians.</p><p>I think Jesus works more like a plumber. In Jesus God enters into the stinking muck of our lives, of our mess, of our sin with us. Sometimes that means we have to really <i>smell </i>the muck - admit it - and live in the shadow of that Cross, as Kobes duMez urges us to do in her book, and then while we're really in it, in that place, as Tom of Metro Home and Drain in rural Silver Lake, Minn., did for us at church this week; Jesus blasts the hot steam of forgiveness into our frozen, cold, angry hearts and lives, and invites us again to follow him.</p><p>That's it. Follow him. Forgive people. Love people. Work for justice. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Pray. Visit people in prison. Let the oppressed go free. Tell the truth. Love God. Love yourself. </p><p>I guess it's possible to find this Grace without actually having a church like Grace in your life. You can be a rogue, individual Jesus-follower. But even Jesus needed a group, a team, a community. In the simplest way, that's what the church in America has been, is, and always will be. Stripped of its money, its power, its publishing deals, its TV slots, its lobbyists ... at its simplest the church is often at its best. </p><p>That doesn't mean it can't do big political work, like abolition of slavery or human rights. The church can do all that, following the leadership of the Holy Spirit. But first it has to look in the mirror. Check out where the plumbing has gone awry, and truth has gotten clogged. Repent and be honest and tear down whatever idols need to be torn down. Then kneel at the foot of the Cross, as we're trying to do in little churches across this country in the midst of chaos, as the season of Lent goes on.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-fDVomJ57xkE/YDbk0kLAIwI/AAAAAAAAdBI/643ahCAJEmkZ7N9tPjBGnicPZp7jHgsDACLcBGAsYHQ/IMG_2465.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-fDVomJ57xkE/YDbk0kLAIwI/AAAAAAAAdBI/643ahCAJEmkZ7N9tPjBGnicPZp7jHgsDACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_2465.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">An image for Good Friday and Lent at my church office</div></div><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-16983464741547314492021-02-17T16:47:00.002-08:002021-02-17T16:47:19.731-08:00Ash Wednesday and National Repentance: A Year Later<p>As I prepare for Ash Wednesday service this year, I re-read again my Ash Wednesday blog from last year. Even though COVID-19 had yet to affect my life in the American Midwest, re-reading last year's blog, I can almost feel its coming pall cast over the year ahead.</p><p>I want to share this post with you again, and then hear anew the call to repentance after a year of pandemic.</p><p>This Lent, may God wipe every tear from your eye, remind you that eternal life dwells next to painful death, and that the God we worship always hears even our penitential cry.</p><p>Thanks for reading ... here's the post:</p><p><a href="https://agoodchristianwoman.blogspot.com/2020/02/ash-wednesday-and-national-repentance.html">https://agoodchristianwoman.blogspot.com/2020/02/ash-wednesday-and-national-repentance.html</a></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0F7qXJfGECs/YC25A2XETnI/AAAAAAAAdAg/KiGRTwYmyBAPpyRI9PCY0foq1J8JkyspgCLcBGAsYHQ/Unknown-1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="300" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0F7qXJfGECs/YC25A2XETnI/AAAAAAAAdAg/KiGRTwYmyBAPpyRI9PCY0foq1J8JkyspgCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h300/Unknown-1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-49282365926478526412021-02-10T19:14:00.002-08:002021-02-10T19:18:36.961-08:00Culpability and Christian Nationalism<p> I've been grateful to see more widespread national media coverage of the troubling trend toward Christian Nationalism in white American Christianity, and the use of Christian symbols and slogans in the midst of the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4wrBsi-D1U4/YCR_3n_vmzI/AAAAAAAAc_o/ZUPAZFBJ1ZUNwP10yYn8Mo9a-0e4x2-MQCLcBGAsYHQ/034.Denker.FEAT_-768x432.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="768" height="180" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4wrBsi-D1U4/YCR_3n_vmzI/AAAAAAAAc_o/ZUPAZFBJ1ZUNwP10yYn8Mo9a-0e4x2-MQCLcBGAsYHQ/034.Denker.FEAT_-768x432.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Image Courtesy: <i>Religion News Service</i></div><br /><a href="https://religionnews.com/2021/01/07/taking-the-white-christian-nationalist-symbols-at-the-capitol-riot-seriously/" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">Seeing signs that say <i>Jesus Saves</i> next to throngs of armed would-be insurrectionists storming the Capitol, posing for photos with Bibles,</a><span style="text-align: left;"> are uncomfortable images for American Christians, who would rather avoid discussion of the ways Christianity has been warped in America, to support power and whiteness and violence over the peace, justice and love of our purported Savior, Jesus, who, it bears repeated, was a brown-skinned, Middle-Eastern Jew.</span><p></p><p>The cozy comfort of church and right-wing American politics, in the midst of such violence and hatred, has to be called into question. And yet a quick, cursory study of American history reveals that such corruption of Christianity is nothing new for white America, partisanship aside. The Southerners wearing white hoods and burning crosses on the lawns of Black families were proud Protestants, praising Jesus on one side of their mouth, and on the other cursing Catholics, Jews, and African Americans.</p><p>Christianity has long been used as a gloss by those in power, typically wealthy white men, to keep and hoard power for themselves, and while slaveowners cited Scripture to justify enslaving Black men, women and children; later on segregationists started so-called "Christian schools," in order to keep their white children out of schools with Black children, and preachers talked about riots in the inner city, and law and order, in order to excuse their reluctance to support Civil Rights, much as they did this past summer as Black Lives Matter protesters rose up against the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police.</p><p>In America, the Bible has been idolized and glorified such that it can support any sort of political theory at all, even the godlessness of capricious capitalism that excuses the deaths of poor children and vulnerable seniors. Without the fear of God, the author of the sacred text, the sacred text itself is merely putty in the hands of charlatans and salesmen, who would wring money anew out of a book written to honor a Savior who died poor, convicted, and condemned.</p><p>As Ecclesiastes 1 says, "nothing is new under the sun," and the same is true of today's Christian Nationalism, a new form of the same old white American Christian supremacy, passed around on social media and in boardrooms instead of in parlors and drinking halls.</p><p>What is also not new is the tendency of most of us to pick the speck out of our neighbor's eye before dislodging the hulking log out of our own, particularly when it comes to entrenched societal sin, like racism and white American Christian Nationalism.</p><p>That's the issue I want to write to you about today, because it has the potential and the ability to distort the conversation about Christian Nationalism and racism away from the potential for repentance, reparation and healing, and into a destructive cycle of blame, shame, and no change.</p><p>I see a troubling but not surprising tendency in much of the national reporting about Christian Nationalism, and it happens in much the same way as it does when white reporters and writers attempt to write about racism, I'm sure myself included.</p><p>Too often, our first reaction, after noticing a disturbing trend of racism or Christian Nationalism leading to violence, hatred, and fear on a grand scale, is to disassociate that trend from ourselves. We can call this the "But I'm not racist," reaction. This reaction arises from a natural human desire for self-preservation, but it lodges our response in preserving our own feelings and dignity, rather than engaging with the systemic problems of racism and Christian Nationalism. The problem then becomes personal and individual, instead of communal and universal. </p><p>I see this reaction, thinly veiled, in <a href="https://www.startribune.com/capitol-siege-puts-spotlight-on-christian-nationalists/600019959/?refresh=true">stories like this one</a>, from our local paper last weekend. The story leads with the sensational, albeit limited audience, story of a fringe rural Minnesota pastor who suggested that a national Democratic platform involved murder and molestation. Coupled with lengthy quotation from another fringe rural Minnesota pastor, who urged his congregants to "arm up" ahead of the assault on the Capitol, the takeaway from much of the story was that Christian Nationalism is fringe, whacky, and totally out of step with regular white American Christian life, particularly if it's urban and liberal.</p><p>Readers could see it and think, "gosh, my Pastor never talks like that," and I'd never storm the Capitol. They'd be left with the suggestion, which reporters and Christian leaders have made to me many times, that Christian Nationalism and racism are somehow always someone else's problem, easily identifiable by language and dress and age and look and location and education level. </p><p><i>This has nothing to do with me! </i></p><p>This kind of reporting screams of a certain sort of privileged and also natural desire to separate oneself from whatever is uncomfortable or painful. It allows you to imagine that because your ancestors did not own enslaved men, women, and children; because your grandparents didn't support segregation, because you never used the N word, that you have nothing to do with the problem of racism in this country.</p><p>It allows you to imagine that because you've never stood and saluted the American flag as part of a worship service, or hung posters with American flags festooned with crosses in your house or place of worship, that you have nothing to do with Christian Nationalism. </p><p>That kind of thinking brings to mind Pontius Pilate, the most powerful man in Jerusalem, washing his hands before the crowd, as he commands his soldiers to crucify Jesus. Or any other recent leader who, after inciting violence, claims he had nothing to do with it, because he was too rich or too powerful or too educated to do such a thing.</p><p>Even the Bible writers, persecuted by the Roman Empire, allowed Pilate to escape culpability. Those with power always wish to blame society's problems and society's sins on those with considerably less power and less ability to blame others for their sins. </p><p>When you imagine that Christian Nationalism and racism are only a problem for people who are somehow not like you, you are part of the problem. </p><p>Maybe this idea and this kind of writing, which "other-izes" Christian Nationalism and racism and all sorts of societal sins, hits me harder because as a Pastor of a rural congregation, I see the ways in which fringe speakers and leaders are granted wide width to speak for entire communities, so that liberal white Americans in urban centers reading articles about white American Christian Nationalism can absolve themselves of thinking it's a problem they themselves might have to confront as well. </p><p>A few weeks ago, myself as well as another pastoral colleague and our synodical bishop were interviewed on multiple occasions about Christian Nationalism and how we understood it as rural Christian leaders and pastors. We spoke about its dangers and about where we'd heard Christianity in our own experience being twisted to support violence, hatred, and power. But each of us also spoke with conviction about the complexity and beauty and love of the rural places and people whom we serve (though none of these quotes or ideas made it into the article, unsurprisingly). Each of us deeply love where we are. We understand that grace and love always dwell close to anger, fear, and hatred -- and those of us who want to follow Jesus are called not to run away from confronting the places where Christianity has been replaced by idolatry, but instead run towards the Cross, so that God might work through us to transform relationships and transform despair and death into hope and life.</p><p>None of us would do this kind of work if we didn't see that kind of powerful, Holy Spirit-driven work happening each and every single day across rural Minnesota, and by extension, across America. God's change and transformation is always at work long before we catch it and try to be a part of it. But we cannot participate in that work of transformation unless we first acknowledge that we are also part of the work of sin and death. Particularly for white American Christians, like myself, it is a cowardly and unproductive work to, like Jonah, attempt to claim a path away from Nineveh, and imagine that because your congregation might have historically taken liberal political positions, that you are not culpable in white American Christian Nationalism and racism. Like Jonah, you will only end up in the belly of the fish - screaming and distraught and frustrated and not ever being heard.</p><p>Christian Nationalism at its root is an idolatry, an idolatry that claims a certain vision of America is worthy of being worshiped and glorified. But Christian Nationalism is also broader than that. Christian Nationalism is the seductive belief that the American government can serve as a substitute for the will and work of God. To be a Christian is to know that God's most powerful work is always done by those granted the least power among us, to be a voice shouting in the wilderness, and if the Gospel is ever preached by the powerful, it is done so fleetingly, before the world is right-sized again, and Christianity takes its rightful place as an outside agitator, a resistance force to the greed and godlessness of the human condition.</p><p>It is not too late for American Christians to take this moment and use it as another Reawakening: a moment of Reformation and renewal, as we crawl through the wreckage of the year of COVID-19, to claim this moment as a time of repentance and reparation. I believe that Jesus has been and will continue to be a powerful force for good in the United States of America, and that the church can again, as it was, at least in part, during Civil Rights, and abolitionism, and as it is in care for the sick, the bereaved, the hungry, and the imprisoned; the church can participate in God's work of liberation and love. </p><p>I wonder how much more powerful that work might be if we approached the problem of Christian Nationalism as one requiring repentance and not shame? If instead of writing about the extremes, we wrote about ourselves, the places where we chose power and alignment with power over love and alignment with Jesus? If we located ourselves within the problem as well as the solution? If we didn't always suggest that the societal sin was lodged in someone else's eye?</p><p>I'm writing this because I know, dear friends, of Christians and leaders and pastors and parents and teachers and friends and kids across this great country who are already doing that important work. They - and you - give me hope.</p><p><a href="https://religionnews.com/?s=Angela+denker" target="_blank"><i>Read more from me on this topic here: </i>https://religionnews.com/?s=Angela+denker</a></p><p>In my book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Christians-Understanding-Elected-ebook/dp/B07NS8K7B2/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank">Red State Christians</a>, </i>I wanted to tell stories of ordinary people - and how their lives were shaped by politicized religion and power-hungry Christian leaders. It is their stories, not the ones of from people who've made the most headlines, that I find most compelling and important in my book.</p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-25487704139271392412021-02-03T15:44:00.000-08:002021-02-03T15:44:02.924-08:00Vaccines, Justice, Love, and Grace<p> We are approaching a year of living in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic here in America, though a year ago the virus still seemed very far away, and I took two flights, one for work and one for a family trip, in February 2020. I haven't flown anywhere since.</p><p>We've endured nearly 27 million cases and more than 450,000 deaths in America as of Feb. 3, 2021. We've spent collective millions on masks, sweatpants, and dubious home gym equipment. We've learned to worship via Facebook. </p><p>We've confronted the ill effects of rampant and entrenched racism in America, with nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer here in Minneapolis. We've watched people carrying Confederate flags and wearing anti-Semitic t-shirts storm the U.S. Capitol with guns, ammunition, and riot gear.</p><p>Millions of people have lost their jobs. Millions more go to work each day with the omnipresent threat of contracting the virus at work, or facing losing their paychecks. Children, teachers, and family lives have been upended with unpredictable and unsustainable changes in school and activity schedules.</p><p>Somehow, we've endured together. There is a gratitude amongst us who have survived. Our wariness and exhaustion lives next to our thankfulness and newfound hope and love. It's never certain which side will win out. We are desperately yearning for hope: for the dream again of summer barbecues and weddings and funerals where we can celebrate safely together, unconsciously hugging and shaking hands and shouting into the air with pure joy, with the blithe awareness that we are spreading only goodwill and not viral death.</p><p>It would be odd if we were not tired, prone to occasional outrage or misdirected anger. In the past year or so, it has been easy to find uplifting stories of families and caregivers and even complete strangers going out of their way to help one another, to put pieces back together of shattered lives due to the virus. Just as easy has it been to find stories of unfathomable hatred and unconscious, deadly privilege, which swallows up all it can for itself in its lurching ogre body, unmindful of those whose lives are crushed underneath its stomping, wanton, bejeweled foot.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-PgjQ5TKIUqc/YBsyiahOOJI/AAAAAAAAc-4/FZJ9m7wiTt4AoTCVIsSvMwdYAvG0xeb8gCLcBGAsYHQ/Unknown.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="224" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-PgjQ5TKIUqc/YBsyiahOOJI/AAAAAAAAc-4/FZJ9m7wiTt4AoTCVIsSvMwdYAvG0xeb8gCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h224/Unknown.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>A cycling instructor to the stars in New York City, 52-year-old Stacey Griffith, <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22260964/soulcycle-stacey-griffith-vaccine-line-skipping" target="_blank">recently made the worst kind of news</a>, for a social media post bragging about how she'd manipulated her powerful connections to get an early dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, which had only been officially made available to healthcare workers, seniors, and teachers in New York City. </p><p>In just the past week, I've also read and heard stories about wealthy and powerful people who wouldn't otherwise qualify for vaccinations heading to the front of the line: hospital board members, fundraisers and donors, a local woman who was quoted in the <i>Washington Post </i>who had just happened to get a leftover dose. She also just happened to own a horse farm, and her post-vaccination plans included a trip to Malibu, Calif.</p><p>The snarky side of me envisioned my own post-vaccination plans, which didn't include a beach trip. Finally, I could enter into the assisted living home and visit my church members there without being worried I would spread the vaccine to them. Finally I could make hospital and home visits to sick, ailing, and suffering people. Finally I might be able to hug my mom and my dad, whose own vaccines I've been trying to schedule for weeks, to no avail.</p><p>As a follower of Jesus I have a natural inclination to strive against the worldly order of justice, which skews toward the wealthy and powerful and against the poor and vulnerable. You can lose hours and days this way, counting and tracking all the ways that COVID has revealed vast American inequities, the ones who were once left behind only further left behind -- the ones called most essential whose lives aren't even valued enough for a rise in pay, or priority to receive a vaccine shot so that they can continue to deliver packages, stock shelves, manufacture masks, farm and process food and livestock, and care for children.</p><p>These stories are easy to find. But to dwell in them - to stop there - is to indulge only part of the work that God has called me into. I don't think that God finds much value in our toddler cry: "<i>It's not fair!"</i></p><p>After all, none of this is simple; COVID is much more than a morality tale about righteousness. And perhaps those of us who are too concerned about the righteousness of others miss out on where God is calling us to see righteous people right in front of our eyes. Those stories are quieter, less flagrant, but perhaps even more important.</p><p>I think of the rural Midwestern pharmacist who, after suffering through COVID due to her work, had a last-minute chance for a leftover vaccine, and instead of taking it, made a quick call to her beloved grandma, who hadn't yet gotten a chance to sign up.</p><p>I think of brave Sandra Lindsay, a New York City nurse born in Jamaica, who volunteered to be the very first American to be vaccinated, to counter the horrifying American past of illegal and terrible medical "treatments" and even experiments on Black Americans, many of whom understandably remain wary of medical services suggested to them by the government.</p><p>I think of the patient and kind farm couples who I know, who have remained gracious and hopeful each step of this year: learning to ZOOM for Thanksgiving with their families, bundling up and donning mittens and snowpants for Christmas Eve outdoors in below-0 weather, who patiently waited for their vaccine and gave thanks when their number was finally called this week.</p><p>I think of the myriad of opinions held by good and kind people about the vaccine, and I give thanks for my dear friends, two in particular, a local rural doctor and a college friend who works as an ICU nurse in Northern California, who diligently and respectfully share medical information with me so that I can sort through all the different opinions and ideas to make a well-informed and responsible decision - and share that medical information with my loved ones, so that they can be confident as they await their own turn for the vaccine.</p><p>Another person I know who has been working in the COVID medical field this whole time, who underwent COVID herself due to her work, told me the other day that she understood the high emotions and anger she and her colleagues continue to face, from all viewpoints and walks of life.</p><p>She said people felt like there was finally a shot of hope. And they were desperate for it not to pass them by.</p><p>Hearing her words, as I begun my day again looking up possible ways to help schedule my parents and other loved ones for their vaccine appointments, I'm reminded that the real "shot of hope," is not in a Moderna or Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson or Astra Zeneca vial, as vital and important and miraculous as that shot is.</p><p>I'm reminded that our best hope instead lies inside one another, and the trust that the Holy Spirit dwells in each one of us, so that when we look at one another we see not a competitor for our chance but instead a co-conspirator in a richer life for us both, marked by love and by grace.</p><p>I'm reminded that I can rage alone against the Stacey Griffiths of the world, inanely posting their privilege, vapidly unaware of their own entitlement and what it does to everyone else, or instead I can look away from that and into the eyes of my fellow Americans, knowing that a rising tide lifts all boats, and true justice is only found when we work for it together, rooted in love and grace. </p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-77380542950289996922021-01-27T16:03:00.000-08:002021-01-27T16:03:15.590-08:00A Small Station of Treblinka: For Holocaust Remembrance Day<p> Today, January 27, is Holocaust Remembrance Day. This date commemorates the date that Auschwitz Concentration Camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.</p><p>More than 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz, and more than 1 million of them were Jews. Among the others were LGBTQ people, Roma, Poles and other Slavic people, the physically and mentally disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, and members of political opposition groups.</p><p>More than 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, the result of a homicidal and genocidal Nazi state government in Germany and the occupied countries of Europe before and during World War II. The Nazi government's murders were systematic, cruel, and unprecedented. </p><p>Holocaust Remembrance Day, however, was not instituted by the United Nations General Assembly until 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II. And despite decades of horrific documentation, death camps, and survivor testimony, there are still those who deny the existence of the Holocaust or suggest it "wasn't as bad as it seemed."</p><p>The Holocaust occurred not just because of a few homicidal maniacs, a few fringe evil collaborators who managed to wrest control of the government -- it also occurred because of businessmen who decided that slave labor and work camps were good for profit. It occurred because of ordinary people who chose to look the other way when their Jewish neighbors disappeared and lost their homes, and Jewish stores were filled with broken glass. </p><p>Reading about the Holocaust now reminds me of sometimes reading stories in Sunday school about the way people treated Jesus. Everyone always thought oh I never would have acted like that. I would have been the one to stand up and say something. But the likely possibility is that many of us would have remained silent, because the cost of speaking up is often higher than we are willing to pay.</p><p>Many Holocaust survivors still tell their stories today. But they are getting older and many die each year. In Israel, 900 Holocaust survivors died of COVID-19 in 2020. As they die, their memories must not die with them.</p><p>As a Lutheran, I carry with me the shameful history of Martin Luther, a powerful theologian who did much good to reform the church, but who also, at the end of his life, wrote anti-Semitic diatribes against the Jewish people. Those writings were later used by Nazis to support their genocide and hate. </p><p>None of us are entirely good or entirely evil. We have to help each other learn from our collective memory to always choose love and not hate, and to speak out and condemn hatred when it's found in our midst.</p><p>Today on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I am so grateful for the many books I've read that have helped to light in me a passion for remembrance and honor and truth surrounding the Holocaust. I carry this memory when I see photos of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, including a man wearing a "Camp Auschwitz" t-shirt, with STAFF printed on the back. Nazism is not an exclusively German formulation, nor is it relegated to the distant past. The allure of hatred to prove one's own superiority and salve one's own self-hatred is always insidious.</p><p>And so in the face of the temptation to hatred and forgetting and obfuscation of the truth, instead, today we remember and honor the lives of those lost and forever changed by the Holocaust.</p><p>I want to share with you a poem written by a Polish Jewish poet, Wladyslaw Szlengel. Before the Nazis came to power and occupied Poland, he was a popular Warsaw writer. He took part in Warsaw's defense and later became a Jewish organizer in the midst of abject poverty and suffering in the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto, where the Nazis forced all Jewish people to live without proper food or shelter. Thousands died there, among them Szlengel himself, in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.</p><p>Before his death, Szlengel devoted himself to recording for history what was happening to the Jewish people. He wrote this poem about transports from the Ghetto to the Treblinka Death Camp, where at last three-quarters of a million people were killed.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GNPpu3Y3qyE/YBH-GAqU5DI/AAAAAAAAc-I/J8S0tto3m08Ul6Vx99Jqt8NxwdgSOvuFQCLcBGAsYHQ/mezzanine_855.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="160" data-original-width="280" height="229" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-GNPpu3Y3qyE/YBH-GAqU5DI/AAAAAAAAc-I/J8S0tto3m08Ul6Vx99Jqt8NxwdgSOvuFQCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h229/mezzanine_855.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="page" title="Page 2"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 700;">A SMALL STATION OF TREBLINKA</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">Here is the small station of Treblinka<br />Here is the small station of Treblinka<br />On the line between Tluszcz and Warszawa From the railway station Warsaw - East You get out of the station and travel straight</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">The journey lasts<br />five hours and 45 minutes more<br />And sometimes the same journey lasts A whole life until your death</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">And the station is very small<br />Three firtrees grow there<br />And a regular signboard saying<br />Here is the small station of Treblinka... Here is the small station of Treblinka...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">And no cashier even<br />Gone is the cargo man<br />And for a million zloty<br />You will not get a return ticket</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">And nobody waits for you in the station<br />And nobody waves a handkerchief towards you Only silence hung there in the air<br />To welcome you in the blind wilderness</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">And silent is the pillar of the station<br />And silent are the three firtrees<br />And silent is the black board<br />Because here is the small station of Treblinka...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">Here is the small station of Treblinka... And only a commercial board stands still: "Cook only by gas"<br />Here is the small station of Treblinka... Here is the small station of Treblinka...</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">—W</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">ł</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">adys</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">ł</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">aw Szlengel</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia;">I am grateful for the poet's words. Never Forget.</span></p></div></div></div>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-67226951459058473262021-01-20T17:24:00.006-08:002021-01-20T17:24:44.003-08:00A Psalm and Prayer for Inauguration 2021<p> On this Inauguration Day, I wanted to share a psalm and prayer with you.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="404" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QQOtTEs0sX4" width="486" youtube-src-id="QQOtTEs0sX4"></iframe></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-27391085339596018832021-01-13T15:38:00.000-08:002021-01-13T15:38:53.636-08:00Christians Against Christian Nationalism<p>I will be honest, I'm not a big "statement" person.</p><p>Maybe it's related to my days in newspaper journalism, when every day would consist of countless emails of public relations "statements," written by public relations professionals, purposely void of colorful language or anything that could spark controversy, interest, or deeper truth.</p><p>As a Pastor, I've carried on my suspicion of the import of statements, even those coming from the central office of my own denomination. </p><p>Statements can often lead to more confusion and resentment. There's never a way to include all the necessary voices. Too often statements are watered down, with too much input by lawyers or people worried about who might be upset.</p><p>So most of the time, I come to the conclusion that signing a statement will do more to make me feel good than it will to actually help the issue I'm signing a statement about. It's relatively easy to make a statement or sign a statement; it's more difficult to do the work of love, justice, and transformation that I believe all those who want to follow Jesus are called to do.</p><p>Today, though, I'm planning on making an exception.</p><p>I've spent much of the past seven days examining exactly what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, when a violent mob rushed the nation's Capitol in an attempt to overthrow and stop the certification of the democratic presidential election in America. As of today, six people have died and many more were injured. The President gave a speech shortly before the attempted insurrection and asked his supporters to take back their country with strength. They responded in kind. </p><p>Many writers and researchers and law enforcement officers will be needed to fully investigate what happened at the U.S. Capitol and how not only participants but government leaders will be held responsible. </p><p>As a Pastor, that's not my job. Politics aren't my job, either. </p><p>When I was ordained into ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I promised to teach and preach in accordance with the holy scriptures and creeds and confessions of the Lutheran Church. These scriptures are not American but instead grounded in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a Savior who proclaimed in his first sermon that he came to: "bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."</p><p>There is no space in my ordination promises to put national identity above the call to preach the Gospel.</p><p>***</p><p>I bring all this up this week, because for white American Christians, there is at least one un-ignorable aspect of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. A huge number of those who violently stormed the Capitol cited their "Christian" faith as part of the reason for their actions. <a href="https://religionnews.com/2021/01/12/the-faith-of-the-insurrectionists/">Writing for Religion News Service, Jack Jenkins documents the inextricable connection of Christian groups and leaders to right-wing, white nationalist violence in America, especially over the past four years. </a> </p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-yjVaYqC5ZIA/X_-Ac_kwkeI/AAAAAAAAc88/pCyPLLI-OdYoTL17pHga-Zry9EcxgxYDACLcBGAsYHQ/webRNS-Capitol-Mob4-010721-768x512.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="426" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-yjVaYqC5ZIA/X_-Ac_kwkeI/AAAAAAAAc88/pCyPLLI-OdYoTL17pHga-Zry9EcxgxYDACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h426/webRNS-Capitol-Mob4-010721-768x512.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>Some rioters at the Capitol carried Bibles / photo credit AP Photo John Minchillo</div><p></p><p>I began my book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Christians-Understanding-Elected/dp/1506449085/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">Red State Christians</a>, </i>with my experiences at Dallas-area megachurches on Fourth of July weekend, and an explanation of the ways President Trump spoke the language of right-wing Christian leaders to make his way to the Oval Office. For many American Christians over the past few decades, there has been an intrusive blurring of the lines between Christian identity and American identity. This American identity, it must be said, is also assumed to be white. For many of these Christians, there is a fear that as America becomes more racially diverse, they will lose their power and identity. For Americans accustomed to living with white privilege (a result of generations of systems designed to benefit white Americans over Americans of color, such as redlining in real estate, unequal schools, and a justice system skewed toward leniency for white Americans), merely the idea of equality feels like oppression.</p><p>All white American Christians cannot ignore the outsized role that conservative white Christianity has played in right-wing violence of the sort that occurred at our nation's Capitol building on Jan. 6. It cannot be compared to protests for Black Lives Matter. This summer's Black Lives Matter protesters were protesting against the violent killing of George Floyd, who was unarmed, by a white police officer, a<a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/blacks-whites-police-deaths-disparity/" target="_blank"> well-documented pattern in the United States where Black people are more likely to be killed by law enforcement, even when they're unarmed</a>. Rarely are those officials held accountable. This is what brought protesters into the streets here in my hometown of Minneapolis and throughout the country. It was a movement for Black lives, organized by leaders schooled in non-violent civil disobedience originating in the Civil Rights era. <a href="https://www.startribune.com/police-umbrella-man-was-a-white-supremacist-trying-to-incite-floyd-rioting/571932272/" target="_blank">Much of the violence connected or attributed to BLM protests was actually conducted by outside agitators or anarchists.</a> </p><p>The movement at the Capitol was very different. And the kind of Christian rhetoric heard at the Capitol was also very different. This is a Christianity built on power and racial superiority. <a href="latimes pastors sermons after jan 6">I researched the sermons of many leading conservative pastors from this past weekend</a>. While many of them claimed to speak <i>for </i>Jesus, none of them quoted his words. </p><p>None of them referenced that Jesus himself was convicted by an angry mob, shouting: "Crucify him! Crucify him!" Jesus himself was executed by an authoritarian government. Jesus himself sought out the poor and the marginalized in his community. Jesus himself was not American, nor was he white.</p><p>American Christians have long taken for granted that we live in a "Christian" nation, but perhaps we have forgotten what that might really means. A Christian nation would seek to love one another and not put our rights over the rights of our neighbors. A Christian nation would prioritize human rights. A Christian nation would not carry out executions. A Christian nation would turn swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks; rather than bragging about the amount of guns and ammunition and power and strength that are on our side.</p><p>For this reason I have signed a statement of <a href="https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/statement">Christians against Christian Nationalism</a>. It is critical for white American Christians to recognize how their commitment to being "Pro-Life" has been twisted upon itself to support power-hungry conservative politicians who would oversee the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans to a deadly virus, and find Christians risking lives to fill large worship auditoriums to satisfy the ego of power and fame-hungry pastors. It is critical for all of us who would seek to follow Jesus to ask how we have become so comfortable with angry and hate-filled rhetoric. It is critical for us to wonder where we have invested more into our national identity, money and power, and less into following Jesus, even when following Jesus causes us to be uncomfortable, vulnerable, or self-reflective.</p><p>For many Americans, the identity of Christian has become tied to intolerance, anger and parochialism. The voice of the Black church has long represented an alternative, for American Christians to side with the oppressed, and to fight for the rights of the marginalized. Millions of American Christians, from all corners of the country, have quietly kept on praying and doing the work of the Gospel. Too often their stories have been ignored, and their brand of Christianity marginalized. </p><p>And many of us have for too long attempted to find some kind of place of personal solace that does not require us to confront the broader trends in American Christianity. We focus on our churches: reports, Sunday school, Confirmation, budgets, charity work. We pray for peace and try to remain "apolitical." I am speaking here of those of us who Martin Luther King, Jr., may once have called "white moderates."</p><p>The recent events at the U.S. Capitol made clear that the claws of Christian Nationalism have dug deep into white American Christianity. And while not all of those who participated in the riot were conservative Christians, those of us who failed to point out how their actions conflicted with the Gospel of Jesus are complicit in the erosion of the Gospel in too many of our churches, and the idolatrous use of Christian rhetoric to prop up American power and right-wing violence.</p><p>The writer Lyz Lenz <a href="https://lyz.substack.com/p/heaven-invade">wrote this past week about returning to her former congregation in Iowa this past Sunday.</a> She noted the experience of listening to a church service that failed to note the violence that had been incited by Christian Nationalist rhetoric at the U.S. Capitol. Those sitting near her in church laughed when the pastor said it had been a hard week - nothing more. Then they sang together, unmasked, and gathered for doughnuts -- talking about anything but the attempted insurrection and the lives that were lost. She called it the violence of white silence. </p><p>If you are reading this and would like to learn more about how you can break your silence, and would like to become part of a movement against the infiltration of Christian Nationalism into American churches, I urge you to visit the website of <a href="https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/statement" target="_blank">Christians Against Christian Nationalism</a>. </p><p>Christians across generations have been called to stand up and speak out when Christianity has been used to justify violence and injustice. I believe this week in our country is one of those times. I'm grateful not to stand alone.</p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-44251252667373218532021-01-06T12:58:00.001-08:002021-01-06T16:06:09.131-08:00Be: America's Self-Examination in 2021<p>I planned to blog today about a new word for 2021. Maybe you've heard of this tradition of choosing a word by which to live in the New Year ahead.</p><p>I'm into simple. I tried to make New Year's resolutions only to find that they all conflicted with each other, and they required at least 60 hours per day.</p><p>So anyway. I chose a word. </p><p>BE.</p><p>I've spent so much of my life determining my value on what I do: in my work, in my role as a wife, mom, daughter, and friend. I've spent so much of my life determining my value by my accomplishments. </p><p>I've spent too little time thinking about how these accomplishments, work and various roles reflect on <i>who I am.</i></p><p>It's easy to get lost when you forget who you are and instead allow yourself to be defined by others, who may or may not praise your various accomplishments.</p><p>I thought of this today while I watched Sen. Ted Cruz stand up and object to the Presidential election results from the state of Arizona. The <i>democratic </i>election results, given by ordinary voters in the state of Arizona.</p><p>I watched as Cruz puffed out his chest when he stood up, and his House colleagues around him stood and applauded.</p><p>He felt good.</p><p>Ted Cruz didn't care who he was in that moment. He cared what he did, or could do in the future. Cruz has always wanted to be President. Today, his values as a constitutional lawyer, a husband, a dad, a self-proclaimed Christian, went adrift, as they have been for many years. Now, he took an unforgivable step. He became a lawmaker threatening to overthrow the Constitution, the law he has sworn to defend. In that moment Cruz was swelled up by adulation, his values and principles tossed aside.</p><p>I don't know if Ted Cruz is thinking any differently now (probably not), when a mob of terrorists have stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overthrow American democracy. At least one woman has died after being shot at the Capitol.</p><p>There was an armed standoff inside the Capitol.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AjZXF7fbzfE/X_YgBeKcWhI/AAAAAAAAc8A/P19n_5ruuYctuJAYa_eFFJMNGTMGTz2qACLcBGAsYHQ/5ff6158fd184b30018aad5b1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="852" data-original-width="1136" height="480" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AjZXF7fbzfE/X_YgBeKcWhI/AAAAAAAAc8A/P19n_5ruuYctuJAYa_eFFJMNGTMGTz2qACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/5ff6158fd184b30018aad5b1.jpeg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Incredibly courageous photo credit to Drew Angerer of Getty Images</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">We will be talking about the lasting effects of the last four years for many years in America. Frankly, I have been worrying about something like this happening today for weeks. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I am heartbroken thinking about the deployment of tear gas and gunfire on Black Lives Matter protesters all over America this summer, including here in my home town of Minneapolis. Meanwhile, today we watch armed anarchists and militia members storm the Capitol with very little law enforcement response.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Meanwhile, National Guard troops are finally called in to save America. Ordinary American men and women who signed up to serve their country and maybe get help with college tuition as they serve drill on weekends. They didn't deserve this. None of us did.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">None of this is limited to the last four years. For far too long we Americans have valued our lives based on our bank accounts and our social media followers. We have lifted up liars and grifters as role models to emulate.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This year, I am going to try and BE. Focus on the following questions: Who am I? What are my values? How do I love my neighbor as myself? How do I follow the Jesus Ethic? Do I consider what Jesus would do in every critical situation in my life?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">My prayer today, as I continue to watch armed protesters punching law enforcement officers on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C., is that maybe America can reexamine herself, too - especially our leaders. If I may, especially our leaders who have supported the President for the past four years. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Reexamine ourselves. Who are we? What are our values? How do we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we follow the Jesus Ethic, for those of us who claim to represent American Christianity? What would Jesus do today in America?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">May God bless the United States of America - and may justice roll down like waters.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">May you and I be those who do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God in 2021.</div><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-26397373448507705942020-12-23T13:47:00.006-08:002020-12-23T13:47:47.141-08:00Christmas Message 2020<p> I will be preaching OUTDOORS in single-digit temperatures tomorrow, so I wanted to take this opportunity to share a longer video message with all of you, for a very unusual and important Christmas: 2020.</p><p>Merry Christmas everyone, and thank you for reading/watching this year.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="401" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UE79aWJs76g" width="483" youtube-src-id="UE79aWJs76g"></iframe></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-29609370514992382182020-12-16T13:22:00.000-08:002020-12-16T13:22:27.246-08:00A New American Narrative: from the Rev. William H. Lamar IV<p> Part of the most important work I want to do as a writer, a pastor, and a Christian, is in reading the work of others. I spend a lot of time each day reading, whether it's the Bible, news, history, or books. I don't often mention that reading in my own writing, though if you look at my past work, you can clearly see the important and essential influence of writers and thinkers who I admire.</p><p>Today as I prepared to share with you my weekly blog or prayer video and meditation, I came across an article so powerful that I wanted to devote my entire blog to it. I'll share a link below, and if you can't access it due to a firewall, let me know and I'll help you find a workaround (though I always try and support places that publish good writing if I can). </p><p>This article, written by the Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., puts to words so much of what has been on my heart for many months and years now. And perhaps what I appreciate most about his article is he not only boldly and powerfully calls out the truth of what ails us, but he also provides a possible framework to create a new, truer, more just reality, one grounded in the teachings and Gospel of Jesus.</p><p>I'm so inspired. As I said, I'll share the link below - and then I'll share some more brief thoughts from me on why I found it so compelling.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/15/dc-metropolitan-ame-church-vandalized-blm-sign/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img data-original-height="633" data-original-width="1137" height="356" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-EOsW4kxmEmk/X9p0ZNqHqOI/AAAAAAAAc0w/c9XuAUtAytwSC_IvHXXloFRovN5AgtDFACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h356/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-12-16%2Bat%2B2.46.53%2BPM.png" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/15/dc-metropolitan-ame-church-vandalized-blm-sign/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/15/dc-metropolitan-ame-church-vandalized-blm-sign/</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Pastor Lamar leads a historic Black congregation, founded in 1838 when most Black Americans were still enslaved. Metropolitan AME has been the site of funerals for Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks. It has been witness to racial violence and KKK cross-burnings. It has stood for nearly 200 years and borne witness to America's greatest triumphs and most grievous sins. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This past weekend, members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups desecrated that history and filmed themselves tearing down a Black Lives Matter banner at the church, burning it in a scene too reminiscent of Black churches burned and bombed during the American Civil Rights era and beyond.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In response, last weekend Pastor Lamar tweeted: "We have not been distracted by signs, sounds, or fury for nearly two centuries. We worship. We liberate. We serve."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">These were the words of a wise and focused leader, determined to protect and honor his flock. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">He expanded further in the piece I link above. He begins, powerfully, by referencing a commonly known American Christmas carol: "Do you hear what I hear?"</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">And then he lays out the truth, "I hear the imperial American myth in the throes of its own death rattle. And I hear a people clamoring for a story by which to order their lives."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In the rest of his extraordinary article, Pastor Lamar unsparingly proclaims the deadliness of an American myth that too many of us have lived by for far too long. The myth of American power as only benevolent and just ignores the suffering of too many in our midst. We have yet to repent for the sin of slavery. We have yet to repent for the continued disenfranchisement of women. We have yet to acknowledge the ways that our nations consumes and kills its poor and sick.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Pastor Lamar claims, rightly I believe, that the most worrisome and also potentially correctable element of what is happening in America has to do with the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves, as Americans and as Christians.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In my research on American Christians across America after the 2016 election, I became convinced of the same truth Pastor Lamar shares from his perspective as a Black church pastor in Washington, D.C. I too am convinced that the story we've told ourselves about America is failing all Americans. I believe that for many Christians, especially white Christian Trump voters, their political beliefs reflect an exhausted and desperate response to a national narrative that no longer rings true. Trump offered nihilism and anger in response. Lamar offers instead hope, with the wisdom and ancestry of a people long oppressed by this nation's government, yet a people who have also often reflected the best of what America could be, helping write a new, truer narrative about America.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Contrary to worries that restructuring the American narrative would weaken America or lessen its power in the world, Lamar's insistence on a new narrative offers an opportunity for a narrative that is both more inclusive and more true, for everyone involved. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This Christmas, even as some of his words are likely hard for many of us to read, I draw hope from so much of what Pastor Lamar writes, again, in response to the desecration and threat to his congregation and his church building. As Jesus commands us, he chooses mercy, hope, truth, and love.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Among other powerful lines, he writes this: "What we must do is the hard work of creating this new narrative - one that tells a true story of humans thriving together and sharing the abundance of the land and their labor."</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">We have done this. We can do it again. This is the work that I so desperately want to do as a pastor, a writer, and a follower of Jesus.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I want to close with these powerful words from Pastor Lamar:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>One God is for all. The other god is for some. One God has chosen humanity. The other god has chosen whiteness, imperialism, and human subjugation.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>The men and women who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church knew and were known by the God of all people. Metropolitan is rooted in this theological vision that humankind is one family. There have been outposts of resistance to the god of white supremacy from the beginning. These institutions must lead the way toward a new narrative. And white-supremacist institutions must assume the role of student, not teacher.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>The United States of America must abandon this god, this story, and the violence that flows from fidelity to the same.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>A sign came down on Saturday. Metropolitan will replace the sign.</i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Will the United States replace the story that makes such acts of desecration inevitable?</i></div><br /><br /><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-91516669047954732092020-12-09T15:36:00.009-08:002020-12-09T15:36:43.241-08:00An Advent Meditation on Love and Fear<p> This season, I've been thinking a lot about Love and Fear. So I spent a few minutes meditating on 1 John 4, and I wanted to share this video message with you.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="395" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FT7fK_4NG1M" width="476" youtube-src-id="FT7fK_4NG1M"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-71616388063604119642020-12-02T13:42:00.000-08:002020-12-02T13:42:33.686-08:00In Love's Eyes<p> A couple of weeks ago, I received a phone call and heard some sad news, in a week that had already been filled with sad and stressful news. </p><p>In this year of global pandemic, the only way to survive I've found is to move through each day unobtrusively, trying not to over-think anything, counting on a cup of hot coffee in the morning, and a glass of wine in the evening (maybe, better, a steaming cup of herbal tea). Depends on the evening.</p><p>Between these two bookends there is work, done increasingly more and more in a small home office, with new family coworkers whose jobs or second grade class have nothing to do with your work. There are no boundaries around life anymore, no division between home and work and play (what is play)? and duty.</p><p>Instead there is a mindless shuffle, downstairs to the laundry room, upstairs to the kitchen, out the back gate to the alley to dump out the trash, a weekly grocery trip: time to wear pants that button! Do they still button?</p><p>Over the past two months we've been in and out of church: as Covid swept through my church's small town and even our congregation, and I've led worship from home, returning again to live-streaming from church with a couple of other brave souls and a silent sanctuary.</p><p>Apparently Christmas is still coming. We put up our tree last Friday, brought out the warm brown and white faux fur blankets and red mugs and hung stockings on the mantle.</p><p>Here in Minnesota we had snow in October, but now it's December and inexplicably green, though the leaves have long fallen. </p><p>I started reading <i>The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe </i>to my kids each night, and each night for a chapter or two, we enter into the wardrobe world of Narnia. I give in to the story, dipping my voice to put on a slight English accent to match C.S. Lewis' writing. I tell myself it sounds charming. </p><p>The story repeats this line over and over again about Narnia: that it is a land where it is always winter but never Christmas.</p><p>Looking out my window upon the bare brown bark of winter's unadorned trees; the grass pitifully poking its blades out into the frigid air, shivering and turning brown in the early afternoon sun, before darkness comes at 4:30 p.m.; I imagine that 2020 could be Narnia: a world where it is always winter but never Christmas.</p><p>Always working but never done.</p><p>Always virtual school but never recess.</p><p>There is an unfinished-ness in the air in America today, whether it's the death knells of the claims of voter fraud in the presidential election, or the hastily pasted signs in the windows of our local shops and restaurants: take-out, curbside pick-up, order online. BUY BUY BUY. </p><p>It is a feeling of never enough. Everyone is trying hard, but it's never enough: never enough hospital workers, never enough treatments, never enough money, never enough time, never enough sleep.</p><p>As various public health leaders look back to one year ago today and ask: "What could we have done differently?" I imagine the strangeness of pandemic life has many of us asking the same: wondering about our lives and the choices we've made. Was it enough? Will it ever be enough?</p><p>***</p><p>In Narnia it's always winter and never Christmas, but in our house when winter begins soon it's always Ben's birthday. Today is the day: Dec. 2, nestled right between Thanksgiving and Christmas. </p><p>Lots of years we'd go to his parents' house in Kansas City for Thanksgiving, and, before we had kids, we'd spend the day Black Friday/birthday shopping. Ben never even had to carry his own bags; that's how much fun we all had celebrating his day with him: me and his parents; them, watching their youngest son grow into an adult, still with that auburn hair that looked like his Grandpa Wilbur, and the smile that said he was even happier than he was letting on. </p><p>I don't know if on those days or other days he realized how much we loved him; or today the delight in our boys' eyes when they hand over birthday cards made especially for Dad. </p><p>Too often, especially in these short days of pandemic life and worries over lockdowns and livelihoods, when we grow introspective we view ourselves and our lives through a cruel prism of wanting and longing and fatigue and regret.</p><p>I started writing about that evening a few weeks ago when I got that sad phone call. Digesting the news, I walked past our bed and stood in the center of the closet Ben built for me last year, in the bedroom that used to be the garage of our 1953-built Minneapolis home. I stood there and stared blankly ahead, seeing stretched in front of me the short days and long nights of work and worry and quiet desperation. </p><p>I turned around then and he was standing there next to me, bathed in the overhead IKEA light he'd wired in with his dad, screwing in the bulb on the black and white stepladder that accompanied us from Chicago to Southern California back to here, the icy upper Midwest where we'd stay and, against our will, put down roots and leave behind our rootless young marriage.</p><p>I turned around and saw myself for a brief moment reflected in his eyes, my whole wretched body standing in front of him: the too-thin hair, the saggy stomach, the tired eyes, the potential wrapped up in alternating failure and fleeting success. In his eyes all this was gone and there was only a shining silence and a flash of love and light, like the first beams of sunlight on freshly fallen white snow, on a winter morning that always leads to Christmas.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AyW0dM9wEpA/X8gKEVWq24I/AAAAAAAAcrw/jMW5haZXBZY5MJOb5XBsiFpFZXplbMHYACLcBGAsYHQ/IMG_2100.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="720" data-original-width="960" height="480" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AyW0dM9wEpA/X8gKEVWq24I/AAAAAAAAcrw/jMW5haZXBZY5MJOb5XBsiFpFZXplbMHYACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_2100.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-68051103929616386142020-11-25T16:29:00.003-08:002020-11-25T16:35:26.484-08:00Thanksgiving Thanks 2020<p>Oh hey, it's 2020.</p><p>The church where I serve as Pastor has a long-standing tradition of doing a special service on Thanksgiving Eve. A few months ago, we were starting to plan for masked, socially distant worship -- complete with sign-ups and organization and bipolar ionization.</p><p>Then, a month or so ago, the COVID-19 pandemic came to my church's small town in full force, and several of our members were diagnosed and/or exposed to Covid. We quickly pivoted to online worship, and we've been live-streaming only for quite a few weeks now.</p><p>I have to admit I always feel a little stressed this time of year. September and October are busy months: the re-start of school, both of my boys' birthdays, lots of preparation for the church program year. This year is no exception, except it feels like we are planning everything without a manual, and with knowing that whatever we plan is likely to fall apart. I've been worried about the ones I love, and filled with anxiety about the uncertainty of so much.</p><p>In the midst of all that noise, Thanksgiving Eve has come again. I've been sitting in an empty church building for a few hours now, but one of our church musicians just arrived, and she's practicing flute far away from my office. We greeted each other in our masks. </p><p>As I listen to her warm up, I'm struck by the power of simple, isolated moments of Thanksgiving. I'm struck by the courage of ordinary people to make the necessary changes to keep each other safe this year, and yet at the same time, refuse to give in to despair, hopelessness, anger and hatred.</p><p>In year where people everywhere have had much to complain about, my church community is no exception. One of our high school students was voted Homecoming Queen, and she had to celebrate in quarantine, all alone, as the end of her volleyball season was canceled. Another family faced the death of a beloved dad and grandpa last week, and had to resign themselves to wait for a memorial service until spring and a vaccine. We are all making different choices than we ordinarily would. </p><p>So I didn't know what to expect when I suggested we put together a video of church members sharing what they're grateful for in this season. I wasn't sure how it would feel to celebrate gratitude in a year of losses and frustration.</p><p>Imagine my own joy and gratitude when I received pictures, notes and videos. No one was glossing over the reality of 2020, but they were also saying that misery or anger would not define our year together. Instead, love would.</p><p>I said in my portion of the video that I was grateful this year to serve a congregation named Grace, where people treat each other with Grace. Part of that grace is knowing that a huge part of ministry (and life in general) in 2020 is all about trying new things - and being willing to fail. As I made the video, I made a few mistakes. I learned that certain photo formats I received showed up blurry. Some of the images got cut off because of the way the program zoomed. And our recording underneath should have been in audio format to get better sound. </p><p>But those imperfections and mistakes wouldn't have the final word, just as COVID and despair wouldn't have the final word, either. Instead, the faces of our church and the love they shared would. Love is not canceled in 2020. Happy Thanksgiving.</p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="397" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s8zfqc74oMg" width="477" youtube-src-id="s8zfqc74oMg"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-36813837675301698872020-11-18T12:10:00.005-08:002020-11-18T12:10:22.298-08:00A Psalm 90 Prayer for Covidtimes<p> A video blog/prayer/psalm for you this week!</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="408" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lwnZMdTTwOE" width="488" youtube-src-id="lwnZMdTTwOE"></iframe></div><br /><p>Love,</p><p>Angela </p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-17792294589896850972020-11-11T13:14:00.001-08:002020-11-11T18:27:02.225-08:00Armistice<p>Every year on Veteran's Day, I think of my Grandpa John. Just 17 years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered the war, my Grandpa bade farewell to his then-girlfriend, my grandma Millie, and he was sent off to war. They'd be married when he returned, on a weekday in their small hometown, with scores of other war brides and grooms.</p><p>Tens of thousands of miles away, lands to which he'd never traveled from his small, rural Midwestern home, he landed on the Pacific Front. Shortly after his battle begun, he was shot in the stomach and airlifted to Australia. My grandma waited, and she wrote letters, and she worried.</p><p>His was a tale of bravery, courage, and pain.</p><p><i>Once a Marine, Always a Marine.</i></p><p><i>Once a veteran, Always a veteran.</i></p><p>One Veteran's Day past, after serving the summer at the Veteran's Hospital in Minneapolis as a chaplain intern, I drove to Fort Snelling to see my grandpa's white gravestone, in rows upon rows of military dead.</p><p>I felt heavy in my chest my tiny connection to the preservation of democracy and the defeat of Nazism, the liberation of the concentration camps. Our triumphant American narrative glosses over our own shortcomings, this the veterans themselves know and have always known as they nonetheless risk their lives for something bigger than themselves. Because of them we get more time to form <i>a more perfect union</i>. Because of them the world haltingly moves forward, two steps forward, one step back, against tyranny and injustice and genocide.</p><p>Every year on Veteran's Day, I think of my father-in-law. Thirty or so years after my grandfather left his small, rural Midwestern town, hundreds of miles to the south my father-in-law left his Missouri farm town to fight for America in Vietnam, the last war in which Americans were drafted.</p><p>He came back with medals, including Purple Hearts, and shrapnel in his knee, and we don't talk much about what happened there. His is not my story to tell, but his honor, his courage, and his sacrifice are part of my family's story on this Veteran's Day.</p><p>***</p><p>This Veteran's Day, in a year beset by global pandemic and political instability, I find myself thinking about another veteran in my family. He died almost 57 years before I was born. </p><p>Peter Jacob Ganzer, Jr., was my grandma's father on my dad's side. Like the rest of the family, he was of German heritage. His grandfather, Jakob Ganzer, left Germany at age 19 to try his luck in the Promised Land, about 20 years before America would descend into Civil War. He lived for awhile in New York City and was a member of the Armed Guards of New York state. At age 42, he came to rural Minnesota, to the county of what is today St. Cloud. After serving briefly as part of the military there, he later built a log cabin in a rural area of the county and finished his life as a farmer, despite losing four of his toes to frostbite while bringing supplies back to the farm.</p><p>His son, Peter Jacob, Sr., was born in New York but lived his adult life in rural Minnesota. He'd marry a woman from a nearby town, and he died at age 48 after the couple had eight children. My great-grandfather, Peter Jacob, Jr., was the fourth.</p><p>His father had died when he was just 18, and seven years later, at age 25, he'd be summoned back to Germany to fight for America, against his not-so-distant relatives, in World War I. </p><p>I've wondered what it was like for Peter Jacob, Jr., to travel so far from home in a time when automobiles and electricity were still new inventions.</p><p>If you wander the graves at the cemetery where Peter Jacob, Jr., and many of my relatives are buried, in that small German Catholic town in rural Minnesota, you'll notice that many gravestones were still written in their native German. Many people in town still spoke German when Peter Jacob, Jr., was sent overseas to fight for America against Germany. I wonder how brave and how afraid he must have been, and how scared his wife, my great-grandmother Susan, must have been as well. She was just 21 when he went to war. I'm not even sure if they were already dating or married when he was sent away. </p><p>They had their first child, Rita, my great-aunt, on Valentine's Day in 1923, four years and three months after the Armistice, on Nov. 11, 1918, 102 years ago today.</p><p>My grandma, Millie, was born a year later, followed by Beatrice in 1926 and Peter Jacob, the III, in 1928.</p><p>But Peter Jacob, III, would never know his namesake father, because my great-grandfather, Peter Jacob, Jr., World War I veteran, would lose his life just 10 years after returning from war. I've been told by relatives that he suffered from ill respiratory health due to inhaling mustard gas on the Western Front. That his lungs were never the same, and when he died at age 35, the official cause was pneumonia, maybe beginning with a flu, likely complicated by chemical weapons used against him by his ancestral homeland.</p><p>A few years after Peter Jacob, Jr.,'s death, the family would suffer another crisis when they lost their home in a house fire. It is only by sheer faith, will, and perhaps the power of God, that Great-Grandma Susan kept their family together. Because of her, and because of the kindness of others in the community, my family survived despite my great-grandfather's early death.</p><p>***</p><p>I'm thinking about my great-grandpa Peter today because I'm realizing how close so many of us are to the wounds of war this Veteran's Day, even as so many of us feel far away, at a time when our nation's military is increasingly set apart from everyday American life. </p><p>Today I tell my great-grandpa's story, and my father-in-law's, and my grandpa's, to remind myself and all of us that the price of our freedom and the cost of war runs in all of our blood. It certainly runs in mine. As I think of what it cost to protect and defend our democracy. And as I think of the courage and selflessness it required of my Grandma Millie, as she waved goodbye to her husband, setting off again to World War, as she knew the first World War had taken her father away when she was only 3 years old.</p><p>Throughout this country's relatively short and complicated history, ordinary Americans like your family and like mine have chosen again and again to sacrifice their well-being, even their lives, for the freedom and promise of this country. It would be lying to say that their sacrifices have not taken their toll on millions of American families, again like mine.</p><p>But this Veteran's Day, it would also be lying to say that their sacrifices have been in vain. They have not. One-hundred-and-two years after that first Armistice, when Peter Jacob, Jr., swept my great-grandmother Susan up in his arms and promised that the war and the pain would not have the final word, their descendants bear witness that my great-grandfather's bravery, courage, and pain made a lasting impact on my family, and on our defense of his chosen nation.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W6WfYIRBh60/X6xReybAlFI/AAAAAAAAccQ/9R_byKsh9Wk0XKiX6NtCekjoj5bBWkc4ACLcBGAsYHQ/s378/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-11-11%2Bat%2B2.19.15%2BPM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="378" data-original-width="248" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W6WfYIRBh60/X6xReybAlFI/AAAAAAAAccQ/9R_byKsh9Wk0XKiX6NtCekjoj5bBWkc4ACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2020-11-11%2Bat%2B2.19.15%2BPM.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">My great-grandfather, a veteran of World War I</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">His grave at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church Cemetery</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Richmond, MN</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i>To my dear family members, please feel free to correct any details I may have transcribed incorrectly in this story. I am grateful to share our ancestry together.</i></div>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-23076944608217791212020-11-04T11:10:00.000-08:002020-11-04T11:10:34.247-08:00Voters are Human Beings<p>It's way too early to draw any sort of lasting conclusions from this week's U.S. elections. Many votes are still uncounted; many essential voices have yet to be heard.</p><p>I wrote a<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Christians-Understanding-Elected/dp/1506449085/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr="> whole book based on Christian voters in 2016</a>, and I'm still figuring out what that research and those results mean four years later, so I write this knowing that much knowledge is yet to come.</p><p>Still, I remain a believer in two things: 1) the possibility of learning; and 2) the ongoing revelation of the Holy Spirit.</p><p>So here's something big I think I learned in 2016 that's coming to bear yet again in 2020.</p><p>We have a bad tendency in this country to dehumanize voters. We have a bad tendency in this country to sort out voters into demographic groups, because this is an age of data and demographics and algorithms, for everything from what gray cardigan I want to buy to what brand of toilet paper is still in stock in my state.</p><p>Out of necessity, in everything from baseball to baby-rearing, we've become overly reliant on technocratic solutions, believing nearly everything to be quantifiable. Democrats in particular (and this was certainly true of Hillary Clinton's campaign; less so for Joe Biden's campaign) are guilty of thinking about elections in terms of measuring out and adding or subtracting demographic groups.</p><p>This type of election analysis has created a huge cottage industry of pollsters and lobbyists and pundits, most of whom treat vast swaths of the country as data points to be fed into equations. But as I learned in my reporting for <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Christians-Understanding-Elected/dp/1506449085/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank">Red State Christians</a>, </i>every data point on a pollster's map represents a unique human being with a unique history, relationships, and emotions. </p><p>Just as the "Red State Christians" I interviewed after 2016 refused to be placed into solid demographic boxes as a monolith of data, so too do American voters deserve the opportunity to be treated as human beings and not demographic groups. That kind of shorthand has a purpose, but it's been overly used in American politics and has led to some legitimate frustration for voters (like, I would argue, in Appalachia; or like many Latino and Asian voters) who don't fit neatly into demographic boxes corresponding to partisan allegiance.</p><p>Yet again we Americans have a close, bitterly divided election that seems incomprehensible to both polar ends of the political spectrum. And at the same time those of us who live and work in families and communities that aren't politically homogeneous know in depths of our souls that while we might disagree fervently with those on the other side of the aisle, we will also refuse to ignore the fact that they exist.</p><p>And that they too are human beings.</p><p>In the age of data and algorithms and mass American death due to a global pandemic, I am witnessing a troubling trend of dehumanization that enables an ugly and destructive callousness toward our neighbors. </p><p>As Christians, we must battle against this callousness and this dehumanization, of the living and the dead. We must pull apart statistics to see the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, siblings, friends, workers, grandmothers, and grandfathers behind reams of data. </p><p>We must find a way to blend of technocratic knowledge with the knowledge that dwells in the heart and, as the ancient Greeks, put it, in the gut. Reclaiming that humanity could begin with each of us reclaiming the faces and bodies behind each and every single vote, and the human being that vote represents. </p><p>Human beings, not statistics, are the building blocks of this nation. They are not easily definable. Their ethnicity or their race or their sex or their age or their education or their wealth will not always determine how they vote. Their biggest influences will never be charts or stats or ads. It will always be the ones they trust: their family, their friends, and their fellow human beings and Americans. Might we work to rebuild that trust in one another.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TJNfwbzr78M/X6L8YIMqgtI/AAAAAAAAcUg/B-rWozg6qbklGPQKVJiTSYqCxUk1DjsgACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_2840.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TJNfwbzr78M/X6L8YIMqgtI/AAAAAAAAcUg/B-rWozg6qbklGPQKVJiTSYqCxUk1DjsgACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/IMG_2840.JPG" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">100% Human. 100% Voter.</div>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-30344795270381659772020-10-28T13:19:00.000-07:002020-10-28T13:19:02.608-07:00The Days are Surely ComingThis week, like many of you I suspect, I'm overloaded on work and worry. I've been doing a lot of writing, but, following a suggestion from a friend of mine, I felt called to dwell today not in my own words but in God's word.<div><br /></div><div>This week, the blog is in video form. Please view it below! </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm praying for you this week and trusting in these prophetic words from Jeremiah 31.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="387" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/92iqCK2dRN4" width="465" youtube-src-id="92iqCK2dRN4"></iframe></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-81331183535686347242020-10-14T18:47:00.005-07:002020-10-14T18:47:45.871-07:00My Night in the Combine<p>One of the greatest gifts of my time as a reporter and a pastor has been the opportunities to be invited into someone else's world.</p><p>As a hockey reporter, I learned what it felt like to ride a minor-league hockey bus through the hills of Pennsylvania, and be called up in the middle of the night to the NHL.</p><p>I learned how it felt to go from a tiny Florida farm town, living in poverty, to being an NFL All-Star and Super Bowl running back.</p><p>As an intern pastor in Las Vegas, I got to go behind the scenes of <i>Phantom of the Opera </i>on the Las Vegas Strip, and learn how the special effects got done on one of Vegas' most popular shows.</p><p>I walked along the shore of the Pacific as a Pastor in Orange County, and heard family tales about the orange groves.</p><p>I shoveled out several feet of snow in Chicago, and walked down Michigan Avenue past skyscrapers at the center of commerce and industry in America's third-largest city, witnessing the racial dividing line of North Side and South Side, and the myriad diverse neighborhoods in between.</p><p>And tonight -- as a pastor in rural southwestern Minnesota -- I got a firsthand glimpse into life on the farm, being invited to ride in a combine.</p><p>The gift of inviting someone to see a glimpse of your life is a gift we should more often give to one another, and it also reminds me the power of stepping out of your own everyday life to experience walking through life in someone else's shoes -- or someone else's fields.</p><p>I won't claim to understand what life is like as a farmer after just one night in the combine. After all, I left after just a short amount of time -- and these families will be working far into the night. Steph, a church member who invited me along to experience life on the farm, told me that her little boys used to curl up on the floor in the front of the combine and go to sleep. She said it was tough on school nights; tough to balance the responsibilities of life on the farm with schoolwork and Cub Scouts and sports and both parents' day jobs, which they keep to supplant their farm income and also be able to access health insurance. Steph's husband, Dean, starts his day early on the farm, then begins delivering mail early in the morning, finishing up in the afternoon to get back to work on the farm.</p><p>When I asked Pete, their family friend and farming colleague who was driving the combine, how much the combine could cost, he said a brand-new one could cost around $700,000. That's part of the reason the families have decided to join forces and farm together, across multiple generations. In order to survive as a family farm today, the up-front costs are huge - and profits are slim because of the massive costs for land, planting, and equipment. That's part of the reason small family farmers have been pushed out and have struggled to survive in recent decades.</p><p>I didn't learn everything -- probably barely learned <i>anything </i>about farming in just one night. But I did learn and was reminded of the faith that farmers have to have each and every year, putting out huge sums of money sometimes for renting land or sharing costs of equipment and planting -- only to put themselves at the mercy of weather and global economics to hopefully make some money at harvest time each year.</p><p>Steph told me that while she and Dean didn't initially plan on being farmers, it soon became important to them to build a legacy for future generations of their family, especially after Dean's grandpa died. Their kids were learning early on the importance of working hard, sometimes for a benefit that was far off in the future, sometimes a benefit that maybe mom and dad wouldn't even fully get to see.</p><p>The benefit they did share, that I got to experience just a bit, was a shared dependence and cooperation and trust in one another. </p><p>As I think about America, and as I think about Christians in America in such a polarized time politically, I think we could all benefit from stepping into the world of the farm at harvest time this season, of learning how we must depend on one another, and inviting each other into one another's world -- even when it seems scary or unfamiliar or unpredictable, and the rewards aren't guaranteed.</p><p>As Christians, God promises us that no matter what it looks like in the present moment, that the Lord of the Harvest is supplying workers and laborers for the fields -- and that our labor will not be in vain. This promise gives me hope and strength in the current moment, and it reminds me that I never labor alone.</p><p><i>A special thanks to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/loncorichfamilyfarms/" target="_blank">Loncorich Family Farms</a> for sharing their harvest season with me. </i></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iD70R2mBUi8/X4emexEpS4I/AAAAAAAAbu8/WzKpY3HrYZM13iDV8gpbn2VURDHdtQGSwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_0271.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iD70R2mBUi8/X4emexEpS4I/AAAAAAAAbu8/WzKpY3HrYZM13iDV8gpbn2VURDHdtQGSwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_0271.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gY8R47bv9h4/X4embaCReWI/AAAAAAAAbu4/jcrPdUvk-i4c3kEpCo72ZQNtDNd_ciWAwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_0711.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gY8R47bv9h4/X4embaCReWI/AAAAAAAAbu4/jcrPdUvk-i4c3kEpCo72ZQNtDNd_ciWAwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_0711.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tBXtGpf2s84/X4emgtGgwZI/AAAAAAAAbvA/7v86S2sm2ZkCaVy_qGSTP0XDcJ1GrxJBACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_1106.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tBXtGpf2s84/X4emgtGgwZI/AAAAAAAAbvA/7v86S2sm2ZkCaVy_qGSTP0XDcJ1GrxJBACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_1106.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9FBhymuwYU0/X4em257BzRI/AAAAAAAAbvQ/iKhxC5uOn74eRMuOxEgfCP_ug0n9-GfJwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_1653.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9FBhymuwYU0/X4em257BzRI/AAAAAAAAbvQ/iKhxC5uOn74eRMuOxEgfCP_ug0n9-GfJwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_1653.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xTTlsjZ4N-A/X4em4mHNDPI/AAAAAAAAbvU/VCzBSjGtmPEhopHpEf4NtrlLL-p4VaungCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_2316.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xTTlsjZ4N-A/X4em4mHNDPI/AAAAAAAAbvU/VCzBSjGtmPEhopHpEf4NtrlLL-p4VaungCLcBGAsYHQ/w480-h640/IMG_2316.JPG" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZW6mfRngWlA/X4em6hT-qMI/AAAAAAAAbvY/pgxVFQYgkfQTzp0MoAPvwClrfAi26Xq4wCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_2439.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZW6mfRngWlA/X4em6hT-qMI/AAAAAAAAbvY/pgxVFQYgkfQTzp0MoAPvwClrfAi26Xq4wCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_2439.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KXV5R2gJwDE/X4enSTLxHQI/AAAAAAAAbv0/lzn1e_flqB8_iIwScH0Ffqf3-RqtN4X5gCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_2621.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KXV5R2gJwDE/X4enSTLxHQI/AAAAAAAAbv0/lzn1e_flqB8_iIwScH0Ffqf3-RqtN4X5gCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_2621.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DyRqOn6kSF0/X4enIuuQcXI/AAAAAAAAbvk/IGQ2jl7aQdw1FXuAh4oq1jAPCR8e9TDuACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_2830.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DyRqOn6kSF0/X4enIuuQcXI/AAAAAAAAbvk/IGQ2jl7aQdw1FXuAh4oq1jAPCR8e9TDuACLcBGAsYHQ/w480-h640/IMG_2830.JPG" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4Nh_NXqCBqU/X4enWFy_0xI/AAAAAAAAbv4/fAO1C5laHJYbLmSCT9e8Sbj--OQzRFo3ACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_3777.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4Nh_NXqCBqU/X4enWFy_0xI/AAAAAAAAbv4/fAO1C5laHJYbLmSCT9e8Sbj--OQzRFo3ACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_3777.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zt64H3HpOk8/X4enf57XdMI/AAAAAAAAbwA/qsiIoWPN9DAaBvetJ7sZPU3TAl4JIIwCQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_4150.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zt64H3HpOk8/X4enf57XdMI/AAAAAAAAbwA/qsiIoWPN9DAaBvetJ7sZPU3TAl4JIIwCQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_4150.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RwkIqPbMvlA/X4enplKRdRI/AAAAAAAAbwU/LN3i7SbI-54vmL9CdpW3P8SpwHfCZ25yQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_4377.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RwkIqPbMvlA/X4enplKRdRI/AAAAAAAAbwU/LN3i7SbI-54vmL9CdpW3P8SpwHfCZ25yQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_4377.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qsQgc9OvBr4/X4enke8LraI/AAAAAAAAbwM/P9GfVVkARZU96F0h3mVN2KDM7MsgEMCGgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_4613.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1638" data-original-width="2048" height="512" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qsQgc9OvBr4/X4enke8LraI/AAAAAAAAbwM/P9GfVVkARZU96F0h3mVN2KDM7MsgEMCGgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h512/IMG_4613.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dk5rIlTHGAc/X4en0QbK1VI/AAAAAAAAbwg/RWEbLscdt-MzwaY7V9vaXK3996qyjktcwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_4800.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dk5rIlTHGAc/X4en0QbK1VI/AAAAAAAAbwg/RWEbLscdt-MzwaY7V9vaXK3996qyjktcwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_4800.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MEFpQNUZpZc/X4eoFVkqvUI/AAAAAAAAbw0/LL8PK1P3iZE3hccGa9hJ_xJMyb8GcKR9gCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_5111.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MEFpQNUZpZc/X4eoFVkqvUI/AAAAAAAAbw0/LL8PK1P3iZE3hccGa9hJ_xJMyb8GcKR9gCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_5111.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B89tfzdTIMw/X4eoD42-bxI/AAAAAAAAbws/Ic7OeXH9468qn6-qbkDIn5xLDY1qFVMlgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_5237.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B89tfzdTIMw/X4eoD42-bxI/AAAAAAAAbws/Ic7OeXH9468qn6-qbkDIn5xLDY1qFVMlgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_5237.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d9ssOxB-5PY/X4eoQZZ3ipI/AAAAAAAAbw4/OFYZ25r-ycURrZTXFzqN2KmHauDpakGvQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_5521.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-d9ssOxB-5PY/X4eoQZZ3ipI/AAAAAAAAbw4/OFYZ25r-ycURrZTXFzqN2KmHauDpakGvQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_5521.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5hHr3FPGzBU/X4eoTtZwTRI/AAAAAAAAbxA/eFjgllcTtNAKTdVPRpO3bkecB1ALRomggCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_6672.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5hHr3FPGzBU/X4eoTtZwTRI/AAAAAAAAbxA/eFjgllcTtNAKTdVPRpO3bkecB1ALRomggCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_6672.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VX-giPHI6lk/X4eodVOAAHI/AAAAAAAAbxE/A0wxKQRwCMAaKQN-oeC0fGDEX_ioMuTEwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_7034.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VX-giPHI6lk/X4eodVOAAHI/AAAAAAAAbxE/A0wxKQRwCMAaKQN-oeC0fGDEX_ioMuTEwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_7034.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VMF9u60bENk/X4eo9sPeBOI/AAAAAAAAbxY/bJsSptiL7e0_E1Px9zecsrAZGZczfQOSgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_7093.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VMF9u60bENk/X4eo9sPeBOI/AAAAAAAAbxY/bJsSptiL7e0_E1Px9zecsrAZGZczfQOSgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_7093.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GSRq-ukHFBg/X4eo8ONjChI/AAAAAAAAbxQ/ZrHeWrTuJtw3J95nAqVzG-pBukfkr1BhACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_7982.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GSRq-ukHFBg/X4eo8ONjChI/AAAAAAAAbxQ/ZrHeWrTuJtw3J95nAqVzG-pBukfkr1BhACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_7982.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kSJ22o78Mkg/X4eo8BEfB-I/AAAAAAAAbxU/YusNyCno21QgxkYtQoElYlhYiHHwCT5xgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_8754.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kSJ22o78Mkg/X4eo8BEfB-I/AAAAAAAAbxU/YusNyCno21QgxkYtQoElYlhYiHHwCT5xgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_8754.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-upwpdMnXr10/X4epVodtZrI/AAAAAAAAbxw/Ipe-8KFHHXsx07GQedERw38U3FmKTfahACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_8925.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-upwpdMnXr10/X4epVodtZrI/AAAAAAAAbxw/Ipe-8KFHHXsx07GQedERw38U3FmKTfahACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_8925.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ufdm0pxYsBw/X4epVsMXUdI/AAAAAAAAbx0/RvcpfQXQA4Eol8R_lB1KwWUkZKuk7zFVgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_9270.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ufdm0pxYsBw/X4epVsMXUdI/AAAAAAAAbx0/RvcpfQXQA4Eol8R_lB1KwWUkZKuk7zFVgCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_9270.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a_G--hJsUsM/X4epVS4UXnI/AAAAAAAAbxs/_WoBx4oghWUIniZ9r1jk88kLMoullpOKwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/IMG_9731.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a_G--hJsUsM/X4epVS4UXnI/AAAAAAAAbxs/_WoBx4oghWUIniZ9r1jk88kLMoullpOKwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h480/IMG_9731.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><i><br /></i><p></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5565098340744307165.post-53324122496961935602020-10-07T15:37:00.001-07:002020-10-07T15:37:03.503-07:00Refugees, Refuge, and God in America<p>At this time last week, I was convinced we couldn't handle another day of online virtual second grade.</p><p>Once evenly divided into neat compartments: the bus, school, work, the gym, dinner, socializing -- life had turned into one revolving carousel with everything bumping into each other, figuratively and literally, as my husband, my son, and I shared a home office with multiple online meetings occurring all at once.</p><p>We spent the weekend setting up bunk beds in the boys' room and making space for a desk. Step one for weekday sanity. Our youngest son continued to spend four days a week with grandma and grandpa preschool. </p><p>This week, I began teaching a new online webinar and also woke up at 3 a.m. to appear live on BBC News.</p><p>The swirl continued, but I kept trying to look at the blazing trees as I drove westward out of the Cities towards church, and as I panted around my neighborhood trying to finish a short run.</p><p>You can't help but gasp when you see the golden leaves of a cottonwood, or the fiery orangey red of a maple tree, gleaming in the late afternoon sun. Autumn is glorious this time of year, when I watch the tractors and combines race around the fields for harvest.</p><p>As I prepared for Sunday worship this week, lines from the Prophet Isaiah kept echoing in my head.</p><p style="color: #46260d; font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">"For you have been a refuge to the poor,</p><p style="color: #46260d; font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a refuge to the needy in their distress,</p><p style="color: #46260d; font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat."</p><p style="color: #46260d; font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;">- Isaiah 25:4</p><p style="color: #46260d; font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>You have been a <b>refuge.</b></p><p>I did some research on that word, refuge, repeated here for effect from a prophet writing to a desperate people, a people who had wandered far from the faith in their God and were living under an ungodly government. A people who did not know where to look next; where to turn next. A people who in their desperation had listened to false prophets and betrayed one another and God.</p><p>Isaiah recognizes that despite the rampant sin and evil present in their world, the people at this moment needed to be reminded of exactly who their God was.</p><p>Our God is this same God: the God who gives refuge to the poor, refuge to the needy in their distress.</p><p>More often in contemporary times we hear the word <i>refugee</i>, such as last week, <a href="https://www.startribune.com/white-house-now-aims-to-slash-refugee-numbers-to-an-all-time-low/572607742/" target="_blank">when the Trump Administration sent a proposal to Congress to further limit the number of refugees coming to America from 18,000 to 15,000, bringing the nation's refugee population to an all-time low, according to the <i>Minneapolis Star Tribune.</i></a></p><p>I understand the seeming sense-making of this proposal in a time of global pandemic, when many Americans have suffered job loss and economic hardship due to COVID-19. How could more needy people come in when people are already suffering?</p><p>This makes a lot of sense, but it also goes against a different principle that has long-guided America, one that aligns America with the God of Israel and Isaiah.</p><p>A <i>refugee </i>is merely one seeking refuge, and the Bible tells us over and over again that God is a God who creates refuge. And this word, <i>refuge</i>, means not paradise or plenty but instead refers to an island of peace and tranquility in a word of chaos. Refuge dwells alongside war and trauma, providing needed relief so that life can go on. Trauma and chaos does not eliminate the existence of refuge, instead they necessitate the existence of refuge.</p><p>When I began this blog, I didn't intend to write about refugees. I wanted to write about how we all, me included, need refuge this week. And we need to remember that the God we worship promises us exactly that: a space of peace and tranquility and we need to create that space for one another, in our families and in our faith communities, and among all those whom we love, even those with whom we vehemently disagree.</p><p>Still sometimes truth is inconvenient and also inescapable. To believe in this God of refuge is also to commit oneself to advocating for that refuge for others, who need it even more desperately than we do.</p><p>My prayer for you this week is you find that refuge, that shelter from the storm. And as you do, that you're motivated to make room for other refugees.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-gsDBuHwqbM" width="320" youtube-src-id="-gsDBuHwqbM"></iframe></div><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>Angela Denkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08668392354453369793noreply@blogger.com0