blip : Blog of Isaac & Jason :

I spoke on behalf of the NC Council of Churches at a state legislature meeting in Raleigh. An edited version of what I said is available via Sojourners magazine.

An excerpt:

No matter what the government legislates, we will continue to practice our Christian faith as our church communities extend hospitality, as we treat foreigners the same way we treat the native-born, as we welcome into our lives immigrants like Jesús. When the laws of the land infringe upon our practices of hospitality, we may find ourselves at odds with government authorities. Yet this is nothing new for us, for Christians have a long history of staying true to our convictions as the political powers twist and turn. To echo the words of Peter and the apostles, “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29).

 

Wilderness roads
Acts 8:26-40, 1 Jn 4:7-21, Jn 15:1-8
by
Isaac S. Villegas
May 6, 2012

“I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says to the disciples, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit” (Jn 15:5). There are some grapevines that grow in a little plot of land on the side of the road across from the campus of Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia. I noticed it again when I was there a few weeks ago. The vine stretches out through a trellis, growing up and down and around, twisting and turning, without any logic of direction that I can discern, just a mess of branches.

This is the image that Jesus uses for the Christian life; this mess of vine branches is what the church looks like: a grape vine, not a tree. Trees make sense. The olive or fig trees that Jesus talks about elsewhere reach up, growing toward the sun. Vine branches, on the other hand, move here and there, sometimes up, sometimes down. There’s a freedom of movement with vines; the branches can grow in all direction, depending on the trellis. An olive tree, on the other hand, only goes up, higher and higher. Trees are more stable; they have deep roots and a strong truck. Trees can grow without support. But not vines. Vines need the support of a trellis in order to thrive. They are unstable, precarious, easily cut down to the ground.

The church as a vine, rooted in Jesus, is a lively image. It can speak to us in all sorts of ways, as it twists and turns in our minds, sparking our imagination, as we find ways to connect our lives to the vine. Here are some ways that come to my mind, just to get us started. You may come up with others.

The church is like the vine in that none of us tries to be the highest, the greatest, the closest to the Sun. Instead, our lives are entangled, supporting each other, nudging some branches up into places of authority for a time, and wrapping ourselves around others when they need to be sustained.

Or the church is like a vine in that we are a mess, a mess of branches, a mess of lives trying to keep ourselves together, as one, trying to figure out how we are united even when we branch out in different directions. The church as a vine makes sense of all the diversity, the push and pull of the various branches, all somehow drawing life from Christ, even as we turn on one another, as we turn against one another for a while and sometimes come back around in the end.

Or the church is like a vine in that it always defies our structures. Once an organizational structure is adopted, the branches start growing in the wrong directions, wrong according to the vision and mission that everyone already decided on. The church as a vine is always changing, depending on the environment, depending on the trellis, the weather, the path of the sun.

Those are just a few ways the image can help us imagine the Christian life. But what interests me is Jesus’ call to abide in the wildness of the vine. What does it mean to abide in a mess of tangled branches, to find a home in vines that are always on the move? [Read more →]

Without resentment
Acts 3:12-19, Luke 24:36b-48
by
Isaac S. Villegas
April 22, 2012

When I was a teenager, I’d say that my grudges, my resentments, were based solely on soccer rivalries. I would look, at disgust, at the players from Cyrus, a team from Phoenix, with their choreographed warm up routine, and every player wearing the same soccer shoes. They were our only true competitors in all of Arizona, and they beat us every year in the state tournament. Even though it was so long ago, fifteen years, I still have feelings of resentment when I think about that team.

Now that I’ve grown up, I’d say that my grudges have matured. As the years go by, it seems like I can’t help but add names to a list, a list of people who have wronged me or the people I care about, friends and family. It feels like I can’t help but remember them, to carry around in my head a list of grudges, of resentments, memories of betrayals.

Why would Jesus be any different? If anyone would be justified in keeping a list of grudges, it would be Jesus. He was betrayed by a friend, by Judas. His followers deserted him in his hour of need. Jesus watched as the crowds turned on him and called for his death. Even his friends denied knowing him. Jesus had every reason to be resentful and to seek revenge. So, after his death, when Jesus shows up in our passage from Luke 24, the disciples are terrified. It says, in verse 37, “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.”

Now, to see a ghost, for first-century Jews to see a ghost, isn’t a good thing. Ghosts are remnants of the dead, sneaking their way into the living. Ghosts were signs of death, of death’s claim on people’s lives. For the disciples, the appearance of a ghost could mean that death wanted to claim another life, in the name of revenge, Jesus’ unfinished business. Was the ghost of Jesus there to settle the score with the disciples, the so-called friends of Jesus, the ones who deserted him? On that first Easter, in the evening, in the city where Jesus was killed, the disciples find themselves with the presence of Jesus, and they are terrified.[1] [Read more →]

“In search of a body”
Isaiah 25:6-9, John 20:1-18

by
Isaac S. Villegas
Easter 2012

Let’s be honest with ourselves. We are a good at making meals. There’s nothing like a Chapel Hill Mennonite potluck, and our Easter potluck is just the culmination of all that is good from our various meals throughout the year. And its not like we keep our food to ourselves. We don’t horde it. When it is our turn to provide lunch for our homeless neighbors, I have no trouble finding people from our church to make food. And it’s always good food; the people who live in the woods behind Walmart and Home Depot, they associate us, our church, with good food, with a delicious meal.

When the prophet Isaiah longs for the day of salvation, he talks about eating and drinking, he talks about fine wine and hearty food. Isaiah says, “The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines” (Isa 25:6). “It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (v. 9). Salvation is described as a meal, as people from all the nations, from all peoples, neighbors and strangers, eating together, sharing food and wine, talking, forming relationships, deepening friendships. That’s what salvation looks like, Isaiah prophesies. When God’s kingdom comes, there will be a feast, a banquet.

Last week at the prison in Butner, I wanted the students to work on descriptive writing, I said that I wanted them to write about something and make it feel like I was right there with them. So I asked them to write about the last meal they had. As they read aloud what they wrote, I realized that this exercise was especially hard for them. The problem wasn’t that their prison food was disgusting; it would have been easy to describe, in detail, how gross a meal was. Those kinds of descriptions almost write themselves. The problem, the reason why the assignment was so hard, was that the food they eat is so bland, so flavorless, so blah. No matter what the menu, the food tasted the same, monotonous — the same texture, the same color, the same smell, the same taste. They didn’t have very much to say. Then I asked them to use their imagination, and remember a favorite meal. Of course, they had a lot more to say; they kept asking for more time to write. As each person read about his meal, I could hear groans and sighs from the others as they listened, longing for a time when they could eat delicious food again. One thing surprised me, as I heard their talk about their meals: Yes, the food itself was important, but they also talked about the people who would be at the meal, the friends and family who would be there. Food and fellowship were tied together in their imagination, as they waited and longed for a time when all things would be restored, when their lives would be put back together, when their wrongs would be made right, when life, true life, joyful life would be possible again:

“The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines… It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (25:6, 9). [Read more →]

I wrote a reflection on an Holy Thursday footwashing service. Here’s a paragraph:

I didn’t want him to wash my feet. It just didn’t seem right to me for an older black man to be bowed so low, at my feet, washing them, like a servant, like a slave. As he bent to the ground, I felt like I should say something, perhaps confess to him that this holy moment reminded me of the way people in North Carolina enslaved black bodies—the way his people were used, bought and sold, subjugated, oppressed, humiliated and abused; the way his black skin conjured for me the spirits of his ancestors. Listen, I wanted to say, your great-grandmother and great-grandfather’s blood is crying out from the ground beneath us (Genesis 4:10). With such a history, he should not take the form of a slave, not at my feet; I should wash his feet, all of us should wash his feet, as penance, as a modest gesture of atonement.

For the rest of it, look at The Mennonite magazine online: “A Holy Hybridity”

~

Crucified hope
Mark 11:1-11
by Isaac S. Villegas
April 1, 2012

After 40 days of Lent, days of contemplation, of wandering into our interior life, we find ourselves here, on Palm Sunday, standing at the edge of Lent, leaning toward Easter. Lent has been a time of wandering, a circling deeper and deeper into our selves, time set aside for us to pay attention to our motivations, our desires. Lent is a season of being stuck, stuck with who we are, always returning to the same old person.

But on Palm Sunday, we get swept into the movement of Holy Week, of joining Jesus as he enters Jerusalem, the city of his death. Jesus rides into town, and the crowds line the streets. The air is electric with excitement, especially when they see Jesus on a donkey, because the people know their Scriptures; they know what this means. The prophet Zechariah told of a time when Israel would be set free from foreign dominion. They would be set free by a king, a king in the line of David, who would ride in, not on a warhorse, but on a donkey, with humility, as a servant. After years and years of Roman rule, you can bet that the people of Israel had memorized the passage from Zechariah, where it says, “Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! [For] your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey.” This would be the day of their redemption, of their liberation, of their freedom. As Jesus passes by, the people shout, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David” (Mk 11:10).

Their hope builds as Jesus rides through the middle of the city, gathering more and more people. “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” they proclaim (v. 9). With the masses behind him, Jesus heads for the Temple, the center of Israel’s claim to sovereignty, because that’s the place where God’s dominion flows into the world. From the Temple all the nations will be judged by God. At the Temple the God of Israel will choose another man to administer the kingdom of God throughout the land. The people know exactly what is supposed to happen, so they continue to shout: “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David” (v. 10). As they get closer to the Temple, marching behind Jesus, with every step they can feel the coming kingdom getting closer and closer.

Finally, Jesus arrives; and we hear the narrator report one of the more anticlimactic moments of the Bible: “Then he entered Jerusalem,” it says in verse 11, “and went to the Temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve” (v. 11). End of story. [Read more →]

“Ever before me”
Jer 31:31-34, Ps 51:1-12
by Isaac S. Villegas
March 25, 2012

 

“To the leader: a psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” That’s the introduction to Psalm 51. There’s a story here, behind the prayer, a familiar story.

David, the king of Israel, is not an evil man. He isn’t like king Saul, his predecessor. That was the bad king. David is the good king. He’s different. Or, at least that’s what everyone thought, probably even David himself.

But that’s not how his life turned out. He became what he was not. He started to live a lie. He commits adultery, which starts him down a path of deceit, of covering up what he had done. One thing leads to another, and he ends up having Bathsheba’s husband killed. He uses his position to cover up his sin, to keep it a secret. With his power he commits murder: an attempt to silence the truth, to deny what he has become. “He has the power to kill without having to admit it even to himself.”[1] David tries to hide from who he is, from who he is becoming. But, as soon as he starts down his path of deceit, he becomes his own prisoner, bound up in a lie, restricted, enslaved, always worried about covering up his trail.[2]

But, as the introduction the Psalm says, “the prophet Nathan came to him”; and with prophet’s word, David is able to pull his life back into focus. He comes to see himself again, without illusions, without deception, without all the lies. “Thou art the man,” Nathan says to him, and David can no longer run from who he has become, he can no longer deny what he has done. He is, in a sense, set free, liberated. Now, after Nathan draws David into the light of truth, David can say, “My sin is ever before me” (Ps. 51:3).

I’ve been teaching a class on spiritual autobiography, on memoir, in prison. We read books like Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, among others; and for their major assignment they write an essay about an important moment in their lives, or about something that they can’t forget, or an episode that they want to remember. This past week I read their first drafts, from the class that I’m teaching at the federal prison in Butner. I noticed this time, probably because I was thinking about the story of David — I noticed that many of the prisoners write about when they starting to deceive their loved ones, when they started to lie about what they were doing, and how the lie became a way of life, a way of living two different lives. They would lie to themselves about what they could get away with, about being able to separate this part of their lives from that other part of their lives. The lie would work, at first, but soon enough they became a prisoner to keeping the lie alive, because they depended on it, they had to maintain the lie, which came to dominate their lives. One thing leads to another, and what that they thought they had under control soon takes control of everything and their lives begin to crumble under their feet.

I’m not telling you all of this to convince you that the little lies we have, the secrets we keep in the dark, will lead you to prison. That’s not the point I’m trying to make. I’m not trying to use prisoners, to use their lives behind bars to show us where we might end up if we don’t change our ways. Instead, what has struck me about reading autobiography after autobiography is that many of the students talk about how they have been set free, how imprisonment has meant a kind of freedom. [Read more →]

For some strange reason The Christian Century decided to interview me in their series on ministry in the 21st century. Here’s an excerpt:

What does being a leader mean to you?
An anticlerical stream runs through the center of the Anabaptist tradition. Pastors aren’t singled out as default leaders. Leadership roles for us are always temporary and specific, depending on whom the congregation appoints for a particular task. These kinds of decisions are made by consensus within our congregational life meetings, which occur every other month.

This leadership model has its frustrations. We have lots of meetings and lots of committee work. I find myself picking up the phone often to confer with different committee chairs or having to wait for the next congregational life meeting before I can get involved in some important matter.

My role as pastor means that I am a servant, doing the work that the congregation outlines for me. Power is always flowing through the gathered people, always being given and received. Perhaps this is an important reason why our church meetings are so well attended; even visitors at our worship services often stick around for congregational life meetings.

I also like to think of myself as a sort of grassroots organizer: our little church assembles as a polis, and I work behind the scenes to make sure everything is ready for the meeting. Each Sunday different people plan and lead the service, preach and provide child care. I spend a lot of time assembling these rotations of people and facilitating their leadership. I also show up early and transform our rented space into our sanctuary; I rearrange the pews, pull crates of hymnals from a storage closet and move the pulpit into position.

The organizing doesn’t end with Sunday worship. This week, our congregation is in charge of the meal for Open Table Ministries, a coalition of churches that sets up tables and chairs alongside the highway so we can eat lunch with people who live in the woods behind Wal-Mart and elsewhere. For me, pastoral ministry means getting enough people from church to­gether to make sloppy joes and casseroles for the dozens of people who are hungry for food and fellowship.

Ministry is organizing space for people to enjoy communion with God and one another. So I rearrange pews, and I find people to help me make sloppy joes.

(For the rest of it, follow this link to the magazine’s website: “Organizing for communion.”)

 

Tile: Baptized with a flood
Text: Genesis 9:8-17, Mark 1:9-15, 1 Peter 3:18-22
Date: Feb 26, 2012, First Sunday of Lent
Author: Isaac S. Villegas

“[A] Christian life is nothing else than a daily Baptism,
once begun and ever continued.”

~ Martin Luther, 16^th century[1]

My garden is coming back to life — crocuses, daffodils, Georgia blue speedwell, all flowering. The blue birds are back, darting in and out of their little house in my front yard, preparing a nest.

It makes sense to celebrate Lent during the spring, as we watch the earth come back to life. Lent is a season of for welcoming new life, a time set aside to make room for the new creation — and that’s what spring is all about, the beginning of new life, a new creation coming out of the old.

This is the story of Noah in Genesis 9 — new creation, new life out of the old. Usually, when we hear this story, we put ourselves in the ark, with Noah and his family, and the animals. That’s the take on the story we hear in 1 Peter 3, where Noah and the ark prefigures our baptism. The point in 1 Peter is that God saves us through the water and from the water. God saves us through baptism, where we pass from death to life, to resurrected life in Jesus, just like God saves the people and animals with Noah in the ark.

But what happens when we read ourselves into the story by identifying ourselves with the earth, the land that is destroyed by the flood — the adamah, to use the Hebrew word: adamah, the ground, the mud out of which God creates the human being, the adam. From the start, at the beginning of the story of Genesis, humans are tied to the humus; earthlings are formed from the earth. So, why not identify ourselves with the earth, with the soil that is our flesh? Why not read ourselves in solidarity with the rest of creation that is washed away in the flood?

After all, baptism is about being submerged into the waters, washed away by a flood of waters, dying with Jesus, and being resurrected through the Spirit. Baptism is a dying to an old self, and being raised into a new creation. That’s what happens to the land, the earth, in the story of the flood. The waters cover the land, “everything,” it says in Genesis 7, “everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (Gen 7:22). [Read more →]

Text: 2 Kings 5:1-14, Mark 1:40-45, Ps 30
Date: Feb 12, 2012
Author: Isaac S. Villegas

I was in New York City last week, which turned out to be the right place for the Superbowl, although I didn’t have the endurance to stay up late and watch the Giants win.

While in New York, I spent a lot of my time at the Bowery. It’s a homeless shelter and mission, started in 1879, in the middle of the city. I was there to spend time with the chaplain of the Bowery, who is a Mennonite minister; his name is Jason. After one of the midday worship services in the chapel, I was standing outside the front doors with Jason. I saw a man stumbling his way towards us, bundled up in layers of sweaters and coats. He had a nasty cough. Jason saw him and greeted him by name; apparently the man was a regular at the Bowery. The man extended his hand to Jason, to shake his hand. I looked down at his hand, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Jason do the same. The man’s hand was disgusting, filthy; it looked a little gummy from what I assumed to be mucus from his running nose. Jason paused, and I wondered if he was going to do it, to shake the man’s hand, to offer him a human connection, a recognition of mutuality, the solidarity that starts with human touch.

Jason shook his hand, and turned the man towards me so that he could introduce us to one another. “This is pastor Isaac; he’s visiting from North Carolina.” I tried to keep my cool, hoping that the man wouldn’t want to shake my hand. I subtly shifted my body, not quite moving away, but making it a little more awkward for him to try to shake my hand. I made sure I didn’t appear rude, or disgusted by him.

“Nice to meet you, pastor,” he said to me, without extending his hand. Jason told him that he should go inside the Bowery and wash his face because his nose was running and he was covered with snot. Since I am a considerate person, full of compassion, I took a step backward and opened the door to the building for the man. I never had to shake his hand.

I read Scott’s sermon from last week and thought this line was appropriate: “Jesus refuse[s] to heal from a distance — instead, he form[s] us in solidarity, making us a healthier, more faithful people.”[1]

That’s the movement of Jesus that I refused, standing outside the Bowery in New York City: the solidarity that comes through touch, the humanity of Jesus that comes to us again and again in the hands of our sisters and brothers. Look forward to the moment, says Sebastian Moore, an old monk, Look forward to the moment when the whole mystery of God will be known in the clasp of your sister’s or brother’s hand.[2] [Read more →]