This Just in! A Memo from God: "Let me let you in on a secret...I Don't Speak in Memos, I Speak in Songs!"

Poem by Walter Brueggemann "Prayers for a Privileged People"

You know who they are. They preach to us like they are shooting arrows right into our most vulnerable places and at our most vulnerable people with intent to do harm. They preach to us like they are traveling shoes salesman giving us a simple linear script for the gospel: "Kneel and say you believe and "poof" there it is...salvation! For six monthly payments your sin can be forever erased." Too often they take one complicated line of scripture meant to be a small part of a story, or a poem, and try to boil it down into a dagger intended to condemn wonderful people who just might have been born gay, or non-binary, or who use a different language to describe their God experience. Using this one line to clobber people who are just trying to be honest...to bear a true witness. They want God to be distilled down to a memo that has little or no room for wiggle or imagination or messiness or dream. There is only one way up their mountain.

When I was 12, I went to one of their movies. It was a youth meeting in our town. All of the churches were invited to bring their youth to their sanctuary. We were 200 strong. Excited to watch this movie designed to inspire us to believe. Only it didn't inspire. It didn't lift like a song, instead it struck like a hammer to the anvil of our young malleable minds. There was only one way up the mountain. And as we watched others who looked so much like us. Who dared to go a lesser road. As we watched them one by one fall off cliffs and slippery rocks and meet with evil eyed bears, we closed our eyes in horror as they fell to their final resting place. No eternity for them! News flash: it wasn’t inspiration that brought us to our knees that night, it was fear! And frankly, even though I bowed and gave my life to Jesus, I decided then and there that this Jesus wasn't something I was meant for. Because this Jesus scared me into lying about my faith.

As I sat weeping in my bed that night, I thought of a poem I was learning in my Literature class. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both; And be one traveler, long I stood; And looked down one as far as I could; to where it bent in the undergrowth…” The world I knew had more than one road and plenty of room to explore! (For in my father's house there are many rooms...) And the God I knew didn't talk to me in memo, but in poem and song with room for me. All of me! My messiness and my creative interpretations. God left me space to enter the story where I needed to enter it. Not where some spiritual muscle man used my human frailty and fears to coerce me into entering. I wanted to enter in joy, not fear!

One of my best friends, Rick Pittenger, knows of this feeling I'm talking about. He encountered it when he was in college. He was feeling a tug at his heart to enter the ministry. He wanted to enter ministry so he could walk alongside others who didn't have all the answers. In walking with them, both Rick and the others would discover a God whose song constantly called them into becoming more human, more loving, and more creative. He was excited about this journey. The journey with a God who had space for Rick to be Rick in all of his wondrous gift and messy grace.

One night he went to a prayer meeting led by the "lead dog" in the Religious Life Council at Dakota Wesleyan University. Rick had felt vulnerable in this "lead dog's" presence. This guy had God in his back pocket. He seemed so sure. So confident. And his confidence made Rick feel small and unimportant. Rick noticed the guy checking him out. Leaning into his weaknesses. Using them to manipulate him towards “his” way of believing. In the end, the "lead dog" asked my friend, Rick, to pray. And with tears in his eyes, Rick stood strong and brave and said, "No! I don't feel like I have the faith to believe right now. I've got too many questions. I've got too many doubts." Rick left the circle, ran back to his room, and cried. That night he almost left the ministry. He felt so small. So weak. So ashamed. And at the same time angry. Why did people in his faith want him to feel this way.

Should religion make people feel ashamed? Was he really weak? Did his honesty about doubts make him weaker or stronger? Wouldn't it be better if that young man named Rick would have been taught or led to embrace those doubts. To talk about them. To work through them. Wouldn't it have been better if Rick had been taught that those struggles weren't him being "off path", but instead him being exactly where he needed to be at this time of his life. Wouldn't it have been better if that wonderful faith-filled community of young Christians would have recognized themselves in Rick's struggles and instead of looking at him with judgement, would have, instead, came around him and beside him and sang this song?

Help us accept each other as Christ accepted us;

teach us as sister, brother, each person to embrace.

Be present, Lord, among us and Bring us to believe:

we are ourselves accepted and meant to love and live.

Teach us, O Lord, your lessons, as in our daily life

we struggle to be human and search for hope and faith.

Teach us to care for people, for all - not just for some,

to love them as we find them or as they may become.

Let your acceptance change us so that we may be moved

in living situations to do the truth in love;

to practice your acceptance until we know by heart

the table of forgiveness and laughter's healing art.

Lord, for today's encounters with all who are in need,

who hunger for acceptance, for justice and for bread,

we need new eyes for seeing, new hands for holding on:

renew us with your Spirit; Lord, free us, make us one!

UMC Hymn by Fred Kaan

Rick and anyone out there who has ever struggled with the theology of memo...get this one! The God I trust doesn't speak in memos! The God I love chooses instead to surround me and this world (every living breath in it) in song! And most of the time my God doesn't even need words!

Your friend and pastor, learning to sing God's songs into a world addicted to mountains and mountains of memos, Brook