Goatwalkin'

Our church coffee house, the Urban Goatwalker, celebrated 20 years of ministry last Saturday. This video are some very few of the many amazing highlights of last Saturday's celebration.

The Goatwalker is an open mic coffee house in downtown Louisville that has been open the second Saturday of each month without fail for 20 years now. The Goatwalker is open to all, but was intended as a place of refuge, dignity and celebration especially for our more marginalized brothers and sisters. The idea was that it would be a place where the homeless, the mentally ill and others who are often actively NOT wanted, ARE wanted. They are invited in, cherished, treated as honored guests, and, along with anyone else, can freely order coffee, lemonade, home made brownies, cookies or other treats.

All our visitors are also invited, if they so choose, to take the stage and perform a song, a poem, tell a story and otherwise share something meaningful to them. And share, we do. The most powerful songs, poems, dancing and other performances come from our visitors and every performer is cheered and hurrah-ed for the treasures they share.

The Goatwalker team didn't want this to be a pity/charity place, where "WE do-gooders" do something for THOSE "poor, pitifuls," but where we are all on equal footing, able to order food and drinks, able to share, able to help, able to perform. And mostly, that is what happens.

God's kingdom come, God's will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

While this might sometimes lead to some strange and edgy moments, it is mostly divine, just divine. I hope the video could give you a taste of that.

* As an aside, while this was designed to be a safe place to share together primarily for our marginalized brothers and sisters, it has become a safe place for many others. Our church's children, for instance, from pretty early ages, begin to want to get up and sing, or tell a joke, or even to take a chance on learning a new instrument - a guitar, a ukulele, a banjo, dulcimer, mandolin, fiddle, cello, drums... - and share at the Urban Goatwalker. As a result, we have an amazingly talented and compassionate set of children, youth and, now, young adults in our midst. They also are frequently our waiters and waitresses and other helpers.

My son and his elder band-mate buddy both were born roughly the same time as the Goatwalker and have grown up in that context. I very much attribute their compassionate and passionate song-writing and music-playing largely to exposure to the Urban Goatwalker and the witness of our more marginalized friends, along with the adults in church who have freely shared music and ideas with them over the years.

The whole idea of sharing freely has some amazing and sometimes unexpected side effects.

Happy Twentieth Birthday, GW!

Goatwalker Candle, a photo by paynehollow on Flickr.

Our church just celebrated the 20th anniversary of an open mic coffee house we hold for everyone, but especially our homeless, mentally ill and otherwise marginalized friends. Yesterday’s sermon celebrated that ministry, and for that reason and simply because it was such a very good and topical sermon, I’m posting it here in its entirety…

Because we are so far removed from Jesus’ culture, we often miss the real impact of the stories that we read. We read scriptures in a personalistic way, and don’t see the political or the social implications. And thus we see Jesus as such a nice guy that we wonder how anyone could kill him?!

The temptation is to read this morning’s story in the same way. It’s a lovely story, really. Jesus is moved with compassion for this poor leper, and he reaches out, touches him, and heals him. Then sends him on his merry way to visit the priests, in keeping with the Jewish laws.

Except that what we don’t realize is that this story is NOT about gentle Jesus meek and mild healing a leper, this story is about angry Jesus – while some of the ancient texts say moved by pity, or compassion, others say, moved by anger (orgistheis), and that is certainly in keeping with the anger that he shows a little later on in the passage. This story is about angry Jesus taking on the oppressive systems of his day, deliberately breaking the laws of his day.

In Jesus’ day, the primary paradigm that shaped his Jewish social world was: Be holy as God is holy. That was the rule of the day, the lens through which the Jews interpreted their world.

Hundreds of years before, when the Jewish people had been hauled off to Babylon, they were faced with the crisis of being assimilated, sucked up, into a foreign culture. You remember the story of Daniel, who refused to eat the diet of the empire, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who refused to bow down to the statue of King Nebuchadnezzar, the Psalmist who sat down by the waters of Babylon weeping, refusing to sing for captors. “How can I sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land,” he cried.

It was a full blown crisis for the people of Israel. Not only had they been forcibly removed from their homes, they were now, bit by bit and day by day, being asked to give up who they were. And it was out of that experience that the Jewish people began to interpret the Torah, in a way that stressed, above all, God’s holiness, God’s set-apartness, thus their holiness, their set-apartness as God’s people. It was during that time that the sections of the law which emphasized separation and purity became dominant. This emphasis was so severe, in fact, that you may recall that it was during that time that Ezra instructed the Jews to put away (divorce, abandon) their foreign wives and children.

Hundreds of years later, Jesus’ society, which was now facing the threat of being assimilated into Roman culture, was structured according to that interpretation. The purity system or the politics of holiness, as it is now called, was one of the ways that the Jewish people coped. It kept them separate from everyone else. But it also kept them separate from one another by establishing a spectrum of people ranging from the pure to varying degrees of purity to people on the margin to the radically impure (Borg). People were determined to be pure or impure according to some extent on birth. The priests and Levites, who were hereditary classes, came first, followed by Israelites, followed by converts, and on down the line.

But one’s degree of purity or impurity also depended on behavior. Those who lived according to the purity codes were seen as pure. And there were, in fact, at least two renewal movements in Jesus’ day in which people sought to become even purer. The Essenes, who believed that the only way to be pure was to remove themselves from the culture, and who lived in the desert, and the Pharisees, who tried to maintain strict codes of purity within the culture. Those who didn’t or couldn’t maintain these purity codes were seen as outcasts. And of course, the outcasts included occupational groups such as tax collectors and shepherds.

One’s degree of purity or impurity also depended on physical wholeness. The people who were not whole, the maimed, the chronically ill, lepers, eunuchs, etc., were impure.

Also, one’s degree of purity or impurity was associated with economic class. While it was certainly possible for a rich person to be impure and a poor person to be pure, it was generally believed that rich people were rich because they had been blessed by God and that poor people were poor, or that sick people were sick, etc., because they had not lived rightly, and were thus not blessed by God. (Which is why Jesus’ statement that God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust is so remarkable.)

And, it was almost impossible for a poor person to observe the rigid purity laws.

Purity and impurity were also associated with the contrast between male and female. Generally speaking, men in their natural state were thought to be more pure than women. And, of course, purity and impurity was also attached to whether one was a Jew or a Gentile.

The purity system had become the political system, and it worked for those who were in power. It kept them rich. For example, farmers were required to tithe part of their yearly crop to the priests and the Levites. If they did not, then their food would be considered unclean, and no one would buy it. Another example, before a leper could be proclaimed clean, he or she would have to bring in a rather hefty amount of offerings to the priest, who could then do the necessary healing rituals. So the concept of holiness had become the politics of holiness, and in fact, the economics of holiness. The powers were highly invested in keeping the status quo, and the best way to do that was to keep everybody in their place.

Okay, that was Jesus’ culture. And we need to know and understand that in order to truly understand the gospels. For example, Jesus’ story about the good Samaritan, with which we’re all so familiar, was an attack on the holiness code. The Levite and the priest passed the man by not because they were particularly apathetic or hateful, but because they were not, according to the holiness code, allowed to touch a dead person, and they couldn’t tell if the man, who is described as ‘half-dead,’ was dead or not. The Samaritan, who is radically impure, comes by, acts out of compassion, not purity, but compassion, and is praised for his actions.

And Jesus was not just attacking the holiness code in this story, he was teaching a whole new one, to be compassionate as God is compassionate (Luke 6:36). He even uses the same formula. Remember, the paradigm of the day was, Be holy as God is holy. But Jesus comes teaching, Be compassionate as God is compassionate. And he doesn’t just teach it, he does it.

Cont’d…

Happy Twentieth Birthday, GW!

Urban Goatwalker Trombone Dudes, a photo by paynehollow on Flickr.

“If you choose, you can make me clean,” says the leper, and you can imagine that his heart is in his mouth.

“If you choose, you can make me clean,” says the leper, and what he’s asking Jesus to do is something that the priests have refused to do, what he’s asking Jesus to do is to declare him clean in the Levitical sense. What he’s asking Jesus to do is to restore him to his family, to restore him to his livelihood, to restore him to his community, to restore to him his dignity and his life.

“If you choose, you can declare me clean,” and his heart is pounding so hard that he knows that Jesus can hear it, and the blood is rushing to his head, and Jesus is looking at him, knowing how hard his heart is pounding, knowing how desperate he is to be restored, knowing how vile and how corrupt this system of purity has become, knowing, according to Ched Myers, who says that that’s the only way that Jesus’ anger makes sense here, that he’s been to the priests already, and that they’ve denied him his bill of health, his access to his family, to home, to livelihood, to everyone and everything that a person would want to live for, and as Jesus stands there looking at him, he is moved with anger at the systems that have cast this man out like so much garbage, Jesus is moved with anger, and he reaches out, and he knows as he reaches out that he is, by Jewish law, not allowed to touch the man, that in touching the man, he will be viewed as unclean, too, and he knows as he reaches out, that if he proclaims this man clean, that he will be overstepping his bounds, usurping the carefully guarded authority of the priests, who according to the Torah are the only ones who can declare a leper clean, even if the priest is an imbecile, the teachings say, it must be the priest that declares the leper clean, and Jesus, moved with anger, reaches out his hand and touches the man, and says to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!”

And immediately the man is made clean. At Jesus’ touch, at Jesus’ word, the man is proclaimed and made clean. But Jesus is still angry. In fact, Mark says that he snorts with indignation. Jesus is still angry at the systems that have oppressed this man for so long, and he says to man, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, show them what I’ve done, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a witness against them. They would not touch you, they would not proclaim you whole, they would not give you back your life. You go and tell them, you go and show them what I’ve done.”

Saul Alinsky, who is one of the most famous community organizers of all times, says in his book, Rules for Radicals, that the job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.’ The word ‘enemy’ is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people, to identify him with the ‘Have-Nots…’

And then Jesus, because he himself was considered to be unclean after touching the man, and more importantly, because in taking a stab at the authorities of his day he had put himself in danger, could not go into a town openly, but had to stay out in the country, where people came to him, where the Have-Nots came to him from every quarter.

Jesus knew what he was getting into. “If you choose,” said the leper with his heart in his mouth, “if you choose…” and Jesus did choose. He chose, not just to heal the leper, which he could have done at a safe distance, as he did in the story in Luke, but to confront head on the purity laws, and thus, the keepers of the purity laws, the priests. He’s already confronted the scribes, and now he’s confronting the priests.

Twenty years ago a group of folks who had grown up under a different, but in some ways, similar, holiness code, and that’s the Southern Baptist holiness code, that can be summed up, perhaps, with this little rhyme:

Don’t smoke or drink or chew, or
hang with those who do…

…they had a vision of a place where people from all walks of life could come together on equal ground. They didn’t want another place where the haves would serve the have nots, no, they wanted a place where everyone would be served equally, and so they decided that everything would be free for everybody. They didn’t want a place where those with talent would perform for those without talent. No, they wanted a place where everyone could have a chance to shine, and so they decided to do an open mic.

They also decided to clap like crazy whenever anybody did anything, or maybe they didn’t decide it, but they sure did it, and people who never in a million years would have thought that they’d ever read a poem or sing a song found themselves up there on stage being treasured, being listened to, being loved.

They had this vision, and they made it work, and now it’s worked for 20 years. 20 years of faithfulness, 20 years of radical inclusivity, 20 years of making coffee and washing dishes, 20 years of waiting tables, 20 years of listening and performing, 20 years of pulling down the walls.

I remember our very first Urban Goatwalker Coffeehouse. Robert and I sat with a couple who was homeless, and the woman rubbed the tablecloth between her fingers and looked at the candle on the table and looked around the room and said, with reverence in her voice, this is really nice.

After all these years, I still feel the reverence of this place where people come together on equal ground, and find healing.

“If you choose, you can heal me,” says the man.

“If you choose,” says this broken, needy, desperate, heart in its mouth world, “you can heal me.” And you warm up the coffeepot and you pull out the tablecloths and you put on our aprons, and you do choose.

Thanks be to God.

Christmas Day Music at Jeff St

Retreat Snippets

Taking Up Your Cross

Jesse's Baptism, a photo by paynehollow on Flickr.

This morning’s story is a rather odd one [Exodus 4 - God's attempt to kill Moses! and Moses' son's subsequent circumcision/foreskin sacrifice!!]. As we look at it, we might find it helpful to remember what John Dominic Crossan says about the Bible. He says that the Bible is a dialogue about what God is like. On the one hand,you have a picture of a God who is violent and retributive, in other words, a God who punishes those who are bad and rewards those who are good.

On the other hand, you have a picture of a God who is non-violent and distributive, in other words, a God who loves everybody, not just the good people, not just the people of Israel, but all the nations, of a God who gives equally to all, who created the earth and its bounty for everyone, who throws a great big feast to which all of the nations come streaming to taste of God’s goodness and mercy. Both of these pictures of God run through the Old and the New Testaments. It’s not that, as we used to say, there’s a God of the Old Testament, and a God of the New Testament. Both of these pictures of God run throughout.

There’s a tension between the two views of who God is, because it can’t be both ways. There are, of course, a lot of people putting a lot of time into developing theologies that explain how God can be both violent and non-violent, but God can’t be both: one precludes the other.

As Christians, of course, the clearest picture that we have of God is through the person of Jesus Christ, and Jesus shows us the God who, in his words, causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the just and the unjust, not the retributive God, but the God who loves everybody equally, the God who is like the father who forgives the prodigal son before he can even say, I’m sorry, the God who is like the employer who pays the workers who show up at the end of the day the same wages as the ones who’ve spent the whole day working their fingers to the bone.

So the Bible, says Crossan, is a dialogue between two visions of what God is like. This morning’s odd story falls on the side, obviously, of the violent God, as will some of the other stories that we look at over the next few weeks as we continue on through Exodus. And this particular story has always struck me as so very bizarre that I’ve chosen to ignore it. You’ll not be surprised when I tell you that it’s not one of the lectionary passages, which means that a whole ton of other preachers also ignore it.

But in the book, Freedom Journeys, Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Phyliss Berman have wrested a meaning from it that I want to share with you. But first let me mention the more traditional meaning, which is that circumcision is so important to God that God is ready to kill Moses because either he or his son, or maybe he and his son are not circumcised. The pronouns here are not clear, though it’s usually translated that Zipporah takes the foreskin of their son and throws it at Moses’ feet. It’s not clear whose foreskin it is, or whose feet it gets thrown at, Moses’ or God’s.

It kind of just seems to be stuck in there. It doesn’t flow well with the rest of the story. Moses is God’s chosen, on his way to free the people of Israel.

You’d think that God wouldn’t want to kill him. You’d think that God might have mentioned something about circumcision back there at the burning bush, and by the way, circumcise your son, or yourself, which ever, while you’re at it, before you head off to Egypt. Maybe that’s the missing part of the story. Maybe God did tell Moses to do this, and Moses resisted, you can’t blame him, and now God is angry at him. At any rate, the most traditional meaning of this story is that it’s a story that underlines the importance of circumcision as a Jewish rite. These stories were written down during the Jewish exile in Babylon, so it would have served as a reminder to the Jews who were being tempted to take on the ways of the Babylonian empire, who were under great pressure to assimilate, to just fit in, to remain faithful to their traditions.

But these rabbis that I mentioned have wrested out another meaning, as well, and that is that once Moses faced death at the hand of God, that he was never scared of anything again. I mean, if God tries to kill you, and you live through that, then really, who are you going be afraid of?

Seeing Moses’ pale, gaunt face imbued with terror, trudging hopeless on the path to death, God knew he had to slay this terror-stricken Moses, had to kill the terror that was already emptying out Moses’ life, making him impotent to face Pharaoh and free the slaves.

Facing a God on the brink of killing him was Moses’ cure. Facing immediate death, he knew a Power more powerful than Pharoah. His terror burned away, and he became the Moses about whom it is written, ‘Never again did there arise among the Israelites a prophet like Moses who knew YHWH intimately, face-to-face’ (Deut. 34:10).

Okay, just to be clear about this. I don’t believe that God tried to kill Moses.It’s one of the threads of thinking about who God is. That’s okay, I guess, except that it might leave you wondering whether or not God will try to kill you anytime soon. And I always remember the story about the woman, who during prayer, heard God’s voice say, “My child, why do people always think me so cruel?”

BUT, I do like the meaning that the rabbis have wrested from this ancient story. And obviously something happened in-between the time that Moses first talked to God, full of hesitation and excuses, but what about this, and what about hat, not me, Lord, and the time that he powerfully confronted Pharaoh. It may have been as simple as the fact that by the time he confronted Pharoah, he had his brother Aaron with him.

There’s great power in numbers, right? He wasn’t going it alone anymore. At any rate, somewhere along the way, he became one of those seemingly fearless ones, like Gandhi, like Martin Luther King, Jr., like Archbishop Oscar Romero, like Sojourner Truth, like Nelson Mandela, like Jesus. And when I say “fearless,” I don’t mean that they didn’t feel or express fear. “Abba,” Jesus prayed on the night of his arrest, “if you are willing, take this cup from me.” I mean that they didn’t let fear guide their actions, they didn’t let fear rule their lives.

And isn’t that what Jesus was after when he invited his disciples to take up the cross? He took the symbol that was most feared by the people, most adroitly used by the Roman Empire, who would crucify hundreds of people at a time right out there at the crossroads for everyone to see, leave them up for days as a way of keeping their subjects in line. It was a very effective tool.

So Jesus took the symbol that most invoked fear and dared his followers to beat them to the punch. Take it on, pick it up, carry it around. Show them that they can no longer control you. Show them that you will not be controlled by fear.

If any want to follow me, he said, deny yourself, take up the cross, and follow.

Baptism, which we will be celebrating this afternoon, is also a symbol of dying to oneself, dying to one’s fear, dying to one’s hatreds, dying to one’s selfishness, dying to one’s old way of living. We die as we go under the water and are raised to new life in Christ. New life in Christ, ruled no longer by fear, but by love. Ruled by love…

Jesse, you’ve been following Jesus for some time now, and we’ve all seen that. We want you to know that your church family is well-pleased with you. For you have chosen a life, not ruled by fear, but by love. You have chosen a life that matters, that counts, not just for your own happiness, but for the joy of others. As you stir the waters of baptism today, we remember our own baptisms, and we pledge to walk alongside you on this journey toward the cross.

Amazing Grace

Eyes Wide Open

The Trabue family playing our first song together as a group, I believe... Eyes Wide Open, by the Vespers. Some of the lyrics...

1. Went to see Grandpa in September
When his days left here were few
He sat me down at his bedside
Told me things that I should do

2. Please respect this crown of wisdom,
He said, pointing to his gray head
I leaned in and listened closely
As my dear grandfather said

CHORUS:
Live your life with eyes wide open
Bide your time with palms toward heaven
People come in circles and squares
Some are hearts but they're quite rare

3. He told me stories of his childhood
Of mistakes that he had made
Told me, Don't you make the same ones
Because love is not a game.

CHORUS:
Grandpa died with eyes wide open
Grandpa died with palms toward heaven
People come in circles and squares
Some are hearts but they're quite rare
Grandpa was one of these hearts
Take a look at what you are...