Keeping It Weird

Finding the Center of Our Stories

Dear Friends,

When I first read Michael Frost’s book “Keep Christianity Weird” some years ago, I knew that the text spoke to me. I also couldn’t quite seem to get a handle on the author – I think because he is considered a leader in the missional church movement. But what does that even mean?

As it turns out, my uncertainty was both unfounded and extremely on brand, in that during the last General Convention, leaders in the Episcopal Church literally referred out legislation in an effort to clarify how we use the word “mission,” particularly on a global scale. It’s a risky word and clarity is important. That being said, Frost, an Australian Baptist, is precisely the sort of person I want to be taking my cues from in this moment.

Frost is someone who can both speak to the need for a fractured Christianity to learn to acknowledge and learn from its disparate elements (gift link), as well as someone who has been arrested multiple times while peacefully protesting the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. And, in “Keep Christianity Weird” he encourages us to orient ourselves more fully around the eccentric – literally off-center - world of Christ’s call to us. If, as Christians, we cannot be distinguished from the world around us, we’re doing something wrong. Or, as Frost puts it, “Jesus was not mainstream. His followers are meant to be different.”

A Not-Quite-Tangent

I want to tell you a story for a moment before we go on. We’ll need it later.

In just over a week’s time, I told the Godly Play version of the Parable of the Good Shepherd three separate times. Twice I told it to children I didn’t know and once to children I did. Twice I told it to very mixed age groups - preschoolers up through older elementary-age children - and once I told it to just a few very young children. Twice I told it in person and once I told it online. These counts are not all in the same order – all of it is quite a variety of things.

The first time I told the story, the children paid a lot of attention to the wolf, as well as to the ordinary shepherd. They were determined to cast them out. They wanted to put them in the lake to drown. They wanted to separate those figures from the Good Shepherd and his sheep.

The Good Shepherd by Kelly Latimore

The most recent time I told the story, I offered a wondering about the feast that the Good Shepherd throws when the lost sheep is found. I wondered to the children who might have been invited and one replied, “the other shepherds and their sheep.” The Good Shepherd and his sheep existed within a wider community of others like them who would understand both the anxiety and despair of the lost sheep and the joy of its recovery.

In between those two tellings, though, is the one I want to tell you about. When I told the story that second time and we wondered about the figures in the story, something unusual emerged. The children rearranged the sheepfold into unique houses for the wolf, the sheep, and the shepherds. They proposed that perhaps the ordinary shepherd could be the shepherd to the wolf. They continued rearranging, until they all – Good Shepherd, ordinary shepherd, sheep, and wolves were settled side-by-side. Suddenly the Parable of the Good Shepherd had become the Peaceable Kingdom.

Turning The Other Cheek

Pivoting again, for a moment – this week’s Gospel reading is one of those real “greatest hits” texts. It’s the text of the Golden Rule – “Do to others as you would have them do to you” – and the sort of passage that made the cut in my worksheet-driven church school when I was growing up. And, as anyone who has been with me for a while knows, I get tired of the greatest hits pretty quickly. But sometimes they just need to be refreshed a bit, read in the sharply angled light of a new context. I’m feeling that this week with the central part of this passage:

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Even sinners love those who love them,

Even sinners lend to sinners.

It’s easy to extend care within our communities, amongst those who are like us. But especially here in the states, where every day it can feel like things are falling apart a little more, it’s tempting to try to lock out people from outside our personal bubbles, to blame them, to say that they made this happen. And sometimes that will be true.

But when has our rage and repudiation, our proud declarations that they are now victims of their own bad choices, their own foolishness – when has that ever drawn people closer to the truth of love?

Liberal politics certainly can authorize us to behave in these ways. Christianity does not. Christianity asks us to figure out how the wolf can lay down with the sheep in peace. It puzzles its way from seeing the wolf as dangerous and instead invites the wolf back in to join the sheep in safety.

Christianity asks us to engage with the risk that simmers under the surface of the Peaceable Kingdom because it’s good for all of us.

It was the youngest children who sought to reassemble the entire scene into one of harmony. The mixed group that I didn’t know understood that the Shepherd was Jesus, but they also engaged in a stark play of good and bad. And the mixed group that I did know – who I saw online for a snow day – saw the expanse of our community, the other people who could be invited in.

Each of the interpretations were made looking at the same materials from the same box with the same storyteller but different immediate contexts. And there is no “right” answer to the Parable. Each has shown me things, taught me something. Each time, it seemed, the story had a different center holding it.

Where will we find our center?

Resource Round-Up

This close to Lent really starts to fell like that in-between time, like you probably know what your plan is by now, at least for core programming. We’ll move on to Holy Week-specific resources in a week or two.

• I’m especially excited about this month’s practitioner podcast from the Godly Play Foundation, which talks about using Godly Play in confirmation contexts with middle and high school students, presented by my friend Ashley Bond. Just another reminder that when we talk about Godly Play as a Spiritual Practice, we really do mean that is has no age limits, but rather opens itself in new ways with different groups.

• For those of us on the programming side of things, this Christianity Today article about how discipling children begins with supporting their parents is a great resource. Mimi Larson, one of the co-authors, consistently brings thoughtful and transformative work to the formation space.

• Do you know about the Episcopal Church’s Lent book club? You can find more information on the Lent resources page, but I think their choice of “The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You” by Dina Nayeri is not only an excellent choice, but one that could be fruitfully paired with a number of picture books and youth-appropriate texts. And, conversely, I think a lot of children’s books about this experience focus on loss and the pain of displacement, a lesson that adults would do well to recenter in our thinking about seeking refuge or “starting over.” - But let this be a beginning for your engagement with refugee concerns, not an ending.
  
  The Horn Book and Brightly both have great lists of books for children and youth about the experiences of different refugees.

• Are you playing Lent Madness this year? I’m hoping to get my parish hooked and expand the material resources which may mean I’m making Saint trading cards? Stats (origin, feast day, patron of, other fun facts) on the backs. We’ll see how it goes!

That’s it for now, friends. Will you share something that is bringing you delight with me? My source of delight is Mushroom Guy:

The mushroom toddler, named Impy, set off an absolute landslide of joy on the amigurumi sub-reddit, earned his own entire sub-reddit. I thrifted some yarn to attempt my own!

What’s delighting you – and maybe even creating ripple effects of joy?

Peace,
Bird