Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

​As we continue through Epiphanytide, we celebrate the revelation of Christ in human form, this light of the world shining in the midst of darkness.

"By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.” -Luke 1:78-79

And yet this Light shines in the the midst of the very ordinary, humble mundane of our lives.This revelation of Love embodied in the small, vulnerable body of a pauper babe. God has come. In a body. In a place. The long awaited Liberator is here. And yet only a few take notice.

"The Life-Light was the real thing:
Every person entering Life
he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
the world was there through him,
and yet the world didn’t even notice." -John 1:9-10

How easy it is for us to dismiss the sacred in the midst of the ordinary. We are so mesmerized by the flashy and the spectacular. We are obsessed with success and our arrival to the greener grass of another pasture. We crave quick fixes and big stories. And yet more often than not, God is found in the small stories of our very unflashy, unspectacular lives. God is found around the table, in prayer-soaked chores, in tear-filled nights, and in the surprise of connection.

"The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood." -John 1:14

God is found in the everyday moments of our human experience. And yet in a world that often seeks the gnostic secret that will free us from the limitations of our body and place, how can we truly celebrate this incarnational announcement? -Paul Sparks, Parish Collective

Why are we so prone to want to transcend, escape, avoid, and numb out? We either want to be superhuman or subhuman. But Christ came to redeem our humanness once and for all.

What if instead of trying to escape the limitations of our body and our place, forever seeking to transcend our circumstances, we turned our attention to fully being here? Being present here and now, in the midst of our everyday lives.

How can we shift from living above our places, seeking to escape our places to being a part of what God is doing in our places? How can we embrace the limitations of our humanity as a gift that cultivates connection and presence? How can we attune our bodies to notice Christ here among us? In the faces of our neighbor, in this patch of earth, in the kindness of a stranger.
​
The miracle of the incarnation means that God is here with us, embodied in one another and encountered in the most ordinary and unexpected places. My prayer this week is that we would practice being present to our everyday lives in our neighborhoods, slowing down to notice Christ among us — here in our bodies and our places.

by Jessica Ketola

The Great Reversal

Emmanuel. God with us.
Us the dreamers.
Us the marginalized.
Us the forgotten.
Us the poor.

Emmanuel. God in the flesh.
You offered a new identity.
You restored our humanity.
You called us friends.

King of Kings.
We did not expect you.
Not like this.
A crying babe surrounded by rumor, filth and manure.
You disrupted the Empire with a love so powerful,
A gospel so dangerous,
A message so revolutionary,
Bringing liberation to the poor and to the slave.

Prince of Peace.
You entered a world of violence.
They tried to kill you and the killing continues.
You were a refugee, seeking asylum in a foreign land.
And the innocent blood of 2,000 babies still did not quench their thirst for violence,
Until they nailed your broken body to the cross.
But you conquered violence with peace; hate with love.
And so must we.
​
Savior of The World.
Caesar declared He was Lord and the Savior of The World.
But in your coming lies the greatest reversal the world has ever known.
The poor would be lifted up and the powerful would be brought down.
The hungry would be filled with good things and the rich would be sent away empty.
And a poor and young unwed mother living under oppressive occupation would give birth to the Son of God.
The salvation of the whole world came through a poor, humble servant,
Through a woman with no power
And the vulnerability of a child.
Emmanuel, our God with us.

​by Jessica Ketola

As many of you know, we have been in a process of discerning what we feel the Spirit is inviting us to in the next iteration of The Practicing Church. It is clear that much is shifting in the North American church today. Much is unraveling. The good news, however, is that underneath the unravelling, God is up to something. And we want to be a part of it.

All along, we have known that we didn’t want to do church in the classic way. We often say that we don’t simply want to attend church or go to church, but we want to BE the church embodying love in our neighborhoods. Our desire has been to be a part of how God is refounding the church in the context of the neighborhood, and we are truly passionate about this.

So many of the prophetic voices of our day from social justice activists to community developers, theologians, and on-the-ground practitioners have the same message. Across the diversity of their experiences and contexts, they are convinced that being incarnational in our places is absolutely essential if we are to participate in God's work of reconciliation in the world. We must be love embodied. For we are called to be the body of Christ for a reason. We are meant to to be family, community and a dwelling place for God's presence. And yet, the church is so very fragmented today and must be re-membered and fit together in the context of everyday life.

I am convinced that we must create new forms of being the church that don’t continue to perpetuate the consumerism, individualism and fragmentation of our culture, but that form us in another way. The way of Jesus, the way of love and generosity, and the laying down of our lives. There is another way to live. It is the upside down, subversive way of the kindom that Jesus proclaimed in the radical teachings of the beatitudes that spells out what it looks like to love God and neighbor. This way of love that is impossible to embody outside of the context of community and proximity.

And more and more, I am realizing that I am an evangelist at heart. Not in the traditional sense of getting folks to pray a prayer. But I want people to know the beauty and the goodness of our God. And so many people today do not know this. They are turned off by the messages of religion. They have been harmed in church. And they are seeking something real, something meaningful and beautiful and true.

And so I am passionate about creating fresh and authentic expressions of church that invite those who are currently not in church, whether they are the dones or the nones or some of us who don't know how to be a part of a traditional church. I want to help create places of belonging, hospitality, and formation, where the gifts of the community are activated as we are pulled into a bigger story to join in God’s healing work in the world.

And so I feel the Spirit continuing to invite us to be an incarnational community rooted in the neighborhood. We are longing to be a community that is embodying the presence of Jesus in flesh and blood and living out a way of love that is compelling. I believe that our form of church must be congruent with our values and our mission. For it is true that the medium is the message. Because of this, we are discerning that we want to move our gathering away from the traditional Sunday morning (with all of its inherent meaning about what church is) to sacred gatherings around a dinner.

For we want to create communal spaces that form us around the teachings of Jesus and a way of self-sacrificing love. And we also want to create hospitable places where our neighbors, friends and coworkers can explore their questions and doubts and experience the extravagance of God's goodness and grace. We are also increasingly convinced that the Spirit is at work in our neighborhoods. And we believe that the way forward is to continue to innovate and to pioneer new and yet ancient ways to reclaim faith and community in a time of such fragmentation.

“More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.” -Henri Nouwen


​by Jessica Ketola

 In Advent, we celebrate that God is with us.

God is near. In John 1, we encounter a God, who became flesh and blood to dwell among us. God with skin on, here with us, Immanuel. It is absolutely breath-taking.

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.
[I John 1:14 MSG]

All this so that we would see what God is like. So we would see this one-of-a-kind glory, this extravagant goodness, and this bountiful generosity.

This is the mystery of the incarnation (God in human form) that now by the Holy Spirit continues in us, the church. Our shared, everyday lives are to be a sign and a witness that God is near.

For are we not meant to be the community of God embodying the compassion of Jesus in the neighborhoods we live in?

Like Christ, aren't we to be faithfully present amongst our neighbors in the particularities of our places, seeking healing, peace, and the flourishing of all? Are we not called to be fit together brick by brick to be a dwelling place for the presence of God?

God is building a home. God's using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what God is building. God used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now God's using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home. [Eph 2:21-22 MSG]

This is why our current models of church fail us. For we are not called to be individualistic, spiritual consumers but followers of Jesus -- being formed and knit together to join God's work of transformation in the world. Much is at stake. For our current brand of Western Christianity seems to have not only lost its mooring but its spiritual vitality and social credibility. It has sold-out to nationalism, economic imperialism, and the idols of technological progress, materialism, and wanton individualism.

Alan Roxburgh, in Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World, argues that the traditional, institutional church (like other social institutions) no longer works; it is unravelling. The good news, however, is that underneath the unravelling, God is up to something.

“The Spirit is busy re-founding the church for our time... showing us how to embody a way of life that makes space for alternative patterns of organizing life together—not more and better church programming that tries harder and harder to attract people, but a thicker sense of community that joins people together more holistically and organically."

We are called to be the church.

To be an incarnational community that participates in and demonstrates God's goodness to our neighbors.

This is why we emphasize faithful presence over a slick worship gathering and formational practices over spiritual consumption. We want to join God's work already present here in our place, at our neighborhood dinners, at Turning Point community meals, at the Social Justice Book Club, at One Cup Coffee, and at the Methadone Clinic. We want to join with God's work of peace and wholeness in our community by partnering with the city, the schools, local nonprofits, our neighborhood association and other faith communities. And we want to live a way of Love here together in this place in a way that is compelling to our neighbors.

As the letter to Colossians puts it, “In Christ, the fullness of Deity is presently living in bodily form—and you [Colossians, together among yourselves] have the fullness of Christ” [2:9]. This radical vision of a local community incarnating the reign of God now, of God’s future penetrating the present through a Spirit-led extended family, was vital to the dynamic witness and power of the early church.

No one has ever seen God,
not so much as a glimpse.
This one-of-a-kind God-Expression,
who exists at the very heart of the Father,
has made him plain as day.
[John 1:18 MSG]

Jesus, our Immanuel, came to show us a God with us and among us. And as followers of Jesus, we too, are called to be God with skin — embodying the presence of God in the world. We are called to be a visible, viable, social alternative. We are to be a transformative community living life together rooted in our places, joining in God’s work of renewing all things. So that all those around us can see this God as plain as day and can experience God's love present with and among them.

by Jessica Ketola

As part of our current series, “Fire in My Bones,” I spoke this past Sunday about what fires me up: life, death, and creativity.

You are – we are – creative people made in the image of a creating God, called to be generative, vital forces in this world.

Though many of us understandably associate creativity with the arts, creativity is not limited to artistic expression. Consider that every conversation we have is completely improvised. Creativity is in everything: leadership, neuroscience, parenting, justice-seeking, coloring, biology, gardening, cooking, athletics, spirituality, friendship, ethics, law, love, meteorology, medicine, and on and on it goes.

But, of course, we know that the world doesn’t always feel like a generative place. There are deaths, both literal and spiritual, that haunt us, stifle us, keep us small. Shame can feel like death. So can comparison or consumerism or fear, or perhaps a death-dealing word or trauma from our past.

What is totally baffling and wonderful is that the story of God is one of entering directly into sites of death and creating new life from those very places. Jesus, who names himself The Way and The Truth and The Life, literally dies and is buried. Death isn’t the whole point of Christ’s story, but it’s the way that The Way goes in order to begin the birthing of the new creation, something no eye has seen and no ear has heard. It’s from this place that Jesus’ words from Revelation 21 resound most prophetically: “See! I am making all things new!”

Creativity tangles with death. Life dies before it can be resurrected. I’m not sure there’s any way around the relationship between life, death, and new life, but I am sure that God has made each of us with unique, creative gifts that contribute to the ongoing new-life-ing of the world. We’re not alone here even when it feels like death because God is with us. And as Diane, Rich, and April pointed out on Sunday, we are with each other. We need others to help call us further into the fullness of our creative, generating selves and to encourage us when we try to discount our good gifts.

So how has God made you to be a creative, vital force in the world? Do you feel alive in your creativity? Or are you in a deathly place? How can we, as your community, help you to imagine with God what creative aliveness is for you? If you want community support, I encourage you to be brave and reach out. Who knows what could be waiting?

by Carrie Cates

We've been talking about the fire in our bones. Why do we exist as a church? In the sea of churches out there, why are we so passionate about God's dream for us and our community? And as I have been pondering this, I truly believe that we are poised for such a time as this.

THE DREAM
Every single person on the planet today is longing for love and for meaning, for wholeness and shalom, to come home to their true selves and to join in God's work of renewal in the world. [I blogged about this last week here].

THE PROBLEM
And yet we know that the world around us is deeply fragmented with fear, hate and greed and hostile to the flourishing of our own souls, our communities, and our environment. And our own souls are fragmented too, captive to anxiety and fear, hustling to be enough and to escape the tyranny of our own shame. The gods of this age, individualism, narcissism, technology, and consumerism have promised the American Dream (which btw is not God’s Dream). But instead of freedom, they have actually enslaved us, oppressed us and ravaged our world. Our 24-7 frenetic lifestyles, addictions to screens and fragmented families and communities have left us anxious, ill, depressed and lonely like never before. And the world is literally on fire as glaciers melt and rain forests burn.

THE HOPE
​We believe there is another way to live. We believe that the church exists to invite people into love and meaning and to join God in the renewal of all things. As The Practicing Church, we join this work of renewal and healing in the world by practices that ground us in the love of God.

THE JOURNEY
As The Practicing Church, we invite you to take this transformational journey into love. And it is a journey inward to heal from your wounds and to come home to your true selves. It is the journey outward as you step into your true vocation and your life’s work joining in this work of renewal in the world. And it is a journey we take together. We were never meant to do life alone.

Practicing Love
And so in order to take this journey, we must engage in practices of formation, mission and community. As The Practicing Church we want to be followers of Jesus that are “practicing” our faith. We believe that living into the way of Jesus takes practice – and that our faith is much more than something we add to our already busy, stressed out lives, but rather, it is a way of life.

For there is no magic pill. We’re not just going to snap our fingers and instantly be transformed into a Mother Teresa, living a life of love and meaning. It doesn't work that way. We all know it takes practice to acquire a skill, whether we are practicing medicine or yoga or learning a new instrument, language or business. What we practice, we become. And so we know it will take practice to live into the way of love. For it is never convenient or easy. In fact, we will have to swim upstream against the tides of culture.

The Power of Community
In order to journey upstream, we believe we absolutely need each other. We cannot do it alone. There is power in community and this has been proven again and again in every context and culture. Where you and I might fail on our own, our chances of succeeding go up dramatically if we join with others around a common goal. Community holds you accountable to be the person you say you want to be, the person you are meant to be.

Living True
If we are to have any hope of embodying love in this world in such a way that is actually good news to us and to our neighbors, we must walk the talk. We must live true. We must be people of love. We must be healing and growing and practicing together to become the kind of people that the world is longing for the church to be. And we will need each other to reengage our faith as a profoundly earthy, bodily and communal experience in the midst of an age of secularism, technology, frenetic lifestyles, anxiety, fragmentation, disembodiment, and loneliness.

JOIN US
There is another way to live. Journey with others to practice the counter-cultural way of love and be a part of something good in the world. We will journey with you to take the road less traveled and to hold you accountable to be the person you were meant to be. Take the journey of transformation to come home to yourself and to step fully into God's work in the world!

by Jessica Ketola

Photo by Gian-Reto Tarnutzer 

Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash

Every single person on the planet today is longing for love and for meaning. God has put eternity in our hearts. We innately know what we were created for. We are all longing to be reconciled to ourselves, to God and to each other. To experience shalom, wholeness, union with God and with one another.

And yet our culture is deeply fragmented, divided, polarized, given to racism, greed, violence and war. And our souls are fragmented too, captive to anxiety and fear, hustling to be enough and to escape the tyranny of our shame.

“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.” - Kant

We all long for meaning, to be a part of something good in the world. We long to join in God’s reconciling work in the world. To offer our gifts in a meaningful way. To step into our true calling. And to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

And yet, the forces of individualism are crushing. We suffer anxiety, loneliness and depression like never before. For the individual was never meant to bear the full weight of meaning. And the gods of consumerism have enslaved us to our insatiable desire for more, stripping away our very humanity for the profit of the dollar. We have been turned into consumers instead of the creators that we truly are.

It is our calling as The Practicing Church to invite people into LOVE AND MEANING.

To proclaim the glorious mystery of God’s grace -- that the gospel is actually good news to our neighbors. And the only way we see that happening is if we together decide to embody love in place - in our work places, schools, and neighborhoods. To actually live in such a way that folks begin to see that God is not like the projections of a wrathful, harsh or distant god. God is good. Like the pinch-me-wake-me-up-I-must-be-dreaming-kind-of-good. Apart from love, everything else is like a resounding gong, a clanging cymbal [I Corinthians 13].

This has become absolutely non-negotiable for me. We must walk the talk or shut up and go home. Of course, we are not going to be perfect. We are human, both beautiful and broken. But we have to own up to our brokenness and be real. If we are going to talk about this God of Love, we must practice the way of love. If we are going to say we are followers of Jesus, then we actually need to be practicing and living this provocative, counter-cultural way of love. If we are going follow the command to love our neighbors as ourselves, then we better well know and love our neighbors!

For this way of love frees us to be who we are created to be.

At The Practicing Church, we desire to be a transformational community. To call people to awake from their slumber to the life that God has called them to. We want to be a prophetic community that says to the world, there is another way to live. To truly embody love and to live out the teachings of Jesus together in such a way that reveals God’s goodness to the world. And we want to invite each and every person on the transformational journey.

Come home to your true selves, own the brokenness and the beauty of your stories, and step fully into your work in the world.

This is the reason we exist. This is the fire in our bones.

by Jessica Ketola

by Jessica Ketola

It is hard to put into words what we experienced this past week in El Paso as we put our bodies in a place that is groaning under the weight of injustice. Our lament began with "the practice of relocation, taking our very bodies to the hard places and tarrying long enough to be disturbed."[Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing]

And disturbed we were.

Children in cages. Ripped out of the arms of their parents and caregivers to be locked up in squalid conditions with overcrowding, filth, scabies, lice, and abuse. Forced to drink water from toilets and sleep on cement floors, without access to showers or human decency. We heard stories of children ripping out the laces of their shoes and considering hanging themselves. And in the last six months, seven children have died.

It's too much. It's simply too much to bear.

As we placed our feet on this grieving soil and resolutely marched around the barbed wire fences and cement walls of the detention center, we felt the heaviness of tyranny. As we stood at the gates crying out and beseeching the powers on earth and in heaven for justice, our bodies bowed in solidarity with the groans of those within on hunger strike. And the signs we carried in the shape of tombstones with names and ages of many more who have died here became oppressively heavy. How is this evil being perpetrated without any oversight or accountability?

Rev. Dr. Robin Tanner words reverberating from the night before, “Here at the threshold between nation states, in the beauty and injustice across the borderlands, I say so goes the borderlands, so goes the world. This is the holy site of our collective moral awakening as a country. From every granule of sand to the winds that sweep El Paso, we must answer: Who will America be?”
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I know this is heavy. Know I am not without fierce and stubborn hope. And certainly, there will be a call to action.

But first, first, we must feel the weight of this moment.

As we gathered for the Mass on Sunday night, we came together across different faiths and divides to cry out for justice. Jews, Muslims, Christians and those following their moral conscience united in a powerful way to join the on-the-ground resistance with Border Network for Human Rights. And I have never experienced anything like it. We were disturbed, disrupted, grieved, challenged, provoked and stirred.

Citing that his father was a migrant, Imam Omar Suleiman offered an impassioned rebuke of the treatment of migrant children and families: “Our faiths are on trial. As a Muslim, I believe in Jesus — peace be upon him. I believe in Abraham — peace be upon him. I believe in Moses — peace be upon him. [Now let’s put this in context for a moment] Jeff Sessions used verses from the Bible to separate those children from their families. Donald Rumsfeld used verses of the Bible to justify the bombing of innocent children in Iraq. Verses from the Bible and the Koran have too often been used to hurt rather than uplift. If you say that Jesus is in your heart, but you would put him in a cage today, you are a hypocrite. If you say that you believe in Moses, but you would let him drown, you are a hypocrite. If you say you that believe in Abraham, and that you are following in the footsteps of Abraham, but you would turn him away from these borders, you are a hypocrite. It is not the humanity of these people that’s on trial; it is our humanity.”

This is more than thoughts and prayers, more than even aid and relief for the immigrant. This is about us. Our humanity. Who do we want to be and what kind of America do we want to be?

And God help us, what kind of Christians do we want to be?

“There is a text that says when God called Ezekiel in the midst of the exile, he told Ezekiel to lay down for seven days in front of the people (Ezekiel 4:4),” said the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach. “I’ve studied the scripture and as I have looked at it, I have come to understand that the reason Ezekiel was instructed to lay down in front of the people, was because he had to feel and pay attention to the experience of the people so the prophetic word he spoke articulated their audible moans and groans. In this way, our voice isn’t just ours alone. We are responsible for amplifying the voices of people who are struggling, and this includes our immigrant brothers and sisters.”

And so this week, I encourage you to lay down. Lay down until you feel the groans of our suffering siblings. Lay down until you hear their audible moans.

This weighty moment begins with lament.

​MORE ABOUT MORAL MONDAY

WATCH LIVE STREAM
Moral Monday Day of Action | July 29

MORNING JOE ON MSNBC
Rev. Barber brings Moral Monday to El Paso

COMMON DREAM
"It Doesn't Have to Be This Way": Faith Leaders Rally at Detention Center Demanding End to Inhumane Treatment of Immigrants 
"We condemn and call evil and unjust the caging of people, the making people drink from toilets, the refusal to even give them a toothbrush," the group continued. "You're holding angels in this place. But you will not hold them forever. We join them now, and not only do we bring condemnation, but we bring hope. It doesn't have to be this way. America, turn around. America, repent. America, stop. America, change your ways."

OP ED - JONATHAN WILSON-HARTGROVE
The Family Values We Need at the Border 
“This is not simply a partisan disagreement about immigration policy. It is a moral crisis that forces each of us to decide who we are. Either we accept the demonization of black and brown immigrants that assumes God has ordained white American culture as superior. Or we act now to demand that the Trump administration end its war on immigrant families.”

EL PASO TIMES
Faith Leaders Head Protests Against Treatment of Migrants at Moral Monday in El Paso 
Our own Stephanie Drury was cited, "I just can't handle that children are dying in custody," protester Stephanie Drury, 44, of the Vineyard Christian community in Seattle, said about her reason to come to El Paso. "It makes everything more real," Drury said of her trip to the border. "It's eyeopening to see what's happening. You can't turn off the news and distract yourself and pretend it's not happening."

RED LETTER CHRISTIANS
Who Will America Be? 
“What we saw at the border was damnable. As people of faith, we are called to welcome the immigrant as our family,” Rev. Dr. Barber concluded. “We need Christians to rise up and challenge theological malpractice that allows people to look the other way and not challenge injustice.”

MORE ABOUT DETENTION
▪This past year, 900 children have been detained (in spite of promises to end family separation last summer).
▪An average of 2,000 children every month are unaccompanied children in custody awaiting placement in detention centers and shelters.
▪According to lawmakers, we have a “broken” and "horrifying" system of immigration detention at the nation's southern border where women in one cell were allegedly told to drink water from a toilet.
▪For-profit detention centers run by The GEO Group and CoreCivic benefiting from bodies in cages and Border Patrol expanding without oversight are regularly in violation of International Human Rights and Constitutional Rights.​
▪ The 'Remain in Mexico' Program is dangerous, cruel and chaotic. It puts migrants in grave danger. El Paso is one of the safest cities in America while Juarez is one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
▪ The President's declaration of a national emergency was an abuse of power, yet strategic as it is the only reason the military can be deployed on American soil.
▪ Our Southern border is the third militarized border in the world although terrorists are a non-issue while our Northern border is not militarized even though there have been accounts of terrorists crossing.

Photo by Alex Woods on Unsplash

​This week we continue our journey through the Psalms as a way to let our prayers be formed by the longings, praises, songs and laments of our ancestors. And as I talked about last Sunday, I think one of the most remarkable things about the Psalms is that they are so raw and human. These are not sanitized and strange words that are irrelevant to our human experience and keep God at arms length. Rather, these are our gut responses to God that draw us into the depths of relationship in the midst of our gritty, wonderful and often painful human experience.

For the Psalms are a mix of poetry and prayer. Far from decorative or surface ideas, the language of poetry calls us into the depths. Eugene Peterson in his book Answering God: The Psalms as Tools For Prayer says, “Poetry grabs for the jugular. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal. It is root language. Poetry doesn’t so much tell us something we never knew as bring into recognition what is latent, forgotten, overlooked, or suppressed.”

The Psalms text is almost entirely in this kind of language. As we read the Psalms, we aren’t looking primarily for ideas about God, or for direction or moral conduct.

We are looking to find the experience of being human before God exposed and sharpened. To be laid bare intimately and honestly before the God of the universe who knows our name.

And this can be daunting for us. We are all too accustomed to talking about God rather than talking to God. The Psalms invite us to move beyond these cerebral discussions to deal with the very viscerally felt prayers of our humanity.

The psalms are disturbing if you read them—all of them. It’s easy to take the familiar comforting ones at face value. We love Psalm 23 speaking about our Good Shepherd and Psalm 145 speaking of our God of compassion. But what about the cries of despair, outrage and vengeance? "How long O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" (Psalm 113:1) "Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?" (Psalm 139:21), even venomous words, "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" (Psalm 137:9)

At first, these words are offensive and off putting. How is it possible that they ended up in our sacred text? And yet we must let go of such romantic notions to catch God's nearness to us in the thick of our human flailing. Walter Brueggemann offers a framework for understanding the whole book of Psalms. And while not every psalm can be fit into a neat category, the majority of the psalms can be viewed in one of three ways: Psalms of Orientation, Disorientation and Reorientation.

It is easy to understand the Psalms of Orientation. These are the Psalms we have come to know and to love. These are the Psalms when life goes as we expect it to and when life is ordered by God's ways. Psalms of blessing and gratitude and worship to our God of creation.

But it is much more disconcerting to read the Psalms of Disorientation. These Psalms are the reaction of the faithful to God when the world they once knew is broken. When life doesn't go as planned and God's goodness seems elusive. When the city of God Jerusalem falls to conquering Babylon, you don't sing Psalms of God's goodness. Rather, you weep, you cry out in outrage and you lament. Here, we are not so concerned whether the content is ethical or not, but we allow ourselves to be moved by these words that reflect the pain of a people engaging with their God in world-shattering circumstances.

Finally, there are the Psalms of Reorientation. The Psalms of Reorientation are the words of people who have experienced a miracle, against all odds. They are gasps of thankfulness when the impossible breaks through. They are whispers of delight when the unimaginable has happened. God has broken into time and space and done something that they could not have anticipated and certainly could not have created.

“Even in a world demystified and reduced, grace intrudes and God makes all things new,” Spirituality of The Psalms, Walter Brueggemann

These are the Psalms of people who have been to hell and come out the other side. Psalms of amazement, wonder and gratitude.

As I consider the Psalms, I am increasingly convinced that they are necessary for our formation. For we are all too prone to keep God at a distance and to find our prayers stale and irrelevant compared to the evocative range of our human emotion. But the Psalms teach us that God is found at the very core of our human experience. There is no need for editing, stuffing or distancing. God is near and hears our cries of lament as well as our songs of adoration. So whether you find yourself in a time of orientation, disorientation or reorientation, may you be inspired and buoyed by the honest and raw faith in these prayers of our ancestors.

by Jessica Ketola

​Sitting midst the heartbreak and injustice for those who continue to suffer the unthinkable in migrant detention centers, I am sickened. The reports of horror and degradation continue with pictures of children in cages, separated from their parents, hungry and inconsolable; adults and children held for weeks or months in over-crowded cells, sometimes with no access to soap, toothpaste, or places to wash their hands or shower, sleeping on concrete floors or forced to stand due to lack of space. Reports of filth, unsanitary and inhumane conditions, sexual abuse, hunger, extreme cold, illness and even death. What are we to do but to cry out.

"Arise, Lord! Lift up your hand, O God. Do not forget the helpless." [Psalm 10:12]

Migrant Detention Centers Conditions - Times Article

As we continue through the Psalms, this week I am struck by the psalms of lament, crying out for justice. As much as we would like to read peacefully through the psalms, there is hardly a page that isn't left smoking by a pungent curse. These outbreaks of hate that smite the enemy can be off-putting. We are used to peaceful prayers, sanitized prayers, detached prayers. There is a rawness and honesty in the psalms that is disruptive and yet necessary.

But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; 
you consider their grief and take it in hand. 
The victims commit themselves to you; 
you are the helper of the fatherless. 
Break the arm of the wicked man; 
call the evildoer to account for his wickedness 
that would not otherwise be found out.
The Lord is King for ever and ever; 
the nations will perish from his land. 
You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; 
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, 
defending the fatherless and the oppressed, 
so that mere earthly mortals 
will never again strike terror. (Psalm 10:14-18)

Eugene Peterson says this in his book Answering God: The Psalms As Tools For Prayer. "But immersed by prayer in this holiness, we see clearly what we never saw before, the utter and terrible sacrilege of enemies who violate a good creation, who brutalize women and men who are made, every one of them in the image of God. There is an enormous amount of suffering epidemic in the world because of evil people. The rape and pillage are so well concealed in polite language and courteous conventions that some people can go years without seeing it. And we ourselves did not see it. But now we see it. And we hate it. We are ejected from our cushioned private religion into solidarity with 'The Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up'."

So what happens when we no longer distance ourselves and begin to lament? What shifts in our prayers as we begin to cry out on behalf of those seeking refuge from violence at our borders who are only subjected to more violence?

​In the article, Responding to Injustice With Lament, Andy Kim talks about how critical it is for the people of God to learn to lament. Here is an excerpt:

The Lost Discipline of Lament 
The Bible is filled with lament. There is even an entire book devoted to lament (Lamentations, anyone?). Check out Psalms 10, 13, 22, 39, 44, 51, 56, 60, 74, 79, 80, 85, 90, 92, 1 Samuel 30:4, Jeremiah 31:15, Matthew 27:46. We see time and time again that when the God's people are faced with evil, injustice, oppression and turmoil, the Biblical response is often lament.

In Reconciling All Things, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice help us to understand what lament is, and what it isn't:

"Lament is not despair. It is not whining. It is not a cry into a void. Lament is a cry directed to God. It is the cry of those who see the truth of the world's deep wounds and the cost of seeking peace. It is the prayer of those who are deeply disturbed by the way things are... The journey of reconciliation is grounded in the practice of lament." (pp. 78)

In our pursuit of multiethnic ministry and reconciliation, are we engaging in Biblical lament?

Author, pastor and theologian Soong-Chan Rah suggests that as the church in America, the answer is often a resounding no.

The Absence of Lament 
In a 2013 article, Rah notes that while laments constitute 40 percent of the Psalms, they are conspicuously absent from contemporary American worship.

Rah observed that out of the top 100 worship songs from August 2012 according to Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), only five songs fell into the category of lament, while the vast majority were celebratory praise songs..." (Looking at the current CCLI Top 100, not much seems to have changed.)
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He explains here and in more depth in his book, Prophetic Lament:

"How we worship reveals what we prioritize. The American church avoids lament. Consequently the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost in lieu of a triumphalistic, victorious narrative. We forget the necessity of lament over suffering and pain. Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget."

When we lack the discipline of lament, we run the risk of letting our triumphalism, our anger, our hurt, our fear or our apathy fester inside of us and paralyze us. Biblical lament calls us to sit in the pain, to truly see the brokenness in ourselves and in our world, and to cry out to God.

Are we willing?

Practice Lament 
And so I encourage you to practice lament this week. Engage your heart and soul with the prayers of the psalmists. And along with your prayers, engage your bodies for I am reminded of the African proverb, "When you pray move your feet." And I've included below many ways in which you can participate and engage here locally.

PILGRIMAGE 
"Pilgrimage is a posture very different from mission. The goal of a pilgrim is not to solve, but to search, not so much to help as to be present. Pilgrims do not rush to a goal, but slow down to hear the crying."

How do we put ourselves in the way of listening to those who are suffering? I encourage you to do participate in Lights for Liberty on Friday night or other local events.
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RELOCATION 
"The practice of relocation [means] taking our very bodies to the hard places and tarrying long enough to be disturbed."

It is easy to be undisturbed at a distance but what happens when we put our physical bodies in hard places? This is one of the reasons I will be going to the border and why it is important to show up at our own detention center in Tacoma (there is an event this Saturday).

CONFESSION 
"[It's] a way of unlearning innocence. As we learn to go out of our way to draw near and tarry with the pain of the world... the challenge is to keep naming the truth, keep being disturbed, keep remember the awful depth of brokenness. The prayers of lament in the Psalms were public prayers, intended to be read and inserted into the corporate life of worship... It is critical that we learn to pray like this, bringing these prayers into public worship in a way that helps us tell the truth and confess in explicit relationships to the brokenness of our own contexts."

This is why we it is important that we pray the Psalms throughout the week and the Prayers of the People together at our gatherings. And we encourage you to write your own psalms and laments so that we can pray them together.