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Getting Out of the Boat

Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Jessica Tate and Linda Kurtz are curating a series written by participants in the first-ever Certificate in Community Organizing and Congregational Leadership offered by NEXT Church, Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, and Metro Industrial Areas Foundation. You’ll hear from clergy, lay people, community leaders, and others reflect on the theology of power and how organizing has impacted the way they do ministry. How might you incorporate these principles of organizing into your own work? What is your reaction to their reflections? We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter

by Denise Anderson

A sermon preached at Unity Presbyterian Church in Temple Hills, MD. Scripture: Jonah 3:1-5, 10 and Mark 1:14-20.

Unity Presbyterian Church, you may remember that recently we committed ourselves to being part of a number of new things. First, we are looking at dissolution of our charter and the possible repurposing of our facility for a new ministry that will meet the specific needs of our surrounding county. But there is also something afoot here in our county that has the potential to facilitate significant change in our community. For the past year and a half, a number of local clergy and lay leaders from a variety of traditions have been meeting, organizing, and working together to develop the Prince George’s Leadership Action Network, or PLAN. PLAN is on track to become an Industrial Areas Foundation-affiliated organization. Now, perhaps we need to examine what that means.

The Industrial Areas Foundation, according to its website, “is the nation’s largest and longest-standing network of local faith and community-based organizations.

“The IAF partners with religious congregations and civic organizations at the local level to build broad-based organizing projects, which create new capacity in a community for leadership development, citizen-led action and relationships across the lines that often divide our communities.

“The IAF created the modern model of faith- and broad-based organizing and is widely recognized as having the strongest track record in the nation for citizen leadership development and for helping congregations and other civic organizations act on their missions to achieve lasting change in the world.”

Our neighbors in the DC metro area and to the north in Baltimore all have IAF-affiliated organizations serving them. They have been effective at a number of efforts to benefit their communities, including ensuring jobs for local resident and fighting for access to healthy foods. Now we want to bring that sort of cooperative leadership and organizing to Prince George’s County. Unity is part of that.

As we do the work of building an organization here, it occurs to me that the Bible is replete with stories of organizers! Let’s frame what it means to organize. Organizing is the building of power across constituencies. Power is simply two things: organized people and organized money. Furthermore, people are organized not around particular issues, but around self-interests. There is a need in the community that, if not addressed, will have reverberating effects. For instance, I need to be able to pay my rent, so it is in my self-interest that a new company setting up shop in town would be intentional about hiring locally.

Today’s texts tell us about two organizers: Jonah and Jesus. One more reluctant that the other. Both effective at tapping into their eventual followers’ interests and abilities.

We may not think of Jonah as an organizer, but in a sense he was. In essence, what Jonah did is what good organizers do: agitate people around a particular need within their community. Jonah’s method of proclamation was necessarily disruptive. Friends, while I don’t advocate walking through Prince George’s County proclaiming its destruction, I think we who are residents would agree that there is deep complacency here. People are prone to cut themselves off from the needs that exist, and there needs to be a widespread calling of attention to those needs. God is not destroying us; we are doing a good enough job of that on our own! For every day we allow our schools to underperform, we bring about destruction. For every foreclosure that is handed down, we bring about destruction. For every bit of commerce that is wooed into our county without subsequent guarantees that residents will benefit, we bring about destruction. We need to be the Jonahs who will agitate the city (or county) and confront the people with a simple question: “What are you prepared to do about this?”

Organizing teaches us to identify leaders within a community. Leaders are simply those who have a following. Jesus after his baptism set out to build his following, and he did so in such an effective way. He honed their leadership using what they were already doing. Like any good leader, Jesus recognizes a need: the Kingdom of God is at hand. So he sets out to gather/organize those who would exist within that kingdom or reign. He sees the fishermen brothers Simon and Andrew, and astutely connects this important work with the work they’re already doing: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people!” He does the same with the sons of Zebedee.

Organizing is not gathering people to do things they have no interests in or training for. That would be a recipe for disaster. Organizing identifies those who already have the capacity for the work and building on that capacity. We know there are people with gifts and expertise to meet the very needs within our communities. Organizing connects those people to work they’re already equipped to do.

And in both Jonah and Jesus’ cases, the work could not start unless someone “got out of the boat.” Jonah initially ran from his calling and took a boat out of town, only to be met with a fierce storm and a fish’s belly. When he surrendered to the call and work, then he was washed safely to shore. Jesus called some of his first followers from their places of comfort and familiarity. These were men who were used to fishing for, well, fish! Jesus invited them to do something somewhat familiar, but markedly different.

Getting out of the boat means acknowledging our fears, but ultimately surrendering to our call. It means letting go of what we had hoped would mean comfort and security for us. It means taking on a vulnerability that defers to the needs of the many. But it’s not entirely selfless. It is also understanding that the liberation of those people for whom we fish is tied into our own. Getting out of the boat is an act of saving our own lives, for to not act is to act. To not make a choice is to choose something (and that something is rarely life-giving). Unity, as I have shared repeatedly since I first arrived three years ago, change will happen either with us or to us. The good news is we have the power to choose which that will be!

The Great Organizer, who hung from a tree on Friday but got up with all power on Sunday, continues to organize. He continues to agitate and push us beyond what we think are our limits. He continues to call us to greater work and faithfulness. And the best news of all, perhaps, is that we are not left without help to do what we’re called to do. In hope, in trust, and in the assurance of God’s love, grace, and empowerment, let us leave our places of comfort and complacency. Let us get out of our boat and into our calling. Amen.


Denise Anderson is pastor of Unity Presbyterian Church in Temple Hills, MD, and co-moderator of the 222nd General Assembly.

Marci Glass: Ninevite Lives Matter

Marci Glass is one of our three preachers for the 2017 National Gathering. Here’s a sneak peek into Marci’s preaching – here’s a sermon she preached at her church last November. The sermon was originally posted on Marci’s blog, “Glass Overflowing.”

November 6, 2016

by Marci Glass

We humans often have a bad habit of “othering” people. By that, I mean we look at someone’s life that seems very different than our own, and we place them in some category at a remove from our concern. (For a great video series on this topic, check out “Love an other” from Theocademy. Videos here.)

Sometimes we “other” people with observation. Sometimes with judgement. Listen to the difference:

They are different.
or
They are weird.

They eat food that is new to me.
or
They eat food that is gross.

They speak a second language. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to have to get by in a place where I didn’t know the language.
or
I can’t understand them. Why don’t they speak English?

They’re from New York. or Bagdad. or Kuna.
or
They’re from a place without culture or civilization.

or the one that speaks to where we are this week—

They approach politics from a different perspective than I do.
They are voting for that person? Are they insane?

It is appropriate to notice difference, to embrace it, even. We aren’t called to pretend everyone needs to be the same.

Sameness is the darkside of “othering.” Because often when we notice the things that divide, we notice it with a judgment that we would prefer it if the other person were more like us.

The story of Jonah is all about this. God sends Jonah to call Ninevah to repent so they can avoid judgment.

And Jonah won’t do it.

Because he wants Ninevah to be judged. They’ve been a basket of deplorables for so long that he can’t even remember if they ever used to be friends. They are nastydisgusting people, seriously bad hombres. Those horrible articles they post to Facebook. They are fully deserving of God’s wrath. And no way, no how, is Jonah going to preach one of his awesome sermons to them so that they’ll be saved from judgment, which will be yuge, I tell you.

Sound familiar?

So Jonah goes to Tarshish instead. It would be like God calling us to preach to Portland, and we instead drive toward Denver. You can’t preach to the Ninevites if you’re hiding out at your friend’s doublewide trailer in the mountains of Tarshish, now can you?

God will not abide having the message of grace and repentance withheld from any of God’s children, even the nasty, deplorable ones. Until Jonah acknowledges that Ninevite Lives Matterspecifically, God won’t let him get away with saying “all lives matter.”

The ship Jonah escapes toward Tarshish on ends up in a huge storm and Jonah recognizes his culpability. He is tossed overboard and swallowed up by a giant fish. God decides 3 days in the digestive juices of a fish ought to give Jonah some time to think about his choices.

And then Jonah agrees to the plan, and gets spat out on the shore, where he heads to Ninevah to preach.

You can almost hear the glee in his voice when he announces their destruction and doom.
“Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! Ha! That’ll teach you horrible people! You ought to be in jail, crooked Ninevah! We’ll see how you feel when God’s judgment puts you in your place!”

Jonah delivers the message, gets out a lawn chair and maybe some popcorn, and sits down to wait for a ringside seat of the destruction.

But the people repent. The King repents. The cows repent, for pete’s sake.

This isn’t an isolated repentance of a few people. This is a repentance of all individuals, the government, and even creation.

God’s message of repentance and grace prevails. God shows mercy on Ninevah and doesn’t destroy them.

Jonah’s front row seat to the destruction of his enemies doesn’t turn out the way he had hoped. Despite his greatest hopes for their doom, they are converted. His very success as a preacher and evangelist annoys the heck out of him.

God will choose to be merciful to whom God will choose to be merciful. We don’t get the final say in the people who are beyond the reach of God’s love.

I’ve shared this quote from Anne Lamott before, but it bears repeating:

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Our job, as it turns out, is not to judge.

Only God gets to do that, and even then, we can’t presume God will hate all the same people we do. God doesn’t “other” people.

There’s a lot of “othering” taking place in the story of Jonah. And not just between Jonah and the Ninevites. On board the ship when the sailors are trying to figure out who’s to blame for the storm, it says “each one cried to his own God.

Even though they are all dying in the same storm, they are not together.

There’s a lot of “othering” taking place in our world. I know we’re all waiting for this election to be over, but unless we have our own repentance and changes of heart, it won’t all get better the day after the election.

The things that divide will remain. The ways we disconnect ourselves and our well being from the lives and welfare of other people will remain.

It is up to us to tell a different story.

Or maybe to claim an old one. To remember who we are and whose we are.

We’ll be coming to the Table this morning, and it is here that the contrast between God’s Kingdom and our kingdom is most apparent. We speak of all people being invited to this Table. And I’m sure we mean it. But not all the people who should be at this Table are in this room. Our religious life is not exempt from “othering.” in other words. The most segregated hour of the week is Sunday morning worship. Somehow, despite God’s message of radical inclusion and grace, we still divide into sanctuaries of sameness, where the only lives that matter are the ones like ours.

We have systems in place in our culture that make racism and sexism, and the other ‘isms’, ingrained and invisible to us. So we can say “all are welcome” but until our divisions become more visible to us, until we can face our privilege with both honesty and grace, until we bring our very woundedness to the Table, how can we know of the fullness of God’s mercy?

That’s what Jonah faced at the end of his story. God calls him to awareness of his privilege. “I care about you, Jonah. Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, as well?”

Jonah has to tell himself a different story.

When we come to the Table, we say we “remember” on the night Jesus was betrayed…. We weren’t there.

Our remembering is recalling the story of our past in a way that “re-members” it,
re-orders it for the present.

We remember that Jesus was betrayed by one of his own. And we remember Jesus still offered his betrayer bread. We remember the body of Christ, broken for us. And we look around at the body of Christ and realize, remember, that is still broken today.

What story of our life, of our faith, and of our nation do we want to remember? How can we tell it differently in the days to come?

One thought is to remember the Table. Because it is here, today, in this very room, that Trump supporters and Clinton supporters will gather. Together. In unity despite their differences to share a feast. Around a Table which has room enough for all.

Can we remember the Table as we go out into a fractious and divided world? Can we remember being fed together and nurtured by each other, trusting that if the mercy of God is wide enough to include us, it is wide enough to include people who would vote for the candidate from Ninevah?


Marci Auld Glass is the pastor of Southminster Presbyterian Church in Boise, Idaho and blogs at www.marciglass.com. She co-moderates the board of the Covenant Network, and serves on the boards of Ghost Ranch, Planned Parenthood Clergy Advocacy, and the Presbyterian Mission Agency.  She and her husband, Justin, have two sons, Alden and Elliott. Marci is a professional espresso drinker, bourbon snob, labyrinth walker, and lapsed cellist who voluntarily listens to opera.