Tabernacle United Church - Philadelphia Progressive Presbyterian UCC
Please join us for praise, prayer, and Holy Communion in Christian community in the sanctuary or on Zoom from 10:00 am to 11:30 am Eastern. Pastor Katie will preach “Original Blessing: Eros in the Garden” from Genesis 2:7-9, 15-25, her first sermon in our Lenten series “Sacred the Body”.
You can contact us any time before 9 am Sunday if you need the Zoom link.
Please join us for praise and prayer in Christian community from 10:00 am to 11:30 am Eastern on Zoom. Taylor Silvestri will preach “Transformed by the Truth: You’re Invited” from 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 and Luke 9: 28-36.
You can contact us any time before 9 am Sunday if you need the link.
Dear Tab Family,
What a joy and a blessing to have Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart join us this past Sunday. I was struck by the invitation to us all to “tend to the wellbeing of our faith” while we listened to the sermon, and the stark truth that yes– some of us are tired of the cost of discipleship.
I am often tired. As someone with chronic pain, I don’t go a day without fatigue. Lately, I’ve been especially tired. If I’m being honest, I’m tired of bouncing around, place to place and workplace to workplace. Prior to thinking seriously about answering my call to ministry, I moved over a dozen times in less than ten years. I have spent this time trying as hard as I can, to put down roots somewhere. To feel at home someplace. To find a place to lay my head and rest for a moment.
And what a gift, for Rev Naomi to bring attention to another truth: that Jesus was homeless. That Jesus did not have a physical home base to rest. I find myself, having spent my entire career thus far, putting up with being driven to overwork, over-produce, over-extend, and push myself beyond my own natural capacity to labor for institutions that name me replaceable, to give grace endlessly to the people that populate positions of power at those institutions when they make excuses for each other, and attempt to gaslight and explain away the insidious ways they exploit my labor, and steal my time.
That will happen, though, when I forget this one simple truth I have been letting rattle around in my soul since Fall 2020, and that I received again in the sermon this past Sunday: my home is inside of my own body. I am never outside of my home because I carry it in me. I carry home everywhere I go, because my home is the divinity God placed in me the moment She breathed life into these very bones of mine.
I have a divine right to work from home. Try as it may, the antichrist that is a society built upon the exploitation of our labor, the violence enacted on our bodies and our spirits, the evil that is capitalism will not make itself a bed in my home, and it cannot stop me from demanding rest. It cannot rip me from my own body. And everytime it tries, I can return to the promise of my baptism, and the promise that there is always more life. There is always more life.
And I guess if I wanted to give it all up, submit my resignation to the vocation of justice-seeking and grace-giving and repair God calls me to, I could. I could hang up my hat and punch out and instead give myself fully to the institutions that insist I am not allowed to rest, that insist I am nothing beyond the labor they can squeeze from me, that insist I have no home outside of what I can produce for them.
But then I wouldn’t get to be at home here, at Tab, with all of you. I wouldn’t be able to rest and rejuvenate with you all whom I love so deeply, you all who have given me grace, and allowed me to live more fully into the home of my own body.
Let’s take a breath together, and reflect on these words from Rev. Naomi:
“I demand the time, Jesus, to do something about the domestic wreckage that following Jesus has brought to my life. I demand the right to love myself and my people, without being impugned for doing so. I demand the both/and, to work fully for God during the day, and binge-watch Jeopardy with my wife every night. I demand to work from home.” – Rev Naomi Washington-Leapheart
Today, I invite you to check out The Nap Ministry, and explore rest as a divine right and a form of resistance:
WordPress: https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @TheNapMinistry
I also invite you to listen to The Grateful Dead’s cover of “I Bid You Goodnight.” As a child of two Deadheads, this was one of the songs my parents would sing to me before bed, and the Dead would often close shows with this song during the late 60s and early 70s. They revived it again toward the end of Jerry Garcia’s life, starting around 1989. This version is from a show in October of 1989 in Virginia. Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8gNgiCWlYg&ab_channel=LoloYodel
In grace,
Taylor M. Silvestri (They/them)
Please join us on Zoom for praise and prayer in Christian community from 10:00 am to 11:30 am Eastern. Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart will preach “Working from Home” from Luke 9:57-62.
You can contact us any time before 9 am Sunday if you need the link.
Dear Tab Family,
Do you pray to a Black God? Is the Jesus you imagine a Black man? What does it mean to you if Jesus was Black? How does it feel in your body to pray to a Black Jesus? Do you feel uncomfortable, excited, validated, scared, or surprised? I encourage you to play with this idea, not because Jesus was really Black, but because we can only meet Jesus in the crucified bodies in our midst.
We know Jesus was a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew living under an oppressive Roman Empire. Pastor Katie said on Sunday, “Jesus not only was one among the working poor of his day, we hear him begin to preach and teach that his very mission was to bring the good news of liberation to the poor.” We believe that God took human form in Jesus and dwelt with us on Earth. Or as John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into our neighborhood.” The reality of this particular incarnation has implications for our faith.
What does it mean that Jesus wasn’t on a hovercraft floating just a little bit above the earth, but that Jesus was a particular person living in a particular time from a particular sociocultural location? Moreover, how is that context relevant to us now?
In Epiphany season we examine how God is revealing God’s self to us now. When we look at Jesus’s particularities or how God chose to incarnate through Jesus, we know that God became flesh to preach and live out the good news, a message of liberation and love that stirred up fury and resistance from people who benefited from the empire. If Jesus lived today, Jesus would be Black in America, because he would be among and standing with the crucified class of our day. Pastor Katie says, “I think we would do well to just sit with this statement and notice what happens inside of us, and to our understanding of salvation and liberation as we see Jesus as Black.”
Writer Danté Stewart shares that when Black theologians and scholars insisted that Jesus is Black, “they were not talking about his skin color during his earthly ministry, though it definitely wasn’t white. They were talking about Jesus’s experience, about how Jesus knows what it means to live in an occupied territory, and knows what it means to be from an oppressed people.” In his recently published book Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle, Stewart talks about learning to love himself as a Black man after reading authors like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. He writes,
“The more I read these works, the more I let them teach me how to love. Not the type of love that must perform to be accepted — the type that would allow us to embrace our humanity and never allow ourselves to believe that proving what could never be proved was the best we had to offer. The type of love that Toni Morrison writes of in “Paradise”: “That Jesus had been freed from white religion and he wanted these kids to know that they did not have to beg for respect; it was already in them, and they needed only to display it…..My world changed when I stopped sitting at the feet of white Jesus and began becoming a disciple of Black Jesus. I didn’t have to hate myself or my people or our creativity or our beauty to be human or to be Christian.”Pastor Katie reminds us that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Today “the Word has become Black flesh and blood and this incarnation is saving us. Jesus didn’t come to make me or you comfortable. Jesus came to save us, to free us. And he will continue to reveal himself to us, if we have eyes to notice and ears to hear.”
To watch Pastor Katie’s full sermon from Sunday, please go here.
Please feel free to reflect on any of the questions posed above and share your reflections with me via email at lanenalinda@gmail.com.
Warmly,
Sana DelCorazón
UTS Seminary Student & Member of Tabernacle United
African-American Spiritual
I want Jesus to walk with me (2x)
All along my pilgrim journey
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me
In my trials, Lord, walk with me (2x)
When my heart is almost breaking
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me
When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me (2x)
When my head is bowed in sorrow
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me
Please join us for praise and prayer in Christian Community from 10:00 am to 11:30 am Eastern on Zoom. Pastor Katie will preach “And the Word Became (Black) Flesh” from Luke 4:14-22 and Luke 4:23-30.
If you need the link you can contact us any time before 9 am Sunday.
Dear Tab Family,
Today would have been my abuela’s 87th birthday. Elisa Gomez, my maternal grandmother and last living grandparent, passed away Monday morning after many years of living with dementia. I pray that she is with God playing, as Oscar (Pastor Katie and Heather’s son) would say.
Psalm 121:5 says that God is our keeper (shamar in Hebrew); God will keep or preserve or guard our life. Pastor Katie reminded us on Sunday that in life, God is with us; in death and in dying, God is with us; and in life beyond death, God is with us. God’s keeping has to do with our worthiness and our sacredness. Shamar is a word of blessing as well as promise: We are worthy of God’s love and God will keep us in life, in death and in life beyond death.
As the people of God, we are connected through the one body of Christ. In God’s love, which includes us all, we believe we are each other’s keeper. We believe our Christian liberty is rooted in our care for our neighbors — liberty that seeks the common good (I Cor 12:7). Our Christian liberty is rooted in radical love – the extent we are able to see one another as worthy of keeping. Sin entered the Bible when Cain killed his brother Abel – when one person acted as if another person was disposable. Pastor Katie said, “sin lurks at the door in all the moments when we refuse to see the life of another as worthy of keeping…How are we doing with seeing each other, even those who we struggle to love, as worthy of keeping?”
I loved my abuela, even when she rejected my queer identity and family. She loved the Lord with all her heart, spending many years of her life sharing the good news. In 2016, in a rare visit with my family, abuela apologized to me and my spouse for any harm she had caused me. In that moment my abuela was keeping me, preserving our relationship and our connection. I am grateful to God for that moment.
Others may not always validate our worthiness, because unfortunately we live in a culture and society that treats many of us and our siblings as disposable. We can rest assured that in life, in death and in life beyond death, God is with us and keeps us. And, we belong to a church community that lives into being keepers of one another, and keepers of the earth and all living things.
Warmly,
Sana DelCorazón
UTS Seminary Student & Member of Tabernacle United
To watch Pastor Katie’s full sermon from Sunday, please go here.
Reflection Questions
Please contact me with your reflection at lanenalinda@gmail.com. I want to hear from you!
By Jobe/Carnes
The Lord bless you
And keep you
May God’s face shine upon you
And be gracious to you
May God’s face turn toward you
And give you peace
Amen, amen, amen
Amen, amen, amen
May God’s presence go before you
And behind you, and beside you
All around you, and within you
God is with you, God is with you
In the morning, in the evening
In your coming, and your going
In your weeping, and rejoicing
God is for you, God is for you
Amen, amen, amen
Amen, amen, amen.
Please join us on Zoom from 10:00 am to 11:00 am Eastern for praise, prayer, and the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Pastor Katie will preach “Worthy of Keeping” from Psalm 121, Genesis 2:5, and Genesis 4:8-10.
You can contact us any time before 9 am Sunday if you need the link.
Dear Tab Family,
And here when I thought being a good Christian was only about the hard work of liberation and salvation, Pastor Katie reminds us that God wants us to experience and embody joy! We see this when Jesus turns gallons of water to wine. “Wine is deeply symbolic, and wine and the abundance of it in the Hebrew Scriptures has to do with joy. Wine is a symbol of joy!” In her sermon, Pastor Katie goes on to ask,
“What if the miracle of this story is the miracle of joy? The gift of joy that comes to us in times where we think there is no more, times when we think we have run out?”
I have been there, my friends, thinking my joy has run out, and not just in the winter, although winters can be particularly rough for many of us. In our neck of the woods, the snow is no longer soft; it’s packed down, dirty and frozen solid. Winter feels hard and long at this point in the season – so does the pandemic! I am not saying we need to pretend to be happy, because happiness and joy aren’t the same thing. Although hard to define, “joy has to do with gratitude in the moment, and a connection to a power greater than ourselves at work.” And like Pastor Katie, I too forebode joy and imagine all the things that can go wrong when I find myself at peace or content with life. Brené Brown tells us foreboding joy is a defense mechanism against the vulnerability of joy. As a child I wasn’t always reassured by my parents or given the tools I needed to lean into God, to experience love, joy or God’s grace.
But God has not created us to live our lives clutching empty jars of fear and dread. We may find joy in places where we thought there was none, in moments when we thought we had run out, if we allow ourselves to be open to vulnerability, grace and love. God’s love and grace are over the top, and we can start practicing this joy through gratitude. Like love and grace, joy grows the more it is shared and practiced. Pastor Katie says, “Perhaps it is time for you to ask God to fill you with joy, and to give you courage to open up to the vulnerability and gift of it, and to let go of foreboding and fear. Because you are loved with a love far more dependable than your own love. You are prized more highly than you ever imagined. When it comes to matters of love, grace and joy, God goes over the top.”
Reflection Questions
Please feel free to email me at lanenalinda@gmail.com with your reflections. I would love to hear from you.
Warmly,
Sana DelCorazón
UTS Seminary Student & Member of Tabernacle United
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in faith so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:13
In case you need to listen to Pastor Katie’s sermon again, here it is: https://youtu.be/RPusD0OQ-Us?t=1892
Prayer from Bukie*
“More like, moved like”
God who leads us
God who made us
You shape us still
In this moment and before
You have heard our joys
You have heard our gratitude
And you’ve listened to our lamentations
Divine Spirit, Christ Jesus who intercedes for us
We ask that you answer our prayers and petitions
That you have mercy on us —
Have mercy on us
Give us freedom from pain
from suffering
from shame
from anger
Give us freedom from the silence that perpetuates injustice —
Have mercy on us
Help us to be more like Mary —
open to your will
Help us to be like our elders and ancestors, challenging hate
Like Jesus, challenging hate and
sowing seeds of love
Help us to be like them —
striving for peace,
compassion,
justice,
kinship
Help us to be the church,
practicing radical love
May we move like Jesus
May we move like our elders and ancestors
Who have changed lives in ordinary ways
God, Have mercy on us.
by Olubukola Adekoje
*shared during Tuesday morning prayer gather
Please join us for praise and prayer in Christian Community on Zoom from 10:00 am to 11:30 am Eastern. Pastor Katie will preach “A Bit Over the Top” from Isaiah 62:1-5 and John 2:1-11.
You can contact us any time before 9 am Sunday if you need the link.