Who’s the We?
Announcements
Debbie: Well, good morning everyone. It is good to be together today. I'm Debbie Manning, I'm one of the pastors here on staff. And we've got a fun day this morning. I'm going to talk a little bit about hearing from our friend Doug Padgitt. But before I introduce Doug, I have a few announcements for this community.
There's a lot going on in the life of this community. And I'm going to start out, let's start out with our kids. Third through fifth graders. It is kids in worship today, so you can stay right here. We've got fidgets and worksheets and things in the back you can grab as you sit and service with us today. Our younger kids will be coming down for communion. You might just hear a little song from them at the end of service, which we're excited about.
Along those lines, we have these snack and chats that we are doing in the fall. We have a couple coming up this month. And if you and your families want a chance to meet with some of our kids' ministry team, come on out. You'll get a snack, you'll be at a park, you'll get to hang out. And it's always fun to get to know each other just a little bit better outside of this context.
The other thing along those lines, and it kind of always is a need in the life of the church, is we are looking for volunteers, and not just any volunteers. If you love kids, you love hanging out with kids. Our amazing kids' director, Caitlin Schmidt, not Mitchell anymore, long gone are those days, decades ago, a decade ago. And Marta Smith, our youth pastor, they've got everything, all the curriculum created, they've got everything set for you there. You just have to show up and hang out with our kids. And it's really fun. It's such a great way not to only get to know our kids, but know their families as they drop them off and pick them up as well.
We are super excited about this. We've just heard about it. Park Place, our friends, our partners, those that we got to know more deeply during Metro Surge, they, and I say this with much humility, are throwing us a thank you potluck. And so we would love to have people show up and deepen these relationships that we've already started with our Park Place families. And that'll be on October 6th from 5 to 6.30. It'll be here. Please use the QR code because they just need to know how much food to prepare. All the food. And they're telling me it's going to be really good food. So I hope you will come. I think it's a great opportunity for us to get to know them better.
Let's see what else I got. The Table Women's Book Bible Study Club that's going to meet two Thursdays a month. They're meeting again on the first. You can use the QR code. Again, almost all this stuff is on our events page, on our website. But we invite you to that. It's a great way to get to know some other women in the community and have good conversations. So that'll happen. Is it, Tami, is it at 10? And is, okay. You can find out the address if you go to our events page. So please do that as well.
Doug and team, Vote Common Good, they have put together a documentary called Who's the We? It'll be showing at the Riverview Theater tomorrow at 5:00pm. I really encourage you guys to go. I've watched it. It's amazing. These guys are doing amazing work just in the life of community and country. So I encourage you, if you're able, tomorrow, Riverview at 5.30. Let me see if I missed anything. We had a lot going on. I think I got it all. I'm looking to Maggie, our expert communicator, communications director.
With that, we are so excited to welcome Doug Padgett. Justin and I, when we've talked about this the last few weeks, we're in this series we're calling Woven because this time in our country and our politics is so important. We're calling it Woven. With this idea that you cannot separate love of God from love of neighbor, and that impacts how we live our faith out in our lives, in our politics, and the way we love one another. And Doug, author, pastor, the founder, the executive director of an organization called Vote Common Good, they have been doing amazing work now for quite a long time. And we've had Doug come over the years. We consider you a friend, Doug. You also might see him hanging out around Lake Harriet, playing his guitar. I recommend it. My husband and I walked by, I don't know, a month ago, and he offered us a beer. And we sat down and listened to his music. It was awesome. So with that, Doug, welcome up.
Sermon
Doug: Thank you, Debbie. Hey, y'all. Yeah, I'm Doug. Yeah, on that little music thing, it's, you know, in some churches they talk about having an audience of one, meaning like, you know, to God. That's how my music goes, but it's usually just an audience of one, and then they listen for a few seconds, and then they walk on, and it's one, and then another, and people don't tend to hang around. So thank you. I'm going to bribe you with a cold drink.
I feel very connected to this community. Some of us have met a number of times. I've had the privilege of being here. I've attended church here. I've been friends with Debbie for a long time, dear friend with Matt. So I feel very connected to your community. Thank you for having me back again. In a moment, I'll introduce you to Donnie.
Well, I'll do it now. That's Donnie back there. He drives, if you saw a bus out there, that's our bus. I'll talk about it in a minute. But Donnie's the driver of the bus. Brandon, you'll meet in a little bit. He's going to include a song in the sermon today.
So we're really glad to be here. We've been on the road. My voice sounds a little tired, or Donnie's or Brandon. We've been on the road since before Labor Day, and we just got here last night, and we leave on Thursday. But we're really glad to be here.
This is a big part of why we came back, because we wanted to have a chance to be with all of you here. And in fact, this building is actually a significant part of my own story. I used to be the pastor of a church called Solomon's Porch. And for a little while, we were in the Linden Hills neighborhood when we first started, and then we moved into the Phillips neighborhood.
And then on short notice, the building we were in was sold, and we had to move, and we didn't have anywhere to go. And the people who were part of this building and this church when it was called Aldrich Presbyterian Church let us come and be here for six months. We were teetering. I didn't know if we were going to make it. And I'm really glad that we did. That being a really beautiful community. But for six months, we were in this space, sitting in rows.
So now it's the Center for Belonging, and The Table is here. So it's that idea that time is this flat circle, and you're bumping into yourself and others at different times is really a beautiful notion. So I feel that very much today, and glad to be here with you.
The theme of the conversation that we're going to have today is this phrase that we're using in our work. Who's the we? If you say we, we're going to get together afternoon. In fact, we're going to have a birthday party at our house, and some of you are going to say, we are going to go to an event, or we went to church this morning. When we use the word we, we always mean some people.
The we, as the way we commonly use it, means some of us, and maybe not all of us. So when someone uses this notion of we, we're picking who we mean. When we use that phrase in our country, we the people, in order to form a more perfect union.
Anybody else have Schoolhouse Rock now running through your head and you can sing it along? All those people laughing and nodding, that is an age reference. Hello y'all, I see you. Others if you don't know it, look it up. It's really great. And that song will get caught in your head.
We the people in this nation is a framing narrative for who's included. And at the time, it didn't include everybody in the same way. Not everybody on the land, not everybody in the nation. So we've always been negotiating the we.
We also do that in spirituality, in Christianity. Sometimes we invert the word we with all. God loves all the world. And then we kind of end up acting just a little bit like maybe some of us more than others or maybe there's a little bit of we or maybe there's a little bit of earning going on. And then we try to drive that out and then it comes sneaking back in. So sometimes our we gets really big and sometimes our we gets really small.
So that's what I wanted to conversation for this sermon around this morning. If you looked on the far side of the bus, if you came in that side and you saw the side of this is faith, hope and love supporting democracy of all. On the back side of it is who's the we? A cross country journey of discovery.
We rode bicycles from San Diego, California to St. Augustine, Florida along the U.S.-Mexico border and then along the coast. I had the privilege of riding every mile of that. We had about 36 different people that rode with us on the U.S. side a bunch of times, another 50 in the Mexico side. And so there were people that kind of came in and out on that journey. That's what we're talking about tonight.
We're going to show you a little clip of that if you want to come. This is a little teaser for tomorrow night at 5 p.m. at the Riverview Theater. We'd love to have you there. It's currently airing on PBS in a one-hour PBS version. So you could just go home all by yourself, watch the one-hour version on PBS.
Or you could join hundreds of people at the Riverview Theater with the best popcorn in the Twin Cities at 5 o'clock and watch the full-length one. So are we good to sort of just run that little bit? And I'm not just doing it to prep you for coming tomorrow. It's also a question I hope it raises for you.
Trailer: Across the country to St. Augustine, Florida. We're going to do that as near to the U.S.-Mexico border as we can to bear witness to the experience of people. It's going to take us 67 days to do this. I was an activist and a pastor, and I'm a pastoring kind of activist. We know that a lot of faith voters think one way on Sunday when they're at church and then act another way on Tuesday when they walk into the voting booth. Our primary effort is to take the stories that we learn along the border and tell them over time with people around the United States.
They killed her husband, and they have nowhere to go. Nowadays the American dream is very costly. You can die making the trip. The way we choose in this country to manage this part of the border is to make this desert so deadly that if anyone crosses here, they're going to suffer in the desert. The desert is being used as a weapon to kill migrants.
Many days when it felt hard, I would look out into that desert and think about migrants who were walking 30 or 50 miles to try to save their family. They were on the run, and they were scared.
It doesn't do anything. All you need to cross a wall is a ladder. That wall is, that's actually not America. That's not who we are. It says, "Get out. You're not welcomed here." Too many people think it's a Statue of Liberty welcoming the new four humble masses to America. It's pure evil down there. They demonize these people. Now they are the bad people who come here to rape and to kill. You're sneaking into America because they want to destroy us. We have this sense in the United States of being afraid of each other, being afraid of our government, and that just gets translated onto immigrants.
But for the most part, all they want is an opportunity to have a job.
Who is the "we" when we say "we the people"? Who gets included in this? The systems that are created, they didn't just exist. Someone made them. And if we made them, we can change them.
That's the film. We'd love for you to come and experience it with us and discuss it afterward if you'd like to. And that driving question in this country, "Who's the "we"?" is answered differently by different groups of people. In political conversations, there's people who think that they hold a wider or more right sense of "we" than we do. We're always negotiating the "we."
And it's not only true in our country. For our purposes this morning, it's true in our Christian spirituality. Jesus' narrative, I believe, is to try to help us expand the "we" whenever we say "we." I think this is what Jesus is up to. Now Jesus had never heard of a democracy. Jesus had never heard of a republic. Jesus wasn't talking about how we're going to form a government.
We might want to take Jesus' teaching to compel us to think about how to form a government, but little hint, trying to use anything from the Bible as the basis for our government doesn't work very well. It barely works well for the governance of a church meeting, let alone for a nation. It's not what it's for. We shouldn't do it. And when people do, we should be extraordinarily cautious.
But in this country, we have a preference toward a democracy. God doesn't have a preference toward a democracy. God has a preference toward justice, toward inclusion, toward kindness, toward healing, toward restoration. That can come through all kinds of different ways governments are going to be organized.
We've been up to this little project for somewhere around 250 years, plus a couple of days. 250 years from now, somebody might come up with a better idea. I don't know. But what I do know is if we end up with any version of life that says the "we" is getting smaller, I don't think we're doing our very best option.
So if we could always expand the "we." So if you were to talk about the country, which we do, we travel around the country in a bus, we run seminars and conferences about how to engage in this election without losing your mind, your faith, or your family and friends. We do that stuff all the time. And we use "we the people" text.
I'm going to share with you this text that I think asks us to engage that question in our faith. But I'd like to do it sort of old-school style we used to do at Solomon's Porch when that was around, and I was the pastor there. And that is, any time the Bible would be read, we'd put it up on a screen, like we'll do in a minute, and anybody in the room could start reading it. So you sort of see it with your eyes, you hear it with your voice, maybe it comes behind you, maybe it's in front of you, maybe you can't hear quite as well. That's okay. Maybe two people start reading at the same time. Maybe there's a word you can't pronounce and you sort of stumble your way through it. In other words, we're just going to be normal about reading the Bible the way we do everything else. In our days. So you up for that? Can we do a little scripture-pasture-pasture-past-past- Sorry. You all know what I'm saying, right? Like, isn't it hilarious? You know exactly what I'm saying? Okay, I won't even correct myself. All right, let's go. We'll just pop through those when the person's done, and then I'm going to talk about the end. So here we go. By the way, this is from the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, for those who like to keep track at home:
10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves. 12 Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
18 “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. 19 In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
Thank you, y'all, for that reading. Now, it might sound to some of you like, you know, that little scene from A Princess Bride where it's like, so you can clearly not drink the wine in front of you. All this, I am in you and you are in me, and there's a father, and then someone's coming, and people recognize, and they don't recognize.
This is one of the classic wisdom teaching passages from Jesus. Like, Jesus' style of being a rabbinic character and teaching on the move in first century Jerusalem, which is under oppression by a Roman government, he is moving about saying things that cause people to be like, "What is he talking about?" This little part right here sits just after Jesus has completed seven miraculous signs.
I wrote a whole book about this. I won't get into this. If you're around one time, I think I did a sermon on this here, outdoing Jesus. Anyway, it's up to that. But then he leads into this big crescendo of the we, and it's this: On that day, by the way, you could spend the rest of your life arguing with people about what the words "on that day" means. We're not going to spend a lot of time here.
You will realize—it's an English translation of an Aramaic word that gets translated into Greek, but I like it a lot—realizing—just hold on that word for a minute. When you realize, when it dawns on you, when it becomes clear, when something that was shady sort of comes into being—like you're on that Zoom meeting, and the person is crackling and crackling, and you can't hear them, and it's all blurry, and then all of a sudden it comes clear, and you say, "Okay, I can hear you now." That thing, it's like a way of realizing something becomes clear.
Then you will realize that "I am in my Father, and you," people he's speaking to, "are in me, and I am in you." Here's the great thing about Jesus' notion of "we." He has this idea that his Father—language that would have been used, by the way, especially in the Gospel of John, because what the Gospel of John is trying to do is to replace a patriarchal system of who was your father and your mother. In fact, it starts out with a poem at the beginning that says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," and it matches the book of Genesis, how it starts with "in the beginning."
And in the book of Genesis, the beginning then becomes a family lineage. "Who's your father? Who's your mother? Who's your father? Who's your mother?" And then that tells you what line you're in.
The Gospel of John says, "In Jesus' narrative, it's people born of the Spirit and not born of a husband's decision or man's will." Removing the patriarchy and replacing it with a new, familiar system of humanity, not built around family lineage. That's just a little freebie that gets really interesting. People have been trying to get rid of the patriarchy for a really long time, and Jesus was front and center in that list.
But he says, "I am in my father," so he's replacing Father Abraham, "and many sons, many sons had Father Abraham," right? He's replacing Father Abraham, replacing Moses, and saying, "You don't have to be about the kingdom of David. You don't have to be about the kingdom of Moses, the kingdom of Abraham, the kingdom of Caesar, because you can be a part of the kingdom of God."
Jesus is big into contrasts. Any time you hear him teach something, he's probably saying it in contrast to something else. So, you could replace God there. "I am in God, and you are in me, and I am in you." Jesus' notion of "we" isn't just us. It finds all of us in God.
The Apostle Paul later borrows that same phrase in the book of Acts, where he says, quoting your poets, that you will see that in God we all live and move and have our being. So, there's a bigger "we" even than our notion of just human relationships. This is why when someone says something like, "We find the divine in each other."
My wife is a yoga instructor. In fact, she runs a yoga studio called Yoga Sanctuary over on 46th and Blaisdell. If you're looking for a yoga studio, let me commend Yoga Sanctuary to you. And in the tradition of the yoga that she practices, they greet with a phrase, "Namaste." The divine light in me recognizes the divine light in you.
This is not an idea, but it's Jesus' version, which isn't just the divine that recognizes the divine, deep calling to deep, but we are in together.
Somebody wrote on the side of our bus this classic phrase, "No one is free until we are all free” because I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you, and we are tied together. Jesus isn't just trying to make a new church, a new religion, certainly not just a nation. He's trying to call us to a new kind of humanity. Whereas one of the poets I like a lot says it this way, "We're all just trying to walk each other home at night."
And then we get these divisions. We get these battles. We get this hurt going on. And when we hurt another, we essentially hurt ourselves. I mean, you can see this imagery, lots of Christian writing in the early centuries, and then going on, you know, that we're all one body in Christ, and the body has many parts to it, and if one part hurts, the whole body hurts, right?
I mean, this is what they're up to, trying to figure out, and it's what we're trying to figure out. And the competition to that idea of Jesus is that somehow we're going to divide ourselves up, we're going to get 50% plus one, and then we're going to take it back.
And look, if that was just politics, we could set it aside. But that notion of power over, creating a "we" that can separate out some so that we are on one side, and what's the opposite of the word "we"? Them or they? They are on the other. We and they. And Jesus is like, "Yeah, all the "we's" and all the "they's," they are in me and I am in them."
Sometimes Christians get really worried that some Christians are going to get too universalist about things, like, "Are you suggesting everyone's going to go to heaven?" It's a real question. A lot of people worry a lot about it. I don't anymore, but a lot of people do, for real reasons.
Jesus is so far beyond that in this statement. I mean, his heresy for most Christian traditions in passages like this just goes so much further. He's not talking about, "We're all going to get to go to a place."
In that earlier part of the passage that you all read out loud, did anybody notice a place where Jesus is like, "The Father is in me and I am in the Father"? Do you remember hearing that? That was one of the phrases in there. Did anybody think, "Oh, yeah, that's one of those parts in the Bible that tells people that Jesus is God"? Pop into anybody's mind?
This is one of the divine passages about Jesus. If you did a course on, "Is Jesus fully human and God?" and, "How do we figure out the fully human, fully God thing?" If you kind of remember some of that or are new to that. That's a passage they point to. "I am in the Father and the Father is in me." Jesus claiming divine status.
May I turn your attention to the final statement? On that day you realize that I am in my Father divine status. And you are in me and I am in you. Uh-oh. That which you do to the least of these you do to me. When was I in prison? When were you in prison? We didn't come visit you. All of that stuff? It's this notion.
Jesus' sense of one another-ism, love one another, is not just for some of us to love some of us. It's that we would love one another. Every single other. Because my Father is in me and I am in you and you are in me.
Brandon's going to come up and share a song with you that he wrote called "Where's the Justice?" One of the things we do as an organization is partner with another group called Death Penalty Action. And they seek to give presence around times when our country chooses to use the power of our state and federal government to execute a person. And run these vigils, online vigils and in-person vigils. And I've had the privilege of standing at them. I've been on death row with people. It's a horrible thing to know that it's coming. The power of the government does this.
And Brandon created this song for one of those vigils. So you're going to hear it. You're going to hear it in a moment here. And I'll just say that one of the things we know about human beings, and that I think is true about all of us, even though I haven't met everybody yet, but I'm pretty sure this is true of all of us. Human beings have the capacity to self-harm.
We hurt ourselves. Our own selves. Like each one of us hurt our own selves. Sometimes with Earth. I mean, some of us know this pretty well. I'll put myself in this camp. There are things that I will think about myself and sort of mumble about myself under my breath. That if I said that out loud to somebody else, I would be embarrassed that I said it. True for anybody else, you don't have to raise your hands. That's okay. We know how to self-harm. We know behaviors, spending habits, eating habits, relational patterns that hurt us.
Because we know how to hurt ourselves, we also know how to hurt another. But we don't hurt another person because they're different than us. We hurt another person the same way we hurt ourselves. That we are so close. We tend to think that if we could just overcome the sociological categories of division and see each other as family, we wouldn't hurt each other.
And brothers and sisters, I wish that was true. But what we know by personal experience, what we know by statistics and people's stories, at least can be the most dangerous places for some people. Those closest to us can hurt us real bad.
The Jewish text wanted to get after this idea by starting out the book of Genesis with the Son of God and the partner, the daughter of God, having two sons, Cain and Abel. One kills the other. How the family values going there just outside the Garden of Eden, over on 777 Garden Avenue. Son of God has a son who kills his brother. You know why? Because we know how to harm ourselves.
So when we pursue justice and kindness and wholeness, when divisions of politics and sports and business and money rip us apart, we have to be reminded that there is no other that is not also us. And the us that we are in is the same us that Jesus is in with the Father.
And the Spirit will come and you will recognize Him. So if you were taught the Trinity and the Holy Dance of Father, Son and Spirit, perfect Holy Communion, Jesus never wanted the imagery to stop there. I am in my Father and we will send the Spirit and you are in me and I am in you. That's the magic of His idea.
So when He says, "Father, forgive them for they don't know what they're doing," this is what He's conjuring up one another-ism for every single other.
Brandon is going to sing a little song that he wrote. I'm going to share final thoughts here and then I'm going to give you a chance to say something if you want to.
Tell me where is the justice we all want to see.
And when I marched in the streets, I began to see.
I saw that the justice we need is the justice that needs me.
Tell me where is the healing.
Where is the healing we need?
Oh, please, where is the healing we all want to see?
Because when I turn on my TV,
I still see so much hate and disease.
I see that the healing we need is the healing that needs me.
Tell me where is the peace that we need.
Oh, please, where is this peace that we all want to see?
So I phoned an old friend. I said, "I'm sorry for the grief."
I see that the peace that we need.
And I see that the healing we need.
And I see that the justice we need is the justice needs me.
Thank you, Brandon. We pretty much live in that bus as we travel around the country, but we're staying at my house and driving over this morning. We're like, "What long do you think we should do this morning?" Brandon's like, "Maybe we do justice." So glad. Thank you for that.
I heard something really cheesy once, and I love cheesy things, from pizza to sayings. Justice means it's not just us. Justice means it's not just us.
May you love your God. May you love your neighbor. May you love yourself. May you love your enemy. Because there ain't no difference.
All right, anybody have one comment? One or two people, one or two comments? Sorry, I know we're going long. Sorry, little sweeties. It was the tall guy with the hat's fault that you're hungry and you don't get to leave yet. And the rest of you that are also hungry and can't leave yet. But I'd love to just give people a chance to say something. There's always an extrovert in the crowd that you've been exploding during all this time. You just need to say something. It'll make life better. Anybody have a thing you want to say?
Yes? Do you have something? Okay. I thought you had your hand up. Anybody have something? Yes, please. [someone speaks without microphone] Yes. Wow, thank you. It's called The Gospel of Being Human. That book. I don't know that book. I'm going to look it up. Thank you.
Hey, you all are going to kick into communion now. We're all going to do that together. The communion story, if you remember, is that Jesus is about to be executed. He's betrayed by somebody at the table. One of those betrayers, one of the people is a betrayer. One of them is a denier. One of them is a doubter. And those are the only three most of us know the names of.
And the story is supposed to imply, because it could be all of us. There's not heroes, villains, and victims. We're all just trying to walk each other home at night. And we're self-harming and other-harming all the time. And this narrative sits right in front of a system that harms. So welcome to Being Human. Thank you.
Words of Institution
Justin: As we prepare our hearts and our minds for communion this morning, just a few logistical reminders.
In front of the aisle here, you'll see an orange tape line. Just a reminder that if you are in front of the orange tape line, you'll come down to this station. If you are behind the orange tape line, you'll go to this station in the back. We practice an open table for all of us. And that means no matter who you are, you can come in and participate. You'll dip the gluten-free bread into the cup, consume it, and then head back to your seat. And as you do so, if you need prayer this morning, Chris is in the back, and she would be happy to pray with you or pray for you in any way that she can.
So on the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, and he broke it and said, "This is my body given for you. Take and eat in remembrance of me."
In the same way, after the supper, he took the cup and said, "This is the blood of my new covenant poured out for you as often as you drink of it. Drink in remembrance of me."
So in body or in spirit, let's stand. And we'll pray together as Jesus taught us, saying, "Our God, who art in heaven…”