10/24/21 “Creative Dislocation” by Nancy Petty

Exodus 16:1-12

August 21 of this year marked the 33rd anniversary of my ordination into ministry and the 36th year of working in churches. These past 36 years have been the most amazing and beautiful years of my life. It’s not that there weren’t challenges and valleys along the way, but I can honestly say that the joy and delight of the last 36 years far exceed any of the hard times.

I was reflecting on my own journey in ministry this past week after talking with a retired minister who had served a very prominent and historic church. In a conversation some months ago, I had asked him about his 18 years of ministry in this specific church because he had once told me that serving his church had been hell. His comment had stuck with me and I wanted to circle back around and ask him more about his experience. In our most recent conversation, I reminded him of his previous comment to me. I asked: “How many good years did you have before things went to hell?” His reply: “None!” He recalled how in his very first year a small group in the church formed and tried to get him fired. And years 2-18 were not much different. My follow-up question to that was: “How in the world did you stay in a church 18 years without any good years?” His answer: “Well, the Lord and I were having a good time.” He said to me, “Nancy, you have to stayed focused and grounded on why you are doing this work. You have a calling from God. You live out that calling in the church. But you have to stay focused on your call and who has called you to do this work.”

The past 18 months have made it a bit difficult to stay focused on the “what” and “who.” The “what” has been eclipsed by trying to figure out how to do church in a global pandemic that has shut down the church as I have known church for the past 36 years. Church, for me, has always been about the people gathering in-person to prepare themselves to then go out to be God’s justice-loving people in the world. Church has been the gathered remnant, singing hymns, praying, sharing a meal, learning and fellowshipping together and proclaiming the good news of God’s love and grace to a hurting and suffering world.

But for the past 18 months, church has felt more like a corn-maze at Halloween in which every turn takes you down another dead end path. The maze of livestreaming. The maze of zoom meetings. The maze of physical distancing. The maze of mask wearing. The maze of how to make important decisions in an institution in which the entire membership makes important decisions at in-person congregational meetings. The maze of trying to figure out how to keep people connected to their church when they rarely have opportunity to be with one another. In so many ways, these past 18 months, more often than not, it has felt like the “what” of church has been on how to have church rather than how to be the church to each other and in the world. During the pandemic, just about the time we, the church staff, would figure out a new approach to the challenges before us – a new orientation, a new way of doing things - something would change and we would have to start all over again to locate ourselves in an ever-changing landscape. These past 18 months of church have often felt like one dislocation after the next.

If it sounds like I have set out from Elim, entered the territory between Elim and Sinai, and joined my Israelite siblings in the wilderness of Sin to complain to the Lord, well…as my wife would say: “you can’t build on a lie, brothers and sisters.” Normally, I am not a complainer. I have too much “fixer” tendency in me to complain for too long. I live more by the motto: “Don’t complain about things you are not willing to change.” And yet, during this pandemic, I have done my share of complaining. Maybe not out loud but certainly internally. It was Jane Wagner, an American writer, director and produce best known as Lily Tomlin’s comedy writer, collaborator and wife, who wrote, “I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.” I will admit, just like the Israelites in the wilderness, I have felt that deep inner need these past 18 months.

This past week, as I reflected on Exodus 16, I realized that I had had one of my own“sitting by the fleshpots and eating my fill” moments. I was watching the ABC 11 news piece that reporter Tim Pulliam did on our church for LGBT history month. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to go to the ABC 11 news website and check it out. The piece showed news footage from our church from past services held in our sanctuary. In all of the footage, our sanctuary was filled with people – people praying, holding candles, singing, arms linked supporting one another in times of tragedy and celebration. As I watched the news footage, I relived the energy, the hope, the comradery among the faithful in those moments. I wanted to be back in that luxurious, comfortable “land of Egypt.” 

Yes, I know that Egypt represents oppression, and I don’t mean to imply that Pullen’s full sanctuary was oppressive. And yet, back before COVID, when things were easy (or at least that’s what it seems in hindsight), we knew that we were not living fully into God’s vision and God’s kingdom. We knew that institutional racism and unconscious bias were alive and well in the world and here at Pullen – we can look at our demographics to know that. We knew that homelessness was raging in Raleigh, and while we tried various things, we had come to accept a limit to our ability to help. We knew that we were in the midst of a devastating divide in our country, but we mostly felt pride and self-righteousness in our role in upholding truth. 

If this all sounds extreme and harsh, forgive me. I am not judging who we were then; we were certainly doing our best. But I am trying to heed the words of the text, and to recognize that the life we left behind, easy and comfortable by comparison, had its own oppression, and that can be called the oppression of comfort and routine. As much as I long for this building to be full again, I know, now, that we can’t just go back. Like the Israelites looking back on the oppression of their captivity and yet still wanting to return to it, I too, have been looking longingly at the past, and have been ready to trade in the sharp focus this pandemic has given me for the ease and freedom of the days that have been left behind.  

Well, sometimes God’s word has a way of reorienting our thinking. I am here today to let you know that I have read the rest of the story, and the rest of the story is about creative dislocation and moments of grace. So, I am staying with the narrative of our faith this morning, and I am choosing the possibility of freedom that comes from being dislocated. No more complaining. No more longing for Egypt.

At the heart of Exodus 16 is God’s promise to see God’s people through wilderness journeying – times, Robert McAfee Brown calls times of dislocation. And furthermore, these times of dislocation – of wilderness wandering – can be Brown writes, times of creativity in which moments of grace locate us in new freedoms and new hope.

In his book, Creative Dislocation, McAfee Brown writes:

“Would ‘relocation’ be a better term than dislocation? No. It might imply that we had arrived, that the journey was over. Our location is the journey itself. But we are always being dis-located, moving ourselves or being moved (sometimes kicking and screaming) to somewhere else along the journey. And it is the worthwhileness of the journey as a whole that makes the dislocation creative. Grace is the name of the movement that gives that worthwhileness”

For me, and I think for the church, the question is how will we respond creatively to this time of dislocation? Will we choose to see the movement of grace that centers us in the worthwhileness of this present moment and in the months and years to come? Will we stay with the journey and not focus on returning to a past where we can sit in our comfort? Will we choose freedom and resist simply trying to re-locate in places of the past that were, if we are honest, holding us back from continuing the journey that ultimately takes us closer to building the commonwealth of God here on this earth?

I know well the script being written for the church post-pandemic. I have read every article I can find on post-pandemic church. (And all the ones you have sent me.) Most question the survival of the church. Many suggest that people will not be returning to church buildings. Some of the articles cite research on how the church post-pandemic will be a hybrid of zoom and in-person with worship, with many choosing to attend church from the comfort of their homes. And then there is a plethora of material on the topic of Generation Z (the young people) and the church; and how if the church wants to reach them, the church will need to meet those folks in the streets not in church buildings.

I am sure that the folks writing this material know a lot more than I do. I don’t doubt the research. I imagine there is truth in each of these predictions. And yet, I wonder if they are taking into consideration the unexpected ways in which God has worked throughout history. I wonder if they are factoring in the creativity of God’s people when dislocated, and the movements of grace among God’s justice-loving people. I wonder if they have read Exodus 16 and considered God’s response to the people’s complaining. And I wonder if they have factored in what happened when the people looked to the wilderness and were able to see God’s glorious presence.

Over two thousand years later, and the church is still present in society. Maybe not as relevant as God wants it to be but nonetheless still present. 137 years later and this particular church, Pullen Memorial, is still living out its call to make a difference in the world. Maybe not as faithfully as God would want us to be, but we keep asking the questions and trying our best to live into being God’s people in the world. It is true, I hope it is true, that the church may not survive in its former state. That’s a good thing. After all, isn’t that the point McAfee Brown is making. But do we really think that the church will not exist for future generations? This pandemic is not the first dislocation for the church and it certainly won’t be the last. To me, the more accurate observation about churches post-pandemic might be: If the church is to remain relevant in society it will need to embrace a new level of creativity in how to be the church, not just how to have church.

Yes, a hybrid model of church may very well be the future – online and in-person. And, attending church sitting in your living room will never be a replacement for building a community where people greet each other, sing together, pray together, and build the kind of relationships that creates and sustains the kind of energy and synergy that moves us beyond our walls and into the streets together where we respond to the cries of the world and meet the needs of those hurting and suffering. That’s not to say that the nones – those with no religious affiliation and who are not a part of a church community – are not in the streets meeting the needs of those hurting and suffering. I know many people who are non-churched who are making a difference in the world. And yet, I still believe, that it is the church, at its best, that can offer people a spiritual foundation that keeps hope alive. Just yesterday a small group of people gathered in the chapel for a day of silence. One of the participants texted me and said: “It’s beautiful to be together in person.” Why is this important? I believe it’s because when we sit in proximity to one another and share a common experience we are made aware that we are not alone doing and being God’s people in the world. What I heard in that statement is not that church is about having church - that is gathering just to fill a sanctuary or a chapel. But rather it is about the beauty of being church together. Showing up for one another and creating an energy and synergy that sustains us in the world as the people of God.

Pullen Church, our work in this time of pandemic is the same as it has always been – to do the work of being the church. There will be no easy answers, no shortcuts, no return to a nostalgic ideal. Rather, we will have to continue asking the hard questions of our faith, we will need to persist in having the courage to go to the margins of society where God resides, and we must remember all the ways to be church for one another and for the community and the world. But beyond what we already know, we will also have to be creative in how we show up for one another and for others, we will need to be relentless in our care and our presence with and to one another, and we will all have to be willing to let go of a past that wasn’t what we thought it was.

 McAfee Brown ends his little book with these words:

“Who can tell whether this dislocation will be creative or not? The evidence is not yet in. It is only beginning to accumulate. The moments of grace are better discerned retrospectively than prospectively, though sometimes we realize at the moment what is happening – that this is a climax, or a turning point, or a new beginning, and that it is grace-filled…Very seldom can we structure such moments ahead of time. That would mean that we were manipulating them (and those involved in them) rather than being transformed by them. We must live with the possibility that decisions made in good faith will turn out to be disasters. If so, then the movement of grace will consist in providing enough power to turn even a disaster toward good and useful ends. 

So in the midst of uncertainty about the future, I do not feel abandoned. I feel upheld, even though I have to remind myself from time to time that there is a power beyond myself doing the upholding…

For all of us, future dislocations loom, whether their content is job, insecurity, spiritual spentness, the fear of death, the loss of familiar surroundings and dear friends, or the sheer tedium of a humdrum life. And I affirm, in the face of all that, that the dislocations can be given creative content, not just because we determinedly will it so, but because we are sustained by grace, whether we call it that or not. So hail to the dislocations. May they be grace-filled. Blessed be their name.”