EARLY ON IN my training for hospital chaplaincy the spiritual care director asked each student to choose a biblical role model of faith. I chose the Apostle Paul. It wasn’t an obvious choice for someone raised as a feminist and aware of the damage done to women through interpretation of Paul’s letters and those attributed to him.
Despite that, I love the way Paul’s faith and humanity shine through his words. Even in his letter to the Romans, one of Paul’s last and most-polished, we have a sense of his limitations. He mixes confidence and humility, offering an unflinching look at sin: collective sin and the sin that is particular to each of us, broken beloveds of God.
I need Paul’s writing on sin so that I don’t grow too self-righteous. When Paul writes that we received God’s grace “while we were still weak” (Romans 5:6), I am reminded that I can’t claim righteousness before God on my own. It is only when we have an honest estimation of ourselves and our capabilities that we can engage in justice work without moralizing or neglecting to set good boundaries.
Taking sin seriously means not only fighting back against oppression but taking a hard look at myself. In my feminism, am I aware of and working to end the ways misogyny particularly oppresses black, brown, Asian, and Indigenous women, as well as queer and trans people? Do I put my own concerns first or truly seek liberation for all people?
June 7
With Us Always
Genesis 1:1-2, 4; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20
READING THE CREATION story in Genesis, I imagine myself deep inside a dark place, with the breath of God like a gust of wind. I recall James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Creation,” especially as it is read by James Earl Jones in a short film featuring animated clay art by Joan C. Gratz. The darkness through which God births the world is “blacker than a hundred midnights / down in a cypress swamp.” From that rich blackness comes the countless colors of the myriad creatures that dwell on the earth.
Too much of Christianity has lost the sense of mystical connection to creation and the Spirit of God animating all that is. That understanding has been replaced by a mindset of colonizing, taking what we can from nature and forgetting about the consequences.
In the present day, one stark example is Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who has weakened environmental restrictions and accelerated deforestation of the Amazon. As a result, the Amazon, “the lungs of the world,” could flip from absorbing carbon to producing it.
It was difficult not to despair when I first read that. The powerful continue to claim the world and its natural resources as their domain. The poor eke out a living trying to extract those resources and sell them, while also bearing the heaviest burdens from mineral-related conflicts and climate change.
It can be difficult to remember that the world does not belong to the rich and powerful; the risen Christ is sovereign. The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that in Matthew 28:16-20, Christ not only expands the mission of the disciples to include both Jews and Gentiles, but also claims the entire world. The gospel begins with the coming of Emmanuel—“God with us”—and ends with “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). Jesus sends the Spirit to stay with us in the struggle against the dominant view of the earth as ripe for colonization and subjugation. Instead, we can embrace our place interwoven in all of creation.
June 14
Our Sturdy Hope
Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7; Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35 - 10:8-23
FOR YEARS I'VE been part of grassroots efforts to prevent gun violence in Chicago. My spirits were lifted when a nonviolence activist told the story of negotiating a truce among rival groups in his neighborhood, bringing a dramatic reduction in violence. I remembered that hopeful account as my neighborhood on the West Side had shootings almost weekly in a battle for territory this winter.
Like recipients of Paul’s letter in Rome, the people I meet sometimes wonder if suffering is a sign of God’s abandonment. I find it difficult to see God’s presence when successes turn to setbacks. Yet we continue to work in hope.
In one translation, Romans 5:5 says that “hope does not disappoint us.” In another, “hope is not ashamed.” The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes the allusion to Psalm 22—which begins with the cry of being forsaken that Jesus spoke from the cross—and in turn recalls that those who cry out to God are not put to shame.
Some of Paul’s theological opponents boasted in their spiritual and material success. Paul turns this charge around and argues that suffering marks a true disciple of the crucified Christ. Believers going through afflictions are victorious yet remain vulnerable in the here and now.
Paul uses the word dikaiao, which can mean “vindicate” or “acquit,” as well as “justify.” He links this vindication with the Holy Spirit who empowers us to keep living in ways that connect us with God’s action in the world—even when that action is difficult to see. The Spirit having been poured out means the believers can continually grow into the life of discipleship. That includes holding on to a hope in a God who has not abandoned us, who will not leave us ashamed.
June 21
Sinners, Be Converted
Genesis 21:8-21; Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17; Romans 6:1-11; Matthew 10:24-39
THE EUCHARISTIC PRAYER most familiar to me includes the lines “in the harmonious world of your creation, the plants and the animals, the seas and stars were whole and well in your praise.” Then sin scars the world.
The image of a wound makes sense when thinking of sin. We all know its reality. Yet if there’s anything most progressive Christians like talking about less than sin, it’s conversion. I’ve been wrestling with sin and conversion as I read excerpts from the homilies of martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero. Sin and conversion are two of his main themes.
In the late 1970s, violence perpetrated by elites and their hired paramilitaries began in El Salvador, setting in motion forces that continue to force people to seek asylum in the United States today. Romero preached to his congregation in August 1977 about the torture and murder of two of his catechists and a priest, while also declaring the church’s solidarity with the families of those imprisoned and disappeared by the armed forces. He compared Jeremiah’s prophetic work to that of the church in El Salvador, the work of calling out “whatever would enthrone sin in El Salvador’s history, and calling sinners to be converted.”
The next Sunday Romero elaborated that this included not only the most powerful in El Salvador, but all people. “If you live out a Christianity that is good but that is not sufficient for our times, that doesn’t denounce injustice, that doesn’t reject the sins humankind commits, that consents to the sins of certain classes so as to be accepted by those classes,” he preached, “then you are not doing your duty, you are sinning, you are betraying your mission. The church was put here to convert humankind, not to tell people that everything they do is all right.”
Paul writes in Romans 6 that dying to sin makes us free to live in Christ. To reach that freedom requires transformation—conversion—and healing for the wounds of sin and injustice.
June 28
How Long, Lord?
Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42
MY HUSBAND AND I were on a walk near our home in Chicago when we arrived at the spot where 16-year-old Angie Monroy had been killed in the crossfire of gang violence. We stopped to pray at the memorial. At its center is a handmade heart with the words: “the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).
I sometimes worry I have become numbed to such loss of life. Then I find I have more tears to shed. At times those tears are in sadness, at others in anger; often they are an inseparable mix of the two. With Psalm 13, I cry “how long?” That was my cry also on the summer day when my husband and I were about 100 feet away from a young man when he pulled a gun and opened fire. Hundreds of people were nearby on the lakeshore. The forces of sin run rampant around us. On the West Side of Chicago, I see the results of white supremacy and ravages of a capitalism that requires the poverty of many for the wealth of a few.
Yet those responsible for killing Angie Monroy and others in Chicago are not permanently ensnared. Neither are the gunmen in mass shootings across the U.S. Though Paul’s letter to the Romans names that the “wages of sin is death” (6:23), he leaves room for redemption: All can cease being “instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life” (6:13). Until we all want to change the warped priorities of our policies, we will continue paying the wages of sin and asking, “How long?”
Celeste Kennel-Shank, author of What You Sow Is a Bare Seed: A Countercultural Christian Community During Five Decades of Change, is an ordained Mennonite minister living in Chicago.
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