Podcast – Pasadena Mennonite Church Pasadena Mennonite

Stanley Green described his first pastorate in South Africa, where his parishioners were menial laborers on farms producing ostriches and grapes. Stanley knew that the very religious white owners of the farms beat their workers. They were paid little, forcing them to buy on credit from the farm store half-way through the month. And at 13, children were taken out of school to work the farms. This history created an interest for Stanley regarding the topic of spirituality. The history of the western church created a duality between mind and body, and other-worldliness over earthliness, as well as linear thinking. This has been manifested through sexism, climate change, and wide-spread disease that plagues our society. It is time to bring back what has been forgotten: the body, the physical world, and those labeled as “other” back into our consciousness so that our world can heal and find restoration.

On September 11th, we were honored to hear from Sarah Augustine, a Pueblo (Tewa) descendant and author of "The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery" (Herald Press, 2021). This is the first week in a series called Anabaptist Academy, and centers around Jesus and Justice. The Doctrine of Discovery is a legal doctrine, a paradime for creating law. It is the current legal doctrine in the United States, defining reality for indigenous peoples, dating back to colonization, mission, and economic development — and last cited in 2005 in a majority opinion written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Doctrine is also based upon Christian doctrine deployed by the church.

Jason T. Smith, gifted in weaving together cultural ideas and theological metaphors, spoke to us on September 4th. Kujenga means “to build” in Swahili. In Kenya, both Swahili and English are official languages. And Leslie Scott, an Englishwoman born in Kenya brought a derivative of the word kujenga to the western world: Jenga. After her family moved to Ghana, she packaged and sold the family game. Jason goes on to talk about a Mythbuster’s Jr episode tasked with whether the whole foundaion of a Jenga tower could be removed while leaving the building standing? He then turns the question back to us as the church, referring to the building up of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 3:9-17. He asks, “What is so foundational to what we are as Christians that removing it would cause what we’ve built to collapse?

We enter Luke 10:38-42 with Mary and Martha, and the topic of empathy. Mike Rewers empathizes with a rather unpeaceful Martha and her blindness in the moment. But when we can become aware of our inability to see clearly, we become more able to see the other with loving and accepting eyes, which is how God sees us — and them. We have to bump into others to become aware of ourselves. God lives in the space between us and the other, and calls us into healing.

As the apostles wonder whether Jesus has returned from the dead to restore the kingdom of Israel, Jesus instead speaks of power that will come upon them in the form of the Holy Spirit. This was not a dominion over others, but the power of the Spirit of God. What if this is a power that allows us to bypass the offenses of others, that makes it possible for us to live in peace, to be able to be patient and kind to others, to trust in God despite adversity — the power to able to control our desires — power that can only be given by the Spirit of God. This is a power so simple, so sweet and profound that it can really only come from God. And it invites us to accompany others.

“What a time in the U.S. to be asked to talk about conflict resolution,” says Kathleen Klompien-Wedberg as she begins her sermon relating to our Peaceful Practices Curriculum. She notes that the past few weeks have seen the world in a time of war and aggression on multiple fronts. Yet our passage in Matthew 18:10-22 about trying to reconcile, again and again, the the songs we sing about God’s love and seeing from one another’s point of view, the interactions with the children this morning — call us to be looking at our situation with humility, with creativity, and with discovery. We’re not doing this by ourselves.