SATURDAY'S ACTION: "Let's Do This!"

Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. 

If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy.

                                                                                        Michael Mo0re

Siblings in Faith,

April 5

All around the country, many will gather in protest tomorrow: for democracy and against fascism; for the planet and against plutocracy; for compassion and decency and against cynical power grabs.  It's a longtime coming.  We've watched for two and a half months now, as a new/old government has systematically terrorized our neighbors and eviscerated our institutions.  And we've quite simply had enough.  There will be protests in Portsmouth and Concord, in Boston and Portland, and in hundreds and thousands of American towns.  And this is a very, very good thing!

I hope you'll join the Portsmouth protest--which begins at 12 in Market Square.  Find out more HERE.  It's important that we stand together, raise our voices together and build power for the long haul.

Speaking of which...I'll spend tomorrow at our Durham church...with 25 friends from four different churches...with facilitators from the Granite State Organizing Project.  From 9 to 3, we'll learn about building power, the kind of power that makes schools safe for ALL kids, the kind of power that leverages our energies to get affordable housing built, the kind of power that protects institutions and traditions that reflect the best of our American values, the kind of power that resists the rule of the billionaire over the rest of us.

We'll welcome friends from other churches to join us in a lively day of workshops and conversations about creating a network in Durham, and on the Seacoast, which allows us to stand up strong and think smart and work collaboratively (and powerfully) on issues that affect all of us.  "Democracy is not a spectator sport," says Michael Moore.  Protests are important.  Making noise is important.  But, over the long haul, we're going to have to invest in democracy and democratic work together.  And that's what this GSOP organizing workshop is all about.

If you'd like to join us tomorrow, and make that YOUR act of protest and hope, please do.  All are welcome.  It would be helpful -- for planning and food -- if you'd just let me know by signing in to this form:

https://officeccd.breezechms.com/form/379716

Wherever you are tomorrow, we are in this TOGETHER--protesting, strategizing, working as a community with our like-minded communities.  And this is, no doubt, God's desire for us in 2025.  I'm grateful for each of you, for all of you, and for our heart.  In such a moment as this.

See you on the way,

Pastor Dave Grishaw-Jones

Community Church of Durham

Email me: DavidGJ@CCDurham.org

MORAL IMPERATIVE: "Being Human"

POEM: "Jesus Walking Upstream"

ON WAR: "Superficial Patriotism"

ALL OF US: "Visibility Day"

ALL OF US: "Bodies of Christ"

HOMILY: "A Delightful Burden"

A Meditation on the Parable of the Persisting Widow (Luke 18:1-8)

Sunday, March 23, 2025

A Poem: "Because of Us" (Em Berry)

This morning I learned
the English word gauze

(finely woven medical cloth)
comes from the Arabic word […] Ghazza
because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries

I wondered then
how many of our wounds
have been dressed
because of them

and how many of theirs
have been left open
because of us

1.

So Luke tells us--even before a word's out of Jesus' mouth--that this particular parable's about "the necessity of praying always and not losing heart."  As if that's any help at all.  As if any of us have the slightest clue as to what "praying always" could possibly mean.  And then, and then, instead of a story about a great mystic or a devout believer or a cloistered master, Jesus tells this one about a relentless widow who wears out, who flat-out wears out an unjust judge. And, as always, we’re left to wrestle with what prayer really means in our lives, in our communities, in our particular moment. What kind of persistence, what kind of relentlessness is Jesus talking about here? Is it simply a story about personal prayer and piety? Or is it also, somehow, a story about discipleship, public life and resistance?

I have a hunch that Jesus’ point is that it’s all one and the same. While prayer certainly is personal—it has to be personal—it’s not insulated from the suffering of our neighbors or the injustice so many face every day. Prayer isn’t the passive practice of a docile people; and God isn’t a disinterested if benevolent force who has everything figured out long before we get around to caring. God insists instead on partnership, engagement, a deeply personal and sometimes even contentious relationship. Sometimes we have to get up in God’s face. As God gets up in ours.  Prayer is all of that.

But that’s hard for us. We’ve grown up with stories and images that resist confrontation, defy disbelief and aim for spiritual simplicity. For example, we preachers are prone to pithy reassurances, like: “God knows what you really need before you even ask.” Or, “God always wants what’s best for you.” Or, “God is closer to you than your very breathing.” Sweet and comforting, perhaps. But how do you square these comforting one-liners with a parable which seems to suggest that there are occasions when God needs to be pressured to move on something important; there are issues where God needs to be cajoled for justice’s sake; there are seasons in our lives in which we must go back to God, over and over and over again, to insist on our passion for the protection of the vulnerable and the healing of the planet? It’s a little unsettling, this story. And I think that’s just as Jesus would have it.

I think that Jesus imagines prayer as partnership, restless and creative and loving, no doubt fashioned in grace—but less interested in pithy reassurances than God’s own disarming passion for justice and renewal. Such a life will lead us in strange and unsteadying directions. Crooked lines.

2.

Years ago, in a Palestinian refugee camp, I met a woman who (that night and ever since) has reminded me of the relentless widow in Jesus’ parable. And her unyielding faithfulness. I was traveling in Palestine that spring with a delegation of Quaker activists, visiting Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers, hearing first-hand their stories of displacement and exile, hope and heartbreak.

And that night, in the Dheisheh camp, just outside of Bethlehem, we were to visit with a Palestinian couple who had grown up, and then married, and then raised their own family in that camp. I never did catch their names; and she was more than an hour late to supper and our appointed time together. And this meant that our delegation had eaten our hosts’ marvelous homecooked meal—shawarma, falafel, the works—while waiting for her and worrying about her whereabouts.

When she did finally arrive and collapsed into a chair at our table, she explained (over a cold plate of food) that she’d been stopped at a military checkpoint outside the city. Stopped, questioned and harassed by 20-year-old Israeli soldiers, wielding (she noted angrily) US-made weapons, who pressed her for information she didn’t have about terrorists she didn’t know. She noted that this happened at least two or three times a week, as she returned home from work. Hassled by soldiers with automatic weapons. Laughing as they poked around in her handbag and mocked her for her frustration.

I remember that Palestinian woman as I think of the widow in the parable because she was angry and relentless. Once she finished her cold plate of food, she didn’t let her husband get a word in edgewise. She fumed at the expanding system of checkpoints that made traveling to and from work maddeningly complicated. She raged in recalling a pregnant neighbor who died at one of those checkpoints, as she pleaded with soldiers to let her get through to the hospital she needed for a complicated delivery. And she insisted that as long as she had breath in her body, she would organize protests and boycotts and anything else that offered any hope at all—to bring that system of apartheid and fear down, and offer her children a future of freedom. All the while, her husband nodded knowingly at her side. As if to say she wasn’t kidding around.

My Palestinian friends tell me that they have a word in Arabic for this kind of faithfulness, this kind of relentlessness. And it’s ‘SUMUD.’ ‘Sumud’ is the steadfastness of the widow in Jesus’ story, determined to make her case, unphased by the judge’s disinterest in her condition. ‘Sumud’ is the steadfastness of that refugee in the camp—mocked day after day by teenagers, unwavering in her commitment to a better world for her children. ‘Sumud’ is courage reinforced by friendship and faith; and sometimes it sounds like anger (as it did that night in Dheisheh). But always it manifests in prayer and perseverance.  For a world redeemed.

There’s a picture you can find online—I believe I saw it first in the New York Times—of a single table stretching for half a mile, through mounds of rubble in southern Gaza, earlier this month. A long, long table brightly covered in red cloth.  And seated on both sides, block after block after devastated block, are Gazans of all ages, gathered to break their fast on the first day of Ramadan. Organizers set up loudspeakers and played traditional music; they hung lights and flags between busted concrete pilings. And there, in the rubble, they had their feast. Though they grieve unimaginable losses, though justice seems a distant dream, though mad men rule the world of weapons and checkpoints: they had their feast. And that’s ‘sumud.’ It’s easy to imagine the widow in Jesus’ parable sitting at that table, telling a story to a friend, dipping a piece of pita into a bowl. Planning her next move.

3.

When I arrive in the West Bank in early May, I’ll have the extraordinary privilege of spending six weeks in the company of two men, two friends—whose friendship has become something of a delightful burden in my life. And I know that’s a strange way to describe any relationship; so I want to tell you just what I mean. By a delightful burden. You’ve met these two friends over the past few years—Ghassan Manasra (a Palestinian Muslim) has visited us here in Durham twice and Zoughbi Zoughbi (a Palestinian Christian) preached two months ago, on Zoom, from his family’s home in Bethlehem. Each is a leader in his own community; each is a generous practitioner of nonviolence and peace; and each has suffered physical violence and years of injustice alongside his people.

Because our United Church of Christ is so profoundly committed to the human rights of all Palestinian and all Israeli people, and because that commitment requires partnership with particular people in particular places, I’ve been blessed over many years to spend time with Ghassan and his family, and Zoughbi and his, in their cities and among their faith communities. In many ways these two men have shaped not only my faith, but the human being I am today.  In their company, religion isn't mere speculation; it's the air that I breathe.

SUMUD: "Ramadan in Gaza"

RESISTANCE: "Apartheid-Free Communities"

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PROTEST: "Violence Begets..."