Utopian Surplus: Ernst Bloch's Antifascist Hoping, Part III

 Peace, All. Here's a bit more from the hope book. Hope you dig it. -Tom

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Contrary to what Bloch sees as the idealizing (making-static/immobile) impulse in fascist ideologies, Bloch looks back at no Golden Age, but only at dissatisfaction and its struggling hopes and dreams, only at becoming and the dreams that helped bodies to make history become. “Our heritage is the Peasants’ Revolt!” Here we see: he looks back not to go back or to be “great again,” but, rather, in order to hope and dream as the peasants hoped and dreamt, even as we hope and dream anew.

Bloch finds in the Exodus, in Jesus, in Joachim of Fiore, in the peasants, and ultimately in Marx, the same impulse: a world where all things are held in common, where each has according to her needs, and where all people are able to eat—and a world where “humanity and nature no longer see each other as strangers,” but as friends. The world will be new—and so will we. We will have become, even as we will still be becoming. Simply put, Bloch’s looking back is looking back in order to dream forward, toward the dream of the classless banquet, which is the resurrection of the body.

It is true: the impulse toward change always runs the risk of going awry. Bloch would be the first to say that the longings of the heart take terrible and even evil turns. Again, he was made a refugee by the heimweh of the Reich. However, not hoping, is an impossible task. Indeed, hope and hunger are what bring the body to life, make life worth living. Though, it seems, the question must be about life for all, not just for me. Said differently, hope must become collective. We must all be looped into one another. Self-preservation (which is willing to sacrifice the other) must become communal and hungry self-extension."

~Thomas R. Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Pickwick, 2021)

The Cathedral: Ernst Bloch's Antifascist Hoping, Part II

Peace, All. Here's a bit more on Ernst Bloch's hope, taken from An Unpromising Hope. Glad folks are finding it helpful. I'll keep sharing here and there when I get a minute. Much love. Peace. ~Tom

 

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[It is] in Gothic cathedrals that Bloch finds a deep well of surplus hopes and dreams.* In addition to their shape and their presentation of space, these buildings also allude to stories of faith which, although they hold the possibility of being corrupted by fascism, still often hold in themselves the feeling of a certain longing for something which is beyond.

Bloch notes, in a surprisingly polemical fashion, that at the center of a pyramid is a dead person, a lifeless body prepared for the underworld—in other words, at the center of the pyramid is death. This is the god of slave-holding empire. In contrast, Bloch lifts up, at the center of the cathedral, that wherever there is a crucifixion (an image of the right now), there is also the body that is again alive. There is at the center of all of the bloodied bodies, still a glimpse of resurrection. There are vines in the woodwork. There are grapes carved into the altar. In other words, for Bloch, even in static materials, there is the feeling of growth, of liveliness, and of becoming. There is a yearning to live more fully wherever we look. Everything in the cathedral screams the secret desire of those who pray: the body hungers for resurrection. The body wants life. The images of a messiah, the apostolic confession about the resurrection of the body—these are wishful images and ideas, day-dreams that, like music and art, feed hope. Bloch does not need to believe them to find their value. It is not the dogmas, but the hunger for a better life, the Utopian Surplus contained in the art, and the space, and the images, and even the spoken words, that Bloch wishes to imbibe. “The last shall be first” (Matt 20:16; Luke 13:30), “The tyrants shall be torn from their thrones,” “Now the whole group . . . were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection” (Acts 4:32–35). These holy words are filled with utopian surplus and so they should be tapped for the sake of hope, and for the sake of messianic longings among and within the hungry.

Bloch’s work is very much the product of this activity: mining history, art, theology, mythology, anything he can get his hands on, for Utopian Surplus, for traces of utopia, for residual hope. All of these might be utilized to feed hope and instigate hunger and heimweh today.* Indeed, in all of his encyclopedic tediousness, this is his primary objective: to drill into cultural expressions of generations now deceased, to find in them the sweet syrup that longs for a liberated world, a classless society, something better beyond what currently is, and to pull that syrup to the surface so that it may be tasted and so that it may feed hope, increasing the hunger and the heimweh, that resides within those who dream, or who would dream of a better life and a better world.* 

In his digging through German history, for example, in search of a German “heritage of hope,” a task which he held like a heavy weight as he saw fascism rising around him, fascism which claimed that Bloch was no longer German himself, Bloch will comment: “Our German heritage is not Hansel and Gretel!” It is not blood and soil. The true German heritage, if there is one, is obvious: “it is the peasant’s revolt!”* With Müntzer and the peasants, and with Bloch, the poor and the persecuted cry: Omnia sunt communia! This is the heart of Bloch’s revolutionary hope.

Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Heimweh," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021), 17-19. 

Footnotes

*Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 20.

*Bloch, “Man as Possibility,” 65.

*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:236

Ernst Bloch's Heimweh & Antifascist Hoping

Peace, Friends!

I wrote my first book as a dissertation during the first reign of 45. Among other things, it was a study of hope summoned in hopeless times--and a search for hope that might hope in a liberating direction. This is a small excerpt from the book, An Unpromising Hope. As you may have noticed, I have mostly peaced out of social media, and have been focusing my energies on relationships, family, and community organizing.

That said, I am quite grateful for the time I got to spend digging into hope. If folks find this helpful, let me know, and I am happy to share more from the book.

Peace, all. And love. And hope. And liberation.  

PS: If you are reading this on your phone, it may be easier to read if you flip your phone to a horizontal position.

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Bloch's Hope

Ernst Bloch began his work on hope in the context of rising fascist ideologies in Germany—and therefore in the context of fascist hoping.* Fascist hopes were hybrid in nature. They were born of an idealized and glamorized German past, a past understood by fascist dreamers as having been both “pure” and “true.” Looking backward, toward a fantasy projected upon history, they simultaneously longed forward toward a future realization of the fantastic images that the glamorization of an idealized past evoked. That is, their desire was directed toward the fulfillment and/or completion of that which the image of the past simultaneously presented and promised.* The sciences of the day helped to ensure that these hopes were well founded in scientific facts. At the time, scientists had constructed and produced a number of racial distinctions and hierarchies, taxonomies that proved to be useful to the fascist cause, confirming at once fascist values and fascist aspirations toward their realization.*

These so-called truths and facts of Arian supremacy were further augmented by the newly accepted and quite in-vogue theory of Social Darwinism. In the service of fascism, science and religion were not necessarily conflicted. Fascist ideologies and hopes were enabled and even propagated by churches who held to the ancient understanding that “all authority is given by God,” and so taught that the Christian is to faithfully obey Hitler, to pray always for him without ceasing, never resisting the SS, and so on.*

In addition, propagandizing preyed upon the already dominant conviction among many in the church, that the Christian is the superior and true believer, and indeed the bearer of salvation. Today this attitude and belief is called “Christian supremacy.”*

Here was a vision of an Arian nation: The Third Reich, the final kingdom.* It was to be for these believers something of heaven on earth meant for the chosen, the few, the pure. “The eternal God created for our nation a law that is peculiar to its own kind,” claimed church leaders in a public fashion, “It took shape in the Leader Adolf Hitler, and in the National Socialist state created by him. This law speaks to us from the history of our people . . . One Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!”* The Third Reich for these Christians was the fulfillment of the promise, spoken from history, the fruition of fascist, supremacist hopes and dreams.

Of course, such hope was not exclusively for the Christian. Resourceful as they were, fascist hopes played similarly on the messianic impulses within communist dreams and socialistic anticipations: desire for power to the people, to the workers, the proletariat, the farmers, those born of sweat and blood and soil.*

Hearing any claims to be of the people, we must always ask, with history, “Which people?” Fascist hopes simultaneously dehumanized and were willing to sacrifice, to kill, to incarcerate, to displace those deemed non-people or lesser people, according to their own scientific or theological classifications.* Such as these were not heirs to fascist hopes, they claimed. They were merely sacrifices toward hope’s fulfillment, here and now, on earth, as it is in the imagined fascist heaven. In Germany these became the Jews, the Roma, those who were gay, and so on. These were rounded up, detained, tortured, and killed in the name of the kingdom, the Reich, the imagined paradise conceived by idealistic minds. To these hopes, Bloch, a Jew and a refugee who was forced into flight, sought to write alternatives.

Thomas R. Gaulke, "Hope in the Key of Heimweh," An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us Who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2021).

Footnotes:

*What Bloch means by fascist hope will be unpacked later in the chapter. (It will become important to our conversation later that these propagated hopes, dreamt by the Nazi party, where they resonated with many, were not born from within the hoper, but rather were received from an outside authority. This authority named both the pains and the responses to pain for the hoper, thereby robbing the hoper from genuine personal dreaming. In other words, hope was imposed, received, and not born from within.

*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:235–36.

*For “scientific racism,” in Nazi Germany, see especially Günther’s notorious work on the “ethnology of the German people.” Günther was praised by Hitler, having been used largely as a basis for the Reich’s eugenics policies. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss was also a leading contributor to this conversation, claiming distinctions between Germans, Nordics, Arians, and so-called inferior groups. Günther, Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes; Clauss, Race and Soul.

*For Bloch addressing this directly as “the europic principle,” see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1:98–102.

*As mentioned, although Protestantism remained diverse, there were concentrated attempts to erase the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew origins of Christianity by the state and by self-proclaimed German Christian movements. The Confessing Church formed in distinction to the German Christians (the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) and, later, the Reich Church, who colluded more directly with the Nazis. Beyond collusion by organizational structures, church members and party members overlapped. Bergen, Twisted Cross.

*Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy; Heschel, “Nazifying Christian Theology.”

*Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 2:509, 3:856.

*Remak, Nazi Years, 95–96.

*Of course, this movement was as much a heresy to Marxists as it was to the Confessing Christians—both schools claiming, at their best, fidelity to the crucified and the poor, to those the regime wished to exterminate.

"Peace, Peace." A few words for Christmas Day.

 "Peace, peace." A few words for Christmas Day. Peace, Friends. -Tom 

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Heart skin. 

Bread. 

Born. Of song. 

Of dreams:

Chains loosed. 

A feast. 

The lifted lowly. 

Trampled thrones and crowns. 

Swords. 

To hoses. Never thirst.

Omnia sunt communia. 

Holy, glows.

Shepherds. Magi. Lionlambs. 

“Home. By another way.”

“Peace, peace.”

Faith Dreaming Dreams from Crosses: Some Incomplete Thoughts Post-Elections

A few thoughts this morning. Flip your phone horizontally for better readability. 

Peace, all. 

Tom

"[A theology of the cross] is a way of life that we live out. It is a practice that involves risk. It is a story that, if truly told, courts danger but moves also into hopeful solidarity, the solidarity of those who are moved by the pain of God in the midst of this world, or by the pain of the world in the midst of God."

~ Vítor Westhelle 

"Hope is to hear the melody of the future." ~ Ernst Bloch | "And faith is to dance to it." ~ Rubem Alves

 

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Pushing us beyond the limits of a Theology of the Cross, our teacher Vítor Westhelle challenged us to develop Theologies *from* the Cross. Well, sort of. But not quite. More than that, he challenged us to discern what it would look like for us to live as theologians *from* the crosses in and around our communities. 

“What does it mean for us to stand in the places where people are suffering, persecuted, and crucified today? What does it mean to see, to perceive, to feel from the Cross, from the crosses?” he would ask. And from there, our teacher Rubem Alves would add, what will it look like to dream the dreams of the Crucified? From the valleys, will we dream the lowly lifted? From the hungry places, will we dream banquets and feasting? From the heart of the abandoned and forsaken, will we dream the isolated and imprisoned among us brought in and celebrated and honored as family? From the grave, will we play the flute? Will we hear the melody of the And Yet and join the skeletons in their dancing?

Learning from these two, we come to understand lived faith as both a place/positioning that influences our theological perceptions, as well as a deeply felt communal desire and wish that moves our shared heart. Again, we gather around crosses. We dream dreams. Or, said differently: we gather in forsaken places and hope against hope against hope. This is the birthplace of solidarity. 

Faith is not an imagined past to be returned to “again.” And it is never faith in a person, whatever their position of power. The dreams of the Crucified are not for projecting onto politicians, but for moving our bodies and communities into action, into “Resurrection practices,” as Westhelle liked to call them. 

We should have no doubt. Much pain is ahead. There are certainly plans to erect new crosses (if we are to take the elected at their word). There are plans to take away rights. To take away care. To imprison. To deport. To continue fueling and funding genocide and aggressions and war. And so on. 

Now is the time to live this kind of faith. To live as theologians from the cross. And to act as Resurrecting communities. Let’s gather. Let’s dream. Let’s rise again. And let’s mobilize. Not for the sake of a party or politician. But for the sake of all who suffer. And for the life of the world. 

Amen. 

Dirty Feet, Hungry Places, & Counter-Kingdoms: Sermon/Study for the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost, 2024

Peace, All! Here's a reflection I shared last Sunday. More of a Bible Study than a sermon with stories and waving and the like. Nonetheless, I hope it's useful to some! The "three considerations" are real, I think, as we seek to follow today. If you are reading by phone, reading might be easier if you turn your phone to a horizontal position. Many thanks to Pastor Lily for trusting me to hang with her fun crew. There are some lovely folks out at Faith in Walworth, to be sure! Enjoy. Peace. ~Tom

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Dirty Feet, Hungry Places, & Counter-Kingdoms: Sermon/Study for the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost, 2024 | Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church, Walworth, WI

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

~Mark 8:27-33, NRSV-UE

Good morning again, everyone. 

And: “Get behind me Satan!”

[PAUSE]

And thank you Pastor Lily for leaving us with this beautiful and uplifting text from the Gospels today. Amen? 

[laughter or awkward silence here]

I’m grateful for this little bit of time to share with all of you

to dig into the beautiful, sacred, holy, and complicated scriptures 

and to think together about how the Spirit might be speaking through them and provoking us, in community, today. 

Amen? 

[PAUSE] 

Here’s where I want to start:

Anytime Jesus calls somebody a name in the bible. 

I hope, I think, I desire for it to be the case that, Jesus,

in his act of name-calling 

isn’t just being, mean.

Amen? 

But, rather, I hope, I think, I desire 

for it to be the case

that something 

maybe, 

in that unexpected event that takes place  

between Jesus and (in this case) Peter…

my hope is that something just might be trying to be said 

in and through that moment 

that might otherwise not have been heard. 

In other words: 

My hope when Jesus says something like what he says to St. Peter today,

is that something is being said that’s bigger 

than just what’s-being-said. 

Amen? 

And that maybe that’s why the Gospel writers decided to write it down. 

And to put here in teh 8th Chapter of Mark. 

My hope is that something is being said that’s bigger 

than just what’s being said. 

And.

I actually do think that that’s what’s going on today. 

And 

that’s what I want to spend just a little bit of time looking at and unpacking with you all this morning. 

And my plan is to do that more in the style of a Bible Study than in the style of a traditional sermon. 

How does that sound to all of you? 

[positive responses abound]

Great. Then let’s begin! 

To help us dig in this morning, then, 

I would like to offer us the following guiding question: 

What’s going on–and what’s actually being said –when Jesus calls Peter, “Satan?” 

What’s going on–and what’s actually being said–when Jesus calls Peter, “Satan?” 

[PAUSE] 

Weird enough for you all yet? 

What’s going on–and what’s actually being said–when Jesus calls Peter, “Satan?” 

[PAUSE]

There are a lot of places we could look for answers to this question. 

Both the scriptures and history have a lot of nooks and crannies to explore and to illuminate and be illuminated by. 

But, for the sake of time, I want us to consider just three in hopes that they will help us find some clarity as we engage our question. 

Amen? 

Amen! 

Okay, then let’s do it. 

PHYSICAL MOVEMENT

Our first consideration as we engage our question this morning has to do with physical movement. 

And I’m not sure I can overemphasize this. 

But: 

in the gospel of Mark, to be a disciple, a follower, that is: to follow Jesus 

really means to follow Jesus. 

Jesus is on the Way somewhere in the Gospel. 

Even if it’s not really clear “to where” right at the beginning. 

Nonetheless, to follow Jesus, the fisherman learn, means literally 

getting up, 

getting out of the boat, 

and leaving some stuff behind 

(some of them even their family-situation)

because to follow meant to follow 

and it’s hard to journey with a boat-full of stuff weighing you down. 

Amen? 

Amen! 

From boat to boat, they now go with Jesus physically from village to village. 

His movement will become known by his future followers as “The Way.” 

The road. 

The path. 

The street. 

El Camino.

Right? 

To follow Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, in other words, means 

to get dirty feet–to go, to travel, to walk the path of faith and hope with Jesus.

And the whole Gospel of Mark, up to this point in Chapter 8, where we’re reading from today, has been marked by such movement. 

So:

physical movement.  

This is consideration number one. 

“To follow means to follow.” 

PHYSICAL FEEDING

The second second detail of Jesus’ ministry for us to take into consideration (as we try to figure out what’s going on when Jesus calls Peter “Satan”) is related. 

It is also physical. 

However, it has to do not just with following, but also, with food. 

With feeding. 

And with feasting. 

And, of course, because of that, with sharing. 

And community. 

And coming together. 

Like this. 

That is, (again) since Gospel of Mark started, when Jesus was baptized and then pushed by the Spirit into his wilderness and then also his mission, 

Jesus has done a lot of things while on that “Way” of faith and hope. 

Jesus has healed countless people 

and exorcised a bunch of demons 

and even brought the daughter of Jairus up from the dead. 

Which is… incredible.  And amazing. And beautiful. 

Plus he’s also preached and taught and prayed and rested. 

But perhaps the most significant for us today with our question–is that twice [in this Gospel-of-Mark] once in Mark 6 and then again in Mark 8…

twice,

Jesus and his followers

who were physically following him on the Way 

feed first 5,000, 

and then again 4,000 people–

[so about three times the population of Walworth if you count both feasts] 

and, as is often mentioned, 

that’s probably not counting everyone who was there.

Which is to say that, here in Mark’s Gospel, central to following Jesus, 

who calls people out of boats and down the path of faith & hope, 

[also…]

is love, 

is sharing, 

is sharing food, 

or as it is said in acts, 

making sure that all are able to eat and that 

each has according to each one’s needs. 

In other words, central to the communities that pop up around Jesus

(like this one)

is this idea of the communion of saints, 

the collective, 

the thing we act out every time we have communion and pass it out to each other–

that no matter how much or how little we have that morning when we show up, 

at the end of the day, everybody–everybody, everybody–

who was there in that moment (and who wanted it) 

gets a piece a bread and gets something to drink. 

How beautiful is that? 

All who want, get. And that’s what we act out in church right here at this table every week.

All who hanger are able to eat. 

And that’s what we call sacred. 

That’s what we call a sacrament. 

That’s what we call the literal, tangible, embodied presence of Christ. 

That’s what we call the presence, the Body, of God. 

And so it is already here in the Gospel of Mark. 

Not just inside.

But out in the world.

Where the crowds gather for good news and good food.

(^Perhaps these are the same^). 

1 To follow Jesus is to follow Jesus. 

2 And to follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into the hungry places so that everyone who needs to–and everyone who wants to–is able to eat. 

Amen? 

These are our first two considerations. 

FAITH IN THE FUTURE REIGN MEANS LIFE IN A COUNTER-KINGDOM

The third thing for us to consider, is that the Gospel of Mark itself, 

(again, from it’s very beginning) 

has called itself the Good News of Jesus, the Son of the God. 

That’s how the Gospel opens right? Those are the first words. 

“This is the beginning of the Good News of Jesus, the Son of the God.” 

In Greek there’s a “the” before all of the nouns. 

“This is the beginning of the Good News of Jesus, the Son of the God.” 

The story is later added to by Jesus when Jesus starts going around and telling people that his Father’s Kindom or “God’s Reign of Love” is near. Or nearby. Or “at hand,” it’s sometimes translated, meaning,“super close, so close you can touch it.”

And this Reign of Love, we learn pretty quickly, 

this Kindom of God is what we might call a counter-Kingdom. [Or a counter-culture]. 

Very quickly we learn God’s Reign as Jesus envisions it is topsy-turvy, upside down. 

Here, in God’s kingdom, 

the first are last, 

the last are first, 

the hungry are fed, 

the peacemakers are blessed,

[Can you imagine that?] 

and the lowly are lifted from the dust. 

In Other words, here, in the Reign of Love, 

here where Good News is delivered about Jesus, the Christ, the Son, of the God–

well… 

here (in God’s Reign among us) is really super different from the Kingdom called Rome, where Caesar is the son of the gods, and where, the good news often manifests in the crucifixion of Jesus and of messiahs, rather than in the lifting, the resurrecting, the rising up of the lowly and the last. 

“God’s Reign of Love in near,” says Jesus. And it’s a heck of a lor different than this. And to be of it, to participate in it means look and think and act and behave in a way that’s different.  

1 So, in the Gospel of Mark, to follow Jesus is to follow Jesus. 

2 To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into the hungry places so that everyone who needs to–and everyone who wants to–is able to eat. 

3 And to have faith in the future that Jesus proclaims means to be different–live a life that’s counter-kindgom in who it values and who it seeks to lift up.

Amen? 

And that’s three! 

Amen? 

ROCKY

And that brings us to Peter. 

Peter! Arguably one of the most beloved disciples. For goodness sake, Jesus nicknamed him The Rock! Rocky. Rocky Johnson. The strong one. 

The supportive one. A foundation. A “cornerstone” of so much of the ministry Jesus was about to build. 

So why (to bring us back to our question)

would Jesus go and do something like calling Peter, “Satan?” 

While I don’t think we can (or should) explain all of the strongness (or strength) 

of that language. 

I do think, considering all we’ve considered, that we have a few clues. 

Amen? 

I mean: in the Gospel of Mark:

to follow Jesus is to follow Jesus. Amen? 

And: To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus inot the hungry places so that everyone who needs to–and everyone who wants to–is able to eat. Amen? 

And: To have faith in the future that Jesus proclaims means to be different–and to live a life that’s counter-kindgom in who it values and in who it seeks to lift up. Amen? 

So, When Peter, the Rock, the Strong and the Sturdy one, takes all that power and privilege that he has as Jesus’ sort-of number-one, 

all that leverage he could use to lift the lowly and feed the hungry, 

all that power that he could use to shepherd what he will eventually call his sheep lovingly and with a little bit of a push from behind, 

When Peter takes all he has, and all he’s used to back-up his Messiah, 

and, then, well, he get’s ahead of him, in front of him, in-the-Way of him, instead… 

All that power that pushed from the back, all that rock that helped the disciple roll, soon became a stumbling block, a trip-wire, a barrier, instead. 

In other words

(and please forgive the rhyme): 

In that moment, for that moment, on the way, in the movement, 

Peter became a block rather than a rock. 

Rather than the rock, Peter became the block. 

He became about himself rather than about the many. And so, he got in the way. 

And if he would’ve stayed there, there would’ve been a lot of people who wouldn’t have been healed, who wouldn’t have followed, who likely wouldn’t have had enough to eat. 

So, I think, (it’s my best guess) that Jesus gave him a little redirection.

Peter became a block rather than a rock 

and Jesus helped him to reposition. 

FOR US

As I read this text with you all: 

I think the spiritual, community question for me, for us, this week is kinda simple. 

The question is just: 

Are we Following? 

Not: Am I following? Remember, we do faith together. Amen? 

But: Are we following? Together? 

Are we on the Way of Faith and of Hope and of Love–into the hungry places, for the sake of all who hunger? Amen? 

And the question is: 

Who are we feasting with? And where (and with whom) might we be called to share and to feast some more? Amen? 

And of course the question is: 

How are we being called as Faith in Walworth, as the larger church, as people who stumble and fumble but who on our better days try to do out best to follow Jesus on the path…. How are we being called as we are, where we are, as followers of Love, to be counter-kingdom or counter-cultural–to speak up and to speak out in Love–for the sake of the least, the last, and the lost around and among us? 

May these questions stir in our hearts–and, in time, stir us to move. 

Amen. 

[Note: the sermon actually ended differently at Faith (as we went a little of script) but this was the “first draft” on paper! Peace and love, all. ~Tom]