Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis

Hi friends, I’m Jacqui Lewis and this is Love Period, a podcast produced by the Center for Action and Contemplation. Listen, I’ve missed you. We thought, all of us thought that we would have a new season for you this summer, but in fact, middle church finally rebuild our site after the fire in December, 2020 that destroyed us. That is about seven jobs to rebuild a church and raise the money and be the pastor. You just can’t be a podcast host so hard, but we hope this monologue on love liberates will be helpful to you. Hi friends. I’ve missed you some. I find myself thinking these days about how we’re in this, what I’m calling a freedom arc in the United States of America. It kind of starts with Juneteenth, the holiday where we celebrate that the last enslaved Africans were liberated. They found out that they had been emancipated two years after, and then we end up with Pride Sunday. Happy pride everybody. And that’s an incredible celebration of queer liberation.

Thinking about all those trans women that helped lead the movement and Stonewall and all the ways that lgbtqia plus folks have been in this movement with straight allies like me, and then we get to July 4th and it’s Independence Day where we’re talking about this little country that could becomes a nation liberates themselves from the tyranny, if you will, of the crown. And I am not on camera and I’m glad because as I say that I think to myself, are we free though really? I’m a pastor in the Collegiate Church, which is the oldest continuous Protestant church in North America. I’m the senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church, many of you know, and we are the oldest continuous Protestant church in North America dating back to 1628 chartered in 1692. We got permission from the King of England to stay a church before there was an America, before there was a constitution, before there was a bill of Rights, before there was any of that we were a church.

So when I think about freedom, I think about Dutch people coming across the pond, not for religious freedom, but to trap first with the Lenape and make money and think about Anglo-Saxon folks coming across the pond to escape a monarchy and how they were really landed relatively wealthy folks who came and how when they came, they didn’t think the people on the land they saw were really people. The legacy of Y’all Hear Me, that the search for freedom that leads you to not free other people. A search for freedom that leads to the creation of a nation with a beautiful, evocative, ambitious document in which it is declared that all men are created equal, but in fact not. So the indigenous not so the Africans, not so the indentured servants and not so the women. What does it mean to be free as a Christian leader?

I’m wondering about whether we believe our faith calls us to free. All the people like Fannie Lou Hamer would say, we’re not free until everyone’s free. I think as I watch the news and in the name of the immigrant Jesus, all of the violence by the so-called ice folks against the immigrants in the name of the President of the United States who claims to be a Christian in the name of a government that elected appointed judges who are supposedly maintaining a Christian ethic, we are just behaving horribly. And it isn’t just the immigration thing in this arc of freedom, which happens in June, I think about the ongoing fight for black liberation. Recent conversations about reparations happen in secular places and in spiritual places, and the basis for this is that African-American people were enslaved in this country and nothing ever got paid. They did not get 40 acres and a mule.

In fact, in the first phases of emancipation, of liberation, any of the black folks, any of the black towns, the places where black communities harnessed their resources and grew wealth, the wealth was taken away even in a progressive up town place like New York in the 1850s, black neighborhoods that were growing wealth were obliterated by 1853 because the white people weren’t going to have it. Not in Tulsa, not in Rosewood, not at all In this nation, when black folks were liberated, when love liberated black folks, they were not paid 40 acres and a meal. But guess what? The white people that owned the black people got paid reparations for losing their property. Do y’all know that the white people who owned the Africans, who owned the humans got paid reparations for losing their property? And in this freedom arc, when we think about queer folks, just folks who happen to be same gender loving, just folks who are trans, who are non-binary, who are lesbian, who are gay, who are questioning though there’s only, I dunno, six texts in the whole Bible that even address this issue.

Most of it not addressing what we think it’s addressing and so many texts about loving your neighbor and sharing your resources and caring for the earth and the church beats up, beats up castigates denies love to queer people. I’m thinking about how if we really going to be the people who say we follow Jesus and we have to ask ourselves, what’s love got to do with this? And what’s love got to do with liberation and why love? Because in the confusion in the trying to figure it out in the wondering what it is it means to be faithful, what does Jesus say? What are we supposed to do? Love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s just so plain. That goes on a T-shirt. Love God with everything. Love your neighbor as yourself. I think Tony Campolo used to make t-shirts like that love period.

It’s not a mystery. Who’s my neighbor? That one, that outsider, that one on the road, that immigrant, that poor person. Who are we supposed to love? How are we supposed to love them? Well, if you saw me in prison, you tried to liberate me. If you saw me hungry, you fed me. If you saw me naked, you cloth me. When did we see you that way? Jesus Matthew’s gospel. Well, whenever you did it to the least of these, you did it unto me. Or whenever you didn’t do it to the least of these, you didn’t do it for me. Love calls us in love of neighbor calls us in, calls us to lay down our lives or lay down the prejudices of our life or lay down the comfort zone of our lives for these friends, for these neighbors. Love calls us to ask a ubiquitous question that happens across all the world’s major religions.

What does my neighbor need? Then? What do I need as I love my neighbor as myself. I don’t withhold from the neighbor that which I need, want desire for myself, meaning I give my neighbor what I need. One faith, the sick faith says, don’t do anything to break anybody’s heart. A high bar, I’m talking, don’t break a heart. Love the stranger. Judaism says, because you were one strangers in a strange land, do unto others as you have them do unto you. Christianity says, do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. If love calls us to love our neighbor like that, would we snatch our own child out of our own arm? Would we snatch our sisters brother’s child out of arm? Would we six people tackle down somebody in masks because we’ve been told by a person who’s clearly not a Christian that that’s what we need to do to make our neighborhoods safe?

Great. Again, I’m putting these things together, y’all, because our love has to be intersectional. Our faith has to be intersectional. When we say love, period, we’re saying paragraphs about intersectionality that the fight for the earth and the fight for indigenous people’s rights and the fight for Israel to have a state and Palestine to have a state because everybody deserves a home. When we fight for peace and sovereignty, when we say all the children belong to us, this is what we mean by love. This is paragraphs of, I often talk about Ubuntu, but paragraphs of I am who I am because you are who you are and I can’t be fully who I am until you are fully who you are. You matter. Your survival matters are thriving and surviving are interconnected. Not just here in my little neighborhood, not in New York, not in the tri-state area, not across the nation, but around the globe.

That kid in the rubble is our kid. That kid being bombed and Ukraine is our kid. That hungry kid in Mississippi is our kid. That queer kid coming out is our kid. That trans kid now being denied gender affirming care is our kid, period. So in this freedom arc, in this time of conversations about Juneteenth and Pride and Independence Day, where what’s on our mind is freedom. Oh, freedom over me. How does love liberate us all is my question. And maybe this liberation, maybe this freedom begins with us. Maybe I need to liberate myself from biases and prejudices, fears so I can love my neighbor, so I can care for my neighbor’s rights. And I know I I I might be preaching to the choir. You’re tuned into this podcast because you believe love is a good thing. But how do we put meat on the bones of what this love looks like, especially when it is in the context of people who fully disagree with us, people who are friends and family, people who voted for the thing you don’t believe in, and who strongly stridently believe that this behavior that we’re seeing in the world is exactly right because people deserve it or it’s just a short time and then things are going to be better.

How do you navigate the waters of disagreement inside our families and intimate relationships when hatred is at war with love? I’m remembering that Jesus was out there doing his thing, preaching and teaching, and someone said, here’s your mother and your brothers right. Here they are. And he said, actually, my family, my mother and my siblings are the people who do the will of God. Nice Christian people. We don’t like conflict. Nice Christian people. We think judging is like the worst thing in the world, but you know what the word justice and judge are like the same words in lots of languages. And there’s a way in which we have to kind of differentiate ourselves from the people who don’t believe that love is the path. And you might not break up with a family member because they don’t believe love is the path. But I think if we don’t confront the family member, or maybe I could say care front the family member that love is the path, then I don’t think we’re doing our work.

I think our work is to be the living body of Christ on the earth. We Christians are the hands and the feet of the living Christ. We are the body of Christ. Our liturgies say we take communion on Sundays so we can remember that we are the body of Christ. We break the bread and we drink the cup to remind ourselves that God is embodied in Jesus Christ and is embodied in us, which is to say sometimes we have to have a table tantrum. Sometimes we have to have a temple tantrum at our tables. I know that’s dramatic, but can you stand to say, I disagree with that. Can you quote scripture if you need to say love is the way and the truth is the life. Maybe we should, in the notes in this podcast, put some references for you of a few good scriptures and a few good quotes that you can ingest taken so that they’re a part of you.

I don’t believe that we’re going to get to freedom if we don’t. To quote Cynthia Arrivo, stand up and take our people with us, and together we are going to a brand new land. This Harriet Tubman gets free, gets to safety, gets north and goes back over and over and over again to take somebody with her to freedom. We’ve got to risk falling down in the swamps. We’ve got a risk being chased by the enemy. We’ve got a risk laying down even some of what makes us feel comfortable to be faithful. Y’all to be faithful to this love ethic, require sacrifice. No kidding. And it definitely requires discomfort. And when we think about how hard that is, let’s think about the one who is discomforted even to the cross to stand up for the reign of God on earth. Can we do that? I like a little conflict, but can we do that together? I think we have to. I want you family to think about what it means to love, not judge love, not impinge love, not to ride love, not fear, love, not hold back, not keep back, not push down love that increases our tribe. Love that says, we are each other’s keeper. Love liberates us to heal the world love.

Thank you so much for taking time to listen today to this podcast. I’m going to be going on sabbatical for two months. I thank you from my board and community for getting the church back up and I can’t wait to rest and play with my family. God bless and keep you. And don’t forget to love yourself so you know how to love your neighbor well. Oh, and PS by the way, I think you know that I don’t really sit around and rest too much. I’m so excited that a brand new children’s bible, the Just Love Story Bible is dropping on September 9th. It is gorgeous illustrated by a woman named Cheryl Tay, co-written with my friend Shannon Daley Harris, 52 stories for you and your kiddos. Feminist, yes, progressive lens of telling these stories with illustrations that look like the people in the region look beautiful, brown, bronze people, beautiful colors, something for little kids to enjoy because they can see. And also something for your older children to read and have theology going into their souls. That’s about love. I hope that you’ll pre-order. It’s available now and those preorders matter. So it’s the just love story bible put out by beaming books. Can’t wait to share that with you.