Spiritual Resilience: Dreaming and Dancing toward Justice and Joy
Luke 9:28-36
Lyndale UCC- March 16, 2025
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
Holy One of brilliant light and deepest, warmest darkness—both of which hold and guide, teach and heal us. Touch my mouth and all of our hearts, that we, with our kindred, Peter and James and John, might encounter you. Amen.
He said he could still remember all the details. A 25-year-old John Lewis had recently gotten out of the hospital after having had his skull fractured by Alabama State troopers as he and 600 people knelt to pray on Selma’s Edmund Pettus bridge on what became known as Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. So much had happened in the two weeks since then. They were still mourning the deaths of Jimmie Lee Jackson, the young Black civil rights protestor killed by police and Rev. James Reeb, the White Unitarian pastor beaten to death by white supremacists for being in Selma and working with them on voting rights. There had been so much fear, so much grief.
And now, as they marched from Selma to Montgomery, they did so with the protection of Federal troops. And each day, their original number grew by the thousands. Interviewed decades later, John Lewis said he could still remember all the details as they finished the march with over 25,000 people filling the streets of Montgomery. With people of all races and classes literally embracing one another, singing, dancing, chanting as if with one voice. “We’ll walk hand in hand… we’ll walk hand in hand…. And We shall overcome, some day”…He said he could remember every word spoken at the rally in front of the State Capitol over which Gov. George Wallace, a staunchly white supremacist, presided but who could not contain the joy, the power, the transfiguration of the Civil Rights movement, and indeed, the nation, that day. He could still hear Dr. King’s words, “How long? Not long!”
I can still remember all the details—a hotel ballroom in downtown Atlanta. The summer of 2004. It was my first time with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries—the Pentecostal, African American, LGBTQ movement and I was transfixed. In particular, I can still close my eyes and see the moment when a young man with full-blown AIDS walked into the ballroom and Bishop Flunder stopped everything else we were doing. She had been told that he was very, very sick and had boarded a bus in St. Louis the day before and taken it overnight to be with us because he was gay, had been rejected by his family and he knew he needed a healing. When he was invited into the middle of the gathered church and we were invited to lay on hands and pray, I felt a power of the Holy Spirit like I’ve never felt in my entire life. Amidst tears and shouts, we prayed him back into love and community and watched as his countanence glowed. I don’t know if we invited any kind of a cure. But we, together, transfigured and healed him.
I imagine that Peter and James and John could remember every detail of that time on the mountaintop, too. I imagine that the experience of a kind of power and connection they had never known before was something that lived on in their cells as a palpable memory. The dazzling light that I imagine they could close their eyes and see for years to come. The sight of Moses and Elijah, symbols of God liberation and prophetic calling, and the foretelling of all that had come to pass.
***
Indigenous and African American activists talk about First, Second, and Third Space. First space is the conditions of oppression and violence that mark much of daily life. Second space is the resistance, the knowing that something isn’t right, the refusal to settle for First Space. And Third Space are those experiences and times when, if only for a moment, or a day, or a collection of days, an experience of liberation, of healing, of wholeness free of oppression happens.
It is those moments of Third Space that fortify and encourage our living in Second Space in order to resist First Space. It is Third Space that gives of glimpses of another world that is possible and help us dream and imagine how life ought be.
The story of the Transfiguration is a story of Third Space. It is a story of Peter and James and John being gifted by Jesus with a vision of the future that will be but also already is. And it is not coincidence that Jesus allows them this experience of Third Space as a way to fortify them for the journey they must accompany him on through his arrest, trial and execution. He knows they need it to have any chance at holding on to hope amidst their despair.
This question of how we hold on to hope in a world that provides us with so much evidence for despair is one that has gripped and guided me most of my life. It is especially close to my heart each year during the Lenten journey.
And it is especially close to my heart this Lent.
I don’t have to tell you that we seem to be in a collective national journey of crucifixion at the hands of Empire. We seem to be on an eerily parallel journey to our siblings Peter and James and John as they accompanied Jesus through Roman Occupied Judea with far too many Religious leaders cowing and capitulating to Empire’s rule. It seems eerily parallel to me. And the grief, fear, and anger sometimes threaten to overwhelm.
How are we to stay grounded in hope? How are we to root ourselves in the power of the Holy Spirit? How are we to practice Spiritual Resilience?
I think Jesus knew that Peter, James, and John would be overwhelmed with grief… and fear… and anger, too. And so he took them to the Mountain Top. Jesus either created or recognized the Third Space and invited Peter and James and John into it. Jesus seems to be saying: see Moses and Elijah? See these symbols? Remember the ways in which God led our ancestors out of bondage and through the wilderness for forty years, feeding and guiding us? Remember that in the face of death, God spoke through a still small voice to our ancestor Elijah, never forsaking him?
Jesus seems to know that Peter and James and John, and all of us, need to visit Third Space to both re-member God’s love and liberation, and dream and vision for what and how God’s justice and love look like in our midst, in this moment, today.
What Transfigurations have you experienced that have helped you dream and vision and hope?
I just heard from a dear seminary friend whose father died two years ago this week. He posted a picture of his holding his father’s hand as he died. And he described being with his dad that whole last day of his life and how even though they never fully understood one another, he felt a transfiguration and forgiveness like he had never known.
I thought about sitting in Elly’s garden and singing hymns with her as she allowed us to accompany her in her dying. I particularly remembered about fifteen of us singing How Can I Keep From Singing? on a day that Elly was well enough to sing along and she sat next to Kathy with a smile on her face.
I thought about Audrey’s memorial service when Don got into her empty mechanical wheelchair, re-embodying and transfiguring it as he drove and danced her into life eternal.
What moments of Third Space, of Transfiguration remind you that our God is a God who makes a way out of no way? That our God transfigures even death into new life?
The coming days will not be easy. We cannot be naïve. We are living amidst a brutal First Space. But neither can we despair. Jesus took Peter and James and John together, none of them alone. Thankfully, there is abundant evidence of Second Space. The resistors and the interrupters of violence. Just this week, this congregation embodied Second Space as twenty five of us from Lyndale met to talk about how we can be community for one another and witnesses and doers of justice and love in the world. We talked about what makes for spiritual resilience.
One answer is that in order to practice Spiritual Resilience we must seek out Third Space. We must put our bodies with other courageous people and march over the Edmund Pettus’ bridges in our lives, believing that it won’t be long. We must gather in worship and song and be a space that lays on hands of healing and transfiguration. We must sit with our dying elders and hold their hands and sing with them into new life.
We must allow ourselves to touch, if only briefly, that world that is possible and allow it to place an irrepressible, revolutionary hope that no American Carnage can contain.
Amen.
Recent Comments