“Many of us came here because All Saints is a community of radical love and inclusion, that speaks truth to power and advocates for peace and justice. I know this why I came. I could no longer tolerate the hideous exclusion and emotional harm done to LBGTQ siblings. I couldn’t identify with Christianity that aligned itself with a view of God as white and male. I couldn’t connect to a religion that was competitive with other religious paths. I had been traumatized by the concept of a God who required torture and death to appease his anger yet, required I love him. Here, I felt comfortable at last, free of unfair, bigoted concepts that seemed interwoven into the faith I accepted wholeheartedly.”

Sermon by Sally Howard at All Saints Church, Pasadena, on Sunday, October 13, 2019.

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This is my home
This thin edge of barbwire.
But the skin of the earth is seamless.
The sea cannot be fenced,
El mar does not stop at the borders
Gloria Anzaldua

Last weekend, I had the joy of taking All Saints church on the road to a conference in Boston. We presented All Saints trauma informed community based care project, led by Dr. Brinell Anderson, to an audience far beyond our church walls. This conference, named “Psychology and the Other”, is committed to recognizing and honoring difference, and non-western, non-binary, non-white ways of thinking about healing. Attending were theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and mental health practitioners gathered to re-examine the western idea of individual health. At this conference, no one discipline holds the center. There is no one-way to think about what it means to be a well and whole human being.

I attended a whole day workshop on queer experience and theory. I was befriended among others, by a queer Lebanese Muslim psychologist. We all shared our experiences. I felt challenged and sometimes disoriented in a world of various disciplines and differences- where my usual signposts didn’t help me navigate the space with the ease I often, by virtue of my social location, am privileged to do.

I felt myself to be in a borderland, such as the borderlands Chicana lesbian writer and activist Gloria Anzaldua identified in her seminal work, Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldua wrote, “Borders are not a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but a spiritual, social and cultural terrain that we inhabit, that also inhabits us.” Borderlands in this regard, are both geographical and ideological. Borderlands are physically present whenever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races, sexual identities, and classes occupy the same territory; where the space between two individuals shrinks with proximity. It is complex terrain where we can hear multiple voices and contradictions. It gets harder to say where one land begins and another ends. We are exposed to other ways of being that challenge our ways. Borderlands are places of holy disturbance and disorientation that can lead to healing and gratitude, but they can also be places of colonization of difference and violence towards those we consider other than us.

Geographical borderlands surround national boundaries. Borders aim to protect what a nation claims as its own–achieved rightfully by its own merit. It disavows what is stolen and refuses to acknowledge its rightful place of interdependence. What are the ideas that shaped our borders? Our country’s concept of borders or frontiers derives from those Western Europe used to colonize, control, and profit from those who were different. On one side was “civilization” which stood as a synonym for Western Europe, and on ‘”del otro lado” –the other side– was barbarism, understood as all that was not western European, i.e. Africa, Asia, and the indigenous Americas. To see barbarism in other peoples, was a projection of the way white bodies traumatized each other in medieval Europe for centuries before they encountered bodies of color. The carnage perpetrated on Black and indigenous people in this country has its roots in longstanding white-on-white practices in England.

The church itself de-formed the face of God to be the biggest patriarchal monarch who chose some and tortured others. Those considered “other than” were marginalized, enslaved, and killed with theological justification. This includes our own Episcopal church, which arrived on the shores of this land with the early colonizers. Most white immigrants didn’t heal from their trauma. Instead, they created the concepts of whiteness, of blackness (and redness and yellowness), and of white-body supremacy to justify dominance. What a bitter irony of our church whose main inspiration was Jesus born into the intersectionality of race, religion, and class, who used his power to disrupt systems of oppression and advocated the abolition of empire greed to empower those on the margins.

I have been captivated by the texts for this week, particularly the locations in which these healing narratives occur, in the borderlands. For Naaman and Elisha, it was the borderland between the northern Kingdom of Israel that held an uneasy alliance with his country of Assyria, and the southern kingdom of Israel, in which Assyrian influence was held at bay.

Naaman, was a person of considerable power, and a nationalist. He was a warrior who colonized, who employed the normalcy of power used over others, and enjoyed a sense of security achieved by the protection and enlargement of riches and territory. As the story opens, he becomes afflicted by a disease that he has no power to cure. His social location changes from strong insider, to vulnerable other. The possibility of his healing is initiated by a young girl he had stolen from her home to be a slave in his own. It is this young person of difference who reveals to Naaman that he needs to travel to the borderlands.

Elisha does not give him a reception that matches Naaman’s cultural status, but sends him simple instructions to wash in a river that he considers to be dirty because it flows beyond his national borders. Enraged, he refuses and begins to return to the familiar superiority and national identity that has been his security. It is only when his companions encourage him to, that Naaman washes. Naaman is healed in the borderlands.

In the gospel story, it is the borderland between Samaria where the descendents of the Assyrian-Israel mix reside, and Galilee, where the citizens see themselves as the loyal heirs of God. Jesus walks into the borderlands where a group of lepers call out to him for mercy. One is a Samaritan, of the mixed race people. (Their religious practices were different, and they were outcast.) Jesus healed all ten, yet it is only the Samaritan who returns to express gratitude. Perhaps this person returns because they understand that in healing them, a double outcast, Jesus has healed them not only physically but has disrupted the oppressive sociological and religious borders that injured their spirit, body and mind, to begin with.

There are many borderland experiences in our personal lives, that cause us to re-negotiate who we are and how we see ourselves. Some borderlands are chosen and some are not. We can be affected by a geographical move forced by conditions so dire and dangerous, that the alternative to moving is death. We can move from independent living to assisted. It can be a new job loss, a new baby, (or a baby who goes to college), an illness, or death.

It can be Spanish spoken in an English speaking service, or a rug in the chapel for families, or a new mission statement. These experiences can cause us to lose our bearings. The good news is that these in-between places can deepen our compassion for others making us aware of things that others do and maybe always have. We are never complete in ourselves, but only well as others are well, only free as we are free of false borders and binaries that exclude or and traumatize other children of God.

Many of us came here because All Saints is a community of radical love and inclusion, that speaks truth to power and advocates for peace and justice.

I know this why I came. I could no longer tolerate the hideous exclusion and emotional harm done to LBGTQ siblings. I couldn’t identify with Christianity that aligned itself with a view of God as white and male. I couldn’t connect to a religion that was competitive with other religious paths. I had been traumatized by the concept of a God who required torture and death to appease his anger yet, required I love him. Here, I felt comfortable at last, free of unfair, bigoted concepts that seemed interwoven into the faith I accepted wholeheartedly.

I am talking about this today because as I presented our church and its work last weekend in Boston, I identified myself as Christian and an Episcopal priest. The responses to those words, the ways they have been weaponized to harm and exclude others were very present. (This even before attorney general Barr blamed secularists for the opioid epidemic and the unrest of young men by “wreaking havoc on organized destruction of religion and traditional values”.) One person said, “the U.S. will never be anything but Christian”, as though Christian was a dirty word—and I understand what she meant. So much violence done in the name of Jesus. I wanted to cry out, that’s not my church, that’s not me, that’s not who my faith community thinks God is!

But I realized in that moment, that I am shaped in unconscious ways that serve my power as a white, well educated woman. I used to think that my academic success was the result of good luck and hard work. I wasn’t aware of schools that didn’t have the same resources, of the ways my education itself matched who I was as a middle class white child. Yes, I was the first person to get a doctorate in my family. It was a lot of work, and I worked outside of school to support myself and pay for my education. But I wasn’t aware of the fact that the ease with which I got work and student loans was in part because I was favored by the color of my skin.

And here is another confession my friends, I came to All Saints Church because I was drawn to the Episcopal way we understand knowledge to be ever unfolding, emergent from tradition, scripture, current reason and experience. I loved the sacramental theology that saw God ever incarnating in the material world, and our amazing liturgy that moved my body in space. The welcome to the table healed my soul. But I also came here because it made me feel better about being a Christian. I hadn’t identified with the colonizing version of Christianity. I didn’t want to be seen as that kind of person. I was so upset by how these words had been used and who people thought Jesus was, that I had stopped using the words. My focus became what I didn’t want to identify with, rather than choosing to descend into the borderlands to recognize the ways that I am part of the story I don’t like.

Borderlands for me, is recognizing that I felt comfortable here also because I was well educated and respectable enough to people in our well resourced church — the majority of whom still to this day share my whiteness. I didn’t go to a Latino church or a black church or a less resourced one. I was comfortable here, unaware that that comfort is part of what it means to be white. (I need to recognize there is a root to the trauma tree, planted many centuries ago that casts a shadow across our entire nation.) I need borderland experiences to become aware of who I am, as well as whom I aspire to be —

Cleansed by radical hospitality from tribal notions, that conceive of wholeness apart from the wholeness of all people and the earth. Cleansed by the love of God that knows no borders, God who is known in the face of the other, present in all things but contained by no thing. We are called to spiritual activism that recognizes radical interconnectedness that does not collapse or ignore difference. God always calls us into holy disorientation. This is how we walk with a revolutionary Jesus.

To choose to be Episcopalian, is not to claim exclusive access to God, but to commit to a particular community, warts and all. It is to acknowledge and tolerate the discomfort that exists between what the church was and is, as we move towards something closer to the heart of God that still might not be understood by others. As Episcopalians, we conceive of God Holy, Three in One, who is ever outpouring Loving union across diversity. Part of our work in the world is to dwell in the borderlands, for our transformation until del otro lado spaces no longer exist.

We will baptize three people this morning, recognizing
the skin of the earth is seamless.
And El mar does not stop at the borders.

This is our deepest identity in all its glorious diversity.