I’ve been chewing on a lot lately, especially since the killing of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7th in a city I love, Minneapolis. But before I get into any of that I want to note how grateful I am to receive all of your birthday greetings over the weekend. Thanks for reaching out and being connected in a season when so much is becoming disconnected by systems and leaders who seemingly want to keep neighbors from neighborliness.
Not only was last Saturday my 52nd birthday, but last Friday, January 16th marks the day Aimée and I were ordained as ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) pastors in the South Dakota Synod, and this year marks our 5th year with these official titles (even though we’ve been about this work for many, many more seasons now). It’s no small thing that got us to move from the city we love. And while peace, happiness, and a sense of “home” have been genuinely hard to come by in the decade since I moved out of North Minneapolis, I am also reminded that my life is deeper with a found fullness that comes from the struggles of these last 10+ years.
At our January 2021 Ordination service we could only have 10 people in the room due to the COVID pandemic. This led us to create an online experience that would not have existed if we hadn’t needed to ask so many to contribute by sending in a video. I was especially moved this morning by the recorded prayers and one of the songs in that service. Here it is:
“We are all one in Christ, we are one body, all one people out of many…”
You can view our whole ordination service here. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about it is because Aimée and I just finished leading the music at an event for a group of pastors and deacons from the Dakotas and Minnesota. I hadn’t until now realized how many of the songs from both experiences overlap. Somos Uno, Canticle of the Turning, and our Tremé Alleluia were a part of these worship services as well as our Street Kyrie, which has taken on an added context with Renee Good’s death.
We’ve come to the part of this post that’s been keeping me awake and restless for the last week and a half. It came to a head with a viewing of Terry Moran’s Substack in which he states that he struggles with using the “F-word” (fascism) to describe the actions of our governmental systems in the United States. This led me to want to get to a better working knowledge of my own understanding because I have a couple family members and a few friends who have continued to insist that they support the actions of this administration and this president. They say things like “I’m conservative and I support conservative values” when they reference what’s happening in the United States. The problem I have with this statement is that Trump, his appointees, and his mostly Republican and white christian nationalism enablers are not acting as conservatives.
A widely accepted tenant of conservatism is that it seeks to preserve institutions and limit power. If you agree with these main tenants of conservatism then why continue to lend support to leaders, parties, and systems that actively dismantle conservative ideals? I suspect that my friends and family who are claiming conservatism as the motivation for their support of our current governmental systems may be ignorant, or worse yet willfully ignorant, of how our elected officials have abandoned conservatism for Ethno-Nationalism and and Authoritarian Populism.
For my own part, I left conservatism many years ago. But I no longer see liberalism as the opposite of conservatism; to me its opposite is progressivism, and I define liberalism as being able to take freely from both/all stances. It seems to me that when either conservatism or progressivism are taken to their puritanical ends we lose all freedom. This is what all pietistic purity cults do. But I am not a political scientist. I am a song-writer and more recently a Lutheran pastor, so these words from Bruce Cockburn come to mind: “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse“, and “got to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight“.
If you’ve read this far I want to conclude with some of what I am reading and hearing from Minneapolis. The last video I’ll post is my most recent tune… “what is this armor of light, if not the body of Christ.” gratefully yours and coveting your prayers, Joel
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