Eternally Egypt

It’s almost the end of January as I write this, and boy, what a year it has been so far. Like many of you, I’m exhausted.

As you probably know, our friends at Beth Israel Synagogue were the victims of arson a few weeks back. A 19 year old man, heavily influenced by Christian Nationalism, set fire to the place where they worship, and called it a synagogue of Satan.

This is Mississippi. We know immediately what it means when somebody burns down your place of worship. We have been here before. Beth Israel has been there before—it was firebombed in the 60s by the Klan. We know what this means.

It means you stand up and say, No. You are not going to do this to us. You are not going to divide us. You are not going to win. You might see us cry, but you will see us crying while standing, not while kneeling.

The faith community here in Jackson swept into action. Money was raised, volunteers got busy, and many communities of other faiths offered space, labor, and funds. No, you will not win, we say. We may say it through tears and gritted teeth, but we say it all the same.

So Beth Israel congregation is meeting at Northminster Baptist Church for the foreseeable future. And last Friday night, more than 20 clergy from very different traditions and faiths showed up as guests at the Shabbat service to say that we love you, and we stand with you, and those who bring hate will not win.

During the service we said a prayer* together that stuck in my chest and rendered me momentarily speechless.

‘Standing on the parted shores of history,
We still believe what we were taught
Before ever we stood at Sinai:

That wherever we are, it is eternally Egypt
That there is a better place, a Promised Land:

That the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness
That there is no way to get from here to there
Expect by joining hands, marching together.’

It’s always Egypt. There is always a promised land to reach for. The only way there is through the wilderness, and the only way through the wilderness is together.

For a lot of us right now, it’s a scary time in the US. But the God who heard the cry of the enslaved in Egypt hears our cries today.

And as it was in those days, there is no path the the promised land that doesn’t go through the wilderness. And no way to get there, except together.

*I took a picture of it with my cell phone, and when I got home, decided to look it up. It turns out it isn’t a prayer – not really. It’s actually the closing lines of Exodus and Revolution, a book by Michael Walzer.

Mississippi’s Infant Mortality Crisis

NB: We are starting a new series of blog posts, where you will hear from voices within the Open Door community. Our first post int he series is from Open Door Member Dr. Cris Glick. – Pastor Hugh

Finally, our officials called it! They admitted that Mississippi’s infant mortality rate is an emergency. It’s at crisis proportions. Indeed, it is the highest it has been in over a decade, and that is a crisis, but not a new one. And it’s not a crisis limited to that one vulnerable group—babies. This is a broadband crisis. Not just for the babies and their families that have lost a member. Not just for the Black families who lose their babies at twice the rate of White families. It is a crisis for all of us. When infant mortality rises, it’s a signal that the entire health system has serious problems. The death of infants, it turns out, is the canary in the coal mine that says danger is lurking in the depths.

So this crisis in MS means that even the richest amongst us suffer adverse health outcomes at higher rates along with the rising infant mortality rates. Even the governor of our state, who opposes Medicaid expansion, has a higher risk for early death and disability-adjusted life expectancy because we do not take the best care of our babies and their families.

Compare Mississippi’s IMR of 9.7/1000 live births with the best in the world, Qatar, at 1.5/1000. Or with the New Hampshire rate of 2.93/1000. That’s almost 300 babies per year that die unnecessarily in Mississippi. In my decades of practicing neonatology, I fought infant death with great passion. I was treating premature and low birth weight infants daily, and we made great strides in saving lives over those years. We saw deaths from preventable infections fall to almost nonexistent levels and respiratory distress syndrome became treatable. But I was fighting a losing battle because our health system was treating the results of poor societal health. We need, instead, to build a system that provides care from pre-natal to elderly, from rural areas to cities, for all skin shades and income levels. We need a system that treats preventable conditions before they cause premature deaths. Then both the newborn and the governor will benefit.

How do we do that? The underlying causes of this tragedy are rooted in poverty, income inequity, poor quality education, and unjust resource allocation. Mississippi has clusters of counties that are virtually “deserts” with only scarce life-giving resources. They have few jobs, few sources of fresh food, few health care providers, few medical facilities. Mississippi leaders routinely shuttle business opportunities, infrastructure creation, money, and medical care to the more prosperous regions of our state. And the factor of race is ever present. In the United States, Black babies die at almost twice the rate of White babies while in other countries this does not happen. Structural and institutional racism worsens health for Black people and other ethnic populations.

The lowest hanging fruit in saving more lives in Mississippi is universal health coverage. States with Medicaid expansion have seen their infant mortality rates go down since expansion. States without expansion have seen theirs rise. All Mississippians need health care coverage and services from hospitals and doctors’ offices located a reasonable distance from home. This translates to Medicaid expansion in Mississippi to cover those who work at low wage jobs without insurance benefits. They make too much to qualify for original Medicaid, but do not make enough to pay for private insurance. Mostly, they go without medical care. When they get into dire situations, they drive miles and miles to an emergency room. Without Medicaid or insurance, their uncompensated care contributes to the hospital’s losses. Rural hospitals in MS are cutting services, closing maternity units and facing closure.

Open Door is part of a coalition of faith-based institutions that continue working for Medicaid expansion. In 2024, we brought together massive support for expansion. But we still did not get it passed. Justice work has not gotten easier since then.

While we continue working for justice in health care, we treat others with kindness and respect. We help those in need. We are gentle with ourselves with good nourishment for the body, mind and spirit.

Dr. Cris Glick is a retired neonatologist and member of Open Door Mennonite Church, Jackson, Mississippi. For over 30 years, her focus was neonatal intensive care before she opened Mississippi Lactation Services, a breastfeeding clinic. Over her long medical career, she saw the realities of underserved families and worked to bring solutions. She has served on a number of volunteer boards and now sits on the board of the Southern Institute for Peace. She enjoys spending her free time with her grown children, their spouses and her grandchildren—all of whom live within a few blocks of each other.

Changes

There’s an old joke – maybe you have heard it. 

Q: How many church members does it take to change a light bulb? 

A: Change the light bulb? My grandmother donated that light bulb!

We laugh because it can be true – oftentimes we can grow used to things being a certain way for so long that we are resistant to change. 

Open Door is going through some changes right now. 

This October 1st it will be two years since I became the solo pastor at Open Door. During that time we have grown some, and some folks that had left have come back, and the reality is that we are no longer the same church we were when I was installed. 

And every so often, we have to look at things we have held onto for a long time and ask if they are still serving us. 

So right now, we are in the process of changing some things to meet our current realities. 

Like how we make decisions. In the past, we had a team of leaders who made those decisions on behalf of the congregation. But we decided that wasn’t in keeping with who we are, so we are moving to a congregational model, where the members of the congregation will decide what is best for the congregation. 

This means that soon, we will announce a schedule of regular congregational meetings. It also means that if there is something you don’t like at Open Door, you have the power to influence how we do it, and to even advocate for something different.

Of course, this sort of change in polity (that’s a fancy word for church government) means we have to change our bylaws – sort of like the constitution of the congregation. We did that years and years ago, but lIke I said, we have changed a lot, and the old bylaws no longer fit us. 

This is actually a very Mennonite path. We take Jesus’ telling the disciples that governance in the community is their responsibility (Matthew 18) seriously. We also believe in the priesthood of all believers – as pastor I am not somehow more of anything than you are – rather, we are whatever we are together. And finally, we believe that God’s voice is most clearly heard in community. 

So this is an opportunity for us to decide, yet again, what sort of church we are, and how we want to demonstrate the reality of God’s love to a world that has legitimate reason to doubt that love. 

And we will do that work together.

Political acts

Things are a mess right now. 

I can make a list. I imagine you could too. 

It’s a mess. 

This is where some of you are afraid I will be talking about politics. 

There are people who say politics does not belong in church, but that is wrong – partisanship does not belong in church. Politics is inherent in church. It’s essential. It’s baked in, as it were.

Jesus was not hit by a bus. Jesus did not die in his sleep, an old man. Jesus did not trip and hit his head. Jesus died at the hands of the political systems of his day. Jesus died at the hands of Empire. Jesus died because of politics. 

When Jesus looked at the Kingdom of Rome, and how it treated people, and proposed instead a Kingdom of God – that was political. When the Roman Empire said that Caesar was Lord, and Jesus followers said that Jesus was Lord, that was a political statement. When the Roman Government marched into Jerusalem with might and power, and then Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, that was a political act. When the Rabbis decided that Jesus should die instead of them incurring the wrath of Rome, that was a political act. When Phillip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch, that was political. When Jesus whipped the moneylenders in the temple, that was political. And when Pilate released Barabbas because he was afraid of the crowd, that was political.

The Jesus movement was born in, and out of, politics. 

When Christians stood up 160 years ago and said that enslaving people was wrong – that was political. When Christians marched on Washington and said that all God’s children, regardless of color, deserve the same rights – that was political. 

The church cannot avoid politics and still be the church. If we act as though the actions of the American Empire have no bearing on what it means for us to be Jesus followers in this day and age, then we cease to be the church of Jesus and have become instead a book club that likes to sing together.

For the entirety of Open Door’s 52 year history, there have been people who disagree with our decision to make our congregation a sanctuary for those others have written off, have disregarded, or wished would go away. Born in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement as a place where people from different races could worship together when surrounding churches refused (also a political act), let me assure you that we are not new to this – we are true to this. 

It’s scary out there. I will not lie to you or give you platitudes- this season we are entering will be ugly for lots of folks. But what marginalized communities have always known, and the rest of us are learning, is that the way we will survive this is by building stable communities based on trust and shared values. 

The politicians will not save us. The government will not save us. The Supreme Court will not save us.

So we are gonna have to save ourselves. We will save each other, love each other, be sanctuary for each other.

And that too, is a political act.

Jesus edited.

Last Sunday I preached on Luke 4:14-30 – the story of Jesus preaching at Nazareth. In that story, Jesus reads from Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor”

And that is where he stops the text. It’s literally in the middle of a sentence. The text in Isaiah reads

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
    and the day of vengeance of our God,

But that isn’t what Jesus read. He stopped it midstream. It isn’t that Jesus did not know the line was there – he was reading. He just chose not to read it. Not to credit it.

Jesus edited.

This, Jesus said, is the year of the Lord’s favor – but not the Lord’s vengeance. He goes on to make the point by pointing out stories they know where foreigners and refugees get preferential treatment, while they – the chosen people – did not.

Unsurprisingly to anyone who has spent much time in church circles, this did not please the crowd. In fact, they tried to kill him.

There is something in us humans that want to see the other guy get theirs. That wants to see the people we do not like get punished. The writer Ann Lamott says that it is a sure sign you have made God in your image when God hates all the same people you do.

There is, right now, a lot of God-talk in the air. People are using God’s name to justify some truly heinous activities. But people in Jesus day did that too. Jesus refused to give them ammunition to do it. So he edited scripture.

I know we are in a very divided time right now. Tempers are hot and division is high and there are systems in place to exacerbate that division. So, I want to be perfectly clear:

The good news of God does not allow for vengeance, does not come at the expense of others, and cannot include retribution and wrath and punishment. God’s love is not just for people who believe like we do, or who love like we do, or who vote like we do.

The Lord’s good favor extends beyond whatever borders we throw up, and includes those who we despise, who we dislike, and those we disagree with. The love of God especially includes the poor, the refugee, and the migrant (There are more than 2,000 verses of scripture in support of this) and all of those who have had religion used as a weapon against them.

Every time we use religion to draw a line to keep people out, Jesus is with the people on the other side of that line.

Every single time.

Because you exist

As I write this, it’s the 4th day of the season of Christmas on the Christian calendar, or the 28th of December, in the way we humans calculate things. Our house is still festooned in lights, with a wreath on the door and Christmas cards from friends displayed on the mantle. Our refrigerator is still full of leftovers from the meals shared with family and friends.

Growing up as I did in a low-church household, where we did not celebrate any but the first day of Christmas, or December 25th, we took all our decorations down on the 1st of January – an arbitrary date determined by the calendar we got from the bank that held our mortgage. My Catholic friends took theirs down six days later, on the 12th Day of Christmas, or the celebration of Epiphany. 

We had another friend who was a bit lazy, who usually took his lights down sometime in March, after his wife had yelled at him about it. 

Regardless of how we mark time, eventually, the lights come down, the decorations are packed away, and we move from this time of feasting and rest back to the so-called “normal” rhythm of work. 

It is popular for people to examine their lives during this slower period of the year and to choose new ways they want to show up in the year to come. Maybe this is the year you want to have a healthier relationship with food, or want to learn how to paint, or desire to pick up an exercise habit. It’s a natural time of introspection over the year that has passed: What worked, what didn’t, and what should we let go of, and what should we do more of? 

This is natural, and in and of itself, there is nothing wrong with New Year’s Resolutions, and this is as good a time as any. We must constantly change and adapt. But it is very easy to slip from thinking, “I want to change this thing I do” into “If I do this thing, I will be more deserving of love.” 

And that is not true. 

You need not do anything to deserve to be loved. You are loveable as you are, right now. You are valuable as you are, right now. You are loved by God as you are, right now. 

You matter because you exist. 

God delights in your existence. There is nothing you can do, no change you can make, no habit you can pick up, that will make God love you more.  

It may be that you need to change things in order to be healthy, in order to enjoy life more, in order to have more money or to reach goals you may have. But none of that is necessary for you to be valuable, or to be more loveable, or to matter to God.

And if you find yourself surrounded by people who do not believe that, people to whom you will only be acceptable if you change the way you look or the way your body is shaped, who can only love you if you meet their criterion for productivity, who have their own dreams for how you show up in the world – Well, may I humbly suggest that one place to start to change is to find a new group of people to surround yourself with? 

Something in the air

Last week, Open Door held our first ever Fall Festival. There were games and a bounce house and hot dogs and Pam brought her big 18-wheeler and we had door prizes. We weren’t sure who would come, but there were more than 75 folks there. Our small church was filled with people we had never met before, and there were other people we had not seen in ages, and the people who were there were excited.

“It feels like a change is in the air, Pastor,” one woman told me. “This feels good, like good things are about to happen!”

That expectation that something is on the way is the key idea behind the Christian season of Advent. The four Sundays before Christmas, Advent is a time of waiting, of expectancy, of waiting for something good to happen.

The scriptures tell us that God made a good world, but then we messed it up. The birth of Jesus – the coming of the Christ child – was God’s rescue plan for the earth. It was God’s plan to make things right, to fix what we had broken, to restore shalom.

Things seem tense right now. Wars, inflation, political unrest. Vulnerable populations are at risk, and we seem so very divided as a nation. We feel like a people in desperate need of saving, and quickly. We need a rescue plan. We need to be fixed. We need some of that shalom.

So, like the ancient Palestinians, we are caught in a time of waiting for the one who will rescue us from this domination system we find ourselves in, and who will show us the way home. That is what Advent is all about really – a time of waiting, yes, but also a time of hope that tomorrow can be better than today, that we are not forgotten, that God is not yet done with us. God is faithful, and the God who loved us into being has not given up on us – will not give up on us – and that God sent Jesus to show us the way to live.

One year in

The first Sunday of October marks one year since Open Door called me to be their pastor, so I thought this would be an excellent time to give you an update on how that’s going – at least from my perspective. Besides, so much in ministry takes time to measure, and can only be accurately seen in hindsight. 

Over the last year, without a doubt our biggest challenge as a congregation has been dealing with our becoming a more egalitarian, congregation led church. I am incredibly proud of how Open Door has been willing to stretch to meet this challenge.

In the year prior to my being called, Open Door went through an intentional plan of discernment about who we are as a congregation and who we want to be.  The last year has been mostly about us living into that, and trying to turn it into reality.  It is only now, a year later, that it feels real. 

Our normal Sunday attendance has nearly doubled (that sounds much more impressive than if I told you the actual numbers) – some of them are old friends who want to give the new vision a chance, and some of them are people who found us and are attracted by who we have decided to be. What makes me really happy is that every single one of them are there because of who we say we are. In other words, they are there as a result of the vision we cast.

One thing we decided in our discernment was that our Mennonite identity was important to us. We had no desire to be Open Door Community Church. But, Mennonite identity here in the diaspora is difficult to maintain. So we have intentionally built partnerships with Mennonite Mission Network, and we host 4-6 tour groups a year as they come through town for Civil Rights learning tours – the last one was a few weeks ago.

Likewise, we are working on strengthening our ties with our fellow Mennonites at Nanih Waiya Indian Mennonite Church in Neshoba County. In September, many of us went up there for their quinquennial remembrance walk from the sacred mound to the church. And this fall, we hosted Mennonite Central Committee – Central States for their semi-annual board meeting. I also serve as a board member for MCC-CS, which also helps in our efforts to connect with Anabaptism at large. 

Before I go, I would like to tell you about my single proudest moment as pastor at Open Door (so far). 

As is well known, one of the outcomes of our discernment process was our deciding that Open Door would be an inclusive congregation. This is more than merely changing a statement on a website, but rather, we as a congregation needed to change – to increase our cultural competence, to be truly curious and open, to be affirming of who people said they were. 

So one day in June, when one of our people asked us to call them by a new name during a potluck, I was not at all surprised when everyone instantly agreed. And then, because I am human, within 5 minutes I used their old name. Instantly, several members of the congregation spoke out and corrected me. 

What I love about this story is several things: 

  • They were hearing this person when they asked to be called by a new name.
  • The person in question trusted us enough to ask us – they were not yet out to all their family or co-workers.
  • And the members of this congregation felt safe enough to instantly correct the pastor when they saw me make a mistake. 

I think we are going to be OK. 

168 hours a week

In a coffee shop the other day, I met with someone who had visited our church. He had some questions, and he said, in passing as we were leaving, that it was easy to be a Christian when you were at church.

“It’s the rest of the week that’s hard”.

He’s absolutely right. The hour or so we are in church – where God’s name is exalted, where we sing songs of praise and worship, where we pray as a community and study the ancient scriptures together – that is the absolutely easiest hour we have all week. 

For many of us who grew up in the church, Sunday attendance was THE defining mark of our experience of what it means to be Christian. It was the evidence of our faith. We left aside our “secular” lives and entered each week into this Holy space as a way to show our love of God. There we would sing God songs and have God talk and then go back to our worldly lives. 

That’s no longer how I think of church. 

In the first place, I resist the idea of a division of holy and secular, as if there are parts of the world that belong to the world and other parts that belong to God. In his poem How To Be A Poet, Wendell Berry says, There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places  / and desecrated places.

I 100 percent agree with that.

It’s all sacred. It’s all holy. It all belongs to God. My work as a pastor and someone else’s work as a plumber and someone else’s work as a mother may be different kinds of work, but it is all sacred. The trees that bend in the wind are as sacred as the altar at the front of our sanctuary. 

The danger for churches if you talk about this too much is that people then start to wonder why, if your church building is not more Holy than the river bank or the park, they need to come to your church after all.

I believe we need church because the primary purpose of church is not to encounter God – although for some people that may happen. And it’s not to have a religious experience – although for some people that may happen. And it’s definitely not to show the world around you that you are a Christian – and I would suggest that if that is the primary evidence of your Christianity, you may need to reexamine how you live your life. 

We need church because church is not the pinnacle of your Christian experience, and not the place where God is portioned out in metered doses in breaks from your “normal” life, but rather a support group for your practice of Christianity. It’s like a 12 step meeting for your life – one that gives you support and tools to live the other 167 hours a week until you will be back. It’s a group of people who are committed to practicing together, who get it wrong and need help in getting it right, who laugh and pray and eat together to remind them that we are working to make it on earth as it is in heaven. 

Not just for sixty minutes on Sunday morning, but 168 hours a week.

Seeking the welfare of the city

Here in the US, we are in full-on political mode, some 90 days before election day. Your social media feeds, your television commercials, your neighbor’s yard signs – all politics, all the time. It can be a stressful season. 

I get people all the time who tell me they hate politics. But mostly, when people say they hate politics, they mean they hate the bickering, the my team vs your team, the name calling, the hyperbole and the bad faith arguments. They hate that it gets reduced to something more akin to SEC football than public decisions about how we live with each other. They don’t hate politics – they hate partisanship.

Because politics isn’t about teams, or elephants and donkeys, or yard signs – that is partisanship. Politics is the way free people decide how we are going to live together. It is the way we decide how to spend public money, and on what. It’s the way we discern our collective values. 

Christians have a sort of dual-citizenship. We seek to live into the reign (or kingdom) of God, while also living, geographically, in the country or state or town where we reside. Historically, some Mennonites have argued against voting, or other forms of political action, based on their faith. But I don’t find this argument compelling. In the 29th chapter of the book of Jeremiah, God tells the exiles to “…seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

As Christians, who live among people that Jesus loves and died for, who seek to work for the welfare of the city where we find ourselves, I believe we must be political to work for the welfare of the other folks in the city, or state, or country where we find ourselves. And God promises us that if we take care of them, then we too will be taken care of. Our wellbeing is wrapped up in theirs. If we would not deny a hungry man a plate of food in Christ’s name, I don’t know how my refusal to vote for someone who wants to decrease the chances of his being hungry in the future, honors God. 

I do not believe the Kingdom of God will come about through the ballot box. And I will never tell you who you should vote for. I am wary of politicians telling us that they are God’s preferred candidate. But voting is one of the ways, in a free society, that we can work to reduce suffering in the world, and to promote the welfare of where we find ourselves. And if we have the opportunity to reduce suffering and we do not, I don’t think God will hold us blameless. 

So, I hope you will vote. I hope you will, in the days prior to the election, focus on how we reduce suffering, rather than how we increase partisan division. And whether your person wins or not, I pray that you will wake up the next morning, committed to working for the welfare of the people you live among.