By Rev. Kathryn Ray

Grief is a communal process.  

This thought echoed louder and louder through my mind and heart as we toured the museum and memorials in Trujillo, Colombia.  A father and son who had lost family members in the government-sponsored massacre that took place in that community from 1986-1994 guided our small delegation from the Global Baptist Peace Conference. They literally led us along the path this community had taken in search of healing and justice in the face of the unimaginable.  With each step we took, each different monument we visited, I saw new visions of the transformational, defiant power of a community that comes together to grieve, to tell their story, and to refuse to stop telling it. ​

By Rev. Kathryn Ray

"Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today."... Zacchaeus stood up and said to the LORD, "Look, LORD! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount." Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham." -from Luke 19

​Public benefits offices are among the most hellish devised by human hands.  These are the places you go to apply for food assistance, Medicaid, or financial assistance with housing and utilities. Where you wait for four to six hours under harsh fluorescent lighting in hard plastic chairs, surrounded by dozens of other people who are stressed and in pain, all to spend five minutes with someone who may or may not understand exactly what services you are requesting. ​

 By Rev. Kathryn Ray

“How does it feel to be a problem?”
 
The question fell to me to answer in a small group setting last February, when I attended Rev. Dr. Greg Ellison’s Fear+Less Dialogues workshop as part of the Young Adult Initiative in which NSBC is participating.  He calls it “one of the five most difficult questions to answer.”[2]   

Rev. Dr. Ellison- pastor, psychologist, and professor at Candler Theological School- did not come up with this question on his own. He draws it from The Souls of Black Folk, by the luminary thinker W.E.B DuBois.[1] Rev. Dr. Ellison also believes that this experience of problem-ness is something many of us- across diverse backgrounds- can relate to. When you are blazing a new path that those around you cannot see, when you are living or working in a space whose values, whose basic assumptions about life, conflict with your own, you may come to find that you are a problem.

By Rev. Kathryn Ray
 
The story of David and Jonathan is one of the great love stories of the Bible.  The text tells us that, soon after they first met, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.  They are thus, perhaps, the first known soulmates.
 
When I was doing background research for this sermon, as is my wont, a lot of articles that came up were debating whether or not we could see David and Jonathan as a gay couple. When we read these words of David that Jonathan’s love "surpassed the love of women," it does fire the imagination.
 
It’s important to remember that neither of these men would have claimed a sexual orientation. That understanding of human sexuality is alien to the text. And furthermore, marriage in this time was not what it is in our day and age. It wasn’t a union between lovers or soulmates.  It was a property transfer, a formal arrangement to ensure and to safeguard the creation of children who would literally keep you alive in your old age and insure that you had a legacy.
 
But keeping in mind this distance between us and our text, I think I stand on solid, biblical ground when I say that the love between David and Jonathan was deep, true, and abiding. 

By Rev. Kathryn Ray

​Jesus answered, "Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." "How can this be?" Nicodemus asked. -John 3:5-9

You know when you've done something basically your entire life, and then suddenly one day it's like you're discovering it for the first time?  This is the story of how I rediscovered sacred reading. Even though I'd literally been doing it the week before.

By Rev. Kathryn Ray

About 10 years ago, I was reflecting on the story of the potter’s house in Jeremiah, and I wrote the following prayer in a journal:
 
“You are not the potter, and I am not the clay. Clay can only be molded for a time, and then it hardens, never again to change form and evolve, until it ultimately breaks into shards to be thrown away.  If I am to be sculpted by a divine hand, let it be as Play-Doh in the hands of a child.  Bright and soft, morphing and transforming, from rocks to pizza to dinosaurs.  May the limits of my being be the limits of an imagination at play, made into something new with each passing day.”

By Rev. Kathryn Ray
​
​During Advent, we read a lot of texts about the Second Coming of Jesus.  There is invariably something about every one of these texts that utterly defies any attempt to fit it into in my brain or my sense of reason. Take Revelation 15:
 
“Then I saw another sign in heaven, great and amazing, seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, or with them the wrath of God is finished. And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire- and also those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands.”
 
That texts is as powerful as it is mind-blowingly incomprehensible.