Tag: jesus

To All My Friends in Ministry

Pastor Jeff Smith1 Comment

Years ago, a parishioner once said to me, “Life is hard. Church shouldn’t be hard. Church should be the easiest thing I do all week.”

I’ve carried that sentence with me for a long time. I remember pushing back gently in the moment, pointing toward the Gospels—toward Jesus’ own words: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Even then, I knew the tension embedded in that exchange wasn’t going away. It still hasn’t.

As we prepare to enter Lent—especially in a season that is profoundly hard for so many of our siblings in our own communities, in our wounded nation, and across the world—I am more convinced than ever that this is not the time for an easy church. This is the time for a faithful one.

This is the moment for the church to take up its cross and move intentionally into the hard places—into spaces where the gospel has been distorted by Christian nationalism and reshaped to serve domination, fear, and power rather than love, justice, and liberation.

The Jesus we follow was never a populist leader. He did not mirror the prejudices of the crowd or sanctify their desire for control. He did not bless a golden idol fashioned in their own image. Jesus understood—deeply and bodily—the cost of solidarity with those crushed by the state, those living in constant fear for their lives and the lives of their neighbors. That path led him not to safety, but to a cross.

So yes—to my friend from years ago—I would say again: church is hard. But I would add this with even greater conviction now: we do not walk it alone.

This is for my friends in ministry who are exhausted.

For my clergy colleagues who wake up already tired, carrying stress and burnout that no sabbatical alone can heal.

While I serve a radically inclusive, justice-seeking congregation, I know many of you are serving in churches where the line you must walk is razor-thin. Churches where honesty feels dangerous. Where one sermon, one prayer, one pastoral word could fracture fragile unity or threaten already-precarious giving. Churches shaped by privilege, where justice is tolerated only as long as it remains abstract and never personal.

Speaking truth to power is not just stressful—it can be terrifying. It is hard to proclaim justice to those who fund the institution while resisting the very solidarity the gospel demands. It is hard to preach good news that sounds like bad news to people invested in maintaining the status quo.

To you, my colleagues: I see you.

And even in churches that name justice loudly and clearly, we feel it too. We try to speak to one unfolding injustice, only to have another erupt before the sermon manuscript is finished. Each new day seems to bring fresh harm—policies and rhetoric that target our Black and brown siblings, women, LGBTQ+ people—all in service of preserving power for a privileged few.

And still, friends, this is not a betrayal of our calling. It is our calling.

The call of Christ was never an invitation to ease or comfort. As the old song says, “I never promised you a rose garden.”A friend once summed it up bluntly during a particularly brutal season: “Ministry sucks.” Some days, that feels painfully accurate.

The call of Christ comes with a cost—made heavier when the church becomes dependent on those whose participation and generosity arrive with conditions attached.

And yet.

Yes, church is hard. But we do not walk it alone.

The good news—the kind that actually sustains us—is this: the same Jesus who compels us toward solidarity with those pushed to the margins is the Jesus who first chose solidarity with us. This is the mystery of the incarnation. Emmanuel. God with us. Not God above us. Not God protected from us. God with us.

As we enter Lent—a season in which Jesus moves deliberately toward the center of religious and political power, knowing full well it will cost him his life—my prayer is that you will experience the presence of God sustaining you in this work.

There will be days when ministry feels unbearable. But may we remember to look up and see one another. May we take courage in the great cloud of witnesses surrounding us—those who have gone before and those walking beside us now.

Our task is not popularity.
Our task is not comfort.
Our task is not survival at all costs.

Our task is to birth the kingdom of God—again and again—until it finally becomes the kin-dom of God.

And friends, we do not do that alone.

The Gifts of Darkness

Pastor Jeff SmithLeave a comment

Hello darkness, my old friend.
I’ve come to talk with you again.

That opening line from The Sound of Silence has lingered with me since my last post. Darkness—named not as an enemy to be conquered, but as an old companion. A presence that holds both fear and possibility.

This reflection isn’t really about the song. It’s about that word: darkness.

The moon as seen through a half-circle window in our home. But the question is if it is a window or light as seen through an open eye. For me, it is both.

Darkness is frightening. In its depths, people lose their way. Some are consumed by it. History makes that painfully clear. And yet, scripture also reminds us—again and again—that God does some of God’s most important work in the dark. Creation begins in darkness. Liberation begins in the night. Resurrection comes before dawn.

For those who are willing to remain present rather than flee, darkness can reveal truths that the light often allows us to avoid.

For me, darkness has become the place where I encounter my most authentic self.

In the dark, the performances stop. The titles and roles lose their power. Using the therapeutic framework of Internal Family Systems (IFS), I have learned that the parts of myself I am most tempted to hide are often the parts most longing to be named and healed. Darkness has a way of inviting those parts forward—not for condemnation, but for integration. It is there that truth begins to surface.

And this personal darkness mirrors the collective darkness of our time.

We are living in a moment marked by rising authoritarianism, endless war, racialized fear, economic injustice, and the quiet erosion of truth itself. We see neighbors turning on neighbors. Families divided. Churches tempted to trade the gospel for comfort or proximity to power. This is not accidental. Darkness flourishes wherever fear is nurtured and silence is rewarded.

The instinct is to escape—to distract ourselves, to spiritualize away the pain, or to demand quick fixes. But what if the faithful response is not escape, but presence?

What if God is calling us not to deny the darkness, but to confront it without becoming it?

One of the greatest gifts darkness offers is empathy.

Brené Brown reminds us that empathy creates connection, while sympathy creates distance. Sympathy wants to fix. It wants to turn on the lights too quickly. Empathy stays. Empathy listens. Empathy refuses to abandon those who are suffering. Empathy is a moral act in a culture that prizes efficiency over relationship.

To sit with another in the darkness and say, “You are not alone,” is an act of resistance.

Darkness also strips away our illusions.

In true darkness, the markers we use to divide ourselves—race, status, ideology, nationality—lose their authority. In the dark, we cannot hide behind appearances or abstractions. We are confronted with who we actually are and with the humanity of those we would rather keep at a distance.

This is precisely why darkness unsettles us. It exposes the lies we’ve told ourselves about innocence, superiority, and separation.

And yet, it is in this very place that reconciliation becomes possible.

When authentic selves meet authentic selves—when we speak truthfully and listen vulnerably—community can begin to take shape. Together, in the dark, we start reaching for the light. Not the false light of dominance or certainty, but the light of the Divine. The light of Christ. The light known by many names, yet always pointing toward justice, mercy, and love.

In the darkness, we discover one another as fellow seekers.

On level ground, we recognize our shared longings: dignity, belonging, hope, peace, and wholeness. This is the soil of the kingdom of God—the kin-dom of God—where no one is disposable and no one is invisible.

When Jesus reduces the law to two commands—love God and love your neighbor—he is not offering sentiment. He is offering a radical vision of community that disrupts every system built on exclusion. This is the Beloved Community Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed—a community where there are no outsiders, no enemies, no hierarchy of human worth.

And yes, in the darkness, we encounter God.

If we attune our senses, God is present—in shared lament, in trembling hands, in voices that refuse to be silenced, in the still small insistence of conscience. This is the God whose breath sustains us, whose image we bear, whose presence refuses to abandon the world even when the world abandons love.

So the call is not to fear the darkness.

The call is to refuse the lie that darkness gets the final word.

May we discover in the darkness the courage to tell the truth, the humility to listen deeply, and the resolve to build authentic community. For when we bring our full selves—and our shared humanity—out of the darkness and into the light, the powers that thrive on fear begin to lose their grip.

And that, my friends, is how the world is changed.

Finding Calm in the Storm

Pastor Jeff Smith2 Comments

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion, and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And waking up, he rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Be silent! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” – Mark 4:35-41

I get where the disciples are coming from in this text. With all the turmoil, the fear, and the overwhelming dread and fear that is be fomented by our President and his slew of executive orders, many of which are threatening to upend much in our lives, it feels like the storm is upon us and the boat is taking on water.

For those who are in marginalized groups, whether they are Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPoC) or whether they are part of the LGBTQ+ community or any other threatened group, there is a great deal of dread over the marginalization that is a natural outflowing of the tenets of Christian Nationalism and the extreme right that seem to be dominating our national policy, if not outright destroying key aspects of our democracy.

The storm is raging, and the boat is taking on water. And we look to the One who is sent to save us, and he is asleep in the bow of the boat. I’m unsure what sleep looks like in a boat that is taking on water while being battered by the storm, but there is this almost eerie sense of calm about this One. When he awakens, he seems almost irritated that we awakened him for this emergency.

No sooner than he calms the seas, he turns to us and says, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

But wait! Do we really have the capacity to do what Jesus did? Do we have the capacity to calm the stormy seas? Do we have the capacity to practice that kind of calm when our minds and our bodies are experiencing outright panic? What exactly is this faith that Jesus expects of his followers?

Since the first of the year, I have returned to a spiritual practice known as Centering Prayer. I use an app to guide me, and each day, there are options as to what Opening Prayer/Reading and what Closing Prayer/Reading will be part of the exercise. Then during the quiet time (known as the “sit” in contemplative practice), I am asked to choose a sacred word on which to focus.

The word I chose today was “calm.” This week, I received a request from one of the members of my flock who is personally threatened by these early executive orders. She was petitioning me to write something that would offer a word of hope even as she and so many others are experiencing panic in this time. That was what led to reflect on the word: Calm

Calm Is Not Denial

This calm is not a denial of the storm that swirls around us. It is not a denial of the panic that is fostered by fear or threat. Calm is the capacity to center ourselves right in the midst of the storm and somehow trust that the One who commands the wind and the waves is right here with us. It is to know that we are not alone and that we shall overcome … yes, even this storm.

How might I approach this turbulent, chaotic time if I believed that Jesus was within arms reach? How might we speak to the chaos and disorder all around us and command it to be still?

No, it doesn’t mean that we magically gain control over the oppressors or those perpetuating the harm. It doesn’t mean that the oppression immediately ceases. It does mean that, when we find our center and stand on the firm foundation on which Jesus stood, we will discover that we are not alone in the boat and that, through faith, we can weather any storm.

Calm as Nonviolent Resistance

When I think of resistance, I have this visceral reaction that feels like I should fight … fight with everything I’ve got. Yet this is not the way of nonviolence. The kind of calm that Jesus brought to his followers was not built on avoidance. Jesus continued to face his oppressors and enemies, yet he did so calmly. He was not anxious or afraid. Yes, he had his moment in the garden when he wished that the cup would pass from him, but then he calmly stood and walked with the soldiers who would lead him to his execution.

In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus talks about how to respond to oppression. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you: Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also, and if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give your coat as well, and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. (Matthew 5:38-42)

This is a subversive calmness. Walter Wink in a beautiful essay on The Third Way, offers us a way of seeing how turning our left cheek after having been struck on the right is to demand that we be treated as an equal without striking back. To give our coat after having been stripped of our shirt is to be naked (when we only wear two garments), which would mean that the person taking our shirt would be humiliated by our own nakedness. To go the second mile, according to Roman military law, would place the solder whose pack you were carrying in serious trouble with his superiors.

It is a calmness, says Wink, that is neither passive nor violent … it is a calmness that is a third way of being in the world.

So maybe that’s where Jesus is as he sleeps in the boat in the midst of the storm. He is neither afraid nor violent, he is practicing a centered calm that becomes then the calmness to which his followers are called.

It is that calmness that is born of a faith that, when the storms are tough, God is, in fact, right there with us. All we have to do is calmly reach out our hand to the One who saves, and we, too, will be those who then turn to calm the seas in the midst of the storm.