Sharyl West Loeung

Continuing the Story, Living in the Shadow of Kyle Lake on this 10 Year Anniversary

Kyle Lake, pastor of UBC Waco, died 10 years ago today. Most of you reading this will know the details well.

I didn’t know Kyle Lake. Although we never met, he was a light in the darkness for me, as I secretly sat in my church context reading with hope and curiosity every piece of work I could find on/about/by the emergent church movement. I was crushed. Even in his death, and the responses to his cause of death, I was spurred further away from my church context without any idea where I might be able to move toward. ( Translation: I wasn’t Southern Baptist in my heart of hearts, not in what the SBC had become and everything in me ached, groaned under the strain of a doctrine that was slowly eating away at my being, but what where else could I turn, if leaving my faith wasn’t an option? Was it my only option?) I had no idea I would find myself one day, walking the same halls of the church I had secretly followed, entering a seminary to preach my first summer in the Kyle Lake Center for Effective Preaching.

Kyle died ten years ago, I have been a part of his former congregation for the last five. I have watched as others have struggled to make sense of what happened. I entered a church that had to figure out it was ok to find light and laughter. There were many moments of stagnation in the fear of not knowing what Kyle would have done. I’ve watched people hurt each other over this very issue, even if only one, subtle underlying motivation for a particular decision. I’ve felt at times, this isn’t my story, and I can commune as best as possible in other people’s joy, memory, grief, and loss, but it is not my experience. It’s not my place to enter in. And yet, as I look back over the last 5 years, I see that I have leaned in with an intensity devoid of avoidance for the fear of the pain of church life (though absolutely not devoid of that pain). I have poured myself out into the middle of a story that I get to help write. I am undeniably formed by Kyle’s last words. I am undeniably formed by his legacy. I am undeniably formed, confronted, challenged, discouraged, supported, inspired by the people who carry Kyle’s legacy. In this messy business of church, I choose to continue the story. I choose to continue to ask what it means to Love God, Embrace Beauty and Live Life to the Fullest.

In his last, unpreached sermon Kyle wrote:

And here I think God is saying to each of us, “Abandon your plans of escape. And Be where you are. Plant gardens and live and live well.” I don’t know what your planting gardens may look like but let me end there by trying to provide a glimpse into what that may be like:

Live. And Live Well.

BREATHE. Breathe in and Breathe deeply. Be PRESENT. Do not be past. Do not be future. Be now.

On a crystal clear, breezy 70 degree day, roll down the windows and FEEL the wind against your skin. Feel the warmth of the sun.

If you run, then allow those first few breaths on a cool Autumn day to FREEZE your lungs and do not just be alarmed, be ALIVE.

Get knee-deep in a novel and LOSE track of time.

If you bike, pedal HARD… and if you crash then crash well.

Feel the SATISFACTION of a job well done—a paper well-written, a project thoroughly completed, a play well-performed.

If you must wipe the snot from your 3-year old’s nose, don’t be disgusted if the Kleenex didn’t catch it all… because soon he’ll be wiping his own.

If you’ve recently experienced loss, then GRIEVE. And Grieve well.

At the table with friends and family, LAUGH. If you’re eating and laughing at the same time, then might as well laugh until you puke. And if you eat, then SMELL. The aromas are not impediments to your day. Steak on the grill, coffee beans freshly ground, cookies in the oven. And TASTE. Taste every ounce of flavor. Taste every ounce of friendship. Taste every ounce of Life. Because-it-is-most-definitely-a-Gift.

I would never have guessed 10 years ago the community, formed by these words, would mean the world to me. To be able to do all this complicated living with these people is most certainly a gift.

Dear Son,

This past week we found out you are indeed a boy! This means we can finally settle on a name for you. We wanted to make sure you knew all the reasons your name came to be.

Your first name had first come to your mom's attention her senior year in high school when she read The Chosen by Chaim Potok. She had gone to Brooklyn the summer before on choir tour and had grown fascinated with the Hasidim. The book began a journey of cultural awakening and increased awareness that would come into play when she met your dad a few months later. Potok's My Name is Asher Lev is her favorite book.

Chaim, חַיִּים, is a Hebrew name that means life. There is something beautiful about a name that means life itself. We have come to know University Baptist Church in Waco as our home. Every Sunday our communal benediction is, "As we approach this week, may we love God, embrace beauty, and live life to the fullest." This is what we think of when we think of the "life" in your name. This is our prayer for you.

For your dad, your name represents an aspect of his history that he longs to learn more about and connect with. Your dad's father tried to preserve his family history in the names of your dad and your dad's brother. The "Khem" part in your Uncle Khemerak's name comes from four generations prior to you. Your dad's great-grandfather bore this name. The correct pronunciation of "Khem" is much more like Chaim than the 'e' would make you think. The transliteration can be blamed for the spelling differences. The meaning of Chaim in Khmer is strongly tied to Cambodia and the sense of identity as a Cambodian.

Your middle name doesn't quite have the same history as your first name. Kosal is a name we found while looking for a Cambodian name that flowed with "Chaim." While we liked how it sounded together, we also liked the meaning of the name. Kosal, in part, means clever, a trait both your parents appreciate. Your mom in particular likes the slight homage your middle name has to her brother, Benjamin. His middle name is Jacob which means "leg puller or deceiver."

Kosal also means mystical or magical which is fun.

The idea of merit, blessing, gifting, or favor is another layer of meaning for the name. There's a sense of not knowing if it's going to be a good thing or a bad thing. You just have to open it and see. That's what life is like. The life we hope you will pursue with faith and boldness.

A quick caveat on nicknames:

Right now your dad loves calling you "X" or "Baby X" because the Greek letter X is pronounced "Kai." This also leads quickly to Professor X, your mom's favorite Marvel character.

Your dad credits a lot of his development to hours upon hours of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. In the show, we frequent the Neighborhood of Make-Believe where in the center is a large tree that houses X, the Owl. We hope that unique characters like X populate the worlds that you'll come up with on your own and with your mom and dad.

So X. It could be a lot worse kiddo.

We assume you will be called Kai quite often in the end which is ok with us!

Immigration Reform Sermon Follow-Up

Rath looking not so thrilled to be paraded around the mall with a sign around his neck that reads, "Cambodia." Hello, 80s ESL programs. Cute kid though!

Almost a couple of months ago I preached at UBC Waco a sermon on Ismael and Hagar and the stranger in our midst.Much of the sermon dealt with immigration and Rath shared some of his story of how the American church has fallen short. Some of the conversations I had in the week that followed were positive, concerned even, but skeptical about what difference someone could make in their community when dealing with so many complexities.

I hope to continue this conversation in a later blog, but there are a couple of opportunities to learn more quickly approaching that I wanted to get out there ASAP.

First, TOMORROW, Baylor is hosting the G92 Summit with Jim Wallis speaking in Baylor Chapel followed by an afternoon of workshops. Follow the link for more details, but here is the gist:

On April 22nd, G92 will be on campus at Baylor University to present a day-long event called “Special Topics on Faith: Christians and Immigration.” The day will consist of workshops led by local and national speakers, as well as chapel services and a keynote address by Sojourners‘ Jim Wallis. The chapel services, workshops, and keynote address will all be open to the general public.

Full Schedule:

Chapel address – Waco Hall

(Waco Hall) – Jim Wallis (three services, same message each time)

9:05
10:10
11:15

Afternoon workshops - Bennett Auditorium (across from Waco Hall)

1:25 – 2:15 – Pastors’ event: Alexia Salvatierra will lead an event for pastors/church staff exploring ways to effectively discuss the immigration issue in a church context.
2:30 – 3:20 – Members of the Baylor community will share their own experiences with our country’s immigration system
3:35 – 4:25- Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute will speak on the economics of immigration
4:40 – 5:30 – Dr. Carl Ruby, Consultant to G92 and the National Immigration Forum will speak on what the Scriptures say about immigration and how we should respond.

Secondly, if you have interest in learning more about how U.S. Citizenship and Immigration works Emory University will be offering a free, online 5-week course, "Citizenship and U.S. Immigration" through Coursera.. You can sign up for the class and just access the videos and other resources, or choose to participate and earn a certificate.

Finally, I want to leave you with a great video from PBS featuring Baylor's own, Esther Reyes.

I hope the conversations will continue...

To Be Young, Gifted and Black...in Waco,TX

Yesterday was not a very good day. Since returning to work I have heard about at least 6 arrests that took place over the break at my school. I am sure there is more that I don't know about, caught or not. I could talk about how high school football in Texas (as 2 local high school quarterbacks face life-altering charges) panders to the already common invincibility complex that is often met without accountability. I could point to the local budget crisis caused by the rising prison population. I could talk about, how, in another part of town, the same offenses would disappear with the money to pay a good lawyer. I could analyze the national dis-proportionality of incarcerations according to race. But I am not going to delve into any of that. At the end of the day, I am not qualified. I would just be another resounding gong in the corridors of public policy, and today at least, I just don't have the energy.

I am just sad.

I would not be the only one to make this observation: Our community is broken, and nothing is changing.

When I first heard that two of my favorite students were facing felony charges, a visceral image immediately flooded my head. It was that of a mother weeping the loss of what was to be. That image was quick to come to the forefront of my mind because it was the same image being used by my conscious to picture a scene from the play I am cutting for the school's one-act play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a semi-autobiographical work of Lorraine Hansberry. In the script, there is a funeral for a young black man who was killed by the police, and the mother is weeping over his casket and says, "Until twenty million black people are completely interwoven into the fabric of our society, you see, they are under no obligation to behave as if they are." These words have haunted me since I read them, and I haven't dared try to unpack what this pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964 statement means today. But I do know this.

Be it 1863, 1963, or 2013, mothers are still weeping.

It is easy to look at this picture, read the accompanying article and think, "What a bunch of thugs." Can a I speak a little out of turn and say they were boys who wanted to be nurses. Boys who wanted to play college ball. Boys who said "Yes M'am." Now they are men who may disappear as only numbers. Men who are statistics. The comments below their pictures (KXXV) are already making sure of that objectification.

Tomorrow I will probably be mad at their stupidity, mad at the system, mad that I'm not making a difference, mad that it will happen again, but today I am just sad.

Liturgical Nerds and the Conflict of Advent

There's not really a way around it. I am a liturgical nerd. I am a plaid jumper/Lisa Frank backpack/penny loafers complete with taped-up-1990's-plastic-rimmed-glasses-before-glasses-were-cool-wearing liturgical nerd. When my teaching pastor, Josh Carney, called out the liturgical nerds last week, he might have just said, Sharyl (and Craig Nash).

So it is with this caveat that you must take the weight of the next statement. Last week, was my favorite week in the liturgical calendar. The transition between Christ the King Sunday and the first week of Advent is something I anticipate every year as ordinary time drones on. No matter how hard I try to discipline myself in the ordinary, I cannot help but eagerly await Advent. I don't even get that excited about Christmas (though I'm working on it), just give me Advent!

Our floating Advent creation.

I love preaching on the themes of expectation and hope. I love studying 2nd Temple Judaism and all the sociopolitical madness that goes with it. I love to retell the story again and again, the grand meta-narrative, where no one can even begin to foresee what is coming, but the story is barreling ever so slowly towards to Messiah in an unexpected Jesus. Jesus is the climax of a great story.

And yet....

This year, the anxiety of waiting has been magnified by my own fears. After a year and a half of job searching I have no idea where I am headed. The waiting has far surpassed a liturgical season, and I know I am not alone.

I went to my parent's house in Abilene for Thanksgiving. The morning after I returned to Waco I received word that a 19 year old friend of my brother was killed in a car accident. They had played baseball together since they were little. This accident all to eerily mirrored the death of a girl in my youth group and high school, almost 10 years to the day, both coming home from Texas Tech for Thanksgiving.

How do tragedies such as this fit in our narrative? What hope is there for a world that still sees such chaos?
This is the moment that I want to hear theology coming from the developed world the least, unless it's the developed world in crisis. Enter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He writes to his parents from Hitler's Tegel prison camp Advent 1943:

As long as there are people. Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you.That is the great seriousness and great blessedness of the Advent message. Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of a human being among us. Do you want to close the door or open it?

Christ is knocking. It's still not Christmas, but it's also still not the great last Advent, the last coming of Christ. Through all the Advents of our life that we celebrate runs the longing for the last Advent, when the word will be "see, I am making all things new" (Rev 21:5).

The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us...

This liturgical nerd can handle the already but not yet, if there is a last Advent, where my purple and pink is void of waiting.

Enjoy Your Table, Gentlemen

If you tell me, even in your most honest, genteel voice, that you are worried, troubled even by the alarming amount of pastorless churches, about the need to think of creative strategies to fill these pulpits in America I will probably laugh in your face. I laugh not because I am normally a spiteful person, but because I am the "laugh so you don't cry" person. I am the "can't hold it in" person. I am the" laugh so long until it becomes a deeply guttural, bone-shaking movement that comes from an awareness of pain far more than humor" person.

This morning I ventured over to the Baptist Standard to look at the classifieds section, something I don't do very often because I find it depressing. It is depressing to see jobs that have been posted for months and months that I fit every qualification sans penis. I go through a cycle of turning over every rock to hiding under the biggest one I can find until I'm ready to start the process over again. So imagine my reaction to this article on the front page of the Standard, with my school prominently displayed as the visual representation.

For the record, I like David Hardage, I feel personally supported by him. But how can we talk strategies when the numbers are so simple? According to the most recent census data, 49.2% of our population is male. Now consider the percentage of the 49.2% that are directly or indirectly discriminated against because of their marital status, ethnicity, etc. I'm not a mathematician, but it is easy to see the pool of candidates quickly diminishing. The problem is not a matter of calling.

The problem is the church's assumption of authority to determine the validity of call on a whim, apart from relationships but instead based on checklists full of gender norms, political party affiliations , and other celebrated traits, calling out the ones that look just like the ones before, creating a little factory of cookie cutter "preacher boys." Maybe the #1 one problem of lack of respect for the pastorate (as described by Hardage through Knox) stems for the common knowledge that many of those who make it into the pulpit have been stripped of their unique calling and identity along the way so they can fit into another ridiculously small box.

When I look at the list of cities with the least gender equality and see three south Texas cities, including Corpus Christi, the site for this year's BGCT (or whatever they are calling themselves now) annual meeting, I want to scream for Texas Baptists to do something about it. Then I remember the only time I've ever experienced sexual harassment is in the BGCT office in Dallas, known not so affectionately as "the building." I also remember that my experiences were quite mild compared to the stories of others I carry with me. I can't rightly ask the church to respond prophetically to the glass ceiling, the bamboo ceiling or any other oppression when its stained-glass ceiling encompasses them all.

After closing out the article in disillusionment, I stumbled across this gem (because of a tweet) by Sarah Bessey:

I’m done fighting for a seat at that table.

The one filled with white men, all reading the same books, spouting the same talking points, quoting each other back and forth. It’s the table where the men – a small, select, vocal group in no way representative of men in the Church overall – sit around and discuss who is in and who is out, who is right (usually them) and who is wrong (every one else) and, a favourite topic, whether women should be allowed to write or teach or preach or even read Scripture aloud, what women should be saying and doing, how marriages should look, how children should be raised, how everyone else should live their lives in holiness.

Me? I am simply getting on with the business of the Kingdom.

Enjoy your table, gentlemen.

Sunday Deja Vu or Why I Keep Hanging Out with Teenagers

Today was one of those deja vu Sundays where the rhythm of church life gifts me with a long forgotten memory. When I left Carrollton International Baptist Mission in the summer of 2007 to purse seminary the youth group was running 30-40 students. This is my last memory, thus the one that tends to stick, however, I think my brain selectively leaves out the many Sundays of the years prior where three of four youth leaders sat around starring at each other, wondering if anyone was ever going to come. Sometimes just got in our cars and started looking for students (young and zealous, yes). And then there were the Sundays, the even more awkward Sundays, where only one student showed up and the decision had to be made. Do we pretend like this is normal and move on as planned, or do we go get Mickey D's? To be honest, our decision varied week to week. I never found a "right" answer, but always tried to make a decision based on the student.

Flash forward five years, after a hiatus in local church youth ministry, to the beginning of another new youth ministry, and as is inevitable, a Sunday with only one student. So of course, the question was posed again. Do we walk to the taco truck, or crack open a Bible? Do I adjust my group activity or run on the fly? Do we attempt the opening lectio divina experience or skip it? Here's a brief account of what happened next (with permission).

Leader (jokingly): Hey, why don't you read something for us?

Student: Okay, okay, I'm going to open it randomly and just start reading and tell you what it means.

Leader: Ummm, could you read Luke 2:41-52?

Student: Awww, I was just going to read something random, but ok. It's gonna be really wonky though because it's the Message.

Leader: It's ok, just read it.

Student: There aren't any numbers! Where are the numbers?

Leader: It must be an older version of the Message. Just read the part about Jesus going to the Temple.

Student begins to read.

Every year Jesus' parents traveled to Jerusalem for the Feast of Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up as they always did for the Feast.When it was over and they left for home, the child Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents didn't know it. Thinking he was somewhere in the company of pilgrims, they journeyed for a whole day and then began looking for him among relatives and neighbors. When they didn't find him, they went back to Jerusalem looking for him.

The next day they found him in the Temple seated among the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. The teachers were all quite taken with him, impressed with the sharpness of his answers. But his parents were not impressed; they were upset and hurt. His mother said, "Young man, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been half out of our minds looking for you."

He said, "Why were you looking for me? Didn't you know that I had to be here, dealing with the things of my Father?" But they had no idea what he was talking about. So he went back to Nazareth with them, and lived obediently with them. His mother held these things dearly, deep within herself. And Jesus matured, growing up in both body and spirit, blessed by both God and people.

I'd never been so struck by this passage. Listening to the young voice of a middle school boy read the account of middle school-aged Jesus, made me for the first time see this passage not as one where Jesus' divinity shown through in some Gospel of Thomas-esque precocious child as I had previously tried unsuccessfully to avoid. No, Jesus looks incredibly human, a lot like this student who often asks the tough questions that adults have been trained are impolite to ask. As one who has a lot to offer the church even when his wisdom is shrouded in giggles.

Our college women's Bible study has been studying how to read Scripture this semester. One of the tenants we have discussed is reading in community. I could have read Luke 2 a hundred more times in seclusion and not for a second felt what I felt hearing it read by a student. The old stories that I am so sure I know, are living and breathing and coming to life again and again. This is why multi-generational church life is so important. This is why I think I'll continue to hang out with teenager even when they tell me Facebook is for old people.