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Jer Swigart

Entering the Voids. Waging Peace.

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The Necessary Pilgrimage I’m Taking with my Daughter

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Our formation and the world’s restoration requires followers of Jesus to wear out the tread on our shoes.

Let me explain….

For the first half of my life, my formation occurred almost exclusively within sterile academic environments. A student with insatiable curiosity, I was well adapted to the practice of learning about people, their places, and their pain. Shod with slippers and from a place of comfort, my books, articles, blogs, seminars, conferences, and instructors taught me how to efficiently and accurately (or so I thought) diagnose problems and offer what I imagined were sure to be mutually beneficial solutions.

And then I took a pilgrimage out of the sterility and into the lives of those I had learned so much about. It was there that I discovered how minimizing my formation to learning about was not only nearsighted…it was dangerously inadequate.

In short time, I recognized that learning about had blinded me to my own entrenched theology and ideology and how both were contributors to the unjust systems around me. Learning about had kept me insulated from the traumatized human beings who are caught in the wake of conveniently broken systems and distanced from the Jesus who dwells among them. This narrow learning style had focused my attention on developing solutions rather than building relationships and had reinforced in me an arrogant, hero-mentality.

It was the pilgrimage I took from what was comfortable to what was real that caused me to lament, trade my slippers for hiking shoes, and expand my formation beyond learning about to learning from.

As all formation is, the journey was (and still is) painful, awkward, messy, and so rewarding. It’s in the experiences of intentional displacement that I’ve been most significantly found and formed by our Immigrant God. It’s through the moments of embodied solidarity that I’ve learned the extent to which my quick diagnoses and well-intentioned yet premature solutions have accelerated the pain and disempowerment of those I’ve sought to serve. It’s within the context of uncommon friendships that I’ve recognized the extent to which my freedom and flourishing is intrinsically linked to the freedom and flourishing of others.

In the adventure that is following Jesus, I’ve worn down the tread of multiple pairs of shoes. Along the way, I’m finding myself in places I’d never anticipated, I’m loving and being loved by people I could never have imagined, and I’m spending my life teaching others how to enter the adventure and wear out some tread of their own.

A bit more of my tread will be left on the trail this weekend as I walk a portion of the El Camino del Immigrante.  The Camino is a 150 mile pilgrimage from the wall that separates Mexico and the United States in San Diego to the great city of Los Angeles.  It’s a walk in which we declare solidarity with the men, women, and children all over the world who are on the move from violence and debilitating poverty toward flourishing.  It’s a sojourn through which we simultaneously confront the injustice of our current system and call for the reform of our broken immigration policies.

I walk for those reasons…but I’m not walking it alone. I’m walking with Ava, my eight-year-old daughter.

My prayer over her is that through this pilgrimage, she would continue to become a woman with a passion for dangerous followership, immersive discovery, uncommon friendship, and humble courage. In this moment of her young life, I want her to experience how the practices of intentional displacement and embodied solidarity are the very best expressions of our faith. I long for her to be a globally formed follower of Jesus who understands that her flourishing is connected to the flourishing of children on the move from all over the world.

So, together, Ava and I are lacing up our shoes and laying down some tread along the Camino because…

…we’re committed to the practice of learning from.

…we’re declaring embodied solidarity with our migrant brothers and sisters in our own neighborhood and around the globe who are taking perilous journeys.

…we’re desperate to ever be found and formed by our Immigrant God and activated as instruments of peace into the world He’s making.

Four Preachers on Racism: Two Black & Two White

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Noise.

There’s a lot of it right now.  Some of it is helpful…most of it isn’t.

I’m working hard to sift through the distortion to locate God’s voice.  I’m listening long and am finding Him in the teachings of my diverse friends.

Here are four important sermons delivered on July 10th and in the immediate wake of a violent week in which black and white lives were prematurely extinguished.  I invite you to join me in listening to the pain, the wisdom, and the exhortation of four preachers: two black and two white.

Rev. Ben McBride preached a sermon titled “Crossing the Street” at United Congregational Church in Oakland, CA.  Through the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Ben emphasized the historic moment we find ourselves in and challenges us to “Join God in His work of restoration. Get your shoes dirty! God is not found in our church buildings but in the middle of the blood!”

Rev. Dee McIntosh took a moment out of her pastoral work with Philando Castile’s family and her organizing in the streets of Minneapolis to preach a sermon entitled, “Reconciler to the Core.” Delivered to the Upper Room Community, a creative, risk-taking, envelope-pushing, mostly white congregation in the suburbs, her message emerged out of Revelation 3 and God’s message to the community in Laodicea.  In this moment of historical significance she challenges the Church to be present in a restorative, refreshing way and asks us to consider the implications of living out a lukewarm legacy.

Having just returned from a Global Immersion Learning Lab into Israel/Palestine and recently relocated to Phoenix, AZ, Pastor Meghan Good preached THIS sermon to her new family of faith.  “Trespassing Fear” exposes fear as a powerful, contagious force that “constantly misfires” and that “cannot consistently and accurately distinguish between ‘danger’ and ‘difference.’” By sermon’s end, she offers practical insight into why we must trespass fear, how we do it, and what happens when we do.

When we experience a week filled with so much pain, pastors need to have the flexibility to pivot their teaching series to offer pastoral perspective to their communities.  That’s what Pastor Daniel Hill did at River City Church in Chicago. He offered THIS sermon entitled “Created in God’s Likeness” in an effort to help his multi-ethnic faith community remember who God is in the midst of injustice, understand how God views the violence in our world, and reconnect us with our commissioning as a people sent into the pain.

Racism in America: A Learning Journey for White Folk

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The back-to-back deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile alongside the deaths of the Dallas police offers are a defining moment in the history of the United States. Our black brothers and sisters are out of breath while our white brothers and sisters are finally asking the question: What are we to do?!

While I’m not certain that the black community can wait for the white community’s learning curve, it is absolutely critical in this moment that we move our understanding of racism in America beyond surface level and into the depths.

In what follows, I offer a learning journey for my white brothers and sisters.  I’m grateful for my black friends and colleagues who have offered grace and patience with me through my own learning journey and have helped me develop this pathway.  It by no means is a comprehensive pathway, but it is an important beginning.

Friends.  Please take this journey.  Listen long and be changed by what you hear.

~~

Involuntary Servitude -> Mass Incarceration

Culture of Suspicion

Classics

For Evangelicals

Connecting Past to Present: Violence Toward Black Boys

Connecting Past to Present: Violence Toward Black Churches

  • Documentary: 4 Little Girls (view entire film)
  • CNN/ NY Times coverage of Charleston Shootings

Misc.

Blogs:

Holy Week: These 4 Days that Shape My Life

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It’s Holy Week and, for the first time in my professional life, I’m not guiding a church through it. The freshness of simply being a sojourner is allowing me the opportunity to reflect on this sacred season in a new way. So here’s what I’m thinking about Holy Week this year and how I intend to allow Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday to further shape my faith, posture, and practice.

Maundy Thursday. It was the bizarre kind of calm.

It was one more shared table with a community of worshiping doubters. A familiar story set the soundtrack for the evening yet there existed an unfamiliar dissonance. The foot washing was awkward. Jesus’ words carried a new desperation. His teaching on the necessity of sacrificial love fell on the deaf ears of friends who were about to scatter, deny, and betray.

He shared with them the bread and wine anyway. Common elements were transformed into symbols of sacrifice and an extraordinary invitation.

This Thursday, as I taste the bread and wine, I will do so as a worshiping doubter. I will acknowledge that I am a wanderer who is beloved by God. As I share the bread and wine with family and friends, I will remind them that God loves them not because of who they are (or aren’t) but because He wants to. Together, we will acknowledge our tendency to scatter, deny, and betray, confess it to one another, and ask for the grace to live sacrificial love.

Good Friday. It was the scary kind of dark.

That God put on flesh and came into our neighborhood seems ridiculous. That He wore a cross on our behalf is incomprehensible. That He died not only for sinners but as a sinner is simply unbelievable. And that His death was necessary? Unthinkable!

Apparently, ours is a God who’s love is ridiculous and incomprehensible and unbelievable and unthinkable. His is a cross-shaped love that jumps borders and defies logic. Ours is a God who embodied the posture of the cross because He couldn’t imagine living without us.

But He still died. That day ended in death. And hope died for a community of people who banked their future on His claims.

This Friday, I intend to embrace the dark and scary through the practice of lament.

  1. I will identify and lament the ways that I still abuse power at the expense of others.
  2. I will lament that I am more prone to talk about the cross than to embody its posture on behalf of the marginalized, exploited, and misunderstood.
  3. I will lament how accumulation and preservation make my love far to reasonable.
  4. I will lament how these three realities perpetuate the pain of so many around the world.

Holy Saturday. It was the deafening kind of quiet.

Looking back on that fateful weekend, we see how, in the muck and the gore and on top of a Middle Eastern rock, God did His best work. So good was it that God exclaimed its completeness in the hoarse whisper of Jesus: “It is finished.”

When it was over, they rushed to get the body down and secured in a tomb. The Sabbath was upon them. It was time to rest.

As they entered into a Sabbath saturated in disappointment, far from their consciousness was that original Sabbath…the one in the Garden. If you remember, God had previously done His best work there. He had spoken existence into being, a speech that crescendo’d all the way to humanity.  God saw that it was good. It was complete. He was done. And then He rested and invited humanity to do the same. That is, God invited us to take a leisurely step back and savor the beauty and completeness of His work.

For Jesus’ community, Sabbath had dawned again. Only this one followed a new pinnacle of God’s work: His death. Like in the garden, God’s work was complete. It was good.  He was done.

This Saturday I intend to take a leisurely step back to savor the beauty and completeness of God’s work. I intend to rest and reflect on the ways in which His redemptive love reaches me and my family and continues to transform us. I will ask God to help me imagine what it means to expand His redemptive wingspan in our neighborhood, city, and throughout the world.

Easter Sunday. It was the wide-eyed kind of pulse-quickening reality.

God got back up. That means that what happened on the cross mattered. Life was restored. Hope was restored. Sight was restored. Relationship was restored. Flourishing was possible.

God got back up! And if God can get back up from death, then what can’t He do?

This Sunday, I will celebrate the hopes, dreams, and relationships in my life that have been restored. I will identify the areas of my life, city, and world where restoration is still necessary and I will ask God for the grace to live in a Friday posture with a Saturday certainty.

6 Practices for Raising Them “Color-Brave”

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“Color-Brave.”

The first time I heard the term was in a conversation with my friend and black, Oakland-based peacemaker, Ben McBride. After an hour of the terms “color-aware” and “color-blind” being thrown around, Ben paused the conversation and invited us to define our terms.

We shuffled around in a ball-pit of words, obviously unsure of what we actually meant. We concluded that “awareness” tends to highlight what’s different between us while “blind” was narrow and naive. Both seemed to suggest that differences in skin tone meant “altered” or “dangerous” or “scary” or “wrong.” Neither was adequate. Both were problematic.

At last, Ben graciously bailed us out by suggesting the term “color-brave.”

“Color-brave” affirms that differences do exist and that they should be noticed, embraced, and celebrated. The term requires that we become aware of our own skin tone and that of others around us and that the distinctions should cause us to lean in with courageous curiosity rather than turn away in suspicion. Being “color-brave” means that we are aware of the privilege and pain associated with different skin tones and choose to leverage and/or lay down what privilege we have on behalf of those in pain. [HERE is very helpful TED talk on “Color-Brave” vs. “Color-Blind” by Mellody Hobson.]

With the recent arrival of my second son, I’m now a daddy of three stunning little human beings. They are beautiful, blonde, and white. Within a world progressively divided by “difference” (skin tone, ethnicity, religion, etc.) I don’t want them to be “color-aware” nor “color-blind.” I want to raise them “color-brave.”

While I’m sure there are many more practices (please share in the comment section), here are six decisions we’re making:

  1. We’re exposing our kids to an unedited version of our family and national history. Who we are and who we become is deeply informed by whom we were. We refuse to ignore, hide, alter, or positively re-frame our family’s history for our kids. The good, bad, and ugly of our story matters and requires our acknowledgement and, where appropriate, our celebration or repentance. Shielding our kids from the bad and the ugly of our national story (Manifest Destiny, Transatlantic Slave Trade, Japanese Internment Camps, Jim Crow South, KKK & white supremacy, New Jim Crow policies, inhuman immigration policies, etc.) increases the chances that they will ever see themselves as entitled victors who are apathetic toward those who they deem “different.” However, when we expose them to all of it, they will be better equipped to advocate for the systems and structures that will promote the flourishing of the marginalized, exploited, and misunderstood.
  1. We’re entering into authentic relationships with those whose skin tones and stories are different from ours. My children will not become fully human unless they step out of the petri-dish of our homogeneous experience. Homogeneity is not safe. It’s dangerous because it generates elitism, fear, and anger. If we want our kids to be color-brave, then we must provide them the opportunity to learn from the stories and perspectives of friends with different skin tones. The stories of our diverse set of friends will change and expand the way our kids see their own story and the world they live in. Established in relationship, the stories our friends tell our kids will help them understand that “different” isn’t dangerous…it’s beautiful.
  1. We’re cultivating curiosity in them by pressing into the concepts and questions that are potentially uncomfortable. Our kids becoming people who ask excellent questions requires us to embody the practice of curiosity. Our kids need to observe us humbly pressing into awkward and uncomfortable topics with diverse friends, listening longer than feels comfortable, and being changed by what we hear. Authentic, loving relationship with those different from us where we can move through the awkward and uncomfortable is one of the greatest tools to cultivating open-minded curiosity and courageous compassion.
  1. We’re cultivating courage in them by identifying what feels risky and then going there as learners. In addition to exposing our kids to sports, music, theater, and literature, we’re committed to taking them with us into foreign contexts (local & global) where they find themselves as the minority. If we want our kids to enter foreign spaces courageously yet humbly, we need to go there with them, follow the indigenous leaders, and listen for a long time. It’s within spaces where we don’t know what to do that we discover how to learn from rather than about.
  1. We’re diversifying their learning environment. Relationships, experiences, faith, and media are the four primary ways in which our young minds are primed to see the self, others, and the world around us. We are committed to cultivating an environment for our kids that is resourced with wise mentors, expansive local & global experiences, diverse friendships, a local Jesus-following community, diverse media sources, and a color-full (authors & stories) library. We want our kids to learn from multiple perspectives so that they don’t fall into the trap of making premature, opinion-saturated conclusions that interrupt relationship and lead to unhelpful solutions.
  1. We’re teaching them about Jesus. The best possible element to empowering our kids to be color-brave is to expose them to the life and teachings of Jesus. We do this by both exploring the pages of the Scriptures and exposing them to men and women who humbly and courageously follow Him. We are doing our best to draw connections between what we’re reading in the Scriptures, observing in the lives of Jesus-followers, and noticing (the beautiful and the broken) in our local and global context. In the life and teachings of Jesus, I pray that my kids discover and become compelled by our others-oriented God. I pray that the practices of their lives are ever informed by Whose they are.

Speaking of Jesus on a Muslim Webinar

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In the days leading up to Christmas Eve, I was invited by a new American Muslim friend and Founding Director of Celebrate Mercy, Tarek El-Messidi, to join him and nine prominent Muslim voices on a webinar that focused on the legacies of Mohammed & Jesus.  I had met Tarek and his wife at the White House days before where we quickly forged a friendship and began conspiring effective ways to guide our traditions toward the embodiment of our common teaching of neighbor-love.

I was honored by the invitation to talk about the Jesus I follow with a global Muslim audience, and, in light of surging religious tribalism and dangerously divisive anti-Muslim rhetoric, I accepted and began to prepare the most unique Christmas Eve message of my life.

Here’s what I said that day:

I want to begin my remarks by expressing to you, Tarek, my fellow presenters, and to those of you viewing this webinar from all around the world how honored I am to be a part of this moment.  If ever there was a time that we learn from rather than about one another, it is now. I ask God to bless us all as we learn together.

Let me reflect for a few moments on the Jesus that we all revere and who I follow as a Christian.

To do so, I want to start at the beginning of our Story where we discover a God who isn’t aloof, distant, and disengaged but is present, active, immersed, and compassionately engaged.  In Genesis 2:10, after speaking existence into being, we find God entering the created order, forming humanity out of dirt, and exhaling God’s breath into the human shape.  That intimate moment brought humanity to life and initiated a human & divine dance that lasted a very short time.

Just a few verses later, humanity shattered all that was beautiful and good by making God tragic, authoring their own fantasy, and chasing it.  The moment they did, everything good was undone and God, the Peace Creator, became the Great Peacemaker.  Here’s what that looked like: rather than ending the Story, God saw and then immersed into the radical center of our brokenness and then contended for our flourishing at the price of blood.

Shortly thereafter, in Genesis 15, God made a blood covenant with Father Abraham in which God walked through blood twice, unilaterally signing the promise.  In so doing, God communicated to humanity that if He didn’t hold up to his end of the deal, God would die.  His journey through blood twice also meant that if humanity didn’t hold up to our end of the deal, God would die.

Mind you, the only way God could die is if God became human.

Father Abraham’s family began an immigrants’ journey that took them from Ur to Canaan, Canaan to Egypt, Egypt to the Wilderness, and the Wilderness to Canaan which was renamed Israel. Because the Israelites rejected their vocation as image bearers of God their journey continued from Israel to Babylon as exiles.  It was from within exile that the people cried out to God to make good on His blood-promise to Father Abraham. Within exile, the present, compassionate, and fully engaged God spoke to the people through the prophets: “The One who will wage a decisive, restorative peace is coming.”

A Great Silence followed, after which God spoke again to a people who were once slaves, immigrants and exiles, and were now occupied by the Roman Empire.  This time, when God spoke, He did so unto an impoverished teenage couple:

The time has come. I’m making good on My blood-promise to Father Abraham. Once again, I’m immersing into the radical center of your broken story.  Only this time, I’m doing so in the most unlikely of ways: within the humble, fully dependent human flesh of a baby.

This moment in the Christian tradition doesn’t suggest that God spawned a child.  Rather, we believe that God who Created entered creation encased in skin, bones, organs, and veins. For the first time…ever…God could bleed so that we could be restored.

At last, we get to Jesus.  While the Gospels focus primarily on the ministry, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we do get a couple of glimpses of His early formation.  In Luke 2:40-52 we discover Jesus as a young, curious student sitting among the influencers, listening, and shocking them with his questions.  He was filled with wisdom and God’s favor rested on Him.

Eighteen years later, at the age of 30, we watch the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry through the ritual of baptism. In John 1:29-32, John the Baptist identified Jesus on the overcrowded shores of the Jordan River, pointed at Him, and exclaimed,  “Behold, the Lamb of God!  This is the one who will take away the sins of the world.”  John the Baptist observed the exhale of God descending on Jesus, while Matthew tells of the audible voice of God saying, “This is my Son whom I love. With Him I am well pleased.”

Now keep in mind…this affirmation occurred before Jesus had really done anything.  Here, we discover a God who loves, not because we deserve it or have earned it, but because He wants to.

I could spend the next several hours reflecting on the core passages that inform the Jesus that I follow.  Being that I only have a few moments, let me share six teachings that Jesus not only offered, but went on to embody.

Matthew 5:9 :: In the beginning of Jesus’ magnum opus we call the Sermon on the Mount, He said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  Rather than referring to those who are soft, docile, inoffensive defenders of the status quo, Jesus identified sons & daughters of God as those who spend their lives on the flourishing of family, friends, neighbors…even “enemies.” 

Matthew 5:38-42 :: Jesus continued his teaching by saying, “When power is abused and you’re the victim, don’t get even…get creative in love.”  In so doing, He asserted that active, creative, sacrificial, non-violent direct action is the only thing that can change an enemy to a friend/family. 

Matthew 5:43-44 :: Then, Jesus pushed far beyond the ethical standard of neighbor-love by exhorting his followers to “love your enemy.”  The love that he referred to was not emotional affection, but self-sacrificial.  Here, Jesus went far beyond teaching…He loved us all, an enemy people, by laying down His life on our behalf.

John 10:30-33 :: In this passage, Jesus offered one of the most bizarre, yet clarifying, statements of his life: “I and My Father are one.”  Here, Jesus simultaneously communicated several truths:

Do you want to know what God is like? Watch Me live with unprecedented hospitality, unthinkable grace, & sacrificial generosity.

Do you want to know what God thinks about?  Listen to Me teach.

Do you want to know who God is for? Watch Me move toward all of humanity…the powerful, the powerless, the “enemy” and the “other” with restoration, compassion, grace, & mercy.

Do you want to know what God thinks about power? Watch Me continuously place myself below & beneath.

Do you want to know what God thinks about possessions?  Watch Me walk a downwardly-mobile, simple journey.

Do you want to know what God thinks about status & reputation?  Watch Me choose all of the wrong kinds of people as followers, restore the sick to health & the dead to life, openly critique the unjust Roman & Jewish power structures of the day, and consistently move away from the applause of the crowds.

Do you want to know what God thinks about you?  Watch Me die and then rise again so that you can be forgiven, restored, redeemed, and liberated. When you watch Me suffer, die, and then rise again, you will discover a God who can’t imagine living without you.  You’ll discover a God who says, “You are worth my Son.”

And then there’s Matthew 4 where Jesus offered the relational, yet dangerous invitation to follow Him.  Rather than Jesus inviting them into a cognitive process, He offered his followers the opportunity to learn to embody His teachings and, ultimately, to become men and women who lived, loved, and led like Him.

Finally, I’ll pair the invitation of Matthew 4 with Jesus’ instructions in Matthew 16:24-25 on the “How?” of followership:

Deny yourself; breathe in the exhale of God; and live a cross-shaped life.  That is, in the power of the Spirit and in the Way of the Jesus, lay down your lives so that others might be rescued, redeemed, restored, forgiven, and liberated.

You’ll note that the Jesus I speak of does not put on display an angry, violent, revenge-oriented genocidal God. Rather, the Jesus that I revealed today puts on display an enemy-loving, self-sacrificial God.

The very best of Christianity, therefore, is a Jesus-looking people joining an enemy-loving God in restoring what’s broken in our world. 

The very best of Christianity looks like a people oriented around Jesus who are humble, creative, collaborative, and sacrificially generous.  They are a merciful and compassionate people who listen longer than feels comfortable and humbly move toward the marginalized and the misunderstood.  The best of Christianity looks like a cross-shaped people leveraging whatever power and privilege they have to usher in the restoration of broken relationships (God, self, others, world).  They are a people who actively and sacrificially move beyond neighbor-love to enemy love.

The last thing I’ll say is this: atrocities throughout time have occurred under the banner of “Christianity.”  Those atrocities were not and are not fueled by the Jesus I just revealed.  Any violence done under the banner of Christianity has been fueled by an inauthentic Jesus conveniently constructed by violent, powerful people.  I’m devastated by this and, to those of you who have experienced violence at the hands of Christians, I humbly beg your forgiveness.

At the White House, Tarek asked me this poignant question: “What is one thing that you want to see renovated within American Evangelical Christianity?”

“Lots of things!” I replied with a sheepish grin, “but I’d start with our understanding of Jesus.”

Jesus is what an enemy loving God is like. 

You honor me today by allowing me to speak of Him.  His peace be upon you, my friends.

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