June 7, 2020
The Rev. Pamela Dolan
The celebration of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, includes a prayer containing a phrase from the prophet Jeremiah, usually translated into English as, “Today the world is born.” As Rabbi Naomi Levy points out, this sounds like a joyous blessing until you know that a more accurate translation of the Hebrew wording would be, “Today is pregnant forever”—which, to be honest, sounds more like a threat, or at least a warning, than a blessing. I mean, can you imagine being pregnant…forever?! As a woman who gave birth in the heat of August to a baby who weighed more than nine pounds, I can tell you that nobody wants to be pregnant forever. It would be a total nightmare.
Rabbi Levy uses that phrase—”today is pregnant forever”—as a first step in guiding people into greater creativity and fulfillment, into living up to their potential. She urges people to find that latent thing, that thing waiting to be born, be it a long-ignored artistic talent or an idea for a new project or the desire for a committed relationship, and then to identify what it is that might be holding us back, whether it’s perfectionism, fear of judgment, or even a kind of hubris. And then she adds, “And some of us are pregnant forever because we’re comfortable being pregnant forever. We like the current routine. It’s easier to live with the status quo than it is to make a change.”
These last few days I’ve been thinking about how that same dynamic can work on a larger scale within a society or culture. So many institutions and organization in this country are founded on principles of justice, equality, and freedom. These are righteous principles. Good intentions and high-minded rhetoric abound. Over and over again, though, we see these same institutions and organizations fail the people they are supposed to serve; they fall short of living into their principles and living up to their vision. Our education system, our legal system, the medical profession, insurance, banking, the entertainment industry, real estate—in all of these and so many more sectors in our society, the outcomes are not the same for people who are black or brown as for people who present as white.
Today, understandably, the loudest outcry is around police brutality. But we all know that if that problem were solved tomorrow our society would still be rife with inequality and racism. And the church is not exempt. In spite of decades of nice talk and good intentions, we haven’t moved the needle very far from the early 60’s, when Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed Sunday morning to be the most segregated hour in America.
I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that it feels like the world is at a kind of tipping point, given all the different crises we’re facing all at once. And what so many of us desperately want to know is if this will be an actual tipping point, something that will lead to deep and systemic change, or if it will turn out to be more like a flareup that will eventually settle down, sliding us back into the status quo. One way people articulate this question is to say that we have to decide if this is a moment or a movement.
My own way of looking at it, one with deep Biblical roots, is to ask if we are going to continue to be pregnant forever, always ripe with good intentions and high-minded ideals that remain largely unfulfilled, or if we are going to give birth to something new and better, something that will create real and lasting change. If we are not careful, if we are not both diligent and daring, both courageous and unrelenting, we will go through all these labor pains without actually giving birth to something new.
Now I haven’t forgotten that today is Trinity Sunday, although I have no learned reflections on an abstruse, complex doctrine to offer. Instead I’d like to suggest that maybe the point of having this day in our liturgical calendar is to give us an excuse to take a deep dive into the nature of God, to immerse ourselves in awe and wonder, to fill up our imagination and our curiosity. None of our words or formulas will ever come close to capturing the truth and wholeness of all that God is. So, let’s set aside any anxiety we may have about that. God is what—and who—God is.
At the same time, let’s acknowledge that for most American Christians, including most of us in the Episcopal Church, our images of God have been blasphemously limited. We have pictured God as white and male and then lamented that people who were not white or male were not treated equally in the world around us. We can do better than that.
In Psalm 8, we are shown a God who is most intimately known in and by those who have no power in society. This Psalm reminds us that humanity has a special role to play in creation: we are of a piece with everything that God created and are meant to live in harmony with the whole created order, paying special attention to the voices of the oppressed, or “what comes from the mouths of infants and children.” To be clear, that means that we, human beings, are not the governor, or Lord, or sovereign, or whatever other word you want to use for the ultimate authority and power. God is God. We are not. And yet, God has given us work to do.
One commentary helpfully sums up Psalm 8 this way: “Yahweh God is our sovereign who provides protection from oppressors and enemies—even out of the mouths of babes and infants. God is mindful of and cares for humanity, and God crowns humanity with glory and honor. In response, humanity is to rule wisely over the good created order. God calls us to be co-creators in the endeavor called life on earth.” This same idea of dominion as a kind of co-creation, a caring for and tending to, is present in both the creation stories in Genesis. You hear echoes of it in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in the great passage where he states, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves.” It lies at the root of our faith. God’s creation is sustained and renewed with every breath, every heart beat. There is always something waiting to be born.
The question that should be animating the church right now is, what are we co-creating? What are we helping to bring into the world? Because if we hold back from the work that is given to us, if we continue to rely on nice words and good intentions, we will end up in a permanent “state of unliving,” rather than in the fullness of life that God promises and desires for us.
Rabbi Levy offers some of the ways we can turn potential into action, including prayer and honest conversation, and ends with the hardest one of all when she counsels us to “feel the pain.” She elaborates, “We must do something most of us spend our lives trying to resist—we must seek to feel discomfort. […] Yes, sometimes it’s your drive and your courage that get you going. But more often, things as they are have to get painful enough so that you can’t live in a state of permanent pregnancy anymore. You just can’t. We become aware of a deep aching within our souls, a knowledge that we are living well beneath our own potential. And once we allow ourselves to experience that pain, it gets to be too much to hold back the change that needs to come.”
As your priest and pastor, I wish I could take away the pain that comes along with living in this moment in history. But if I do that, I will have failed you. Instead, I must do my own work to feel the discomfort and live with the pain and offer to stand alongside you as you decide to do this work also. We must choose—will we continue to live in a world and a church that is forever pregnant with unfulfilled potential? Or will we be the midwives who help bring into the world lasting change that leads to true justice, peace, and equality? Amen.
Note: All quotes from Rabbi Levy are from the book Einstein and the Rabbi: Searching for the Soul. I’ve transcribed passages from the audiobook version. The commentary on the Psalm is by Nancy deClaisse-Walford and can be found at woorkingpreacher.org.
