Author Archives: MaryAnn McKibben Dana

Abound in Hope-A Message for National Capital Presbytery

I was invited to preach at tonight’s meeting of National Capital Presbytery, during which we heard reports from our commissioners to General Assembly. The sermon (more or less) is below.

Also, during small groups I shared a couple of tweets by Niraj Warikoo, a reporter for the Detroit Free-Press who was covering the meeting. Presbyterians can get very self-deprecating about our sometimes tedious parliamentary processes, and I was touched by Mr. Warikoo’s view of our meeting from the outside. Others wanted a copy, so here it is:

“Watching the Presbyterian assembly you see why Protestant-rooted civilizations have been so successful. You see the Protestant sense of time, order, democratic openness, rule of law, & an unending drive to improve themselves & the world.”

Anyway, here’s the sermon:

MaryAnn McKibben Dana
National Capital Presbytery
June 24, 2025
Romans 15:4-13

Abound in Hope

⁴For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. ⁵May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, ⁶so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

7 Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. ⁸For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, ⁹and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,
‘Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles,
and sing praises to your name’;
¹⁰and again he says,
‘Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people’;
¹¹and again,
‘Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,
and let all the peoples praise him’;
¹²and again Isaiah says,
‘The root of Jesse shall come,
the one who rises to rule the Gentiles;
in him the Gentiles shall hope.’
¹³May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

One of my Sunday morning rituals for many years was to drive to church with the radio tuned to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. And while I like Audie Cornish, the current host, just fine, for me Liane Hansen will always be the voice of Weekend Edition Sunday. (Yes, even folks in their early 40s can get set in their ways.)

One of the things I miss on that program is the Voices in the News, a feature that was sadly discontinued 6 years ago. During this segment they would play short quotes from various world leaders or celebrities, in their own voices. It was sort of an audio collage of the events of the previous week.

Tonight I want to keep that spirit alive, and I’ve enlisted some friends to help me. (Keep in mind that these readers may or may not endorse the words they say!)

“Here were some of the voices in the news this past week”:

Voice 1: “We are not here to fight and divide, but to continue to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ and to testify to the transforming power of his love that is available to everyone. We urge you in the strongest possible way to refrain from actions, attitudes, and language that would mar the image of Christ in your response to the Assembly’s actions.”

Voice 2: “You should tell your pastor and the members of your session that you disapprove of these actions. You should refuse to fund the General Assembly, your synod, your presbytery and even your local church if those bodies have not explicitly and publicly repudiated these unbiblical actions. God will not be mocked and those who substitute their own felt desires for God’s unchangeable Truth will not be found guiltless before a holy God.”

Voice 3: “We pray that the discussions that will take place around amending the Book of Order in the coming year can be vehicles for healthy conversation about what it means to be church together, even with deep disagreement.”

Voice 4: “Divestment is not the end, it’s the beginning of non-violent means to fight the oppression of our Palestinian brothers and sisters.”

Voice 5: “The decision will undoubtedly have a devastating impact on relations between mainstream Jewish groups PCUSA. We hold the leadership of the PCUSA accountable for squandering countless opportunities… to isolate and repudiate the radical, prejudiced voices in their denomination.”

(Thank you all for reading the words of others, and in some cases, giving voice to sentiments you don’t agree with!)

Part of the fun of Voices in the News on NPR was trying to figure out who was speaking and what they were talking about. I will save you that mystery and say we heard words from the Fellowship of Presbyterians, the Layman, the Covenant Network, former GA moderator Rick Ufford-Chase, and a spokesman for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

As for what they were all talking about: if you managed to miss the news about GA via CNN, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or heck, even the Springfield Shopper, you’re going to hear about it in our breakout groups with our GA commissioners in a few moments. Suffice to say that some people are elated, others are furious, some are elated about the one thing and furious about the other, some are proud of their denomination for speaking prophetically and at great risk, some are wondering why we even weigh in on half the stuff we weigh in on, some have been looking for any excuse to leave, some are trying their hardest to stay, some have been waiting for a decision for years, some wanted just two more years to study the matter.

In the midst of that, here’s another voice, not from the news this week, but echoing down through the generations: Live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify God.

Oh Paul, you ask hard things of us! One voice? The divestment vote passed by seven votes! Even the marriage decisions, as decisive as they were, left 30-40% of commissioners in opposition. Do you detect a lot of harmony in the voices we just heard? We are not a well-tuned barbershop quartet, glorifying God with our tight chords. At best we are one of those 12-tone pieces by Schoenberg or some other 20^th century composer. If you’ve taken music theory and listen really hard with your head cocked just so, you can hear a unity and coherence to the notes. But 12-tone music is more appreciated than it is loved. It’s probably not going to be your choice of soundtrack for a dinner party or your first dance at the wedding reception. And it’s not likely to fill its listeners with all joy and peace in believing so that they will abound in hope. It’s more likely to leave people cringing with their hands over their ears.

You will hear from our commissioners in a moment about what happened at GA. What I hope they will convey, and what I wish to convey, is that the debate was vigorous, and intense, but also prayerful and respectful. That matters.

Personally, I call it a success that we made it through the marriage debate without hearing the words pedophilia or bestiality. And nobody in the Middle East debate got compared to Hitler. Now I realize that’s setting the bar pretty low. But it’s bar we haven’t always cleared in this presbytery or at General Assembly, so kudos to us!

But regardless of how we made the decisions we did, the decisions themselves have consequence. And we are not of one mind and one voice. And what makes our current situation more challenging, especially here in this presbytery when it comes to the Middle East, is that folks who are used to agreeing with one another don’t agree about divestment. It’s one thing to be colleagues in Christ when you see eye to eye on a whole laundry list of social issues. It’s much harder when those colleagues disagree on something that feels so fundamental. This is going to put our unity to the test. (And at this point our loyal conservative minority is thinking, “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.”)

And still, despite all of this, I do have hope. Because thank God, our hope is in God, who is the one true author of the joy and peace that we so sorely need.

This is the last section of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. It’s a sweeping epistle that has covered everything from the role of the law to the significance of Adam to the interplay between spirit and flesh. It’s no accident that after these weighty matters of the day he winds up where he does, in a place of unity, of welcoming one another, lifting up the steadfastness of the Christ we meet in scripture. But this is not quite his last word to the church. Later in this chapter Paul acknowledges that he has “written rather boldly,” or what the Message calls “bold and blunt criticism.” There is an edge to Paul’s words; they are not all sweetness and light. Deep issues are at stake. So Paul must feel like it’s possible to do both: To be bold and even blunt with one another, to say “here’s where I see God at work in our church,” but also to do the “one-anothering” that Jesus calls us to do.

But how do we live with that tension between the call for unity and the deep disagreements we have? Maybe we need an image to guide us. And the one that comes to mind is from an old Looney Tunes cartoon. (Stick with me.)

Those of you who’ve been to GA know is the exhibit hall, where you have booths for the different affinity groups. Whoever’s in charge of the placement of those booths has a godly sense of humor, because the groups that are diametrically opposed to one another often end up side by side. And it’s not unusual to see someone at one booth chatting amiably with someone the next booth over. And when I see that, I always think of Ralph the Wolf and Sam the Sheepdog.

For those who don’t remember these characters, Ralph the Wolf looks like Wile E. Coyote and Sam is of course a Sheepdog. Ralph’s goal is to steal the sheep for his dinner, often with the help of various products from the Acme Corporation. And Sam’s job is to guard the sheep and keep Ralph from doing that, often with the help of his big doggie fists. Slapstick gold.

But what’s funny about the Ralph and Sam cartoons is that they’re not enemies. In fact, if you remember, they begin each morning by greeting each other: “Morning Ralph. Morning Sam.” They meet each other at the punch clock and they each punch their time card and go to work. And here they are, taking a lunch break together as friends before they go back to doing what it is they do.

Now, my point is not that one side is stealing sheep and the other is the benevolent guard! But maybe the kingdom of God is something like this. We have divisions. But we can decide whether we want to be a divided church. We will continue to address controversy, but it need not be cantankerous. The councils of our church will continue to hash out issues. We will line up at microphones, offering our best arguments and scriptural support for our position. We will be bold and sometimes blunt. And when it’s time to break bread together we will do so, as we did every single day of General Assembly, welcoming one another just as Christ welcomed us.

The things we decide matter. But do we believe that God holds our future or not? Do we believe that God works through our deliberations and beyond them, within us and without us, through us and in spite of us? Do we believe that God is not finished with us?

I do. I believe that God has got this.

And that belief is the peace that Jesus promises, not as the world gives. That kind of peace can only be dreamed up by a wildly imaginative God… a God of joy, steadfastness and hope.

Controversy is Baked Right In: On Marriage, the Middle East, and the Presbyterian Church

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Those rainbow colors had us all a-muddled last week…

1. I was not elected vice moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly.

2. I’m home, and very glad to be so.

3. We made some people mad last week.

…Those are in reverse order of importance.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) made decisions about marriage and the Middle East that left some of us celebrating, and others of lamenting or downright furious. You can read my take on the marriage decision at TIME.

Temperamentally speaking, Presbyterians are not firebrand folk. We joke about being the Frozen Chosen and doing things “decently and in order.” (That’s from the Bible, by the way.) So it’s a bit uncomfortable for us to be in the news, even if we agree with the decisions made last week.

But as my friend Jan Edmiston reminds us, Faithfulness is Disruptive. And last week, after hours of deliberation, conversation, prayer and discernment, a majority of commissioners decided that the faithful thing was to give pastors and churches the discretion to perform same-sex marriages where they are legal, and to divest from three companies who are profiting from non-peaceful pursuits in the Palestinian territories, in keeping with a long-standing policy of socially-responsible investing.

Some people wonder why we wade into controversial issues at all. Churches will leave the denomination, they say. Our long-standing partnerships with Jewish congregations are in serious jeopardy.

Yes, and yes. Here’s the hard thing though, for big-tent, good-natured Presbyterians: that doesn’t make the decisions wrong.

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook yesterday-a snippet from last week’s Feasting on the Word:

If Jesus were really the affirming nice guy we often insist on imagining, should he not have been able to stay out of trouble? What incited people to call him such appalling names? Why would following him wreck families? How did he end up on a cross? The answer is not that his opponents had strange and unsettling ideas, but that he did. Contrary to popular opinion and bestselling books, not everything the follower of Jesus needs to know can be learned in kindergarten. Kingdom work, it turns out, is more controversial and subversive than conventional kindness.

Not every controversial action is of the gospel, of course. We may have gotten it wrong last week. But the potential for controversy is not a reason to do nothing.

When you’re talking about Jesus, subversiveness is baked right in.

That said, conventional kindness is a welcome overlay to all this. So be kind, folks; everyone is fighting a great battle.

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photo credit: incurable_hippie via photopin cc

My Disembodied Head… Or, On Not Being Two Places at Once

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So what the heck is this all about?

Well…

The Presbyterian General Assembly starts on Saturday, but most members of Team Wilkinson/Dana are already in Detroit today, meeting with young adult advisory delegates, having meals with interest groups, and attending a prayer gathering to get fortified for the work ahead (whether as moderators of the gathering or as among its 650 commissioners).

I am not with them.

I already knew that I would miss Margaret’s dance recital on Saturday afternoon, which coincides with the opening plenary of the assembly. But my heart sank several weeks ago when I discovered that the girls’ piano recital was Friday evening. In an ideal world, I would already be in Detroit today. But working parents never live in an ideal world. (Does anyone?)

Thankfully John, my co-conspirator on this great adventure said, “This one’s easy. Don’t miss the recital.” So I asked the girls’ piano teacher to schedule them in the first half of the program (which she was happy to do) and am booked on the last flight to Detroit tonight. If the timing works out, I will listen via conference call to the prayer gathering while waiting at the gate, but I am holding this and all things lightly.

I remember hearing about pastoral boundaries during the call process. Ministry is a demanding job, emotionally and spiritually, I was told. You have to protect yourself! And yes, there are more opportunities for caregiving than you could ever complete. Sunday seems to come every 39 minutes. The average congregation is not going to guard your mental health, people warned. (Guess what? Your kids don’t do that either. They want all of you.)

I don’t know whether this antagonism was intended, or whether I misheard it. In either case, I entered ministry thinking of boundaries as thick walls. Sometimes family life took precedence and sometimes the church had to come first, but there was a clear right answer—or at least, I convinced myself that there was, because the ambiguity was too uncomfortable to acknowledge.

Thanks to my friend Julie Johnson, I now think of boundaries not as brick walls but as semi-permeable membranes. Think about the wall of a cell: some things get through and other things don’t. The cell changes shape depending on a number of factors, but it retains its basic integrity. And most important, it is an organic thing, alive and changing.

To be sure, it’s disconcerting to see yourself as a semi-permeable membrane. There is vulnerability in it. You’re… squishy. But also, stuff can filter back and forth more easily. Case in point: this afternoon I was playing Margaret’s recital music from my laptop and got a private recital. As I closed my laptop afterwards, a “thinking of you as you get ready for GA” email caught my eye. So it goes.

Today I am here, but I’m thinking about my colleagues in Detroit—my heart is partly there. And Saturday afternoon at 1:30 p.m., I will be at the dance recital, in spirit if nothing else. And that’s OK. In Sabbath in the Suburbs I talked about the importance of being present, of fully doing whatever it is you’re doing. And that’s true. But it’s also OK for your heart to be somewhere else too. That’s the way of the world.

AND! Permeability gives you some grace to be playful. Today I’ll be in northern Virginia in the flesh, but in Detroit in spirit… and, it turns out, in image. Some of John’s friends suggested a MaryAnn cardboard cutout that they will carry around with them, just for fun. We decided a MaryAnn mask, pictured above, would be more manageable. I’m hoping for pictures today, a la Flat Stanley, or perhaps Waldo.

Splendid.

If you’re in Detroit today, look for my disembodied head! And tomorrow, I’ll be all there. Except when I’m thinking good thoughts about the little girl dancing hip-hop to Run-D.M.C.

The Harder Thing is the Easier Thing

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I love it when blogs and online articles build on one another. Sarah Spath, a career and life coach, recently wrote about an old blog post of mine, in which I reflected on one of my parenting mantras: the harder thing is the easier thing. Sarah summarizes it like this:

MaryAnn tells the story of being exhausted and trying to run errands when one of her three kids asks from the backseat, “Mommy, can we pretend we’re in a spaceship?” Irritable MaryAnn, out of creative energy, initially just wants to say No—to be left alone. But something in her said Yes instead, so fighting traffic and running errands while in the Minivan Spaceship became a fun adventure that averted cranky kid syndrome when bedtime finally rolled around. The harder thing in the moment—to give her kids creative energy—turned out to be the easier thing over the course of the entire evening.

Robert shared another example with me just yesterday morning: instead of trying to coax and fight our reluctant children to get out of bed, he made them a big yummy breakfast. The harder thing (scrambling eggs, slicing fresh strawberries, making toast, on a busy weekday morning) became the easier one because they sprang readily out of bed and threw on their clothes.

Sarah compares my idea to another meaningful idea she picked up along the way:

Acute pain is often better than chronic pain.

She describes her experience with repetitive stress injuries that came from being at the computer for 8-12 hours a day for her work. These injuries meant she wasn’t writing regularly:

Dealing with it required embracing some treatments that brought acute pain—the sore tearing up of knots in massage therapy, the angry abrasive friction of gua sha in acupuncture, and the terror of letting a chiropractor crack my neckbones. I’m now past the point of needing any of these treatments regularly, but they were critical both for healing and for understanding how my body works and what it needs. And then a physical therapist told me that simply moving around more and getting exercise would help my healing.

So now I prevent and manage the chronic pain with regular exercise, something I never imagined myself doing because it seemed like such a chore. But the acute “pain” of going out for a walk, getting on a yoga mat, or lifting weights always paid off tenfold in the way it loosened me up (both physically AND mentally, it turns out) so that I could have a real writing life again.

This reminded me of the old Anne Lamott story from Bird by Bird about getting her tonsils removed. Her throat was in vicious pain afterwards, and the nurse recommended getting a pack of chewing gum and going at it. When we’re wounded, the nurse explained, our muscles clamp around the wound in an attempt to protect it.

The mere idea of chewing gum made Anne clutch at her throat. And sure enough, the first few seconds brought excruciatingly acute pain, a “ripping sensation” in her throat. But within minutes, the “chronic” pain was gone for good.

My current mantra relates to this stuff. In the midst of lots of big things coming up in my life-General Assembly being just one of them-my task has been to “hold it all lightly.” That’s a hard thing for me-I’m an excellent manager *cough*controlfreak*cough*.

But it will be the easier thing in the long run, as I’m able to be more flexible and gracious to embrace whatever comes.

Do you have a phrase or other wisdom that’s helping you through these days?

photo credit: Deborah Leigh (Migraine Chick) via photopin cc
This is one of the pictures that came up when I searched PhotoPin for “chronic pain” and I couldn’t resist.

What Novelist John Green Teaches the Church about “Reaching” Young People

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BRING ON THE FEELS!

If you’re a fan of John Green (and if you’re not, what’s your problem?), you’re going to want to check out the New Yorker profile, THE TEEN WHISPERER: How the author of “The Fault in Our Stars” built an ardent army of fans.

John Green is like Colbert to me: someone who’s extremely good at what he does and who brings a joie de vivre to his vocation. I can’t help but root for him.

The church is awash with concern these days about the so-called “nones”: people who are not affiliated with any religion, who may (or may not) consider themselves spiritual but not religious… many of whom are in the millenial generation—aka many of John Green’s fans.

How can we “get” more young people? churchy people ask. Is there a way we can “appeal” to them? The format of the questions reveals their purpose—to find more members so that our churches won’t decline and die.

Guess what? Young people don’t care to be our institutional life insurance.

(Neither do 42 year old mothers of three, actually.)

That said, being interested in young people isn’t necessarily opportunistic. Jesus calls us to love our neighbor, and young people are our neighbors. (So are old people, married people, single people, LGBT people, poor people, Muslim people…)

Jesus also calls us to serve, and that’s something that motivates millenials a great deal. (As the saying goes, they love Jesus; they don’t love the church.)

So. In the spirit of connection rather than conversion, friendship rather than membership, partnership rather than fixing, here are some things we can learn from John Green and his tremendous appeal.

He isn’t trying to “reach” young people. Green reportedly hates being called the “teen whisperer,” which is to his credit. His crazy popular vlogbrother videos were not started as some calculated attempt to build his fan base. (Well, not primarily with that purpose, though you can’t argue with success.) Rather, he and his brother Hank started them in order to play with the online video format, which was pretty new back in 2006. They created something winsome and irresistible and the fans thronged to it.

Do we in the church see millenials as a means to an end?
What are we doing that is winsome and irresistible?

He takes young people seriously and learns from them. The Fault in Our Stars is filled with wickedly good dialogue, pitch-perfect one-liners and deep wisdom. Some have criticized him for this because “Teenagers don’t really talk like that.” I read somewhere that Green doesn’t try to duplicate the speech patterns of teens. He tries to write the way teens sound to themselves and one another—clever, weird, and wise, assured sometimes and sharply insecure at others. It’s like teen-speak, boiled down to its essence. You have to love and admire and understand young people to pull that off.

Also, the protagonist in The Fault in Our Stars was inspired by an actual teenager with thyroid cancer, Esther Grace Earl, whose experience helped shape the book. Four or five times a month, Green talks on the phone with kids who have cancer, sometimes through Make a Wish, sometimes not. He is also fluent in social media and engages folks on Twitter and Tumblr. And once every few months, he Skypes with teens who are struggling with serious illness.

Is your church present where young people are present, whether online or in person?
Are you cultivating actual relationships with them, not so you can bestow your wisdom,
but so we can all grow together?

He’s created a tribe. There are traditions and catch phrases and a shared history—not all of which were created by him. (This is important.)

Last year I checked out a John Green book from my local library and when I got it home, out fell a note that had been tucked into its pages: “Hey, nerdfighter! Don’t forget to be awesome!”

DFTBA is very big with this tribe.

And there’s a focus on giving to others. Esther Day is a holiday that Esther Earl asked people to observe on her birthday. According to the New Yorker, “Her idea was that it could become a celebration of non-romantic love—a day when you’d say ‘I love you’ to people who don’t often hear it from you.” And check out the Project for Awesome that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for worthy causes.

How does Christianity help people (of all ages) become a part of something larger than themselves? (Hint: as the Project for Awesome demonstrates, they don’t need us in order to feel this. Still, what is our distinctive gift in the midst of the broader culture?)
And are people encouraged to bring their own energy and ideas to the table, or are we the keepers of our traditions and norms?

He’s a learner. Check out his Crash Course videos. In these, he (and Hank) are teachers, but he comes at his topics with the posture of a student. And my kids love his Mental Floss videos in which he tests out various lifehacks:

Do we have all the answers, or are we willing to learn?

He employs humor with substance. From the New Yorker profile: “In a post advising boys on how to charm a girl, John jokingly said, ‘Become a puppy. A kitten would also be acceptable or, possibly, a sneezy panda’—an allusion to a popular clip on YouTube. But he also said, ‘If you can, see girls as, like, people, instead of pathways to kissing and/or salvation.’”

As communities of faith, do we offer meaning and substance… while taking ourselves lightly?

He loves the grand gesture. Again, the New Yorker: “Many authors do pre-publication publicity, but Green did extra credit: he signed the entire first printing—a hundred and fifty thousand copies—which took ten weeks and necessitated physical therapy for his shoulder.”

Which leads to my final question for the church:
When’s the last time you undertook an extravagant gesture for the sake of this world God loves?

The Blue Room

MaryAnn McKibben Dana