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On Good Friday (April 6) we’ll observe a Tenebrae (Latin for “shadows”) service at the Clare House Oratory (2717 South 8th Street) starting at 9:00pm. All are welcome.

The distinctive ceremony of Tenebrae is the gradual extinguishing of candles while a series of readings and psalms are recited. The participants depart from the gathering in darkness and in silence in observation of the death of Christ.

Meet your local urban farmer. Find out what Seward Coop is up to. Gain tips from your neighbors about ways they work toward using less of the earth’s resources and becoming more self reliant. Learn from organizations and groups advocating for issues related to alternative transportation, alternative energy, urban gardening, and sustainable living. Participate in an event which is fun and hopeful, while providing opportunities for networking and enhancing the sustainability of our daily lives. Please join us!

Sponsored by: Seward Environment Committee, Faith Mennonite Church, Missio Dei, Community of St. Martin. Questions? Contact Phil Stoltzfus, 612-375-9483, minstaff@faithmennonite.org.

- K.S.

A Meal at Sattler House

Currently, Missio Dei only owns one community house – Clare House. Our reliance upon other housing has been unstable and unsustainable. In recent months, we have had to turn many away – not only guests needing lodging, but others who have wanted to join our community to share in our work. We are simply at capacity.

Missio Dei is raising funds for the purchase of a new hospitality house to provide food, shelter, and healing. We will be looking for a building with at least 8 bedrooms and at least 3200 square feet. We intend to name the new house Simone Weil House, after the French mystic, philosopher, and activist.

Simone Weil House will provide much needed space for new guests and interns. The house will host several open meals a week and provide additional garden (and chicken) space.

Not only will the building serve as a hospitality house, it will also be home to the Gene Stoltzfus Center for Creative Peacemaking (Gene was the Director of the Christian Peacemaker Teams from its founding until 2004. He passed away in 2010).

The center will open creative space for people who want to explore Christ-centered peacemaking in the Twin Cities. The Gene Stoltzfus Center will work to expand the Christian peace witness in the Twin Cities by offering programming and resources that will help groups and individuals challenge oppression and get in the way of violence and injustice. We will set aside about 1000 square feet for this center. While Missio Dei will be hosting this center, our hope is to create an open environment that can belong to all those in the Twin Cities who want to pursue Jesus’ way of peace.

Hospitality and peacemaking must go together. Practicing hospitality helps us to tear down walls of division in our homes, while peacemaking does so in the world outside our doors. The Gene Stoltzfus Center for Creative Peacemaking will be a space to imagine ways of acting as the hands and feet of Christ in a broken and inhospitable world.

How You Can Help

Our goal is to raise $100,000 in 2012. We would like to use 80% of that for purchasing a property (probably either foreclosed or tax forfeited) and the rest for renovation.

We’re not just requesting money, but asking for volunteer laborers (all skill levels welcome) to help with renovation. We’ll also be accepting donations of a variety of materials needed for renovation as well as furniture, appliances, and fixtures. There will be many ways to help as we continue this campaign. Will you join us in making this project a reality?

To make a donation to support Simone Weil House and the Gene Stoltzfus Center for Creative Peacemaking, please donate securely here or send your gift to:

Missio Dei
2717 South 8th Street
Minneapolis, MN 55454

The basic story can be found in Matthew 2:13-20:

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”

The story serves as a reminder of what can happen when authority is challenged by the Kingdom of God. Today is as good a day as any to lament the loss of innocent life in our world–to cry out on behalf of those children in our world who have been beaten to death, starved to death, worked to death, or neglected to death.

Let us grieve. Let us remember what ugliness the powerful can sometimes embrace in their desire to maintain power. Let us mourn the oppressions of children in the Holy Land that continue to this day.

Today, let us remember that so many of the victims of oppression and war are children. Let us remember that our Lord Jesus Christ entered into the world as an oppressed baby amidst a time of bloodshed and violent repression. And let us imagine that the Christ was being born into every region or city experiencing violence and death.

I grew up in a household where the dining room table was simply used as storage. It was a place for mail, keys, and stuff that didn’t fit inside the “junk drawer.” We certainly didn’t sit around the table for dinner; we sat around the television instead.

That is why it has taken me years to understand the importance of the dining room table. Apart from the Table, the New Testament doesn’t make sense. After all, Paul saved some of his harshest critiques for those who abused the common table—saying that, because of their lack of love for one another, they ate at a “table of demons” instead of the Table of the Lord. And among other things, Jesus was condemned because of who he ate with. His adversaries couldn’t tolerate him sullying himself by eating with “sinners.” Likewise, the church was expected to practice hospitality to the stranger.

The posture of our way of life as the church is, in some ways, summarized by the Table. The Table is the place of mutuality and respect for our sisters and brothers (for example, 1 Corinthians 10-11). The Table is the place where we welcome the outsider (for example, Matthew 25:31-46). And the Table is the place where we leave the comfort of our own home to dine with “sinners” (for example, Luke 19).

Hospitality is at the heart of Christianity. And, by definition, it is practiced with strangers. Sharing food and shelter and all-good-things with friends and family is good, but it isn’t hospitality. The word “hospitality” comes from the Latin root hospes which means “stranger” or “guest.” It can also, in some instances, mean “host”. The Greek word for hospitality is philoxenos. This is, incidentally, the word for hospitality we find in the New Testament. “Philo” (the first part of the word) means “love” and “xenos” (the second part of the word) means “stranger”…but it can also mean “host.” And so, “philoxenos” can mean both “love for the stranger” and “love from the host”.

When you are hospitable, you are showing the hospitality of God who desires to include all people in the project of redeeming all of creation. Alternately, when you are hospitable, you are welcoming Christ. Paradoxically, in the act of hospitality God is both the benevolent host and the Stranger in our midst.

Living in South Minneapolis, the problem of homelessness is something which we at Missio Dei run into daily. We try to relieve this problem by offering homeless people a place to stay in one of our hospitality rooms. Between our community houses, there are homeless staying with us every week, however we do not just give them a place to stay and leave it at that. We interact with our guests and invite them into our daily life. We share prayers and meals with our guests and try to discern what they might need to help them get back on their feet in an unforgiving world.

“Gary” and “Vicky” were just such people: a young transient couple who, at first, just needed a place to stay. We soon learned that they were expecting their first child. Despite their attempts to find lodging at homeless shelters here in the Twin Cities, they found themselves either turned away because of liability issues related to the pregnancy, or were asked to separate into different shelters. We decided to let them stay with us until the baby was born and longer term housing was secured.

People need more than just shelter; they need a community of support. By practicing hospitality, we not only have an opportunity to meet tangible “needs,” but to offer safe places of healing, where folks who experience alienation can begin to experience wholeness. All of our churches can offer such healing to those in our communities who need to experience welcome in the midst of an inhospitable world.

Jesus not only challenged how we extend hospitality, but broke the social norms by being a guest to questionable hosts (like tax collectors). It was a big no-no to be a guest in the home of a disreputable person. This goes beyond the ancient notion of hospitality into something much more provocative. Jesus didn’t ask for the stranger or outcast to adopt the regular symbols and practices of covenantal faithfulness before including them in the Kingdom. Jesus went out into the world, to places of alienation, to houses of woundedness, and offered healing.

If we, the church are to be a people of hospitality—a people of welcome—we are also called to leave our places of safety to bring healing into the brokenness. This way of life is clearly seen in Jesus’ patterns of ministry.

If we extend hospitality with an open heart, eventually our guests and friends from the margins will become a part of our community. It is easy to minister to “them.” But it is hard to be like family to those whom we judge as “less” than us. Paul knew this reality all too well—he was constantly challenging the churches throughout the Empire to love one another like family. Nevertheless, the gentiles judged the Jews and the Jews judged the gentiles. And the wealthy disrespected the poor (though, strangely, we don’t hear about the poor disrespecting the wealthy).

At Missio Dei, we have meals often. But the two meals that I appreciate the most come on Sunday and Saturday. On Sunday, we structure our worship service around a common meal. We make no demands upon those who come share a meal with us—even though we considered it to be “communion.” Since Jesus made no demands upon those who were welcome at the Table, neither do we.

On Saturdays (during the warmer months), we load up our bike trailers and bring fresh ingredients and high quality portable cooking equipment to prepare a meal in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood. A variety of people from all over the neighborhood come to our weekly feeding for good food and friendly conversation. Over the years, we believe a miracle has happened—on any given Saturday from noon to 4pm, you will find Somali refugees, local students, nomadic anarchists, local businesspeople, homeless folks, and Mennonites eating a meal together. In this way, we believe we are helping people to affirm one another just as they are.

The Table is a place without judgement. It is a place of acceptance and mutuality. It is a place where all of us come just as we are before God to experience God’s presence in and through one another.

Jesus’ way of hospitality goes way beyond welcome–it is transformative. The ultimate goal of hospitality is tearing down the walls of division. And that, I believe, includes economic walls. We must, as folks who depend upon the mercy of God, realize that those of us who have houses don’t “deserve” to be sheltered any more than those who don’t have homes. That the divisions between homeless and housed, rich and poor, powerful and meek, do not reflect the Kingdom of God.

This is why Paul had such strong words for the Corinthian church, essentially arguing that when we bring social divisions to our dining room table, we are eating judgement. The eucharist–the holy meal of the gathered saints–is a revolutionary sacrament. It isn’t magical–by eating bread and wine we don’t simply become like Jesus. Rather, it is a place where we can re-imagine our shared humanity in such a way that we can then go forth and infect the world with healing and liberation.

Around the common table, prejudices, judgements, and inequities are to become undone. Hospitality provides not only an opportunity to attend to basic needs, but also a chance at destroying the very inequities that render such attention necessary.

The question is, how do we embody God’s heart? Can we be a people who sit at table with strangers and let the walls of division fall? How do we take all of our things—our money and stuff and homes—and yield them to God’s dream for his people? How do we welcome the stranger as Christ and be a willing guest in uncomfortable places? We must give and receive revolutionary hospitality.

Revolutionary hospitality refused to accept the status quo. It moves beyond mere charity and, instead, creates space for enemies to live as family, strangers to live as friends.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, anthropologist David Graeber writes:

…revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations [even within the collective]…Revolutionary action doesn’t necessarily have to aim to topple governments…attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power would, almost by definition, be revolutionary acts.

I believe this begins with hospitality–by inviting people into our common lives in such a way that they transform our most basic understanding of family and community. Hospitality becomes revolutionary when the line between the host and the guest, the owner and the dispossessed, the master and the slave, the privileged and the marginalized gets so blurred that we can begin to redefine our social relations in the way of Jesus Christ.

When we gather around the table, we can experience Jesus Christ through our friends, through strangers, and even through enemies. And we can begin to become the Body of Christ, showing God’s love to an inhospitable world.

Image from the 2011 CPT Delegation to Grassy Narrows.

Aboriginal justice was largely a non-issue to me until two years ago. This is a sad thing for me to confess. For my entire life, I’ve lived with Native neighbors. I grew up near White Earth in Northwestern Minnesota. In my twenties, I moved to the Twin Cities, which is home to Little Earth, as well as the center of the Dakota Oyate—the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. My city is filled with visual reminders of the past subjugation of the aboriginal peoples of this land. The place names of Minnesota—even the name of the state itself—comes from the first people of this land. Our longest-lasting state monument, Fort Snelling was built to assist in the subjugation of the Dakota. But, until recently, I didn’t have eyes to see these reminders for what they are: symbols of occupation.

Indigenous people have been “invisibilized.” Few people care. Our social consciousness has placed Native Americans in the past–people who used to live here. Many mistakenly assume that there is justice for those that remain. We’re talking about 3.5% of the population of Canada and 1.5% of the population of the United States. Since the earliest settlers landed in these shores, the aboriginal peoples have experienced a genocide that we won’t publicly acknowledge. Settlers gained vast land and resources and, in exchange, granted relatively small patches of land and a mere facsimile of self-determination and sovereignty. It simply isn’t in our national interests to have an open conversation about this. And so many of our societal myths have effectively rendered indigenous people as nostalgic images of our past.

So, in my imagination, indigenous peoples were remnants from the past. However, as I began to encounter indigenous activists and scholars who talk about oppression and struggle in the present-tense, my imagination began to fracture. What once was safely kept in textbooks began to break into my conscience as I learned about the genocidal treatment of the aboriginal peoples of North America. A catalytic moment for me was reading Waziyatawin’s What Does Justice Look Like? Later, I was able to interview her on the Iconocast. That interview changed my life. I realized that I needed to recognize (and own) the dark legacy of Christianity, while, at the same time, commit myself to being a part of seeking justice.

I had always believed that I wasn’t responsible or complicit in the sins of the past. Nevertheless, it dawned on me that, as a part of the Body of Christ, I was responsible for seeking justice for the future. No amount of time can heal the injustices of the past. And as someone who benefits so highly from these injustices, I do not have the freedom to remain neutral or silent.

We, the Church in North America, cannot silently accept the the injustices that have brought us to this point. We must begin to “name” and confess those injustices that have shaped our current realities and step by step act in faithfulness as we embody peace and justice in the midst of a violent world.

At one point in my interview with Waziyatawin, I asked her what role Christianity can play in a just future. In part, her response was “…its very difficult for me to see how Christians can proceed into the future [in a just way] while adhering to Christian principles.” This challenge, while discouraging, was also liberating. I felt challenged to embody the teachings of Christ in such a way that I could both repent of the sins of the Church, while also pointing to the peace that Jesus seeks to bring.

This was something that others at my community, Missio Dei, felt as well. As a result, we decided that a faithful step forward would be to participate in an Aboriginal Justice delegation with Christian Peacemaker Teams. While participating in a delegation at Grassy Narrows (Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabe) would only give us one local example of injustices among one Nation of aboriginal peoples, we felt it would be a good place to start. As more people from Missio Dei participate in delegations and trainings, our goal is to form a Regional Group with CPT that would have a strong, but not exclusive, emphasis on Aboriginal Justice.

I was the third person from Missio Dei to travel to Grassy Narrows. Their traditional way of life, which has depended upon a balanced ecosystem, has been threatened by mercury poisoning and clear cutting. And their history is that of forced residential schools and genocide. If the aboriginal people couldn’t be wiped out, they could at least be “civilized” by force.

Given this horrific history, I am amazed by the perseverance of some of the people to resist. The people there have very little control over what happens. They have been “given” a very small area to live on as a reserve and have been “granted” access to traditional lands. Governance is complex. Democracy doesn’t really exist for native North Americans. Federal and provincial (or, in our case, state) governments can basically control the outcomes based upon their own economic interests. That was why, in 2002, women like Chrissy Swain began blockading logging roads. CPT has been a presence in that work since the beginning, accompanying and bearing witness with those who have decided to take a stand against an unjust system.

Many tend to mistakenly assume that violence against indigenous people is a thing of the past. But not only do systems continue to muffle the voices of so many, but fear tactics and intimidation continue. The police in Kenora can often become abusive as local natives are abused or hassled. One night in Kenora, our delegation was encouraged to document the police presence outside of a bar—where many were celebrating after an Aboriginal hokey tournament.

The police paid a lot of attention to one bar. At least 8 police vehicles and 16 officers were present at any given time. We made our presence known to the police and they became uncomfortable. They positioned themselves away from the bar. By the end of the evening, there were no incidents. We heard from local folks that, usually, the police would forcibly disperse the crowd at a certain point in the evening and that there would be several cases of police brutality. By all accounts, our presence limited police intimidation. This was ominously reinforced as we drove home for sleep after a long night and realized that a police cruiser was following us.  We were staring down the dark street in disbelief when the officer suddenly and almost aggressively sped off past us.

This occurrence, and many like it, would have been invisible to me before. It is painful to come to terms with the fact that injustices happen all around me and I simply do not have eyes to see them.

If we are going to be a part of a just future (after all, the Church is sadly all-too-complicit in the injustices of the past), we need to do more than feel bad. We need new eyes. And we need to act.

But now that I can see the injustices for what they are, now what? What happens when we realize that the USA and Canada are occupiers? What happens when we realize that our governments have failed to keep what few promises they’ve made to the First Nations? What do we do when we realize that the Church—with scandalously few exceptions—has not only been complicit, but has also fueled, injustices both past and present? What does repentance look like?

Here are a few thoughts about how we might consider moving more deeply into that repentance:

1. We can participate in something like an Aboriginal Justice Delegation, where we can learn about a community and its struggles from their own perspective.
2. We can begin to learn the histories of the places where we live and tell the truth to our communities. When I visit Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis with my son, Jonas, I tell him what the place is supposed to be—that it was a special place to the Dakota people and that it was taken from them—rather than simply telling him that it is a park. We must tell truer stories that don’t gloss over realities with the hazy mist of the American Dream.
3. We can ask our local denominations to move beyond simply apologies by seeking to meet with local indigenous leaders to honestly explore “what justice looks like” without us assuming we already know the answer. The call of Jesus to the wealthy man in his day was to “sell everything” and give it to the poor. Our denominations have acquired wealth, in part, through the deprivation of Aboriginal peoples. We must explore with them what justice looks like even if it comes at great risk to our institutions.
4. We can respect existing Aboriginal sovereignty by boycotting those companies that continue to exploit lands protected by treaties. It is a mistake to assume that the damage has already been done when it comes to Aboriginal sovereignty. Governments and corporations continue to exploit lands that were already granted to indigenous communities. In other words, the governments of the US and Canada (as well as state and provincial governments) aren’t content to exploit the lands that have already been taken, they’re trying to peck away at traditional and reservation lands as well. We need to challenge our governments and boycott those companies (like Weyerhaeuser) that add insult to injury by extracting natural resources from indigenous lands.
5. We can stand with native peoples in their struggles, as supporters. There aren’t many indigenous people left. By standing with them and telling their stories, we can help amplify their voices. It is awkward work, learning to be an ally. But it is a necessary step towards justice.

Many within the U.S. and Canada experience violence and oppression. The US government doesn’t limit its oppressive violence to those outside our borders. Oppressive violence is still a common experience for aboriginal peoples and others in these lands.

This, of course, is just a beginning. But if we can humble ourselves and turn from injustice, God can bring some healing to the deep wounds of the past.