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Friends. It is an honor to join you tonight . Thank you so much. President Irizarry for the generous invitation to preach. And thank you also to dr given to for the kind introduction dr demento was

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one of my most formative teachers and her work continues to shape me as a preacher. As I'm sure it does many of you. Can I get an amen? So you will understand the deep fear and

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trembling that I am having now that I chose a text from one of paul's letters knowing you'd be in the room, professor, but here goes nothing. How are the dead raised? Someone asks fool,

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Paul responds. He's just so pastoral. You know what you sow does not come to life unless it dies. He goes on and into his illustrative list of binaries. What is sown is perishable, what

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is raised is imperishable. What is sown is in dishonor, It is raised in glory, It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power, It is sown a physical body, it is raised

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a spiritual body, that's the most baptist I've ever sounded. And Paul may not be very pastoral in this particular letter, but the man can preach right ? And whether it was his intention or a trick

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of the rhetoric or the philosophical context of his hearers and later his readers, whatever it was, the effect of Paul's words here and elsewhere has been to draw a deep and dividing line between body and spirit

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. Right? Yeah. The perishable, dishonorable, weak body and the imperishable, glorious, strong spirit . Alright, let's add to the mix. The other texts that we read tonight. The great commission

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, jesus last words to his disciples in Matthew's Gospel , go get out of here make disciples of all nations. He says, if we put those two texts in a shaker, add a little ice and

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a squirt of lemon, then shake them up or serve them if you prefer. Now we've got a faith that is not only disconnected from our bodies but also disconnected from any sense of place. Any location

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at all. The disciples are set loose on the waiting world, which is everywhere and nowhere. The gospel is universalized and it's up to the disciples to take their beliefs and get other souls to believe them

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. That's the effect. Anyway, this cocktail has proven deadly and it is burrowed deep in Western christian thought and practice when our identities are disconnected from the land on which we live, when we see ourselves

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as separate from the earth and living for another world , then we have no problem ripping other people from their lands. Whether with a genocidal campaign to push native americans out of their homeland or with the atlantic

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slave trade ripping millions of Africans away from. There's dislocation is normalized when people are spirits not bodies, then we can sell black bodies on the auction block and write piously about the conversion of their souls.

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We can steal Children from their native mothers and put them in boarding schools that attempt to erase their culture and language like the Carlisle boarding school, whose motto was kill the indian save the man. Carlisle was

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one of the first of over 400 federal Indian boarding schools in the United States that were government funded and often church run. They were marked by violence and abuse and some were in operation until the 1970s.

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If you've heard of these schools at all, you may be imagining stern nuns and priests at the helm , I hate to break it to you. But 28 of these schools were presbyterian affiliated and as for

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Baptists, well, we are so fractured and divided and unwilling to confront our own history that as far as I know, no one has even counted when we see ourselves as spiritual beings separate from material creation

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. We can exploit and abuse the earth. To a point of climate crisis, we can dump toxic waste on indigenous sacred sites, We can create a trash vortex in the pacific ocean and clearcut ancient forests

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, endangering the existence of whole species of plant and animal life and just barely notice, right? Our scripture cocktail keeps us disconnected from place from creation from our bodies from each other. It gets us drunk

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on a spirituality of conquest. Now, I know what some of you are thinking, Those are the bad guys, right? The baddies as my seven year old would say. And Natalie, that is

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a bad interpretation of those scriptures, let me take you to the original greek and show you what paul really means, right y'all are seminarians and scholars what jesus is really getting at. Yeah, yeah,

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yeah, okay, stick with me. Why is it so difficult and so convoluted to unravel the bad reading and provide an alternative? Why is it so easy, so natural for folks to find this mind

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versus body dualism, this heaven versus earth separation that leads to so much harm? Is it just me or y'all's people like that too? That one sermon where you explain it all is not gonna do the

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trick your proficiency and biblical greek and I love greek . Please forgive me, professor, but your professor , your proficiency in biblical greek and stellar exchange, jesus may get you an A but they aren't going

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to help you sink back into your body, they aren't going to ground you in the dark clay texas , prairie soil. I mean when you think about it, it's kind of hilarious that we think if

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our disembodied brains can just get the correct interpretation that will allow us to overcome our disembodied brains right? Trying to think our way out of this one is just doubling down on the problem stuff is very deep

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, y'all the worldview that allowed my ancestors to steal people to steal homelands is the same worldview that allows me to believe that if I just think the right things and come to the right conclusions. I'll be

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on the right side of history, I will be righteous or at least I've done all I can in a dark and decaying world, turning our focus to justice does not get us out of this trap.

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We gotta call bullshit y'all? We gotta get off this merry go round because it's not just harming some generic other that we may want to help right? We are bleeding out from the damage it's doing to

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our churches and to our own lives. We live and breathe a worldview that depends on division superiority, which without fail, leads to racism, Sexism, Classism, et cetera. And that mess is always

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finding new ways to manifest among people like us who think we are above it. Is it any wonder that most of the church's efforts in social justice are anemic and ineffectual. The spirituality of conquest haunts us

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? How do we get out of it? We don't need a better interpretation. We need a whole new world view whole new way of seeing a transformation of our minds. If you will Billy Jennings writing

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about the age of conquest and Discovery says the deepest theological distortion taking place is that the earth, the ground spaces and places are being removed as living organizers of identity and as facilitators of identity. We need

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to relocate re ground our identities, but I know the divorce between humanity and the rest of creation between our bodies and our true selves is so rooted in our psyches and in our systems that most of us

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don't even see There's another way to be. But there is, there is another way to be. There is another way to see Robin Wall Kimerer in her book braiding Sweetgrass talks about learning potawatomi, the

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language of her ancestors, in pottawatomie, 70% of the words, approximately ar verbs, and this is opposed to about 30% in english. So instead of learning vocabulary like saturday and hill and bay and read

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, she was learning words that meant to be a saturday or to be a hill to be obey to be read. This seemed ridiculous to her at first and she admits to almost giving up. She writes

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the ghosts of the missionaries and the boarding schools must have been rubbing their hands in glee at my frustration . But then something clicked. The language helps her worldview shift obey. She writes, is a noun

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only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans trapped between its shore's and contained by the world. But the verb to be obey, releases the water from its bondage

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and lets it live. She writes to be a hill to be a sandy beach to be a saturday or all possible verbs in a world where everything is alive in english, you're either a person or a

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thing right. But in many indigenous languages, the other than human world is animate living, has personhood as Eco theologian, thomas Berry writes the world is full of subjects, not a collection of objects.

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So what would it mean for us to see the world this way? It would be much harder to exploit the land, I think to disregard the sacredness of the living water, maybe we'd spend less time

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trying to save the world with our theology izing and instead go to the water and the trees and the mountains and ask them to be our teachers. I mean, if we go back to the first Corinthians

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passage, that's what paul did, right, Fool what you sow does not come to life unless it dies and as for what you so you do not . So the body that is to be but a

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bear seed and God gives it a body as he has chosen. What if we stopped trying to organize and extract doctrine from this passage? What if we went outside and grew something and read it again,

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Go plant a seed and watch it grow and see what it tells you about resurrection. This is what Jesus does too. Look at the birds, look at the wild flowers, look at the sparrow,

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look at the fig tree, look at the seeds scattered on the path, let them be your teachers . When I was in seminary, we learned to translate jesus's parables right out of the wild, right

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out of the earth. I'm not sure if it was ever explicitly said, but I remember thinking, oh well of course Jesus uses all of these agrarian and natural metaphors. He's in an an agricultural society

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, right? We've got to take these and reshape them for our context. Does that sound familiar to anyone? Yeah, of course. There were plenty of mechanical and social and urban analogies available to jesus

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. What if in reshaping his teachings, we left the gospel behind. It's not too late for us , beloveds to become human again, to find our identity where jesus finds his in flesh and blood and

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the plants and animals, who were his teachers in the land, which was inextricably tied to his identity and teaching and being and meaning. Now, if you're like me and you have been so fully and

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thoroughly disconnected from nature from the earth from this land for your whole life. I mean, start talking to me about camping and I will break out in Hives if you don't have any idea where you would

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start in reconnecting, reintegrating. Don't worry, there are willing and experienced guides who will lead us. Randy Woodley writes in his book Indigenous theology and the western world view that the land hasn't welcomed settler folk

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because the settlers have not bothered to ask to be welcomed to the lands, no proper introduction to the land with shots. Instead they were presuming it was theirs for the taking. But he goes on to

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say, I want to suggest that it is not too late to be introduced properly to the lands, there are thriving indigenous communities here in central texas and throughout the United States who have literally millennia of experience

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in the sacred relationship with this land. This land whose wisdom and identity and memory is etched in and flows from the hills and forests and rocks and springs that we drive over and pass by every day as

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we stare at the asphalt ahead of us and wonder why we're so lonely. It should be no surprise that the people our american ancestors saw as in need of civil civilization and salvation would turn out to be

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the very people who held the medicine that our ancestors needed the most, the people who continue to hold the medicine that we still need. I mean it's such a gospel move, right? Like why are

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we, why did we not see this coming? So that's what we're gonna talk about tomorrow. Come on. Who doesn't like a good cliffhanger. Now , before you go buy a dreamcatcher on amazon tonight

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, that is not what I'm talking about. But I do want to share with you my journey and my congregation's journey as we've begun a really intentional attempt to center indigenous voices and to connect with our indigenous

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neighbors to locate our faith and our identity in a particular place in our flesh and blood and in the ground. That's here, beneath our feet. I don't know how the story is going to end and

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I won't know by tomorrow night, but something in me is already beginning to heal and to expands and to remember that there is another way to see. There is another way to be in this world.