Ep. 19 A Benediction for the Wanderers
Hosted by Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu
Welcome to the finale of Season One! In this episode, Jeff and Sarah offer their reflections on the season, their gratitude to you, dear listeners, and finally fill out The Evolving Faith Podcast bingo card for good. Then, weaving together the entire season’s talks and moments throughout the season, they offer a Benediction for the Wanderers as we all move forward or onwards from here.
Sometimes we’re traveling alongside of each other for a long time, other are with us for a short time. And that’s how it should be. We’re a people on the move. Spending these weeks of this first season of the podcast with you has been such a gift and we hope that this moment of belonging and listening and even camaraderie has nourished you. It means a lot to us and we thank you for listening.
Now available and streaming wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Listen & Subscribe
Show Notes
You can still register for Evolving Faith 2020 Live Virtual Conference even though it’s over. On-demand streaming of the conference is available to watch until April 1, 2021.
You can find Jeff Chu on Instagram and Twitter. You can also subscribe to his newsletter Notes of a Make-Believer Farmer at jeffchu.substack.com.
You can find Sarah Bessey on Instagram and Twitter. You can also subscribe to her newsletter Field Notes at sarahbessey.substack.com. Learn more about her books here.
The Evolving Faith Podcast Bingo Card
Special thanks to Audrey Assad and Wes Willison for the music on this episode. And thanks as always to our producer, Lucy Huang.
“You are empowered to show up in the pews of an unwelcoming space and be a welcoming presence, to ask questions and name doubts courageously in a place that has more often been about certain answers and definite conclusions, and to be present to another person who is struggling and to hold onto hope for them and with them.”
[IMAGE CONTENTS: First: White square with a green flourish, at the top is the Evolving Faith logo. Photographs of Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu are in the center. Text reads: A Benediction for the Wanderers. The Evolving Faith Podcast Ep. 19 featuring Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu. Now Streaming. Remaining images are the same: white squares with a line drawing of an open book that has a tree growing out of the pages. Floating bubbles of green, maroon, and brown surround the bottom third. Text is as follows: 2. “It’s nice to have excellent teachers but it’s even better to be taught by beautiful friends.” - Jeff Chu. 3. “You don’t need to be afraid, you are always and fully and completely held by the love of God.” - Sarah Bessey. 4. “Friends, if you in some way call yourselves followers of Jesus, you are the church. You are empowered to be the church you haven’t had.” - Jeff Chu. 5. “You are God’s people in the world, and no other human gets to take that away from you.” - Jeff Chu. 6. “I pray that you would be an explorer, that you would recover delight and wonder and curiosity about your faith and about God and the story with which we are still wrestling.” - Sarah Bessey.]
Transcript
JEFF: Hi, friends, I'm Jeff Chu.
SARAH: And I'm Sarah Bessey. Welcome back to the Evolving Faith Podcast.
JEFF: This is a podcast for the wanderers, the misfits, and the spiritual refugees to let you know you are not alone in the wilderness. We are all about hope. And we're here to point each other to God. No matter where you are on your journey, no matter what your story is, you are welcome here. We are listening—to God, to one another, and to the world.
SARAH: The story of God is bigger, wider, more inclusive and welcoming, filled with more love than we could ever imagine. There's room here for everyone.
JEFF: There is room here for you.
--
JEFF: So we made it, Sarah! It is our final episode of Season 1!
Before we begin, just want to remind you that if you attended Evolving Faith 2020, the goodness is not over. You have access to the recording of the conference right up until April 1, 2021. You can watch it on your own time and at your own pace. We had such a tremendous group of speakers—where else can you get Barbara Brown Taylor, Padraig O Tuama, and Neichelle Guidry all speaking on hope, one after another?—and we had that especially amazing artists’ session with Amena Brown, Audrey Assad, Nichole Nordeman, and Propaganda, which was transcendent. If you missed Evolving Faith 2020, it is not too late to join us either. You can still register and get access to the videos. Just go to evolvingfaith.com—the table in the wilderness is there for you still. And you are still welcome.
SARAH: Oh, and the Evolving Faith store is still open too! As we are sitting here recording, I actually have my little stainless steel Evolving Faith tumbler beside me— it has made me really happy— both me and Jeff’s husband Tristan think it is the perfect coffee cup size. So that’s there, along with all the books from the speakers from this year are in bundles, there’s tote bags, see-through face masks, I mean, just all the good swag. That’s all still there waiting for you guys as well at evolvingfaith.com.
As Jeff said, this is the season finale, for our first season. And so we end as we began: awkward and terrified!
Jeff: On brand, Sarah, on brand.
Sarah: Very on brand. It felt so overwhelming when we began this project and now we’re here. And it has been a rich rich and life-giving - and tiring! - twenty weeks. I’ve been overwhelmed by the response from our community. These hundreds of thousands of downloads—it’s because of you. All of you. No other brand new podcast launches like this, and it is because you all were the ones launched us. We have no network, no big podcasting machine production thing behind us. And yet even more importantly we've been able to reach so many folks out here in the wilderness with this message of companionship and hope. And people are finding each other out here and it's really beautiful to see.
We are so grateful to all of you. Grateful for your generosity to share, tell your friends, review it on podcast apps, especially those of you who give us five stars—you’re my favorites. You’ve encouraged us, even though Jeff and I clearly don't know what we're doing, and you’ve believed in this project so completely. We honestly had no idea what to expect and to be met with such enthusiasm has been humbling.
So thank you! Before we begin the episode, we wanted to say thank you to you. You are the best listeners and community. You meet not only us but one another with grace and boldness and courage. And it has meant the world to us that you’ve trusted us with your friends and your family members or your online communities every time you’ve shared an episode. It’s really good to know we’re not as alone as we thought - and it turns out there’s actually a lot of us out here in the wilderness.
JEFF: So I’m just as awkward as when we started but I’m slightly less terrified today, because we’re just a few minutes from being done with our season, so that’s a lot less runway on which I can crash and burn.
SARAH: It would not even be an episode of this podcast if one of us didn’t mention quitting in a very hopeful tone of voice. So, you know, while we’re at it, if you have been playing along with your Evolving Faith Podcast bingo card that is in the Facebook after party group, we’re just going to load you up with a black-out here: Just going to name them off. We’ve got Wandering! Table! Wilderness! Compost! Deconstruction! Hope! Reimagine! Invitation! Schitt’s Creek references! Jeff trying to quit podcasting!
JEFF: So I don’t know why we didn’t have pro-ject—Sarah saying pro-ject. We have Sarah saying “A-boot!” I don’t know if it counts because you didn’t say it this time; I did. Anyway, I don’t think “boot” is quite right. It’s like a combination of vowels that maybe doesn’t exist in American English.
SARAH: Well, that marks depravity off!
JEFF: Sarah….
SARAH: Any references to the enneagram! Me adding the word “right?” at the end of every single statement. Mentioning the apocalypse! I think I could do this all day long.
JEFF: Please let’s not. It’s so humbling and gratifying to look back at that first Evolving Faith gathering that has constituted most of this season, and to realize that we had no idea what we were getting into. I had no hand in curating the lineup that year, and you and Rachel really did a phenomenal job throwing together a pretty weird and wild group of humans. So I’m curious: Why did you pick these people? What were you and Rachel looking for?
SARAH: Hm. Yeah, that’s a good question. I like that you mention that you didn’t help curate the lineup. Was that absolution you’re looking for?
JEFF: Freedom. It’s freedom. A declaration of freedom.
SARAH: There you go. There are a lot of things that we were looking for. I remember Rachel saying that year—we had, the night before Evolving Faith begins, we usually do a speaker dinner where we just all get together and hang out for the evening, and right before that night, I remember her kind of walking into the room and saying that it felt like walking into the reception at your wedding and Mike McHargue said, “yeah but with people you like.” And that’s kind of what we did, honestly. We had at that time zero idea that Evolving Faith would connect with so many people, we had no plans of this being a long term wide ranging community with a podcast or any of the things that have happened in the years since. We asked people we knew, and people we liked, and people who were our own good guides in the wilderness. And I think that comes across both onstage but also off stage.
JEFF: Maybe that’s one of the real intangibles about Evolving Faith: For the most part, we actually really like each other. And we actually respect each other. And we actually love each other. And I’m not just talking about you and me, Sarah, but I mean so many of the people we’ve heard from this season. It’s nice to have excellent teachers but it’s even better to be taught by beautiful friends.
SARAH: Yeah, you know, Rachel and I were also on the speaking circuit back then. I think I was preaching like twenty weekends a year at least. And it’s lonely. Right? It’s lots of time alone in your hotel room, long travel days. Even the burden of carrying a whole event on your own shoulders. And so when we planned this, we knew we wanted it to be a blessing to all of the folks who would come including the speaking team. We wanted to love them, and gather them, and make sure that they all felt less alone too. So yeah, in a lot of ways it felt like we gathered up the teachers and friends that we wished we would have had ourselves during deconstruction. We knew that these cycles of our faith - these moments of questioning and doubting and rebuilding, all of it - is very unshepherded and very lonely. And so we thought these were good shepherds and good guides and good friends. And in the end, we did feel a lot less alone. And maybe that’s because what we were yearning for, then and now even, is to feel just a little less alone and to borrow that hope from each other. And I think the other thing too that we were looking for was to be reminded that you don’t need to be afraid, that you are always and fully and completely held by the love of God.
JEFF: The epidemic of loneliness I think is something we could talk about for a long time. It really troubles me, because it’s one indication that the church has not done adequately what it’s supposed to do—not in terms of fostering our relationship with God and not in terms of nurturing our interdependence with one another. So if the church—and I include myself in this, so I don’t want anyone to think I’m just pointing fingers—if the church had done a better job, I don’t think you and I would have the jobs we have. I don’t think anybody would have showed up at Evolving Faith in 2018, or 2019, or 2020.
SARAH: Yeah I think that’s really true. And it’s interesting that even though these talks that we featured were from the 2018 gathering, they are just as relevant and timely to this moment in time. And if we were lonely or feeling isolated then, well, then came 2020, right? Which has been apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word, revealing those fissures and cracks in the Church in really devastating ways and so I think knowing you aren’t alone, and that there are lots of us reimagining scripture and church and community and neighborliness and politics and justice— it’s healing. And so that’s where I think that idea of borrowing hope really comes into play here, because this year has felt really hopeless for a lot of us.
JEFF: I guess I just want to reiterate one thing as we close out this season: Friends, if you in some way call yourselves followers of Jesus, you are the church. I know you haven’t always felt that; you might not be feeling it now. But here’s the thing: There’s the church, by which I mean the institution, the worldly institution, and then there’s the church, meaning the gathered people of God. You are empowered to be the church you haven’t had. You are empowered to show up in the pews of an unwelcoming space and be a welcoming presence, to ask questions and name doubts courageously in a place that has more often been about certain answers and definite conclusions, and to be present to another person who is struggling and to hold onto hope for them and with them. If the conventional practice of the church has been to lecture people and to draw hard lines, you have the tender strength to listen attentively and to love well. You get to embody God’s possibilities in the face of despair and proclaim justice amidst bigotry. You are the church, and you have a calling to bless and to serve. You are God’s people in the world, and no other human gets to take that away from you. It’s both a privilege and a responsibility. It’s a blessing—and it means that we’re called to be a blessing to one another.
SARAH: Come on now, that’s gonna preach. That’s-- yes. Yes. I mean, I know people can’t see me but tambourines would be involved if I could. That’s a great, great reminder. And that I think leads into what we wanted to do even with this episode, of having it feel more like an Evolving Faith gathering, because we end every gathering with a benediction. That year, I was the one who gave the benediction but rather than simply playing the recording of that for you, Jeff and I have edited it a wee bit and we’re going to offer it to you together. The benediction every year draws from each of the speaker’s talks and from moments that have happened during the weekend. We work on it all weekend, we’re adding and editing and crafting it until the literal moment that we are offering it and then sending you back out to the place where you belong. Which is part of this journey. After all the nature of the wilderness or of being a wilderness person is that of a traveler. And so this is a feast in the wilderness for you, for us, and we have sojourned together here and we’ve spent these moments of time together, but then we do move forward or onward. And sometimes we’re traveling alongside of each other for a long time, others of you maybe are with us for a short time. And that’s how it should be. We’re a people on the move. And so spending these weeks of this first season of the podcast with you has been such a gift and we hope that this moment of belonging and listening and even camaraderie has nourished you. It means a lot to us and we want to bless you as you keep moving onward. So let’s do this.
As Rachel said, may we be blessed with an evolving faith that survives and adapts to change: change in circumstances, change in the culture, change in our own heart and mind, change in relationships. May your evolving faith survive precisely because it can adapt to change, because it embraces these seasons of tearing down and building up, of planting and uprooting, of death and resurrection. May you grieve what you have lost. Rage against the injustice you see around you. Laugh deeply with your new friends. And hope. Hope, even though it's risky, even though there's a chance you're going to be disappointed again. We can guarantee you, you're going to be disappointed again.
As Jeff said, may we embody a narrative of hope, knowing that the story of the compost pile is the story of You. May we remember that we are still becoming and that every single moment of our lives we are worthwhile to you. May we remember what it feels like to cook with the ones who fed us. May we surrender the comfort of our fears to embrace your dangerous gospel. And then carry your great hopes for us, remembering that nothing separates us from your love.
JEFF: As Jen said, may we give ourselves permission to grieve our losses, and may we perceive the gains too, staying on the lookout for the rest of the weirdos. God, show us how to be a people who know what it is to cast down the idol of human approval. Help us choose intact souls over intact careers. And remind us to fire ourselves over and over from being your publicist.
As Osheta said, may we embody an ethic of peacemaking so that it’s what we do, not just what we feel. Show us how to embrace and understand and reimagine your dream of shalom, so that we see it as wholeness and goodness and persistent flourishing that leaves nobody out. And help us to begin to tell, or even imagine, or leave a little bit of room for, a better story for our own enemies.
SARAH: As Cindy said, may we not inflict our spiritual baggage on those we love and those who love us. Prevent us from weighing them down with a heavy yoke that they don’t need to bear for us. And give us the confidence to allow those we love to find their own paths of spiritual formation, even as we grow in the courage to tell the stories of ours.
As Kathy said, may we own our story and remain open to healing. Would you help keep our hearts tender for signs of it. In this evolving faith journey, you have given us the ability to change the legacy; would you give us the courage to engage with that? Our systems taught us to find ways to be approved of and that our worth only came from that approval. So may we learn how to untangle you from people, knowing that somebody’s disapproval of us does not mean that you disapprove of us.
JEFF: As Pete said, may we remember that all faith is an evolving faith. May we be in awe of all that you are doing that we can’t figure out. And inspired by that divine mystery, God, may we reimagine you humbly and faithfully and boldly, just as the saints and our ancestors and all who have come before us have done.
As Mike said, may we stop being lukewarm. May we recognize that the climate is changing, that it’s our fault, and that judgment is coming—and may we repent, turning away from destruction and toward a true shalom that encompasses the health of the planet.
SARAH: And as Cheryl said, may we find these portals of the Spirit, that breathe with your presence. May we sense and become acquainted with that. May we find ourselves somehow under your outstretched wings, holding all of the unnamed daughters and unseen sons together. Thank you for never leaving us unnamed and unseen, never leaving us as orphans.
And as Wil said, may we begin to embrace the whole community and may our feminism become something that is marked and known as intersectional. May the God of Hagar and Sarah and Keturah and Rebekah and Rachel and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah be with us—and may we become better acquainted with their God. May we never again erase women's voices and experiences from Scripture and may we learn from the margins that we ourselves maybe aren’t on.
JEFF: As Kaitlin said, may we always recognize and remember that light begets light, love begets love, and solidarity begets solidarity.
As Austin said, may we refuse to be taken in by a message of dehumanization. May we fight for dignity and humanity, for ourselves and for others, as Rizpah did. And may we have the courage to be angry and the love required to pursue justice.
SARAH: As Sandra said, may we integrate fully our worship with justice. May your justice roll down like a river into our own lives and hearts and minds and communities, its waters decentering our own selves and moving us, shifting our sadness and anger into action and embodied worship.
As Nish said, may we discern our times and put the needs of our neighbors ahead of our own. May we be formed by the Holy Spirit into the image of Jesus for the sake of others. And may we steward politics well as institutional neighborliness.
JEFF: As Propaganda said, may we understand the power of creating narratives. And may we terraform with faithful courage, examining our narratives and building our identities and telling better stories.
As Audrey said, may we recognize you, God, as the great iconoclast and may we pay attention to the stories that our bodies are telling us, so that we might become re-embodied, healed of the images and the stories and the lies that have damaged both us and those around us.
As A’Driane said, may we examine the things in our stories, the things deep in our core, that we would rather keep hidden and that keep us from exploring. And once we’ve done that excavation and even the burning, may we lay the foundation for who we will become, taking risks and nurturing all the diverse forms of creativity that exist.
SARAH: As Stephanie said, may we cultivate the ability to let go of the old in a way that frees us to imagine and discern something that is truly new, not a new and improved version of what we had before, but something so radically novel that we don't have an existing framework to compare it to. We praise you for the wilderness where we can be led by those for whom prophetic imagination is like second nature, who have no temptation of the things of old. Would you help us look for ways to partner with You, finding You in the mundane and in the right now and learning to perceive the work that You’re doing right now, not just in the someday to come.
And as Derrick said, may we no longer entertain fantasies that we are independent and don’t need anybody. May we be born again, that we would understand the need and value of interdependence, and flourish and thrive beyond survival. And on the days when we don’t have hope, may we be diligent and faithful and get up another day and do it again.
As Raedorah said, may we restore the image of God among the fellowship of believers, reaching out, restoring, rehumanizing, abled and disabled together, we are called to God's love in this way. May the covenant of hope wake us up every morning, that covenant with humanity. May we have hope that we will do better today, we will be better today. May we experience those glimmers of joy that fuel our hope, glimmers of resilience that fuel our hope, knowing that our covenant relationship is with something bigger than our Right Now.
JEFF: As Austen said, may we go to ourselves and for ourselves, to you, God, and for you, God, following your call to be something and someone different than perhaps we had imagined. Help us embrace our transitions, especially the one into acknowledgement of your love and the one into blessing the rest of humanity.
As Michiko said, may we be prophetic and countercultural and revolutionary, like flowers blooming in unexpected places and mushrooms growing after forest fires and weeds in the cracks of sidewalks, resisting the death-dealing ways of this world by living our most beautiful lives.
And as Tina said, may we name our lovely paradoxes, may we embrace the lessons of Jesus’s paradoxical teachings, and may we be people who offer hospitality of the heart and hospitality for the human spirit.
SARAH: All right. Now, gather in, friends. I pray that you would not be afraid. And I pray that you would live as if you are loved. Because you are. And I pray for you to have bravery and guts for honesty and discernment. I pray that you would remember and that you would know that you are not a liability to Jesus. There is no fear in love. I pray that you would be an explorer, that you would recover delight and wonder and curiosity about your faith and about God and the story with which we are still wrestling. I pray that you would be someone who is known and marked and embodied, as one who walks with love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and even, I hear, self control.
May we be a people who remember to whisper to one another and to find each other out here on the other side at this moment in time and whisper to each other: There's room for you. Do you remember that you belong here?
May we be a people who hold the doors open for everyone. That we would hold each other's hands, and hold space for the complexity of all of our pain, and our brilliance, who can hold the light and the salt, and who can hold all of the silences that we feel and the storms that we are experiencing, that we would know what it is to hold our opinions loosely and yet love ferociously. I pray for perseverance and discipline in your life. I pray for speech that is seasoned with salt. And I pray that when we are bored and tired and discouraged and frustrated, when you are feeling futile and small and maybe even a bit ridiculous that you would remember to sink into and chase after and follow love. And there receive your new life and your new joy and your new strength, new boldness, new courage, new versions of love. And I pray that you would experience the courage to turn around and face your life as it stands right now.
Jesus, would you give us the courage to look our life in the eye because this right now is it, whether we are surrounded by a bunch of jelly-faced toddlers or by thousands of longing and hungry souls or just facing the prospect of Thanksgiving with our families. We lift our heads to find ourselves in hospitals or back alleys or boardrooms or Zoom classrooms or kitchens.
May we know the truth, that we are people of love, that we are by love and for love and through love and in love and called Love and prophesying that. I pray that we would keep our eyes open for signs of your presence. You are always up to something. Thank you for the joy of journeying with you and being with it. And as we leave the sacred time, this time of challenge and learning and comfort and hope, these episodes of laughter and tears, would you bless us? Would you bless us?
We dare to boldly ask before the throne of grace that you would bless us with reconnection to ourselves, to one another, to creation, to the story that you are telling and with you. And I pray that you, my friends, Church, that you would experience the wild and inclusive and generous invitational, disruptive, welcoming, love of God and that everything that we have embodied over this season together - the sorrow and joy, weakness and strength - that it would all fill you with such longing for God's dream for you that we can do nothing but live it out.
As Rachel began our season, we know we cannot promise resurrection. But we can promise you companionship. I pray you have found some here with us, that you have found fellow travelers to help you carry those burial spices. And as we have tended to the vulnerable things together, it is our prayer that the God of every season, the God of cave angelfish and autumn leaves, the God of survival and if not survival then death and resurrection, bless, preserve, and keep you, now and forever. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God, Mother of us all. Amen.
--
JEFF: As we said at the top of the show, this is our last episode of our first season. Thank you so much for walking with us through this little adventure. We are so grateful—and we hope that you’ve been blessed in some way by our speakers’ wisdom and our weird ramblings. On the off chance that this is actually the first episode you’re listening to, well, I guess this was kind of a weird place to start. I hope we didn’t scare you away. We might or might not be back in the new year with some more episodes. Sarah says no promises.
SARAH: You can find me at sarahbessey.com for all my social-media links, my newsletter, and of course my books. And you can find all the links to our speakers mentioned during the show as well as a full transcript in our show notes at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. As always, the Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with Lucy Huang. We’d also like to thank Jordan Gass-Poore, our founding producer, who helped us get this podcast going. Thanks too to Audrey Assad and to Wes Willison for our music.
JEFF: You can sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com. Thank you, friends, for listening to this first season of the Evolving Faith Podcast, and until next time, whenever that comes, remember that you are loved.
