We Are Poor Indeed If We Are Only Sane

One of the most beautiful things about Jesus is that he cannot be contained.

One of the most difficult things about Jesus is that he cannot be contained.

One of the most alarming things about Jesus is that he will not be contained,

not by the prejudices of his own time or even his own mind,

not by the grave, not by our assumptions, and certainly not by the confines of our minds.

That's the Reverend Matt Fitzgerald, and today he brings you a powerful message entitled,

We Are Poor Indeed If We Are Only Sane.

I'm Katie Givens-Kheim, and this is Day One.

Welcome to Day One, the weekly program that brings you outstanding preachers

from America's historic Protestant churches,

sharing insight and inspiration from God's Word for your lives.

Hello, friends. I'm your host, Reverend Dr. Katie Givens-Kheim,

and today on Day One, we are honored to have with us the Reverend Matt Fitzgerald.

Matt Fitzgerald is a lifelong member of the United Church of Christ

and has been a pastor for 25 years, serving churches in Chicago and Massachusetts,

including the United Church of Christ.

including St. Paul's Chicago, where he is in his 12th year as the church's senior pastor.

A graduate of Macalester College, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary,

Matt has written essays for Poetry Magazine, for the Christian Century,

and for the Journal for Preachers.

Reverend Matt Fitzgerald, welcome to Day One. We are so happy to have you.

Thank you, Katie. It's a real honor to be a part of this and to speak with you today.

Yes, and I know you're preaching a bit, but other day,

one listeners might not. Give us a picture of the life and ministry of Matt Fitzgerald these days.

Well, let me tell you about where I serve. I have been a minister for 24, 25 years,

and I was ordained in 1999, and I have been, I spent the bulk of that time in the city of Chicago,

on the north side of the city, serving historically German churches in the United

Church of Christ. I grew up in the UCC as a congregationalist, and our denomination,

for those of you who are interested or forget your Confirmation lessons,

was a merger in the 50s between two denominations. St. Paul's is, and the first church I served also,

both have a sort of unapologetic faith about them, which, and it's not an uncritical faith

or an unthinking faith, but in my experience, it's unusual, and I love it. I feel like a really good

fit for the theological impulses, instincts, traditions of the church.

I've been a part of many of the traditions of the churches that I've served, and that's been

motivating and energizing. We're right in the city, for people who know Chicago, we're a few

blocks east of the Lincoln Park Zoo, more or less, right near DePaul University. And that's a great

church. I serve, I'm fortunate to serve with two other pastors, so I have a nice community of

colleagues here, and gifted, talented ministers, good preachers. It's great.

And we have a really terrific music program and an engaged congregation. So we hold a lot of

different things together. As I said, it's a fun church to serve, more than fun, but it is a fun

church to serve, and it's a great place to preach. I feel like who I am as a preacher has been

really absolutely determined by the congregations that I'm serving.

Well, that leads perfectly into the question. What are a couple of things,

you've learned about God or about being Christian from your parishioners?

Well, let me try and tie it. I mean, all kinds of things, my goodness.

Yeah, sure.

I mean, I'll say first, like, faithfulness. But there are some days when the shape of my own faith

is about as engaged with the passion that preaching requires as I was engaged with,

the news as a 15-year-old when I was throwing the paper at people's houses. So one thing I've

learned about God is that a deep and rich sense of God requires our faithfulness. So when I lead

worship and I look out and I see people who are coming to church over and over and over and over

and over again for decades, and it's not their job, you know, it's their love for God and God's

love for them that has them.

When my faith is in a fallow point, and I think all of our faith, right, waxes and wanes.

Absolutely.

It helps me understand God's faithfulness to us more clearly and the faithfulness that

God's commitment to us engenders just by knowing the saints of the church and witnessing their

faithfulness. So that's one thing. In terms of the sermon that I'm sharing with you,

I think we're all, all of us are odder, stranger, more eccentric than we, like Freud says,

we, you know, there's a false self that you have to put on to get through the world. And we can

confuse that with our real self. And I wouldn't necessarily want to live in a world or be at a

bus stop where nobody is in false self mode, right? I mean, wherever, where, yeah, where no one is in

false self mode. At the same time, I think we're all, all of us are, all of us are, all of us are,

all of us are, all of us are, all of us are, all of us are, all of us are, all of us are, all of us are.

Especially in affluent, striving contexts, and St. Paul's both is and isn't one of those contexts, but in those contexts, we can confuse that resume self with who we really are.

So, I feel like I have come into this much deeper appreciation for the strangeness of God.

I think in that regard, my appreciation for God's eccentricity, I mean, that's a strange way to put it, but God's inability or refusal to correspond to our definitions and assumptions of normality, of right behavior, etc.

I see it more easily because of, again, the...

The out there people that I've grown to love in church.

Love it.

What kind of preaching do you think the world needs now?

I think the world needs preaching that takes risks, both in form and content, and holds to the best of the tradition that one is coming out of.

I think the world needs preaching that is honest, and that cuts both ways.

It means that congregations need to allow their preachers to...

To push them, to take risks, to surprise them, to make mistakes, to be bold.

And preachers need to worry less about how they're coming across and more about faithfulness to revelation in scripture.

So, a preaching that is biblical, honest, but entertaining is the wrong word, but I mean...

Engaging, I think.

Engaging, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you and I could lob off of this and get on YouTube and find literally, you know,

like innumerable things that are more interesting than our conversation, right?

Or than most any sermon ever preached.

And so, if we're limiting ourselves, you know, the difference is not in how witty or entertaining can I be because...

Or any preacher, because there's always going to be...

If that's the ground that we're sort of competing on, there's always going to be more entertaining things than a sermon, right?

The difference is...

Unlike any other mode of expression, a sermon has the potential to, and often does, become the word of God.

And, you know, the best comedian on YouTube doesn't.

And so, I think an awareness and an appreciation for that promise in preaching, I wish more preachers carried that into the pulpit.

Matt, give us a quick snapshot, just a little bit about what is your first memory of God?

When I was a little boy, I had sheets.

I had sheets that had Noah's Ark printed on them.

And I remember at night dreaming of Noah's Ark.

I would say that, you know, funnily for a...

Not funnily at all.

I mean, for a preacher, maybe for a Christian or just for a human being.

The first plain memory I have of a sense of God is one in conversation, talking about God.

Not like some experience of being awestruck, although I know I had those.

But talking with my...

My mom, when I was a little boy, about feeling a closeness with God, I felt a sense of God's approachability, which surprised me.

Because I had a sense of God's, the way I think most of us intuit this, God's grandeur and awesomeness and distance.

And yet, I felt in prayer, which is funny because I'm not a very disciplined or faithful prayer, but back then, I was probably five, six, seven.

A sense that in prayer, I could approach God.

And that was like approaching a friend.

And so, I remember that sort of like feeling that tension.

I mean, a resolved tension, but that tension and talking about it with my mom.

I was pretty young.

Now, listen for God's word as we hear from the gospel according to Mark, chapter 7, verses 24 through 37.

From there, he set out and went away to the region of Tyre.

He entered a house and didn't want anyone to know he was there yet.

He could not escape notice.

But a woman, whose little daughter had an unclean spirit, immediately heard about him.

And she came and bowed down at his feet.

Now, the woman was a Gentile of Syrophoenician origin.

She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

He said to her, let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.

But she answered him, sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.

Then he said to her, for saying that, you may go.

The demon has left your daughter.

And when she went home, she found the child lying on the bed and the demon gone.

Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went by way of Sidon toward the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis.

They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech, and they begged him to lay his hand on him.

He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue.

Then, looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him,

Ephatha, that is, be opened.

And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one.

But the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.

They were astounded beyond measure, saying, he has done everything well.

He even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.

Now, Reverend Matt Fitzgerald's sermon, entitled, We Are Poor Indeed If We Are Only Sane.

Jesus is all over the place.

First, an embarrassing argument with a Gentile woman whose daughter is possessed by a demon, and probably near death.

Emily Dickinson describes the mindset.

I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading, till it seemed that sense was breaking through.

The woman's daughter felt a funeral in her brain.

The woman felt it with her.

She's ready to try anything.

Crystals?

A blood infusion?

From a disbarred East German Olympic physician, Ivermectrin?

Or wait, how about God?

The one who tamed the chaos roiling her daughter's mind when he spoke the world into being.

He has already defeated evil.

But cut the head off a rattlesnake, and its death throes remain dangerous.

Her daughter is endangered.

The woman's faith is strong.

Jesus is standing right in front of her.

He can stomp this snake out.

Easily, she drops to her knees, begging for help.

And Jesus calls her a dog.

Let the children be fed first, for it's not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.

As if grace were coal, a limited commodity.

Not the product of a love so superabundant the rim of heaven failed to contain it.

As if his love were meant for a select few.

Not this seropheny.

Not a niche in hyphenated outsider.

She cracks on him with a comeback honed in a dojo known only to the perpetually disrespected.

Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.

Maybe, she whispered, checkmate, maybe it was a prayer.

Jesus is undone.

He stammers for saying, ah, you may go.

The demon has left your daughter.

Before he encountered our unnamed heroine, Jesus was riding high.

In the verses immediately preceding today's reading, he won a verbal joust with Pharisees and Sadducees,

triumphantly arguing that it isn't what you put into your mouth that pollutes, it's what comes out.

And then, just two or three verses later, he coughs up some pollution of his own and has it thrown back at him.

In the form of faith.

How can Jesus not have been humbled by this exchange?

He thought he was in control.

Turns out, this woman knew him better than he knew himself.

Humbling.

He thought God was controlled by the constraints and rules and prejudices of time, which is to say he thought he was.

Turns out, God is free.

Uncontrollable.

Out of control.

Ever lose an argument only to realize that your self is fathoms deeper than you knew?

For me, this happened in therapy and on the basketball court in high school.

Back then, my top-ranked team lost to a tiny school from a dying mining town whose players warmed up in jean jackets.

David with a denim slingshot.

I walked out of that gym, 18 years old, humbled by a forced awareness.

We control very little in this life.

My legs felt weak.

And it wasn't because I'd been chasing a 10-point lead all night.

Decades later, in therapy, I realized that my drive to be a perfect pastor was not rooted in my love for God,

but instead in a zombie-like determination to please my long-dead father because grieving him wasn't possible when he died when I was 14 years old.

I walked out of that office.

I was humbled and reeling with relief, stunned by the fact that I had been trapped in the certainty of faith for more than 20 years.

Or I should say the certainty of mistaken faith.

The horizon becomes wide-ranging and expansive when you're dropped to your knees.

Because on your knees, you're forced to either stare at the dirt or lift your gaze godward.

When you stand up,

you find the ground beneath your feet feels less certain than it had before.

Less certain.

Less stable.

But uncertainty is more powerful than assurance.

Certainty constrains.

Uncertainty opens endless possibilities, even as it leaves you shaky, weak in the knees, reeling.

I like to imagine Jesus reeling.

As he proceeds from the region of Tyre, stumbling past Sidon, bouncing off the Sea of Galilee, and then sprinting for the region of the Decapolis, moving forward, the unmoored incarnation of a God who cannot be contained, who will not be controlled, who is out of control.

Eventually, he encounters a man who cannot hear and cannot speak.

The man's friends ask Jesus to heal him.

Here's a confession.

In childhood, the Three Stooges frightened me.

They came on reruns on Saturday afternoons when the cartoons ran out.

And when Larry, Curly, and Moe got rolling, poking each other in both eyes with one hand, fingers out, tongues wagging, ears wiggling, I was completely unnerved.

I had to look away.

It was as if these three men would do anything to make me laugh.

I changed the channel.

It was too much.

In most of his healing stories, Jesus speaks.

And wholeness comes to the infirm like wind, a fine spiritual thing.

Mark doesn't mention the Three Stooges, but he does describe Christ's fingers in the man's ears, Christ's hand and his spit on his tongue.

Jesus seems out of control, determined to do whatever it takes to give anything so this man can be well.

His spit and his touch.

What's next?

His body, his blood.

We look away.

We change the channel.

And then we project our cold ideals onto heaven.

God is unchanged and unchanging, distant and reserved, all-knowing, inscrutable, in absolute control of all things at all times.

A series of attributes, I think.

I really do.

I think there are a lot of them.

I think this is a series of attributes that might describe the aspirations of the patriarchs and philosophers who coined these attributes.

But none of this sounds much like Jesus.

As Stanley Hauerwas says,

Get too close to Jesus and you'll find that Christians are stuck with a God who bleeds.

Quick, let's think instead.

Sometimes it seems we have placed Christ inside our minds,

turning him over and over.

And over again, like a rock in a tumbler, until he is polished and smooth, pleasing, and easy to believe in, confined inside our minds.

At its worst, that's what a theological education can do.

At its worst, that's what rational religion can do.

At its worst, that's what a lifetime of church-going will do.

But one of the most beautiful things about Jesus is that he cannot be contained.

One of the most difficult.

One of the most difficult things about Jesus is that he cannot be contained.

One of the most alarming things about Jesus is that he will not be contained.

Not by the first century, not by the prejudices of his own time or even his own mind.

Not by the grave, not by our assumptions, and certainly not by the confines of our minds.

How wild would it be if God came to be with us

and one of the very first things he did was get in an argument with his mother at her college,

his cousin's wedding reception?

Wilder still, if he lost the argument and then got everyone at the party super drunk, he did.

What if he spoke to a herd of pigs and convinced them to leap off a cliff?

He did.

And then he cursed out a fruit tree.

His friends were traitors and rebels, bad fishermen, despised women.

His politics made no sense.

He flipped tables over in a rage.

He wept.

While he prayed, the government, the senior pastors, and the state senators conspired to kill him.

And he returned, rose up to forgive his murderers, meaning each one of us.

What if God isn't in control of himself?

During my last two years of seminary,

I worked as a support person for a group of previously institutionalized men.

Each one of these guys.

They had his own apartment and a part-time job.

I would help them run errands, fill prescriptions, make dinner.

I loved this job, and I still think of it often.

I loved the men I worked for.

My favorite was Dave.

He was a non-stop talker, but he lacked the gift of inflection.

His voice was always turned up to 11, no modulation.

He loved science.

He was scientifically minded, and he carried a childhood fascination with models and globes into adulthood.

He taught me the word orrery.

Matt, this weekend I will make an orrery.

In my first week of work, I walked Dave home from a doctor's appointment

and stood in the doorframe of his apartment as he entered.

The smell of multiple air fresheners leaked out into the hallway.

He invited me in for a Coke.

I declined, and he invited me again.

I got a lot, more than two cases.

I said no, and he repeated himself.

This went on for a while, until he took offense.

Come in, he shouted.

And then he bellowed at me,

I got more pop than you can handle.

He did.

More pop.

More verve.

More intensity.

More burning, urgent honesty than I could be bothered with at the end of a work day.

I backed away, unnerved.

And although I dropped Dave off at his apartment three days a week for the next two years,

he never invited me in again.

He remained a client.

We never became friends.

To this day, I regret rejecting the man's hospitality, unhinged as it might have been.

But I hear it echoed in Jesus' wild intensity.

Nothing can stop his more than sane insistence, his verve, his honesty, the burning urgency

of Christ's new creation bursting into our old, staid order, again and again and again,

determined to unmoor us.

It makes me feel giddy, nervous, which they say is just your body telling you it is excited.

Still, it makes me fearful.

But a carbonated kind of fear, which is to say Jesus makes me joyful.

I like to imagine God looking at us the same way Sylvia Plath looked at her children when they were young.

There is electricity in her vision.

You're clown-like, happiest on your hands, feet to the stars and moon-skulled,

gilled like a fish, a common-sense thumbs-down on the dodo's mode,

snug as a bud and at home like a sprat in a pickle jug,

a creel of eels, all ripples, jumpy as a jumping bean,

ripe like a well-done sum, a clean slate with your own face on.

You're the vision.

Or the child of a God who cannot control himself.

Mercy spills over the rim of heaven and soaks you like whiskey from the glass.

You couldn't balance dancing.

You dancing at your own birthday party.

It runs down your arm and soaks the cuff of your one good dress shirt.

And if you go racing to the dry cleaner, turn your back on God,

shove Jesus onto the cross and straight out of your life,

that won't stop him from reaching you any more than his own ignorance

or an immobile tongue stopped him from healing people 2,000 years ago.

After all, we only get anywhere near the truth of God

when all the sensible things to say about him are overwhelmed by the fact

that the earth itself pitched and rolled beneath angel feet when the stone was rolled away.

The ground shakes.

The earth's spine could break.

He is here for you.

With spit on his fingers, he touches you.

You're a clean slate with your own face on.

Amen.

¶¶

Our preacher today was the Reverend Matt Fitzgerald.

For a free transcript of his sermon,

We Are Poor Indeed, If We Are Only Sane,

you can visit us online at dayone.org.

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This sermon is fantastic.

Tell us where this title came from.

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

I'm glad you asked that

because it's an unattributed quote.

It's from Donald Winnicott,

who is, you might know his work, but-

Winnicott!

Yeah.

Oh, we're gonna dork out on the psychoanalytic theory.

Oh, bring it.

That's awesome.

I'm not a huge, my wife is a psychotherapist

and she and a church member

who also has both really turned me on.

Donald Winnicott, I don't presume to know a ton,

but his sense of like the third space, right?

And the way that children have access to this realm.

Transitional objects.

Right, yeah, yeah.

This realm that isn't interior and isn't exterior,

but exists somewhere between them or beyond them.

I love that notion.

I think it has real applicability

for what the life of faith can look like and is.

This imaginative space that children access more readily.

But I think that phrase too, I find it to be evocative

and it just captures what I was trying to get at

in this sermon, which is,

I think there is an impulse to pull Jesus

into categories, boxes, ways of being relatable even

that are easy for us.

And that we wanna make,

I'm not saying Jesus is insane,

but we wanna make him sane, right?

Or we wanna reduce, we always wanna reduce him.

We always wanna reduce God, I think,

to that which we can either in our most foul moments

as a people or as a nation that we can use and control.

But the impulse is also somewhat admirable.

We wanna reduce God so that we can relate to him.

And we forget as Christians that God has done that work.

He has made himself known and knowable

in the humanity of Jesus.

But the humanity of Jesus is really intense

and a little foreboding, off-putting,

hard to get a handle on.

And so to me, thinking about our own lives

and we're poor indeed if we're only sane.

Only sane implies like, right?

I've got it all under control.

And we can be sane and also be open.

And humble, expressive, wild, full of verve,

all those things and without being in a manic episode.

So I'm not saying, I wanna be clear about this.

I'm not saying the goal is like, don't take your meds

or mental health is got something suspect about it

or to be clinically insane is to be like God,

but rather to box ourself into understanding

of stayed ordered respectable behavior,

which is one way of thinking about sanity

is maybe we need to begin there,

but then how do we get out of that box?

How do we transcend it?

How does our humanity transcend it?

And I think Jesus in that he's a model

of what it means to be human

as well as God with us, shows us that.

You mentioned therapy in the sermon as a space where you,

Yeah. As a space where you,

realized your drive for perfection wasn't rooted in love for God. So what would you say to

listeners who have doubts or questions about the possibilities of working with a therapist

to deepen one's own faith? There's lots of reasons to work with a therapist, but

how can that have anything to do with faith? Do you have to always go to a spiritual director?

And well, I can only talk about my own experience. I mean, I refer a lot of people to therapy

and as a pastor, you know, if and when I get a, you know, I always tell people like the thing I

say when I refer somebody is my door is wide open, always open. I'm not making this referral in order

to push you off, but rather recognizing the end of my ability to help with whatever the issue might

be. Especially if the issue that a person brings to me is presenting more as a psychological issue

than,

a spiritual one. Karl Barth says about faith and science that he has this great phrase that they

are overlapping magisterium. And I think about the psychoanalytic ways of helping the psychological

ways of helping a person and the spiritual, the faithful, the Christian in similar terms

as overlapping. Personally, I don't go looking for a therapist who is Christian. And it's

funny, I've had conversations with therapists before where like a modality that they're working

in is perhaps implicitly atheistic, right? And they start to go into this big rigmarole about,

you know, you might not, this might be offensive to you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you have to just let your, you know, and it's a very patronizing kind of approach. And

I've always said, you know, like, hey, I care about, you know, I want to be helped. And,

and you've got the tools to do it. I'm really interested in your belief right now. And,

and even the belief of, of the minds behind it, behind your approach, as I am the faith of the

orthopedic surgeon who repaired my Achilles tendon when I tore it. I mean, these are,

do you know what I'm saying? Like, these are areas of, of, of, of, of really attenuated,

finely honed expertise. And the world doesn't correspond to my belief as a Christian. I don't

expect my mechanic.

Or my therapist or whomever. It'd be great if everybody did, but I think it's on the Christian,

the individual to draw those lines and make those connections. Now, I am sure that there

are really good Christian therapists working explicitly with faith material who, who would

blend these things more than I'm talking about. But I guess my only point is, I don't think you

know, to answer your question, I don't think, at least in my experience, you need to go find

somebody who's,

who's working in the same faith tradition that you bring. That said, you know, there's an old

antipathy toward religion in psychotherapy. And so.

And so many areas of medicine, just, you know.

Yeah. And so you don't necessarily want to find somebody who's going to be constantly telling you

that this, the most important thing in your life is bullsh** either. And, and, you know, that can

happen. So you got, it's like, it's so relational. Therapy is so relational. You got to find somebody

that, that you click with.

Yep.

Well, it's great. It's an example of how there's so many doors to open when it comes to going deeper

in one's faith and not where you'd always expect.

Yeah. I mean, that experience in general, not to go on and on, but that, that example that I spoke

of in the sermon, to me, it's like in the same way that a true encounter with Christ will drop you to

your knees, will humble you. Right. And that can happen. And I think often does happen, not in that

we realize how broken we are. But it can happen. And I think often does happen, not in that we

realize how broken we are. But it can happen. And I think often does happen, not in that we realize

how broken we are. And then we go to Jesus and God restores us or forgives us or loves us.

I think with Karl Barth that often, for me, at least, it is an awareness of the pain and the

drama that Christ went through in order to bring himself to me and to love me. That makes me

realize, you know, either that's a crazy, dramatic overkill, overreach, or, you know,

I must be pretty broken in order for that to be necessary. Right. And so then you drop to your

knees. Anyhow, I think the encounter with, with God is a humbling one. Therapy is humbling. I mean,

it's very, you know, you're kind of down on your knees in the same way. Help me. And so I think

that in that regard, if, if you're kind of approaching the need for help again, to use the

orthopedic metaphor, like I did tear my Achilles a few years ago and I, you know, I couldn't walk

for a little while. I couldn't walk for a little while. I couldn't walk for a little while. I couldn't

walk for a little while. I couldn't walk for a little while. I couldn't walk for a little while.

Which was a very humbling experience. Like I need this. I need to be restored, healed. If, if you're

thinking in those terms, in terms of mental health or just emotional balance, wellbeing, or past

trauma or whatever, and you're a person who believes in God, you can, you know, in terms of

the conversation in the therapist's office, you can leave God out of it. But, but you're going to

come to some realizations that have everything to do with your faith. Right. And, and for me,

that's, that's a very humbling experience. And I think that's a very humbling experience.

That's what happened in that instance.

Matt, you described the wild intensity and burning urgent honesty of Jesus that can sometimes

unnervous and the electricity and the joy that can come from embracing the unsettling transformative

power of encountering the divine. I also know about you. You appreciate cities and the city

you live in Chicago, Chicago, and the city can crop up in your sermons and in your way of

experiencing God. And I think that's a very humbling experience. And I think that's a very

humbling experience. And I think that's a very humbling experience. And I think that's a very

Do you have specific spiritual practices about how you engage the city?

I would say that to be in the city is to be confronted with human beings constantly. And

I'm not, I grew up in a city of about a hundred thousand people, a little less than that. Probably

it was at a low point in the Rust Belt economy, Duluth, Minnesota, which is a city I love, a town

I love, but not as a, as a, as a, as a city. And I think that's a very humbling experience. And I think

compressed as Chicago or Minneapolis or Boston, other cities that I've lived in or near.

But to be right in the heart of a city, to be right in the heart of Chicago,

is to be surrounded by, confronted with, engaging with all kinds of different people all the time,

unless you're intentionally hiding away or retreating into your own space. And we can do

that, of course, really easily. But in the same manner that I can feel closer to God by looking

at the rapids of a river or a mountain, I can feel closer to God by having encounters with God's

people, you know, waiting for the train in line at the grocery store, etc. And I think that for

whatever reason, for me at least, happens more easily and readily in the, you know, relative

hothouse of urban life. Matt Fitzgerald, thank you for the preaching and the ministry you bring

to the world. Thank you for bringing it to day one.

Today. And we look forward to all that is coming forth from you.

Thanks, Katie. This has been really fun. I appreciate it. Always glad to talk about myself

and God.

Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Rev. Dr. Katie Givens-Kime,

wishing you all God's blessings on day one and forever.