A Reflection by Trevor Bechtel on August 25 2024

One of the blessings of being a part of Shalom for these last fifteen years has been getting to go out for coffee with John Powell occasionally. This typically happens at the Panera on Washtenaw. When we started going for coffee we’d get ceramic mugs and bear claws on ceramic plates and sit a one of two tables by the window looking out on the Whole Foods parking lot. We would talk about a variety of topics in the overlap of interests we share; Mennonites, Universities, Racism, Politics and things from our lives, our dreams and disappointments, our memories, and what we might do next. Panera has been a good meeting place for us. 

But Panera has also been changing. 

When we came back from the pandemic there were sneeze guards and the other assorted very reasonable accommodations to public health. Then one day when the cashier offered us the paper cups for our coffee and I asked if we could have ceramic cups instead, she said no, we don’t have ceramic cups anymore. This was very disappointing to me. I really like drinking my coffee from a ceramic cup. In fact, since you asked, I prefer a ceramic cup with a wide rim for my coffee. I like to drink tea from bone china, with as thin a lip as possible. And beer from a glass. The Panera cups were not ideal, but they were good. Anyways I have these preferences but I’m also a little embarrassed by them so of course I didn’t say anything, accepting our paper cups; cheerfully handing one to John and turning to the coffee pots. A great advantage of Panera is that it still allows for limitless coffee consumption. I fondly remember my 20’s and 30’s when I could expect limitless coffee from any coffee shop I’d venture into. Now I expect that I’ll need to pay full price for each cup I consume. 

For several visits this new order remained the same paper cups, but ceramic plates for our bear claws. At some point during that era I noticed that a set of iPads with credit card machine were installed on the counter in front of the pastry display case. John and I eschewed those and continued receiving our coffee and bear claws from the cashier. 

Then a couple of visits ago, we came inside and all the pastries were wrapped in paper bags with cellophane windows. I wondered to myself if this was another change or some temporary accommodation to a broken dishwasher. I was disappointed to discover that it seemed permanent on our next visit. 

John and I had coffee again last Thursday and that conversation shapes a bunch of what I’m sharing in this sermon with you, but anything you don’t like is on me. Anyways, this time when we went in there was no cashier in sight. There were some binders and other pamphlets and brochures stacked up against the cash register giving it the feeling of disuse. There was a small group of people clustered around the iPads. John and I headed in that direction. A worker came out and starting packaging some more baked goods. 

I turned to John and suggested that we might used the iPad to order our coffee and bear claws. He looked at me as if to say, “well whatever” and instead said something like, “let’s see if I can learn how to do this”. I dove in and order our coffees relatively seamlessly. I started to look for bear claws. There were none. I asked the worker if they had bear claws. She said the didn’t have them anymore. I turned to John and suggested we could order Pecan Braids. We did. John paid with his credit card in the reader and we stood there a bit forlornly, wondering what would happen next. We moved over to the cash register that we might have used to order and waited. Without too much time elapsing another worker came from the back, paper cups in hand and walked by us to grab two pecan braids in their paper and cellophane bags. We took our seat and began to talk.

There is a lot that makes me sad about this story, and you can probably guess all of that. Happily, my conversation with John was unaffected by the paper bags, the paper cups, the awkward ordering or the shift from bear claws to pecan braids.  I tell this story because I’m the kind of person that tends to pay a lot of attention to my surroundings, and knows that often the kind of attention I’m paying is not particularly useful. I care about things like what kind of coffee cup I’m drinking from, how much plastic was used in it’s making, how many machines I need to negotiate to buy it, and whether all these things are working together to create a better society for me and those around me. This matters, in an important way, in that we need to have spaces in our cities where people can come together and converse, and the more accessible and hospitable these spaces are the better off we will be. However, my minute focus on detail also doesn’t matter if the space is in fact good enough, as Panera has always been for my conversations with John. 

But it does matters that we attend to the places we inhabit. We always live in a particular place. Abstract ideas can help us categorize the world, but if they don’t land in real places, they probably aren’t much good. Again, I was surprised when I was choosing hymns for worship today just how few evoke a sense of place. Geographical features like mountains and rivers are named but it’s rare that our hymn give us more than the name. 

This week and next, the peculiarities of schedule mean that I’ll preach twice inside this soft opening of Shalom’s Packard Era. I’m going to focus on what kind of future we can hope for, a topic suggested by the lectionary texts for these two weeks, and by our political climate, this week I’m attending to externalities and next week I’ll focus more on what we hold inside. Hopefully this will bridge Jo’s sermon on new beginnings from last week to our fall series on prayer. 

The question of what kind of future we can hope for was a big part of this past week as the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago. Speaker after speaker let us know that Kamala Harris is the person that can carry us joyfully into that future, and the convention planners leaned in to the celebration of that future, and of Joe Biden’s career, in ways that made the news. The United Center in Chicago was filled with balloons an music and the last night included the promise of an appearance by Beyonce and/or Taylor Swift that was just about believable given the week that proceeded it even if it ultimately didn’t happen. 

There was much to laud about this presentation; a celebration of Harris’ blended family, and of Tim Walz’s neurodivergent son are a kind of inclusivity many of us also want to celebrate. The absence of a Palestinian American voice on the stage, and a focus on Harris’ prosecutorial career and military promise were less exciting politics. There was also a middle class feel to the  convention, without centering politics on the oppressed, the poor, the marginalized, the immigrant, the excluded. 

There was a point early in the convention that I want to comment on a bit further though; the sermon/speech offered by Senator Raphael Warnock, who pastored Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church for nearly 20 years before becoming a senator. Warnock offered a view of the future that brought together his Christian faith and his hope in democracy. Warnock has not given up on the Christian roots of his worldview as he has become a politician. For those of us who have some anxiety about participation in the political process, and Brethren and Mennonites have long had, it was both a beautiful homily and a cause to pause and consider what he was saying. 

Warnock discusses the work and faith of his mother who picked other people’s cotton and tobacco, but who was also the mother of the man on the stage talking now as a U.S. Senator.  

I heard him as a Black American suggesting a trajectory that sees democracy emerging from slave holders and then electing him to the Senate. He framed this trajectory with the phrase, “This is my America.”  It was a subtle shift from the “Only in America” rhetoric that was more common at the convention. In that trajectory I heard Warnock locating democracy inside the Black American experience. Rather than saying that participating in democracy is Christian Warnock said that participating in democracy is for him, and his world, the faithful response to creating the world he wants to see. Warnock talked about voting as a form of prayer. This was again a powerful statement but not a universalizing one. Instead it built up context around a set of commitments so that we could understand them as responses to the oppression of slavery and racism, and then opposed to another kind of Christian approach to politics, that found in Christian Nationalism. 

Jacob Rosenberg says in article about Warnock’s speech on Mother Jones, “[Warnock] does not say that everyone’s America involves a story of like [his]. Instead, the senator from Georgia implies that we fight, despite how easy it would be to be cynical, with a relentless faith that maybe this America is possible. Thank you, he says to his congregation, for having a faith in democracy that is not always earned.”

Recognizing that choice does resonate with me about how I might like to exercise my faith in the world. When I talked to John about this view he stated his disappointment that the call to privilege the oppressed was not a big part of the convention but agreed that engaging in democracy as a part of the black experience made sense. John noted that the kind of change he hopes for is often different than the kind of change he sees white people hoping for. 

There is a bear coming. Are you concerned with who the bear might endanger, or are you concerned that the bear might endanger you? Do you want to preserve your own comfort or do you want to increase the comfort of everyone. 

One of the things that I have learned working for Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan over the last six year is that the comfort of everyone is something that we need government to engage. We in the church cannot impact the world enough to shape the comfort of everyone. We can impact the comfort of a few, and most challengingly perhaps just of ourselves. Large scale change needs functioning government, it needs the power of a child tax credit, or nationwide legislation on gun control, immigration, or women’s healthcare. 

We need large scale change to build the kind of future we might want to see, but, and I think this holds especially for those of us who are white, we need to understand the context of that kind of large scale change in the way that people like Rapheal Warnock see it; as the outgrowth of the kind of work that his mother did, picking other people’s cotton and birthing a future senator. We are not looking to build a perfect system, nor do we hope that the system will guarantee the kind of outcomes we cherish. We participate in the possibilities that are at least good enough for now, and might hold more if they can be pushed in those directions. 

An idea that holds these different kinds of future building–whether it is American Democracy, or our new worship space here at King of Kings, or the newly bagged pecan braids at Panera–comes from the Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas. Here’s how he describes Junkspace,

“Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its …. meltdown . . . Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory . . .Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids.”

There is a lot about this idea that I like. I think it describes my experience of Panera perfectly. The parts of Panera that I like have all existed for hundreds of years. But my experience of Panera now is mediated by paper cups, cellophane wrappers, and iPads. The individual parts are genius, but they come together in a really underwhelming way. 

As Koolhaas develops this idea he suggests that shopping is the last remaining form of public activity. Shopping captures everything and even religion and politics are swept into its role as the most commanding political force. The convention and our engagement with it resonate. We could even think about our engagement with this space in this way. We compared various options, we chose the one we thought would work, we are negotiating how we use it. 

The instinct when we hear about Junkspace is to assume that it is negative. But Koolhaas continually insists that we locate identify Junkspace in the concrete cities we inhabit. And it notes that the character of Junkspace is its malleability. We don’t create at the scale or pyramids or cathedrals anymore, but our creations are malleable. 

They can become good enough for us to invest ourselves in. They can become our future.