Seeing Things | Show & Tell

"Show and Tell: Waking Up to Participation"

Show and Tell

Most of us remember show and tell from elementary school. You brought something from home — something that mattered to you — and you stood up in front of the class and you showed it and you told about it. Why it was special. Where it came from. What it meant.

It was a simple practice. But underneath it was something profound: the assumption that what you've experienced, what you've been given, what you've come to love — matters to other people. That your story is worth telling. That the room is changed when you share it.

That's the practice we're talking about today. Except the stakes are a little higher than a favorite baseball card.

The Viewmaster and the Commissioning

For the last month we've been using Easter stories the way you use a ViewMaster — holding them up to the light, letting the depth and color and detail get in us, and then setting them down changed by what we saw.

We're not here to relitigate what literally happened two thousand years ago. We're here to ask: what do these stories do to us when we really look at them? What wakes up in us?

And here's what's interesting: every single one of the writers of the four gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John… the life and times of Jesus…  ends their account of these resurrection stories with some version of the same moment, which doesn’t always happen.. Jesus gathers the people he's been walking with, and he says: go. In different words, with different emphases, but the same essential movement. “You've seen something. Now go and live like it.”

Four different writers, writing to four different communities, with four different angles on the same moment. And in every single account — the last thing he does is send them out.

The word for someone who is sent — the Greek word apostolos, where we get the word "apostle" — literally just means: one who is sent. It’s a word basically used in Christian spaces, so it often sounds like a religious status, but that’s it… someone who has been given something, and is sent to share it.

That's it. That's the commission.

You've been given something. Go share it.

The Whole Series in One Movement

So let's trace what we've been given over these five weeks — because I think it forms a single, cumulative movement, and I don't want us to miss it.

Week one: Mary at the tomb — waking up to being seen. You are known. You are named. You are not invisible. Even in your grief. Even when you can't see clearly. Someone calls you by name.

Week two: Breakfast on the beach — waking up to being fed. There is enough. More than enough. The fire was already burning before you got to shore. And the story of scarcity that tells you there isn't? That story is manufactured, and we don't have to live by it.

Week three: Thomas returning to the room — waking up to belonging. The wound is allowed in the room. You don't have to clean yourself up to come in. Saying the true thing is what keeps you connected, not what disqualifies you.

Week four: The road to Emmaus — waking up to beauty. The image was already there. The presence was walking beside them the whole time. Soften your gaze. Pay attention. What you've been looking for might be right in front of you.

And week five — this week: waking up to participation. You've been seen, fed, welcomed, and awakened to beauty. Now the stories ask: what are you going to do with that?

Awakening is Not Private

Here's where I want to say something plainly, because I think it matters:

Awakening is not a PRIVATE ACHIEVEMENT. It is a COMMUNAL RESPONSIBILITY.

There is a version of spiritual growth that becomes a kind of spiritual consumerism — where we collect insights, feel transformed in the room where transformation is happening, and then go back to our regular lives essentially unchanged. Where the ViewMaster stays pressed to our eyes and we never put it down and bring what we saw into the world.

The commissioning — in all four versions of its telling — pushes back hard against that.

Womanist (womanism: a social and intellectual framework and movement that centers the experiences, struggles, and contributions of Black women.) theologian Emilie Townes writes that authentic spiritual formation cannot be separated from public action. That the personal and communal are not separate tracks. They are the same track. Inner spirituality without an outward “show and tell”  is incomplete. And embodying an inner spirituality without community is unsustainable.

You cannot wake up alone and stay awake alone. We wake each other up. We keep each other awake. That's the whole design.

What Community is Actually For

I think this perspective is pointing toward something that connects directly to what every version of the commissioning is saying. You bring what you have. You share it. And in the sharing, something happens that couldn't happen if you stayed home alone with it.

bell hooks takes this further in her writing on beloved community (a community in which everyone is cared for, absent of poverty, hunger, and hate). She writes: "Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world."

Beloved community is not uniformity. It's not everyone arriving at the same conclusions. It's not the erasure of what makes us different from each other. It's the opposite: each person showing up fully as who they are, with what they've been given, with the stories and wounds and gifts and cultural legacies they carry — and the community being made richer and more whole because of it.

That is show and tell. That is the commissioning. [[That is, in part, why Fabric exists.]]

Think of moments like this in your own life when somebody has a breakthrough moment in their life and brings you into it. Or, when you share honestly within your circles of influence about what's been shifting in you… that's the kind of show and tell we’re talking about. You're saying: Here’s something I’m waking up to, and it matters to me, and I think it might matter to you too.

Closing: A Commissioning for Fabric

We're living in a strange and charged moment. And part of what makes it strange is that the Jesus being used to justify the hoarding of power, the cruelty toward the vulnerable, even the villanization of empathy — that Jesus is not recognizable in any of the biblical stories about him.

The Jesus in the stories we’ve been holding up to the light throughout this series makes breakfast for exhausted people. Says someone's name when they can't see straight. Invites the one with the courage to share their doubts back into the room. Walks seven miles with grieving travelers and stays for dinner. And then — in every account — sends people out. Not to conquer, or exclude, or to try to pass a vaguely religious litmus test for the powerful… but to share what they'd been given, and to make the beloved community larger and more expansive.

So here is a commissioning for us — for Fabric — as we leave here today:

• You have been seen. Go and see others.
• You have been fed. Go and keep the fire burning.
• You have been welcomed with your wounds and your doubts. Go and make room.
• You have been awakened to beauty and goodness. Go and point to it — stubbornly, defiantly, in the middle of everything that tries to make us forget it's there.
• With all the curiosity, softness, and courage you can muster, show and tell about a different kind of world that is possible.

May it be so. Amen.