"Self-Care as Sacred Resistance"
Psalm 139:1-3, 13-16, 19-24
Abigail Chamblee, Westmoreland United Church of Christ
Feb. 23, 2025
In the Fellowship of the Ring, the first of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, Frodo, the unlikely hero, says to the wise wizard Gandalf, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” In the movie, this comes after Frodo has received the One Ring – and with it the immense responsibility to conquer evil and save his world of Middle Earth.
To this, Gandalf responds, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But it is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
There is something poignant and relevant about this exchange between Frodo and Gandalf, and a bit intimidating. What do we “DO” with this time we have been given? What do we do when it seems like evil and unbridled power are winning over goodness, love, and mercy? And of course, there isn’t one right path or next move, but I think a good place to start is looking within ourselves. Reading Psalm 139, believing it, living it. Living into love and joy and mercy (for ourselves AS WELL AS others) as a way to resist.
When receiving treatment for cancer, Feminist author and Civil Rights activist Audre Lorde wrote about the importance of not overextending herself, and emphasizes that caring for herself isn’t “self-indulgence” it’s actually an “act of political warfare” [1] – this was especially true for Lorde, a Black Lesbian woman navigating cancer treatment in the 80s. For her, her survival itself was an act of resistance, but she gives us an important reminder to watch out for overextension and she reminds us that self-care itself as a subversive act. Not only to support ourselves but also so we can stand up for our neighbors who are being targeted and oppressed.
This is why, in our call to worship, Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes actually calls self-care “subversive” [2] and asks God to strengthen and empower us as we aim to truly care for ourselves. In the dictionary, subversive is defined as “to undermine the power and authority of an established system or institution.” But why and how is self-care so subversive?
As both Walker-Barnes and Lorde explain, the oppressor wants us to burn out, to overextend, to over-exhaust. To not be able to keep up with all the breaking news. To turn to doom-scrolling social media rather than organizing and making change. To despair rather than do the next right thing. To be too tired and too drained to truly love our neighbor AND ourselves. The powers that be want to push a narrative of selfishness, not self-care or self-love. Not a recognition of our divinely woven, fearfully, and wonderfully created selves. And that selfishness they are pushing, it makes me angry!! And I know that a lot of you are angry too.
But I often get stuck in the trap where I ask myself – “what’s the point?”
What is the point of putting down social media and getting out there to push back and protest people like Musk and Trump who have more money and power than I can even fathom? They don’t care! They don’t care if I take care of myself or my neighbors. They will continue to use God’s name as manipulation. They will continue to use God as a pawn in their play for power, and influence and indoctrination. They will continue to use God to oppress and to hate.
They will continue to use the teachings of Jesus and rake them through the mud. The teachings of love and care and community they will keep manipulating to preach hate and individualism.
And that’s just a short overview! We know there are even more specific actions, and executive orders, and takeovers and defunding that is directly impacting our lives and the lives of those we care for. And that makes me angry. Really angry. And what can I do? I can say this here. But they don’t listen. The people who follow his every word won’t listen. I mean Bishop Budde looked him in the eyes from a pulpit and asked him for MERCY and he didn’t listen.
As David asks in the Psalm, admittedly a part I never looked close enough to know was there, and he asks God, aren’t your enemies my enemies? Can’t I hate them and be angry at them for their wickedness and the ways they manipulate you, God?
But then David stops and thinks, and looks inward. And puts those pieces together that wait, if I am intimately known and created by God, if I was knit together by God’s own hands and God knows my innermost thoughts, my innermost everything, then didn’t God do that for my enemies? Didn’t God create them in God’s image? Didn’t God knit them together too?
And this is difficult to think about, to reconcile. And we see in the psalm that David struggles with this too. David asks God to search him. And I think we need to ask God to search us. Help us. Help us to not succumb to anger and hatred. To this “wickedness” as quoted in the psalm. Help us God to remember our own sacred worth and use that to uplift and empower those around us. Help us to care for ourselves so we can do the next right thing, the good we know how to do.
And don’t get me wrong, anger is okay. Anger is good and holy, and it fuels further resistance and action. And if we think about Jesus, well Jesus got angry all the time! Jesus flipped tables and calls us to flip the tables. But it’s easy to avoid or become overwhelmed by this table-flipping anger, to run away from it (because it can be really uncomfortable) it’s easy to stare at CNN or MSNBC for hours or scroll Facebook and Instagram until we are just too exhausted to do
anything else. But we can’t do this.
Because you can’t flip a table if you’re physically, mentally, and spiritually depleted. You can’t flip tables if you’re sick with stress. You can’t flip tables if you are pushing through chronic illness or cancer or sickness or migraines or depression, without truly caring for yourself. You can’t flip tables if you’re running away from them.
Now I am NOT saying this is easy. I’ve heard that preachers tend to preach to themselves (so I think that’s what I’m doing here today). Because this is all something I struggle with, like a LOT. And I am not good at it. I’m not good at avoiding avoidance. And I am admittedly, not very good at self-care (although I am working on it!) Especially in this political time, it seems even harder to push through and to step away from the screen, and to think about what “next right thing” I can do. What do I “do with this time I have been given?” But again, that’s exactly what we have to.
We have to love and care for ourselves and again, we have to truly believe and live our miraculous creation. We have to find that scary, stubborn, subversive, sacred joy within ourselves – that comes from our Creator. Caring for ourselves is an act of sacred resistance because, as GingerGaines-Cirelli who wrote a book on Sacred Resistance [3] during the first Trump presidency says,
“Our resistance is sacred because it is driven NOT primarily by self-interest or fear or even only a benevolent wish for the good of an oppressed group. It is sacred because it is God at work in and through us.”
God is at work because, as I tell the kids almost every week, God is always with us and always loves us, and this is something I think the kids have an easier time remembering that than we do as adults.
We forget what the psalm tells us, about how intimately connected we are with God. God knows our “innermost parts,” saw us an an “unformed substance” and “knit us together.” God knows our “path” and our “pages are written before we even existed” because we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Amen.
