Along the Way

For a Day, Forever

2011-03-17T08:39:00.000-04:00

What keeps you going? Diet Coke? Chocolate? There’s an ad that used to be on TV. A woman was getting overwhelmed by the “The traffic! The boss! The baby! The dog! That does it!! Calgon, take me away!” Each of us has something that keeps us going when the day gets out of control.

For me, when the pile on the desk is rising and the deadlines are coming fast, it’s coffee.

But sometimes the stakes are higher. It’s not enough just to get through the next deadline or the next meeting. Dealing with death or addiction, divorce or loss, or even the paralyzing nuclear meltdown going on in Japan, coffee won’t keep you going. Nor will a nice bath. It takes something more powerful, more permanent.

When Jesus fed the crowds with five barley loaves, it was for the moment. Having their immediate needs met, John says, the crowds wanted to make Jesus their king. They wanted him to keep them going day-to-day. But Jesus wasn’t interested only in that. He offered another sort of bread—not like daily manna that fed the Israelites in the wilderness—the eternal bread of life.

Bread that satisfies forever is no Willie Wonka daydream, but a metaphor of faith and trust in God’s love revealed in Jesus. Yes, we need our daily bread—and we pray for it. But we also need infinitely more. We need someone in whom to place our trust, someone on whose promise we always can rely. To believe in Christ is to stake a claim in God’s coming kingdom. To receive the bread of life is to taste and see that the Lord is forever good.

My prayer for you is that along the way you will have both bread for the day and bread forever. The future calls. We answer in faith. Amen.

Lent 1 Prayer

2011-03-14T07:52:00.000-04:00

Almighty God, whose love reaches every dark and unforgiving corner of the human heart, whose justice will redeem and save the world, we praise your name this day. We come before you in gratitude. Receive our thanks: for a day bright with possibility, for a friend who reaches out across the lonely, deep divide. Receive our thanks for shelter and sustenance. You clothe us like the lilies of the field. We are grateful for each other, and for eyes and ears to hear and see the signs of your presence in one another’s face.

We remember those whose lives touch ours and realize we do not know them fully. Dissolve the veils of estrangement between us. Fill our hearts each minute “with sixty seconds worth of distance run.” Give us strength to respond to the cries of the injured and the dying, and courage to face our fears of the unknown. Inspire our creative minds with new ways to meet the world’s emergencies. Make us generous in service, passionate and persistent, merciful and kind.

With the people of Japan, we cry to you for healing of communities, of ocean, of livelihood, of land. In the prayers of those in southeast Asia, “We remember, O Lord, those who suffer from any kind of discrimination, your children, and our brothers and sisters, who are humiliated and oppressed. We pray for those who are denied fundamental human rights, for those who are imprisoned, and especially those who are tortured. Our thoughts rest a few moments with them … And we pray that your love and compassion may sustain them always.”

We are grateful for Christ’s presence in our midst. Let the power of his love unite us as one people. Teach us in his name to welcome those on the outside looking in. Strengthen the powerless. Save the lost. Bless us with the coming of your new and renewing kingdom—these things we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Direct quotes are from "If" by Rudyard Kipling and the Ecumenical Prayer Cycle resource for this week, with prayers for Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Absolution

2011-03-12T11:09:00.000-05:00

I don’t like breaking bonds. We are bound to one another, after all, by friendships, marriages, clubs, common interests, common threats, and teams. Bonds of trust and shared experience, both joyful and adverse, cement our relationships. We get energy from being bound together. We are stronger, happier, and more effective at everything we do. “Blessed be the tie that binds,” we sing, because we’d rather be together than apart. Breaking bonds hurts.

But some bond-breaking is good, especially when the bonds are to destructive things. We bind ourselves to bad habits, caustic attitudes, actions that demean or corrode. We may be bound by evil forces outside our control. When we confess our sin and God forgives, the result is absolution (Latin, ab – from, solver – to loosen). We are loosened from our bonds to the “sin that clings so closely” (Hebrews 12.1). We are released from unhealthy attachments that keep us from becoming whole.

Absolution breaks the spiritual bondage at the core of our being. It’s like when molecular bonds are broken and energy is released so atoms are free to combine with one another in new ways. Absolution sets us free to reconnect in news ways with God and one another.

More dramatic still, when atomic bonds are broken in the nucleus of the right atom, chain reactions happen. Imagine the spiritual chain reaction we release when we break our bondage to the evil within us. The power of love will change the world!

My prayers for you along the way are two: first that our bonds of friendship remain strong, and second that our spiritual bondage to evil, sin, and death is broken, generating love to change the world. Amen.

Forgiveness

2011-03-12T08:57:00.000-05:00

March 11, 2011
“Please forgive me. Can you forgive me? Will you?”
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive...”

Asking forgiveness requires at least two choices. When I ask you to forgive me, I make the first one. I choose to believe that our relationship can be better. I choose not to walk away, not to write you off. I choose to believe you belong in my life and to hope I belong in yours. When I ask you to forgive me, I risk owning fully the wrong I’ve done, but I chose to believe it’s worth the risk because I respect you and value our relationship.

The second choice is yours. It’s the same as mine, and it also involves risk. Do you choose to believe the relationship is worth restoring? Are you willing to work at it with me? The answer might be no. You might not believe I can right the wrong. You don’t have to forgive me. You could walk away. But if you choose to forgive, then we’ve sealed a commitment to make things better. We’ve acted in faith. We’ve said to each other that the relationship is worth more whole than broken.

Thankfully, God’s judgment — sharp in the pit of the stomach — is always mediated by grace. In the Lord’s Prayer lies a challenge. We ask God to forgive us as we forgive each other. I would like to believe God will be better than that, that God will forgive more freely than I do. But in that prayer I accept my challenge: to forgive as freely as I’d like to be forgiven, to work as hard at restoring a broken relationship as I can. And when I fail to meet your expectations or you fail to meet mine, or either of us falls short of God’s expectations, then we throw ourselves together at the feet of God’s grace and mercy.

You can forgive or not. So can I. The power lies within us. My prayer today is that God’s grace will help us to forgive each other, that by God’s mercy all our relationships will be made right. Amen.

Confession

2011-03-10T12:42:00.000-05:00

Can I share a secret? I’m not a big fan of confession. Oh, I know we need it. I need it. But confessing my sins is not only painful (because it brings up old wounds); it’s also difficult. It requires ruthless self-assessment. To confess my shortcomings and missed chances is to risk feeling like a failure. Why would anyone willingly do that?

Still, there’s confession and there’s confession. Confessing my sins to God—honestly and without artifice—is easier than confessing to someone I know. Perhaps it’s that I trust God to be more forgiving. Indeed, “God is merciful and gracious and abounding in steadfast love.” But confessing to someone else is harder. With my neighbor, there’s give and take, conversation, vulnerability to the unknown and unsuspected. I risk being wounded when I discover I’ve wounded others. I'm obligated then to do something to make things right.

After last night’s Ash Wednesday service, someone joked, “Maybe we need to use the joys and concerns time in worship to confess our sins… and be specific!” Take heart: we won’t be doing that, at least not out loud. But the fact is, we all need to be able to say to God and to our neighbor, “Here’s how I messed up,” to follow it up with, “How can I make things right?” and then to follow through. Reconciliation requires confession. In the end, that keeps me open to it, uncomfortable as it is. Without being able to confess my sins, I can’t make peace with my neighbor. With it, our relationships can grow strong.

My prayer for you along the way is that you will find renewal this season in self-examination and confession that leads to reconciliation with others and reconciliation with God.

Ordinary Silence

2011-03-09T12:12:00.000-05:00

The priest making the case for Mother Teresa’s sainthood has called her “an apostle of the ordinary.” What an inviting title! To be an apostle is literally to be “sent,” but what made Teresa of Calcutta ordinary was what she was sent to do: one-on-one, she practiced love.

From her journals we have learned other things about her. Perhaps the most intriguing is that after her mystical experiences in the 1940s, she knew a lifetime of darkness and silence, things we never knew while she was engaged in the ministry to which she had been sent. The silence she bore inspired her to serve. Yet she spoke of it only in private. We now know she lived most of her life feeling “bewildering rejection and even complete abandonment,” experiences most of us confess knowing well. Still, she was sent out to change the world, and she did so, one single heart at a time. The business card she handed out to enquiring visitors did not have her name on it. It contained instead the core principles of her spirituality. It began, “The fruit of silence is prayer.” She used to talk about five silences: of the ears, eyes, mouth, mind, and heart.

What silences do you experience? Are there times your ears hear no voice from God, your eyes see no vision, and your mouth does not taste that the Lord is good? Have you known a silent mind, or a heart unable to feel? We tend to mistrust silence. Silence sounds like guilt, ignorance or, worse, rudeness. But silence can be the instrument of our calling. In the absence of God’s voice, not knowing when or even if the Master will return, we love one-on-one. How ordinary!

May you find God’s silence today in ordinary, one-on-one relationships, and in that quiet place discover the strength to carry on. Amen.

Holy Exposed

2010-07-22T23:26:00.000-04:00

On reading about King David dancing madly before the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6.12-20...

foot-stomping,
sweaty-browed,
robe-flying
sacrifice,

acrid smell
of roasted meat
hanging in the air,
banging drums

and shimmer sharp
of tambourines
pounding out
the rhythm as

the royal sandals
stir dust-devil
swirls of earth
that cling upon

the oily, salted,
flinging drench
of Yahweh’s
lover’s hair.

Mission trip to Beaumont Day 1

2010-06-22T11:22:00.002-04:00

The first thing you notice is the heat. It's a moist, steamy inhalation that takes your breath away. I've been around it for years, living in Texas longer than anyplace else, but I've never really become used to it. Few people ever do.

The second thing you notice is the sky. It's wide and blue, with white clouds scudding in from the Gulf of Mexico. When they build up in the late afternoon they bring a breeze that may mean rain; refreshing, perhaps, and like yesterday, cooling and carrying a rainbow, but often just creating a sauna outside. Clothes hung on the fence never quite dry.

When we arrived, we noticed a third thing. We're part of a much larger group. Fifty-six of us were here at last count. There are Disciples from Kansas, Missouri, Indianapolis, and Kentucky, plus the seven of us from Lynchburg. The church we're framing is about 45 feet wide and a little under 100 feet long; it will house a sanctuary, offices, classrooms, restrooms, and a few utility and store rooms. By Thursday, we'll have all the walls squared and trusses fastened across the top so the roof can be built.

I wonder at the architectural plans throughout the Bible, some good, some not... tabernacle and Temple, Babel's tower, Jerusalem's walls, the rich man's bigger barns, the heavenly city's four-square walls. We have jackhammers and pneumatic nailguns. Our capacity for good is tested against God's gracious gifts used well.

Jackson and Kayleigh are helping in the kitchen, as the brownie batter on their shirts yesterday attests. Jackson volunteered to lead the prayer at dinner and thus got to go through line first, along with the designated clean-up crew. Susan learned to build interior walls. David's expertise has already saved us some major construction mistakes. Julia plans to use some power tools she's never used before. Wes seems to be right at home with a hammer, and I'm learning how to read building plans.

We're showering in the afternoons in a trailer designed with a dozen stalls, six for the men, six for women. The water's heated during the day by a solar panel on the roof. This is one time you want others to use up the hot water so you can get a cool shower.

Last night after dinner, we drove to Temple of Praise Christian Church, where thanks to their gracious hospitality our group is camped. We batted around ideas for the Wednesday afternoon worship service we're going to lead. Then Jackson and Kayleigh introduced us all to the game Apples to Apples. David was the runaway winner. After lights-out, sleep came quickly. Today, we'll get the exterior walls up and squared.

Getting Dirty for Jesus

2010-06-15T16:08:00.002-04:00

Next Sunday, I'll meet our mission trip group from First Christian Church of Lynchburg, VA, at the airport north of Houston. We'll drive east a bit to spend a week rebuilding Northwood Christian Church in Beaumont.

As the one driving, I'll haul some of our members' favorite hammers, tool belts, and other gear. Probably a few air mattresses, too! The weather looks good. Well, that is, if temperatures in the 90s and the high humidity of the Gulf look good to to you. At least there aren't any tropical storms brewing in the Atlantic.

We're part of the second-week group of Volunteers in Mission, a ministry of Disciples Home Missions of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) who are rebuilding the worship center this summer. This means we'll probably be framing walls.

Two of our group members, David and Wes, have extensive construction experience. I have pretty good skills with a hammer thanks to several Habitat builds. Susan and Julia are in the same boat I am. J and K are middle-school age. They're going to have better construction skills and knowledge by the end of the week than most kids their age.

I'll update this blog as best I can during the build. The kids are more tech-savvy, so they'll edit and upload a vlog to YouTube and I'll link to it from here.

What do we want from you? Prayers, mostly, and to know that you're part of what we do. When one part of the body of Christ is at work, it's on behalf of the whole body of Christ. So, keep cheering us on and, by following our updates on facebook, Twitter, and this blog, you can participate in the build along with us.

You can stay up to date on Twitter by following @fcclynchburg (that's the First Christian feed) and @GD4JC (Getting Dirty for Jesus, the Volunteers in Mission feed).

Blessings and Peace!

Sabbath Rest

2010-04-03T11:01:00.000-04:00

On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.
—Luke 24.56b

How do you spend the day before Easter? You may be madly cleaning house and doing laundry. You may be setting tomorrow’s dining room table with Grandmother’s china and that crystal you got for your wedding. If there’s time, you’ll polish the silver. Menu? Check. Last minute groceries? Check. Too bad the eggs are too fresh—they’ll be fine to color but madness to peel.

How would you spend today if you didn’t know Easter was coming? As Luke tells it, the women who followed Jesus followed Joseph to the tomb, saw the body laid out, and came back to make preparations of their own, mixing spices and ointments for burial. Then on Saturday, on sabbath, they rested.

I hope you have set aside some sabbath time for yourself this weekend—for rest, renewal, silence, and spiritual preparation. You might not get the benefit of an entire day—but whatever time it takes, take it. Sabbath, to remember God’s rest in creation. Sabbath, to give thanks for our own liberation. Sabbath, to prepare for whatever may come.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Being Joe

2010-04-02T23:19:00.002-04:00

Now there was a good and righteous man named Joseph… This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.
—Luke 23.50, 52

In the aftermath of a tragedy, all it takes is one person to do the right thing. It may be someone to hand you the phone, someone to make travel arrangements, or someone to fill your glass with water. Or it may be someone like Joseph, who can take the body and place it in the tomb.

Maybe someone’s been a Joseph for you. Your life has been turned upside down by grief or loss, confusion or guilt, and there’s Joseph, asking how to help—not generically saying, “Call me if you need anything,” but being truly helpful. “I’ll take care of the laundry.” “I’ll pick up the kids.”

Tonight, I’m grateful for all Josephs—the one who buried Jesus’ body and the countless others who in the aftermath of tragedy are able to do what needs to be done. Name the Josephs in your life. Give thanks. Someone may need you to be Joe for them someday. It’s just what Jesus’ followers do.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Burning

2010-04-01T22:12:00.000-04:00

For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?
—Jesus, Luke 23.31

Final things are on my mind. Last words matter.

Here, just before he is crucified, Jesus is speaking metaphorically—no surprise—making reference to the destruction that is coming. He is the green wood; this much is clear. But whether the dry wood that is to burn is that of the disciples or that of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans doesn’t really matter. It’s not even important that the destruction may well be not just from the Romans but from God.

What matters is this. At our worst moments, when we’ve hurt someone deeply—perhaps we’ve betrayed a trust, or maybe it was a white lie that got out of control, or even a cruel remark spoken with more anger than compassion—it is here that we confront the seedy “dry wood” underside of human nature. We are able to hurt each other. And we do. We are able to wound. And we do. We can even destroy.

As much as I want to believe in our essential goodness, created as we are in the image of God, I also know we are sinful, falling short of God’s glory. I don’t like to talk about sin, think about sin, or even for the most part acknowledge sin in myself or anyone else. But it’s there. And it has the ability to burn even the greenest wood, even the most immune, the most innocent, the most pure.

What will my last words be tonight? Will I light a fire, falsely accuse, deny, or hammer a nail? By Easter morning—dare I hope?—perhaps the embers will cool. Perhaps my life and yours will be redeemed, and we can bear witness to the goodness of the coming reign of God.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Engraved and Cursive Prayer

2010-03-31T23:57:00.000-04:00

Generally, Latin-based scripts fall into two categories: formal—the scripts used as the instrument of authority; and informal—the cursive or quickly written scripts used for everyday transactions. History repeatedly shows formal scripts degenerating into cursive forms, which are, in turn, upgraded, finally achieving formal status as new hands in their own right.
—David Harris, The Art of Calligraphy, 6

The engraved invitation is formal. The cursive scrawl on torn notebook paper, even if it’s letting you know you’re welcome at the wedding, is not. The hand-written thank-you note on 20 lb. vellum gets your attention in a way a tweet or voicemail can’t convey, no matter how cheerfully you chirp.

Still, I believe we need some of both when it comes to prayer, which is our way of verbally placing ourselves in the presence of God.

At times, prayer is a casual, cursive conversation, a garden walk on a bright afternoon. You can sense God strolling along with you, smelling the flowers, humming a silly tune. You chat about the weather and the Final Four. God points out a cloud that looks like a swan. You laugh and shake your head, because you think it looks like a bear.

But at other times, prayer is hand-lettered, in careful meter and verse. You get out the good stationery of the soul, dip your spirit’s pen in the inkwell and let your lifeblood flow. You scent the prayer with your best eau de toilette and seal with hot wax. The subject matter is serious, deep, moving, rooted in longing, skirting the edge of loneliness or despair.

Cursive at times, at others engraved, my prayers have led me on a good journey. I hope your prayer life has been richly varied this season. I hope you have been able to listen for God.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step

Command Performances

2010-03-30T22:01:00.000-04:00

…Then he turned his face to me one last time, / as on the day he died in my arms, and said, I would like to add / two more commandments: / the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not change,” / and the Twelfth Commandment, “Thou shalt change. You will change.” / Thus spoke my father, and he turned away / and disappeared into his strange distances.
—Yehuda Amichai, “My Parents’ Lodging Place,” in Open Closed Open, 58-59

As a parent I understand. I treasure the moment. I want it to last. You know that instant when your child is on stage, the spotlight picks up every gesture, the disbelief is suspended, and you see your son, your very own, become the star of the show. You can die happy now. You know the hug at bedtime as your daughter’s tiny arms circle your neck and you drink in the fragrance of soap and toddler. Eternity is like this. Don’t ever change.

And yet, there is also the thrill of legs and arms growing longer, the changing shape, voice, smell, and touch. You can see the magic of growth, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually. He gets better at baseball; she’s in pointe shoes now; she’s perfecting the robotic Legos; he’s developing his own journaling style. You hear the whispering promise of perpetual evolutionary motion, the generation of possibilities, the possibility of generations to come. There may be grandchildren, someday! Change, change, thou shalt change!

I can say, “Don’t change,” because I love you as you are, and “Do change,” because I love you as you are becoming. Is it wrong to claim both the present and the future and give thanks for each? I believe there is a place where delight meets hope, where the snapshot leans into the unknown. It’s what it means to be a parent. It’s what it means to be someone’s child.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

One Body at Work

2010-03-29T08:33:00.000-04:00

Because so many eyes witness the unthinkable, there must be eyes that see hope. Because so many ears hear the ringing of solitude or the explosion of disaster, there must be mouths to speak words of love. Because there are so many bellies that cry out to be nourished, there must be hands to feed them. Because so many feet walk such long, lonely paths, there must be legs of strength to walk alongside them. Because so many bodies are broken, the Body of Christ, the whole body, with all of its various parts, is at work in the world.
—Laura Evans Mahn, “Compassion and Caring: Giving Concrete Expression to our Unity in Christ”

We are one body. What an awkward thing to say! Of course, we’re not one body—we’re myriad bodies, of multiple minds, a swirl of conflicting emotions. How can anyone say we’re one? We feel so disconnected. And yet…

There’s too much suffering in the world for us to pretend we’re not united in Christ. I trust that we are one. Without one body that can see hope, speak love, feed the hungry, walk with the lonely, and heal brokenness and division, the world is lost and the future ridiculously scattered. If God is love, and if we are made in the image of God, then we must be, at some level, one. And we have to work together.

When we try to act otherwise, a conservative arm slaps at a liberal leg, and an orthodox ear refuses to cooperate with an agnostic eye. How crazy our dance must look to outsiders! It’s helpful to remember that old line from Rupertus Meldenius, oft-quoted by our movement’s founders, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.”

Jesus reminded us of what’s essential: loving God and neighbor. He was also clear on the fine print. Our neighbor? Once there was a man on the Jericho road who fell among thieves…

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Relinquish Everything

2010-03-28T23:13:00.000-04:00

He had already relinquished, of his will, because of his need, in humility and peace and without regret, yet apparently it had not been enough, the leaving of the gun was not enough. He stood for a moment—a child, alien and lost in the green and soaring gloom of the markless wilderness. Then he relinquished completely to it. It was the watch and compass. He was still tainted. He removed the linked chain of the one and the looped thong of the other from his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and entered it.
—William Faulkner, “The Bear,” in Go Down, Moses, 208

Luke Skywalker had to set his targeting computer aside and rely on the Force in order to destroy the Death Star. The boy in Faulkner’s epic tale had to set aside gun, compass, and watch—the tools of the hunter—or he would never see the Bear. What must I set aside to know God?

So much of my journey is spent relying on tools—my Bible, my library, commentaries, historical and textual critics, philosophers of language and ethics, theologians, and preachers who have gone before. Could I set these aside and still preach? Unlikely. But until I set them aside and clear my mind of all the stimulating chatter, I may be unable to listen.

Elijah fled the wrath of his own leaders and went up to a mountain, where he could not hear God in all the mighty acts going on around him—whirlwind, earthquake, fire. But afterward, the still small voice came to him, admonished him, and sent him back to work.

What will you relinquish today in order to make a still, small, vulnerable place in your soul for God, who like Faulkner’s Bear appears “immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon’s hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity”?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Silence is Key

2010-03-27T23:40:00.000-04:00

Having lived most of my life thinking that it was risky to look forward, especially because of my mother’s death at forty-nine and my father’s at sixty-two (my age at this moment), I’ve come to count each day as a gift beyond anything I ever expected. I wouldn’t go back to change a thing… Of course I would prefer not to have encountered spasmodic dysphonia. At the same time, I know that the illness has provided me with an opportunity to examine aspects of my life that I might otherwise have neglected.
—Diane Rehm, Finding My Voice, 239.

Have you found your voice? So many forces in our culture compete for it. Advertisers ask us to speak with our wallets. Politicians ask us to speak with our vote. Ethnicity and culture ask us to speak with our identity. So many voices! Host of her own NPR talk show, Diane Rehm discovered she was stricken with a disorder that affects her ability to speak. The only treatment she’s found effective is a series of Botox injections directly into her throat. Following treatment, her voice eventually comes back. But the treatments do not last. “Experiencing silence has become the key,” she says, “to finding my voice.”

I hope never to face a physical ailment that interferes with my ability to speak. Still, silence—and the extended solitude that can come with it—is the key in finding and claiming my voice. In silence I can set all other voices on “mute” for a moment, to set aside the politics, to set aside all that is ideological and polarizing. Instead of figuring out what to say, I can figure out how I am supposed to be.

It is in silence that I can hear my own voice developing because in silence my deepest relationships become clear: husband, father, son, brother, friend. These are relationships not based on what I do or what I think but who I am and to whom I am connected. From here I find my voice.

What relationships come to you in silence, relationships that are really gifts that help you find your voice?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

The Grand Drama

2010-03-26T23:36:00.000-04:00

…Where is Old Fiddler Jones / Who played with life all his ninety years, / Braving the sleet with bared breast, / Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin, / Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven? / Lo! He babbles of the fish-frys of long ago, / Of the horse races of long ago at Clary’s Grove, / Of what Abe Lincoln said / One time at Springfield.
—Edgar Lee Masters, “The Hill,” Spoon River Anthology, 2

Our son was born a dozen years ago this week. I recall that early morning in the recovery room, skin to skin, exploring the wonder of new life. Since then, there have been funerals, family members who have died, and births as well, with cousins born on one side of the family and on the other having children of their own.

The sweep of life has been on my mind today, the grand drama spread across the years.

Early in our marriage we visited the Lewiston, Illinois, cemetery where Edgar Lee Masters was inspired to write Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems in the form of epitaphs that tell the stories of the community. We picnicked on a sunny hillside, then walked among the markers, reading Masters’ poems when we recognized a name. The graves are marked with numbers for those on self-guided tours.

The honesty of the verse is stark, as it cannot harm the dead to tell the truth about themselves. Painful loss, betrayal, vanity and secrets are revealed. Honor, too, and goodness of the heart. Admonitions, pleas, and even gentle reflections grace the page. I wonder how honest my own epitaph will be the day my “dust to dust” returns to earth.

My prayer is for our son: that one day he will see the panorama of his parents’ lives and find there a story he is pleased and proud to share. At least a verse, a couplet, perhaps a sonnet with its trademark twist near the end; I cannot hope for an ode.

My prayer for us all is that we become worthy ancestors to the generations who follow us. How will your life honor the future? How will those who knew you remember and be changed?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Licking the Bowl

2010-03-25T23:02:00.001-04:00

Thy kingdom come. That’s what co-creation with our Maker is all about, the coming of the kingdom. Our calling, our vocation in all we do and are to try to do is to help in the furthering of the coming of the kingdom—a kingdom we do not know and cannot completely understand. We are given enough foretastes of the kingdom to have a reasonable expectation. Being a loved and loving part of the body; praying together; singing together; forgiving and accepting forgiveness; eating together the good fruits of the earth; holding hands around the table as these fruits are blessed, in spontaneous joy and love, all these are foretastes.
—Madeleine L’Engle, Herself, 144.

When I bake cookies, I lick the bowl. Sometimes I’m generous and let someone else lick it. Either way, there’s a foretaste—in the cool batter on the tongue, the crunchy granulation of sugar, the smooth roundness of butter and flour together, the stray chocolate chip—of what the batch will taste like when it’s baked.

In the act of creation, whether in the kitchen, at the office, or in the studio, we get glimpses of what will be. God, I believe, gets glimpses of the future, too, in us. We’re works in progress. But what makes us so spectacularly different and wonderful is that we have a role in our own creation. We’re co-creators of our life, along with God.

That’s something the cookies can’t do. They can’t change their own ingredients or proportions. They can’t bake themselves. We, on the other hand, can determine what sort of people we become. There’s a physical dimension—we are what we eat, after all, and we can shape our bodies to some extent by exercise and healthy habits. There’s a moral dimension—we become how we behave. Aristotle was right. There’s also a spiritual dimension—we shape our relationship with God and one another through prayer, study, ritual, liturgy, confession and forgiveness, and various spiritual disciplines.

When we work together with God in the kingdom’s kitchens, we both get to lick the bowl. We each get a holy foretaste of what our lives will be like. We have the ability to add a little sugar, a little salt, or a few more chocolate chips. Co-create your life today. Taste the batch in the mixer. And let the kingdom come.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Beyond our Vision

2010-03-24T21:12:00.000-04:00

It helps now and then to step back and take the long view. The reign of God is not only beyond our efforts. It is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying the reign of God always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. We cannot do everything but there is a sense of liberation in realizing that because this enables us to do something and to do it well. It may be incomplete but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.
— Ken Untener , “The Prayer of Oscar Romero” at http://ow.ly/1qveP

Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, died 30 years ago today. After calling on the international community to protect those being killed by his own government, he was assassinated. It took place as he was raising the chalice celebrating communion.

I’d like to think that as disciples of Jesus we make a difference. And the reality is that we do. Show up with a fresh loaf of bread when someone comes home from the hospital, and you’ll make a difference in that person’s day. Recycle your plastics, cans, paper, and glass, and compost your food waste, and you’ll take better care of our planet.

But how many of us are willing to risk our lives for the benefit of others? How many of us celebrate communion as a radical act of political solidarity with the oppressed?

Remembering Romero and envisioning a world that is peaceful and just, my challenge is to trust God’s promise for the future while I work to make the world a better place. I pledge to acknowledge the limited good I can do and to trust in God’s grace to inspire those who come after me to carry on.

I hope no more Romeros will die. But I hope as well that Christians will always speak out against exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, regardless the risk. Beyond our vision, just past the horizon, is the coming reign of God.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

The Plague of Self-Service

2010-03-23T16:34:00.000-04:00

Self-service is the worst of inventions. There we are, all with our own tray, own little bottle of wine, own little sachets of sugar, salt and pepper. It’s terrible to assume that everyone is going to eat and drink a standard quantity, and do it alone into the bargain. How much more human to have a nice big bottle from which everyone can pour as much as they want, and one nice big dish so that everyone can make sure that the others have what they need. Then meals are no longer a solitary and egotistical business but a time when each person shares and loves.
- Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 323

I remember the song our children’s choir sang when I was a kid. It came from the Avery and Marsh Songbook:

I can be a Christian by myself,
Leave my dusty Bible on the shelf.
Sing a song and pray a bit.
God can do the rest of it.
I can be a Christian by myself.

Sometimes I think we fall into that ugly trap. Our faith becomes individualized to the point where we forget we need one another. Just like self-service meals, we practice self-service religion. As if that were possible! I’ve heard the “spiritual but not religious” line before. What it usually means is that the church has failed to be the community God intends for it to be. More particularly it means that some of us have forgotten how to invite, and others have forgotten how to say yes to the invitation.

We’re getting closer to Jerusalem each day, on our walk. And while each one of us takes our own steps, we’re still on the path together. When we pause for refreshment and encouragement, we call it worship. It’s really a holy meal. The table is set family style. There’s a loaf large enough to share, and arms and hearts wide enough to hold each other up. Jesus has invited us. Let’s extend the invitation and throw wide the doors.

Now, will you please pass the bread?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Thievery and Mystery

2010-03-22T23:00:00.001-04:00

There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine. I wish I could remember the Latin. It is even finer in Latin than in English. “Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.” This sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.
—Samuel Beckett, quoted in David Cunningham, “Do not presume,” Christian Century, March 23, 2010, 30-31.

So spoke the playwright when asked about his two characters in Waiting for Godot. Beckett seemed to suggest they were modeled on the thieves crucified beside Jesus.

One of the thieves mocks Jesus. The second asks Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. Jesus tells the second one, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.”

It’s not clear what happened to the first thief. Tradition has assigned him, in art and story alike, the role of villain. He gets, we presume, what comes to those who mock God. Oddly, though, in the gospel Jesus doesn’t engage this mocking thief in dialogue at all. There’s no mention of his fate. We are the ones who create balance, shaping our theology to match our sense of fair play—good vs. evil, heroes vs. villains—where perhaps none exists. When it comes to grace, scripture avoids balance the way nature abhors a vacuum. Grace isn't fair!

I’d rather re-punctuate the second part of Beckett’s supposedly-Augustinian sentence, removing the semicolon: “Do not presume one of the thieves was damned.” It suggests something far more challenging than the tidy dualism of good versus evil. Perhaps we go too far filling in the other thief’s blanks. If we have confidence in the overflowing grace and mercy of a loving God, isn’t it possible that Beckett’s balance gives sin more credit that it is due? Isn’t it just as likely that Jesus welcomed both thieves into God’s presence?

There were not only two crosses on that hill. There were three. I believe the One who died in the middle reconciled the whole world to God—thieves and sinners all—in a moment of mystery and grace.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Houses for Strangers

2010-03-21T23:59:00.001-04:00

When Christianity came out of the catacombs, one of the first things the universal council of Nicea did was to establish xenodochia – “houses for strangers – in every region. Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, for example, built such a structure on the edge of town. Its rooms were dedicated to the lodging and refreshment of poor, wayfaring strangers. Eventually a wing was added for those who were sick and needed bed care, then a separate ambulatory care wing, then a wing for the aged, another for the crippled, another for lepers, another for infectious diseases, another for care of foundlings and orphans. A crib was placed outside the foundling wing for any who might choose to deliver their newborn to the care of the Christians. Every day Basil sent out “guides” to find needy people and bring them in. The church in Caesarea ran a combination shelter, poorhouse, nursing home, orphanage, rehabilitation center and urgent care center. The church was a hospital for sinners.

-R. Wayne Willis, “Pastoral implications,” Lectionary Homiletics 13 (7) June 2002: 11

Health care reform is on my mind. It's also on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. But setting aside the legislation, I'm thinking about what it means to follow Jesus.

Here's what I believe. Jesus healed people. He saved them. The verb is the same: sozo. Salvation and healing are connected. They have the sense of deliverance, rescue, safety, preservation, cure, being made well. When we talk about health, we're talking about something at the core of Christian ethics. We're focused on a significant part of Jesus' ministry.

Is it any wonder Christians build hospitals? Is it any wonder we become doctors, nurses, therapists, counselors, and other medical professionals? We're walking along the healing path with Jesus. I wonder if insurance agents feel the same way. I know some do. They get into the business in part to make a living, but also because they know they are helping people secure the health care they need. The healing vocation can be practiced in a variety of careers.

You may have better ideas about health care reform than the Senate bill being passed by the House of Representatives. But as a Christian, I applaud whatever we can do to extend access to healing care to people who are at the margins, especially the poor. It's part of what it means to build "houses for strangers."

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

God on Guitar

2010-03-20T23:58:00.001-04:00

After a lifetime of leaning over his guitar,
Segovia offered this aesthetic of craft: Not more,
not less. When approaching the romance of spirit,
Put on the brakes. Too much music, isn’t music.
Be calm. Let the word do its work. Allow
each string its resonance in silence.
—Joseph Stroud, “Hacedor,” Below Cold Mountain, 23.

I want to stretch my usual metaphors for God as Creator. Too often I limit them to the physical: God the Architect, arranging all the pieces just so, or God the Potter, fashioning us from dust, breathing into our nostrils the breath of life. Occasionally, I even imagine God the Author, writing out complicated plot lines, fleshing out characters, spinning out the myths and stories that bring us meaning and joy.

Stroud’s poem leads me to set the physical imagery aside. What if God played guitar, I now wonder? What if the events in our lives were the notes, and each life a song?

I think it’s liberating, imagining God leaning over my life like Segovia over his guitar, allowing each string to resonate in the silence, waiting to hear what it will do. The sweet melodies, the deepening themes, even the dissonant chords and suspended sevenths that demand resolution—all of it in God’s careful fingers. Never too much, never too little—God always playing, sometimes delighted at the result, at other times perhaps concerned. But always calmly, allowing the word to “do its work.”

Perhaps some lives are etudes, studies upon a theme, testing various techniques. Perhaps others are sonatas, folk songs, or dance tunes. I’d like to think many of us are jazz combos, a series of intimate twelve-bar phrases with a little improvisation to work things out against the silence to which all music returns.

What’s your song sounding like? Are you keeping your instrument tuned? Can you feel God’s fingers on your strings?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Theological Disobedience

2010-03-19T18:23:00.000-04:00

Civil disobedience can be accomplished by two forms: violating a law which is obnoxious; or symbolically enacting a law which is urgently needed. When Negroes sat-in at lunch counters, they were engaging in both forms: they violated state laws on segregation and trespassing; they were also symbolically enacting a public accommodations law even before it was written into the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
—Howard Zinn, Uncommon Sense,112

Civil disobedience got my mother arrested at a lunch counter on March 31, 1960. It was in Montgomery, Alabama, with Ralph Abernathy, one of Martin Luther King’s most trusted allies. The police blocked the street with their cars, then charged Mom and the rest with creating a public disturbance. Her mother, my Grandma, was mortified when saw her daughter on the national nightly news being loaded into a paddy wagon. As for me, born on this side of the Civil Rights Act, I’m proud of my mother’s nonviolent civil disobedience.

But I wonder about my own complacency. When I do nothing in the face of injustice, I’m engaged in the inaction of theological disobedience. When I do nothing in the face of injustice I violate a higher law which is essential and good. That law is the command of Jesus to love God and neighbor.

I’m pondering my theological disobedience this season, my sins of omission when I fail to act for what Paul calls the common good. When Virginians Against the Death Penalty keep silent vigil in front of the church each night the Commonwealth executes a convict, am I standing with them? When Equality Virginia calls on the governor to protect gay and lesbian state employees from discrimination, am I writing letters and calling my delegate and senator to insist on equal treatment? When health insurance is unavailable to 45 million Americans, am I working to align U.S. law with the compassionate healing witness of Jesus?

Let my theological disobedience end, and, if necessary, my nonviolent civil disobedience begin. I want my life to reflect the law of love. I want to be my mother’s son.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

New Mistakes

2010-03-18T08:25:00.000-04:00

Always make new mistakes.
—Esther Dyson, internet entrepreneur, cosmonaut

You’ve heard the well-worn definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. Making old mistakes may not really be insanity, but it’s certainly not productive. Still, I keep making old mistakes. My singular challenge today is to make a new mistake instead.

It sounds odd, in a way, to want to make new mistakes. But what it really means is that I’ve learned from my old ones and have stopped my insane insistence on repeating what hasn’t worked and never will. If I’m making new mistakes, it means I’m trying things I haven’t tried, looking for solutions to problems I haven’t solved.

Thomas Edison said, in 1890, “I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. ... I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory” (Talks with Edison, Harpers, vol. 80, p. 425).

Creativity for tomorrow is always among my nightly prayers. But how often do I really follow through on the deeply difficult work that can make such a prayer come true?

Ask yourself: When was the last time you managed a truly new doozy, a whopper of unprecedented scope and proportion? When was the last time you wiped out completely because you were trying something new? It might not have been the solution you were looking for, but you got closer by taking a calculated risk, eliminating one more dead end.

If I make a new mistake today, it will be humbling. But unless I’m trying new paths, I won’t find the right path. It’s time to take that risk. And this time, I might just succeed.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

We Lived Elsewhere Once

2010-03-17T10:38:00.000-04:00

On this day of all days in the Irish-American calendar, when ethnic pride swells, let’s raise a toast: Here’s to the Irish, and here’s to the rest of us. May we never forget where we came from… We are all people who have lost our land in one sad way and found another. Whether we lament and celebrate in a pub or cantina, whether our tricolor flag has a cactus on it or not, we are closer to one another than we remember.
—“San Patrico,” editorial in The New York Times, March 17, 2010

Whether we were kicked out or left home on our own, we identify with the wanderer, the ex-patriot, the exile, the rogue. Our movies and novels, folktales and songs, often speak to the wanderlust in us. We all came from somewhere, and that somewhere is rarely where we find ourselves now, except in those emotional moments of discovery when we realize we can never really go home.

We’re spiritually displaced, too. The childhood certainties no longer hold. Our image of God heats, cools, and is tempered by experience. Sometimes it shatters, sometimes grows strong. Just as we no longer speak Gaelic or German, Swahili or Urdu, at least not fluently as our ancestors did, we also don’t speak Presbyterian or Methodist or Catholic or even that newer language of Disciples of Christ very well.

On St. Patrick’s Day, we celebrate our memory of having lived elsewhere once upon a time. We recognize—and sometimes lament—the path we’ve taken. But the biblical witness is strong and clear: God leads exiles and wilderness wanderers to new lands, new relationships, new understandings and knowledge. God is with us now as God was with us then.

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

The Point on the Horizon

2010-03-16T20:58:00.000-04:00

If you ask a farmer how he ensures that he is plowing a straight furrow, he will give you this advice: Fix your eyes straight ahead on some fixed point on the horizon—a tree perhaps—and keep moving steadily toward it. Don’t watch the furrow. Just keep your hands on the plow and your eyes on that fixed point.
—Margaret Silf, Inner Compass, 37

So many things change, it seems like life is in constant flux. Everything seems out of control, as in the W. B. Yeats poem,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart. The center cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Depression, anxiety, confusion, despair—all are characterized by a loss of focus, or, rather, focusing on something less than ultimate. To have a healthy spiritual life, it helps to focus not only on a fixed point, but on the right fixed point. Wealth, health, happiness—these are all fine goals for life. But none is ultimately the right point.

What is the fixed point in your life? Family can seem fixed, and it’s true, you can’t change how you were raised or to whom you were born. But those are fixed points in the past. What fixed point is in front of you? Where do you fix your eyes so that the furrow you plow is straight?

Margaret Silf says this: “Jesus is our fixed point. He is at the head of each of our personal lines of oxen teams. It is his risen life and energy that provide the power for our every movement.” I believe she’s right. When I fix my eyes on the horizon, I see the overflowing love and grace of God before me. Fixing my eyes on Jesus I manage to stay on track.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

The Revolution in Personalized Religion

2010-03-15T08:09:00.000-04:00

An explosion of research in the past few years has taken us from a general observation that diseases tend to run in families to the discovery of very precise DNA variations that play a predictable role in many diseases, and that can be used to make increasingly accurate predictions about an individual’s potential future likelihood of illness.
—Francis S. Collins, The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine, xvi

Medicine is discovering precisely how alike we are and individually how different at the level of our basic encoding, our DNA. Francis Collins headed up the international Human Genome Project, which has mapped now, in exquisite detail, the 3.1 billion rungs on the human DNA ladder, containing over 20,000 individual genes. Mutations in the pattern, he discovered, account for the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle differences among us. Illness and health, susceptibility and immunity to certain types of disease, and the ability to respond to certain treatments are largely genetic.

I imagine each of us has our own spiritual DNA. And it may be as complex as our biological genome. Our spiritual DNA isn’t made up of base chemicals, sugars, and phosphates. Instead, it’s shaped by how often we went to church as children, our parents attitudes toward religion, the particular Sunday School teachers we had, the number of times we dozed off listening to a dull sermon, the church camp games, the powerful bonds from youth group, the mountain top experiences we’ve had, the response that we received when we started questioning, and 19,992 other factors. Our religion can be as personalized as our physical health.

But as different as we are, as Christians we still have most of our spiritual DNA in common. We may mean slightly different things by it, but we confess Jesus as Lord and Savior and commit ourselves to living out his commandment to love God and neighbor. In the shorthand of the old hymn, we trust and obey. We share baptism and communion. We share scripture. We share a common tradition. We’re susceptible to many of the same spiritual diseases.

When you map your own spiritual genome, note the differences that make you unique, the weaknesses, the strengths. But note also what you have in common with other Christians. You may find we have more in common than you think!

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Making a Scene

2010-03-14T23:20:00.000-04:00

A visionary light settled in [Mrs. Turpin’s] eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of [lower class whites and blacks], and whole battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the rear of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right… They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.
—Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”

We want to think well of ourselves, to believe that we’re good and decent people, honest as the day is long, generous to a fault, hospitable and kind to strangers, willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. And of course, we’re kind to puppies. But in reality, we’re like all but the saintliest of saints—we take pride in our own accomplishments and are genuinely perplexed, if not a bit upset, when others aren’t as passionate about our aims as we are. It’s hard to try to better ourselves without measuring against those who choose a different path and then judging them.

Mrs. Turpin put great stock in the way she composed herself. She looked down her nose at anyone who wasn’t her equal. In her revelatory vision, she was simply shocked to see a bridge to heaven that had people like her walking behind all the folks she looked down upon.

It’s easy as a reader to shake our heads at her pretensions, her ignorance. But the brilliance of O’Connor’s story is that, just as I make judgments about Mrs. Turpin, I become her. She indicts my own sense of pride, because I suspect that if I were seeing her vision, I’d be in that last group, too, even as my self-claimed virtues burned away.

Maybe this is what it means to enter the kin-dom of heaven, to be separated no longer from anyone, by neither vice nor virtue, prejudice nor honor. As I look forward to Jerusalem with Jesus this season, I want to see who’s in the crowds. Who’s throwing down their coats at his feet? Who’s shouting Hosanna? Are they like me? Can I possibly be like them?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Saying Grace

2010-03-13T11:57:00.001-05:00

Reverend Sykes’ voice was as distant as Judge Taylor’s. “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. You’re father’s passin’.”
—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 242

At our dinner table, we say grace before each meal. We offer thanks for the day, the food, our family, our time together, and in a phrase I learned from my father, “all our many blessings.” It’s a good umbrella, and it covers a lot of ground.

What I don’t always appreciate is the connection between thanksgiving and grace. Thanksgiving is our way toward God. As Meister Eckhart has said, if the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank you, it is enough. But God’s role is what I sometimes forget. There would be no need for thanksgiving without grace.

Grace is the selfless giving of oneself for another. Grace is the undeserved over-and-above, the unmerited extra mile, the overflowing cup when a sip is all that is expected or required. It can’t be parceled out in tiny packages, because it flows like a mighty, everlasting stream from the very heart of God.

Grace is Atticus Finch defending Tom Robinson against trumped-up charges and Scout defending Boo Radley’s privacy. Grace is God’s gift to us revealed in the life, death, resurrection, and living presence of Jesus. Grace is the source of the challenges and blessings of each day.

I expect Rev. Sykes had it right, telling Scout to stand up as her father was passing by. At the dinner table, maybe offering our thanksgivings isn’t enough. Perhaps we should also stand.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Wild Things

2010-03-12T23:29:00.000-05:00

And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth…
-Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

Max is aptly named.

Maurice Sendak’s solitary, lonely boy experiences his emotions—particularly anger—at maximum velocity. He chases the dog with a fork in his hand; he howls at his mother; he storms off to bed without any supper. And when his bed sails away to where the wild things are, he meets their monstrous, terrible roars with the magic trick he never learned at home. He says to them, “BE STILL!” And the wild things are stilled. They make him their king.

Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be able to reach that place where emotions can be tamed? To silence the wild caterwauls of anger, despair, or frustration is to harness deep psychological forces. To control the sulking, silent groans of resignation is to discover spiritual health. Hair-trigger rage is a wild thing that can damage the soul. Bitterness, jealousy, envy, greed—the church has named them all before.

Max gives me hope that I can plumb spiritual depths and not get lost. The wild things are still there, but they no longer have control of my life. In centering prayer, I can recognize their power and not be overcome; in the stillness of contemplation, I can find the calm that gives life to my soul.

My prayer for you today is that you find that spiritual place where the terrible roars within and the gnashing of terrible teeth become still. It’s not our doing, but the grace of God, that allows us to find a meal still warm on the table after the raging storm.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Holy Silliness

2010-03-11T22:32:00.000-05:00

Gadgets for God: the Hallelujah Button – Just won the lottery? Just been told by your boss, “We’re going to have to let you go”? Either way, the Hallelujah Button is a godsend. Simply hit the button (or shake your iPhone) and a few seconds of the Hallelujah Chorus burst forth. It’s perfect for use in church services too... just hold your iPhone aloft when the preacher finally concludes the sermon. The Hallelujah Button. As developed by George Frederick Handel.
—shipoffools.com

This makes me laugh. Not in a sarcastic, bitter way, but out loud, from the gut. Yes, the Hallelujah Button is real, and yes, I can imagine the congregation all holding up their iPhones at the end of the sermon—the only improvement I can imagine would be if it let each user choose tenor or soprano, alto or bass.

It’s foolishness, Paul suggested, to stake our claim on a crucified savior. It’s holy silliness, Batman, to ride a donkey into town. That whole temple-torn-down-and-rebuilt-in-three-days thing? God poking fun at human pretension. And why not? You can’t take seriously a guy who turns water into wine.

But isn’t that just the way with faith? It blows up balloons and twists them into giraffes for children. It listens for God’s laughter through tears at the foot of the cross. Faith smiles knowingly when Mary mistakes the risen Jesus for the gardener. It laughs out loud when the Spirit at Pentecost makes Peter insist the disciples really aren’t drunk. Healing from illness, wholeness from fragmentation, life from death—there’ll be joy in the morning on that day!

Sure, I take my faith seriously. I get passionate in particular about Jesus’ teachings on social justice. But I also have to wear it lightly. In our church art gallery there’s a print of a laughing Jesus, his eyes crinkled and sparkling, his head thrown back. I love the image. Yes, Jesus wept. But surely he also was in on the holy humor of God’s ridiculous grace. Surely (“hey, stop calling me Shirley!” ba-dap-boom), Jesus also laughed.

So should you. So should I.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Run!

2010-03-10T17:34:00.000-05:00

I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! … If you’ve got a priest who is preaching social justice, find another parish.
—Glenn Beck, The Glenn Beck Show, March 2, 2010

Throughout Lent, I’ve been meditating on the spiritual journey. Where do we begin, where are we going, and who are our companions along the way? I’ve been sharing the path with plenty of people I like and respect, people whose thoughts stimulate me to deeper places in my soul.

But it’s good for me to remember that there are others on the path from whom I learn because they and I fundamentally disagree. There’s something about an argument that forces me to consider carefully what I believe. Glenn Beck is one of these from whom I learn this way. A few days ago, he urged his listeners to look out for code words that their religious leaders were really promoting Nazism and Communism using terms like economic or social justice. He told his listeners to run away from such churches and report their pastors to church authorities. I had to chuckle a bit as I wondered what Jesus would say to someone tattling on us. We have our shortcomings as a church, but we’re pretty much in agreement that Jesus expects of us a love rooted in just and right relationships among friends and enemies alike.

I want to hang a banner out on the lawn that says, “Social justice is what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of heaven.”

And another that reads, “Economic Justice is part of the Economy of Salvation.”

So I want you to know what I’ve done. I’ve sent Mr. Beck an email telling him that I’m a social justice Christian. I’ve told him that if he’d like to visit us some day at First Christian Church, he will be welcome here, and he’ll find that everyone is welcome, even people who don’t always agree with each other or with him. He’ll find a congregation that believes love and justice are flip sides of the same divine coin—and we give to God what belongs to God. Our actions show it. He’ll find a church that believes God cares about poverty, illness, hunger, and social marginalization. He’ll find a church that’s running all right, but it’s running toward the gospel, not away from it.

He’ll find a church that sees a vision of God’ justice before us, and as we set our faces toward God’s kingdom, we’re prepared to RUN.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Temples of an Unimaginable Mercy

2010-03-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice / Of compassion, pity, understanding? / To be human is to be completely alien among the galaxies. / Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “Religion Comes,” in Second Space (2004), 58

The world is not impersonal. Oh, it seems like it at times: cold, uncaring, callous. But that is not the world I accept as my ultimate home, either in the future or here and now. It is not the world that determines the decisions I make each day. I hear mercy and compassion in the human song. It gives me hope. It grants me a glimpse of God.

None of us is immune to the evil around us. But neither must we accept that Hobbes was right—that life without some tenuous social contract is nasty, cruel, brutish, and short. Selfish desires are our bane, but what makes us as human beings “alien among the galaxies” is that we have the capacity for compassion. Altruism isn’t just a cover for some deeper self-interest. We really do have the capacity for love.

Remember when you first fell in love. Didn’t something tingle inside? It was a connecting point in you that was tied by an emotional cord to a connecting point in someone else. It was your identity moving from within your skin into the larger sphere of relationship. It was your soul accepting a universe whose underlying cause is love.

When Jesus alludes to his body as a temple, he’s speaking about being torn down and raised up. But I believe there’s also something of the unimaginable sacredness of human community behind his words. It is as community that we are his body, his temple that can never be torn down completely, because we are always being raised up by the compassion, mercy, and love of God.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Adams and Eves

2010-03-08T08:05:00.000-05:00

Watching my toddlers in their highchairs taught me that food is miraculous, its myriad colors and shapes, its glorious textures, an invitation to play. Squishing peas or squeezing fistfuls of mashed potatoes, my children were Adams and Eves discovering the wonder of creation for the first time, reaffirming the gift of this world and offering it back… and as I obeyed their infant commands to name the things of this world, the world became holy.
—Suzanne M. Wolfe, “This is My Body,” Image (Winter 2009), 82

How as adults do we discover the miraculous, the holy, especially when we don’t squish the peas anymore, when we don’t respond to the mashed potatoes’ invitation to play? I wonder how to reclaim our delight and surprise when everything around us was creative and new.

Perhaps there is a command in the play of toddlers and infants, an obligation, a moral imperative, for adults also to name the world. Isaiah was right. The way forward is found when “a little child shall lead them.” It is in the early naming of things, people, and relationships that we discover who we are, our roles and possibilities. We reaffirm the world. We offer it back… to whom? To one another, yes, but more. The world around us becomes holy when in our toddler-like discovery, we offer it back in wonder to God.

For a moment today, rediscover your inner Adam, your inner Eve. Discover a miracle. Give thanks.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Family Celebration

2010-03-07T22:04:00.000-05:00

It is so important for a family to celebrate all together. It is so important for the children to laugh and play and sing with their parents and to see their parents happy to be together.
—Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 315

So many things get in the way of family celebration: work, school, laptops in the family room. There is distance, both emotional and physical. Few would deny that the forces tearing families apart are strong.

How much stronger, then, are the celebrations that truly overcome the daily grind? You don’t have to throw a party, but at least carry a playful spirit into each day. Parents who laugh around their children—with them and not at them—teach by example what it means to live into the kin-dom of God. And the occasional party is like icing on the cake!

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Draw Me a Sheep

2010-03-06T18:33:00.000-05:00

“If you please, draw me a sheep…”
When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey. Absurd as it might seem to me, a thousand miles from any human habitation and in danger of death, I took out of my pocket a sheet of paper and my fountain pen. But then I remembered how my studies had been concentrated on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar, and I told the little chap (a little crossly, too) that I did not know how to draw. He answered me:
“That doesn’t matter. Draw me a sheep.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 10

When the pilot met the Little Prince, it was in the wilderness, after crash-landing his plane. The pilot’s singular focus: to repair his plane and get back on his way. This was, as he said, a “matter of consequence.”

The Little Prince, however, was a mystery. He seemed completely unconcerned about the pilot’s plight. Instead, he drew the pilot into his own search… for a sheep to protect his flower from the baobab trees growing on his planet far away. Ridiculous, of course! And a distracting interruption to the pilot! But how often does the overpowering mystery of another’s concern appear ridiculous? Most all the time, I fear.

Except for this: we become responsible forever for those we love. The pilot in time discovered that the Little Prince’s life had meaning because he loved his rose. His life had purpose because he fed, watered, and protected her. He endured her faults and adored her. In the end, he even gave his life for her. In the end, the pilot understood. And he drew the sheep.

Whom do you love? Is there someone you have fed, watered, protected, endured, and even prepared to give your life for? If so, you may find yourself asking strangers odd questions. This Little Prince gives me hope for all of us. Perhaps we each will find our purpose in loving others and draw strangers into a life-giving relationship. Perhaps we will remember we are responsible for those we love.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Good Health

2010-03-05T19:37:00.000-05:00

Certainly one of the best ways to good health is to follow a well-balanced diet and the motto of the American Institute of Wine and Food: Moderation, Small helpings, A great variety of food, No snacking, Weight watching and sensible exercise, Above all—HAVE A GOOD TIME.
—Julia Child, The French Chef Cookbook (rev. 1998), iii-iv.

Few of us could live long on a diet of cheese soufflé, salmon mouse, Crêpes Suzette, Chicken Cordon Bleu, and fois gras. The cholesterol alone is frightening! Yet most of us have at least heard of these dishes, thanks to Julia Child. Trying them once in a while is a culinary treat, and, if you’re the one doing the cooking, a nice challenge.

Spiritually speaking, there are practices that few of us could successfully do every day. But occasionally it’s worth doing something out of the ordinary. Fasting, perhaps, or a day of silence, or even a particular yoga position—any of it can be a challenge worth trying, even if it’s not part of your daily spiritual diet.

What such disciplines highlight is that we each do have a daily diet. It may seem like meager stuff by comparison—a morning prayer may be a lot like a simple bowl of oatmeal; a quick glance at a daily devotional calendar may be like mashed potatoes—spiritual comfort food. But it’s the regular spiritual practices—morning or evening prayers, regular reading of scripture, weekly worship—that sustain us in the long run. It’s the occasional Coq-au-vin or Saute de Porc aux Champignons that then feeds the soul in deeper ways.

I hope you’ll find a way to splurge a bit, spiritually speaking this season. Step out of your ordinary routine and try something a bit more challenging. It might not be everyday fare, but it’s still good for the soul. And HAVE A GOOD TIME.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Be a Good Ancestor

2010-03-04T10:16:00.000-05:00

Lesson 21: Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn. Give something back. Every minute you drink from wells you did not dig, are sheltered by builders you will never know, are protected by police and soldiers and neighbors and caretakers whose names are in no record books, are tended by healing hands of every hue and heritage, and are fed and clothed by the labors of countless others… What will your obituary say? What will you’re your legacy in life be?
—Marian Wright Edelman, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, 166-167

I wonder what sort of ancestor I’ll be. Or you, what sort of ancestor will you be? What will your children’s children tell their children about you? I hope they’ll say we were trusting and good. I hope they’ll be glad about the care we took for the earth and its peoples and be proud of something we accomplished that made this world a better place. I hope they’ll have stories to tell, like that time when someone came to us hungry and we sacrificed our convenience to be sure they were not only fed but watered. Or the love we passed on in the family, or the difference we made in the community, or the (you have to use your imagination… how do your hopes fill in the blank?). We hope. We hope.

Perhaps that’s one place hope come to us, from the future. It’s not about irrational dreams that we cynically and secretly think will never really come true. Hope is about imagination rooted in possibility. Hope is the trust that someday a well we dig will satisfy someone else’s thirst. Hope is the trust that someday someone we loved will pass that love on to someone else.

I hope I’ll one day be a good ancestor. I hope your great-great grandchildren will be pleased to say you were a branch on their family tree. Even more, I hope that those who never know our names will be glad we were here, when we’re no longer David or Sherry or Bob, and we’re just “ancestors.” How will we work today to make their lives flourish?

Let your imagination fly.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Navigating the Intersection of Politcs and Faith

2010-03-03T22:28:00.000-05:00

Nobody in his or her right mind would want to be a member of a socially acceptable religion. It's very dangerous for the soul. A nation is in the business of doing Caesar's work, not God's. There's a distinction we get from the New Testament between religion and politics. That's not to say, however, that one shouldn't vote according to one's personal beliefs. All of us do that. But it is to say that one should never expect the state to function in accord with passionate faith. It won't. It can't. It shouldn't. That would be a confusion of roles.
—Phyllis Tickle, interviewed by Becky Garrison in The Wittenburg Door, 11/28/2007

We all live at the intersection of politics and faith. It’s a busy intersection, so we have to be careful not to get run over! Perhaps the trick in standing at the crossroad between politics and faith is to decide if you’re there to dodge traffic or to help people cross the street.

Last night the Lynchburg City Schools shared the deep challenges faced by next year’s budget cuts. It was an event filled with political realities and passion, anguish and cold, hard facts. Students, faculty and parents spoke up in defense of their schools. Several from our church were there. Christina Maclay spoke on behalf of Perrymont Elementary, where she teaches. Tickle is right in principle that Caesar’s work and God’s work are separate, but many of us have to juggle both. There are places—like public education—where people of faith don’t set aside their compassion and commitment to justice just because Caesar signs their check. In one way or another, most of us live in this intersection.

What is our role as Christians in the public square? I believe that it is to be faithful to the compassionate claim Jesus makes on all his disciples. So we speak up for the marginalized. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” the prophet Isaiah reminds us. Will you write a letter or make a phone call? Will you encourage a child to do his best? Will you show appreciation for a teacher who doesn’t know if she has a job next year? Advocacy is hard work, but all it means at its root is to speak up. Look around you today. Who needs to hear your voice speaking up, speaking out, speaking tenderly when needed? Who needs your help to cross the street?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Jesus at the Crossroads

2010-03-02T01:34:00.003-05:00

Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek (or should we say in English, in Bantu and in Afrikaans?) at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died. And that is what he died about. And that is where church [members] should be and what church [member]ship should be about.
—George F. MacLeod, quoted on Richard Pulley’s home page at The Intersection

We have a cross between two candles on our communion table. It’s important that I never forget that cross is there to point me beyond my own experience. It points beyond the church walls, out into the street, up and down Rivermont Avenue, one arm toward downtown with its inner city challenges and the other out toward the mountains and rural poverty.

The cross on the table reminds me that the church at its best lives at the crossroads. Whether we’re serving a meal at Gateway with men working to overcome addictions or hammering together wheelchair ramps for the homes of people with disabilities, we’re where Jesus lived and died. When we’re picking up trash on our adopted section of the street, or paying a power bill for a single mom, or assembling diapers and sleepers into Baby Kits, we’re where we belong.

We’re not sent only to nice people who pray, sing, and think like us, even though we're sent to them, too. We won’t necessarily find Jesus at a fancy dinner party unless we go out behind the kitchen where he’s taking out the trash. But we’ll find him. Because we’re not an imperial church. We know full well where he was crucified. We remember by whom. And, just as importantly, we remember by whom he was raised.

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Interconnected and Interdependent

2010-03-01T08:02:00.001-05:00

Every individual matters, nonhuman as well as human. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference. We cannot live through a single day without making an impact on the world around us. And we all have free choice—what sort of difference do we want to make? Do we want to make the world around us a better place? Or not?
—Jane Goodall, in Lorne Adrian, The Most Important Thing I Know, 83

Not only are we interconnected, we’re interdependent. Interconnected things are part of a structure, organized, attached, perhaps even orderly. Certainly the church is an interconnected web, where one person’s joy or grief is felt by all the others. Pull one string of the web and the vibrations are felt throughout.

But we’re also interdependent. Interdependence rises a level above just being connected. Interdependence means that not only do we sense each other’s existence, but we also need one another. We each matter not just because we’re attached, and for one of us to go missing is like the unraveling of a fishing net, but because we make a difference in each other’s lives. My joy is impossible without yours to feed it; my sorrow is unbearable without you to share it.

Paul said the same thing organically when he spoke of the body needing hands, eyes, ears, and feet. Imagine a body where the hands are connected but they don’t ever wipe the tears out of the eyes. Imagine a body where the ears are connected, but they don’t share with the feet a cry they hear for help. Interconnected is not enough. We’re interdependent. We each have a role to play in one another’s lives.

And it/s not just other people with whom we’re interdependent—our ecosystem depends on us and we on it. Our society depends on us and we on it. Even God is part of this interdependent dance, as we depend on God and—here’s the radical part—God depends on us. From the office to the home to the whole of creation, we can choose each day to make things better. Or not.

How will you make a difference today, to your friends, your coworkers, your community, your world, and to God?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Other People

2010-02-28T19:46:00.001-05:00

Sartre is wrong when he says that hell is other people. It is heaven that is other people. They only become hell when we are locked into our own egoism and darkness. If they are to become heaven, we have to make the slow passage from egoism to love. It is our own hearts and eyes that have to change.

- Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 312

I used to think Sartre was right. Cynical and sour (although I thought myself simply realistic), I held to an existential worldview of isolation, filled with sadness that there was no meaning in the world except in resistance, that there was no real God, nothing really good.

In ministry, I rediscovered the joy of life in community. Vanier is right. Other people, as difficult and cantankerous as they can often be, are still heaven. We are created to live in relationship with one another. We are not ourselves when we are isolated. To become trapped in my own ego is to deny my responsibility for others and their responsibility for me. As one of our more modern hymns sings, “We are not our own.” But when we live in community, sharing vulnerability and setting ego aside, there the Holy Spirit moves. There, in mutual openness and accountability, we know the beginnings of holy love.

Who do you love? If your heart and mind are unlocked and set free, the answer becomes clear. Jesus called it love of neighbor. And your neighbor is anyone who is in need.

Lifeguards and Life Guards

2010-02-27T09:22:00.002-05:00

We learn that there are lifeguards and there are life guards. The former monitor our swimming for safety and rescue us from harm. They can be indentified by uniforms—usually bright red or orange swimsuits. When they hear our exclamations of panic—“Help, help” and “Save me, I’m drowning!”—we know them by their swift response.

Life guards, on the other hand, guide and keep our feet in the paths defined by our limits. They can be identified by a uniform convention—the practice of identifying ourselves and each other in certain limited ways… We inevitable [are asked], “What do you do?” The answer to that question of vocation is my “life guard.” It helps keep my life on track.
—San Portaro, Crossing the Jordan, 34-35

I’m Jackson’s dad, Katy’s husband, Jeanne and Dan’s son, and the pastor of First Christian Church. Each of these descriptions is a “life guard.” It sets certain safe limits around who I am and what I do. It keeps my life on track. You, too, have your “life guards,” those relationships and activities that give you a place in the community, that set you apart uniquely from the rest of the world, that create a safe space in which to live.

We know very little about the “life guards” of Jesus. We treat him instead as a Lifeguard, calling on him to rescue us in trouble. But we don’t know what he did for a living. We know little about his relationship with his mother, father, sisters or brothers. Some speculate marriage, perhaps kids—important things to know! Except we don’t. And it makes it harder to “know” Jesus. We don’t know what boundaries of activity and relationship defined most of his life.

We do know that he was relatively old when, for whatever reason, he felt the need to turn his life around. John baptized Jesus in a ritual that marked a changed direction. From then on, Jesus knew his calling. He discovered new relationships. He made a radical new commitment to others and to God. From this point on, we can trace his tracks.

Have you discovered your calling? If so, your “life guards” are different than they used to be. Your vocation is set, your commitment firm, your new direction clear. Your Lifeguard, however, is the same. Go ahead and swim into deeper water in confidence that you are not alone. Help will come when needed.

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

O Hilaritas

2010-02-26T08:25:00.001-05:00

According to Newton
the intrinsic property of matter on which weight depends is mass.
But mass and weight vary according to gravity
(It is not a laughing matter).
On earth a mass of 6 kilograms has a weight of 6 kilograms.
On the moon a mass of 6 kilograms has a weight of 1 kilogram.
An object’s inertia (the force required to accelerate it)
depends entirely on its mass.
And so it is with me.
I depend entirely on a crumb of bread
a sip of wine;
it is the mass that matters
that makes matter.
In free fall, like the earth around the sun,
I am weightless
and so move only if I have mass.
Thanks be to the creator
who has given himself
that we may be.
- Madeleine L’Engle, The Ordering of Love, 94

Madeleine L’Engle plays off the dual meaning of “mass.” Mass is both a property of matter and worship that matters. The crumb of bread and sip of wine identify who we are. We may not call our form of worship “mass,” but worship makes us matter just the same. I hope to see you Sunday as we matter together to God, as we move together in prayer and song, as we worship the one who matters most, en masse.

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Beyond Ideology

2010-02-24T00:03:00.001-05:00

I am what we should be—that is, post-ideological. We are to be about healing, not division. We are not to be subservient to ideology, but above it.

- Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, defending himself against criticism that he has been co-opted by liberals.

Most of us are passionate about politics, religion, justice, and peace. What are your core values? They are likely to affect not only the way you vote but also the way you relate to other people. They’ll even affect the way you relate to God. You may believe people are essentially good, and left to their own devices they will be kind, loving, and generous. You see God unlocking human potential, setting people free. On the other hand, you may believe people are essentially self-serving, and left to their own devices they will always do what’s in their own best interest. You see God regulating human behavior, forgiving sin, and demanding satisfaction that only a sinless Jesus can provide. Competing ideologies lead to radically different images of the church. Communities fight and divide over things like this.

What would it be like to be truly post-ideological? Could you imagine, for a moment, an image of God that doesn’t reflect your own assumptions about human nature? It might lead to healing, both in our communities and in our souls.

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace for today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

The Gift of our Physical Selves

2010-02-23T08:54:00.001-05:00

We have to remember that we have a body which has its own laws, and that the physical has its effect on the spiritual. We have to respect our body and its needs, and care for it even more than a craftsman cares for his tools. Our body is more important than a tool. It is an integral part of our being, of our self.
- Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 255

Are you taking care of your body? Exercise and diet, regular checkups—you know the routine. And it is a routine, if it’s done right. Binge dieting and sporadic exercise are as damaging as binge prayer. When self-care is something you only occasionally squeeze in between other things on your “to do” list, you put stress on your body, as well as on your spirit. Instead, engage in a regular, habitual pattern of exercise and prayer that integrates your life.

The early Christians prayed with their whole bodies—whether stretching out their arms with lifted heads, or kneeling, or lying face down prone on the floor. Living in community, they prayed while planting grain, kneading bread, and laying brick. As you go through the movements of your day—making the bed, preparing breakfast, walking to the mailbox—tend to the physical needs of your body and you will be well-positioned to open yourself to the presence of God.

At work, at school, or at home, whatever you are dong with your body, allow yourself to do so in prayer.

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace for today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Sink or Swim? The Gift of Emptiness

2010-02-22T00:01:00.003-05:00

I discovered another picture of freedom one night while lying in a warm, deep bath. I had emptied one of the little plastic bottles of bath oil into the water, hoping that its promise to be “revitalizing” would rouse me from the threat of lethargy and despondency that was lurking around the corner.

I watched idly as the bottle bobbed up and down on the water. Then I held it down and filled it up. I let it go and watched it sink slowly down and settle on the bottom. I fetched it up again, emptied it, and let it float. My childish pastime made me realize that God sometimes does the same with me. I fill up, gradually, with all the things I desire and want to hold on to. The more I fill up, the deeper I sink, until eventually I lie like a lead balloon at the bottom of the bath, quite incapable of movement. Then something happens to “tip me up and pour me out.” It is usually something unwelcome that I resist with all my strength, but it succeeds in draining me of all the attachment feelings I have collected, then something new happens. The little bottle bobs up again, freed of its cargo of bathwater, light, floating, and responding to every wave. This is the gift of emptiness; only in my emptiness can I be sustained by the buoyancy of God’s unfailing love and move on as he created me to in order to grow.
- Margaret Silf, Inner Compass, 161-162

Take a moment and let God tip you up and pour you out. Empty yourself of desires, wants, passions, moods. No longer weighed down, how does it feel to float?

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace for today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Slowly Count to 40

2010-02-21T00:55:00.003-05:00

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone.” ’

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil* said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” ’

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”, and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” ’

Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” ’ When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

- Luke 4.1-13 (NRSV)

Lent takes its name from the same word that gives slow music its lento tempo: lentus. It has at least two meanings. The first and most familiar meaning is “slow, lingering, lasting.” Lent, then, is a season for slowing down, lingering a while on the spiritual journey, discovering the lasting meaning of life. Certainly, Jesus takes his time. Forty days fasting in the wilderness is enough time to slow down and figure out what direction he is to take in life. But it’s also an interminably long time when crisis comes. Now, not yet 40 days from the earthquake in Haiti, we see how long days in crisis can become.

That’s why another meaning is helpful. The second meaning of lentus is “tough, resistant, barely yielding to force.” Jesus displays toughness in his encounter with the devil. He resists temptation. He does not yield to the forces of hunger, weakness, or self-doubt. When faced with the vast suffering and evil present in the world, we must not be overwhelmed. Jesus is trustworthy. God’s love is the engine that powers our resistance. Our compassion will not yield. There is no disaster so large that we cannot meet it in the confidence of a compassionate faith.

How will you slow down this season, as the ashes imposed on your forehead on Wednesday are washed away by now, this first Sunday of Lent? Take a moment today and slowly count to 40, breathing in, holding it, and breathing out. With each new breath, visualize the inner toughness that you will draw on to resist the forces that separate you from God. Feel the compassion that rises up toward those in need. Act on your faith. Make God’s love visible in the things you do.

We do not put God to the test. Instead, in the slow, steady march of this season’s journey, God is testing us, refining us, tempering us like steel.

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Balancing Between Opposites: Detachment and Attachment

2010-02-20T23:53:00.002-05:00

Our spiritual lives are a constant interplay, a dynamic process. At the heart of this dynamic interplay are several interdependent pairs of seeming “opposites,” such as activity/receptivity, consolation/desolation, and detachment/attachment, which are, in fact, mutually interdependent.

- Kay Northcutt, Kindling Desire for God, 103

Detachment is the practice of spiritual formation that allows us to pray for the best possible outcome, without a sense of what ought to happen. Detachment is letting go of our own desires and purposes and praying into the purposefulness of God’s intentions. “Detachment,” Northcutt says, “clears space for the Spirit’s leading and God’s purposefulness in the congregation.” Attachment, on the other hand, can be “selfish, grasping, thoughtless, and all too often motivated by a will-to-power.”

Experiencing detachment is hard for me. I care deeply about my own goals, my own desires. My attachment to family and friends is strong. The challenge for me is to remain attached to those who matter to me while not grasping. I think the key is this insight: God is already holding us together. The harder I hold on, the less I sense God already holding us close. To detach, in a spiritually healthy way, is to see the bonds God is already weaving, trusting in God’s love more than my strength, and then focusing my energy not on duplicating God’s efforts but on becoming more loving and trusting of others.

If I want to hold something fragile, I have to let go of my tight grip on hurt feelings, resentments, and unfulfilled desires. The irony is that in order to develop healthy attachments to others, I have to gently let go. Then I become free from blaming, scapegoating, resentment, and anger; free from desperately seeking others’ approval, free from the superficial. By letting go, I allow myself to be held by God, which allows me better to connect with others, who of course are also held together by God, which allows me to be filled with love.

Then, I can pray in the words of the hymn: “Weave, weave, weave us together; weave us together in unity and love. Weave, weave, weave us together; weave us together, together in love.”

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace for today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Balancing Between Opposites: Consolation and Desolation

2010-02-19T07:45:00.002-05:00

Our spiritual lives are a constant interplay, a dynamic process. At the heart of this dynamic interplay are several interdependent pairs of seeming “opposites,” such as activity/receptivity, consolation/desolation, and detachment/attachment, which are, in fact, mutually interdependent.
- Kay Northcutt, Kindling Desire for God, 103

Each day has its ups and downs, its consolations and desolations.

Consolation is not just a second place prize. It’s a gentle pat on the shoulder or a hot crock-pot of freshly delivered soup. It’s one life reaching toward another, heart to heart. Consolation turns us outward. It exists in relationship. In prayer today, ask what forces are binding you closer to someone else. Who embraces you, picks you up? What within you generates new inspiration and ideas, releasing new energy, lifting your heart so you can see the joys and sorrows of others? These are the moments of consolation that extend the tendrils of your heart into the soil of another’s soul. Identify your consolations and give thanks.

Desolation turns us in on ourselves. It is absence, not presence, like an open wound that will not heal. Desolate moments are those without comfort and without hope. Ask also in prayer today what forces in your life cut you off from community, isolating you from family, church members, coworkers, and friends, draining you of energy, spiraling into deeper and deeper negative feelings. Identify your desolations. Name them. Let them go.

God is present in each moment. It may not be possible to know those moments of consolation until you have lived through desolate times. But when the one we know as Comforter comes, you know you will never have to face another moment completely alone.

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace for today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Balancing Between Opposites: Activity and Receptivity

2010-02-18T10:31:00.002-05:00

Our spiritual lives are a constant interplay, a dynamic process. At the heart of this dynamic interplay are several interdependent pairs of seeming “opposites,” such as activity/receptivity, consolation/desolation, and detachment/attachment, which are, in fact, mutually interdependent.

- Kay Northcutt, Kindling Desire for God, 103

Activity is how we shape the world. We mold, influence, nudge, suggest, and close the sale. We build and plant, teach and learn, tear down and raise up. Our identity is tied up in activity. As soon as we meet someone, we want to know what they do. What would today be like if you considered part of your activity to be sacred? What would the day be like if some of your “doings” were dedicated to God? Active spiritual practices include visiting the sick, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and working for justice. They also include singing in the choir, attending meetings, setting up potluck dinners, and writing birthday cards for your parish group. Shape the world today, as you usually do, but also shape it in the image of God.

Receptivity is how we see the world. We observe, listen, watch, taste, touch and smell. But we are receptive not only with our physical senses; we also open our minds and spirits, becoming receptive to insights, epiphanies, and revelations. It can be hard to receive instead of do. What would today be like if you sharpened your spiritual nerve endings and became more receptive to the holiness around you? Receptive spiritual practices include contemplative prayer, lectio divina, devotional reading, silence, fasting, prayer groups, and labyrinth walking. Be receptive to the world today, not only with your physical senses but also open with the eyes and mind of God.

Along the way, I wish you God’s peace for today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

A Daily Lenten Devotional: Ash Wednesday

2010-02-18T10:24:00.003-05:00

The Gift of Discernment
Some people have a true gift of discernment. They can seize what is essential in a complicated discussion or a confused story. They are quick to understand what is really needed and at the same time, if they are practical, they can suggest the first steps towards putting people on the road to healing. Some people in a community who do not have an important position may have this gift of light for us. We must learn to listen to them.

- Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 253

Think about our church community and, sometime today, ask God in prayer who has a gift of light for you. Whose discerning eye casts light on something in your life? Their light may be broad or focused, subtle or bright. It may shine on something you haven’t seen before. It may shine on something you see all the time, but from a different angle so you see it in a new way.

Name that discerning person in your prayer, receive their gift to you in your heart, and notice the difference it makes in your day. If you see that person today, thank them for what they’ve helped you to see.

I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.

Prayer for Haiti

2010-01-16T09:10:00.003-05:00

We each pray in our own way. Here’s mine right now…

Almighty and infinitely compassionate God,
before whom the waters recede and the earth trembles:
Look with mercy on your children in Haiti this day.

Wrap warm blankets around bruised shoulders.
Purify water to quench the most desperate thirst.
Calm terrified children and reunite them with parents, guardians, and friends.
Still the panic in your people and fill them with resolve.
Strengthen those waiting to be rescued and inspire the rescuers to find them.
Heal the injured; comfort the grieving; befriend the dying; receive the dead.

Hear our intercessions:
For lives that are injured or lost, we grieve.
For lives that are saved, we magnify your name.
For aid workers, missionaries and volunteers,
for peacekeepers, ecumenical partners, and our leaders, and especially for those whose gifts sustain and heal, we give you thanks.

Unbind the generosity in our hearts:
Use our gifts to build up those who have been torn down.
Make our hands extensions of your loving and healing touch.
Accept and bless all we have to offer,
that our gifts may meet the needs of those who suffer
and through our actions your love will be most fully known.

All this and more we ask in the name of Jesus Christ,
who knew suffering even unto death
and raises the dead to everlasting life. Amen.

Prayerful Promises

2010-01-06T00:45:00.003-05:00

We made some prayerful promises these past two Sundays in worship. As we dedicated each infant, I charged the congregation with the following words: “As the congregation of God’s family, it is our sacred obligation with these parents to enfold this child in our affections and continuing care, to uphold her in good, to guide her in truth, to forgive her in error, and to protect her from all that is evil and unjust.”

When you think about how we raise children as a church, that charge covers a lot of ground.

First: affection and continuing care. That means getting to know our church’s children, and more than that, taking an interest in them and loving them. Each child in this church should be able to tell by our actions that she or he is beloved by God.

Second: to uphold the child in good. This means positive reinforcement, praise. Our children must hear from us when they do well—cards, letters, compliments. We all respond well to praise from those we love.

Third: to guide the child in truth. This means knowing ourselves well enough, including our relationship with God, to be able to teach things that never have to be unlearned later. It’s a high and humble responsibility to guide a child in truth.

Fourth: to forgive a child in error. How often have you felt the residual guilt of a childhood mistake that remains unforgiven? Children experiment. They try new things. They are creative. And sometimes they inadvertently err. If we can pray that God forgives us as we forgive others, then we should practice forgiveness toward those who feel it most—our children.

Fifth: to protect the child from all that is evil and unjust. Children have a keen sense of justice, fairness, good and evil, right and wrong. With a strong congregation as their shield, they can stand against anything life throws their way.

Our call this year is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Let it begin with the way we commit ourselves to our children’s care.

Blessings and Peace.

Seven Last Words of Christ #7

2009-04-07T00:34:00.001-04:00

Lenten Meditation
April 8, 2009

Seventh Word
Luke 24.46, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

It’s one thing to take your life in your hands. Want to scale that mountain? It’s your life. Want to hop on your granddaughter’s skateboard and try out the half-pipe? It’s your life. We tend to think what we do with ourselves in private and that doesn’t affect anyone else is our business. It’s a form of ethical egoism. An ex-Marine friend of mine said they called it the 180 rule when he was in the Pacific—what happens west of the 180th stays there. Vegas took ethical egoism and made it into a PR campaign. As long as no one else can get hurt, why not?

It’s another thing to take someone else’s life in your hands. Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath—first of all, do no harm. When your patient comes in need of help, you diagnose, you treat, but under it all, you recognize that you have an obligation to someone else’s health and happiness. Any time you drive a child to school you’re taking someone else’s life in your hands—so don’t text or do email while you’re driving. For that matter, even when you’re alone in the car, the other drivers on the road are in your hands. Professionally, personally, emotionally, legally—we have a responsibility for each other’s well-being, a sacredness of life to honor and uphold. If the Good Samaritan had come along a little earlier and seen the robbers beating up the man beside the road, he would have been obligated to stop the mugging, not just wait until it was over to bind the wounds. Internationally, politically, we get involved because when you have the responsibility to help someone else and the power to do it, it’s wrong not to. As Emmanuel Levinas put it after the Holocaust, when we meet someone face-to-face, we become responsible for them.

Taking your life in your own hands is relatively easy, but isolating. Taking another’s life in your hands is inevitable, and morally compelling.

It’s another thing entirely to place your life in God’s hands. This isn’t a question of obligation. The great commandment aside, you cannot order someone to love you and force it to happen. No matter how loud you scream, “Trust me!” or how successfully manipulative you are with someone else’s emotions, you can’t make someone have faith in you. And neither can God. With all God’s power to create, enable, and persuade, God cannot force us to love him or have faith in him and maintain that the results are genuine love and faith. It’s up to us. To place my life in God’s hands is to acknowledge that I am not the center of the universe. To place my life in God’s hands is ultimately an act of the deepest trust.

But when you have commended your life into God’s hands, you have done what Jesus did on the cross. You haven’t denied your own strength to act for yourself, because it takes tremendous strength to let go of that to which we most closely cling. You haven’t given up responsibility, because it is an act of great responsibility to decide where your life belongs. Instead, you have embodied the deepest faith and love of which human being are capable. You have come finally to the cross. You have found your life in God.

Seven Last Words of Christ #6

2009-04-01T22:38:00.001-04:00

Lenten Meditation
April 1, 2009

Sixth Word
John 19.30, “It is finished.”

The artist makes the final stroke on the canvas, and the painting is finished. The surgeon ties off the final stitch. The operation is finished. You push back from the table, satisfied, full, the last drops of coffee cooling in the cup and the crumbs of cake clinging to the napkin. The meal is finished.

So many things come to an end. We live in time, you and I, so beginnings and endings make sense of our experience. Projects at work begin and end. Appointments begin and end. Relationships are more murky, but they, too, have their beginnings—just listen to a couple tell their story—and their ends, sometimes painful. Our main experience of the world is temporal, in time—chronos, in Greek. T.S. Eliot wrote, “For I … have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons; I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

What is so ordinary about Jesus’ death is that it takes place in real time. Each breath, each heartbeat, is measurable on a chart. In the horizontal plane of chronological time, he is nailed to the cross, lifted up, mocked. He dies in time. What is so extraordinary about Jesus’ death is that it also takes place outside of time and connects us to eternity. He dies before he should—the soldiers come to break his legs as an act of mercy, allowing his death to come more quickly, but he has already breathed his last. God’s mercy trumps that of soldiers … or disciples. The horizontal coffee-spoon reality is transformed by the verticality, the transcendence, of Jesus’ final moment.

The word tetelesthai (it is finished) conveys not only the end of something in time but the completion of something that stands outside of time—there is a fullness made complete in Jesus’ death, an action transforming the present. It is like a cup of water with a thin film of oil on the surface touched by a single drop of dish soap. The entire surface is transformed in every direction at once. When Jesus says tetelesthai, “it is finished,” everything, everywhere and every when, becomes different in the eternity of now. Past, present and future are transformed.

With Jesus’ death, what is finished isn’t like the final stroke on the canvas, the painting sold and hung. It isn’t like the surgeon’s work, now healed and never, we hope, to be needed again. It isn’t like finishing dinner, which we then begin to crave again in a few hours. What is finished in Jesus’ death is completed not just in time but outside of it, bringing time and space themselves into a sort of fullness that overflows in everlasting abundance, that burns with an eternal flame casting light through all of history.

We ourselves who have been baptized into his death are thus finished, complete, made whole. We who are in Christ receive newness of life, the paradox of salvation. Evil, sin, and death have no ultimate power. They come to an end. What endures brings wholeness, healing, love and light. What is finished, made complete on the cross, is our salvation.

Seven Last Words of Christ #5

2009-03-26T07:33:00.003-04:00

Lenten Meditation
March 25, 2009

Fifth Word
John 19.28, “I am thirsty.”

There are few moments so intimate and difficult as accompanying someone who is about to die. The voice fails. The breath labors. The vision clouds. The mouth dries. For those who have been there at the bedside, a haunting dismay arises, peaceful and painful, inevitable yet tinged with anger, not forgotten ever, but in time, endured. It is among the most cherished of moments as whatever it is that gives life evaporates, and words fail to make anyone understand. Many who die have stopped taking food days, even weeks earlier. But once it becomes impossible to drink, it may be only hours or at most a few days. That Jesus would thirst before he dies is understandable. He was human. That he might not be able to drink what is offered is painful to recall.

We’ve made the ones who put the sour wine to his lips into monsters. But perhaps it was not so. In Mark he does not drink; in Luke the wine is offered, although mockingly; in Matthew it is simply offered, without opinion; but in John Jesus receives the wine. John is the only one who hears in Jesus’ death his thirst.

The one who soaked the sponge makes me wonder what Jesus thirsted for in life. In death, certainly, the thirst was real enough, a thirst like any other. Psalm 22 puts it well:

    I am poured out like water,
       and all my bones are out of joint;
    my heart is like wax;
       it is melted within my breast;
    my mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
       and my tongue sticks to my jaws;
       you lay me in the dust of death.

In life, what do you thirst for? Personal gain and fulfillment, an economic cushion, a good grade, employment that is meaningful, relationships of comfort and of trust, success for your children, a retirement cottage on the lake? Not bad things, not in and of themselves. But even so, the things we thirst for will not satisfy the thirst of Jesus on the cross. Living water carries no mortgage. The bread of life does not charge a value added tax. Unity in faith is not exchanged for entrance to the ball.

In life, what did Jesus thirst for? Unity, to be sure, “that they may all be one,” and justice. Righteousness that rolls down like rivers, and love. When life is near its end, by which I mean its purpose, its goal, its reason; when we walk the Way of Jesus and take up our cross; when we feel poured out like water, and the veil of eternity is lifted, and God delivers up our soul, may Jesus’ thirst become our own. On the cross, he thirsts for water, yes, but also for everlasting peace on earth, for justice, for unity, and for love. May our lives do what sour wine cannot, and satisfy the parched and dying longing of Jesus’ soul.

[We each received a cup of water to hold during the extended silence following the spoken meditation, with the instruction to meditate on how Christ's living water quenches our thirst, and how our lives can quench the thirst of Jesus for unity, justice, righteousness, and love.]

Seven Last Words of Christ #4

2009-03-18T21:56:00.001-04:00

Lenten Meditation
March 18, 2009

Fourth Word
Mark 15.34, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

To be forsaken, to feel abandoned or deserted, to believe even for a moment that in all the universe we are completely alone, may be one of the most awful experiences we know. Living alone is hard; dying alone is harder. We value independence, and at times we seek solitude. But not the sort of forced loneliness we call forsaken. You don’t have to hang on a cross to know what it means. A family member walks away. A trusted friend betrays your trust. A lover whose reality did not live up to your imagination abandons you. Your church doesn’t notice. To be forsaken is to feel surrounded by the torn places in the web of life and to hang on by a single, silken thread.

Jesus on the cross felt forsaken. Why else quote the line of lamentation that begins Psalm 22? It is a traditional lament, in that its meter is three-two, while most Hebrew poetry is three-three. There is something missing, incomplete, halting in the dance. Laments stop too soon, leaving empty space in the prayer where God ought to be. The words are honest. They plumb the depth of our darkest feelings. I cry but you do not answer. My ancestors trusted you, but I am despised; why do you not deliver me?

If I said, “Twinkle, twinkle,” you’d say, “little star.” If I sang, “O say can you see,” you’d sing, “by the dawn’s early light.” If I sang, “On a hill far away,” you’d sing, “stood an old rugged cross.” When Jesus says, “My God, my God,” his audience should suspect where he is going. When he continues, “why have you forsaken me?” they should know the rest of the tune. But for some reason, they do not understand. They think Jesus calls on Elijah, and the cruel ones wait to see if Elijah will appear. What we know, and what the early church remembered, is that Jesus was quoting a Psalm that, short of Rachel weeping for her children, wallows in the lowest lows in scripture. But it also has the highest highs. The Psalmist admits, “I am a worm, and not human.” Yet he commits his cause to God. Jesus recognizes that even on the cross, with his life seeping away, it was God who delivered him at birth, God who kept him safe so he could nurse at his mother’s breast, and, even now as trouble encircles him like charging bulls and ravenous lions, even now as he is poured out like water, even now as his bones creak and his skin wastes away and his tormentors laugh and divide up his clothing, God remains his salvation.

If Jesus identifies with being forsaken, he also identifies with the Psalm’s ringing song of praise. You and I who follow in the way of the cross may be tempted to flounder in our forsakenness. Jesus does not want that to happen. He knows we know the words that follow: From you comes the praise of the great congregation! The poor shall eat and be satisfied. Those who seek him shall praise him. All the ends of the earth shall praise the Lord. Jesus’ song continues in us as it reveals God’s purpose for the coming kingdom. As the dead bow down and generations to come will sing, as past and future ring with the songs of salvation, Jesus’ song resonates in our hearts, not as excuse or apology but praise proclaiming our place in the life to come, the dominion that belongs to God.

Seven Last Words of Christ #3

2009-03-11T12:06:00.002-04:00

Lenten Meditation
March 11,2009

Third word
John 19.26, “Woman, here is your son.”

At birth, the midwife hands the baby to the mother with a gentle whisper, “Here is your son.” At graduation, the neighbor leans over, remembering the rehearsals and games, the late nights and early mornings, points at the stage and says, “There’s your boy.” At the wedding, you walk her down the aisle, place her hand in another man’s hand—a boy really—and the pastor says, “Who gives this woman to be married?” And you say to yourself, “Woman? No, please God, not yet, she’s my daughter.”

Generations pass, and we take pride in our children, joy and anguish, too. Their successes are ours, and their failures. Hands off or hands-on, we live our lives through them. And when, as occasionally and tragically happens, we lose them all too soon, we live our own death through them. This is something larger than sacrifice.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ mother remains anonymous. Yet watching Jesus die, if she really is his mother and not mainly a symbol, she must remember him in the manger as in Luke, the mysterious strangers bearing gifts as in Matthew; lost and found in the temple with the elders (Luke again); beside himself outside her door in the crowds, herself thinking him possessed; then the dangerous journey to Jerusalem; tables overturned; prison; this. Now her child on the cross with strangers on either side, and his best friend standing with her, she hears what no mother or father can bear: her son making arrangements for his death and her survival.

John gives us something more than a casual exchange. We experience the anonymity of mother and disciple (who really knows another human being?) in the carefully-constructed scene on the cross. Jesus places us in each other’s hands, commits us to each other’s care. His unnamed mother can represent the church, while his unnamed disciple can represent each of us who remain faithful and devoted. On the cross, Jesus constitutes between them the community we are to become—according to John, it is it at the cross and not at Pentecost that the church is formed. “Where are my mother and brothers?” he once asked. And he answered, “All those who do the will of God.” At the cross, the will of God is that mother and disciple become mother and son, that the church become not just a classroom or a cafeteria but a family, a community of mutuality and equal regard.

When we stand at the foot of the cross, we become one faithful people. We may come as beloved disciples, followers, students; we may come as fathers or mothers; but we become something more. At the foot of the cross, we behold in each other a deeper relatedness, for we are all children of God. When Jesus entrusts us to each other, we become related not by our blood but by his spirit. Then, when we come away from the cross, we come away changed, bound by deeper ties. Empowered and encouraged by Jesus’ word, we take each other in.

Lectio reflection: 1 Corinthians 1.18-25

2009-03-03T23:46:00.001-05:00

“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?” Philosophy, religion, politics—it all gets turned upside down by the cross. There’s not much wiggle room for reasoned thought, dogmatic theology, deliberative decision-making. Such harsh and sharp words from Paul! They cut to the core, because in fact we value the wisdom of the philosopher, the scribal accuracy and passion of the religious, and the politician’s persuasive power. We grant degrees, ordain, and elect. We give honor where honor is due.

What would it mean for us to take seriously the claim that God’s foolishness is wiser that human wisdom, God’s strength is stronger than human strength? Of course, in the church, we could claim that we’re already living that upside down life. We who follow the way of the cross are already measuring on a different standard, metric measures in an avoirdupois world. After all, we stand up for the poor and needy, run soup kitchens and food pantries, clothes closets and hand-me-up shops. We fly the not-for-profit banner in the capitol of capitalism and get arrested in Selma.

But we haven’t really transformed the world. The Nazi death camps are the most egregious symbol of our failure, but the killing fields are still wet with blood, and the Congo River runs red. Terry Gross interviews Tim LeHaye and John Hagee, men who inspire millions of Christians to ignore threats to creation as theologically insignificant, all the while constructing elaborate houses of scriptural-sounding, self-righteous cards that show the end-times are here (oddly, they copyright their work!). If we who see the world through the concave emptiness of the cross want foolishness, we simply open our eyes, but we hardly want to claim such nonsense as God’s wisdom.

What would our preaching look like if we really preached the foolishness of a crucified savior? We couldn’t offer the popular, pious insights of self-help. We’d acknowledge that the gospel overturns not only our worst but our best. Then we’d have to preach that our expectations are too small. We want tiny miracles, a parking space close to the door, a diet that sheds the final fifteen pounds. We don’t really want resurrection. We don’t really believe people can change. We want Dr. Phil to be right and Oprah to sound prophetic. But the true stranger in our midst? The absolutely other? The one who appears dangerous and threatens decent order with crazy claims about the Confederacy or bizarre notions that cilantro is the devil’s food? Clearly they are fools. But isn’t it just such as these whom God might use to shame the wisdom of the wise? Can we see in the crazy lady on the corner a glimpse of the kingdom at hand?

The cross is a scandal, not a piece of jewelry. We domesticate it at our peril. Instead, we need verse 30, in which true righteousness, sanctification, and redemption become visible in the one who takes the cross, the Christ who “became for us the wisdom of God.” Right relationships include true justice. Holiness reclaims the original goodness of the garden in the face of serpents and fruit. And redemption frees us from any system that accepts as worldly wisdom, faith or politics that slavery is acceptable or that bondage is ever good. The wisdom of the cross is that anything less than death is folly, so long as death holds the power to claim to be our end. Jesters know what is true, for if they didn’t make us laugh, we’d cry. Our purpose is life that turns death on its ear, that answers Paul’s question by pointing to the scandal of Jesus crucified, saying, “There’s your wise, your scribe, your debater. There’s God’s wisdom. Crucify me upside down.”

Seven Last Words of Christ #2

2009-03-03T16:34:00.001-05:00

Seven Last Words of Christ
Lenten Meditation
March 4, 2009

Second word
Luke 23.43, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Paradise. Let’s assume for a moment that it’s not Cancun. What has Jesus promised us?

For the first eight centuries of Christianity, Paradise referred to an earthly garden of delights that Adam and Eve lived in for a time. Even into the 16th and 17th centuries, explorers sought to discover the exact location of Eden on the map, God’s walled garden guarded by the angel with the flaming sword. Paradise comes to us from the Greek word paradeizos that translated the Hebrew word pardes that came from the Old Persian apiri-daeza, meaning a walled-in garden. Ezekiel speaks of this garden covered in precious stones (Ez. 28.12-14) on the holy mountain of God. Isaiah sings of God who makes Zion’s desert like a garden, filled with joy, gladness and thanksgiving (Is. 51.3). Much later in Revelation, the heavenly city of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven is described as a new Eden, with precious stones and constant water and abundant food.

Jesus’ promise to the thief comes in response to his plea, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” The thief is no follower of Jesus, has not to our knowledge been baptized or confessed his faith. He hasn’t lived according to the commandments. Why should Jesus remember him? I believe this is what the thief hears: you, who are dying with me, for no reason except that you have asked, will be with me in the primordial garden, the birthplace of humanity, a place of abundance and renewal. Nothing, neither death nor life, nor confession of faith nor lack of it, no, nor anything in all creation will separate you from God’s eternal love made known in Jesus Christ. And the best way to describe the pure abundance of that love is the garden of Paradise.

Plea, promise, and presence are what matter here. The details of such paradise—precious stones, garden walls—are not in the end significant. I don’t need to know if paradise means heaven, with streets of gold and Frank Capra’s angels second-class trying to earn their wings. I don’t need to give the after-life any real thought or speculation. I certainly don’t need to orient my life around the question of whether I’ll be seated in smoking or non-smoking. These issues don’t motivate Jesus during his ministry. They don’t matter to Jesus on the cross.

What matters on the cross, in the midst of suffering and death, is that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. What matters is the holy assurance that then and there, when life is at its worst, and the veil between life and death is stretched thin enough to breathe through, we will be with God and God will be with us, and we who suffer together and live together and even die together will not be cast away but will be together, in some way that transcends time and space. The key word in the end is not Paradise. Paradise can lead us to distraction. The most important words he speaks are, “you will be with me.”

Seven Last Words of Christ: #1

2009-02-24T11:27:00.001-05:00

Seven Last Words of Christ
Lenten Meditation
Ash Wednesday, February 25, 2009

First word
Luke 23.34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Ashes are the right symbol for forgiveness. The palm branches waved as crowds hailed Jesus coming into Jerusalem as a new Davidic king, Messiah, Christ. The thunderous crowds acclaim him, shout Hosanna. But mere days later, Hosanna has become Crucify. The deal is struck. Silver changes hands. Barnabas is released instead.

We burn the branches that once hailed Jesus’ triumph. We grind the ash to powder. We mark our heads with the sign of the cross. Because the stains of sin penetrate past skin-deep. There are at least three sins for as many nails, Betrayal, Abandonment and Denial mark the final days of Jesus’ life.

He is betrayed by Judas. We have had good intentions, to feed the poor, to care for the sick. We can’t know for sure. But who ever really knows why friend betrays friend? Betrayal is bitterest because we are hardwired to expect loyalty from those closest to us. Betrayal undermines trust. Trust is at the root of faith. When you’ve been betrayed, you wonder if anyone can be trusted. Can you even trust yourself? Without trust, life becomes the whiplash of looking over the shoulder, wondering when the other shoe is going to fall. Father, forgive us. We meant well.

He is abandoned by the crowds. So fickle, the public adoration. From celebrity savior to criminal scum—it’s not just a PR campaign gone bad. It’s the crowds, the disciples, even us. We have a collective amnesia that wipes our slates clean. Once the exciting rush of the new and improved is over, and the novelty fades into the background, we go on with our lives as usual, letting the opportunity for real change pass us by. Public inertia. Who can sustain euphoria for long? Father, forgive us. We really have no clue.

He is denied by Peter. The one who first declared Jesus Messiah becomes the first to deny. We know what it’s like to look out for our own self-interest. It’s scary to be different, to be identified with outcasts, to worry what others think. It’s safer to blend in, to look and sound like everyone else. Theological peer pressure is real. Spiritually bland, we are like boiled grain that takes on the flavor of whatever seasoning happens to be nearby. Father, forgive us. We were just taking care of ourselves.

On the cross, betrayed, abandoned, denied, Jesus remains loyal, present, and affirmative. Father, forgive us. We do not know what we are doing. But you know. And you stand with us, you stay with us always, and you raise us up. Mark us not only with ashes that trace the cross skin-deep but with grace that plumbs the depths of our being. Amen.

Youth Congress 2009 Keynote #3 Inclusion

2009-02-23T18:35:00.002-05:00

Movin’ on Up: Worship, Generation, Inclusion
February 20-21, 2009

Inclusion

Invocation
Gloria a Dios, gloria a Dios, gloria en los cielos (repeat)
A Dios la gloria por siemre! (repeat)
Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen.

Gloria a Dios, gloria a Dios, gloria en el Espiritu
A Dios la gloria por siemre! (repeat)
Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen.

Gloria a Dios, gloria a Dios, gloria Jesu Cristo
A Dios la gloria por siemre! (repeat)
Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen.

Hate Crimes

Two sources of misunderstanding gay and lesbian issues
1. Bible
See how important it is to Jesus… not at all.
He never mentions it.

See how important it was in the OT … not at all.
The Bible deosn't address same-sex relationships except in contexts where opposite-sex relationships would also be immoral. In other words, the kinds of same-sex relationships the Bible condemns would also be condemned if they were opposite-sex.

It is interesting, though, to see what the Bible says about sex.
Note what's punishable by death:

sex during the menstrual cycle (Lev 18.19, 15.19-24);
adultery (Dt 22.22);
losing virginity for women before marriage (not applicable to men btw, Dt 22.13-21)

Look what the Bible says is sometimes okay:

Polygamy – Abraham, Isaac, David, Solomon
Concubinage – Solomon
Sex with slaves – Abraham
Levirate marriage – sex with dead brother’s wife so as to produce heir; read Genesis 38.1-11 for several of these at once, including
Prostitution – Judah

We should be careful how we use the Bible in figuring out our sexual ethics. It approves some things we would outlaw and outlaws some things that most Christians don't think are quite that bad (is eating shellfish really an abomination?).

There are only about 6 or 7 passages in the entire Bible that are said to condemn same-sex activity. To a text, they all deal with idolatry, that is the fertility rites of other religions (Leviticus 18.22, 20.13, Rom. 1.26-27, 1 Cor. 6.9, 1 Tim 1.10), OR they deal with violations of hospitality (it’s okay to let your daughter be raped to death rather than let your guest be violated by neighbors, Gen. 19.1-29; Judges 19-21).

How does the Bible itself interpret the sin of Sodom? According to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations (where the women, it is charged, boiled their children) Sodom's sin is idolatry. According to Ezekiel 16.49 the sin of Sodom is pride and prosperity without helping the poor and needy, a violation of hospitality to the stranger at the gate. Not once does the Bible say the sin of Sodom was about sex. We’re the ones who came up with that. Not the Bible.

The vast bulk of the teachings found in the Bible defends those at the margins, the outcast, the persecuted. Those who are condemned by the Bible are almost without fail the religiously, politically, and economically powerful, the idolatrous, and those whose resources are not used to help those farther from the margins than they are. Who’s persecuted in our society today? People like Matthew Shepard, Evan Kittridge, and Fred Martinez. Who is doing the persecuting? Christians with Bibles in their backseats. Not all Christians, no, but enough to make us take a hard look at how we talk about gender identity and ethics. Enough to make us look at what the Bible really says, not passages pulled out of context to justify violence or exclusion.

2. Science. That’s what the next video is about.

What does the Science say?

Who has been excluded?
Jesus’ first sermon gives us a clue. You can tell who is important to Jesus by the text he chooses as the theme of his entire ministry. In Luke 4.18-19, he quotes, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ What do the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed have in common? They are at the margins of society. Jesus says he came to fulfill the good news of God not to the rich captors who see perfectly well how oppressive they are, but to their victims.

What Jesus requires (and what he doesn’t)
When Jesus asks Peter who he thinks Jesus is, Peter tells him, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus does NOT then lead Peter through a list of everything else he must believe in order to follow. Instead, he gives some guidelines for making all decisions: The Great Commandment, which is to Love God and Neighbor (no exceptions). Then, in the fifth adn final speech of Jesus in Matthew 25, he makes it clear that the kingdom of God is explicitly for those who treat the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, and imprisoned with the respect they deserve as children of God. This is radical inclusion. Jesus never mentions gender identity or sexual orientation. But he talks about the marginalized a lot.

Who would he talk about today?

To stand by when others are excluded is to participate in the exclusion

Challenges
I'm going to leave you with some challenges today.

Read the Bible with the same generosity toward the oppressed that the Bible itself shows
Go find someone excluded at school and become a friend to him or her, not on your terms but theirs
Talk to your congregation about how to include the people Jesus came to save

Benediction
Gloria a Dios, gloria a Dios, gloria en los cielos (repeat)
A Dios la gloria por siemre! (repeat)
Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen.

Gloria a Dios, gloria a Dios, gloria en el Espiritu
A Dios la gloria por siemre! (repeat)
Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen.

Gloria a Dios, gloria a Dios, gloria Jesu Cristo
A Dios la gloria por siemre! (repeat)
Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen, Alleluia Amen.

Youth Congress 2009 Keynote #2 Generation

2009-02-23T16:35:00.002-05:00

Movin’ On Up: Worship, Generation, Inclusion
February 20-21, 2009

Generation

2 Kings 2.13-14
“Elisha picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. He took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, saying, ‘Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?’ When he had struck the water, the water was parted to the one side and to the other, and Elisha went over.”

This is one of the main transition stories in the Old Testament. The great prophet Elijah, the one everyone expects one day to return before God sets things right with the world, has gone off to heaven in a chariot of fire. The younger prophet Elisha has asked for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, and now it looks like he gets it.

The mantle is passed. The authority and power and responsibility have passed. In the church, you see a lot of people in times of grief—the death of a parent, often, or an aging spouse. What I’ve noticed is that when the second parent dies, the children feel a strong sense of responsibility passed on to them. You may have felt it, too, or seen it pass to your parents from your grandparents. It is a heavy mantle. It's an honorable one, yes, but you can tell what someone feels they now have to carry on the legacy of the family.

Elisha has willingly taken the role of Elijah.

Watch out for bears

2 Kings 2.23-25
“Elisha went up from [Jericho] to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, ‘Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!’ When he turned round and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. From there he went on to Mount Carmel, and then returned to Samaria.”

What can we make of Elisha, the boys and the bears?
At first, the conflict was generational—young boys taunting an old man
But Elisha was also in the wrong for using the Lord’s name to curse the boys
There’s power for harm and for good in our use of God’s name
There’s power in our faith, so hadn’t we better use it generously and well?

These are the generations who may be in our churches
G.I. Generation – 1901-1924
Silent Generation – 1925-1945
Boomers – 1946-1964
Gen X /Busters / MTV – 1965-1985
Gen Y / Millennials 1981-1997
iGeneration 1997 – present

Each generation has its own idea of what it means to be faithful and generous. A friend of mine was consulting once in a church that was conflicted over money. He took a stack of silver dollars and put it on the table in front of one of the old, Silent Generation men and asked, “What should you do with it?” The man covered it with his hands and said, “Keep it safe.” My friend put the stack in front of a Gen X young man who also served on the church board. “What should you do with it?” The young man knocked the pile over, pushing coins all over the table, saying, “Make it move.”

Multigenerational Church
Most churches can serve 3 generations well.
Churches that have been around 30 years or more are serving at least 4 generations.
Most people can worship easily enough with people a generation older or younger than they are.
Most struggle to worship well with people two generations removed.
See the challenge of 4 and 5 generation churches?

It’s in your hands
2 Timothy 1.5-7: “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”

Others’ hands have been placed on each of you. And your hands now have the power, just like your voice has the power, to make good things happen or to call out the bears. Which will it be?

Caring for each other tears down generational walls

Challenges
Understand the needs of people two generations removed from you or more.
Be honest about your own needs, and find ways to tell your church clearly what you need in your generation to be faithful.
Use the power of your faith to do good, and not to curse; after all, you have to watch out for bears.

Youth Congress 2009 Keynote #1 Worship

2009-02-23T16:06:00.006-05:00

Movin’ On Up: Worship, Generation, Inclusion
February 20-21, 2009

Worship

Invocation
Wa wa wa emimimo
Wa wa wa alagbara
Wao wao wao
(trad. Yoruban, Nigeria)

Come, come, come, O Holy Spirit
Come, come, come, O Trinity
Come now, come now, come now.

We’ve rung bells that change the shape of the air by vibrating. We have invoked the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, the fullness of God, Creater, Redeemer and Sustainer, Father and Mother, Son of God and Human Being, Breath that hovered over the face of the waters at the beginning of time and Breath that reaches into the depths of every cell of our lungs. We have one thing lest to do. We need to see and smell what God is doing, too. For that it takes FIRE. So we light a candle.

This is how they do it in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages and pilgrims still today come to offer their devotion to God. Thousands each year come to the cathedral where St. James’ remains are said to lie. St. James, named for the brother of Jesus, is the medieval saint who ran the Moors out of Spain. Pilgrims came and smelled the place up. So to sense the sacred, they swing this enormous censer roaring with flaming incense up to the ceiling and back, when pilgrims come to pray.

Tearing down walls
We’ve just torn down some walls by getting to know some Christians on the other side of the world—The ancient Easetern Orthodox by way of Missouri, Evangelical Protestants in Nigeria, and Roman Catholics in Medieval Spain.

Think of the things that separate us.

Language – Greek and Hebrews, Aramaic, Latin, Assyrian, Coptic, and Arabic
Tradition – Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant (all varieties), Episcopalian
Nationality – China, Indonesia, Congo, Australia, Chile, ….
Race – red and yellow, black and white, we are precious in his sight
Culture – middle class, rural, high church urban
Age – children, youth, young adults, empty nesters, retirees
Theology – immanent, transcendent, incarnational, spiritual, …

All of these areas create walls. You can come up with others. Think about the walls you live within. How much of the world can you see from where you stand? And then the big questions…

Where is God?
And can worship tear down walls?
We’ve identified some of the walls we live within. We started to worship beyond those walls tonight the moment those first chimes rang and we called God’s presence into our gathering. Let’s be clear. God isn’t contained by our walls. God is not bound up in white, North American Protestant Christianity. God’s not some tool we use to scratch our backs or make ourselves feel good. God speaks English and Yoruban. God is white and black., old and young, and as we’ll talk about tomorrow, gay and straight. God is on every side of every wall. Don’t ever let anyone tell you something’s too small for God or too large. So if we’re going to worship the God of all the universe, our worship has got to find ways that tear down the walls between us.

Ephesians 2.13-15
One of the apostle Paul’s disciples, writing in Paul’s name to honor his teaching, wrote, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace. In his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace.”

Everybody get up: you’re going to take sides. You have to take a side. I’m going to give you a whole list of two things to choose between. Divide up, left and right.

Left-handed vs. Right-handed
Football vs. Band
Lunch vs. Study Hall
Dance floor vs. Wallflower
Traditional vs. Contemporary
Facebook vs. MySpace
Mac vs. Windows

Where is God?
God is on every side of every wall and cries about the walls we build to keep others out. What I want to do tonight and tomorrow is challenge you to name and then tear down the walls that come between Christians.

“In his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of two.”

That’s what worship is supposed to do. It creates one humanity in place of two.

Create one humanity in place of two
Think about worship in your home congregation. What does it do that creates one humanity in place of two? What walls does worship in your congregation tear down? I want to start with what it does well. Don’t tell me what fails. Tell me what succeeds.

Music – how does it tear down walls? Give me an example.

Preaching – have you ever heard it tear down walls? When?

Prayer – when have you heard language in a prayer that tears down walls? How about the ways people address God not just as Father, King, and He? Come up with a dozen other names for God that don’t sound like a tyrannical old man in the sky. Right now. Do it. Call them out.

Communion – here’s where Disciples should shine. What do we do that virtually no other church does? Invite everyone to the table. Deny no one. Who would Jesus turn away?

You know that Religion can divide people. You see what it can do with rats. I’m going to challenge to go back to your congregations and help your home church figure out how worship can tear down the dividing walls and create one humanity in place of two.

Two ways to see worship
Thomas Moore has said that there are two ways of thinking about church and religion. One is that worship is the EXCEPTION. We go to church as an exception to the rest of the week, to be for an hour in the presence of the holy, to retreat for a time into that sacred presence. Now, this is well and good. Worship should tell a story that helps us come into the presence of God. The rituals, the smells and bells, the taste of communion bread, the bowed heads at prayer—all of is fine. But when we think that’s all there is to religion—what happens in church—then we start to think that our way is the only right way.

There’s a second way to think about church and religion, according to Thomas Moore. He calls is the “art of memory.” I call is TRANSFORMATION. What happens on Sunday then makes sense of everything else that goes on during the week. Worship isn’t just a once a week retreat. Instead, it reconnects us to God all week long. Did you know that the days of the week are named after gods? That’s because time reveals the sacred. From Monday’s Moon to Thursday’s Thor to Saturday’s Saturn—the days mark the sacredness of time. So what happens on Sunday inspires the rest of the week for Christians. If you’re in worship on Sunday, you have an easier time seeing the sacred in everyday things.

You also become more generous to other religions. Because they are also finding the sacred in the everyday. Let Christian worship and Jewish worship and Muslim worship uncover common ground in the sacredness of the everyday.

Let’s finish out these meditations by invoking God’s presence once again. What you begin tonight should make a difference not only while you’re here at Eagle Eyrie but throughout the rest of your life.

Wa wa wa emimimo
Wa wa wa alagbara
Wao wao wao

Lectio Reflection, 1 Corinthians 9.24-47

2009-02-06T16:47:00.004-05:00

There’s a popular trend on facebook right now: 25 Random Things About Me. You write a note about yourself, tag your friends, and they’re supposed to write about themselves. The other day, I saw this on a friend’s page: “I don't believe in participation medals, batting the whole line up in youth baseball, not keeping score, not failing students…. Not everyone can be good at everything, sometimes you are supposed to fall flat on your face and move on to something else.” I think Eddie must have read Paul.

Tertullian calls the race of faith a “noble struggle,” with the Holy Spirit as our trainer, with “the sweat of the brow on everything” (Ad Martyras, III). The language is that of competition, with winners and, presumably, losers in the game of life. Those who see sport as the driving metaphor find Paul on their side here. And it’s not just a practice session. We’re not beating only air. The prize is imperishable, with a shelf life greater even than Hostess Twinkies, the prize of everlasting right relationship with each other and with God. It is a prize to be lost or won. Paul has been speaking about his street cred in proclaiming the gospel, so he uses the language of the street. He’s got the degree, the authorization, the sponsorship. But he doesn’t choose to hold any of that over his hearers. They shouldn’t honor him for all his fancy belt buckles or trophies. They should pay attention to his message. It’s worth reflecting on winning and losing, striving, success and failure.

Here’s the rub. I’m competitive enough on the field, but like most of us, I rarely come in first. What does it do to me to think of myself as a loser? When I hear Paul talk he sounds like the winning quarterback. “We had a great opponent, came to play the game, did what we had to win.” Cliché, yes, but he’s speaking from the position of victory. It’s not an easy point of view to hear when you rarely win, might not even make the team.

How to strive and win, without taking pride in the win or lording it over the losers? This seems to be Paul’s way. And it’s possible because the race isn’t against other people. I’m not boxing my neighbor. Rather, the competition is inside each one of us, I against myself. “I punish my body and enslave it.” Strong words. And hard ones to emulate for the person whose self-esteem is shot, who, never having won anything, doesn’t see how to win at life. Precisely the audience Paul is speaking to.

So, is he saying most of us will lose while dangling hope out there for the precious few who, through practice, patience, perseverance and, yes, a little luck will win? I don’t think so. I think Paul is reshaping the idea of competition itself. I’m not competing against Steve or Jerry or Monica. I’m competing against those forces in me and in the world that would divide me from others, divide me from myself. And victory is difficult but possible. I can run the race, follow the rules, win the prize. But that doesn’t mean others can’t also win. Because other people aren’t my opponents in the match Paul describes. My opponents are perishability: sin, evil, and death when they look like individuals; injustice and unrighteousness when they play as a team.

Sometimes we are supposed to fall flat on our face. But this is a noble struggle. And failure, while possible, isn’t required. This may be a race all of us can win.

Lectio reflection, 1 Corinthians 9.16-23

2009-02-06T16:18:00.001-05:00

Preachers are a strange lot. To what lengths we go to proclaim the gospel! We speak truth to power, compassion to the loveless, healing to the ill, and hope to those who grieve. We give people permission to laugh at death. This isn’t a standard occupation. The salesperson meets a need with a product or service. The engineer solves a problem. The politician lobbies for the vote. The physician isolates the tumor. The mechanic diagnoses, replaces the coil. Doings, all. But not for preachers. “Doing” is not the ministry of proclamation. The one who proclaims the gospel isn’t just doing something. She is someone, for someone. It’s about character.

Paul asserts the right of the apostle, the one who is authorized—made co-author with God—but by not exercising the right. His right to preach, and be paid, is clear, but he takes no pride in it; he does not declare that his right to preach supersedes someone else’s right not to listen. Preachers who speak too loudly, take note! Preaching isn’t a privilege but an obligation, not a badge of honor or an act of will but a commission. Bound and free, obliged and indicted, Paul recognizes that to speak the gospel into being one’s own being must change. It must become whatever is real for others to face what is not.

Luther took this passage and built his system of Christian Liberty around it: free with respect to all, slave with respect to all. But what interests me in the text is not freedom or slavery, per se, but the idea that preaching the gospel changes the preacher into something the preacher is not, so as better to communicate. To the Jew the preacher becomes a Jew, to the Gentile a Gentile, to the weak weak. Preaching is ultimately a paradoxical activity, because in proclaiming good news, we preachers become all things to all people. There is an “I must” beneath the “I am.” And “I am” speaks when “we are.”

It’s good to recognize the projections people cast upon us: righteous, holy, saintly even, above reproach, on a pedestal, whether we want to be or not, even as it embarrasses us. When we walk into the hospital room, the patient is well aware that we represent something greater than ourselves. Becoming all things to all people, we participate in incarnation, Word made flesh. We represent. We exercise our right not to exercise our right! And we don’t have much choice in this. Being a proclaimer of gospel brings it on.

Who among us has not wondered at the source of pastoral authority? Perhaps it is bestowed by the hierarchy of the church or laying-on of hands. Perhaps it is authority granted through genuine relationships, the authority of a trusted friend. But I suspect that the authority granted the preacher is more the power of vulnerability, the power that comes to the shape-shifter who can become all things to all people, and in so doing, can accompany them as representatives of the divine in human form. There is an incarnational quality to Paul’s case: as God becomes human, so we reveal God, in all our diverse and paltry glory. In fact, we must. There is imperative built in.

The obligation is heavy: we are not free from God’s law of love. Yet it is also liberating: we are free to engage other people where they are. The door opens. We visit them in homes, coffee shops, workplaces, and nursing homes. We have privileged access in the ER. We tremblingly point the way. Doing so, flawed, imperfect, we still become instruments of salvation. Right becomes responsibility. Proclaim the gospel? That’s a double dog dare.

Public Radio Underwriting Spots

2008-05-21T16:15:00.002-04:00

The church's underwriting announcement is now being heard on WVTF and Radio IQ, the local NPR stations for central Virginia. Here's what it says:

"First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Lynchburg: renewing hope and celebrating diversity with a reasoned faith and a passion for justice."

That says it just about right!

Open and Affirming

2008-05-21T15:35:00.001-04:00

On Sunday the congregation adopted new langauge that confirms what we've known all along, that the church is open and affirming in welcoming all who would join us on the journey of faith. It doesn't change our behavior. But it does make clear that First Christian Church of Lynchburg is the safe congregation many glbt fgolks in Lynchburg have known it to be for many years.

Next steps: continue with inititatives on health and wellness, becoming a green congregation, and simplifying life. Onward and upward!

The story we tell about ourselves

2007-10-30T02:20:00.000-04:00

A pastoral counselor once told me that the best advice he can give people is to learn to tell their story differently. “The stories we tell about ourselves,” he said, “give our life its meaning. If we tell ourselves we are failures, we fail. If we tell ourselves the world is out to get us, we’re not being paranoid. It turns out to be true. But if we tell ourselves we are the forgiven children of the Most High God, it’s hard not to see the good in ourselves and others.”

Mircea Eliade speaks of religious ritual as the constant re-telling of the myths of human origin so as to give meaning to life here and now. What makes us human is this ability to give life meaning. With apologies to René Descartes, who said, “I think, therefore I am,” and got it only partially right, I think it’s far more accurate to say, “We tell stories; therefore we are.”

Mine? A skeptical, musical, scientific rationalist whose world fell apart so it could be refashioned in the language and rhythm of poetry, historical critical method, ecumenism and liturgy. Pretty messed up, eh? Not really.

What story do you tell about yourself? I expect it shapes who you become.