Friday, May 21, 2010

The Space Between



Yesterday the alarm rang at 4:30 am in our hotel room in Palm Springs, Florida, and we juggled our luggage downstairs and waited in the dark morning for the airport shuttle, then sat in the airport and waited for the plane boarding to start, then we found our seats and waited for the plane to take off, and when it landed we waited in the aisle to deplane and head to the next gate to wait for the connecting plane to board.  Once we settled into our seats and ready to take off, we were told there was a mechanical problem and it would be a 2 hour wait for it to be repaired.  When all was said and done and we finally arrived in Minneapolis, we waited one more time on the curb with our luggage for our ride to arrive and bring us home.  Our journey progressing in fits and starts, held up in the waiting.

Life is full of waiting.  We wait for college acceptance letters and wait for the baby to arrive.  
We send our children or grandchildren off to Iraq and wait to hear that they are safe.
We wait to find out if we got the job we want so badly, or to hear whether the house we made an offer on will be ours. We wait for the results of the blood test, or wait with hospice for our husband’s final breath. We wait for change and when it comes we wait for a return to normalcy. 
The common denominator in waiting is the reality that the situation is out of our hands. It is now beyond our control. There is nothing we can do now, but wait, stuck in the space between what we have known and what comes next.

In the days leading up to our passage, we see the disciples after Easter.  Jesus had returned from the grave, and revealed himself to his followers, His days are spent speaking to the disciples of the kingdom of God and a future in which they are to play an integral role.  It is a rich time of faith and confidence, hope and excitement. The days are filled with color, purpose and meaning. Eating with him again, sitting at his feet, absorbing his teachings and hearing promises of power and the kingdom of God. Their belief is strong and sure, they are passionate, fiercely committed, men of purpose, men of destiny.

And then, he disappears. One moment they are standing there hearing yet again of the mission to the ends of the earth that they will be part of, feeling ready to do it, strong and sure, steady and full of faith.  Then he is gone. Just like that. Suddenly they are utterly, completely alone, staring at the sky, nobody speaking.  All at once they don’t feel so powerful, don’t feel so sure. 
They are left - a little cold, a little damp perhaps, stomach growling here, itch on an ankle there, the sound of insects and birds in the trees around them, and smell of a nearby donkey. 
Jesus is gone.  Thud. The real world comes rushing back.

So there they stood, gazing after him into heaven, left behind to carry on something way too big and frightening on their own, to continue what he started. Looking at each other they must not have seemed a likely bunch for such a task.  Nothing divine about any of them.  Just a rag-tag band of Galileans stranded by their Lord in the middle of Jerusalem with nothing to show for their message but their own eyewitness accounts. And the command of their risen and now gone Lord, to wait. 
They don’t have many choices at this point. They don’t know how to move forward on their own. They can’t go back. They are stuck with nothing to do but wait for God to act.

This week is the celebration of the Ascension.  A glorious end to Christ’s ministry on earth.  And also the space between the promise of the Risen Lord and its fulfillment at Pentecost. The security of the past is gone, and the future has not yet arrived. And right in the middle of it is the waiting.

Our culture despises waiting, It is often seen not just as an inconvenience, but as downright rudeness and an affront to your dignity.  Most of the modern conveniences, or necessities, if you see it that way, of our culture, are designed to keep us from having to wait.  We pay our bills instantly online, eat our fast food, and make our phone calls in the car before we reach places. We make reservations so we don’t have to wait for a table, we can get instant approval for loans and buy passes to amusement parks that let you skip the lines. Poor service most often means making you wait too long, and the source of most road rage outbursts is simply sitting behind someone who, for whatever reason, is making you wait.  
We hate to be out of control, we hate to be left at the mercy of someone else’s timing.

Today we stand with the disciples, gazing into the heavens after their departed Lord, in the uncomfortable event of waiting.  They are stuck in this one. Jesus is gone and there is no more chance to clarify what he meant.  Now Jesus, when you said the ends of the earth what exactly did you mean?  Hey Jesus, how will we know what to do, what to say, where to go? 
It’s too late to admit to Jesus that they may have naively expected him to stay with them and see them through this process, that they were really only strong and sure because he was there to lead them, and that they really weren’t sure if they could carry out this one on their own.
They can do not a thing at this point, but wait. 

Their waiting was not a giant pause button or a power outage.  It wasn’t a halting of things with them left twiddling their thumbs and playing tic-tac-toe, sitting on the tarmac with their bag of peanuts until God could get it all started up again at the right time. 
It was part of the whole process, God was still at work.  Waiting provided space for preparation and cultivated their readiness for the next step when the time was right.  And just in case they might be tempted to think they have what it takes already to go rushing out and change the world on their own, waiting forces them to realize that they are not the ones running the show.

If life could be broken into segments, far and few between are the parts where faith is strong and sure, where Christ is tangible and life is secure.  The times when we know for certain who we are and where we are going, and we are confident in our path and our place – these are the exception, rather than the rule. Most often, we live in the unknown, when our faith seems to have slipped behind a cloud and things seem less certain. 

But the covenant life with God is made up of all of these moments too.  When jobs are lost, and children are born, and families are uprooted from their homes, when war decimates societies, and cancer invades healthy bodies, and we embark on brand new careers, or have a year with no change in it whatsoever, we rarely go through any of these things with the constant sureness of our place with Christ. 

But these times when the rubber hits the road and the hypotheticals become real, when we can’t see the future, and can’t turn back to the comfortable past, we find ourselves in the place where faith becomes real: suspended in the tension of waiting.  The space between the promise and its fulfillment - The place where the seed that was plunged into the dark earth has yet to penetrate the surface, where the incubating season of preparation occurs without our knowledge, where we are called to live in the anticipation for a step we cannot foresee, and told to wait and believe we are guided by a faithful God. And it is these times, the waiting for God times, that remind us that life is fragile and unpredictable, and we have very little control after all.

But these times of waiting also become reminders that even in the middle of all this real life awareness of our own weakness or inadequacy, God is Lord over all.  All these things belong to God and not to us.  This is God’s world, we are God’s people, our lives and futures are in God’s hands.  God holds all this world with a love greater than ours, a grief more extensive, a passionate caring that outstretches the best of ours. God has this in God’s sights even when we can’t see the way in front of us.

And when we allow ourselves to wait faithfully on God we find in the moment of surrender that we are freed from the need to run it all ourselves, the need to be strong and able, the need to never fail.  Then, when God does act, we will know for certain that it is not our own wit and wisdom, our own power and proficiency that saves the world, but the grace of God that includes even us in the grand scheme of redemption.

Being people of the promise does not mean we are strong, and sure, and steady, or that we make no mistakes and have answers to life’s questions.  It does not mean we are able to answer every cry and meet every need, and finish God’s work for God.  Being people of the promise means that in the all the times of waiting we remember together God’s faithfulness in the past, and that we remind one another of the promise that holds us until its fulfillment. It means we walk side by side one foot in front of the other for a cure as we wait, it means we pray for and call up and stand with and sing out and listen as we wait, and we don’t pretend we aren’t waiting – instead we sit in the discomfort of waiting alongside and with others. Being people of the promise means that we wait well, we wait fruitfully, we bear together each other’s burdens and joys, each other’s waiting, and give voice to the waiting of the world around us.

And it also means that when the Spirit moves, when God prompts us to action, as he will the disciples at Pentecost, we plunge in with reckless abandon, knowing it is God’s mission and not our own, that God will lead and direct us, and give us the strength to carry out the tasks God gives us.  Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.  
May we wait well.
Amen.


(image shared by Silvia de Lucque on Flickr) 

Sunday, May 2, 2010

The Journey Unfolding


I have kept a journal since junior high school.  At times more consistently and faithfully than others, but always coming back as a touchstone, a place where I record my thoughts and dreams, experiences and encounters. In the moment you often don’t think much about what you’re writing – at least for me, the writing itself was a way of living more fully into the experience, and I never intended that they be read later on. 
But I bet that laying these stacks of notebooks side by side and reading through them would tell a story – the story of my life the way it went, not how I thought it should or would go, not how I planned it or hoped – though those hopes and plans are in there too – achieved, unfulfilled, fleeting or tenacious – they are there and they are certainly part of the story.   But also revealed would be the way the writer was changed by the journey itself, the way I grew and my perspective shifted, dreams were altered as they became reality or drifted into impossibility, goals adapted as who I am continued to unfold by the experiences and encounters that contributed to my being and my world, and I write about them in my journal.
Today we have before us two journal entries of sorts.
The first is a dream, John’s dream of the future, God’s future, God’s promise of what will ultimately be.  Chaos gone, things as they are meant to be.  God living right there, side by side with people, wiping every tear from their eye.  Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.  All things made new.
John has a dream and writes it down – can you ever be the same after such a dream?  How would the story of life unfold differently when you have an idea that this was its end?  How would your own awareness change when you looked at life around you every day, the pain and suffering that will one day be no more, the joy and connection that is a foretaste of eternity, how would such an awareness change you?

The second journal entry we have before us is a travel journal.  When Andy and I went around the world 10 years ago, my journal resembled this.  There are entries that read things like, “We sailed from Greece to Italy, being delayed a day in a rundown seaside town waiting for a ferry with a schedule change. We spent the night shivering and dozing in the cramped belly of a rocking boat, after offering to pay any amount for a cabin with a bed and finding them all booked.  I slept on the floor with my head on a chair, and Andy lay crumpled in a miserable heap with food poisoning, while people snored or talked all around us all night long until the chilly dawn finally docked us in Italy.”
The interesting thing about travel journals is the disparity between the plans you have in advance, and the actual way the trip unfolds. The itinerary is often very different from the trip itself.  We had meant to take a bus from Egypt to Israel but things got more dangerous and we ended up buying plane tickets over the phone in Singapore at the last minute.  Or the way our two weeks of intended scrimping and backpacking in Cairo wisely became 4 luxurious days at the Cairo Hilton and seeing sights in style instead.  The foolishly optimistic 26 country rail pass we cashed in when we got home because we’d already been to over a dozen and didn’t know what we were thinking when we thought we’d try to see EVERYTHING on one trip.  The places we decided to linger and enjoy a few more days, just because.
But most of all, travel journals reveal the ways you are changed by the people you meet.  You can never anticipate the people. The couple in Australia who took us under their wing and have become surprise lifelong friends.  The childhood friend living in London who, recognizing our road-weariness, opened her home to us for 11 days, where we ate home-cooked food, slept in clean sheets, washed our clothes and watched TV until we felt like ourselves again. 
The conversations in trains with strangers that make you see things differently, the people you only know in passing, a day here, a few hours there, their lives continuing before and after you, but for that moment colliding and impacting one another – part of each other’s stories, each other’s travel narratives.

Paul’s travel journal is like this.  Guided by the Spirit, he is traveling around and sharing the message of Jesus Christ, the crucified and Risen one who introduced himself to Paul like a kick in the teeth and radically altered the trajectory of his life forever.  On Paul’s journeys, he doesn’t know where he’ll end up next, he sometimes thinks he’ll go one place and for whatever reason, the door slams shut and God directs him elsewhere.  And it all takes its place in a story, that looking back, makes perfectly undeniable sense. Why, of course we’d go there!  Wasn’t that always the plan?

 When you look back at travel narratives it seems in retrospect that things were meant to go that way all along, indeed, would you have arrived at the same place if they hadn’t? Would you be the same person if things had unfolded differently, if the route had taken a different direction?  The best part is that the story is only THAT story because it went THAT way, if you had met different people, if the timing had been different by a day or two, or someone had been held up a few hours that morning waiting for the cable guy, or overslept and missed a train, if just one of the people had stopped for lunch on the way, the story would be different. 

So when Paul shows up in Philipi, who knows why he didn’t start with the synagogue like he did other places?  Who knows why he and his companions were wandering along a river outside the city on this fine Sabbath day, instead of checking in with the powers that be in their local religious gathering?  What had they heard about this “place of prayer” they set off to discover? And who knew that it would become a sacred place for them, a quiet place they returned to often? 

And surely, as they walked along that day, how could they know they’d meet Lydia?  How could they have imagined this “seller of purple cloth”, this stranger, this established businesswoman who happened to be in this place of prayer that Sabbath day, gathered with other women, this worshiper of God- meaning, a gentile who followed the God of Israel- how could they have imagined she’d have anything to do with them?  Who was she to them a moment before? 
And what if we had her journal?  She didn’t know when she awoke that day that Paul would come wandering up and pull up a rock to chat.  She didn’t know that her life was about to radically change and take whole new direction.

All over this story we see the fingerprints of God, the breath of the Spirit, blowing the story along, leading and prompting people into situations they could never have imagined, and yet, looking back, could never imagine their life without.  Isn’t that just like every story?  And if we were John, with our vision of God’s future leaking into our day to day lives, perhaps we’d be more aware when it’s happening, but most of the time, we’re not.

So Paul meets Lydia.  And when he tells her about Jesus Christ, God opens her heart, and she knows what Paul is telling her before she hears it, it resonates deep in her being, it is meant for her, she is meant for it.  This is her story; she’s ready to live it.  Immediately she is baptized – her whole household is, in fact.  And she urges Paul’s posse to stay with her, and their plans shift; she prevails upon them and they relent and are embraced by the astounding and abundant hospitality of this first Christian convert in Europe.  This Jesus-follower’s house becomes for the road-weary little band a kind of home base, a place to eat home-cooked food and sleep in clean sheets and wash their clothes, a place to which they can return and find comfort and care, find themselves again.  And when Paul and Silas are released from Prison a little later, Lydia takes them in.   
Lydia quickly becomes for them the friend you keep in touch with over years and distance, the one you can send friends to when they’re passing through town and she will throw open her door and croon, “mi casa es su casa” as she hugs them over the threshold.  “Any friend of Paul’s is a friend of mine!” she laughs as she takes your coat and boots.  That was Lydia’s house.

God invites Lydia to the table, quite apart from Paul’s initial plans or intentions, then God brings together these two souls, on different paths in different parts of the world, and weaves them together so that they would both look back and not even know who they were in their lifetime if they hadn’t met one another in a seeming coincidence on that one day back then. 
And not just Paul the individual was changed, but the church that was coming to life, here and there, spreading and growing, in homes and communities, in lives changed and hope shared.  Pastor Lydia, Leader Lydia: Lydia’s house, Lydia’s table and her message, her influence and her energy, Lydia’s hospitality… she embodies the gospel message that Paul wanders around telling people about.  And certainly Paul’s very message itself gets a jolt, a shift, when instead of a Jewish man from Macedonia – as he had expected and intended to meet – the person God bumps him into is a Gentile woman who already knew, but was waiting for an introduction to, Jesus the Christ.
 
And we sit here, the legacy of Lydia and others who were woven into this story, this story of the Risen Christ changing lives, calling people to open their hearts, their lives, their homes to the people that come across their path, to discover and marvel at what mysterious and magnificent stories unfold when the Spirit of God moves and strangers meet. 
What would our travel journals read like?  The story of the Spirit’s prompting and leading in surprising and unexpected ways in each of our lives and in the life of this little community of Jesus-followers?  How might we one day look back and say, Of course! Could it have been any other way?

And standing here in the middle of this unfolding journey – I wonder, when all is said and done, and all the journeys converge around the same table, when we’re gathered together in John’s vision, beyond pain and suffering in the presence of the one in whom all things are made new, when we lean back from the meal and over drinks the travel stories start to come out, what will they reveal?  How will we have been part of another’s journey?  How might we discover we’d unexpectedly joined God’s plans? How will we have recognized God’s fingerprints, gone where the Spirit nudged us?  What will be the stories where we’ve thrown open our doors and hearts to the ones God would have us changed by?  
How are we living this amazing journey?

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