Sunday, April 28, 2013

God's Forever Home - and Ours


"Heaven"


“If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”  Paul said (1 Cor. 15:19).  As people of a resurrected Lord, we claim that death does not have the last word, that there is more than we can see, and that death is not the end that it appears to be.  But what does that mean?  What is our hope?

Standing in a long line, our feet hidden by fluffy clouds, outside of a gate made of actual pearls that reaches high beyond the scope of our vision, we approach the oldest looking man we have ever seen.
 Long white beard down to his belly, white robe tied with a golden rope, huge feather pen in his hand.  He is leaning over an enormous volume, on a podium in front of him, and as each one approaches, he fans through the tabbed pages in search of their name.  If he finds it, the gates slowly open, and the person walks into a shining light.  If he doesn’t, he points his arm, and the person is dropped out of the bottom of the clouds like a trap door, to eternal torture.

Once generously inside, we find that the very pavement beneath our feet is solid gold bricks, in a crosshatch pattern.  There are mansions everywhere, in neat rows along the street, everything is bright, in some hue of either yellow or white.  Angels flit around adorned with floating halos and holding harps, and there in front of us, is our name on the mailbox of the house of our dreams.

Is it something like that?  Of course not! we shake our heads and smile.  But, if not quite this cartoonish, I’ve heard lots of similar versions of heaven, or the end, that is too not far from this either.  And so often our messages about what comes after this life are so wildly disconnected from this life as not even to feel hopeful, and also, to be honest, not entirely appealing either.

One afternoon when I was fifteen years old, I was sitting in my living room, looking out at a beautiful rainstorm.  The grass was bright electric green, and wrapped in the sheltering steel gray sky, everything else in the neighborhood seemed put away and quiet, and I was surrounded by the consistent loud drumming of the drops on the roofs of houses.
The phone rang, and it was a friend of mine, (a moody broody friend of mine).  With some measure of desperation in her voice, she asked me if I thought there would be rain in heaven.
We reflected on all the things we had heard about heaven, and it seemed quite unlikely.  But in the middle of that particular spring rain, something didn’t seem right about that at all.

Praise the Lord from the earth,  
you sea monsters and all deeps,

fire and hail, snow and frost,

stormy wind fulfilling God’s command! 

Mountains and all hills,  
fruit trees and all cedars! 

Wild animals and all cattle,

creeping things and flying birds!      
(Psalm 148)

In this season of resurrection, we’ve sought to look for the living One among us, to see where God is at work in the world and in our very lives. To notice that which we fail so often to recognize because it is comes in love and laughter and redeeming joy and true connection and kindness and justice and other ordinary everyday miracles. 
We’ve heard people’s stories of resurrection – like Peter, who is redeemed in the welcome and the sending, the come and have breakfast, and the feed my sheep.  Like Mary, who hears her savior speak her name, and Thomas, whose doubts are put to rest in the invitation to reach out and touch, and trust.  We’ve heard stories of resurrection in Joyce’s family relationships, and in Amy’s neighborhood barbeque, and in Callie’s surprise calling to help children get ready for their forever homes.
But what is the world’s story of resurrection? 
What about the earth and her creatures and the whole harmony of life?
What does God have in store for the big picture, for this whole world that God created and loves?

There is so much wrong in the world. And it’s before our eyes every moment, so much so that to make it through a day takes a certain amount of numbness or denial, or it would crush us.
More than 800 million people on earth are hungry every day.
One in four women on the face of the earth has been raped.
48 million people in the United States are living below the poverty line.
Every year more than a million people die of AIDS in Africa alone.
We live on land that was settled by displacing its inhabitants and herding them into reservations.
We live in a country built on the exploitation of African slaves.
We live in a church that killed and coerced people into believing its truth.
We consume natural resources leaving nothing for future generations.
Parents beat their children who grow up and beat their children.
We reflect the values of the culture we are raised in, innocent children spat on Jews, innocent children repeat the hateful words of their parents, innocent children grow up to shoot others in their schools, workplaces, or homes.
We perpetuate evil, we breed it and nourish it even while we fight it and attempt to escape it.
We wound with our words.
We enter into relationships, knowing that therein lies an encounter with God, but all relationships are polluted with pain, and we hurt the ones we love.
Marriages fall apart, loved ones die of cancer, tragedy comes in seemingly infinite ways.
There is so much pain. There is so much injustice.  There is so much fear.

But there is rain.
And even in tears, there is something comforting, something that tells us we are alive.  And this is what my friend was getting at, I think.
Right now, in the world as we know it, these things are so entwined: beautiful music is composed by madness, breathtaking art is created in anguish, and in the most horrendous of circumstances, real connection is often found. 
My friend on the phone had decided that she would rather not go to “heaven,” if in its sanitized perfection it left out those things.  If there was no rain.  And I was almost inclined to agree with her.

But if we’ve seen anything in the character of God, we’ve seen again and again, in God’s deep adoration and commitment, and God’s relentless self-definition as the One who is with us and for us, that it is utterly incongruent for God to give up on this world, or any of us in it.  Ever. This is God’s Story; this whole big wonderful and broken world belongs to God.  Nobody loves all of this like God does. And God will never abandon it.  God will never abandon any of us.

The end of things is not a trade off.  It is not an escape for humans to a happy place in the sky, a departure from here, never to return.
And it isn’t God giving up on this cosmic failed project, wiping the slate clean and starting fresh.
The end of things is a new beginning for all things.  It is Resurrection writ large.  God says, “See! I am making all things new!” You me, this tired earth and its broken creatures and all creation, made new.

And like the Creator who walked the garden in the cool of the evening and the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, God will come, and then God’s forever home will be here, where God’s heart is.  With God’s people, in God’s creation.  And when God does, “Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

The passage goes on from here to list all the things that will not be part of this new beginning – the things that will forever be destroyed as in a “lake of fire” – all that injures, damages, erodes, breaks down and harms life and relationship with God and each other will forever be purged from the earth. 

And it will be Life: as it should be.  It will be both the righting of all wrong, and deep, unparalleled intimacy between God and humanity, God and creation, each of us and all of us, belonging to each other as we are meant to, all life in harmony.
And all living creatures “ will join us in cacophonous singing.” (1) And along with Mary and Peter and you and me, “and all witnesses of the resurrection, with the earth and sea all their creatures, we will praise our Creator and join the unending hymn.” (2) 
At the end of the Narnia books (3) is another picture of the end – a little different than the mansions in the sky on golden streets motif.  It is described this way:
“The New Narnia was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.  I can’t describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean.  It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling.  He stamped his right forehoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here.  This is the land I have been looking for all my life, thought I never knew it till now.  The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.  Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!”
He shook his mane and sprang forward into a great gallop – a Unicorn’s gallop, which, in our world, would have carried him out of sight in a few moments. But now a most strange thing happened. Everyone else began to run, and they found, to their astonishment, that they could keep up with him: not only the Dogs, and the humans, but even fat little Puzzle [the donkey] and short-legged Poggin the Dwarf.  The air flew in their faces as if they were driving fast in a car without a windscreen.  The country flew past as if they were seeing it from the windows of an express train. Faster and faster they raced, but no one got hot or tired or out of breath at all.”
That day when I was 15, I wish someone had been there to answer my friend and me in our teenage wonderings about heaven.  I wish someone had been there to say heaven is the new beginning, the resurrection of all, and one day all living things and all those gone before will be redeemed. I wish someone had said to us:
In heaven, there will be rain, but no flooding.
In heaven there will be sunshine, but no parched desert.
In heaven everyone will have what they need, without taking from others, or killing to eat.
In heaven the least will not be trampled on, they will be first.
In heaven the weak will be strong, and the silenced will have a voice. 
In heaven there will be no disease, no injustice, no betrayal.
The earth will be free from abuse, and people will know no pain, sorrow, or death.  In heaven, our Creator will finally come home to earth, and dance with us in the rain.

 And what we experience now as beauty, joy, release, justice, and peace, are momentary and passing views of the real life that awaits us right here, just further up and further in, which will never diminish or disappear. 

This is the hope embodied by you and me, the resurrection people of the living Lord. 

*     *     *     *     *      *
But you know this already.  You already are witnesses.  So listen now, Listen, as this community that lives this hope, tells of this resurrection promise.  (This was followed by an audio recording of people in from our community, answering the question, What is Heaven to you? They answered things like:
Fellowship of all of us after this life, togetherness, peace. 

A feeling of warmth, acceptance and unconditional love.
Family get together.  Nothing to be afraid of.  A reunion.  Welcome.
Love, peace, beauty, serenity, community.
Closeness with God, with everything and everybody, loving, sharing, helping, affirm our connection
Being in God’s loving embrace.
Peace on earth. No violence.
Everything close to God.  Experience being with God.
Paradise.  Being with those I love and have missed.  All my questions answered.


 ___________
(1) quote from Revelation scholar Barbara Rossing
(2) from the Lutheran Easter Eucharistic prayer
(3) The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis

Sunday, April 21, 2013

There is where you'll find me







I had a professor (Ray Anderson) in seminary who tells of once seeing scrawled on the wall of a men’s room, “Judas, come home. All is forgiven.”
It eventually led him to write a book called, The Gospel According to Judas, about a post-death encounter between Judas and Jesus, Judas’ own resurrection story, forgiveness after the grave, wherein Judas finds that his own refusal to forgive himself keeps him from accepting Jesus’ forgiveness, until finally Jesus’ compassionate and relentless love prevails, and Judas is welcomed home.
In the story as we have it, Judas dies on a cliff at the end of a rope steeped in shame and guilt.  And that’s the last we hear of Judas.  Good Riddance, right?  He got what he deserved. No need to wonder what might have been.

But here is Peter. And while he didn’t outright betray Jesus into the hands of the enemy, he may as well have. The last time he saw Jesus, Peter was standing at a charcoal fire and Jesus locked eyes with him across the courtyard, just after the rooster crowed three times.  
And the words of Jesus just a few hours earlier rang out in Peter’s head, “Before the cock crows this very night you will three times deny even knowing me.” 
Jesus! I would never deny you! had been his reply. 
And the guilt and shame roared up within Peter, deafening and defining, and he turned and fled from that place.
That was the last time he had seen Jesus face to face.

But now this is his moment.  The moment Judas never gets in this life. The moment after, the follow up to his shame and betrayal, his own encounter with the Risen Lord.

Peter had said to the post-Jesus disciples, “I am going fishing.”
“We will go with you,” they replied.  
And with all the simplicity of a children’s reader, they returned to the familiar, the clear cut, to what they knew they could do, to what made sense.

And now, after they’ve been fishing all night and coming up empty, Jesus appears to them, and once again nobody recognizes the Living One until he does something so Jesus-like, which is to say, something so utterly impossible and unexpected and also familiar, right out of their own relationship and experience of him.  He tells them to put the nets to the other side of the boat and when they do, they come up busting with fish. 

And then Peter, dear passionate, impetuous, committed, devoted and broken Peter, panics under the tension and anticipation.  When he hears that it is Jesus, he puts on his heavy clothes, (which were off because evidently Peter prefers to fish in the nude), and he leaps into the water – one can only presume arriving on shore panting and drenched after the boat filled with his friends and the fish they had just hauled up, paddles calmly past him and lands on the beach ahead of him, because, after all, the text says, they had been quite close to shore. 

Jesus calls out to them, ‘Bring what you have.” So they, or rather, Peter, goes to the boat and drags all 153 fish in the net up the beach to Jesus, who has warm bread and grilled fish waiting for them over a charcoal fire. 
And Jesus says to them, in the words of the grandma at the stove to pajamaed children, and the mom with a mug of hot coffee to her hungover teenager, and the husband to his exhausted wife just home from the night shift –
“Come and have breakfast.”
Come and be cared for. Come and receive. Come and let me bless you. Come and be nourished. Come and sit, warm yourself, fill your belly, rest a while, come and simply be.
Also, though, bring what you have – we’ll make more; your fish can be part of this meal.

And then comes Peter’s face to face encounter with the Living One, his story of resurrection. Ripe with longing and dread, taut and pain-filled, he stands there, just beginning to dry, and Jesus draws near to him, and locks eyes with him oice again and  – just like Mary when Jesus calls her by name, and Thomas when he reaches out his nail-scarred hands, and those on the road to Emmaus whose hearts burned within them, and those gathered around the table whose eyes were opened – Peter’s encounter with the Living Lord was exactly what he needed.
 
 “Peter Do you love me more than these?” 
  Yes, Jesus, I do love you. 
 “Then feed my lambs.”
 
Do you love me, Peter?
Yes, Lord, you know that I love you!
Then tend my sheep.

Peter, do you love me?
And now it hurts.  “Please Jesus! You know everything! You know that I love you!”
And Jesus looks at him right in the eye and says to him a third time, “Feed. My. Sheep.” 

The Dalai Lama has said, “If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause another to know that they are safe. If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand. If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.”

And this is true, and perhaps this is part of how Peter is healed, by being called on to reach out in healing to others.  Surely for Peter to know the love of God he must share love with others. He must give in order to receive. But that is not the whole picture of what is happening here.  And that puts an awful lot of pressure on Peter to step up his game and be his very best self.  
Is this why Jesus says, “Feed my Sheep”?

This has been quite a week in America.  A strange and hard week. It has highlighted the worst and the best of who we human beings are.  We are weak and vulnerable, yet strong and caring, corrupt and self-serving, and yet brave and self-giving.  All manner of humanity was on display this week, raw and uncensored – smeared across our screens with emotion-laden commentary on a 24 hour, non-stop basis.  So much let-down and horror, shock and disappointment, sadness and fear.  And right alongside of it, people reaching out and rising up and sacrificing themselves for others.  Calling on us to be our best selves.  To give to others, to reach out and do good.  To find healing by seeking to heal others.

But here in snow-buffered Minnesota we’ve lived this week in the mostly comfortable in between: close enough to feel the tremors but far enough from actually being called on to step in and help out or forced to grieve the loss of someone close to us, or our entire town. 
The mostly comfortable in-between: not nearly as evil as the greedy politicians or the crazy bombers but also not likely as good as the self-sacrificing first responders, firefighters and altruistic bystanders. 
The mostly comfortable in between: feeling guilty that we don’t feel worse when it happens farther away than the East Coast of our own country, but also feeling relieved that neither is it any closer to us than that.

So when Jesus says to Peter three times, “Feed my sheep”, is Jesus calling Peter to be his best self?  To rise up and now be worthy of Christ’s calling?  To prove how sorry he is, start over; to put his past behind him and his best foot forward, to reach out and be altruistic and good? Hardly.

Peter knows by now, even if you and I don’t quite yet, that our best self is unpredictable at best, foolish and unreliable.  We say things we don’t mean; we seek safety over fidelity, and choose the approval of others over what’s right, and when push comes to shove and things heat up, who knows?  It might be our worst self that comes out.  We can’t know for sure until it happens.  And often, when our best selves do show up, it surprises us.  We look back and say, Wow! Look how well I handled that moment! 
We can’t really plan on or count on our best selves; for all we know, we could be Judas or Peter.  And certainly, there will always be those heroes whose best selves are better than ours could ever strive to be; the ones who really should be entrusted with the sheep.  We’ll just hide, then, in our mostly comfortable in-between, for as long as we can, God, and pray that we get by on avoiding ever having to, God forbid, be called upon to rise up and be our best self.

But that’s not what we’re called to.  And that’s not what is happening here for Peter, either.  
The love of God - that is what we are called to.  That’s all we’re called to.
Come, my beloved, come and have breakfast.
Come and rest beside me.  Let me feed you, nourish you, and care for you. 
Come, abide in my love, and also, bring what you have to the table, we’ll eat it together. We’ll share it together.

We are called into the perfect love of God, even in our very worst selves.  Even in our denying, betraying, fleeing, hiding, self-serving, self-protecting selves.  Even before we’ve sorted it all out or forgiven ourselves or figured out how to do it right, God loves us, and God calls us.  
God calls us back to relationship, and God sends us out, neither prepared nor praiseworthy, but just as we are. Exactly as we are, even right at this very moment, we are nevertheless and always drawn into the work of God, the love of God, the life of God.  And sent out to encounter the Risen Lord alongside the other scared and hungry sheep.

Feed my sheep.
Not because you’re so good at it.
Not because it’s the right thing to do. 
Not because they’re so hungry.
And Not because it will do you some good.
But because you love me.  That’s why.  That’s all.
Do you love me? 
Then feed my sheep. Abide in my love.
That is where I am.  There is where you’ll find me.

And someday, Jesus adds to Peter and to all of us, you’ll suffer even more. This is no promise that life is going to go smoothly for you, or that you can hide from danger or sorrow forever.  Someday you’ll be dragged where you don’t want go.  Someday, awful things will happen to you too.  Feed my sheep anyway.  Abide in my love anyway.

If he had lived longer, I wonder, what would Judas’ story of resurrection be? 
What could his life have been if he hadn’t ended it in shame?
What life is there left for someone who has done awful, unthinkable things?
The others may not have welcomed him back, we might not forgive him, but Jesus surely would have.  If there was ever a sheep that needed to be held by his shepherd, Judas would be it.  And not just forgiven enough to receive, but to give as well.  To bring what he had to the meal, whatever it may be, along with his own broken self, to be fed and nourished, and called and sent, as each one of us are, over and over again. 

Come home, my child, all is forgiven.  
Follow me.  Feed my sheep.  
Care for each other, you guys.  
I am in the world, redeeming the world; come and be part of my love. 
There is where you’ll find me.
Amen.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Spying for Hope and Joining Jesus



One of my favorite bloggers wrote on the day of the Boston Marathon, that as she watched the news, "...I learned that I want to be a First Responder to every hurting person who crosses my path. God bless all those who run toward those in pain and fear."
- Glennon Melton

That is Incarnation, friends, a God who runs toward those in pain and fear. 

At LNPC we've been talking a lot in this Easter season about noticing the Living Lord, seeing Jesus right here in our concrete, daily lives.  And so as we held in prayer all those affected at the Boston Marathon, we also sought to notice and give thanks for all the ways people join Christ in being with and for one another in the midst of pain and fear.

As "spies for hope" and witnesses for wonder, we began collecting some words, images and article links on our church facebook page that help us to see God-with-us as we are with and for one another.

Here are some glimpses of grace we came across:

Stories of Kindness...Atlantic Wire

13 Examples of People Being Awesome...Business Insider

These Heroes Showed Compassion...Huffington Post

Love and Hope in the Wake of Boston...Rev. Dr. Eric Baretto

Status Update: By Anne Lamott (4/17/13)

"Frederick Buechner wrote, 'Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.'

But it is hard not to be afraid, isn't it? Some wisdom traditions say that you can't have love and fear at the sam
e time, but I beg to differ. You can be a passionate believer in God, in Goodness, in Divine Mind, and the immortality of the soul, and still be afraid. I'm Exhibit A. 

The temptation is to say, as cute little Christians sometimes do, Oh, it will all make sense someday. Great blessings will arise from the tragedy, seeds of new life sown. And I absolutely believe those things, but if it minimizes the terror, it's bullshit.

My understanding is that we have to admit the nightmare, and not pretend that it wasn't heinous and agonizing; not pretend it as something more esoteric. Certain spiritual traditions could say about Hiroshima, Oh, it's the whole world passing away.

Well, I don't know.

I wish I could do what spiritual teachers teach, and get my thoughts into alignment with purer thoughts, so I could see peace and perfection in Hiroshima, in Newton, in Boston. Next time around, I hope to be a cloistered Buddhist. This time, though, I'm just a regular screwed up sad worried faithful human being. 

There is amazing love and grace in people's response to the killings. It's like white blood cells pouring in to surround and heal the infection. It just breaks your heart every time, in the good way, where Hope tiptoes in to peer around. For the time being, I am not going to pretend to be spiritually more evolved than I am. I'm keeping things very simple: right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe; telling my stories, and reading yours. I keep thinking about Barry Lopez's wonderful line, "Everyone is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together; stories and compassion."

That rings one of the few bells I am hearing right now, and it is a beautiful crystalline sound. I'm so in."



How to Keep Our Babies Safes, by Glennon Melton

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Learning to notice


Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

- Mary Oliver

Luke 24:13-35

Here is something I’ve realized since Easter: it is really, really hard to look for the Living One.  Resurrection is so difficult to recognize.  
Noticing life isn’t easy. Which is silly, actually, because it’s all around us all the time.  
Within us, between us, around us, life is everywhere. 
It’s greater than death, even, but, still… we really struggle to see it.

I held my baby nephew last night as he fell asleep. Gazing into my eyes until he drifted off.  Nothing else but trust and comfort, sleepiness and presence.

































I played with my little foster niece.  She watched me make meatloaf. Standing on a chair peering over the counter, she exclaimed about each ingredient and pointed dramatically as I added it to the bowl.
She helped me set the table for dinner, clapping after she put each fork beside its plate, and pausing once to shout over her shoulder, for no apparent reason, “I love you, Vincent!”
I don’t know what will happen to her in her life.  And I cannot even take in what has happened to her in her past, but the miracle of this tiny child and her infectious spirit made me feel grateful for life.
 

And it dawned on me that for all the struggle to try to notice God, God is there all the time, and maybe these are the ways I've seen the Lord.  Maybe I could recognize Jesus in those moments that surprise me, when I feel gratitude well up and I notice I am alive. 

And then I began to see more from my week - like the switch that happened in the horrible mid-April blizzard, when I was dreading every second of dreary gray and yearning, longing, for green, and suddenly I saw lightening and heard rolling thunder as the sky spit out snow pell mell all over everything, and all at once the absurdity of it all made me laugh aloud.  And the next thing I knew we were taking out the Easter bunny marshmallows and filling mugs with cocoa before school (unheard of!), and tromping off feeling like explorers and survivors, all snow drunk and flurry dizzy, scrambling up snowbanks and laughing at our hair getting caked with blowing ice and I was watching my children burst with joyous life in the midst of the storm.








Or how later that day I was stuck on a hill, my car wheels spinning slipping me closer and closer to the back of a parked BMW, when an acquaintance walking by waved at me, and then stepped up and wedged herself between my car bumper and the beemer- stomping both feet in boots unceremoniously up on the BMW’s rear bumper, and pushing my car out.  Then not 24 hours later I was able to pay it forward to another startled and struggling stranger, when I cheerfully jumped up onto the back of a minivan to shove her car out of her icy parking spot.


This week my favorite children’s author wrote on facebook about getting an anonymous letter from a sad adult thanking her for her characters, for their love and triumph and humanity, and it made this writer feel stunned and grateful and overwhelmed, and made her call herself is a “spy for hope” in the world.

  


Jesus is everywhere.  Right here, as close as your breath and your beating heart.  In grateful strangers and surprising helpers and the joy of children and the trust of infants in your arms and the ability to share with each other.  And while life and the Living One seem so hard to recognize in the abstract, when I adjust my vision and begin looking in the concrete and real, suddenly I notice Jesus all over the place.

My friend texted me a message of encouragement during my solo-parenting stint this week; she seemed to know just what I needed to hear just when I needed to hear it.

I get to start most week day mornings on a treadmill next to two amazing, insightful, funny and wise women, and we wrestle our way into wakefulness and vent out our frustrations and lap up each other’s advice and encouragement.  And on Wednesdays I get to sit with a bunch of crazy preachers gathered around a table and looking for Jesus in the word enough to head out and invite our people to look for him yet again too.
 
This week I’ve noticed again how my children have teachers who get them.  It’s hard to imagine something more significant for their day to day lives, and it is certainly something that would be painfully obvious in its absence, but when have I stopped to recognize and celebrate its presence?
 

I started out the week wondering if I could see it. What is my story of resurrection? Where is Jesus?  Abstract, hypothetical, disconnected from my life.  Some straining, spiritual kind of searching.  And I’ve ended the week seeing the Living One.







Yesterday the lady at the corner market came out from behind the counter to grab me a different bunch of gerber daisies, bright and sunny, because the one I had chosen looked a little wilted, and she really wanted me to have one that would last, because as she said, “We need to brighten up this monochromatic landscape!”
 

On Friday morning I got to hear about a friend's trip to South Africa – and see her photos of children and hear her own wonder at attending a funeral entirely in the Xhosa language complete with a mournful march to the grave, a burial and a parade home.  She was moved at being part of a much needed food drop for a displaced community, and laughed with delight as she shared of watching women dance and sing and rev each other up each morning before sitting down to their looms.

And on Monday night I sat in a pub next to one friend, anxious after her first day of grad school, on the brink of what she’s wanted to do for a long time and wondering if she will be able to handle it, yet she and another friend were willing to drop it all and meet me at a moment’s notice to share sweet potato fries and hard cider on the opposite side of town.  And we listened to people tell stories of yearning and faith and living and struggle and hope, and watched strangers’ eyes light up, and well up, and heads nod in recognition and felt the palpable weight of shared living, as voices sing along.



I am thankful. I am hopeful. 
I see life and love in the world. 


Living is really hard. And we are so aware of that so much of the time. We screw up a lot and other people screw up a lot, and there is so much corruption and evil and things feel so broken so much of the time, and we attune ourselves to that - so that is what we notice.  That is what we forward to our friends and post on our walls and lament about to our neighbors and spend our energy thinking about and our voices talking about.  And all the while in millions of little and big ways, life and hope are breaking through, and love is being shared, and people are being mended, and God comes near and walks with us, and we go on talking about God’s absence and how the darkness has won, and do not notice what is happening right there in our path.

These followers of Jesus on the road to Emmaus, they walk with him and talk with him and listen to him and all the while they grieve, missing him, and failing to recognize him right there on the journey next to them. 
And then, after he breaks bread and gives it to them and their eyes are opened and he vanishes, they turned to each other and said say, looking back, Friends, were not our hearts burning within us?

So often we see life in retrospect. 
I want to learn to see life as it is unfolding.
I want to see Jesus and know Jesus and recognize Jesus and be a little bit brave about bringing it up.
I want to have people I can turn to and say – Did you see that?
Did you hear that too?
Something was happening there, right? 
I felt it, did you feel it too?  Were not our hearts burning within us?
I want people I can run home to and say, You’ve got to hear what just happened to me!  and barely get the story out before they are telling me their own tales of hope and wonder and daily-life love.

This is church, friends.  
They got together and told stories about Jesus. 
They reminded each other what it is all about.
They ate bread and talked about when he broke it,
and drank wine and talked about what it meant when he poured and shared it.  
They sought out others with whom they could say, Will you listen to what has happened to me?
And who would say back to them, It’s true! God is here! I see God in your life. I feel God in mine.

We did this last week when we heard three ordinary miracles – in fact we heard three stories loaded with ordinary miracles.  Testimonies, witnesses to the risen One, living and moving and healing and hoping in the world and pulling us into God’s schemes of love.

Life is prevalent and enduring, and also hard to pay attention to and easy to miss, and we need practice. It is so so easy to forget to look.
It is more than natural to forget to listen.
But God is redeeming the world, and is starting with you. With me.  In each one of our lives. Our ordinary and miraculous lives.

So let’s practice together.  Let’s practice noticing life. Looking for the Living One.
In the season of Lent we confessed our brokenness and need, we confessed our trust and faith, and now in this season of Easter we get to confess the places we see life, the stories of resurrection hope.

The followers of Jesus converged from their various experiences and stammered out, We have seen the Lord! and answered each other, Us too! He is risen indeed! 
We will be those people tonight.

We are going to have a chance to share, to practice noticing, and to tell each other how we too have seen the Lord.

How have you seen the Lord in small or big ways this week?
This week, where have you been a spy for hope?  
A witness of life?   A sharer in love?
How has your heart burned within you?

 When you finish sharing, I invite you to say, I have seen the Lord.
And we will reply, He is risen indeed!

And you, dear reader, what about you? How have you seen the Living One this week?

How to Repent (It's not how you think)

Psalm 46 ,  Jeremiah 31:31-34 When I was in college, I spent the large part of one summer sleeping on a 3-foot round papason chair cushion o...