Sunday, February 23, 2014

What it's really about

Lakewood Cemetery Chapel ceiling, Minneapolis, MN

Beatitude Series - Part 4

"Blessed are the Merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."

Mercy, it is said, means to show forgiveness or compassion to someone whom it is within your power to punish or within your right to ignore.  Mercy is unearned.  Undeserved.  and Unexpected.

Who in our world can show mercy?   
The one with the power, who could give you what you deserve, but instead decides to let you off easy, that’s who can show mercy, if they so choose.  The school principal, the boss, the prison warden or the DMV clerk.  Whoever holds the cards in the given situation is the one who can show mercy. 

Then there are those exceptional human beings, those rare truly good people who seem nearly never mess up and are basically beyond reproach, that seem to be able to show mercy. The Pope, or Mother Theresa, or the person who quits their job to run a soup kitchen in the inner city or sells everything they own to open an orphanage in a war-torn African country.  They could hold others to the high standard they themselves uphold, but instead, they go around blessing the world with their flawlessness and taking pity on others with their mercy.

So basically, in our estimation it comes down to this: Mercy is an option for those in a one up position either actually or morally, the in charge or the super holy.  And the people within their right to give mercy, then are rarely, if ever, the ones needing to receive it.

But Jesus isn’t saying that.  What he is saying really messes with our system. He says blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Those who are in a position to give mercy could just as easily be on the other end of the phone or the other side of the counter.  The merciful are in need of grace as much as anyone else. 

This also means that you don’t have to wait until you’re no longer in need of grace yourself to help dispense it. You and I – in whatever pitiful state we find ourselves at a given moment – can show mercy to others.

So here Jesus goes again.  This “life as God means for it to be shared” business is full of this sort of surprising and upsetting thing. Where people just go around easing each other’s burdens for no apparent reason. Where people look past bad behavior and lowly standing, to the person underneath. 

And mercy is a tough one. Everything would fall apart if people all went around just giving mercy to each other, wouldn’t it? What would become of us if people didn’t get what they deserved? If there were no more distinctions between good people and bad, hard workers and lazy, rich and poor, strong and weak, male and female, Greek and Jew, slave and free?

What in the world would happen, if we really lived in this reality of God’s, in this life as God means for it to be shared, where nobody is above or exempt – and everybody is hanging open – with their flaws all flapping in the wind, and every single person has the opportunity to give someone else “more than they deserve?”

Mercy breaks the game wide open.  It reveals the flaws in the system.  It lifts up people and shatters shackles and releases captives – you and me – from anger and unforgiveness, from raging jealousy and burning desire for recompense.  From self-centeredness and the relentless need earn our worth.  It sets us free. It sets others free. It rains down on the world color and light and hope that softens the hard edges and pulls people’s hearts out into the open.

Not everyone will receive mercy, not everyone wants to. Fear keeps us pretty protected.  The game seems pretty damn powerful, and grace seems way too good to be true.  It’s dangerous and embarrassing.
Sometimes we would rather be punished harshly. Restoring order, so we can feel we’ve paid penance, earned our way back to acceptance.  Sometimes it feels wrong to accept grace. Mercy is not always welcomed.

And sometimes we’d rather do whatever we can to show others they are wrong. To make it fair, to keep it just.

But the currency of this way of life God extends to us, the kingdom of God, is mercy. Mercy is what makes it keep moving – keeps us all afloat.  So, in on the miracle, then are the people who find ways boost others up – especially when it appears they haven’t especially earned it.

And, it turns out, you don’t have to feel particularly merciful to be merciful. In fact, when you’re owed something, an apology, a mea culpa, recognition, fairness, justice, when you’ve been shorted and here’s your chance to be vindicated, you’d have to be either superhuman or really out of touch to feel all affectionate and bighearted toward the person who owes you.
But not feeling it doesn’t have to stop you from doing it: treating someone as a full human who has not done the same to you.  To the one who hurt you, or overlooked you, whose turn it is to feel the sting of humiliation or the just payment for their transgression, when instead you uphold their humanity, and treat them with full dignity, as one made in the image of God, worthy of love and respect, something happens.
To them and to you.

The promise is, you brave souls who step forward in mercy, who reach your hand toward another with no guarantee they will accept or appreciate it, when you may not get the recognition or justice you deserve, You brave souls will receive mercy.

You who have the courage to give it will also find the courage to accept it. That is part of the wholeness of things.  You will drink it in and lap it up and let it fill you from the ends your toes to the top of your head. Mercy will wash through you and clean you, refresh you, drop you deep under its surface and pull you up new and clean and washed in blessing.

Mercy changes our hearts and makes it oriented to one thing – it makes us able to see God. When we submit to the mercy, it washes away the hardness and the stuckness and cleans out the arteries and enlivens us to a different way of living in the world.  To see God.  Who is among us. Between us. Beside us.
To notice. To wake up and recognize the divine holding up all around you, filling all with the breath of life. 
In God’s way of life, We’re invited to run on mercy instead of jealousy. On Mercy instead of vengeance. On Mercy instead of anger. On Mercy instead of hurt.  Mercy is what turns people into “wounded healers” instead of “wounded wounders.” (gratitude to Glennon Melton for this wording).

And Jesus is saying, you don’t have to get it from someone first in order to give it.  God’s already given it. You can jump into the mercy river at any point. You can let it carry you.

On Thursday Dick and Marty showed up to the funeral of someone they’ve never met.  Eldon Wenzel Jr. was born on New Year’s Day in 1934, and confirmed at Lake Nokomis in 1948.  Beyond that, we knew almost nothing about him.  Dick, Marty and I were three of the eight people in attendance. Two former neighbors, Eldon’s sister and two nephews.  
Quiet, withdrawn, unassuming, at times difficult.  He mostly kept to himself.  He didn’t win friends or influence people. This man was misunderstood most of his life; he struggled with physical and mental disabilities that made it hard for people to connect with him and hard for him to connect with others.

I could have said no to this funeral.
A stranger calls from Chicago and asks me to do his uncle’s funeral.  I have no obligation to respond to this. I have my own congregation, my own people, my own responsibilities. 
Marty could’ve said no to coming. It was the first few hours of an epic storm, and he didn’t know the guy from Adam. 
Dick could’ve said no to showing up, he had things to do and people to see – he’s a busy man.  But we said yes instead.  

And for an hour, inside a breathtakingly beautiful chapel surrounded by graves buried under the silent snow, we stopped and we held up this man.  We thanked God for his life.
We heard about the love of his mom who gave her life to caring for him, and in her death 20 years ago, she ensured that he would continue to be cared for in his own home with a whole rotation of cleaners, and meals deliverers, and care assistants and yardworkers.  And a gentle picture began to unfold of a web of people whose lives intersected his. 

We heard his sister tell about sledding, and hide and seek, and ice cream after church on Sundays. We heard his nephew talk about the devotion of a mother and the hard work and protection of a father and a family – far from perfect- who stuck by each other.  We got little peaks into his adult life and his jobs and a lot of wondering what really was and what could have been.  Among the eight of us, standing in on behalf of all those who had gone before and who had surrounded him with care throughout his life, Eldon was celebrated and honored.

Mercy. Let there be mercy.
Let us show gentleness and kindness to one another. A woman who doesn’t want to be late to a doctor appointment comes anyway and takes a seat in the chapel. Another one who nodded hello from across the street for 40 years agrees to join the family afterwards at a nearby restaurant for lunch. 

The delicate lace of grace that lay over that day, as we stood out in the puddle snow with the sky spitting down on us and clouds threatening the deluge to come, as we looked down at one grave marker, with his father’s name, and next to it, his mother’s name, and right under hers, his own, awaiting him, to be buried in her grave, laid to rest in the arms of the one who sheltered him in this life.

When you are cared for by others, when someone else translates your moods or advocates on your behalf, when you don’t have it left inside you to be duplicitous or cunning, you simply receive. And you simply give.  You’re just raw pain, or happiness, contentment, or frustration, or gratitude.  And you get a glimpse of something that gets missed by the rest of us who overcomplicate and overfill and overanalyze and overmuddy everything.  You see God.  
I think Eldon Wenzel Jr. probably saw God all the time. 
One day we will all see God.  Face to face.
Now we see in the mirror dimly, clouded by our own reflection and our own projections and our drama and baggage.
But one day we will all be pure in heart.

Blessed, then, are the pure in heart for they will see God.
They who welcome mercy. Who’ve been washed in mercy. Who, for whatever reason, have chosen NOT hard and cynical.  NOT self-protective and cunning.
Blessed are the trusting. They’re not necessarily savvy, probably not powerful.  They may say the wrong thing at the wrong time. They might blurt out their delight when it’s time to be quiet.  They likely never quite fit in. And they don’t seem to be much competition. 
Maybe it never occurs to them to succumb to the game. 
Or maybe they’ve got an inside scoop – maybe they’ve stopped competing because they can see God. Maybe they get it more than the rest of us that life is less about winning and proving and strength and fairness.  And it’s more about love.  And joy.  And grief.  And noticing.  And mercy.

It seems weak and kind of stupid to go into life like this. You could be taken advantage of and probably will be. You could be seen as irrelevant, and not worthy of respect.  You could be overlooked. 
But of all the views this life has to offer, the vista you get is God.  You get to see God.  In the mercy. In the beauty. In the little kindnesses and unseen moments.  You’re tuned in to the song the rest of us ignore.

What would the world be without the mercy?
And what would it be without the ones who notice the mercy?

Blessed are we, then, when we jump in that river of mercy, and let it wash through our hearts.  
Especially when we’ve no reason to forgive and every right to punish.  
And when we’ve no reason to care and every right to ignore. 

Especially then, when grace is the last thing expected, Let there be mercy.
Amen.

Listen to Mercy, by Ben Kyle.  (Seriously, do. You'll be glad you did)

Rather Be Right?

Amoeba. (clearly, a psuedopod).

Beatitude Series - Part 3
GUEST PREACHER/BLOGGER: LISA LARGES

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."


I still remember the bet I won against Jon Hanson. This was thirty some odd – mostly odd – years ago. I was sixteen. We were on a camping trip – some kids from the neighborhood, I don’t even remember exactly who all was there. I don’t remember many other details about the trip either, except that Jon Hanson and I got in to an argument about whether amoebas were pseudopods. I could take the time to explain what this means; but the specifics here aren’t relevant. The only important piece of the story that you need to retain here is that I was right. If you do want to know more about what it means that amoebas are pseudopods you could ask me at coffee hour, for I shall surely tell you, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend asking.

Whether or not amoebas are pseudopods is a matter of fact. But this argument, oh my children, took place before the time when there were smart phones, or cell phones of any sort. It was before cell phones, and before Wikipedia and Google, those tools that have revolutionized bar bets everywhere.
I have absolutely no idea how it was that we came to our disagreement about amoebas. It’s not a topic that comes up often in every day conversation. I’m sure I have never had a discussion about it with anyone since. But somehow we did come to disagree about amoebas, and it seems to me that it must have been early in the camping trip, because, as I remember it now, neither one of us, or rather, let’s say I, didn’t have the decency or good sense to drop it, or at least let it go until we got back to civilization. It wasn’t like we were arguing about an opinion, or a principle, something that might benefit from a little back and forth, the art of persuasion and all that. No, instead, for what seems now like the entire weekend, I maintained strenuously that amoebas were pseudopods and Jon Hanson was adamant that they were not. Basically, I spent the weekend saying “yes they are,” and he, “No they’re not.”

Now, this was also the time, oh children, when we looked up information in books! Home from the camping trip, I went straight to the braille edition of my biology textbook, found the paragraph that listed amoebas as pseudopods, got the print edition of the textbook, found someone to help me find the right page number, -- I was committed -- and walked up the street to the Hanson house with the textbook open to the page on amoebas. I still remember the moment. I hadn’t even gotten inside. I was standing on the Hanson’s doorstep, Jon stood just inside the open door, the book between us. What he said was something like, “Oh my God.”

Now, if I was a. a better preacher, b. a better person, or c. a better Christian, I would have begun by telling you a story in which I was wrong. There are certainly a lot of them. For the purposes of our discussion I would even be willing to stipulate that I’ve been wrong as often as I’ve been right, maybe the balance is even a little bit over on the wrong side. I am now fifty, and it is true that my on board memory and its retrieval system more and more return bad data. There are more and more stories in which I am the one who miss-remembers or has the facts wrong. What’s more, I have been on the wrong side in matters far more consequential than the classification of amoebas. I could have told any of those stories. But, and again, I know this is perhaps revealing a bit too much about my character, when I sat down to write these reflections, I couldn’t come up with a compelling example. I don’t remember any stories of being wrong with anything near the clarity with which I remember being right when I was sixteen.

And I know perfectly well that it could have gone the other way. I could have been the one to miss-remember what I’d studied or not about amoebas. I could have been the one to miss-remember so completely that I was willing to bet on it. The point is, as I’d like you to recall, is that I was right.
“Why is it so fun to be right,” Kathryn Schulz asks in her book called “Being Wrong,”  “As pleasures go,” she continues, “it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life's other delights--chocolate, surfing, kissing--it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, and our swoony hearts. And yet, the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating. 
We can't enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything. The stakes don't seem to matter much; it's more important to bet on the right foreign policy than the right racehorse, but we are perfectly capable of gloating over either one. Nor does subject matter; we can be equally pleased about correctly identifying an orange-crowned warbler or the sexual orientation of our coworker. Stranger still, we can enjoy being right even about disagreeable things: the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend's relationship, or the fact that, at our spouse's insistence, we just spent fifteen minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.”

Back when I was working with That All May Freely Serve, advocating for the full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons, I attended a church service one Sunday in New Haven Connecticut at which the pastor had used for the title of her sermon the title of a bluegrass song called “You’d Rather be Right than be in Love.” I don’t remember the Scriptural text nor the point or points of the sermon, but the title stuck. There were plenty of instances from my own life when I chose perversely for my own delusional infallibility. It also seemed to me to be an apt diagnosis for what was ailing the church. As the fight over ordination of LGBT folks wound its way through the church, at any of its meetings or debates or assemblies at which the question was argued, you could find a vast multitude of sincere Christians of all political and theological opinions who exercised a strong preference for being right. Surely there were many, of many a theological stripe who preferred the way of love and mercy and grace, but their voices tended to get drowned out.

The payoff of being right is that delicious feeling of being superior, which we know we ought not admit to caring about, but which is altogether satisfying nonetheless. Being right also helps us feel secure, and that is a feeling we’ll go to just about any length to find. Being right is beautiful in its simplicity. Choose being in love over being right and you’ve just opened the door to a world of complications. These complications are too numerous to list, but chief among them are the complications of heartbreak and vulnerability. As Kara would say, it’s messy!

It’s a short hop from being right to being righteous. Stir in some morality and a few letters and your there. We all crave that kind of security – not just that we have the facts right about amoebas, but that we’ve made the right choices, acted in accordance with the highest principles. There is that part in all of us – or, at least I know there is a part in me – that turns to religion to satisfy our need to feel more secure. It is hard and humbling to realize that faith leads us not to security but vulnerability –that faith calls us to choose being in love over being right.

In his ministry and his teachings Jesus endeavored to put a little daylight between us and our righteousness. In Matthew’s gospel he starts out in a spectacular way – reversing all of those assumptions about which we are so certain that we need not even name them. We would not choose to be the poor in spirit, to be those who mourn, to be the meek, or those who are perpetually hungry in spirit. But, when Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount it is suddenly opposite day.
Sometimes gently, sometimes fiercely Jesus sets before us the truth both terrible and liberating that we are creatures who are wholly dependent on grace, and wholly interdependent with one another. Jesus holds out to us the salve of humility, which is the balm for all of our striving and all of our obsessive hankering after security. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

When I lived in San Francisco, I was a member of a tiny little Presbyterian Church. There was never quite enough money, and, what was more difficult, there was never quite enough people to do all the things that needed doing. As I was getting ready to move back here, that congregation was in the middle of an ridiculously ambitious capital campaign. Our beautiful Victorian 110 year old building had been damaged in the 1906 earthquake. We were the congregation of deferred maintenance. But finally, we got to the point where we had to remodel or close.
We considered closing. Then we voted to continue. The rebuilding would cost $5 million. If each of the 62 members wrote out a check for $80,645.16 we would be done. But, most of us didn’t have a spare $80,000.

So, our already over-burdened membership set out to raise a lot of money. What’s more, in order to complete the renovations, we had to move out of our church. We decamped to the chapel at a nearby hospital. People hadn’t exactly been beating down our doors when we worshipped in the beautiful Victorian church, but now, at the chapel, it was almost impossible for those much coveted new visitors to find us. You could call our decision to continue courageous, or you could call it absurd.

When I decided to move back here, I wanted nothing more than to find a church that would not be linked to the adjective “struggling.” I wanted to find a church where you could slip in on Sunday morning, shake hands with a few people, and leave again, with your anonymity mostly intact.
Yet, as if I needed more evidence that God has a vast appreciation for irony, the warmth and hospitality of this little struggling church got to me before I had even had time to experience the fun and freedom of being a church shopper.

I don’t mean to suggest that there is any inherent virtue in struggling – of having always to figure out how we will pay the bills, or who will serve on the Deacons, or bring treats for fellowship time. I’m only suggesting that we are, because of these things, relieved of the allusion of thinking that we are sufficient unto ourselves. We have the blessing of being reminded in real and substantial ways that we are dependent on God and on each other.

To be those who hunger and thirst for righteousness is to know that there is a way beyond our way. To hunger and thirst for righteousness is to finally come to know that to feed on our own righteousness is to fill up on empty calories.
To be meek then is not to be ashamed or small or groveling. It is only to be at peace with our place in the universe, not to be secure, but to be at home.

Let us be the church that would rather be in love.
Let us be the people who know the blessing of being at home in God’s grace.


Wednesday, February 19, 2014

A gift of a day


I am so excited about this - I had to share it.  
My congregation is hosting a sabbath experience on March 8-9, and here is the email people receive when they register.

A Message from Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church:
We're delighted you will be joining us to kick off your 24-hour Deep Breath!
This "retreat" experience begins at Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church and moves into your own home.  One of the reasons we are hosting this event is to help people experience sabbath time in your own ordinary life, as opposed to some place far away from your ordinary life.  To that end, we hope that by registering you have blocked out the full time - 4 pm Saturday until 6 pm on Sunday - and that you guard this time as you would a retreat you've driven 3 hours away to attend.  In other words, don't schedule anything overlapping, and think about how you might "pack" for such an event.

Here are some questions to help you "pack":
1. Consider what you would like to "leave behind" when you begin this experience. 
  • Would you bring your work laptop or papers to correct to a sabbath retreat away?
  • What about your cell phone, facebook, or the laundry?  
  • Would you want to spend that time away doing your taxes, preparing for your mother's visit, or fretting about a coworker conflict?  
What would it feel like a huge relief to leave behind for 24 hours?

2. Consider what you would like to "bring" to this experience. 
  • What activities give you joy or bring you rest?  Knitting, napping, drawing or dreaming, reading, or relaxing in the bath?  What do you need to do in advance to be ready to follow your heart if the moment arises - a good book? Some new yarn? A puzzle?  "Bring" those things to your sabbath retreat.
  • Food is part of your day.  Would you love a day not to cook? What can you get or do in advance to allow that? Would you love the chance to linger in the kitchen and create a lavish meal? What can you get or do in advance to allow that?
  • Who in your life will be sharing this experience with you?  Children? Spouse?  Friends? How can this day be a different kind of day for you all?  If you are alone a lot, consider spending part of the day with someone whose company you enjoy.  If you're around people a lot, consider finding a pocket of time each person in your house can do something alone, or plan an hour when everyone is quiet together (this CAN work with kids! - we'll talk about how, if you'd like!).  If you will be with a partner and/or kids, what do you enjoy doing as a family that you don't often make time to do?  What can you look forward to together?
What would it feel like a huge gift to be able to bring into your experience?

3. When the bus leaves...

Finally, the Jewish Sabbath begins right at sundown - not by a time on a clock or by someone's to-do list or when everything is finished and everyone is ready for it.  When the sun drops below the horizon, the Sabbath has begun. What is done is done, what is undone remains undone.  The important thing is that everything gets set down, so that space may be opened up within us and between us, to be met by God just as we are.
It is a day for being, instead of doing.

This means - even if the retreat day arrives and you have done no preparing, do not worry.  Get on the bus anyway - this day will be a blessing to you.  It really will!

And even if you get to the day and discover that while you "intended" to participate, some super important things came up and you simply do not have time, all the more reason you should be there and keep to the boundaries of your day set apart. Get on the bus anyway - this day will be a blessing to you.  It REALLY WILL.

Finally, as the day comes to a close on Sunday evening, we will provide you with a closing blessing to mark your transition back to ordinary time.  We will also have an online portal for participants to share about their experience with each other for those of you who would enjoy this.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have questions as the event approaches.

Peace, and we look forward to our time together!

Rev. Kara Root 

You could be getting this message too!
If this sounds really good to you - you probably need to join us.  
Find out more and Register at 24-hourdeepbreath.eventbrite.com

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Sadness Verbed



Beatitude Series - part 2

Blessed are those who mourn
for they shall be comforted.

Are you mourning?
When that question sinks in, when I really ask it to myself, I realize a more accurate question is this one, What are you mourning right now?
Take a minute and call it to mind and heart. Those things and people you are mourning.
Let’s invite them into the room so we can hear this alongside our mourning.

I am mourning a dear friend moving away and having a baby far from me, where I don’t get to be part of her life like I had dreamed of being.
I am mourning a relationship severed with dishonesty and pain and silence so extended that I no longer see how it can ever be mended.

But right now I am most mourning for my beloved foster nieces and nephews, who are about to leave the care of the only stability and family they’ve ever known, their home for 2 ½ years, and drop utterly unanchored into a dilapidated and defective Jackson County foster care system.  The family that was going to adopt them has backed out, and their future went from settled and hopeful to frightening and unknown. 

I am mourning for my sister and her husband, whose anticipation of the birth of their third child is overshadowed by their own desperate mourning for these children.  Mourning is all they can do – letting go, deep sadness and terrible grief, for what could have been and wont be, for what might be that they have no control to stop or hold back, for so much that feels outside of their power. 
And in their exhaustion and at the end of themselves, still the love is so big and their lives are so bound to these little ones, that the grief feels monstrous and never-ending.  
They are mourning.

And every single night my kids pray for a forever family for their foster cousins.  (And my daughter adds, “And may they live no further from us than church!”) But every day it continues as it is, with no end in sight.
And so we mourn.

And the world feels full to bursting with things that deserve mourning, that cry out to be mourned.
Blessed are those who mourn.  

When we began our series on The Beatitudes last week, we talked about the meaning of blessed- which is something like deeply contented, grounded and grateful, “in on the miracle.”  And we also noticed how the beatitudes are the beginning of a long Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, or, life as God means it to be shared.

He said life as God means it to be shared begins not with all we should do and how we should live, but right here, with blessing. 
It begins with being honored, and grateful, and in on the miracle.

And then he says that the ones who are in on the miracle are the poor in spirit- those with nothing in them to fake it, the unworthy and broken. 
Life as God means for it to be shared belongs to the wretched. 

Also in on the miracle?  Those who mourn. 
In life as God means for it to be shared, those who mourn are in on the miracle, for they will be comforted.

This word for mourn is gut-wrenching grief – it’s the strongest possible word for mourning.  Blessed are those who are in absolute abject despair.  
And comforted here is the strongest possible word for comforted – not comfort as in comfortable, like hanging out in a familiar place with a hot cup of tea and your feet propped up.  But comforted as in completely propped up on someone else’s strength. Comforted here is not a pat on the head and shush word, but a walk-alongside, holding up word, carrying with you the enormity of your burden.
Blessed are those who find themselves in gut-wrenching grief, because they will be held up and carried by someone else’s strength.  They discover life as God means for it to be shared.

Mourning in many times and cultures is an official act – a communal practice, designated by certain dress and behavior, bracketed by time frames and carried out with rituals.  Throughout history people have found ways to be “in mourning” for the loss of those they love.  But in our time and place, we’ve lost most of those customs – we no longer wear black for months or sit all night with the body of the departed, we don’t wear arm bands or exempt people from social obligations for certain lengths of time.  In fact, when great loss comes, most of us don’t know how to mourn. 

How long are we allowed to walk around crying before we should pull ourselves together? (Are we ever allowed to walk around crying?)
How much grief should we be leaking out onto others, and what should we politely keep to ourselves? 
What things will people deem worthy of true grief and what makes us seem silly or weak?

So we often keep our sadness pent up inside and private.  Whatever rules there used be that shaped a space for it, these days there is very little to guide us.   We get a funeral, a visitation, some meals from friends and cards from coworkers and distance from acquaintances.  And then things move on. 
Our sadness and grief is ours to do with what we will. 

But there’s a difference between sadness and mourning – sadness is a feeling, you can sit stagnant in sadness- you might have a shot at keeping sadness kind of in check.  You might be able to be sad and still fake it. 
But mourning is an action.  Mourning is grief in motion, sorrow exposed, emitted and shared.  Mourning is sadness made verb. 
There is no decently and in order way to mourn.
Mourning is a surrendering of control. It’s like the first step in AA – admitting you are powerless.  Mourning takes you down.  All the defenses crumble and you feel everything fully, raw and painful.  And instead of faking it, mourning is actively living in how not fine things are.
Blessed are you when your sadness is active and your grief is entered into and lived out.  You are the ones who will be comforted.

And so we hear for the second time inside these beatitudes, blessed are the real. 
Blessed are we when we live the way we’re wired to live.
When we cry when we’re sad and laugh when we’re happy and hold one another up when we’re falling, and lean on others when we’re weak. 
Mourning is an essential part of being human, and to live fully we need to mourn, just as we need to celebrate and we need to sleep and we need to eat.

Christ is among us as one who bears all suffering in himself, the one who walks alongside us holding us up in our suffering.  The way we experience this is the strong arms and backs of others.  When we walk alongside one another and offer our strength to them in our suffering – it is there that we encounter Godwithus.  And when we fall down in gut-wrenching loss and devastating grief and others lift us up and carry us on - it is there that we encounter Godwithus.

Jesus did not say blessed are those who mourn for they will find inner strength to triumph over their circumstances, or blessed are those who mourn for they will be delivered from the things that are causing them grief.
No, he said blessed are those who mourn for they will be joined in their grief and their circumstances. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be given the strength of others to carry them through.

Here we sit again in Epiphany, the season where Jesus is revealed, Godwithus is made known and God’s purposes are disclosed in this One who came to share life with us, who calls the whole world to share life with each other.  Here we sit again in the presence of the One who enters in. 
And, tonight we are told, in on this miracle are those buckling in grief, for they will be held in others’ strength.  They will be joined by God.

The kingdom of God – life as God means for it to be shared- is a not strong independence, and it is not escape out of pain.  Life as God means for it to be shared is dependence on God and on each other.  We belong to each other and we belong to God. The whole world. Everyone in it.  We are not meant to be in this alone.  When we mourn, we remember that; we discover it again.  

And when we mourn, we are speaking for the kingdom of God, because mourning is always about the loss of something that is essential to the life of God – love, belonging, hope.  When we grieve over what isn’t or what was and is now lost, we uphold the promise of what will be. Mourning honors and cherishes life.  It reminds us what we were made to share in.

I am with you. And one place you will especially know this, is when you mourn.   

If you want to see Jesus, to share in the kingdom of God here and now- if you want to be part of life as God means it to be, unfolding right before us and between us, be with someone who is mourning, let yourself mourn.  And you will be comforted.

Next weekend I get to go be with my sister’s family.  I get to be alongside my sister and her husband and join them where they are. 
I get to be in the presence of the blessed. 
Whatever that looks like and whatever unfolds, that is where I know God is.

Amen.


Prayer practice: 
We lit candles for those for whom, or alongside whom, we mourn.  
Our prayers tonight lifted up the names and situations we mourn, and the gratitude we have for those who share our burdens.


Part One of our Beatitude series, "The First Word" explores "Blessed are the Poor in Spirit..."




Friday, February 7, 2014

24-Hour Deep Breath (or, Why is Sabbath So HARD?)



One of the things we regularly notice, as we are "keeping Sabbath" around my house and in our congregation, is how hard it is.  You'd think that telling people to put things down and rest would sound like good news.  And it does sound like good news. But it is so not easy to do.  As Louis CK points out, we've kind of forgotten how to just be a person.

So, we need help not doing.
We need other people who are not doing with us, and who will check in and see how our not doing is going.
We need some help launching ourselves into a luxurious pile of not doing and then need help staying there, not crawling out to go do something when the urge arises - which happens like every forty seconds, at first.

Sabbath time is for rest.
It's for connection and play and quiet and things that bring you joy and feed your soul.
It is for stopping whatever ordinarily keeps you captive - work, worry, anxiety, unfinished projects, the ever present 'to do' list, mindless distractions and relentless multitasking, guilt and pressure to be 'productive'.  Just stopping all that.  Putting it down for a bit.  Just being a person.

And it is a time for space and spaciousness.
Slowed down and opened up.
Gentleness with yourself.
Noticing God's presence in the world.
Seeing these people you love right in front of your face who are usually mostly blocking your path while you're busy doing. Being a person with them.

The other thing is, though, that while it is super hard to keep to our commitment to not do for that day, we also keep finding that when we really do our not doing, something wonderful happens.
When we really allow ourselves to stop
and take a proper breath,
time seems to stretch out and welcome us in.
We are suddenly awake to our lives and the world, and the space we hold open fills up with gratitude.  We remember a little it's kind of great that we get to be a person, and God meets us in ordinary and extraordinary ways.
I am not exaggerating when I say this.  
This happens.

So, if you've never really tried sabbath in an intentional way, and would like to, or if you want to be launched into a Day of Not Doing with some direction and support, and some accountability that there are other people who've agreed to also not do and so you're in this thing together, I want to invite you to something.

Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church is hosting a 24-Hour Deep Breath.

This time around, it is for Twin Cities folks, and we've got 50 spots available.

How about it? Want to try out a day of Not Doing? 

Sunday, February 2, 2014

The First Word


Beatitude Series - part 1

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'

So begins the most memorable sermon of all time, that has shaped countless people and cultures and orators, the kind of speech the analysts sit around their news desks and continue to rave about and pick apart long after the cameras stop rolling, the one that people keep referring back to throughout time, holding up as a standard, memorizing lines from and weaving into their songs generations later without knowing where the words came from. 
The sermon on the mount is Jesus’ greatest hits album, it’s got:
You are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world. Let your light shine. 
If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
Let your yes be yes and your no be no.
Turn the other cheek. 
Love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you. 
Pray this way, ‘our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…’
Where your heart is, there your treasure will be also.
You cannot serve two masters – you cannot serve God and wealth.
Consider the lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin…. 
Seek first the kingdom of God.
Don’t worry about tomorrow -Today has enough trouble of its own. 
Do not judge lest you be judged. 
Before you tell someone they’ve got a splinter in their eye pull the log out of your own.
Ask and it shall be given, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened. 
Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. 
Enter through the narrow gate.  
‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock…
You will know them by their fruit.
You get the picture.
It’s like Shakespeare’s top monologues and one-liners all together in a single play.
And it’s also like the ten commandments, fleshed out.

In Matthew Jesus heads on up a mountain – like Moses - to deliver the new reality from God.  And the first time this happened God gave the people the law, freeing them from slavery and showing them reality with God in charge of them instead.  For this mountain speech, Godwithus fleshes it out, describing what reality with God in charge- the kingdom of God- is like.  Here is what life looks like when you’re living in God’s community and promise for the world. 

It’s a direct and at times harsh, and it’s also comforting and compelling, with lots of imperative commands – It calls people to respond and to act and tells people how to live.  And the beatitudes before us today are where the epic sermon begins.  The first preached words of Jesus’ ministry in Matthew begin with these.  Someone once said, “If the sermon on the mount is the constitution, the beatitudes are the preamble.”

First word?  Blessed.  As Happy, but not surface or cheery, more nuanced than that, more like, contented, grounded and grateful. Centered and awake, in touch with joy, honored. Blessed.
Blessed, it says, are those who are destitute in crushing spiritual poverty.  For the reality of God’s rule belongs to them.

OK, let’s just get one thing straight right out of the gate, Jesus says, this is not going to be what you thought it was.
So before I school you on the kingdom of God, before I spell out what’s what and give you some guidance on how to live in this reality, I want to tell you whom I especially came for. Whom I especially meet, who’s got the edge and is sitting pretty, and it’s these.  The miserable and the meek, the broken and the heartbroken.  They are the blessed ones.

This is so wildly uncomfortable for us that we’ve conveniently and ironically, turned the beatitudes into exactly what they are not – commands to be a certain way or feel a certain thing in order to achieve blessing- strive to be meek, make sure to hunger thirst for righteousness and be peacemaking mourners. 
The part of the epic sermon without a single command in it at all, the intro that is just a statement of fact, we’ve made into a list of things to strive for to get God’s blessing and approval. We want so badly to be strong, to be sure. We think religion or faith or God is supposed to make us more secure, and certainly everything else in life honors security and strength and prosperity and power. So this must just be God’s own way to get those things, right? And for our own sense of order and balance, we’ve turned the preamble into prerequisites.  “Be like this so you will be blessed.”
But that is not what they are at all.

Instead Jesus is saying the strangest thing.  Secure are the insecure.  Strong are the weak.  Grateful are the grievers. The reality I bring into the world belongs to them. They will see God.   “… nobody gets what they deserve but infinitely more.” as Buechner says, “Blessed is the one who gets the joke, who sees that miracle.”

What is this reign of God, this reality of the world with God in charge of it – what is the kingdom of God that has come among us and unfolds between us?  It is one of blessing. Of lifting up and honoring and breath catching in your chest gratitude and joy because you’re in on it. 
God is doing something in the world and God is doing something in you.  And the glimpse of that happens, the feeling of blessing comes, when we are most ready to receive it, when we are most in touch with reality as it really is.

Comparing can be a horrible poison.  So, when I hear, “poor in spirit,” I figure, it must mean somebody else who has it way worse than me, someone who is flattened by guilt and shame in a cycle of addiction, say, or completely incapable of kindness, shut down and hardened, or maybe someone utterly morally bankrupt and corrupt, or someone chronically selfish and ignorant who says hurtful things and constantly belittles others.  So I get to feel both morally superior – for not being as poor in spirit as that sorry schmuck, while also feeling slightly slighted: too bad this blessing doesn’t apply to me because I’m not in such a bad state.

But here’s the rub, I am sometimes so impoverished in spirit there’s nothing there but parched rage and hot shame.  Yesterday, for instance, I behaved terribly, and felt myself completely off the rails, letting my pride and disappointment, sadness and fury run loose and spill all over my kid.  And the momentary satisfaction of letting my anger run the show meant a whole day of feeling dirty and mortified and sad.  And I wanted to take it all back and couldn’t.   And all day the beatitudes are bouncing around inside me and blessed are the poor in spirit! rings out and I want to say, yeah right.  I do feel poor in spirit and I don’t deserve to be blessed. 
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven! 
Whatever.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Yup that’s me.
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
I don’t deserve that.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. 
I feel awful.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.  Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Stop. Hear it.
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the miserable, For Life as God means it to be belongs to them!
And suddenly I do hear it. And it feels like utter gift.

Life as God means for it to be shared belongs to those who can’t get it together. To those who are trapped in guilt and shame and addiction and are incapable of kindness and are utterly morally bankrupt and corrupt and are selfish and petty and who rage out at their kids and who feel trapped in cycles of disappointment and who suffer over what they can’t take back and who feel hopeless to keep it all together or seek God or practice faith or do good in the midst of their own failures and fallings. 
Blessed are they!
Life as God means for it to be shared belongs especially to them!

I want so badly to share life as God means for it to be with my kids. I want them to know they are loved, and to know that I know I am loved, and for all of us to live that way – in ourselves, with each other, in the world.  This promise, this is for me.  And it’s for you.

Henri Nouwen says, “Claiming your own blessedness always leads to a deep desire to bless others.”  Claiming our own blessedness makes us want to help others claim theirs.  
When I am poor in spirit I want the kingdom of God: love and patience, forgiveness and openness, kindness and hope.  I want to live in that and share it, and I feel impossibly, hopelessly far from it and piercingly aware that I can’t conjure it up on my own and I am utterly incapable of faking it at the moment.

Jesus goes up a mountain to tell the world what reality is like with God in charge, and he starts off the whole thing by saying, Blessed are you, then, when you feel the depths of your poverty and brokenness.  When it’s just emptiness and you. For you, is life as God means it to be shared, for you, is the community of people who get the joke, who are in on the miracle.  Honored are you indeed, for you are free to welcome life as God means it to be.


Amen.

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

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