Monday, August 18, 2014

to be human in the world

This has been a crazy summer to be human in the world.
I get that crazy stuff is happening all the time, and probably always has since the very beginning, but it feels crazier, or more urgent, or more relentless, or something, right now.  Part of it is the never ending stream of information and opinion and footage and interpretation flashing in our faces night and day.
OK, so that's probably a lot of it.
And we get so caught up in the frenzied whirlwind that we find ourselves disconnected from life.




Last Spring, a few weeks before school let out for the summer, the Spider Tree died. A beloved five trunk tree that has majestically and playfully graced the park near the elementary school in our neighborhood for decades, and made its way into local lore and art, lost one of its "legs" in a storm. Inspection revealed that the whole thing was rotten and had to come out.



It was devastating for the kids (and parents) - notes and cards were left on the stump, and on its mosaic likeness inside the school.  My daughter and son had to find a new meeting place to walk home together, since they always rendezvoused at the Spider Tree.



The other night our next door neighbors asked if we wanted to help with a project down at the park. We had nothing going on, so we picked up our shovels and gloves and marched down the street with tools over our shoulders like Snow White's dwarves.

It turns out that a group of parents had saved the trunks of the Spider Tree. They had talked with the principal and gotten a city permit, and were gathering to build a play area from boulders and the remains of the Spider Tree, circling the stump like a huge wagon wheel.  So we joined in.
Adults and kids, digging, pulling, laughing, sweating - it was what I imagine a barn raising had been like in an era gone by.

And besides the iPhones snapping photos (my own included), there was nothing technological about it, nothing that kept any of us plugged into the rest of the big world, or our own jobs, or urgent pressing matters, or anything other than that moment. We were working together as neighbors, on a project that would be enjoyed by others for decades to come.

That night we walked home sweaty and dirty and happy and connected.  And the world kept going for those few hours we weren't watching it.



Human beings were not made to bear the weight of the world, and we weren't wired to be "on" all the time, day and night, week after week, year after year.  We were designed, as the rest of nature was, to thrive in cycles of work and rest, connection and withdrawal, yield and dormancy.  But we've lost touch with that quite alarmingly - and it manifests in body illness and soul sickness, anxiety and stress, loneliness and exhaustion.


A few years ago I began to learn about Sabbath.  A few years ago, our congregation began trying to practice it together. Sabbath begins with the radical belief that God is God and we are not.
And that by stopping on purpose, we can remember that.  And by remembering that, we will be more whole people, more awake for our own lives, more present with our loved ones.  And by being more whole and awake and present, we will be better equipped to live as humans in a world that is terribly complicated to be living in at the moment.
Stopping on purpose makes us more creative, less fearful, more responsive to the needs around us and less reactive.  (There is a lot of actual research that proves all of these things). It actually makes us better, happier, more helpful citizens of this crazy world God loves.

But who has time for a "break"? "Sabbath" is a quaint idea from an era gone by, right?  How would you even know what to do or how to do it in today's day and age?  How wouldn't it just get eaten up by all the pressing tasks and blinking alerts and relentless demands that creep into our margins?

Here's how.
We are giving you a chance to take a Deep Breath and step away for a while.
For 24 hours, you can STOP.
 It's a retreat that you design.  It begins with a workshop on Sabbath, a worship service, and a delicious meal that prepares you for Sabbath and eases you in.  And it continues for 24 hours.


“Imagine for a moment that someone who cares about you has sent you a gift certificate for a day that is to be devoted entirely to the needs of your soul.  On that day you don’t have to work.  You can take a walk and have a relaxing conversation with friends or loved ones about the things that really matter.  You can meditate, pray, and read the books that speak to your soul.  You can nap and let your mind take a rest, or dance and sing and let your spirit sour. 
For one day, you can stop trying to prove yourself to the world.  You can look at your life as a blessing and feel at peace with where you are right now.  Instead of feeling fragmented and pressured, you can spend the day in a generous, positive, and contemplative mood.
Does this sound too good to be true?  You may be surprised to discover that this gift certificate...is actually the fourth commandment.”

Leonard Felder, The Ten Challenges, 82

Please join us.  Begin your Fall with a deep breath.
Come and find your way to be human in the world again.

Find out more.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

in need of a course correction




Don’t tell me no.

I have seen you

feed the thousands,

seen miracles spill

from your hands

like water,
like wine,

seen you with circles

and circles of crowds

pressed around you

and not one soul

turned away.
Don’t start with me.
I am saying

you can close the door

but I will keep knocking.

You can go silent

but I will keep shouting.

You can tighten the circle

but I will trace a bigger one

around you,

around the life of my child

who will tell you

no one surpasses a mother

for stubbornness.
I am saying

I know what you

can do with crumbs

and I am claiming mine,

every morsel and scrap

you have up your sleeve.

Unclench 
your hand,

your heart.

Let the scraps fall

like manna,
 
like mercy

for the life
 
of my child,
 
the life of

the world.
Don’t you tell me no.

Since we last saw Jesus, with the crowds at their kingdom of God feast in the deserted place, where they dined on absurd abundance in the face of the empire’s evil, Jesus has been a few more places, had a few more arguments, walked on some water, and healed a whole lot more people. From there, it says, he went to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 

From there he left the places where he was all the rage and went to a place where most self-respecting Jews wouldn’t wander, and probably few locals had the faintest clue who he was and even fewer cared.  Jesus went off grid a little ways, to the land of the Gentiles, the home of the others. A respite, maybe?  A break from the crowds? A chance to take a breather in place where, hopefully, he’d be a little ignored?

Just then a Cananite woman from that region came out and started shouting, Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon!

Now I don’t know about you, but I can barely stomach imagining the anguish of watching your child suffer relentless torment day in and day out, with no relief in sight. The fear and persistence of it, the struggle and the desire for something different, a hope for her, for wholeness, for a future, for something to end this agony. 
There are lots of mothers, and wives, and brothers, and fathers, and friends who watch a loved one living in torment day in and day out. So many stand alongside while depression carves a gaping hole in who she once was, or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder keep him locked in a cycle of despair, or addiction sinks in the talons and tightens its grip, so many stand by and wish they could help but feel utterly helpless, wish they could change things for her but feel completely at a loss.  What wouldn’t you do to see this one you love set free?

Love and desperation drive this mother, and she has done her research.  This one from Galilee may not be of her people, may not come from her storehouse of resources, or her list of approved vendors, but she has heard things, and there is no way on God’s green earth he is passing through her territory without her giving it a shot.
Have mercy on me!

But Jesus didn’t say a thing.  He did not answer her at all, it says.
It’s as though she’s not even there. Her cries go unheeded.  He keeps on walking.

Then this story gets way uglier.
After a few minutes, his road-weary disciples whine to him, Jesus, she’s bugging us with all that yelling. Tell her to go away.
So Jesus stops, and, I imagine him not even turning his head, staring straight ahead and saying into the air, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
In other words, Lady, Your problems are not my problem.

But God bless her, she will not be put off.
Instead she comes and kneels down right in front of him, and looks up into his face, and says, “Lord, help me.”

And here comes the really cringe-worthy part, Jesus looks down at her and answers, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.”

Jesus calls her a dog. And in the process, Jesus also implies that there is only a certain amount of what he has to go around, and he isn’t going to go wasting it, when there are more mouths than he seems able to feed already clamoring at the table.

Now, this is a very strange response, considering the feast he’d just presided over a few days earlier- where the abundant grace of God spilled out all over everyone with more leftover to spare. That meal of strangers made family where sharing actually seemed to increase the gift, and every person shared and every person was filled, and not a soul was excluded.

Now Jesus is standing in a foreign place away from the hometown crowds, with one single person at his feet, begging him for help, and all compassion, not to mention basic decency, seems to have left him.

I will just pause here to say this makes most of us really uncomfortable. We don’t like seeing Jesus like this and we don’t know what to do with it.  Some people try to explain away his behavior, to soften his words, to justify what’s happening here.  But the woman herself doesn’t bother with any of that.  The one standing in the place of suffering on behalf of her beloved daughter doesn’t hesitate to counter back to him,
Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.

And with this she grabs hold of her dignity and talks back to God. She does something bold and prophetic and incredibly challenging to Jesus. It’s as though she says, Fine, I’ll take the role of the dog in your scenario. But if a dog, then I am no feral stray, I am the beloved family pet, who sleeps with the children and sits at the master’s side. I am the master’s responsibility to care for, valued and belonging; this “dog” at your feet, sir, has a place in the household.

And with that brave and wickedly witty retort, she stops Jesus in his tracks. 
In that moment, he is forced to see her – in that moment her humanity is restored.  
She is no longer a hypothetical problem, a distant idea, a burden or a barrier in his path.  And she is not a dog at all, but a sister, a child of God who confronts him with her person, and now he cannot turn away.
So Jesus answers- Woman! How great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish! 
And that instant her daughter is healed.

This Gentile Canaanite woman, the absolute other to the Jewish Messiah, is the only person in the gospels to win an argument with Jesus.  And in this moment, she is the prophetic voice of God, the cosmic course correction in Jesus’ unfolding ministry, that who you thought you came for, and what you’re here to do, may not be as simple and clearcut as all that, and a few chapters later, by the end of Matthew, Jesus is sending his disciples out with the mandate to make disciples of all nations.

By answering Jesus as she does, the desperate mother shifts Jesus out of ideological commitments to personal encounter.  He is taken from the hypothetical religious ideas – I came for the house of Israel – to the personal and human and personal reality – she is my sister and her daughter is suffering and she is asking for my help and I can help her.

And when the shift happens, from ideological commitments to personal encounter, instead of exclusion, suddenly there is inclusion.  Instead of defining people as other, they are brothers and sisters, instead of seeing what we don’t have to give, we do whatever we can to share.  When ideological commitments give way to personal encounter, we are forced to see the person in front of us and be a person ourselves, and in this meeting, God meets us.

The danger of this time for the church is the turn away from the person to the ideological.  And in this week we feel that pull especially forcefully.  The death of Robin Williams thrust depression and mental illness front and center, and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the fourth unarmed young black man to be killed by police in this nation inside of a month, and the ongoing protests and intermittent violence still happening there brings our utter brokenness and our nation’s deep, underlying racism right to the surface.
This week, when the massacres of whole villages of Christian and Yazidi men, women and children by ISIS militants in the mountains of Iraq and the terrifying spread of Ebola sweeping West Africa are the horrifying if not faint backdrop to these stories of national grief and anger, and the 24 hour news cycle bombards us with nonstop commentary and images, and exposes us to far more than we could ever take in, it is important for us to hear this.

What we are called as a Church to pay attention to and notice, as followers of this Jewish Messiah, what should raise our heads and stop us in our tracks, isn’t terrible disease or lack proper medical help, it isn’t political struggle and corruption, or genocide, and it isn’t depression, or racism, or inequality.
The course correction we are prophetically called by the events of our day to drop whatever is in front of us and turn our whole selves toward is real persons, real persons who suffer and yearn for life so deeply that they will take the crumbs

We are called to see and embrace real persons, like you and like me, who have value and worth and are loved, and who stand before us as children of God, with their suffering right there in their hands, demanding that we see them as human beings and hold onto them. 
Real persons who are relentlessly tormented by depression. 
Real persons who are forced to bury their 18 year old boy.  
Real persons who fail alarmingly in their duty to serve and protect. 
Real persons whose live are sacrificed to senseless war or lost to violent sickness or smothered beneath layers of cold bureaucracy. 

Ideologies make us into others from each other, sorting people into friend and enemy and indifferent distraction, and they divide our needs out neatly into categories of “important” and “not my problem.”  They give us the power to judge and dismiss, to stand righteous in our cause and let the chips fall where they may.  Ideologies let the Savior of the world stroll through enemy territory ignoring the cries of a desperate mother. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with believing in a cause.  But when the cause becomes the thing, so much so that it allows us to place it above the very human being confronting us, sinner and saint, a holy mess of contradictions and need, hopes and horrors – when a cause allows us to ignore or dismiss or destroy a person, any person, we are in need of a prophetic course correction.

Following Jesus, it turns out, is not about an ideological commitment, and it is not a call to hold to certain principles and beliefs.  It is a call to join your life to the One who came for us all, the one who comes for real persons, who comes into our suffering and our brokenness, and especially we who long for life so deeply we will gladly take crumbs.
It is a call to see the real persons before us, in their full personhood, dignity, worth and need, and stand on their behalf, to share what we have, and to welcome them in so deeply it might even change us and the direction of our lives.

I have no theological answers for this week, and there is no ideology that can reason our way out of the heartbreaking events surrounding us this day. 

But I do know of one thing.

There is a great and mighty Biblical tradition of lament. 
Of crying out to God in distress and anguish and insisting that we be heard.  And this is a deeply faithful way to stand alongside real persons. 
This is not slapping solutions onto them like they are problems to fix, not rallying a cry around them like they are mascots for a cause, and not psychoanalyzing them like they are issues to be blamed.

It begins with listening deeply to the anguish of real people and refusing to turn away to the ideologies that remove us from the suffering, or the beliefs that keep us safely in our heads.  It begins with the persons in front of us and beside us, and around us, bearing great anguish and great joy, and worthy of great love, claiming their place in the household of God, and demanding by their presence that we take them into our hearts and our prayers, messing with our lives in the process.

There is a great Biblical tradition of yelling back at God, the patriarchs argued for God’s character to be honored and faithfulness to be revealed, the prophets told it like it is, human’s hopeless destructive violence, and God’s promise to restore and redeem instead of raining down the judgment we clearly deserve. 
Come, Lord Jesus, Maranatha!
Christ, Have mercy! Christe Eleison!
Lord, help me!  Don’t you tell me no!

So today, let’s step into that great and faithful Biblical tradition, and stand with the Canaanite woman, and demand crumbs for our tormented daughters and sisters and selves and brothers and fathers, nearby and far away.
Let’s take into ourselves their cries of suffering. Bearing in our very souls the anguish they carry, and holding it up for God to see.  Giving voice to the pain of those whose weeping has grown hoarse, wrapping our arms around those who are stumbling, and laying our hands upon those who march fearfully into the fray of another day and telling them with our bodies and our breath that they are not alone. 

Let’s not be afraid to talk back to Jesus, to remind God that we are all God’s children and the world needs a hearty helping of God’s abundant grace, that every person might share, and every person might be filled, and not a soul might be excluded from the feast. 

Let us pray for each other, sisters and brothers.  Let us pray for the life of the world.

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Absurd, Subversive Feasting



It’s a pretty cool trick to have a bunch of food appear to feed thousands of people when there was only a very little bit to begin with.  Besides the Resurrection, the Feeding of the Five Thousand is the only miracle that appears in all four gospels; it’s a super important story for the early church and clearly meant to give us a glimpse of who God is and what it means to be disciples.  And as bible stories go, it’s pretty tame and unassuming, so we love to tell it to children. It’s not scandalous or disturbing, and it has a happy ending too! 
What’s not to like?

Once, in the middle of what was the darkest and most wretched period of my life (so far), I had a conversation with my sister about an experience of unexpected and inexplicable blessing from God.  She was in the middle of a prayer meeting and some people suddenly got gold teeth. A miracle of the Holy Spirit, I guess, just to say God loves us.  She told me that, and how it had impacted her, and then I hung up in the phone and got in the car and a few minutes later drove past the worst car accident scene I had ever witnessed, complete with a bloody sheet-covered gurney.  And I wondered, deeply raging, wailing wonder, what kind of God this is that we have?  And what God could possibly be up to on this earth, or not?

Our text begins, “Now when Jesus heard this...”  Heard what?  When Jesus heard that his cousin, John the Baptist, who had been in prison, had just been beheaded, and his head delivered to Herod on a platter in the middle of a extravagant and vulgar dinner party – when he had heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place.

 And who wouldn’t?  
What else in the world is there to do?  
The utter horror and shock; the terrible helplessness and loss. This can’t be undone. 
John is gone, his cousin, his friend, the one who knew who Jesus was from before he was born – leaping in recognition in his mother Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of pregnant Mary’s voice, the one who declared the news in the wilderness that the Messiah is coming, and plunged God incarnate under the waters of baptism, the one whose whole life was about proclaiming God’s kingdom come and announcing that Jesus had arrived, this John has just died a pointless, disgusting, inexplicable death, as a pawn in a gluttonous game of revenge and power.

How could this happen? 
How did God allow it? How could it not be stopped? What could it mean?
Who is this God? And what could God possibly be up to on this earth, or not?

So Jesus withdraws to a deserted place. 
After all his teaching about the Kingdom of God, always surrounded by people, so many words, so much touching, all that talking and healing, everyone wanting a piece of him and he having much to give -  when he hears that John is dead, he goes off to be alone. And who could blame him?

But the crowds catch wind of his little escape attempt, so on foot they go ahead, like clingy toddlers they flood his alone place and his apart time with their need and their clamoring, their sheer mass, the overwhelming sound, smell, the hungry obligation of them. 

He has every right, here and now, to absolutely lose it. To tell them all to go away. To tell the disciples to make them leave him alone.  To turn the boat around and float alone in the waves for hours until he regains his composure, until he has some peace and quiet.

But when Jesus sees the crowd, it says, he has compassion on them, and cures their sick.  He brings the boat ashore and goes to them and stays there with them, each one.  What’s your name? What do you need?  How can I help? I see you. God sees you.  Be healed. Go and be well. You are set free.  Find new life, my friend. How long have you struggled with this? It ends today.  Peace to you.

As the day stretches toward night the disciples start getting worried – I imagine as much about Jesus as about the hungry crowds without a port-o-potty or vendor stand for miles around, so they tell Jesus to send the crowds away so they can find food for themselves in the villages.  A very sound piece of advice, if you ask me. But Jesus answers, They need not go away-you feed them.

There are two meals in this chapter of Matthew.  At the first meal a corrupt and cruel leader who wields the power of the empire for personal gain, thinks little of using death for entertainment or personal reward, and a good and faithful person dies.  That feels really big and really powerful.
And then comes the second meal, where, out on the edge of nowhere, Jesus unexpectedly feeds 5000 plus people with a few pieces of bread and fish. 

And I have to admit, seeing these back to back, at first a part of me wonders, is this meal some kind of l gold teeth to the world’s traffic accidents? Some kind of feel-good, flash in the pan miracle in the face of life-ending tragedy? 
Who is this God?  And what could God possibly be up to on this earth, or not?

Israel and Palestine are locked in a bitter and terrible cycle of destruction, oppression and death, and innocent people are dying daily.  Terrified kids are fleeing danger in their countries and traveling to our borders for safety, and finding themselves in a precarious place with no future clear.  Ebola creeps through villages and neighborhoods in West Africa, and cancer ravages loved ones, or alcoholism, or mental illness.  What can we do in the face of injustice and evil – on a global scale or right here in our own lives?  Where is God in the middle of all of this? 

It was incredibly vulnerable for Jesus to be with the crowds that day.  He was grieving, his cousin was dead, evil had dealt a harsh blow.  But in his vulnerability, he met them in theirs.  In his humanity he reached out to theirs.  In his own need and dependence on God, he saw them as God sees them – beloved and valued.  The Son of God looks on the crushing crowd of humanity and, even in grief and the desire to be alone, Jesus is moved with compassion, and goes to be with them, touches their sick and their dying, bringing new life to them all.  And then they are fed a banquet of unexpected abundance.

The power that brought the world into being, is here, among them, healing the sick, and providing their bread for today, until all, every single one of them, to the last man, woman, and child, is fed until full, and there are leftovers galore.  Food enough for all.  Like no meal in memory, a meal of promises past and hope futured.  An impromptu feast that in every way threatens the powers that be, uncontrolled, unrestricted, unearned and unexpected.  That night all receive and are fed. 

And the people, out there in the deserted place, far from the center of commerce and empire, sit down on the grass like one enormous picnicking family, and dine on manna.  Like the Israelites in exile, the crowd is fed at the hand of God and drawn into the promise of the story larger than themselves, encompassing history and future and a love that is stronger than death.  A very different kind of dinner party than the one before it.

We here today will share a meal in a few minutes, a feast that seems almost silly, really, bread and grape juice in the face of starvation and sickness, a meal of symbolism and signs while the real violence rages and scared children get caught in the crosshairs, and our own lives threaten to brim over from time to time with pain and injustice and fear. 

In this feast we are reminded that Jesus himself was broken for us, even alongside us, instead of saving us out of the world’s pain, God joins us inside of it, that all might be saved.  In this feast we receive that gift of God’s love, and in even our own brokenness we are called to share that gift in the world.
But what can we do about the evil and the sadness, the injustice and the hopelessness? What can we do? What could Jesus do about his cousin’s death at the hands of a tyrant?  Nothing.  And also everything. 

We could go away, bury our heads in the sand of a deserted place, and wish these things didn’t happen. Or we could watch Jesus join the people, moved with compassion, and we could join him, listening to the needs around us and within us, receiving the meal he offers and reaching out and sharing that gift with others in real and concrete ways. 
We can let love direct us instead of fear, let God set the terms for how life is supposed to go instead of evil and brokenness and sin.  Don’t send them away, he said, you feed them.  And hey, disciples, you will feed them. I will give you the food and you will distribute it to all, as each one has need.

Gathered here today at our little absurd and subversive feast, we are like those gathered on that grass that night at their absurd and subversive feast, finding themselves plopped down next to a sister who has been healed and a neighbor who has found hope, and thousands of other strangers who are now roommates in this world God is creating anew.  And I imagine that evening the picture must have looked pretty big, the lens pretty pulled back, as the God who promised way back when to your ancestors in the wilderness to provide and lead and love and save, leans down and looks you in the eye, and hands you a piece of fish and a crust of bread, and you take some and eat, and turn and pass it on down the line.

There is a power greater than death, a force greater than evil.  And it comes not to the powerful but to the weak, and it comes not through force but through compassion.  Instead of wielding death, it brings life. Instead of revenge it heals, instead of retribution it births hope.
And there is a feast more abundant than the most lavish and excessive meals of the empire, a different kind of meal.  Instead of gluttony, it grows generosity, instead of greed, it draws all to freely give.  And instead of playing people against each other it brings all people together and reminds us that we are one, that we belong to each other and that we belong to God. 
There is so much more going on than what we can see. God’s rule is utterly different than human rule, and God’s realm is breaking in in unstoppable ways.  Love endures to the end, and love will prevail.  
That is who our God is, and that is what God is up to in this world.
May we receive and be filled. May we share and the world be healed.
Amen.




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...