in the hereandnow

The Free Life

2012-01-29T16:14:00.000-06:00

What we usually think of

Once, when Owen was four, and Maisy was yet two, we had a moment that made me realize what the Ten Commandments were all about.

In a fit of frustration with his baby sister, Owen threw a Star Wars action figure at her. In our house, throwing something (other than a soft, squishy ball) leads to an immediate time out. After his grueling four minutes in the torturous time out chair, I knelt down in front of him and asked him if he knew why he had to sit there.

This is a routine that happened, by the way, daily, and several times a day on bad days. I did not expect him to engage me, and hoped only that repetition of these consequences would cause him to figure that it wasn’t worth it, and give up on throwing things as a means to get his way. So far it hadn’t happened that way, but forge ahead I did.

So I asked him if he knew why he was on time out, and he said, “Because I threw something at Maisy. Sorry.” But something stopped me this time, and since I had his attention along with his contrition, I asked him, “Owen, do you know WHY we don’t throw things in this house?” He looked at me, big eyes and pensive stare, “Why?”

“We have that rule because we want this house to be a safe place for everyone to play, a place where everyone is protected and free to have fun. You, Maisy, Mommy and Daddy, and even people who visit us. If people were allowed to throw things here, nobody would be safe or protected, or be able to play without being afraid. That’s why we can’t have any throwing.

Do you think that is a good rule for us to have?”

And he paused, then he nodded.

Then he said, with a very concerned face, “Mommy, that’s a good rule. But I forget! I forget what to do when Maisy touches my things! So I just throw things at her!”

And I promised that next time she touched his things, I would help him remember to tell her NO, then ask me to help get her away. Because just as we don’t throw things, we also don’t take other people’s things without asking. And he left satisfied.

Last week we saw our Israelites fresh into the wilderness, their liminal space, caught between where they’d been and where they were going, and adjusting to the vacuum of structure and order.

This week we catch up with them when they’ve reached the base of Mt. Sinai, and set up camp there that would end up lasting two years. And their leader, Moses, keeps disappearing up this mountain to talk with God. He comes back and tells them all to be ready, because God is going to appear. Then it happens – the ground shakes, the mountain billows smoke and a trumpet blares, the whole camp trembles with fear, and God speaks.

We call this portion of scripture “The Ten Commandments” –and to a person, I’d be willing to bet we picture Charleton Heston clutching the stone tablets, his gray hair and beard shining as he gazes at the heavens.

Or we think of tombstone shaped faux stone, with Roman numerals down them – a Sunday school prop. Or the fight to a few years ago to have them displayed in a courthouse. We may pause and search our memory banks, straining to get them straight in our heads like state capitols or books of the Bible – the point is, we’ve at least encountered them before.

And chances are that if we are honest, other than seeing them as a distant ethical code, or simple Bible trivia – they haven’t impacted us all that much.

In Hebrew they are referred to as, “The ten words” , and they are the foundation to all the laws and teaching of the prophets that follow in the Torah. More than that, these ten words are to define the Israelites.

God said these are the things that will characterize you as a people, as my people. They are not worded as suggestions or guidelines, requests - these are descriptive – they describe the way this new life they will build together will work. No contingency plan, simply the way it is. Period.

They are grounded first in God – who God is and what God has done for them. The first word that shapes all others is: I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt – and gave you water and food and fed you and parted the red sea and destroyed the Egyptian army and guided you day and night across the dessert – that is all implied here as well.

I am the God that saved you and claimed you as my own and guided and protected you. That’s me – and now, here’ s you – you wont serve other gods, you wont covet or steal or murder or commit adultery.

These people, 400 years in slavery, are used to being told what to do. They are punished when they don’t obey, their wills don’t factor into it at all, they are slaves.

There is no such thing as choice, they are not seen as human, they are valued only for what they provide and do, and are basically disposable. And now, suddenly and quite dramatically, they are given freedom.

They are given personhood, ontology, being – being in relation to each other, being in relation to God. They are valued for who they are and claimed as God’s own. They have an identity, and they have freedom.

My kids and I used to spend quite a bit of time in the summers at Como Zoo. It is only about 2 miles from my house, and admission is free, so almost once a week, we park outside the gates and load up the stroller and spend a few hours visiting the monkeys and gorillas, lions and giraffes, zebras and sea lions.

Sparky the sea lion is not the Sparky from when I was a kid, in fact, I think we are about 4 Sparkys removed – as the offspring of the offspring of Sparky carry on the title and perform as Sparky. For decades and generations these sea lions and the other zoo animals have been raised in captivity – their parents were born into captivity and their grandparents too.

I wonder what would happen if these animals were one day, for whatever reason, released?

The zebras’ gates thrown open, and the buffalo prodded out to the grasses beyond the walls, the penguins waddling down Como Ave.

They wouldn’t have a clue what to do, how to find food, where to sleep, even what it feels like to venture beyond the 20 x 20 walls they’ve only ever known. Many of them would not survive for long.

With the move from Egypt to the Wilderness -these Israelites are dramatically and irreversibly thrust into a radically different way of life, perhaps imagined, but never experienced.

Slaves for generations, now suddenly, they find themselves with no rulers, no forced labor, no mandates dictating their daily activity. They are free.

When God gives them the Ten Words, this isn’t about exchanging one set of rules for another. This is the contrast between slavery and freedom.

The rules in freedom are rules for life, for liberation, not for enslavement and oppression. These are rules for the promised land – filled with promise.

Here is what it looks like in the promised land, what it will be like in the home I give to you. Here is what life looks like when done in a way that honors and respects people, all people, in a safe place where everyone can grow, and play, and not be afraid.

This is not a burden on you – taking away your freedom. This is your freedom. Freedom to live for God and one another. Where everyone matters and who you are gets to breathe, and thrive.

This is a description of life in my house.

The 10 Commandments is more than a list of rules, something to be displayed in a courthouse, a standard to hopelessly aspire to, or measure yourself against.

Rather than the orders of a bossy God who is just trying to tell people what to do and dictate their lives, the ten commandments are a promise: this is what life can and should be like.

They are the house rules of a life of freedom.

Hear again the ten words God gives the people of Israel as they are descriptions of the home God makes for God’s people:

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt.

I am your deliverance and your freedom. You are not on your own, facing the elements and the enemies by yourself. I am in charge here, and I delivered you out of slavery and into freedom. You can trust me.

You will not have other gods before me.

You are not to be a slave to anything else – nothing else can dictate who you are, you’ve been freed from slavery. Not money or power, not self-promotion or personal security, not your work or your reputation. Nothing else defines you – I am your God, and I made you free.

Make no idols for yourself – and no images of me.

You cannot possess me or control me, and as soon as you try you make yourselves slaves again to an idea of your own making.

I am not a political party or a stance on an issue, I am not a way of worshipping or a particular denomination.

I am not what you make me to be with your songs and your prayers and your stained glass windows and your infighting. I am always more.

No box can hold me, I am free to be mystery, to be encountered instead of encapsulated.

Don’t take my name in vain.

I am not something to be used to back your point or vent your frustration.

Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy.

Keep perspective and balance, everything does not depend on you, and your life is about more than work and what you do, or produce, or contribute. It is about who you are as my people. Remember that. Choosing to remember that is a discipline that needs practice, or it will be forgotten.

Honor your parents and your life will be long in the land I am giving to you. Cherish those who gave you life and nurtured you, respect them and esteem them. And those you raise and love will do the same for you as well - there is a generational cycle of love and respect and honor that characterizes life in this home – this place values past and anticipates future.

You will not murder.

You are human beings, persons made in my image, not a workforce, not possessions, not a number, or a credit score, or a diagnosis or a burden. Each one of you is sacred, your life is valuable - not to be tossed away or taken away, precious and irreplaceable.

You will not commit adultery.

Your relationships will never betray or trivialize someone. Within your relationships you will be safe and respected, you can trust the bonds you have, they are real.

You will not steal.

You can be assured that in this home what is yours will never be taken from you unfairly.

You will not falsely testify against another.

The truth about you or anyone else will never be sacrificed in order for someone to “win”. Everyone’s integrity and personhood will be upheld, so that matters can be decided honestly and fairly.

You will not covet your neighbor’s house, or spouse or kids or car or job or vacation home or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Jealousy, greed and envy have no place in this home. Everyone has what they need, and we all live in awareness of our blessings, in joy and gratitude. We have not become slaves to things, we’re all different, and our relationships come before the things we have.

This is the home God makes for us, the life God gives to us and calls us into– the life of freedom, liberation from slavery.

We make ourselves slaves to so many things.

We allow things to define us and our lives – and this is a way of fear, not of freedom. We are slaves to schedules and deadlines, to consumer pressure to buy, own, accumulate. To people’s expectations and self-imposed obligations, to habits and traditions, to the systems and markets and structures we’ve set up. These things should support our lives, but often they rule our lives.

But God delivers us from slavery into freedom – and describes the perimeters of that freedom, the way it is cultivated and maintained, shared and spread.

When you break it down it sounds like a list of rules. Follow the rules so you don’t get punished. And fresh from slavery and newly, bewilderingly freed, maybe that is the way the Israelites needed to hear it at the time. Truthfully, it is the way we all need to hear it sometimes. You will not throw things at your sister. PERIOD.

But the bigger picture is that this list of rules is a description of life, and a promise of hope, the way we were meant to live, freed by God to live for God and for others.

Today we gather at the table in communion, with the Church, the Household of God – all over the world in congregations of all denominations, all cultures and languages, people are coming before God, with their own fears and doubts, their hopes and their failings, their joys and their very lives.

And together as one we are celebrating the freedom God brings us in Christ. At home at God’s table: We are breaking the bread of the body and lifting the cup of the blood and speaking out the promise of God’s love and liberation for the world.

And as we remember the promise, we pray that it would live in us, that we would see it realized in and among us, and share its reality in the world that God claims and loves, until the day we are all at home in God.

Amen.

The Wilderness of In-Between

2012-01-22T08:59:00.001-06:00

Image from a stunning collection by Clare Benson

This reflection draws from all of Exodus...

but especially Exodus 1:6-22

& Exodus 15:20-6:8

And the Hebrew people are delivered from slavery in Egypt to…?

No, not the Promised Land. Not just yet, anyway.

First, the wilderness.

What’s the point of the wilderness? What is God up to? What is the reason for the wilderness? In the story of the exodus, the story that defines a people and a God, the actual exodus - as in the leaving itself - is never separated from the wilderness. The wandering in the wilderness is somehow part of the deliverance.

There is this word that came up for me around this story, Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"). Originally studied as a middle part of a rite of passage, "a liminal place is defined as “a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes.”

...It refers to in-between situations and conditions that are characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes”.

So I am intrigued by the wilderness, this “in between” they get delivered to. This threshold.

When Andy and I graduated from seminary I was awarded the “Parish Pulpit Fellowship” for excellence in preaching and commitment to parish ministry. What it basically meant was that some anonymous donors were awarding us $21,000 to travel and study, to supplement what I had learned in seminary with a broader, experiential education utterly of my own choosing.

So we packed up everything we owned into a 15 x15 storage unit, surrendered our apartment, forwarded our mail to a PO box, put our student loans on hold, and filled a few bags with just a tad more than we could carry and essentially dropped off the grid for six months.

We traveled around the whole world, heading west. Beginning in Fiji and Hawaii, we stopped off in Australia for three months, and then progressed through Egypt and Israel to Europe, where we bounced around from country to country, currency to currency, language to language with nothing but the packs on our backs for two months, ending in Britain, and eventually returning to Southern California via New York City. When we left for the trip we had been married just over a year.

But here’s the thing – it sounds really exciting, and it was, at times. At other times it was incredibly boring. We were living on a shoestring and spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week with each other. We had no bills to pay, or errands to run, no communities we belonged to, no family, no friends, no expectations on us whatsoever, and at times the time seemed to stretch on forever. The adrenaline withdrawal in those first four weeks was nearly enough to drive me mad.

Not only was the experience foreign to anything we had ever known, and without all the normal things of a normal life, we were living in true liminality. The season of life we had been living in was concluded, and our future had not yet unfolded. Nothing awaited us when we returned- we did not have a home or jobs to come back to, and all of our friends had graduated when we did and moved away to start their new lives elsewhere.

The life we had known as students with part time jobs and full time studying and a breakneck pace had come to a screeching halt when we boarded that plane. And what would greet us upon our return remained a mystery.

But some things happened in that liminal space. Parts of me that had died before I left were let go, and the space opened up within me to see myself in a new way, to be redefined, reoriented, rearranged.

After the exhilaration of Fiji and Hawaii, we landed in a flat in Melbourne, Australia for a couple of months. While we were there Andy was working on his second graduate degree, so he was studying 7 hours a day and I was alone to occupy my time in a strange city with no connections or routines. Having been through a painful and difficult time in the months before our trip, I didn’t trust God much when we set out on this journey. And now, when I wasn’t distracted by sightseeing or spouse, I was stuck alone with God for hours and hours every day.

I would walk through parks and sit in a coffee shop called “Lana’s” with my journal and vent my jittery anxiety and restlessness until I was settled enough to sit still. And then I would feel open and alert.

I can still remember the feel of the air on the streets of Melbourne, and the sound of the streetcars and the smell of the eucalyptus trees. I was awake. Present. Coming back into myself, meeting God again.

And on that trip, in our extended liminal state, Andy and I learned a ton about living with each other. We learned how to share. We learned how an introvert and an extrovert can coexist; how to respect each other’s space, and how to find space for ourselves in unfamiliar terrain. We learned how to budget, down to the penny, how to keep track of expenses and juggle plane tickets and train tickets and meals on a set amount that needed to stretch the globe.

We discovered that most of our fights happened when we went too long without food, and that anger is often directly triggered by hunger and fatigue. Without alarm clocks or obligations, we learned our own and one another’s sleep rhythms, and our most productive times of day, and we discovered just how much capacity we each had for adventure and ancient ruins before we’d need a big mac and internet cafe. We learned who was better with the map and who was better with the train timetables and how to tell each other over someone’s head with just a look that no, this hostel is probably not where we want to stay and yes, I’m right behind you if you bolt for the door right now.

Through sea sickness and homesickness and heartsickness and tons of laughter and a few tears and lots and lots of walking side by side we learned things about life together in relationship that would have taken us years to figure out if the lessons were diluted with jobs and friends and schedules and bills and all the joys and struggles of ordinary life. But in this intense liminality they were melded into us our being, and our being with each other, deeply and wordlessly, simply by the heat of constant proximity and duration.

And when we came home, without really knowing how I got there, I knew who I was and where I was going. It was on this trip that I knew I was going to come back and be a minister. And we knew we would both surrender our hodge podge religious backgrounds and become Presbyterian. And Andy knew he’d do a Ph.D. and go on to teach. It took us all of 18 hours from the time our plane touched down to find an apartment and sign a lease. And by the end of the weekend we were moved in and filling out applications, so eager we were to begin the next phase of our lives.

Now granted, we were not in a “wilderness” –as it is often described - I have known in my life times of suffering and loss, wondering where God is and what could possibly be the meaning of this. This had been a time of healing and rebuilding for me, not one of tearing down. And there are lots of ways to explore the wilderness as just that, as the Dark Night of the Soul and the place of loss. But I am fascinated, at this telling of the story, by the wilderness as a liminal place, by its function as a threshold, an in-between spot, where both tearing down and building up occur. And how often God’s movement of us from slavery to freedom, for whatever reason, involves wilderness.

In order to be the people of God, the Hebrews have to stop being the people of Pharaoh. You can take the people out of bondage to oppression, fear and mistrust, but it might take a wilderness to take the bondage to oppression, fear and mistrust out of the people. That is to say, just because God saves them doesn’t mean they are suddenly fundamentally different. The wilderness is filled with complaining and fear. The urge to self-preservation is intense, the lack of cohesion and unity is palpable, and the distrust of God and Moses incessant.

So here they are, in this in-between place, for 40 years. Letting go of the old, not yet ready to step into the new – existing between two existential planes- their identity in suspension, the death of all they’ve known behind them and the future yet unborn. They are no longer slaves. They are not yet free.

The wilderness is their detox, their reset button, their school of identity and purpose. They need to meet God again. They need to meet themselves again.

The people are going to have to get to know God out here where it is just them and God, face to face, for an extended period of time without any distractions, good or bad. Who they are and where they go from here depends on this. They cannot live as free people in a promised land if they carry their slavery within. They must rely on God, and come to trust in God’s love and care for them, God’s relentless FOR-them-ness, God’s promise to be a different kind of Lord than the Lord they have known in Egypt.

The wilderness is the place where there is complete dissolution of order as they have known it – and bad as it had been, at least it was order! But in the process, the new structures are being constructed within them that they do not yet realize.

And later on, they will look back and decide that this time – as hard as it was, as disorienting and uncomfortable and confusing as it was, was the most formative experience of their entire corporate existence. That all of who they are and how they live together came from this time.

And even more, this time defined for them who God is. No longer is God “the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. Now God is “I AM the God who delivered you out of the land of Egypt,” The God who will continue to care for them, even in the times when the promises seem hard to see and they feel all but forgotten.

And then, throughout the rest of scripture and through Jewish history the story of God’s provision in the wilderness became, especially during the exile, a source of great hope and identity. It defined them as a people cared for by God, and taught them how to be this people with each other. And it reintroduced them to God who is steadfast, even when we can’t see the way. God who provides when it all looks hopeless. God who leads us and never lets us go, even when we doubt and question and test. Remembering this story that defined and shaped them sustained them through future times of struggle, hopelessness and the unknown.

Who is God? Who are we? Who am I? Those are the questions that God’s story continues to explore, answering them in different ways as the story changes. But when our liminal stages come, – whether huge, drop off the grid-type wilderness experiences, or small, ordinary ones like the school ending or jobs beginning or new circumstances arriving on the scene - these are the questions that get front and center treatment. “Who am I? Who are we? Who is God?” echo all throughout the thresholds and in-betweens.

And most especially when it feels like we’re not going anywhere, when we’ve lost a sense of purpose, and what used to be is impossible to return to, (and even if it wasn’t that great we long for it because it was familiar), and what’s ahead is undefined and intimidating, but mostly we’re sick of feeling like we’re treading water and going nowhere -

Take heart.

You’re on a threshold. You’re in between. Something is dying and something new is being born. Something is being worked out of you to prepare you for what you’re meant to be and do.

The real struggle and challenge and promise and invitation of the wilderness is trust. Trust in the steadfast love of the God who is leading you. Trust that you will not lose yourself forever. Trust that you are being held in the purpose of God, and that on the other side of this you will be changed.

And even when you don’t feel trusting, and you can’t really say you know God is there, (for THIS part of the journey anyway), you’re not in charge and you can’t just step out of the wilderness when you feel like it. So settle in for however long a haul it turns out to be with the God who is relentlessly FOR you.

And don’t be scared to dwell for a time in the questions of the liminal state, for they are ultimately a gift:

Who is God?

Who are we?

Who are you?

It begins with a bath

2012-01-15T15:46:00.002-06:00

Genesis 1:1-5

Mark 1:9-11

When Maisy was first born, just after the drama subsided -- when the hospital room was cleaned up and cleared out, the staff off tending to some other birth and Andy gone to check on Owen -- and I was alone with this tiny stranger bundled in my arms, the nurse came in and asked me if I would like to give my new daughter a bath.

I had not been asked this when Owen was born, he had been bathed efficiently on the other side of the room while I was being tended to and was given back to me all soft and warm and fresh. So I didn’t really know what I was being asked. “Yes” I answered, “I would love to.”

To my surprise, the nurse went into the bathroom next to me and began filling the enormous tub with warm water. ‘Now you just come and get in here, and I will hand her to you.” she said.

So I set Maisy on my pillow and slid out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom. I took off my gown and carefully lowered my aching and traumatized body into the water. When I was sitting comfortably the nurse unwrapped Maisy from her blankets and removed her impossibly small diaper, and then reached over and handed me this 5 lb 5 oz creature that practically fit in her one hand.

Maisy woke up from the shock of the cold air as she was being unswaddled and handed over, and she squirmed and cried out in my arms- her little voice stretching her new vocal chords. I propped up my knees and rested her on my legs so I could study her little face, hold and examine each spindly limb, and then she relaxed, her fingers finding her mouth and her eyes peeking open just a crack.

I began dribbling water over her belly and arms with a washcloth, scooping it in my hand and pouring it down her hair, where it ran past her ears and onto her small, soft shoulders. I gently massaged shampoo on her head and between her fingers and toes.

And I absolutely marveled in wonder at meeting her this way.

“Hi.” I said. “You’re Maisy. And I’m your mommy. And I love you SO MUCH.”

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. And God spoke, out of the chaos of the waters God made life, and called it good, and so began the Story.

Fast forward to this moment, when Jesus stands before John in the river Jordan, the water rushing gently past his legs, those who’d gone before him dripping on the shores ahead and those behind him waiting dry and dusty in the sun.

The time comes and Jesus’ knees fold under him and he feels John’s hands supporting his back. His eyes close and he drops, with a rush of cool he is underneath. Darkness beneath, except the dancing of light refracted through the water, the sounds above muffled but the rushing in his ears, his body buoyant, his breath held. For one split second he relaxes, quiet, still, as though dead, lost to the world above, and then John’s hands, lifting him back out, the breaking of the surface with light and sound and air, his lungs fill with a gasp and his feet find a place underneath him again. The water runs down his face and shoulders and he blinks and opens his eyes.

And then the heavens tear open.

“Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down!” They cried, the prophets of old, with all the longing of a people for a savior, yearning for God to come to them.

And the Spirit descends upon him like a bird coming swiftly and steadily to land – he feels the weight and warmth on his head, even. And then the voice. A voice penetrating his whole being. You. You are my son. And I love you SO MUCH.

It begins at the water. And we come back here every year just after Epiphany, to stand on the banks and watch him be baptized. After the light of the world penetrates the darkness and spreads over the earth. After God comes in to join us in the life God so delightedly set in motion- we come to this moment when the prophets’ plea is answered and the heavens are torn open, and the gift given to the world is standing in the waters between his childhood and his ministry: the beginning of Jesus’ activity of God in the world.

I love the image of God incognito, submitting to baptism for repentance of sins, just like any one of us. I love that he is quite passive in this story, he is pressed into the deep by the prophet who proclaimed his coming, called out by the voice of the Divine who spoke the Word at creation, and propelled out of the water into his calling by the Holy Spirit. Welcome to it, Jesus, life happens to you. That’s how it is when you come to share humanity’s place. And so he is baptized into our life of death, as we will be baptized into his death and new life.

I love the image of the waters of creation, flowing over the earth, dividing into oceans, then lakes and rivers, flowing millennia through the land, pumping out of deep springs and carving paths through rock and field and now rushing down the Jordan, against the human knees of Word made flesh. In these waters of the beginning he finds his new purpose. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Mark says. (Mark 1:1)

Now in the waters of the earth he is cleansed and claimed, blessed and named.

And so are we.

Whether you were baptized as a baby, utterly unaware of what occurred, or you came into the waters on your own two legs, by choice submitting to the blessing, what happened from there was God’s work. Holding you in the broad arms of the community of faith, God spoke words of truth to you with human voices, and by water and the Holy Spirit, God named you and claimed you as God’s own.

Hi. God said. You are my beloved, and I am your God, and I love you SO MUCH.

And then like the Word bringing life and the story beginning anew, before anything else, belonging to God became what defined you. Your journey for the rest of your life comes from this starting point. The Spirit indwells you and compels you to follow. To discover in every phase and relationship, every loss and every connection, every one of life’s endings and beginnings what this means for you, how you are meant to share in God’s love for the world.

In the mystery of this moment, in the water of the earth, God claimed you and marked you as Christ’s own forever.

And so, when we gather in this place, and sit here between font and table- between the waters that give us life and the bread of life that feeds us, we remember who we are, and to whom we belong.

I read this week that we live in a homeless kind of time, a rootless, placeless kind of existence. Our own homes are the places we stop off to sleep, passing others as they come and go, sometimes eating there but not always. Our places of origin have mostly changed or disappeared, we’re always, it seems, on the move, in transition.

To be people of hospitality, this author argued, we need a place from which to reach out and meet others.

This is that place. This is our home. Not the physical location, but the claim of God on our lives- as the community that gathers in the love of God and shares the story of God, the water and bread and wine and prayer that summon us to find our selves again in the blessing of God.

And so as we begin again, each year, in our own lives and in the life together of this congregation, we come back to the place of our beginning. Because whatever happens to you from here, whatever else in this world would try to claim you or name you, would try to tell you who you are and how you are defined, this truth remains and can never be removed: You belong to the God who shares our place. We have been cleansed and claimed, blessed and named. In life and in death, we belong to God.

This makes us brave and open, able to share our lives with others, able to enter into even their darkness and pain. Being held in the love of God allows us to hold others there as well.

So come to the font where we are cleansed and claimed, blessed and named.

Come to the table where we are fed and freed.

Find here again your life, in the life of God lived for us and with us.

Find here again your purpose, in the love of God lived in us and through us.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Reflecting on a year...

2012-01-13T16:09:00.000-06:00

I always struggle to write my "annual report" as a pastor. It is so hard to put into words our life together in the past year, to succinctly wrap up what I sense God has been up to in us. But the deadline comes around every year just the same, and somehow I feel able, in the end, to at least give a little snapshot after all.

So, here is my take on 2011 in the year of Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church...

Thanks be to God.

Rise and Shine, you seekers of mystery and hope

2012-01-08T07:34:00.000-06:00

Isaiah 60:1-6

Matthew 2:1-12

You sit here tonight – all Christmassed out, new years resolutions maybe already broken, in this weird, depressingly Springish January, where the earth never has yet been covered in the clean white magic of winter and we have to keep seeing the muddy dry brown bristling up everywhere, you sit here tonight in your ordinariness and the world’s occasional dreariness, and whether you see it or not, whether you know it or not, you are the decedents of Magi, offspring of mystery-seekers.

The Story we tell tonight is as much your story as any story you may ever hear, because tonight we tell about how God moves out of the manger and into the world, permeating our lives and every nook and cranny of this ordinary existence.

So to start, forget what you know about the magi. Magi, as in magicians. They were not kings. There were not three of them. They were not from the orient. They were sorcerers, tarot card readers, dabblers in magic, astrologers, pagan philosophers. Decidedly NOT Jewish. Clearly foreign. Foreign looking, foreign speaking, foreign thinking, foreigners.

The king of the Jews has been born, the Messiah of Israel, the chosen One of the chosen ones. And other than, as far as we know, some random rural sheep herders, and Anna & Simeon – elderly eccentrics whose whole life was on the lookout for God’s coming - nobody so far seems to know who this kid is.

That’s another thing. Kid. As in, toddler. No kings crowding around the manger with their camels tied up outside next to the sheep, fresh off an angel-drenched hillside. This journey took some time. Jesus was maybe walking, maybe talking. Mary and Joseph had been living normally in this strange miracle for some time when the knock came at the door.

The whole village coming out to see, or peeking out between the curtains on their windows, the gossip lines abuzz when the dazzling caravan of foreigners rolls into town and right up to the young couple’s doorstep.

That hadn’t been their first stop. A star hanging directly above a village is not the most precise indicator of destination. And they didn’t have google maps with the pin dropped right on Joseph’s house, number 4 carpenter lane. They, naturally, stopped by the palace.

“Where is this divine royal child?” They asked the king. “We have come to honor him!,” And they moved on from there a little stupefied that the king knew nothing of this.

What must it have been like to travel for months on end, guided by a belief, convinced by a picture of where God and the cosmos and all of history was leading you, only to find out, well, this might not be quite what we thought?

I have to admire the openness with which these summoned ones continued their search. The tenacity with which they hunted. OK, so he’s not in the palace? Fine. We’ll look for him in the streets, door to door, village to village, until we find him. How many people did they ask along the way? How many stops did they make before they found the little family? Did they stay the night in the Bethlehem Inn - perhaps tying up their camels after all in the quiet little stable out back? Did the innkeeper tell them over dinner the strange tale of the night his stable was invaded by shepherds and noise and mess and the Lord of creation?

And what when they saw him? This God incarnate, this chubby, flesh and blood boy? Overwhelmed with joy, the text says. Overcome, bowled over, engulfed in elation. Tears and laughter, universal expression in foreign tongue: before them the journey’s culmination, a lifetime’s zenith. The heavens and earth conspiring to point to this unthinkable conclusion, this drooling delight in front of their eyes.

And how was it for Mary? For Joseph? “Welcome, unexpected surprise! Unfathomable guests!”

What was he thinking when he went out to draw water for their camels and fill the jugs to wash the dusty strangers’ foreign feet?

What was she feeling when the mystical, mystified guests gathered at her table and lifted her familiar food to their exotic mouths?

Neighbors couldn’t guess what these of other language and land shared in common with the two of them. How could they know these ones were kindred in the secret, connected by the promise to which they were privy?

Epiphany: Light. Awareness. New direction. Inspiration. They sat there that night illuminated, by the star and the Light of the World.

And when the visit was over, the meeting fulfilled, the message confirmed, they packed up to return home. By another way, by the way.

Not one step of this journey could have been anticipated. So what would their return bring?

How does epiphany change you?

For one, you don’t return to Herod. Kings are nothing. Monarchs, money, power, politics, pshaw! You’ve bowed before a higher authority! You’ve glimpsed a greater reality! You’ve met the eternal mystery! What sway can the powers of this realm hold over you? You’re changed; your journey has changed. So you return home by another way.

And I also imagine you’re a little more open to the journey. A little more ready for divine surprises, for startling revelations and life-altering, course-changing encounters. Who knows when they’ll pop up next? And who can guess where they’ll take you after that?

And now that the light has come, come in the darkness, what ordinary occurrence isn’t connected to the next? What daily moment isn’t infused with the holy? What conversation or connection or situation isn’t part of God’s scheme of salvation?

I think it’s safe to assume that some of the Magi walked away from this encounter genuinely altered, and spent the rest of their lives fueled by this epiphany, open to God’s ongoing appearing, interfering, investing. Looking for it, sharing in it, spreading the word about it.

Perhaps they died fulfilled in having seen the salvation of God and believing that the whole world was filled with God’s light, and though the trajectory is often hidden, we are irreversibly heading toward something spectacular.

But I would venture to guess that others had a different experience. Light illuminates a lot of things, not all of them pretty. It puts a demand on you with what it exposes. It forces you to look at the shadows, it asks you to notice the dim places. Sometimes it’s easier to just avoid the light, to dodge it’s glare, to put your head back down, duck back into the shadows and try to regain a sense of life before epiphany invaded things and changed everything… because even though the light has come, there is still more than enough darkness to go around. So some may have chalked it up to an isolated, grand adventure and then never spoken of the event again. Safer that way.

And Mary? Joseph? When the bedding was washed and the dishes put away and the yard cleaned up of camel dung and the dust of the caravan long out of town, what did it mean for them?

How did they absorb the realization that their baby Messiah to the Jews turned out to be here for something bigger than their minds could even have conceived of, than anyone had ever imagined before? The whole world, it turned out, has a stake in this story.

For all their innumerable differences, there may have been real tears as they waved goodbye to their strange and esteemed guests from afar, real grief as they placed the container of frankincense on the mantle.

For as much as the magi themselves had journeyed to reach their epiphany, they had carried epiphany with them to Mary and Joseph, and in their meeting something happened.

They were connected, companions in awareness, brought together by Christ, and they separated now, related in a way no others yet were. Wherever their journeys would bring them all after this, they would likely never bring them together again.

And for Mary and Joseph, in the days to come - the troubling days, the ordinary days, the days that made them question the whole thing, and the days they would spend on their own dusty and fearful journey - perhaps their consolation was to look again at the gifts left behind by their visitors from a foreign land and remember that someone out there, far away, also knew the truth. And this mystery held them as well.

So, you who sit here tonight, you companions in awareness, brought together by Christ: Arise, shine! Your light has come, you epiphany-bearers, mystery-sharers, journeyers in the Story! The glory of the Lord has risen upon you. It pulls you from your seat and beckons you into the world.

The trajectory is set, the journey beckons, and your own Story, in all of it’s accidental glory and spectacular ordinariness, is a conduit of the Divine Light come into the world which cannot be extinguished. So be ready, you strange and foreign people, for nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. Lift up your eyes and look around, seek epiphany, the presence of God that comes to us in surprising and unusually common ways, through unexpected people, every day.

And once in a while, may the delight of it all bring you to your knees before the unexpected Savior with your gifts.

Then you shall see and be radiant, you shall thrill and rejoice,

for God has come, God is here. Now and forever. Thanks be to God.

The Astonishing Event

2011-12-24T18:50:00.001-06:00

God. the Creator, the One who spoke into nothing and made everything...

God, had everything been leading up to this? It was so radical that nobody would have thought to even wonder if it might be possible. So fantastic, so incomprehensible a move this would be, that all the hinting in the world couldn’t have brought it to mind for anyone. It was inconceivable. Ludicrous, even. Unthinkable, Impossible.

Ah, but remember? Impossibility is God’s most favorite territory, this Artist’s most preferred medium.

And so the time came for her to deliver.

The time came for the timeless one to enter time. For the Creator to get created. To go from beyond to being, from apart to within. From invincible to oh, so very vulnerable.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Nothing would be allowed any longer to separate God from the ones God loves.

No more.

This is it.

How to prepare? What will it feel like?

To be one of them, with them, so completely, to dwell within, inhabit, to become flesh. To see human life from the inside, to taste and smell all the things they do, to touch them, to cry the tears of your image-bearers…

Conceiving of it all was one thing.

Creating it, imagining what they would need, how they would live, and making them for it, watching them in their joy and their struggle, enjoying them and grieving with them, and wishing, always yearning, to be closer, to be connected. But making it all, seeing it all. That was one thing. And that was something. That was something indeed. But this, to be what you made –to join them there, to share it all, this is something else entirely.

And now the moment was here. Finally here. God must have been giddy.

And then it happened.

In pain and confusion, a collision of fear and joy, raw animal instinct and desperate human ingenuity, the extraordinary, ordinary, astonishing event occurred.

I wonder what it was like to draw that first breath? To smell the sharp scent of animals and hear the cacophony of creature sounds and the gentle voices giving you your name. To feel the scratchy hay, the soft bands of cloth, the strong arms holding you steady, the kiss of a father’s beard, the thump of a mother’s heart beating against your brand new cheek.

But then, no new baby remembers their first things, do they?

The barrier is broken, people. God has come.

The world will never be the same.

And neither will God.

Being where we'd never choose to be

2011-12-11T09:30:00.002-06:00

Psalm 126

Matthew 1:18-30

There are times in life, (we might even say most of life is this way), when things do not go like we’ve planned them to go. When we find ourselves in utterly new territory, somewhere unimagined, un-planned for, even undesired.

There are times in life when life directs us more than we direct our lives, and factors outside of ourselves make the decisions for us about where we are going to go, or what we are going to do, and even, who we are going to be.

This is certainly the case for Joseph. Joseph is not the lead character in this story, so he doesn’t get a lot of press, but even so, he is essential. The family line of David comes through him, not through Mary – so the prophecies aren’t fulfilled without him. He is to be the father of this child, the human parent adopting God as God has adopted all of us. That’s a little mind-boggling. And yet, Mary at least is given the news awake and in person when an angel stands before her – she at least has the illusion of control and agrees to participate in this scheme. She is able to ask questions and get clarification about God’s plans and how they might affect her.

But Joseph’s first inkling that his well-laid plans are meaningless occurs when he finds out Mary is knocked up.

The Christmas story – the story of God-with-us - begins with scandal and infidelity (or the strong appearance of infidelity) to this marriage, which was yet to be made complete. For some reason, when God comes, God comes not only in impossibility– bringing to mind the creation of the universe from nothing, and life and promise from all the barren wombs of old - by taking up residence inside a virgin - but God also doesn’t seem to mind much what people think about it. Controversy and the appearance of guilt, the suggestion of wrong-doing cling all over this couple, and would have over just her if Joseph hadn’t decided to go through with the marriage anyway.

We’ve got the Christmas story all soft-lens sentimentalized and “holy”, but these are real people with real relationships and expectations and emotions and secrets, and it couldn’t have felt saintly and nostalgic to Joseph. It must have been a cold shock, betrayal, horror, anger, deep hurt.

And Joseph doesn’t even get the first-person conversation, the chance to decline before the wheels are set in motion; he finds out secondhand that this is his fate. Stone her, divorce her quietly, or go along with this whether you want to or not. Some hand dealt to him.

And then he has a dream, which puts things in a much different light. And when he awakes he makes his choice. He says yes to the path he is already on anyway, and agrees to jump in - with all the implications thereof: the guilt it paints him with, the change of his own plans and life direction. In this unexpected, unwanted life interruption, Joseph finds his new calling.

Would he have said yes to this role if he were asked ahead of time? If he knew what was coming and had a real choice? The fleeing to Egypt to protect his small family from Herod, the returning to Nazareth years later to start all over again, the worry and stress and burden of shepherding this miracle through childhood and adolescence - the enigma of raising God, disciplining God, parenting God, what must that do to you? Would he have said yes to all of it? Would we?

When you look back at your life, knowing now how painful or challenging some of the things you’ve walked through have been, would you have said yes to them before they came?

Lucky for us, we don’t have the choice, most of the time, to say yes to all of it, but we usually do have the choice to say yes to one little step in front of us. The one little thing within the bigger picture – for Joseph it was, don’t be afraid to take her as your wife. That’s it. Stick with your plans. Marry her anyway.

And he does. And his life goes in a massively different direction than he ever could have imagined- than anyone could.

How do we participate with God in life? Where do we see God? Really, concretely, can you see God in life? Where? How? I think perhaps, like Joseph, sometimes we see God when we choose to be where we already are. When we decide to open our eyes and our hearts to the possibility that even though we never would have chosen this, we’ll live here anyway. We’ll invest ourselves in this new thing that is our life at the moment.

I’ve shared with you about my sister and her husband and their 8 year old son’s surprising foray into foster care. They went through the process of entering the system with the dream of one day adopting, and they have found themselves instead with a household full of children that can’t belong to them – a baby and her 2 and 4 year old siblings, and another 2 year old, all with various needs and sufferings. Abuse, neglect, night terrors and developmental delays - my sister’s days are filled with all manner of surprising and unexpected turns. Court visits, home visits, supervised parental visits, doctor visits, and babies visiting college finals.

My sister is exhausted, juggling the child who can’t sleep in the same room as another with the one who can’t sleep alone, the one who cries at night and the one who screams at night and the one who wakes up at 5 am to go and shake the rest of the household awake and bellow at the dogs. This isn’t remotely what they imagined.

But she finds herself in the night, when everyone else is asleep, rocking this sweet baby, with her deep mahogany skin and soft dark curls, resting peacefully in my sister’s arms, she finds herself suddenly wondering how she got to be so lucky. What had she done to deserve this moment? Holding this little beating heart in a warm bundle in her arms while the moon looks on? She catches herself, between the fatigue and the chaos, suddenly hearing or seeing one of these little ones in their joy, or in their fear, a moment of washing a foamy head or buckling a small lap into a carseat, and she realizes that she is alive, connected, even, for the moment, contented.

And I see her, in a situation I could never imagine being in, and one she could never have thought she could handle, and she is somehow thriving, her little family is in this together, making space in their home and hearts for these tiny lives passing through. Being this haven for them.

And, like Joseph, (and most of us if we’re really living in love), she takes on guilt too. She is part of a system that is broken, failing them almost as much as it rescues them - she sees how complicated all of it is and that she will eventually give them up too, eventually let them down, and no matter how hard she tries, she can’t save them. Was it enough? Of course not. But it’s something. And while she can’t tell you with any certainty what will happen tomorrow – how many her household will hold a week from now or six months from now – she has said yes to where she is, and God has met her within it.

This is God-with-us, God who comes in. And God doesn’t always, or usually, give advance warning or veto power. God will do what God will do.

But also, there are no circumstances, no situations, no lives that are outside of God’s incarnation – no places or people with whom God is not already involved, already there, alongside.

And so often God, life, other people’s choices- or a messy cocktail of all these factors and more - puts us in a place we never would have chosen for ourselves, opens a door and shoves us in a direction that frightens us, angers us, challenges or intrigues us, and then slams the door shut behind us and we’re stranded there - in this new and unrecognizable place, where everything about us looks different in the strange light, and the smell is unfamiliar, and we aren’t sure what to do.

And while we have no choice, we do have a choice. To say yes to where we are. Or not to. And I am not even suggesting that the only faithful response is to say yes, necessarily, to wherever this bend in the road takes you. It might be more faithful to kick and flail and resist with all your might, to die resisting.

But perhaps, in some of these moments, you are invited to plant your feet, fill your lungs with air and look the moment squarely in the face and introduce yourself. We’re going to get to know one another, you and I. We’re going to figure out how to live together, how to share the fridge and take down each other’s messages, because I’m apparently not going anywhere and nether are you, cancer, unemployment, new relationship, empty household.

And there is a freedom that comes from relenting. From choosing, from saying yes to where you already are – even if you didn’t plan ahead of time to be there. Because the truth is, God can only be found right where you are. God is not stuck in the past or dangling out the future, and God isn’t writing out some perfect plan you are expected to find and follow – God is right here, in the moment, in the situation, as confusing or unexpected as it may be. You can only really see and welcome God when you let yourself open your eyes and your heart and be where you are.

This looks different for everyone, but is an invitation for us all.

I have asked a couple of people what it was like for them to be somewhere they didn’t choose, face something they never wanted.

Diane shares her experience this way:

Last May I discovered a lump in my breast. I had a mammogram and a biopsy and was informed it was breast cancer. When I learned of the cancer it was a little hard to believe. I didn't feel sick or look different. Than I got caught up in the swirl of doctor appointments and tests and treatment discussions. I didn't feel overwhelmed or depressed, and I just wanted to get on with it.

I expected to not feel well part of the time and not be able to continue doing all the things I usually do. But I did expect to continue with most of my work and activities. I thought I would probably join a support group, but then found that there were so many people that I knew or knew of that had had breast cancer that I could just talk with them.

Having breast cancer has affected me a lot with time and scheduling. I have lots of doctor and treatment appointments and they take priority over other things. And I have a good excuse not to do things I don't feel like doing. My experience is tremendously affected by my body responding well to chemotherapy and the surgery going well. My progress has given me lots of hope that I will recover. Had I had setbacks or not responded well to the treatments, I would not feel as hopeful.

I am grateful that God is part of my life and is there for me. Also grateful that God has been somewhere in the medical advances that have helped me so much. God's presence created a sense of peace that no matter what happens God is there. I will probably feel the absence of God if I don't continue to recover, or if the cancer returns.

I feel like I will be a stronger person after this. There are issues with my business and my family that I will be making some changes in. Part of that is realizing that life is short and I can't be passive or tolerant about things I am uncomfortable or unhappy with. The future is right now. It is no longer way off in the distance.

I don't know how it has changed my relationship with God. This is yet to come and I will be thinking about my relationship with God, family and friends more than I have before.

This month, Barb watched her son, David head down to Florida to face a felony drunk driving charge. She shared about it this way:

The day of David's trial I prayed for a miracle. Jail time and no felony, time served and no jail, many different outcomes than the actual and deserved verdict. I wanted the phone to show a picture of David when it rang then I would know that he was at his Florida home and safe from all of the dangers he would face in prison. When the call did come and the number was friends of ours who had spent the day with David in court, my heart just stopped and so many thoughts and feelings rushed in that I thought my heart would burst. It was like a part of me died.

Before the trial I had spent a lot of time wondering if only I had been a better mom, if only his father hadn't died, all of the what ifs. Knowing that no matter how much I loved my son, this time I could not fix anything, I just had to stand by and let all of the pain unfold. My mind told me that what happened in court was for the best, but my heart cried for all of the what ifs.

I have encountered God with a ton of prayer. I rely on him to keep David safe. I do not feel an absence of God, I just know that he is always with me, even when I have pulled away from life God is with this sometimes crazy mixed up person. I may at times be absent, but God has a way of finding me and pulling me back to just where I belong. That may not be where I want to be but I can accept and live with that, given time to think things through.

I do not spend too much time thinking about my future because that who knows if the future is tonight or many years from now. It is very bad medicine for me to go any further than this moment. The future is now.

I have been through some pretty ugly stuff in my life and it was only by God’s grace that I was able to get through it. There have been so many times that I unknowingly put God on a shelf and then realized I had not prayed or thought of him in a very long time, it is usually when I realize that, that pain and sadness has been replaced with the gift of joy and a happy heart. Right now today it is difficult to stop the tears and pain but I do know that no matter who I shut out of my life God will remain steadfast because I am his creation and he loves me very much.

This is the week of Advent that we focus on joy. The week we talk about joy in the waiting. But as we look at the story of Joseph – at our own lives when we find ourselves in something we don’t choose to be in – as someone said to me earlier this week, joy would be a stretch.

But that’s just it, isn’t it?

Joy is a stretch.

It comes when we’re not expecting it, when we’re right in the middle of the sorrow or the fatigue, and suddenly the tiny head shifts on our arm, or the gratitude for family and friends, for the gift of living, floods in and takes us by surprise. And joy stretches us starting right where we are into a moment of eternity.

God is in the midst of it. Whatever it is. Always. That’s the promise we celebrate and anticipate in this season.

So let us join our voices with Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist and the Prophets and, not knowing how it might change our lives or what it might do to us, let’s say anyway,

Come, Lord Jesus.

A special thank you to Callie, Barb, and Diane, for honoring us with the sacredness of their stories.

Prophets and Preparers

2011-12-04T13:10:00.002-06:00

John the Baptist, oil painting by Jack Baumgartner, used with permission.

Isaiah 40:1-11

Mark 1:1-8

What is John the Baptist doing in Advent? Wouldn’t he still be crawling around on the floor when the first Christmas rolls around? And yet he is a central figure of Advent, the one who prepares the way, or who cries out, “prepare the way!”, depending on where you put your quotation marks, so both, really. The grown-up John who comes into the scene after Jesus is grown up too, bellowing in the wilderness about what God was about to do, what God was already doing without us even knowing it... What’s he doing here?

Who are you John? You Advent invader…

What do you think about out there when the crowds have gone home and the stars are glowing above you and the sounds of the desert creatures and the wind are all the noise that’s left? What keeps you awake, tossing and turning? What gets you up in the morning, for another day of camel hair and locusts and yelling yourself hoarse with passion and fire?

You are pissing people off, you know. You don’t live much longer than this – you’ll die soon for telling Herod like it is and calling him out on his adulterous marriage. And you don’t get much sympathy from the establishment after your criticism of them and your direct competition – baptism for repentance? Really? The people can get that in the temple. The grace and forgiveness of God is already available. For a fee… But you do it for free? All the while saying something greater is brewing and you’re just a sideshow, a warm-up act?

I’m sure you heard the story over and over in your childhood, in those few short years your ancient parents had left - between all their prophet grooming, their stories of prophets of old and messages to Israel and encouragement to listen, listen, for the voice of God, the surprise of God that would bring life to deadened wombs and laughter to creaky voices, lay mountains low and raise valleys up, bringing hope and wholeness – between all of that I am certain you heard tell time and again of when Mary came to see your mom, the moment the fetus you bumped belly homes with the embryonic Messiah, as you jumped for joy, recognizing already that everything was changing and there was nothing to do but celebrate it.

And the messages, all those prophets swimming in your mind, taught to you from Torah, spoken in story from your priest father and your devout mother – it must have meant more to you than to others…

did you three carry this secret promise, this crazy truth that you had come from impossibility and God had broken in and nobody knew it yet but the time was coming when they would all see…?

Did you ever forget? And wake up knowing there was something to remember and then have the truth wash over you in wonder once again? That God was making good on all those promises of old, that God was coming in.

Did you recognize him in the prophesies? Jesus, I mean. Did he seem like the one? Tell the truth now – was he just so ordinary? Or did you know all along?

What was it like, by the way, the day he came to the river, the day you plunged him under the water and the sky opened up and the voice of God claimed him? After the elation that it had come at last, were you psyched to retire? Be finished with your message? Or was it anti-climactic? Or disillusioning? Who are you now once the one you’ve prepared the way for has arrived in our midst?

If you knew then what you know now, would it all have gone the same?

Mark begins all of it with you, you know. “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God,” then he has you bursting out like you could contain the secret in silence no longer, the message ripening within your young body and mind until you had to get out of the city, flee to the wilderness and give the message room to breathe, give it space to expand or it would swallow you and everything else with its magnitude, power and incredibility.

The others don’t begin with you – Luke and Matthew, they tell Jesus’ genealogy and his birth, and the book of John starts with the very, very beginning, with the Word of creation, but Mark starts with you.

Where would you begin the story?– I bet you’d go back to those prophets – your lifeblood, your mother’s milk, your father’s breath in your ear, whispering their messages and hope.

You’d begin the story by saying there were those who said it was coming… remember those voices? Remember those promises? Then you’d say, It’s true. It’s coming. It’s already begun. You spoke fantastic visions as well, baptized with the Holy Spirit? The very Spirit that hovered over the water at Creation claiming and cleaning us? Now? It was a fact, you spoke these things like they were a fact – preached the future with a present tense. With a bold confidence. Perhaps because you yourself had come from the impossibility that was becoming. You believed it and made them believe it too.

I heard someone say once that ‘Repentance is what happens to us when the truth of who we are and who God is enters our lives and scatters the darkness of competing ideas.’ (N.B.W) What did it look like to see so much repentance on people? Could you see it in their eyes? Was it relief? Joy? The darkness scattering, the truth seeping in… Did their faces change as the light entered their lives? Did people feel lighter coming up out of the water than they did going down? Did seeing it strengthen your own hope and belief?

Did you know how they looked at you? How they saw you? You must have. You dressed like Elijah, you sounded like Isaiah, you were a prophet and the people came. They came from far and wide to hear you, catch a glimpse of that modern day prophet who was just like the ones of old. But the others thought you were dangerous, crazy, threatening. Did that bother you? Once someone well-known and respected who spoke in front of crowds told me that what was hardest was the admiration, being admired, because you feel you either have to live up to people’s expectations or disabuse them of their notions, is that how you felt? Is that why you were always so quick and forceful to point out that it wasn’t about you at all, that you were paving the way, clearing the clutter, making the paths straight because the one who would bring life to the world was coming -?

I know what’s ahead for you too, John – when you’re in prison and you hear about what Jesus is doing and you send your people to Jesus to ask if he “really is the one who is to come or if we should wait for another?”, when you question if it all really is real. Even you! That doubt and fear are such an integral part of faith that even YOU wondered, faltered, you, who told everyone else it was coming, had those scary secret moments when things didn’t look like you thought they would and you weren’t sure if you could trust what you had believed.

And his answer to you was, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Did that bring you comfort as you sat in prison, just days away from dying? Did it put it in perspective, that what the prophets had said was really happening, and they had seen it with their own eyes? Did it bring you peace?

I’d bet you never heard that after he sent away your messengers he told the crowd that you were a prophet, just like those of old, actually, more than a prophet, he declared, the One who announced the Messiah. Then he said, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

I think you would have liked hearing him say that. About the least being great, the poor and forgotten being lifted up that way in God’s kingdom, I mean. Maybe even more than his message to you, it would have affirmed that this is all really happening after all- God’s kingdom really is breaking in, showing how upside down we have it all. You would have liked hearing him say that; I know it.

When you died it crushed him – he left everyone to be alone with his terrible grief. Did that shake his faith, I wonder, bring him to doubt? That even though God has begun and the light is in the world, the darkness is still here too, for a time? How did he reconcile that?

How can we?

What would you say to us now about that, John?

There is no place for you in my nativity, John, you know that, don’t you? You aren’t even a bit-player here – you come later, and earlier too, actually, but not right then, that cosmos-altering moment when God broke in, when God came for good.

You come along with your pronouncements in this second week of Advent, and the third too, but you don’t even make it all the way to Christmas Eve. By then you’ve done your job, you’ve prepared the way and told us to as well, and now it’s all about the main attraction.

So, what would you have us remember or keep?

What would it look like for us to be ready to receive this Savior when he comes?

You see, we have the benefit of hindsight, we get to see all of this WAY after the fact, so we don’t have to stand on the banks of that river with the mud in our sandals and the insects buzzing around us, listening to you roar out your message and wonder whom to believe –wonder whether what you say is even remotely possible, or whether you’re just another fanatic off his rocker. We know who you are and how it all goes down from there.

So we can ask you now, and we’re willing to hear, what would you have us do?

How can we be ready to receive our Savior?

Ah, but you’re long gone. You’re silent now. And so it’s on us.

See, John, it’s like this every year.

It might have been all new and amazing to you, but we’ve beat this thing to death with jingle bells and sentiment and buried it in a sea of candy, carols and wrapping paper. We’ve put Jesus in the manger and we like him there, he’s so cute and clean.

And it comes around every year, too, so if we really take you seriously, how can we keep on believing?

Preparing the way, preparing the way, for centuries we’ve been waiting and talking about all of this like it’s real, year after year we prepare the way, like you told us to, but what about it anyway? What should we be doing now? Saying now? Does God still come? Is God still coming?

We need a little taste of your honey and fervor, I think, a sense of wonder and awe once again, a longing to be stirred enough that it feels like absolute refreshment to be plunged under and feel the water roll off us with all that keeps us in darkness, to be baptized into a promise that holds us even when we can’t see it. To repent.

What should we do, John? Things are a mess, and we’re not very good at doing very much to fix it, and also at the same time most of do the best we can with what we’ve got but still never feel like it’s enough. What is it all about, John?

But you would never really say, would you? You’d just point your finger again at him and tell us God has come. In the flesh. Right here.

“I’m just using water, people,” you’d say, “he’ll immerse you in the Holy Spirit, you’ll be surrounded by the life-creating breath of God.

So get ready. It will be. God is coming. God has come.”

And you’d leave us to the repenting, and let the truth and light invade us once again.

*****

We are here today to do as John did. To speak fantastic visions of hope and peace like they are a fact, the future unfolding before us, within us. To anticipate with his same wild joy, the in-breaking of God and prepare for it to happen, whenever, however it happens.

Last week we took up the call of the prophets, to lament on behalf of a broken world, and today we take up the call of John, to foreshadow a future that is coming, to live from a reality of love and hope and peace that flips all of this upside down.

Today we are eating bread and calling it Christ’s body, even while calling ourselves the body of Christ. We are drinking - grape juice, calling it wine, - then calling it the blood of Christ, and then saying that this means something, that it has something do with life and promise, and it beckons us and seals us into something bigger than we’ll ever understand. Into God’s with-us-ness, and our with-God-ness.

And today we’re welcoming someone into membership, which is to say, we’re celebrating that we are all members of the Body of Christ, but that inside that vast and wonderful identity, those of us here in this place are on loan to one another for this little portion of our journey, and we get to be for each other the ones who fulfill promises made over us by those gone before for this time. We get to be with each other the lamenters and foreshadowers, the prophets and preparers, who make room for grief, make room for repentance, and who speak words of comfort and hope in a broken world. We get to be the wild and joyful reminders that God is with us.

So let’s get on with it.

Amen.

Preaching Advent's Absurdity

2011-11-26T19:58:00.000-06:00

I've written an article entitled Preaching Advent's Absurdity for Working Preacher's "Craft of Preaching" section for the season of Advent. Check it out, along with their other great resources for Advent!

Longing with all the Honesty of a Prophet

2011-11-26T19:44:00.001-06:00

Advent Candle Lighting 1: Hope

In the beginning was the Word,

and the word was with God, and the word was God.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

The Word has come to live among us.

We come waiting for the light of Christ.

Tonight we remember the Prophets,

who spoke of things unseen,

giving words to the longings of a people

and their God.

Tonight we light a candle for HOPE.

Dear God,

As we begin our Advent journey we pray for hope.

Give us the courage to anticipate hope.

Hope that we are not alone,

Hope that this is not the end,

Hope that you are always with us now and you promise always to be.

Amen.

Isaiah 64:1-9

Advent is a gift to us- the darkness and hush of these weeks before Christmas.

A time of preparation and awareness, a waiting that lets us feel our longing for hope.

But the first week of Advent is always jarring. We’re all turkeyed out and geared up to plunge into the Holiday season along with apparently everyone else in the world – we’re sentimental and ready, but then we come to our scripture to begin us on this journey of prayerful, joyful waiting, and we find either dire end time predictions or disconcerting lament.

Where are you God!? Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down!

Today our wait for Christmas is shaped by a view of life through the eyes of the prophets. Throughout scripture the prophets have a profound role. They speak to the people for God, telling the people what God has done, or will do; standing in the gap they interpret God to the people.

But they also raise their voices to God on the people’s behalf. They interpret the people to God. They are emboldened to convey the message back and forth, almost like the angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder, the prophets are both the messengers of God and the voice of the people’s true experience back to God.

Our lament tonight comes from a people who were driven out of Jerusalem into exile by the Babylonians and have just returned- some sixty years of prayers have been answered and all the hope that sustained them while they were in captivity in Babylon is coming to fruition. Finally! They are free to go home! God is going to help them rebuild and they will be as glorious as of old!

Only it doesn’t happen that way, and all that kept them hanging on while they were in their wilderness of exile turns out to be false, or at the very least extremely overly optimistic. They return - and most of them don’t, so the disappointment starts there, but those who do - come back to a home different than when they left, it barely remembers them, and it’s not so easy to get it all up and going again. The tension and conflict between those returning and those who had moved in in their absence and those that remained behind comes to a head, and this is not turning out like anyone had believed it would when they dreamed of rebuilding their lives. They are frustrated and disheartened.

This week our friends Matt & Annamarie were all set to move back to Jordan tomorrow – Blaze had his last day of preschool and said goodbye to his friends and teachers, they packed up and moved out of their missionary housing apartment at Luther, and were spending Thanksgiving with Matt’s family before they said goodbye and eagerly returned home.

Then on Wednesday Matt fell down the stairs and broke his leg in two places. Now he’s laid up with rods and pins in his leg and their dream of returning home is postponed a minimum of 8-10 more weeks, and they are really, really disappointed.

I have been watching the well wishes pour in on Facebook, and a few of them have really rattled me. They imply – or state directly- that God must have some reason for keeping them here, or even that God made it happen and must not want them to go.

It’s the same as when we tell people at a funeral that God called their loved one home, or pat someone’s shoulder and say God has some reason for the sickness they are going through or the layoff that pulls the rug out from under them.

It’s our way of coming to terms with the disappointment, I suppose – or avoiding it – our way to try to find hope. But it’s not real hope, this optimism that keeps God on a pedestal and makes us have to stuff down our disappointment or sorrow and keep a positive smile plastered on. It’s the stuff of a holiday season, if you think about it. And while this might be what we’ve decided it means to be a good Christian, or to honor God, it could not be farther from what a prophet does.

In this lament the prophet does a rather astonishing thing, actually. Even while affirming God’s steadfast love, the prophet lays the blame for the distance between God and humanity on BOTH God and humanity. Because you were angry, we sinned, because you hid from us, we rebelled.

God, this is not like we thought it would be. It’s not like we believe it should be. It’s not like we feel was implied in our relationship with you. We’re mad, and we’re disappointed. And we feel a little abandoned. And we get it, yes, that we abandoned you too and have really dropped our end of the relationship so maybe we even earned this, but you never were one to pay people back by what they had earned – who could stand then? No, you always acted from your own faithfulness and commitment to us, your own unending love, so will you please do that again now?

Where are you God? The prophet boldly cries. And this question, we discover, this very human and honest, Where are you God? is astoundingly not a forbidden cry. It is actually a cry of faithfulness.

Only one that knows God can be there, one that has seen God in the past and believes God is capable of showing up again can utter such a cry.

Crying out about the absence of God is an act of great faith. It can come only from trusting in the presence of God, and grieving when God lets us down. We let God down too- that’s not in dispute, but here the prophet is holding God to God’s character and capacity – not ours.

And Advent begins with this view, this call, this voice of the prophets: To raise up on behalf of all people a great cry of disappointment, to point out God’s absence and wonder if God is going to step in and do something.

We would feel much more comfortable, perhaps, if we just tried to explain away God’s actions or lackthereof; we’re pretty good at big rationalizations that get God off the hook for the state of the world and put it all squarely on human shoulders. But the odd invitation of both Advent and this text is to hold God to account. And certainly to be aware of what we are asking as well, that human beings would fare poorly indeed if God actually did tear open the heavens and come down and we were scrutinized by the Divine for our own faithfulness and goodness because most of us are rarely very faithful or good - but nonetheless, this text says, nonetheless, we are to come to God and ask for God’s presence. Not based on our own righteousness or fidelity but on God’s.

And the beauty of beginning Advent this way is the irony that it represents – the prophet speaking for the Hebrew people has no way of knowing that God will indeed come down – God will indeed enter intimately into the scene - just not at all like he is asking for God to. He has no way of knowing that God doesn’t smite enemies or come to us in power and intimidation with awesome deeds and trembling onlookers– instead God comes in utter humanity, in the weakness and vulnerability of a poor, illegitimate and homeless infant, and experiences all of it with us from the inside.

For the next four weeks our lives are going to get crazy. We will project onto Christmas irrational expectations and nostalgic optimism, and we’ll spend more money than we should and eat more junk food than we should, and I’m just acknowledging that this is the reality and I don’t want anyone to feel too badly about it, because that’s just how it goes.

But there is something else going on these next four weeks that is really significant and a lot less noticeable. And it is this invitation to deep honesty, to step into the shoes of the prophets- to see the world with stark candor and not be afraid to bring our complaints to God, and also to speak into the world the hope of a God who enters in. A God who comes near. A God who shares all of it. And joins us just as we are. That’s quite a celebration to anticipate.

The beginning of Advent is a chance to let down our guard, and our weird pressure about being good or right people, people who believe in the right causes and stand up for the right issues and give to the right charities and never lose sight of the larger global crises and our own cushy existence and earn the respect of our neighbors and our God with just the right attitude and faith.

No, the prophets would say. It is what it is, and we are who we are. And also, God is who God is, so God, will you be who you are?

Advent is a chance to open our eyes and hearts and minds and be brutally, refreshingly honest with God and ourselves. Some really terrible things happen and are happening. And we are brokenhearted about it.

And we don’t’ have to have it all worked out – how God comes or what it looks like, so we can’t even make sure we are asking for the right thing with the right motivations - we just have to ask. To speak out of our own deep honesty.

To answer the incessant invitation of God throughout all of scripture to be in this with God! To drop all the religious and polite filters we usually put on, and to speak right to God who already knows who we are and how it is, and just longs for us to be real with each other, us and God, and who really, really likes it when we are.

We’re called to put voice to the longing. These next four weeks, we function like prophets, or rather, all together like a prophet. With boldness we call God out and are not afraid to lift up to God those things that have broken our hearts and confounded our faith and cry to God, If only you would tear open the heavens and come down?

Wont you come down, Please?

It’s no mistake that the cry of Advent is “Come, Lord Jesus!”

Someone once said, “Hope is what is left behind when your worst fears have been realized and you are no longer optimistic about the future. Hope is what comes with a broken heart willing to be mended.” (Patricia E. DeJong in Feasting on the Word)

This Advent, let’s be people of Hope. For each other and for the world that will be rushing through to Christmas with smiles plastered on their faces and God at a distance let’s be prophets who give voice to our longing for God’s compassion and companionship, and who recognize that the steadfast love of God holds us even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Let’s invite God to strip away our optimism and religion so we can stand bravely with our broken hearts and the world’s broken hearts waiting to be mended. Let’s not be afraid to see and say things as they are, and then to put our trust in the savior who crawls into it all right beside us.

Come, Lord Jesus!

Amen.

Stewards of the Story

2011-11-20T13:52:00.003-06:00

Ephesians 1:15-23

Psalm 100

It’s a week to give thanks. A week to pause and recognize what a gift it all is, and as complicated, messy and hard as life and relationships often are, we are so grateful for them. It’s a week to celebrate.

Three years ago this week we had asked people in the congregation what they were thankful for, and we recorded it and played it in worship. I listened to it again this week, and I want to play it for you.

(Recording of people answering the question, “What are you grateful for?” Answers included family, nature, freedom to elect our own leaders, hope for an upcoming surgery, health, food, relationships…)

Here’s what I noticed when I heard it again. Two of the voices are those of people no longer with us – together we’ve celebrated their lives and grieved their passing and benefit still from all the ways they kept the faith while they were among us. Another voice is someone who stopped in with us for a short time, and moved on somewhere else. A couple of the voices have grown up some, almost doubled in age from the time this was recorded.

Another thing I noticed was how present, in the moment, contextual, the things were that people were thankful for. A new grandbaby on the way, in the womb – surely in preschool by now, right? Safety for a loved one in the midst of a wildfire so long since turned to fertile soil that new trees and shrubs have sprung out of. And yet, while gratitude is really contextual, our thanks is also timeless – there are always corrupt and unstable governments, always babies being born and surgeries looming and sky and water surrounding us and our own slowing down bodies with us. Life is strange. Always changing, always the same.

Perhaps this is what it means to live within the Story. There is something enduring, continuing, that is outside and beyond us, but there is also something contextual, something about this moment and these people that links us so intimately with it all as well.

Today we celebrate our part within the Story. The table is set, the china is out, we’re marking the moment. Pausing in gratitude.

We’ve gathered today surrounded by symbols of our story from the past few months – the tree from the garden, the fire we’ve sat at while listening to the old stories, the pictures the children did of Noah’s Ark, the drawing of Joseph’s saga that materialized before our eyes as we listened last week, and the themes that have arisen from these stories all hanging behind us.

And all the broken and selfish people we’ve met from long ago, whom God loved and claimed anyway, and through whom the blessing continued, are part of this celebration. Because all the stories we’ve shared – as strange and prehistoric and archaic as they are- they are not so different from our own stories. And ours wont end up being so different from those to follow.

Today we celebrate our little spot in the Story. In gratitude and awe we pause to consider this great thing that has been placed in our hands. This thing that it is to be church together, share life together, stand with each other in suffering and joy and together love and serve and hope for and pray for a world that we’re called to stand with and for as well. This mysterious and amazing thing that can’t be grasped, but can only be shared, that in some way we are connected with all that has gone before and all that is to come by the steadfast love of God, which never ceases, and by which we seek to be defined. I’m ready to give some thanks for all of this.

But it’s stewardship Sunday. If there were ever a phrase that made my skin crawl and my defenses go up, that’s it. “Stewardship Sunday.” The Sunday where somebody stands up and guilts you in to giving your money to the church – where it is implied that faith can be measured and the mind of God can be known, because we talk all about all the things God wants to do if only we would fork over the cash and let God get on with it. Where the plug for money is subtly woven into every part of the service – and we’re eased into it like a frog boiling slowly in a pot of water that began lukewarm.

I was invited a few weeks ago to a jewelry party, which I learned later, was next to impossible to escape from without buying an expensive item; I mean, I might have, but I had drunk the wine and eaten the hor devours, and glanced through the catalogs, so if I slipped out without paying up how would I ever look those women in the face again? That’s the feeling I get with stewardship – if you want to be here, you’d better ante up, or else, how will you look God, or any of us, in the face again?

Not to mention the air of desperation about all the pleas we get this time of year – wonderful charities on the brink of shutting down, this child who wont eat if you don’t give, this public station you’ve been mooching from all this time without doing your part, this crisis that rests completely in your self-centered hands, it’s oh so overwhelming. And I hate it. And it’s not what God or church is about at all.

Besides, if we’ve learned anything so far from all these stories within the Story, it’s that God doesn’t need our money, or our power; God will do what God will do, and God has a tendency, actually, to work from impossibility and barrenness, from weakness and faltering faith, with the unlikely people and in the sketchy places we’d rather not be seen.

So I approached this week with a mixture of excitement and dread – wanting to get on with gratitude, celebrating the Story, pausing to be thankful - not wanting to disrupt our true worship and life together by carrying on some campaign for money. I wanted a chance to communicate how thankful I am for this little group of people who love and serve God, and so I was just going to set stewardship aside, until I realized with a start that beyond all the baggage it has, and all the ways it has come to mean only giving money, we actually talk about true stewardship all the time. And it is completely tied up in gratitude and celebration.

The word “stewardship” means having the responsibility to care for something which belongs to somebody else – and that is what we do. None of this belongs to us, really, this is God’s Story, God’s ministry. These people sitting alongside you, they are God’s people. This building, this community we’re planted within, the strangers who walk by on the sidewalk or come in to do yoga, or talk about city planning or paint in the basement, this earth and it’s aching and abundance – it all, they all, belong to God. And we have been invited to care for what belongs to God – alongside God, along with God – to be stewards of the ministry of God, and also, as Paul says, of the mysteries of God. We prepare a table, hang up a coat, pull out a chair and invite the world to have a seat; we hold open the sacred space where Christ meets us in and through and on behalf of a world.

Oh, may we be good stewards! For the brief and fleeting time that it is our hands holding the mystery – others are to come and so many have gone before, but for this time and place, for the here and now, it is us! - may we steward faithfully! This rag-tag bunch of people – with all our different, rich and poignant stories, our joy and our pain, all the things that have made us who we are, people each taking our turn to be the confident ones or the fearful ones, the strong or the weak of body or mind, the doubters or the faith-holders, the givers or the receivers and so often both at the same time. How marvelous this is!

God is doing something here and we are part of it, we ARE it – we bear it in ourselves and between us - and thank you God, for the chance to be this, together, for this time!

We are not "campaigning for" stewardship today. We are celebrating our stewardship today, which means we celebrate all of the ways we participate, the ways we steward the ministry together, the ways we tell and live the Story, (and I am mostly not talking about money). I’m talking about praying and cooking and lighting candles and changing diapers and singing and planting the garden and welcoming one another. I’m talking about honesty and hunger and giving away your bike when someone’s is stolen, and gluing pictures with kids we may never see again as they disappear back into the foster care system but with whom we have one sacred moment, and driving our friend to chemo.

I’m talking about watching other people’s kids grow up to know you as a part of God’s family, their family, a way they see and discover what it means to belong to God; I’m talking about washing dishes and taking the recycling home to put on your own curb, and making quilts to sell so the money can be donated to local charities and handing one another a torn piece of ordinary, store-bought bread with the incredible words, “This is the body of Christ broken for you.”

I’m talking about intentionally being the people defined first and foremost by the love of God.

And one day, when this little congregation is no more – because NOTHING lasts forever- and when WE are no more than the stories we’ve left behind, others will be stewards, carrying on the Story, living within it, celebrating and struggling just like we have.

But for now, for this moment, we are the ones in the story, one little group in a vast collection little groups of “we” all over the world. We are the Body of Christ, the fullness of him who fills all in all. And God’s steadfast love that we get to share here and now, endures forever and ever.

Today is the end of the church year, Next week we sink into the darkness of Advent, but today we call “Christ the King Sunday,” which means we’re liturgically invited to crane our heads backwards and lean our eyes forwards and recognize the hand of our God from the beginning of time to the end, but most especially right here in our own lives, our own stories. And there’s an invitation here as well. It is to participate: oh stewards of the mystery, steward on! But it begins by seeing that you already do – the invitation now is to notice it. Do it on purpose. Choose it. And celebrate it, too. It is quite something to be invited to be a blessing, quite something indeed.

So together let’s

Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth.

Worship the LORD with gladness; come into his presence with singing.

Know that the LORD is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name.

For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

Amen.

Our "table" in worship - with hands of gratitude created in worship, and our shared prayers of thanks and mourning represented in candles

Blessed & Limping

2011-11-06T14:43:00.002-06:00

Genesis 32:22-31

What is the defining moment of a person’s life? The point at which you become you – when everything that has happened to you and everything that will happen converge in a single moment, and who you are becomes real? All the other moments matter – maybe even more so in the light of this single moment, maybe they all suddenly reveal their meaning, the way they were leading up to or coming out of this moment, anticipating it before it happened, flowing from it forevermore.

For Jacob, this is the moment. When his name is changed. For Israel, born Jacob, all of life was anticipating or coming out of this moment. And not just for him- but for all of Israel to come, for the blessing bearers and the people of God from this point onward, this is the moment that sets the trajectory.

The moment Jacob wrestles with God.

But how did he get here? In the dead of night, alone, fighting a stranger in the dark all night long until dawn, struggling to spare his own life? How does one get to the point where there is nothing else happening but the struggle? No sound but scuffling and grunting, panting breath and pounding blood, no sensation but falling and gripping and flailing, no awareness but the present moment, mind and body unity of hanging on for dear life so that life will not be lost, and it seems it will never end?

For Jacob, it was a tumultuous journey, and it began with his name.

It is said, that in some ancient cultures, a name could be so closely linked with the bearer of the name as to put words to something of that person’s character. And so it was with Israel, born Jacob, son of Isaac. Jacob is the second of twins, holding onto his brother’s heal, and so he is named, he who supplants, the one who takes over, the heel.

So, perhaps like all of us, from time to time, Jacob lives into his label, he claws his way up and over in his deep yearning for blessing, for recognition, for place and acceptance in this a home where he is his mother’s favorite but his father loves his brother Esau best.

There are other moments, that, before this moment here, Jacob would have said were his defining moment. The biggie. The game changer. And one of them goes like this:

Now Isaac was getting older, and decided it was time to pass down the blessing to his oldest son. He called Esau to him and told him to go and hunt some game and prepare a savory stew and bring it to him, so that he could bless him. So Esau left to do as his father had said.

But Rebekah heard what Isaac said to Esau and she went to Jacob and told him to quickly go and kill a kid from the flock so that she could prepare a savory dish, and Jacob could bring it to his father and receive the blessing intended for Esau. But Jacob was worried that despite his father’s failed eyesight, he would be found out and be cursed instead of blessed. “Besides,” he tells his mother, “Esau is hairy and I am smooth!” And so they took the skin of a kid and put it on his arms and they put Esau’s clothes on Jacob, and he went into his father, bringing him the bowl of stew.

Hearing Jacob’s voice, Isaac doubted at first that it was Esau, but he reached out his hand and felt his son, and he pulled him close and smelled him. And apparently this was enough to convince Isaac, who proceeded to give to Jacob his blessing, and the blessing of God.

Just after Jacob leaves his father’s tent, Esau returns, holding the bowl of savory stew he had prepared from his hunt, and tells his father he has returned and is ready for the blessing. “Who are you?” Isaac cries.

“I am Esau, your eldest son.”

And Isaac trembled violently, and asked, “Then who was it that I blessed?

Blessed he was, and blessed he shall be!”

Esau cried out with a great and terrible cry, “Then bless me too father, please!”

But Isaac could not. He spoke words of heartbreak to his son instead. And Esau burned with rage towards Jacob, and plotted to kill him as soon as Isaac passed away.

But Rebekah heard what Esau was planning, and called Jacob to her. “You must go now, to the people of my brother, at least until Esau’s anger abates, then I will send for you and you can come home. I could not bear to lose both sons in one day.”

So Jacob packed up his belongings, and departed from his people.

And so he leaves, both the betrayer and the blessed. But blessing or not, Jacob finds himself cut off from his family and sent out alone. And not long after comes another defining moment. One that most certainly could have been the high point of his life – the unmistakable path-shaper. And was, for a while anyway…

On his journey Jacob stops for the night and lays his head on a rock and dreams. He dreams there is a ladder stretching up to heaven and the angels are ascending and descending the ladder between heaven and earth. And suddenly God is standing beside him and says,

‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; ¹⁴and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. ¹⁵Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’

¹⁶Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ ¹⁷And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’

And now the promise rests within and upon this rootless, wandering, undeserving one. As does a new awareness, both of the blessing and of the terrible guilt of what he has done. Jacob moves on with the understanding that God is real, God is there, God has made some promises, and life is not merely what you make of it, nor is it yours to make of it what you decide.

Twenty years follow. Twenty years in which Jacob’s cunning and deception are on full display, and so is karma, because Jacob gets from his uncle/father in law the same kind of deceit and trickery he practices. Twenty years pass, during which his mother Rebekah dies without ever summoning him home; his brother Esau and father Isaac move on with their lives, and he himself has eleven children between two wives and two concubines. Twenty years in which Jacob struggles and strives for success and recognition, in which he knows love and loss, is cheated and vindicated, and all the drama of life and love and families and fortune unfold. And finally, it is time for Jacob to return to the land of his fathers.

And so he sets out and gets ready to face Esau. He is terrified. He does all sorts of things to try to lessen the blow, such as sending gifts on ahead of him in waves so that Esau will receive them first and perhaps be softened towards Jacob. He has with him everything that matters to him – his wives and children, his flocks and household, and he is aware that in a very short time he could lose it all.

Which brings us to this night, this moment. The big one that trumps all the other big ones. The one which could not have been reached without the others, and which makes him who he is. Jacob brings his wives and kids across the water and then he is alone. And with no explanation and out of the blue, a life and death struggle with a powerful stranger begins.

This is a good spot to stop for a moment and remember that for all the ways this is Jacob’s story, this is first and foremost God’s story. We must keep reminding ourselves of this as we go, because if we don’t we either dismiss them as someone else’s “stories,” having nothing to do with us and even less to do with reality, or we try to make them all about ourselves – pulling from their lives lessons to apply to our own belief and behavior, turning these messy, complicated human beings into two dimensional characters, archetypes, illustrations and saints.

But this is God’s Story. And for that reason it is also Jacob’s, and ours. But in a far more significant way.

And so we see that before Jacob can face his brother, he must face God, and himself, for that matter. And God must face him. The one who supplants is now confronted with a force he cannot undermine or overcome. All night long, he struggles. And what must this be like? What could be going through a person’s head at a time like this? Will I die? Will I prevail? Who am I fighting? And why am I fighting?

Have you ever found yourself sitting in front of a movie, and a sad thing happens to a character – their mother dies or their child disowns them – and you find yourself weeping? Not for this fictional person at all, but for the places in your own life where you’ve disowned, buried or lost another? Have you ever found your anger kindled at traffic, or broken technology, or asinine comments from a politician, and realized with a start that the irrational rage bubbling up has a different source entirely? That it may have more to do with broken promises than broken technology, or shame over your own foolish and arrogant comments that have hurt another?

“In the night,” it has been said, “the divine antagonist tends to take on the features of others with whom we struggle in the day.” (Walter Bruggeman - Genesis)

And so Jacob struggles. And perhaps all the struggles of his whole life arise and work themselves into and out of this battle. And a curious thing happens. He doesn’t lose. He holds his own. And when his assailant realizes he is not giving up or wearing out, that Jacob wont be defeated, he strikes him on his hip. This is a serious injury, not a battle scar, but a lifelong crippling. And he says to Jacob, “Let me go, for day is about to break.” But Jacob, the cheeky heel, says aloud the longing of his whole life, and demands that his opponent bless him.

And so it comes to this – what is your name? Who are you?

And he answers that he is Jacob. Jacob – heel/trickster/overreacher/supplanter.

But the man replies that this is no longer his name. That now his name shall be Israel – God rules/God preserves/God protects, because he has striven with God and prevailed. And his belonging shifts, from himself to God.

And then Jacob - because, why not? - demands to know the man’s name; because knowing someone’s name is power, knowing a name is possessing and revealing something about the being it represents. But the man will not tell Jacob his name, and so while Jacob is given a new name, God remains a mystery.

And there is an unsettled and unsettling ambiguity as to just who is powerful in this exchange, and who is weak. And there’s an astonishing inference about divine and human roles, strength and weakness, and God’s relationship with humanity that might find echoes centuries later in the Story when the Creator of the whole cosmos hangs limp and broken on a cross, and when the symbols of God’s relationship to humanity are not thrones and trophies, but spilled blood and poured water and torn bread. Power and weakness, God and humanity, it’s unclear sometimes who is prevailing - What does God want from us? How does God relate with us? One wonders.

Now the blessed Jacob rises, exhausted, wrung out, injured and made clean.

“I have seen God face to face and lived.” he says.

And now he is ready to face his brother.

I imagine him passing back through the water and climbing the banks as the sun is coming up, returning to his family and looking different. Broken and whole at the same time. Blessed and injured. He is made new. And they see him coming over the ridge and squint in the rising sun, looking twice to discern who it is that approaches.

Jacob swaggers, you see. But this one, Israel, he limps.

Because sometimes newness looks like limping.

And so, that day, Jacob is reunited with Esau. He approaches him in conquered strength, a mighty weakness, with humility and deference to Esau’s justified anger, not expecting mercy, but Esau falls on his neck and kisses him. And Jacob responds, “Seeing you is like seeing the face of God”, because in the morning light there is something of the face of God in the forgiveness of a brother, just as there is something of a brother’s face in a piercing confrontation with the divine in the darkness.

And it’s not a completely triumphant reunion between brothers, it’s awkward and bumbling, there appears to even be more deception or distrust in the exchange, because reconciliation among human beings is never as clean and simple as we like to think it is, and because we are who we are, and patterns of relating are hard to break. But there it is anyway. And when Isaac dies, the two sons, side by side, bury their father.

And the Story continues.

And it makes me want to know, as I look around this room full of complicated and messy human beings chosen and loved by God, What are our defining moments?

Where are the places we have been invited, or forced, to wrestle with God?

Where are the places where everything we thought we were, and the world recognized us to be, gets taken away, and we become, instead, who we are?

How have you been made new- whole but broken, blessed and also limping?

How does the Story live in you?

I am indebted to Walter Bruggeman's Geneis in the Interpretation Commentary Series... His vivid exploration of these texts shaped my view and approach to this text. His perspective is reflected herein.

Lovin on Advent

2011-10-26T13:04:00.002-05:00

I love Advent. Love Love Love it. I love the color of the "darkest sky before the dawn," I love the anticipation and the honesty, the willingness to say, "Look at this world, God! We really need you! Could you please come?" And the waiting. I love the active, eager, honest waiting for the light of the world. Yum.

However.

I DO NOT love shopping.
I hate shopping. And I ESPECIALLY hate shopping in Advent. It corrupts my Advent. Muddies it with florescent brightness. Shopping spoils my waiting - because the good waiting, the dark and quiet and hopeful and prayerful and yearning waiting- is ruined by the noisy, pushy, honking, piped-in-carols, counting-down-shopping-days waiting of "Holiday Season."

I worked at Pottery Barn for a holiday season, people, I've seen it from both sides. And it is not pretty. Normally fine people, perfectly pleasant people, become snippy, rude, pushy and greedy. (And I'm including myself in this). The smell of consumption clings to our clothes and our hair, the commercials screaming deals assault us and the never-ending checklist hovers over our waking hours. And buried behind all this mess is the poignant call of Advent to settle into the deep. To get in touch with our need. To wait for God.

(And, let's just be clear, here, I am not going to be the person who can skip gifts and just donate to charity. I enjoy the gift-giving and won't not do it. I love Christmas. Almost as much as I love Advent. Almost).

Well, I've had enough.

Today I read about someone who completes all their Christmas shopping and wrapping BY THANKSGIVING. Done. Then they spend all of December enjoying time with their family. Ignoring the sales and the pressure and the crowds. And I almost wept out loud.

That's it. I'm doing it.
I'm reclaiming Advent.

Every year I get swept into the madness, and feel overwhelmed and guilty and tired and sad and rushed.

Not this year.

I am in charge of my time and money - I am the steward of the gifts given to me to share! (Look into the mirror and say it with me!) My time is more valuable than I treat it sometimes. When the dust settles, I can remember what's important. It just gets stirred up and confused sometimes.
So. I'm doing things differently this year. I'm doing my Christmas shopping now.

I'm hoping that shopping now - when the stores have already been displaying Christmas things for a month, I might add, but before the real drama of the consumer season begins - will help me keep some perspective:
That Christmas is really about presence, not presents,
that connecting with people is how we connect with God,
that the whole point of all of it is celebrating that God comes to share life with humanity, and we are called to share life with one another,
that the whole world belongs to God and not just the people I personally love.
That all of Advent is for sitting in the grey twilight of reality, holding life's treasures and pain gently, tenderly, openly - and not trampling all over them with tinsel and cheer.

36 shopping days until Thanksgiving. (38 until Advent!)
I'm getting it done.
So I can sink into the wait.

Advent, sweet Advent, here I come.

Sarah's Story

2011-10-16T13:12:00.000-05:00

At LNPC we're in a series, telling the old stories of our faith in many different ways. Today, we had a visit from Sarah, played by local performance artist, Julie Kurtz. And Sarah shared her story with us firsthand...

From Genesis 16-18:15, 19-21:7

The promise wasn’t to me. It was to Abram. He was to be “the father of many” – Abraham. Clearly I was not part of that. I was the mother to none.

The strangers said I would have a son. Me. They didn’t say he would. They said I would.

Of course I laughed.

What did they know of my womanhood? My time was past. Besides, my womb had been closed my whole life. My arms were never to hold a little one, my breasts long past the days when they awaited a purpose, ripe and ready. My body had always been an empty, aching vessel - once agile, but now deflated, comfortably worn and finished. I had accepted my fate. I always did. Even in the days when there was still some hope. The days when we would wander, always at the word of God – get up and go here, pack up and move there.

And in some places, Abram, the spineless coward, would pass me off as his sister, and I would comply. Because I love him. Because I trust him. Because I don’t want anything to happen to him. He always was a worrier.

And his God kept intervening. Punishing the men who would take me as their own, driving them mad in one way or another until they would demand to know from Abram the truth and he would have to tell them I was really his wife and they would return me to him and we’d be on our way. You should have seen the pandemonium it caused when I was taken into the Pharoah’s house! Oh the misery on that household that would not let up until Abram and I were restored to one another! Because I belong to Abram, and Abraham belongs to God.

Of course, It never occurred to us to just trust this God who had sent him there in the first place and be who we were without taking matters into our own hands, but then, that was never our strong suit.

Back in the day, before this all began, before the promise that turned everything upside down and sent us packing, blowing across deserts like tumbleweed from one place to the next, we were so young and strong and sure of ourselves. We could make each other laugh, and oh, the schemes we’d concoct! We’ve always been a great pair, a clever pair. Life was comfortable and we were in it TOGETHER. Abram & Sarai, everyone would say. Oh that Abram & Sarai… Did you see Abram & Sarai…? like it was one word. We could finish each other’s sentences. It sometimes felt like we shared the same brain.

Then the damned promise. That uprooted us and gave us a mission, a calling. Or, him anyway. And the hope, the driven terrible hope that lived in his eyes and grew between us like a tangled weed. Father of nations! Offspring like the stars!

I could not conceive. My body stubbornly refused to fulfill his God’s promise, to agree to the arrangement they’d come up with. And it’s not like Abram could keep quiet about it, either. Oh, the fretting that man did! Every year added to my age was anguish; I was standing in the way of what he was meant to be, what God was supposed to do. The barricade to fulfillment was me, my useless flesh, my barren self.

But every time he despaired and nearly gave up, something would happen to him out there in his God moment and he’d come back all fired up about the promise again. Believing again. Do you have any idea the pressure that puts on a woman? I knew it wouldn’t happen. While my sisters had all raised children, and their children had grown, married and conceived, I remained empty, yearning and ashamed.

How was I to live in this belief of his? This faith of his that pulled him somewhere I couldn’t follow? I was not the one hearing these promises. And I knew I could never be the one to fulfill them. At least not in myself. I was a liability, an obstacle. And we’ve always trusted one another, through thick and thin, across more miles than could be counted, through more adventures and disasters and struggles and celebrations than I could ever describe, we’ve been Abram&Sarai. Even with his damn obsession and the drive of this promise I didn’t understand, we’ve always been there for each other, sacrificed for each other, or at least been willing to take a hit for the other.

So I made up my mind. I would not stand in the way of this promise any longer. There was something I could do to help fulfill it. So I gave him Hagar, my slave. Hagar, with her young, strong body, full and firm, latent with potential; a warm, ready place for a baby to grow.

Oh, if I could take back that moment.

Oh, to remove that day from existence like scooping a worm from the flour bag!

But we must live with our choices, musn’t we?

It was never the same after that. After he had known her, who had only known me, I no longer knew him in the same way. Somehow he was stranger to me. My Abram – a divide now yawned between us that I couldn’t have bridged if I had wanted to.

And I didn’t want to.

And she! Oh, how she lorded it over me! As her belly began to swell she looked upon me, her mistress, with such contempt, as though I were less than worthless.

The two of them… I could barely stomach the thought of it; it plagued me relentlessly! That she would give to him what I never could?

This child wouldn’t be ours; it would be theirs.

I couldn’t stand the sight of her; the pain burned inside me into a molten rage and I “dealt harshly” with my slave woman.

After she fled from me I regretted what I had done. Not only was I useless, I was wicked. I should never have behaved in that way. No matter what has happened, I am still Abram’s wife, I said, and mistress of this household. And it is incumbent upon me to remember my place and the duty I have to uphold the dignity of my husband and position. I am the one who did this. And I will bear the consequences graciously if it kills me.

She did come back, and I swallowed my pride and struggled daily to push past my shame and anger and the gnawing, constant grief, and keep my head high and my emotions restrained. But after that, part of me was dead.

The years went on and we managed. We found a way, our odd little family. Abram doted on Ishmael, his son, and I fulfilled my duty and cared for the boy for Abram’s sake and the sake of this project we were now in, living the dream for this God who had settled him here, anchored him in this boy, leaving only me to drift through the desert alone.

For a while, I fought the hostility inside me every day; the regret, pain and confusion, and mostly the loneliness and isolation. We were still together, he still reached for me in the darkness of the night, there was still some comfort in the familiarity of his arms and the daily patterns and unspoken rhythms of a lifetime side by side; we still shared language and even occasionally laughter, but what we’d had was gone. And sometimes I’d gaze at him and realize with a start that I’d no more know his thoughts than a perfect stranger’s. We were closed to one another.

But over time, the anger softened into defeat, and I accepted the life we had grown into. I was no longer young, and my old age had worn away regret and gradually filled in the places with a not-unpleasant mixture of gratitude and resignation.

Then it happened again, this promise giving, this sudden burst of belief, and Abram returned one day, like he had the first time, seventy years before, flushed and luminous and filled with purpose. He set about circumcising all the males in the whole place and going on about the promise once again. He said God had changed his name, that he was to be Abraham now, ancestor of a multitude of nations, for through him were to come nations and kings. And he announced that there was now a covenant, God claiming them all as God’s people forever. And this was fine. I’d grown accustomed to accepting this spectacular direction our lives had become oriented to and his breathless reports of God’s words, only a few days later he started in again on me.

He stood as we were finishing dinner - Ishmael, the continuously in motion teenager, had gone off somewhere in his usual flurry, and I was about to clear the meal, and Abraham grabbed my hands and pulled me down to sit beside him. Sarai, he said, with a strange mixture of sadness and hope in his watery eyes, Ishmael is not the promise.

Then he stood over me and laid his hands on my head, closed his eyes and said, You are now to be called Sarah, the princess of a people, for God will bless you and give to me a son through you. God will bless you and you shall give rise to nations, kings of people shall come from you. Sarah you are and Sarah you shall be.

His hands still heavy on my head, he knelt back down in front of me, and then gently slid them from my head to my face, cradling it before him.

I sat like a stone.

I could feel his breath on my face, he was so close. Finally I raised my eyes and looked into his crazy, hope-filled face and I felt nothing.

There was nothing.

I gave him nothing.

How could he?

How dare he?

I reached up and gently took him by the wrists, removed his hands from my cheeks, and lowered his arms away from me. Then I turned away from this man, and slowly rose to my feet and walked out of the tent.

I was finished.

Some time later three visitors appeared in our camp in the heat of the day.

We don’t often have visitors, and Abraham was turbulent with hospitality, caring for their animals, offering them rest and shade, setting the whole camp into motion to provide respite and welcome to these travelers stopping in. He rushed into our tent and told me how to do my job, always a sure sign of his nervous energy, and I set about making cakes for his guests, while Abraham, all ninety-some years of him, hiked up his robe and ran to the herd to select a calf and have it prepared for a feast.

Once all was ready and they were eating in the shade of the tree, one of them said to him, “Where is your wife, Sarah?”

Inside the tent, my heart skipped a beat. Abraham had not spoken my name; I had declined to come out of the tent and meet the guests. (I had made it silently and unmistakably clear that these little projects of his no longer included me).

I drew near the entrance to hear what they were saying.

“She’s there, in the tent.” Abraham answered. He seemed embarrassed. Good.

Then one of them said, “I will return in due time, and I will find your wife Sarah with a son.”

When I heard that, I laughed to myself.

Oh, I am so beyond that! I thought. WE are so beyond that. He’s old, I’m old; he and I are FINISHED, and NOW, in my old age, when my life has been riddled with disappointment beyond words, NOW I am to have pleasure? I highly doubt it, strange sir. Nice sentiment, but you seem to have caught the illness that touches folks around here…there is to be no great happiness for me. What you say is IMPOSSIBLE.

And I ask you, truly, What else could I do but laugh?

The tears dried up long before my womb. I had nothing left to weep. Nothing.

But somehow they knew. Somehow God knew. I may have been hiding there in the tent, but these strangers had read my mind.

Why did Sarah laugh? was the question. Why did she laugh and say, Shall I indeed bear a child now that I have gotten old?

I slipped outside the door, my heart pounding in fear. They looked over at me and I at them, trembling.

Is anything too wonderful for God?

And the visitor turned back to Abraham and repeated, louder this time, “In due time I will return and Sarah will have a son.”

“I didn’t laugh.” I blurted across to them.

And he stood and looked at me once again. And a shiver went through me.

“Oh yes. You did laugh.” he said.

More time and drama came after that. More moving, more of the same adjusting to the new. Lot came back into our lives for a time, we even had another “pretend you’re my sister” incident, like the good old days, complete with another household in upheaval until God alerted them that I belonged to Abraham and we were once again on our way, wondering at how we’d managed to repeat an old mistake so egregiously. But it was nice to feel desirable again, anyway, to get back into the groove with Abraham, a little like our young selves, all this adventure and motion.

And something within me had come back to life. I could feel it healed over, like fresh, fertile soil in my soul, willing to begin anew with Abraham, willing to open myself to the possibility that life might hold something promising. Even if I didn’t understand it.

That strange day with the visitors lived always in the shadows behind everything that happened. It hovered there, without explanation, but also without disappearing. And I had grown to treasure it for its inexplicable warmth. If nothing else, for what it felt like to finally be seen. To hear my name as the opening to a stranger’s promise. To have my very self laid so bare for such a brief and shocking moment. And to find, in some strange way, solidarity with Abraham in the holy, in the place he had always stood alone and told me of later. To feel the mystery electrify the air between us all, hear the voice of God together - it seemed to burn away the hardness between us, to fill the gulf that divided us and draw us close, and we could see each other again, reach each other again.

And then one ordinary day, God did as God had said.

One regular, uneventful day, unremarkable day, the Lord did for me as the Lord has promised.

I conceived.

And in due time, I bore Abraham a son in his old age,

just as God had promised.

On the day he was born, when I held his tiny life against me, and felt the tapping of his new little heartbeat against the timeless thudding of my own, when I lowered him to my breast and gazed at the downy softness of his impossibly beautiful head, I said in my joy, the hot, fresh tears streaming down my face, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me! Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”

Abraham called him Isaac. Which means “laughter.”

And on the eighth day he circumcised Isaac, to bear the mark of one held in the covenant of God, one belonging to the God who will never forsake the people of God’s promise.

Abraham was one hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

And I not much younger.

Is anything too wonderful for God?

How could I not laugh?

I held in my own arms the promise itself, the sign of a God who will never forsake the people of God’s promise. The joy pours out of me yet, for my body bore the promise made flesh, and my breasts nursed not just my own fulfillment, but the future of God’s people: nations and kings, numerous as the stars, a people chosen and brought forth by God. A people of God’s blessing, with God’s purpose.

This promise of Abraham’s, that guided our whole lives, it never belonged to him.

Or to me.

We belonged to it.

The plan of God doesn’t come from what is possible; it comes from what is promised.

And nothing we do can hinder it or break it, can prevent it from coming.

One could, I suppose, decline the invitation to participate, and I suppose I almost did, for a while.

But God is relentless and committed;

God will do what God will do.

And blessed, oh so blessed, are those through whom God does.

That kind of story, that kind of God

2011-10-02T12:42:00.003-05:00

This is the third in a chronological narrative series through Genesis, which began with Creation and the Fall. This reflection spans Genesis 6-9, and the story of Noah.

Excerpts from Genesis 6-9

Sometimes a story is so overused, so adapted to the wrong context, that you stop hearing it altogether. And then if, for whatever reason, you decide to give it a second look, you are utterly horrified at what you see, it’s not at ALL what you thought it was.

I think, for example, of nursery rhymes sung to children, ring around the rosie, pocket full of posie, ashes ashes, we all die of the black plague, is what that’s really about. Or tearing down a monarchy and having the children sing, “down will come baby, cradle and all!”

And so often when we’ve stopped hearing the words or remembering where they came from and we pass them onto the children without a second thought.

Let me be clear right off the bat. Noah and the Ark is NOT a children’s story. So let’s leave the two-by-two wallpapered nursery and stuffed playsets and first say it like it is. This is a really disturbing story of what looks like God giving up on creation and destroying the whole entire world and everything in it, but saving one guy and his family to start over. Right? Even in the best light, is this what we want our kids looking at from their cribs?

At first glance, real glance, this seems like an awful story. At least to me. There are any number of things in it I don’t like, not least of which is the idea that God gives up on what God had just declared “good”, and lets the whole rest of creation get sunk along with humanity. Or that God is so abidingly upset about how violent the world has gotten, that God violently washes it away.

And then there’s the nagging question, What made Noah so saveable and everyone else so damnable?

And what exactly is the promise here? I always heard it in Sunday school as God promises not to destroy the world by FLOOD ever again. Phew, I thought at the time. That eliminates ONE method. Of course, God may use any other means God desires, but at least flood is off the table.

From the point of view of the people who bit the dust, this story sucks. From the point of view of Noah and his family, it’s nice to be saved, but beyond that, not much better. It can’t have been a pleasant task.

And most of all, from our point of view, what on earth are we supposed to do with this thing?

To be honest, I am still wrestling with this story. I don’t like it. It’s not a nice story. It’s not an easy story. And part of that is because it is a story of God’s judgment. At least in part. There is judgment in this story, God deems something unacceptable, some people unacceptable, and punishment – or what feels like it – follows.

And so, we hear the words of our song earlier, O Sinner Man, where you gonna run to? This God gets the last word. He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness’ sake, because you’ll be held accountable in the end.

But, if I might be so bold as to say this is what is so great about the bible, and about our faith. These things are hard to understand, and we are invited to wrestle, like we’ll see in a few weeks Jacob wrestling the angel, and to leave blessed but limping from the exchange. You can’t enter into this dialogue with any honesty and not be changed.

So while we haven’t made easy friends, this story and I, I’ve come to discover there is far more than meets the eye. And I’ve actually had something of a change of heart.

It came when I remembered, finally, that this story, which is part of a much bigger story, has a primary protagonist, and sister, it isn’t Noah. (In fact, just in case we begin to think Noah is some perfect person, the story is immediately followed by a bizarre incident involving alcohol, nudity, humiliation and disproportionate rage. So, no saints here).

The central character of this story is God. This is a story about God. And we’ve already seen that this God who wields the power to create an entire universe out of nothing, has also opened Godself to these creatures made in God’s own image and invited them to share God’s love and care for the world and one another.

But the relationship is broken. And the brokenness affects God. The brokenness does not exist simply between human beings or between them and God, it is carried inside God. The grief of a parent over her child destroying himself and rejecting her, and any love or help she seeks to give him, standing on the sidelines where he has thrust her, watching the inevitable destruction he is hurtling himself towards cannot begin to touch the grief within God’s own heart over what is unfolding in this creation God poured God’s soul into. And the devestating fracture runs deep between God and these ones God has planned to share life with who have utterly turned their backs on God and devoted themselves to the violent tearing down of one another at all cost.

And I wonder if at some point, amidst the grief and the anger, God doesn’t take it on Godself: this is God’s own failure as much as it is theirs. God made it, and clearly they are unable to pull themselves out of the death spiral, so God’s going to fix it. Wipe it out and start over.

So God reverses creation. In language paralleling the creation story, the dome of the sky that separated the waters collapses and the deep that was pushed out by land wells up again and everything is returned to the chaos from which it was liberated and created.

Except God can’t quite do it. Can’t quite obliterate all of it. It was so beautiful. so good and God loves it so much. Perhaps it could be good again? Perhaps it can be saved? So God chooses this one little family out of everyone else to save, to begin again. And a sample of every kind of animal as well; maybe it wont be an utter loss.

And then God rages and weeps and releases all of the wrath and sadness and anger, and creation is violently dismantled and returned to nearly the nothingness from which it first emerged, except for this boat, bobbing on top of it all, this odd little remnant of hope.

It’s a tragic and horrifying scene, a heartwrenching scene:

²¹And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings; ²²everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. ²³He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. ²⁴And the waters swelled on the earth for one hundred and fifty days.

Then after this purging and cleansing, the time of recreation begins:

But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; ²the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, ³and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

And finally the ark comes to rest and the inhabitants pour out into a brand new world.

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, ⁹‘As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, ¹⁰and with every living creature that is with you… that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.’

¹²God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: ¹³I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth….¹⁶When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.’

And here’s the kicker. Here is where the story turned and grabbed me, where I realized I don’t hate this story at all. This is a marvelous story, an astounding story, a deeply and beautifully true story:

God began the story seeing no other way but to write it all off and begin fresh. But when all is said and done, and everything is dead and gone, and the earth goes back to its watery formless state, something happens inside God. Because by the time the water recedes and the naked and fresh earth is exposed, and it is ready to begin again, God is in a different place altogether. You might say God has gotten some clarity and made some decisions.

God realizes that over and over again humanity is going to choose death instead of life, choose hatred instead of love, choose to cut off from one another and from God, instead of live in the connection that God created us all for, that even flooding the whole earth hasn’t washed away sin from the hearts of humanity. But even seeing that, despite all of that, God hangs God’s bow in the sky, the weapon of a warrior God puts down, and pledges to all creation never to wipe out the whole earth again.

...the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind… nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.  ²² As long as the earth endures,  seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night,  shall not cease.’

What does this mean? What is God promising?

Nathan Nettleton says it beautifully:

This story is telling us that God neither gives up on us, nor clings to the right to wipe us out if we get too out of hand or the pain we cause becomes too great for God to bear.

It tells us that God voluntarily gives up some freedoms; voluntarily accepts some new restrictions on what God can and can’t do. God signs away the right to simply treat us as we deserve; to dish out punishments that are simply direct and proportional consequences to the crimes. God swears off such options, and makes an irrevocable commitment to wildly disproportionate generosity and mercy. And God does this with open eyes, knowing that such a commitment means signing on for continual betrayal and heartbreak, continual grief and frustration and pain.

But that is a price God is prepared to pay. God makes a personal commitment to be open to the pain, to enter into the pain, to absorb the pain, and to go on loving without limit.

This God, I want to know more. This God I want to see at work in the world and feel in my own life. I want to recognize this God in the lives of those around me, and hear within the stories of those far away that I will never meet but who share this same world with me signs of the unquenchable love of this God.

This God gives me hope.

I will admit this today, that I still don’t completely understand these old stories of our faith, the prehistoric ones that were carried by heart and mouth from generation to generation and finally written and passed down to us today. But I’m willing to wrestle with them until they bless me. And I’m willing to go away limping as well - rearranged, humbled. Because these stories are part of my story. I belong to this God. These people - whether the ones in the stories themselves ever existed as we see them here or not, whether the drama depicted ever unfolded this way or not - these people are my people, and this God is my God.

And it helps me to see and live in the world, claiming this story. It helps me notice the ways I choose death over life, and gives me a way to grieve and even rage over the violence we do to each other and creation.

And then it quiets me in the awe of a God who goes on loving without limit. Who “neither gives up on us nor clings to the right to wipe us out if we get too out of hand or the pain gets too great.”

Who begins here, with Noah, to live in a covenant with humanity, a kind of indestructible commitment to humanity that culminates in plunging right into this world with us, alongside us in utter solidarity and taking onto Godself the darkest and most broken parts of us in a relentless resolve to share life with us, and tenaciously work towards restoring us to the wholeness we were created for.

So I press on in the story, and I invite you to as well. Dig in, wrestle, question, open yourself and press on. Together we’ll watch what comes next.

Original Love, Original Lie & What Happened Next

2011-09-25T08:01:00.000-05:00

Masaccio's Adam and Eve

From Genesis 2:4-3:24

“Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’”

“We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’”

“You will not die! For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

What if God lied?

What if what I thought was true, really isn’t?

What if God can’t be trusted?

What if it is all a lie?

When those words, those thoughts, creep into the relationship, they take root and grow, like a cancer they eat their way through the system, destroying the healthy tissue, casting their shadow over what was good and strong, and making it weak and tenuous.

What if I can’t really trust this person?

What if they don’t really love me?

What if there is nothing I can count on?

What if I am ON MY OWN?

That’s what it is really.

After God creates this whole system to work together – a place for everyone and everything, all mutually dependent, caring for each other, suddenly you’re on your own.

You can’t really trust that you have a place. The very foundation everything rested on – that God was taking care of you and you have a place and a purpose, that the whole thing is built on something good and intentional – once that is up for grabs, then Nobody else has your back, so you’d better look out for yourself. Whatever it takes. Even if it means disregarding someone else, even if it means demeaning yourself, even if it means disconnecting from the God who made you.

Let’s back up.

The Story began at the beginning. But there are so many important things to say about the beginning – about who God is and who we are and how it all comes together – that there are a couple of different tellings of the beginning right side by side. The first one we saw last week: the God who brings life out of nothing - out of impossibility births new beginning. We saw that it was all created to work together in harmony, that animals and birds, tides and seasons, God made this incredible, interdependent eco-system and set it all in motion.

Then we saw that God made human beings, male and female in God’s image, and drew them into God’s rest and care for the world, called them to participate with God. This first telling of the beginning reveals a cosmos-wielding God of beauty and power, of creativity and omnipotence.

The second version of the beginning is a love story.

Not that the first wasn’t, but this one is more intimate and more revealing of God’s vulnerability and connection to humanity.

In this story human beings don’t come last. The human creature come before the rest, held in God’s very arms with life breathed into its nostrils from God’s own breath. And this creature is there to witness God finish creating– sees the earth begin to produce – the plants and trees grow right up out of the ground. God shares the process with the human creature, placing the human in the garden - here is the home I made for you, for you to live in and care for.

And right in the center of their relationship is God’s vulnerability.

I love this creature, I want it to love me, but in order for a yes to really be yes, there has to be a no as well. Is it love if there is no other option?

Is there mutuality if there is no boundary between you and me, no chance for you to reject me or hurt me or choose me or trust me?

God desires that the creature trusts and opens itself to God, and so God opens Godself and trusts the creature. God places, among all the glorious fruit trees of the garden, one tree, right in the center, and God says to the human creature, You may eat of any tree in the whole garden – but this tree you may not eat of. If you do, you will die. This is the boundary I set up; here you do not cross.

And then God observes the creature God has made in this home God has made for it and notices that it doesn’t work for there to be just one. There needs to be another, a partner, a helper the way God is a helper (it’s the same word in the Hebrew). A relationship like the one that is at the center of creation and the Trinity itself needs to be hear as well, so God begins creating animals from the dust, forming them and bringing them one by one to the human creature – What about this one? And whatever the human names the animal, that is what it becomes. Side by side, God and human, creating, naming, and the rest of the earth begins to take shape as its inhabitants come to life. And yet as much joy as there is in creating and in naming, there is not found one that corresponds to the human creature. None of them are right.

So God causes this earth creature, literally this adam, from the earth, adamah, to sleep. But rather than from the earth, God takes from the material of the creature itself and forms another – like it, but different.

(And this is why- the story says in a sidenote, a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and the two become one flesh. In this differentiation of male and female coming together, there is reflected the image of God – not in one alone, but in the relationship of differentiation in unity).

So the creature awakens male, and here in front of the creature is female. And they are both naked and not ashamed. They are fully themselves before God an one another with no reason whatsoever to hide, to be anything less, to deceive themselves or one another. They exist in wholeness and trust, together in their precious particularity.

And the first creature is delighted. Here at last is one like him, one meant for him and he for her. Here is his corresponding partner. Now there is not a solitary earth creature, but humanity. And now life is as it was meant to be. And all creation is living in harmony and wholeness.

Until…

“Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’”

“You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

And the doubt seeps in, the distrust that separates flesh from bone has begun.

What if God lied?

So they crossed the boundary, reached out their hands, took and ate.

DID God lie?

Did they die?

What is death?

Where once there was wholeness, trust, mutuality and interdependence, now there is brokenness, disconnect, distrust.

Where once there was freedom, dignity, self-awareness, now there is a fear, shame, self-deceit.

Did they die?

Not at that very moment, not physically, anyway. But also, yes. This was the death of them.

They looked at one another and realized they were naked.

So they scrambled and wove together loincloths of leaves, to cover and hide their vulnerability, their difference.

When God came walking in the garden they hid and cowered.

And the grief that must have ripped through God’s heart. My children? Where are you ? Why are you hiding from me?

We heard you coming and we are naked!

What? Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat of the fruit that I commanded you not to eat?

And now that they’re on their own, protecting themselves above all others, now that they can’t trust one another and they’ve hidden their weakness and put on shame, the finger pointing starts. It was this woman you gave me!

It was this snake that tricked me!

But they had seen that the fruit was to be desired to make one wise, they had decided that God could not be trusted, and they would each take into their own hands God’s role, and forfeit their own role as God’s beloved children in order to instead be like God, and they ate the one fruit in all the garden that God told them not to eat.

And then God spells out the consequences of getting what they wanted- what it is to truly know it all.

You chose to see everything, to know everything, all the potential for things to go wrong as well as right, all the places for pain and deception, all the ways we are different and could hurt each other, you have chosen to have your eyes opened to all of it, and this is what life looks like now:

You'll bring children into this world on your own, in pain. And when you till the ground you will see that it is hard work. The earth will not yield easily to you, your own body will not cooperate with you. I made you for one another, to exist together, but you've made yourselves against each other, to exist alone; you will seek to tear him down, and you will lord power over her.

You have placed yourself over and against and that is how you will live.

And I can’t have you now eating of the Tree of Life and living forever in this broken state, and so you must leave the garden. This home is no longer yours, you have rejected the life I have made for you, you could no longer function here as you were meant to, you have chosen instead to forge out on your own.

And then God, who meets us where we are –even in the consequences of our actions, even in our self-inflicted pain and our brokenness, even in the shame God never intended us to have but we’ve clothed ourselves in anyway- God takes off their flimsy leaf coverings and gives them instead animal skins.

And God clothes them. I imagine God peeling off their dead leaves and draping the skins around them, like a parent dressing their child in jammies before bed. And then they are out of God’s arms.

And there it is.

How can you ever again make whole what has broken? How can the trust ever be regained? Once you’ve shattered the relationship, once you’ve allowed distrust to color your vision, once you’ve betrayed your beloved so egregiously, and there is no taking it back, how do you move forward? How do you go on?

Well, herein lies the grace.

The grace of the Creator and lover God, the the God who decided from day one that God would never be cut off from these beloved creatures, made in God’s own image. The God of covenant, whose promises to us hold us even when we can’t reciprocate.

This is God who brings life out of nothing, right? Who brings hope out of impossibility? What more impossible situation was there ever, than that of humanity living in the consequences of their rejection of God? Impossible to make things right. Utterly incapable to patch up what they have torn.

If the story ended there, we’d be screwed.

And we often act like it did end there.

But it didn’t. And it doesn’t.

All those places in our lives, of insecurity and doubt, all the original lies that underlie original sin,

the ways we act as though we don’t need God or one another,

the shame we feel over who we are, terrified to reveal our vulnerability, hiding our differences, doubting our place,

that ways we give into desire, self-gratification, individual fulfillment, as though that – and not the image of God- gives us our identity,

the ways we throw others under the bus, protecting ourselves over and against those closest to us…

These could have been what we were left with. These could have been what defines us.

But they are not.

We are God’s beloved from the beginning.

God never lets go. God never gives up. God wraps us in God’s care, and sometimes God’s care looks like compassion for our shame itself, meeting us right there and giving us what God knows we don’t need but we desperately believe we do.

And in the beginning, and in all of our beginnings and our falls, God keeps the story going.

All these stories carry the taste of a promise. Where we try and fail to truly love, God loves completely. And God’s vulnerability in loving again and again despite multiple rejections, like a parent who will never give up on their children... God keeps coming back.

And one day God’s vulnerability would be exposed in sharing humanity with us so completely as to take on this very death – head on- that threatens always to separate us from our Creator. To suffer under it with us, for us.

But for now, we’re holding our finger in the book on a chapter that is filled with pain and doubt, with a poignant tear in the fabric of creation and a split through the relationship between God and humanity.

And we recognize its reality still within us. Around us. In our DNA and the air we breathe. In a thousand little and big ways, we participate in sin and death, and we recognize it today. It is right here in the center, and we swallow the lie daily. The belief that we are on our own. That God can’t be trusted.

May we see it and face it with open eyes, and may it drive us back into the arms of our God.

What that "something from nothing" God did

2011-09-18T14:29:00.002-05:00

At LNPC this morning, we kicked off Fall with our "Lessons and Carols of Creation." We are entering a season of storytelling, recalling the old stories of our faith and exploring our own stories for God's presence and activitiy. We began this week with Creation and will continue forward from here, using different methods to dig into The Story of which we are all part. Below is the reflection that followed our Lessons and Carols of Creation.

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

And the Story begins.

The beginning of a story always sets the trajectory. The opening lines give you a taste of what’s to come. What’s it going to be about? What’s the dominating tone of this story? What questions is it exploring? Who are the major players?

Will I hang on past the first page to see what happens next?

In the beginning

when God created

the heavens and the earth,

²the earth was a formless void

and darkness covered

the face of the deep,

while a wind from God

swept over the face of the waters.

³Then God said,

‘Let there be light’;

and there was light.

⁴And God saw

that the light was good;

and God separated

the light from the darkness.

⁵God called

the light Day,

and the darkness he called Night.

And there was evening and there was morning,

the first day.

Talk about an opener! The first day of what? What else is this startling and confident character going to do? A formless void? Light out of nowhere? Corralling darkness? Naming day and night? Where is this story going to take us?

The story begins with God.

Before time and space and you and me and our capacity to grasp or explore or explain any of it, this story invites us to set down scientific debates and questions of origin and expectations of proof or details

and to meet this astounding protagonist,

who speaks into the silence and the darkness,

this voice, this intention.

Out of nothing, out of the void and the emptiness and the impossibility,

out of the places where there is nothing and no chance of anything

ever, God creates.

In delight, in revelry in joy, God brings life out of nothing.

God brings hope out of nothing. God brings breath and future and possibility out of nothing. from chaos, order, from darkness, light, and this complex and captivating figure, this mysterious and compelling God is just getting started.

Talk about a debut.

But the stage gets shared.

Objects become subjects alongside our main character, there are others, now, participants. God doesn’t paint a still-life, but ignites a whole self-sustaining, interdependent eco-system – plants and animals, days and nights, tides and seasons, creeping things and flying things and God looks at what God does and says it is good. It is so very good.

Blessing creation God says to it: live, thrive, love, grow! God celebrates and enjoys what God does, all is woven together in harmony: interdependent, interconnected.

And then the story takes an even more intriguing turn.

Human beings, oh! Humankind! In God’s own image!

Male and Female, different but the same, mutual, connected, related, together reflecting the image of God that cannot be captured in one alone solitary creature,

conscious recipients of the gift – directly invited to get involved.

The Psalmist in Psalm 8 says, When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,  the moon and the stars that you have established;  what are human beings that you are mindful of them,  mortals that you care for them?

 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,  and crowned them with glory and honour.  You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;  you have put all things under their feet,  all sheep and oxen,  and also the beasts of the field,  the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,  whatever passes along the paths of the seas.  O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

This something from nothing Creating God has entrusted the joy of God’s heart to us, the very art from God’s hands. Look what I made! Isn’t it fantastic? Wont you join me in it? God blesses human beings and opens up a relationship of trust, of shared delight and wonder, inviting us to connect with God’s joy, to care with God for all of this creation even as we exist within it.

And when God is finished with what God made, God rests.

As part of the creating process itself, one of the generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created, the final stage in creation, God Rests.

But not to adjust or critique, to improve or continue the work.

God simply smiles and enjoys it. Steps back and sits down and rests.

And God digs that resting so much that the third blessing here God gives is of the rest itself. Setting-aside time. Finishing time. Sacred, holy time, to rest from the work. To appreciate the whole. To delight in the project, to rest.

We are invited into the rest of God.

Karl Barth calls us "seventh day creatures." Unlike the rest of creation that exists as created, we are invited into the seventh day, we become co-creators, working and resting and communing with God, alongside God, invited to view creation as God does, joining God in caring for creation, in nurturing one another, and in contented resting.

So, if this is how the story starts, where will it go from here?

Well, given this opening, I expect we’ll be seeing more of this God bringing something out of nothing. That seems to be a very pleasing mode of operation for this character. Perhaps it will be the most significant and prevalent way this God will act as the story unfolds.

And the story of this whole thing – this earth, this experiment of interconnected life, this thing set in motion - that interdependence and the celebration of life seem important. The way we all need each other and the world seems set up to function cooperatively. That’ll come up again, I predict.

And finally, I bet we’re going to see more of these humans, for sure. And maybe they’ll get themselves into some trouble; that’s an awful risky thing God does, putting so much confidence in these creatures God barely knows. Though I suppose, God does know them somewhat, being that they are made in God’s own image. But we’ve yet to truly see what they are like, and there’s potential there for some interesting dynamics in the relationship between God and them. I bet we’re about to see something happen. I bet God wont be resting forever…

In the meantime, we pause on the very threshold of the story and hear its invitation to linger here and rest. To look back on the wonder of the whole thing, and the beckoning within it to dive in and be a part of it, and to look for God’s same creative hand at work in our world today and in our lives.

In the meantime we pause on the very threshold of the story and hear its invitation to celebrate. And to observe, that despite all the pain and sorrow that certainly lies ahead in this story, which we ourselves can attest to, the brokenness in store for creation and these humans, there is an incredible protagonist here, the very author of life, who has done and continues to do astonishing and unfathomable things.

As we look upon the heavens, and the works of your fingers, Oh God, our souls well up in amazement and gratitude, and we can’t wait to find out what happens next.

The Hypocrisy of Ministers & Moms

2011-09-10T14:58:00.002-05:00

“You really did bring this on yourself, then.” she said. I was shocked. My husband’s exact words coming out of this lab-coated, spectacled, medical professional. Somehow they sounded different in the glaring light of this office than they had in my living room.

“So,” she continued, “This is my prescription, and I mean it: Do not be productive. Stop. For the next few days, if it doesn’t absolutely have to be done, you don’t do it. Do nothing. Do you hear me? Order take-out, skip cleaning the house, whatever it is, let it go. This has gone on far too long.”

I have been sick for twelve days. Twelve. Days. When I first got sick, I dutifully plunked the kids in front of the TV with fistfuls of granola bars and thermoses of water, called in sick and tucked myself into bed to shiver under quilts for the next eight hours. That was my sick day. And when the day was done, I basically resumed normal life. Except I was still sick. And exhausted. So I wasn’t present with my children, my husband, my work, myself. I wandered around in a stuffy, achy fog for a week and finally dragged myself into the doctor to score some antibiotics and kick this thing, only to be told it was a nasty virus that would need to work its own way out.

“If you’re not better by the end of the week, come back.”

I was back.

“Hot liquids and naps.” she announced. “And stop being productive.”

Telling me to stop being productive is like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking. “We heard you were sick,” someone said to me last Sunday morning. I was. But that didn’t stop me from going to church. Even though someone else was preaching. Even though everything was already taken care of by others. Even though I was sick. And at least three different people asked me, “Why are you here?”

I would’ve asked them the same thing.

What is it about ministers, that we’re willing to sacrifice our own humanity for our sense of duty, responsibility, or inflated view of our own "necessary-ness"? What is it about moms? My friend told me the other day that her college-aged daughter had said to her that week, “But, Mom, you have never been sick!”

“That’s because when I was sick you all still had to eat and be driven to soccer practice.” she had answered.

Sitting there being chastised by my doctor I realized what an utter hypocrite I am. In a congregation that embraces Sabbath, that seeks wholeness in our lives and relationships, I had been doing the opposite of what I believe and preach. As a mom who wants my children to be healthy people with good habits for self-care, I was a disgraceful example.

There’s a reason for the rhythm! The regular work and rest cycle that God designed inside us and in the world around us. It’s a pattern! as my kids would say. Rest can’t be hoarded and doled out as a reward or saved up like vacation time. Just make it through this couple of busy weeks and then I’ll slow down for a week. I thought. But my body announced loud and clear that it doesn’t work that way.

But there is so much that needs to be done! But I’m useless laying here, and bored! But people need me! But I’ll get behind… I’ll let them down… I’ll seem weak… I’m not REALLY THAT sick…

Recently I heard someone say that pastor-types tend to be really in touch with the universal human needs for meaning and purpose, so they focus heavily on these and often tend to be less in touch with other human needs such as exercise and rest. I would admit that often I listen well to the promptings of my heart and mind and overlook the messages of my body and soul. And for many, it becomes only when we are forced to Sabbath, as Wayne Muller describes, by sickness or injury, other outside factors, that we actually do finally rest. So our lives preach to our children and our congregations that we don’t actually believe that God is God and we are God’s beloved children, but rather that producing, consuming, contributing and controlling is what we worship, and we are slaves to the system that will not stop.

So, I hope I’ve learned my lesson, although I’m sure it’s a lifelong process. And even as I say this, there are several things in the next few days I am not yet able to say I can not do. But my hot tea is beside me and I’ve napped on this couch. And I’ve done nothing productive this afternoon(other than this blogpost). So I give my husband, children, and congregants carte blanche to call me on my hypocrisy when I forget to live what we believe. And when I start becoming what I do instead of living wholly who I am, I want someone to remind me of my humanity and tell me to stop being productive.

Fellowship (of Presbyterians et al.) in the Kingdom God

2011-08-28T13:04:00.003-05:00

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Romans 12:9-21

Saturday night in worship at LNPC we gathered around this scripture and talked about times we had experienced these things in real life. Mutual affection, weeping when someone weeps and rejoicing when they rejoice, extending hospitality to strangers or overcoming evil with good. We shared a story, each of us, of just one time when we had been part of one of these things, and what it felt like. And then we looked at a whole list of human needs/values that we all share, which also characterize life in the Kingdom of God, and we circled the ones we had experienced in that moment. When human life functions as God designed it, and when the Church is truly being the Church, we participate in life-affirming interaction with one another. There is trust, joy, connection, integrity, mourning, compassion, clarity, contribution, and authenticity. And we were designed by God to thrive in this way, to share in God’s purposes when we experience and contribute toward these things in the world, living into the wholeness we each need in our very core.

This scripture text presents an impossibly beautiful picture of what life in the Kingdom of God is meant to be, what being the Body of Christ should look like – and it is easy to read it and feel paralyzed or despairing by the stark contrast with what most of us experience regularly.

This week the Fellowship of Presbyterians gathered in Minneapolis – 2000 people grappling through how to be church in all its nuances with our various interpretation of scriptures or understanding of faith or desired practices as communities. Twitter was going crazy with people from the outside, desperately seeking to get a sense of the discussion, or throwing in their own snarky judgments as the days unfolded. And, as with any such gathering, there were some things said about (and at) the event that did not contribute to wholeness or reflect God’s intention for life in the Body of Christ.

But my week was centered around a side event, “Eats & Empathy,” that was designed to help anyone – regardless of nuances in theology, experience, interpretation, emotion, etc. – to stay grounded and present, open to God and one another in the midst of the discussion. We practiced empathy – really seeking to see and hear one another, to understand the needs and values being expressed within the words that are spoken or the actions that are taken. And we looked at our own needs and values, grieving those that may have been unmet in the experiences of the week - such as communication, connection, respect, mutuality or security - and celebrating the beauty of these God-given needs anyway.

On Friday, our second evening, we addressed “enemy images” – those labels we use that allow us to dismiss one another, most glaringly and prominently “Liberal” and “Conservative.” Sitting there together, a whole eclectic bunch of us, with all the enemy images we bring to the table, across from and next to these very people we’ve categorized and dismissed, or others we’ve labeled and assumed to be just exactly like us, we found ourselves experiencing solidarity, hope, shared grief, community, inspiration, the sense of understanding and being understood.

And we could acknowledge that within this debate our denomination has been waging for 25 years, some people are really in touch with the needs for inclusion and justice and others are really in touch with the needs for integrity and faithfulness. But in truth, we all share all of these needs, and the needs themselves do not conflict. In God’s Kingdom there is integrity, inclusion, faithfulness and justice. In God's Kingdom all people are made whole and God is glorified. So no matter which needs any of us gathered there tend to hold more dear, we found ourselves able together to grieve the way we fall short of these things as the church. And at the same time we were freed to celebrate together the beauty of what we are called to as the Body of Christ and the foretaste we glimpse of eternity when we experience them here and now.

On Saturday night, when our tiny rag tag group of Presbyterian Jesus followers in all our weakness and humanity left our church worship service, we were filled with hope. Holding in front of us these ridiculously full charts of qualities of life in the Kingdom of God that we’re evidently regularly part of - often without realizing it – and feeling the significance of what we had shared the night before on behalf of the larger Church, we were profoundly aware that this is indeed the Body of Christ. And that we are indeed individually members of one another. And I, for one, am so very, very grateful to be part of such a holy and mighty undertaking. Thanks be to God.

(For more on the Fellowship of Presbyterians, Romans 12, and being the Body of Christ, see last week's entry: Living Sacrifice)

Living Sacrifice

2011-08-21T13:09:00.004-05:00

photo "holding hands together" from sethskim

Romans 12:1-8

On Friday I was driving down 35W, and on the 35^th street overpass a man was standing, looking down at the cars below, with a dog sitting beside him. He was holding an enormous American flag in one hand, which was billowing in the wind, and with the other hand he was pressing a handmade sign against the fence, the words barely legible to the passing cars, it read, “Thank you Nick for your sacrifice. We will miss you forever.”

Here was this person, demanding to be seen in his grief, seeking to honor someone who had died, I assume, in service to his country. And this man’s need to share it, to be seen and heard, was so great, and had so little outlet, that he had to silently shout it to strangers in their cars on their way to work.

I couldn’t see the man’s face, but in the narrative I constructed, it was streaming with tears, defiant and proud and lonely tears, and, (just to make it all the more heart-breaking), I imagined that the dog beside him was this Nick’s dog and the two of them stood as a testimony to Nick’s sacrifice – that somehow by their actions he could be remembered and honored – even if just by the two of them in all the world.

Seeing that man and dog made me think about sacrifice, about this exhortation in our text today to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God.” We see sacrifice as giving up something, hurting us in some way for the sake of another. The ultimate sacrifice you can give is your life, like Nick. It means you’re dead. Gone. The sacrifice, then, the exchange you made or thing you let go of, was everything that you could have been and never got to become. The sacrifice was putting someone else’s battle, someone else’s agenda, someone else’s calling ahead of your own, or taking it on as your own in exchange for whatever you would have been without it. Thank you for your sacrifice, you will be missed forever.

In Paul’s context, a sacrifice was dead as well. To bring a burnt offering, a sacrifice to God was a religious symbol, recognizing God’s sovereignty and your place as God’s subject; it was a way to worship and honor God.

So this language about being a living sacrifice, about your bodies, your lives, your whole beings, being a living sacrifice… it hardly even makes sense. A living sacrifice is almost an oxymoron. Nothing is put to death in this sacrifice, nothing is killed or made dead. Instead it remains vibrant, thriving, vital; the life lived becomes the sacrifice.

Rather than giving up who you are; you fulfill it. You let your every day, your imagination and actions, your creativity and fears and hopes and skills and relationships and encounters be the way of honoring God.

In fact, this urging of Paul says we honor God most when each person lives fully who they were created to be, no less, in mutuality and connection with each other. Everything you do, then, is part of this gift back to God, this thank you so much! lived out in each moment. It’s not separate – the spiritual and the bodily, it’s one and the same.

You belong to God!, Paul has been saying for chapters and chapters up until this point – you belong to God and not to sin, you belong to grace and not to condemnation, you belong to freedom and to wholeness and not to slavery and brokenness, so live like it. This is your new natural state, you need to live your way into it.

And here’s how, he says, with your whole selves as an offering to God. And this is absolutely and completely tied up in how we treat one another, in all of us together sharing in this thing – many bodies, one sacrifice, many members, one body, many gifts, one calling, many functions, one intention, serving the whole as we serve each other, and honoring God by doing so. That is how we share in the purposes of God on earth.

Sitting here today, you probably cannot sense it in this moment, you probably have not seen the increasing build up, but our denomination is in a tenuous place, and this week some of that will come to a head. In congregations all over the country, this is the Sunday before, the Sunday of prayer and preparation, for this national Gathering put on by the Fellowship of Presbyterians here in Minneapolis.

This week the more conservative end of the one-dimensional spectrum we’ve created to judge and rank ourselves, this week those “conservatives” that are not so far over that they’ve given up completely on the rest of us, the ones just in from them, and then lots in the middle too, are gathering to talk about the future of their congregations, their presbyteries, their faith and how they practice it and whether it can still be practiced in the PCUSA, and if not, then what?

And the those on the more liberal side of this deceptive and perilous teeter-totter we’ve all frantically balanced ourselves upon, are either ignoring this large and emotional Gathering altogether, watching with concern and apprehension, or openly mocking and criticizing it.

A few days ago someone whom I would consider a friend, or at the very least, a friendly colleague, wrote a scathing blogpost about the event, in which he, in essence, judged the motives of those attending as being about power and money, and finished with a “don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.” approach. He was lauded for his words by some; and I wept when I read it.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to ….

For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

If they go, (whoever “they” are), we who stay, (whoever “we” are), will lose valuable, integral parts of our body; we will not be able to function as we were meant to. Where each person, and each congregation - in our limited awareness, and capacity, in our own little faith or great faith, in our gifts and our strengths, our weaknesses and blindspots - let our whole lives be part of this amazing thing we are called to, let our lives participate with God and each other.

Where will be prophets and the givers if we are separated? What leaders and compassionates, which ministers and teachers will we lose? And how will we carry on without these parts of our body? What are we really saying, if any one of us thinks we can dismiss the other, or ourselves, from the body? We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

These verses before us today are the first verses I really remember memorizing, (aside from John 3:16 and the other givens). I was at summer camp, I must have been about ten, and we got points for different various activities, one of which was memorizing verses. This one sounded so much like a sermon that I threw open the windows of our bunkroom, and shouted it down to passers-by until I had the whole thing perfected in the cadence of an old-timey preacher.

Do not be conformed to this world! I would roar out the window, jabbing my finger at the sky. This doesn’t mean, like I thought it did when I was ten, not to swear or cheat or kiss boys or think bad thoughts or lose your temper. It means not to let yourselves be dominated by the mentality that some are better than others, or that we are not utterly connected and dependent on one another.

This week is the 2-year anniversary of our move to embrace Sabbath more fully as a congregation. I was asked to contribute some articles to a worship website on the meaning of Sabbath and how we practice it together, and as I wrote I found it fascinating to remember why we chose to do this, and to reflect on what it has given us.

Sabbath breaks us out of the cycle of this world, the 24/7, non-stop, consumer-driven system that sees people as competition instead of companion, that sums up your full worth by your net worth, that isolates us as individuals instead of binds us as a body. Sabbath demands that we stop and sense the grace given to us, and recognize the God who breathes life into it all.

Sabbath renews our minds and helps us resist the messages of this age. It means, stop being solitary you in traffic, on the way to your own job and absorbed in your own life and look up at the man on the overpass – standing there in his grief and his need to be seen – and see him, and his friend who is gone, and your connection to them as human beings, and realize how grateful you are for your own connection to others, for places of belonging, for people who will grieve you when you are gone, and see your life for the living sacrifice it can be – the offering, the gift – to God and to the world, each and every day that you are living, and not only when you’re gone.

Sabbath rest means being reoriented, reminded, that God is God, and that you are part of the people of God, and that is how you are defined first and foremost –and in Christ you have a unique and particular role to play and others are blessed when you are fully you, living that role out alongside them being them and God being God.

All week long, with thoughts of Sabbath bumping around my brain, and watching the internet hubbub build up around the PCUSA, I was aware of the constant struggle not to be conformed to this world, and how even in the church, everywhere in fact, we are indeed opposing the forces that would throw us back into sin, that would lie to us about ourselves and our world and our God. I was reminded that allowing ourselves to be renewed, body and mind, is a deeply spiritual and radically revolutionary act of resistance and honesty.

There is joy in all this too, by the way. Not like I preached it from the second floor bunkhouse window. Not all hellfire and brimstoney and preachy. But worship, worship it becomes! Full on, joyfilled worship, thank-you-God, worship, worship that says, yeah, things are bad, and they are hard, but still you are God and I am so thankful to be yours.

Not worship as our world worships – worship of self and self-sufficiency, of wealth and fitness and independence and the sacrifice of death. But worship to our creator and designer of life, who knit together this striking and intricate, eclectic body and knows how it all works together, worship that finds its rest and purpose and meaning in the one who sets us free and then holds us accountable to live in our freedom.

I urge you, therefore, it says, – wherefore? Because from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever and ever amen! (vs. 11:36) That kind of worship.

As we head into this week, I pray for the strength to keep seeing one another- as individuals, as members of one another, as a church and a denomination, as human beings, family and friends - to keep seeing each other and not leave one another stranded on the overpass in grief and isolation.

And I pray for the vision to recognize that this is God’s body, and not our personal property, and that each and every one of them – especially the ones I can’t relate to or don’t understand – are part of this body with me, and their purpose is necessarily different than my own, and I am not complete without them.

And may my discomfort be a sacrifice of worship and widen my capacity to love,

and may my anxiety become a sacrifice of praise and expand hope in God’s design,

and may my apprehension or confusion become a sacrifice of surrender and deepen trust within me.

And may I know the joy of belonging to God and each other, that each day, by imagination and action, our lives may sing out together in all their notes and harmony, into a living and holy sacrifice of praise, which is our spiritual worship.

Amen.

Happy Sabbath Anniversary

2011-08-18T15:22:00.005-05:00

This week I spent a day at Sabbath House, a home in the middle of the city, where some Sisters of St. Francis open up garden, bedrooms, library and lovely, airy porch to people in need of a respite. I napped, read, listened to peaceful music while the breeze made the wind chimes ring outside the window, and ate a delicious meal with fresh garden goodies from their CSA. I felt tucked away and hidden from the world, right in the middle of it, and it gave me a chance to reflect on the two years our church has spent intentionally practicing Sabbath.

It was here, at Sabbath House, that half our congregation gathered over two one-day retreats to learn about Sabbath from these Sisters, to experience a day of it and worship together in the context of Sabbath. It was here that our dream of practicing Sabbath as a congregation began to grow real live roots and leaves, and become something we could nurture and grow and live into. We had explored how, for us, worship went far beyond sitting in pews, and hospitality was about truly meeting God and others, and had decided we wanted to embrace a fuller, more expansive experience of worship and hospitality, that could maybe be explored if we practiced Sabbath together.

(I have shared about our congregation's transition to a Sabbath-keeping pattern of worship over at Clayfire Curator. You can find that article here).

In the two years now, that we have been practicing Sabbath as a community, we have settled into a rich and nurturing rhythm. First and third Sundays we worship on Sunday mornings in all our Presbyterian glory. Second and Fourth weekends we meet Saturday nights, by candlelight and harp, and sink into Sabbath rest together. The “preached word” takes many forms, looser in format than the Sunday sermons, and often very interactive. We hold silence each week, two whole minutes that sometimes stretch into eternity, but have become life-giving. Simple, Taize-esque music is woven throughout the service, and we center our worship around shared prayer (something that has invaded our Sunday morning services as well).
Our Saturday worship continues with a communal meal, prepared in love by a member whose large house and grown children are on the other side of the country. She leaves her seminary dorm room to meditate in the warmth of the church kitchen for the day, feeding her own soul in the preparation to feed us. Then we go home.

And on Sunday, we spend the day in Sabbath. Here and there, all over the city, individuals and families purposely stopping. The guidelines we give ourselves are to try to do nothing from obligation, to pay attention to the struggle to stop and offer even that as a gift of gratitude, to get outside some, to play some, to do something that gives us delight. To be with others if we’re alone a lot. To be alone if our lives are busy. To make the day different than our ordinary days. To pay attention to what our souls need. And it works for us.

Today I met with our music director to plan for the next few weeks, and together we marveled that we have reached the two year mark. And we realized that neither one of us could ever go back to the pattern of life and worship we had known all of our lives. This way of worship has become who we are, and has fed us abundantly as a community and as individuals. So, in gratitude we celebrate.

Happy Sabbath Anniversary, Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church!

To read more about what Sabbath is and why we keep Sabbath, see an earlier article on Clayfire Curator here, and check out their many Sabbath reflections and resources this week.

____________________________________________________________________

Our Opening Sabbath Ritual is adapted from the Jewish Shabbat, and involves lighting two candles labeled “Observe” and “Remember,” drawn from the two places in Scripture (Exodus 20:8 & Deuteronomy 5:12) where the Sabbath command is given.

LNPC Sabbath Opening Ritual:

God meets us here as we come together.

We set aside our plans and open up our lives

to be nurtured in sacred time.

By resting from our labors and worries,

and delighting in that which gives us joy,

we discover who we are,

and in whose image we are made.

We are drawn into the rest of God,

we are refreshed and renewed,

and so we Observe the Sabbath.

(“Observe” candle is lit)

We meet God here as we come together.

We lift up our hearts and open up our lives

to recognize God in sacred time.

By resisting the rule of an anxious and fearful world,

and lingering in the wideness of God’s generosity and love,

we discover whose we are,

and in whom our life is found.

We give our trust and gratitude to God,

we are reoriented and reminded,

and so we Remember the Sabbath.

(“Remember” candle is lit)

Prayer

God of creation and deliverance,

Christ with us in life and death,

Spirit of love, forgiveness and hope,

We meet you here,

and you meet us here,

as we come together in sacred time.

(liturgy copyright Kara K Root and Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church)

Sabbath: A Weekly Journey from Slavery to Freedom

2011-08-16T07:19:00.000-05:00

I've written an article on Sabbath for Clayfire Curator.

Telling Time or Living Time

2011-08-07T17:56:00.001-05:00

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, 14-15
Matthew 14:22-33

There is a time to mourn and a time to celebrate, and so often in life, these times are one and the same. This is the third occasion this weekend on which this passage has been featured – first at Doug Johnson’s funeral, where we celebrated his ordinary and remarkable life and the love that poured from it, and we mourned his passing and grieved losing him, and we did both of these things at the same time, even while recognizing that Doug is held in God’s eternal time.

Then yesterday this passage came up again at my Dad’s wedding, where two people with broken pasts and broken hearts who have found each other started over together. And it was, for them, truly a time to celebrate as they joined their lives into one and the future opened up before them. But for me, sitting there, as a living part of the time that was in my Dad’s past, it was painful. I am thrilled for him, but I grieve over the brokenness of my family that can never be recovered, and the way that brokenness invades my very being. And it was really, really hard to find myself inexplicably mourning when anyone at all can tell you weddings are times to celebrate.

There is a time for everything and so we like to use this passage to tell you what time it is. It’s happy time, not sad time; it’s time to build up, not break down, it’s time to look forward, not backwards, it’s time to speak or dance or smile, not be silent or sit quietly or weep. Get with the time.

But the problem is that almost nothing in life is just one thing or the other. And all these times nestle so close to one another that one person’s time for silence is another’s time to speak, and building up often demands some breaking down at the same time, and joy and sorrow are such a shaken up cocktail that they can barely be tasted separately and are impossible to completely extract from one another, and tears and laughter absolutely belong together at funerals.

And I hate when people use scripture, any kind of scripture, to tell you what you should do or how you should be. We do that to ourselves all the time. But that’s not what this book is. It’s not a how-to manual. It’s not a self-help guide or a right-living formula. It's so much more valuable and powerful than that.

This is the story of our faith. This is the story of life. Of God. Of God’s involvement in people’s lives. So it is mostly not prescriptive; it is descriptive. What I mean is, this beautiful poetry read in so many different times and contexts is not telling us that we should divide life into these clear-cut categories and try really hard to do the right thing at the right time.

It is observing, noticing, that life is filled with all of these things, that sometimes we mourn and sometimes we dance and sometimes there is war and sometimes peace, and we keep and we throw away and it’s all part of the package, this great big mixed bag called life. And it is suggesting that in every season there is purpose, meaning, and mostly, it is recognizing that in the midst of whatever season we find ourselves in, God is there with us, this God who holds all these times, and all time, in God’s hands.

And so when we come to our passage of Peter walking on the water, I can’t help but feel almost irritated, because there is nobody who has been in church for any amount of time that hasn’t heard sermons on this text, and 99% of the time they are prescriptive. They tell you what time it is. It’s faith time, not fear time! It’s worship time, not doubt time! You should have enough faith to get out of the boat. You should not be distracted by the storm. You should keep your eyes on Jesus.

Duh. Nobody needs to be told that. We know that. It just makes us feel bad to be told once again to keep your eyes on Jesus because if we are honest we are very often distracted by the storm, and who wouldn’t be? And very seldom do we really have the faith, or stupidity, or whatever it is, to get out of the boat in the middle of it. And who in the world can keep their eyes always on Jesus and what in the world does that mean anyway?

So, we could sit here, all itchy and annoyed, ready to be told once again how we are supposed to feel or follow, what we are supposed to do or believe, and let the beauty and ridiculousness and reality of this story blow right over us. Or we could really listen to the story, immerse ourselves right into it and let it describe instead of prescribe, let it help us observe life and ourselves, and fear and faith, and worship and doubt and let it show us a little bit about what it mean to be human and how hard it is, but mostly, let it tell us something of who God is and what God is up to.

Immediately following the feeding of the 5000, where the disciples not just witness, but participate in this doubt-busting miracle, they head out alone into the boat on the Sea of Galilee. And then they spend the entire night fighting a relentless storm, thrown around, bailing water, struggling with sails and bracing against wind with no respite in sight, terrified for their very lives, and, I can imagine, utterly and completely exhausted.

It has not been a good night.

And in the wee hours of the morning, wind still gusting and waves still heaving, here comes this figure, walking atop the water.

So let’s just pause there and note that, at least to me, their fear makes complete sense. This must be the end, right? They’re seeing things, they’re going down, or they’ve already died.

But when he’s within shouting distance Jesus tells them, “Don’t be scared, guys, it’s me.”

And Peter, dear Peter, calls back, “Jesus, if it’s really you then tell me to walk to you.” (which of course, no ghost or figment of your imagination would do-?). So Jesus invites Peter out of the boat, and Peter actually climbs out of the pitching, heaving boat and puts his feet onto the water and stands up.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that seems to me some kind of faith. “You of little faith,” Jesus calls him later, little faith like a mustard seed that moves mountains, little faith that gets you raw, open and vulnerable in the middle of the storm because you’ve asked Jesus to call you there. Just sayin’. Little faith is no small thing.

So Peter steps out and walks to Jesus. But he is suddenly distracted by the raging sea and the roiling sky and the wind screaming around him and he begins to sink.

And here is where we get told to just keep your eyes on Jesus, as though somehow it’s God’s goal to get you out of storms, even ones you’ve put yourself into the middle of, or that God sends storms to test us and we are supposed to have some big faith, bigger than Peter’s little faith, and just resist.

We also like to assume at this point that discipleship is some kind of mental game of focus, like karate or zen golf, and if we just believe hard enough we wont sink, like seeing the storm is what causes the sinking, so if we just keep ourselves from acknowledging that the elements are raging around us and threatening to break us down, somehow we’ll coast along the top of the water and everything will be peachy. But when we admit our fear, or notice how terrible things really are, down we go, under the waves. And apparently, Jesus is just there to get us back on track.

So buck up, little Christians, and put on that smile! This the time for bravery and stoicism! This is the time for faith!

But with all the encouragement we get with this passage to keep our eyes on Jesus, we rarely take our eyes off of Peter long enough to really look at Jesus. Where is he in this story? What is he doing? What does he do when Peter cries out? Who is Jesus here?

Biblical scholar Dave Lose says,

“Jesus, finally, isn't simply our guide or life coach; he's our Savior, the One who does for us what we cannot. Too much of American Christianity, I think, has forgotten that, reducing the gospel to one more spiritual self-help recipe, hardly different from what you might hear on Oprah. But the Lord who walks atop the sea in this story not only directs wind and wave but also death and life. This Jesus wants more than to command our attention; he wants to save our lives. And he has promised to do just that.”

Jesus, Lord of wind and rain, is right here in the middle of the storm, face to face with Peter, catching him when he sinks, climbing back into the boat with him. And the disciples who began this encounter not even recognizing him, fearing and doubting him, now worship him.

There are two places in Matthew where doubt is talked about – here, and after the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And both places, doubt sits right alongside worship. They doubted and they worshiped. In both situations the time for doubt and the time for worship were one and the same. They so often are when encountering this God-man in all his divine humanity and messy holiness in the midst of this painful joy of a life.

It’s not about how to be a good Christian who doesn’t fear or doubt or notice life’s storms; it’s is about what it is to be human and who God is in the midst of it.

And it isn’t about defining or categorizing our times, trying to find the right way to be and only that, it is about what it is to be human and who God is in the midst of it.

Being human means that there is no experience that life doesn’t throw at us, but whether we’re laughing or crying, tearing or sewing, seeking or losing, planting or harvesting, warring or at peace, dancing or mourning or doing them at the very same time, God invites our honesty, our humanity, our doubt and our worship, because the God who stands both outside of time holding it all, and also drenched to the bone and reaching out in the very center of the storm

is right here,

in all things,

no matter what,

and there is nothing that God doesn’t have us through.

Amen.

God, groanings and good news

2011-07-23T21:13:00.000-05:00

Our prayers this night in worship -
each one spoken simply and then held by the community in prayer.

Romans 8:26-39

The very last thing I would want to hear, if I were the parent of any one of those kids on that island in Norway – whether living or dead, or really, if I were any Norweigian at all today, is “All things work together for good for those who love God…”

I might be a little more open to hearing, “The Spirit prays for us with groanings too deep for words.” Because it isn’t that we know what to pray for and just need a little help getting it out, it’s that we have no idea what we need, we don’t even know what we want half the time-

Sometimes all we have is just pain, just raw awful pain and nowhere to put it and nothing to say about it. Or we have regrets; half the time we want to pray that something didn’t happen, we want to pray to change the past, and our prayers are just a bunch of “if onlys” and “whys?” Can we just pray that that madman didn’t get on that island? Can we just pray that we never sent our kid there?

Very rarely do we know how to pray or even know what we’re praying for, as though we would know how to solve the nation’s budget crisis? The devastating famine in Somolia, projected to kill 800,000 kids? The war in Iraq? As though you and I could figure out the best way to bring peace to the Middle East? As if I know how to stop my son’s deep fears, or help my mother cope with unemployment or chronic pain?

Lord knows, we don’t know how to pray. We just know things are not right. And we don’t even know how it would look if they were right, or we feel selfish asking for perfection, or overwhelmed by the suffering of others, so we are paralyzed in prayer so much of the time.

So, if I were a Norweigian parent of one of those kids tonight, I might be ok with being told that the Spirit prays for me with groanings too deep for words, because that is all I would have right about now.

But this passage is filled with things that are gospel, which means, "good news," I mean really, really good news, that have often been wielded so thoughtlessly, applied so dreadfully, that it becomes not really good news at all, kind of news we’d rather avoid instead. Like being told, in the midst of some crushing grief, that all things work together for good, as though God wanted this tragedy to happen, or at least planned it, which in my book would be plenty malicious enough.

After centuries of filtering the gospel through Catholic guilt and Protestant work ethic and Western Capitalism and American Consumerism and Individualism, we can barely hear the good in this news at all. And what is good news here, what most everyone can agree is most certainly and undeniably good news, we reserve mainly for the dead.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus! So for you who lay before us in your casket, gone from this life, this is great news! You are held safely in God’s care and love. As for the rest of us… I guess someday we’ll all be in your shoes anyway and the promises will mean something for us as well.

This passage is so filled with pitfalls and baggage hooks, especially for formerly religious or raised religious folks, this “comfort” ends up the opposite – it represents a lot of the reasons we left the church or are wary of coming back. "No condemnation" for some must surely mean condemnation for others – and all this talk of “elect” means we’re just politely not mentioning the “damned”, right?

But despite all the theological jargon and the baggage-laden words (like “predestined” “conquerors” “justified” “saved” “elect”) that may make us want to steer clear of this passage, and also often those who feel comfortable with it, there really is good news here, good news for all of us, and for the whole world.

And it begins with who God is.

Because if God is a distant God, demanding perfection and hard to please, dictating in advance all that is to happen without regard to its impact on individual human beings or communities, if God is just wielding God’s power, arbitrarily choosing when to step in and stop things and letting other terrible things go on, for the sake of some greater purpose that some of us might be called to and others excluded from, then this is not good news.

And it really isn’t for any of us either. Because who among us could really please this God? Who among us could endure such suffering as "conquerors" and just go along with whatever "good" must be coming from our pain? Perhaps there are some.

But I already know I’m not one of them.

And it would take some kind of super feat of faith, some great personal piety (and a hearty dose of denial?) to live as though things around us are unfolding as they were always meant to, as though God intends each and every thing that occurs, and its meaning simply temporarily escapes us.

Poet and essayist Scott Cairns says,

“Whether or not you think the world was initially created as the shaky sphere it is - a notoriously unstable crust skidding over a roiling swirl of molten rock - there's no arguing that it isn't something of a crapshoot now. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, famine, flood - take your pick. And lest we forget the human hand in our crapshoot's wealth of crap, we must remember to add to that wild mix our own pathological history of aggression, murder, war, and genocide.

And where, exactly, is our God in all of this?

Well, the story goes that He has descended into the very thick of it.

The story goes that He remains in the very thick of it." (Scott Cairns, The end of suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, 108).

And if THAT is who God is, then suddenly the good news really is good. Because God doesn’t stand back like a puppet master, God enters into all of human life and existence, with and for us. Jesus lives life with us and suffers death for us and is raised back to life and now death never again gets to have the very last word. In Christ, all of life is bent back towards God; in Christ all of life is redeemed.

So to say that "God works all things together for good for those who love God and are called according to God’s purposes" does not mean that God plans out a course of suffering for us to make us stronger people, or lets bad things happen in order accomplish some supernatural purpose or glory. Instead, because God joins us in our suffering, shares it from the inside, bears it with us, for us, all things work together for good because there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love. All things work together towards love. Because God’s love embraces us even when we feel utterly abandoned and godforsaken, God shares our place of abandonment and godforsakenness in Jesus’ death on the cross.

The promise is that this suffering, this tragedy, this pained relationship or financial ruin or horrifying disaster or crippling depression – God’s love meets us even in this. God’s love isn’t stopped or hindered by this, in fact, the power that brings life out of death brings all things, anything, no matter how awful or trivial, into God’s purposes of love.

Earlier today I shared a message from Bard and Kjersti, our congregation’s friends in Norway, Bard said, "We are all well - all considering. Today we are in tears, mourning and losses of those killed in the bombing and particularly all the young people (at least 84!) shot to death at the social democratic youth camp. But how radically evil this is - we will not let hate eat our hearts out. Today the atmosphere in Norway is one of care and love."

For those who love God and are called and moved and motivated by God’s purposes, by the things that call and move and motivate God – love, forgiveness, healing, wholeness - for these the good news is that there is nothing that ever happens that cannot be used by God for love, evil can never get the last word, hopelessness or despair cannot win. Because God can work love and healing and wholeness in and through everything.

And we are more than conquerors, stoic endurers of suffering who one day get the satisfaction that we’ve made it through, survived, as though this life is something to be merely tolerated, or is to be separated from our spiritual existence. No, we are more than that, much more. Through Christ we are participants in this love that transforms, redeems, makes whole, not just us, but the world we live in, the people we love, the communities we share, the families we’ve been given for this short time we have on this planet.

“The extreme greatness of Christianity,” said Simone Weil, French philosopher and Christian mystic, “lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.” But, as Paul reminds us, it isn’t we who work to do this, it is the Spirit of Christ who lives in us, prays for us, works through us. And for a God who brings life from death itself, all things are ingredients for life. And, as we pour into one another and declare over one another at our baptisms: since we have been claimed by this love and now belong to it, chosen by love to spread it and talk about it and share it and hang onto it and give it away, what, then, could ever separate us from the love of God?

Could "hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" If all of evil swelled up and swallowed us whole, even that would be no match for the love of God in Christ Jesus, this love that claims us and lives in us and works everything towards love.

So groan away great Spirit within us and between us, because we don’t know what to do with our sadness sometimes, and we don’t know how to fix the brokenness we see and share. And draw us ever more into your love, to be people moved and motivated by your very heart of love for the world.

Amen.

The Inescapable God

2011-07-17T14:08:00.003-05:00

Psalm 139 (all of it, not just 1-12,23-24)

I know people who like to talk about God for fun. Ok, I might be one of them. And there is no end to what could be said, from whatever perspective you say it. Is God the cosmic power over all? The personal savior? The beginning of all things? We can pick apart how God is represented, what beliefs reflect our picture of who God is, speculate about what God thinks of things or how God does or doesn’t intervene in life.

And whether its fun or frustrating, at some point, you reach the end of it; you’ve said about what you can say for now, you rise from your seat, clean up the empty wine bottles and dirty dishes, turn off the lights, and everyone heads home. And it usually doesn’t ultimately change you that much, all this ad nasueam talking about God.

Not like talking to God. Now that’s something else entirely.

Once you’re home, and the silence wraps around you and the whole world is asleep but you’re still lying there.

Vunerable. Tentative. unguarded.

Oh God. Hi. It’s me.

It’s me again. Little old me.

Do you know who I am?

I’m not sure I know who you are.

I think I saw you today, God. Was that you?

Where are you? I’m so afraid and so alone, where are you?

There is no telling where this might lead. You can talk about God without really even believing God exists. But when you talk to God you’ve just opened up your own being to another being. And that is quite something.

I love our Psalm today, because it feels like we are eavesdropping on an intimate conversation, peeking in at someone’s diary, listening in on their secret heart. This isn’t a poem about God, this is a love letter to God. And the voyeuristic thrill and sentimentality hook me right off the bat.

“Oh God, You have searched me and known me...”

How we long to be known! It is so rare and fleeting in life that we ever feel fully known. Being known in this life happens in glimpses, in spurts, in moments frozen in time. A look of shared meaning, the comment that show you this other person can tell what you’re thinking, the gesture that says he knows exactly what you need in that moment without you saying it.

It’s nice to be known, it makes us feel complete to be known. Full. At peace.

But we also like to control how we’re known, how much we’re known, what is known of us in different contexts, and how the knowledge can be used.

It is unsettling to think that there is one who knows absolutely everything, the good and the bad, the deep and ugly, the ridiculous and embarrassing parts of us, and not just what we’re willing to post on our status updates.

There is a song by the Civil Wars where the frustrated lovers sing back and forth to each other. He sings, “You only know what I want you to.” and she answers, “I know everything you don’t want me to.”

That God knows us that way? Everything, not just the things we want known about us. And closely, intimately...

I was with a dear friend this week, sharing something that painful, and she was right there, listening, and I felt really known. But then there was a moment when the being known went from feeling good to feeling too intense. When I became afraid of my own emotion and weary of sharing, and I didn’t want to take things any deeper or stretch the conversation any further. In a split second I moved from feeling open and trusting, grateful for her presence with me, to wishing I could teleport her out of my car so I could just cry in peace without her looking at me with such invasive tenderness.

Sometimes it’s hard to be known. Sometimes it’s excruciating to be loved.

Sometimes we’d rather be alone.

But God’s knowledge of us, God’s love of us, is apparently unyielding.

Margaret Wise Brown wrote a wonderful book called, The Runaway Bunny:

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.

So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”

“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you.

For you are my little bunny.”

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny,

“I will become a fish in a trout stream

and I will swim away from you.”

“If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother,

“I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”

And they go on: he becomes a rock on a mountain high above her, she becomes a mountain climber, he becomes a flower in a hidden garden, she becomes the gardener, he becomes a bird, a sailboat, a trapeze artist, she becomes the tree, the wind, a tightrope walker. And when he becomes a little boy who runs into a house she answers,

“If you become a little boy and run into a house,”

said the mother bunny, “I will become your mother

and catch you in my arms and hug you.”

“Shucks,” said the bunny, “I might just as well

stay where I am and be your little bunny.”

And so he did.

“Have a carrot,” said the mother bunny.

THIS is how relentless God’s love is.

But there’s more, even.

What about that chunk of this Psalm that was omitted for this week’s lectionary, and is almost always left out when we hear this psalm?

The part where our cosy waltz veers off into mixed martial arts and starts ranting about hating people and asking God to kill them.

Pretty horrifying, actually. Almost discredits the whole thing. I suspect this section gets cut because it makes us so uncomfortable to think someone could be this intimate with God and then go off into a hatred spiral. It feels so inconsistent.

But instead of being scared off by this part of the Psalm, I suddenly remember that I am seeing this as a raw, open diary, as a brutally honest person talking right to God who knows what he’s thinking anyway.

And then it strikes me as so beautiful in its uncensored wrongness, it’s candid depths, and the trust it must take to say it all to God, it all its passion.

And it’s a little bit of a relief, too, to see this here, because how often do we get it wrong! In how we unthinkingly judge other people and the world, how we try in unhealthy ways to fix what we see broken, in what we selfishly ask God for or mistakenly offer to God as some kind of praise.

But as heartfelt and misguided as we so often are, even that doesn’t stop God for a second. I imagine God taking this passionate psalmist up into God’s great lap and pressing his head onto God’s ample chest and rocking, crooning, chuckling about all the offers to smite the enemy on God’s behalf, just like I do with my tiny ninja when she tires of protecting the house from invisible impending doom and peels off her mask, dejected,

or how I held my fierce little big brother when I heard that he stood guard over his little sister for four straight days when she started at his daycare, ready to take on a anyone who tried to mess with her until the teachers finally told him they’d look after her and he could stand down.

Hush now. Mama God says. I’m here. I don’t need your protection. You can set down your weapon. Just let me love you.

God loves us with an unfathomable depth of love. God knows us. So it’s ok that we get it wrong sometimes. And when the sadness or the disappointment or pain pierces you, it’s ok to say irrational and crazy things. It’s ok not to qualify yourself, or censor to what you think God wants to hear. And even if you try to run away and hide your face in shame after you realize what you’ve actually said, what you’ve really done, there is nowhere, NOWHERE you can go to get away from God.

Oh the mixed joy and terror of this!

Oh the freedom and bondage that is being loved so completely!

God simply will not let you go.

Knew you before you knew yourself, knew you in the context of the very earth and cosmos, before time and space! Knows when you work and when you play, when you rest and when you run yourself ragged. Knows when you’re generous and loving and forgiving, and when you’re at the end of your rope and lash out in inappropriate anger at your children or roommates.

Knows all that you do and think. ALL of it.

And you can’t hide. You can’t escape. Wherever you go, God is there – and not just peeking through the crack in the door, like a mother I know watching her son at Summer Robot Camp this week – no, standing there in plain site, WAITING for you, like YOU are the reason for God to show up at all.

And in the utter depths of despair, when it feels the night will swallow you whole, and the darkness cover all that is light, darkness is no thing to God. Dark, light, night, day, in, out, old, new, malignant, benign, free, incarcerated, whole, broken – this one’s not intimidated, not backed down, not going anywhere. Steadfast. And unafraid. And this unafraid one is standing here for you. With you.

When all is said and done, and the flailing or fleeing or shame or doesn’t do a thing – God is still right there. And when the words run out and the theories about God and all the eternal trying and failing to be the person you think you should be, there God is. All along.

“Fine then. God, Search me, Know my heart, you may as well if you love me that much. Look in on my thoughts and help me, change me, heal me. I relent. I surrender. Shucks, I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.

I invite you today to begin the conversation again, as we are invited to everyday.

Hi God, it’s me, you know, me.

Surrender to the one who knows you so completely and will never let you go.

Rest.

Breathe.

Abide in the love of the one who holds you.

And have a carrot. Cause God’s not going anywhere.