Sunday, May 15, 2011

Hanging out where God is


 John 15:1-11

“I am the vine and you are the branches.” This passage from John 15 was read to me at my baptism.  I stood in a white robe, waist deep in water, in a pool at the front of the church building - a short, nervous 13 year old - and said into the mic that I loved Jesus and wanted to be baptized.   And my mother stood in the congregation, holding open the bible and read to me these verses as a charge. “Your life comes from Jesus, hang onto Jesus, abide in him and his joy will be in you.”  I can still hear her voice saying those words. Hang onto Jesus.

That's a wonderful charge, and in the moment, standing there at my baptism, I was feeling that abiding like nobody's business.  I was hanging on to Jesus, and everyone could see that.  But when that moment fades, and real life creeps in, the question becomes, How do I do this? This intimidating thing of “hanging onto the vine”? How do I abide in Christ?  Is it about what I do? What I think, or believe, about God? Is it about how I feel? Is that it, do I need to “feel” God or “feel close to God” in order to know that I am truly abiding in Christ?  I wanted this; I want this.  This joy that is promised, God’s life in me. That closeness with God.  But what am I supposed to do to get it, or keep it?  Or keep from losing it?
Hang on tight and don’t let go, I suppose. 

But this pesky word, “Abide” kind of mucks things up. It’s not really a “give it all your effort,” “do your best” kind of word. “I was abiding so hard.” It is clearly NOT striving.  And abiding is definitely not hanging on really tightly.
It is more the opposite. It is relaxing your grip, opening up, dwelling, hanging out.  It is more like letting the life of God that is in you, that claims you, live through you.  Abide.  It is John’s whole theme – trusting, letting your life come from the Life.

We abide because God abides. God abides.  All through scripture, this word is mostly God’s word. God remains. God hangs out in and through it all.  Underneath everything and binding it all together is this Word; God’s creative energy that spoke the whole world into being now speaks through love. We find ourselves in God, who abides, because God is love. We can because God is.

So how do we abide, then? How do we live in God’s love?  Not by ourselves, that’s for certain. If these passages say anything to us today, it is that it is impossible to abide in Christ alone.  If the fruit of this abiding is love, it means that when we abide in Christ, we will find ourselves living in love, loving others, receiving others, remaining with others, standing by others and finding others doing that for us as well.  There is no individual discipleship, no personal, isolated relationship with God.  Abiding in God means love. Loving, being loved, love.  And that requires other people. God’s love is embodied in us, between us; it uses our voices, and our arms and our eyes.

We’ve been talking about encounters with the Risen One. We’ve been sharing stories of resurrection.  Mary, Thomas, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, our own lives when we see life come out of death, hope emerge from despair, the places of God’s presence.  But where do we most often meet the Risen One? When we love, when we are loved.  We meet Jesus in the places we are with and for one another in love.

And despite what we most often believe and how we most often relate, there is no fear in love. None at all. Perfect love casts out fear.  If love is our salvation, fear is our damnation.  Love is the currency, the energy, of life – love fuels life, deepens life, builds life, grows life.  But fear is the currency and energy of death, fear motivates and propels us to shut others down, close them out, fear breaks down relationships and dismantles trust, in fear we keep ourselves isolated, falsely “protected” from hurt, insulated in unforgiveness.  Where fear is stoked, it sucks up all the oxygen and stifles love.

The opposite of love is not really hate.  We don’t really hate one another, at least not most of the time. We fear one another. We fear what the other can take from us, require of us, do to us, stop us from doing. We fear each other.
But there is no fear in love.  Perfect love casts out fear, so love is stronger than fear.  Love forgives and mends and sets us free.  

I attended the Westminster Town Hall Forum and couple of weeks ago, to listen to a psychologist speak, a world expert on forgiveness.  He said he was frustrated some time ago because faith traditions always speak about the need to forgive and how good it is to do, but they don’t tell us HOW to forgive. They don’t often help us to do it. They just tell is TO do it. And people get so stuck in unforgiveness. So very stuck.  So he has dedicated 20 years of research and work to teaching people how to forgive, to measuring scientifically the effect it has on people’s bodies and minds and relationships.  And do you know what his team has found is at the very root of all forgiveness?

Abiding in God’s love. 
Of course, they wouldn’t say it quite that way in the laboratory. Instead they would talk about finding that place of peace within, about living from that place; but the way you get there?  Love.  He walked us through an example.  Think of someone you adore, he said. Get a good picture of them in your head.  Remember what it feels like to be so loved by them, so known and valued. How they delight in you.  Let your heart even get warm right now as you think of this person. Hold that feeling within you.  Now open your eyes, he said. Five minutes of this every day is more effective than psychotherapy in helping people to forgive. 

Abiding in love unclenches our heart, drives out fear, and frees us – ever so much more - to forgive and to live out of love, because all forgiveness, all love and mercy and with-each-other-ness come from God’s own love.
“No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another God lives in us and God’s love is completed in us.”
How do we see God’s love? In the love of others.
How do we see God’s love? When we love others. 
It’s not an abstract, spiritual and distant thing.  It is a concrete, real, tangible thing.
Holding my son in the dark when he has a nightmare, helping him to change the story and reminding him of his own strength...in my words and my arms, he feels God’s love.  And so do I, in the aching pain of loving him. God’s love is completed in us.

The two word email from my sister in my moment of frustration, the email that says nothing, really, but means everything- she sees me and laughs with me and I am not alone. When she sees me, Jesus sees me, and in one bright moment I feel God’s love.

The instant when my arrogance crumbles, and I can apologize for being wrong, because as important as it is to me to be right – and that is often far too important to me –this person in front of me whom I love is actually truly more important to me than myself. And by dropping my guard I realize that underneath of this fight is the desire to be close, to be heard, to be known, together we feel God’s love in our own broken and faltering love.

The friend whose terrible suffering was secret, distant, and who only now is opening up to tell me what she has been through, and I feel crushed for her, so sad, completely helpless to fix any of it and at a loss for the right words, but I can listen, and I can bear it with her.  And we are for each other the presence of God. 

When we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is completed in us.
Have you seen the Risen One? He is right here, meeting us in the love between you and me, in the space here that exists between us, and the Spirit that connects us, sharing the hope and joy and pain and life that we share.

So Abide in this love.  Relax into this love.  Remain in this love.

And when you can’t, when you are dry and alone, parched and empty, when you wonder, Where is God?,  it’s not up to you to go and find God. It’s not up to you to hang on really tightly and muster up some kind of doubtless faith or spiritual certainty or religious or moral tenacity. 
If you want to see God’s love, then love somebody.  Say something, do something, for somebody else. See them. Hear them. Join them.  It’s a concrete action and real window, that opens your eyes and heart. Love someone. Do it and you will find yourself held by it.  Live like it’s true and its truth will live in you. 
Because it is not really about what we do -  it’s not even our love, after all. We’re just sharing it, swimming in it, breathing it and passing it around; we are just abiding in the love that sustains us, the love that is life, the life of the world. 

So don’t be afraid. Jesus is here. Open your hands, relax your grip, and let the life of God that is in you, that claims you, live through you. 
Amen.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

A note to my congregation...

Yesterday, at the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area meeting, the presbytery voted 206 to 56 to replace the wording of Amendment 10A in the Book of Order regarding ordination standards.  The change in wording was approved at the last General Assembly meeting, but required approval from a majority of of the 173 presbyteries in order to take effect.  Our presbytery was the 87th presbytery to vote for this change in wording, which means the change will go into effect July of this year.  The change in wording removes the wording "chastity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman" from our ordination standards - language that has been used to exclude those in same-gendered relationships from serving as deacons, elders and ministers of word and sacrament.  The new wording emphasizes the church's desire to "joyfully submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all areas of life" and maintains that it is the job of the ordaining bodies - individual presbyteries and sessions - to prayerfully discern each candidates suitability for ordination.  (To see the full wording, and more explanation, see the PCUSA website).

For some, this is the culmination of a life-long struggle, and the change brings joy and relief. They feel the affirmation and support of their denomination in their calling as leaders in the Body of Christ, or elation for those they love and respect whose calling is recognized and upheld by this change.  For others, this is a great sadness.  It goes against their understanding of scripture and they feel a loss of trust in their denomination and alienation from what they hold to be true.  All of these people - those celebrating today and those mourning - are our sisters and brothers in the Body of Christ, and I find myself in the discomfort of simultaneously celebrating with those who rejoice and mourning with those who mourn.  We all long for belonging, connection, support, integrity and wholeness.  For some, this change contributes to these things, and for others, this change takes away these very same things.  
It has been my privilege to know faithful followers of Jesus, whom I admire and respect, who come out with different understandings of what following Jesus means in many areas.  It is also a delicious frustration of our faith that God has not just handed us a list of bullet points that answer every question or universally explain how to do this messy thing of being human, loving God and living faithfully.  Instead we get God in flesh: a sweaty, hungry, complex human being, loving and healing, teaching and fully sharing our place.  And we get a scrapbook of faith: stories and pictures and poems and descriptions and messages and snapshots of God's constant faithfulness through generations of human beings wrestling in their own times and places with the same needs and struggles we have today.  Neither of these is very clean cut or easy to explain or grasp. (God seems to enjoy paradox and ambiguity).
This means that for as long as there have been and will be a Church, God, who is "above all and through all and in all" will embrace in God's abundant welcome different understandings, interpretations and applications of Scripture, but continue to weave and grow us together in "one body, one hope, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith and one baptism."  (as gorgeously expressed in Ephesians 4). We are reconciled to God and each other not by our own great faith or beliefs, but by the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.  I was drawn to the PCUSA because here I found a denomination that wrestles through difficult issues together - that allows one another the freedom and support to come to differing interpretations, conclusions and expressions of faith in Jesus Christ, within a commitment to listen to the voices of the past and of those next to us.  
I believe that in this covenant life, rather than by one certain, airtight answer or another, God's Spirit most often works in the tension in between, the messy discerning, the challenge of different voices and experiences, the places of doubt where we need to meet God and not just talk about God.  And that for however "right" any of us may be, we are also just as "wrong", and we need one another on this journey of faith. Most importantly, I believe we are guided by the Holy Spirit, and that Christ is still present, with us and for us, and we meet Christ as we are with and for one another.  This is God's Church, and God's ministry that we participate in; it began way before us and will go on far after we are gone.  We seek to faithfully join in here and now.
So, as unsettled and uncomfortable as it may be, I pray for the courage to continue celebrating with those who celebrate and mourning with those who mourn.  I pray that our little congregation may have the openness to live in God's hospitality and continue to extend that mutual and authentic welcome to others - regardless of their beliefs.  And I pray for the compassion to continue seeing one another as human beings, beloved sisters and brothers, chosen by God and knit together into this one, messy but beautiful Body.  
I invite you to come - in your joy or your grief, and in everything else besides - and sit with us together in the discomfort of the unknown (where the Spirit loves to act!), as the denomination moves forward and we seek - as God's people have always done - to faithfully follow our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

"Reconciliation" by Bert Monterona





For more:  The Presbyterian Outlook has links to a number of extremely helpful explanations and resources related to this vote and its implications.  It also as an often-updated page with Several responses to this vote from various groups.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

to recognize Resurrection...

Caravaggio, "Doubting Thomas", 1603



The other night we were sharing stories around the dinner table, and Andy shared with Maisy a story Owen has known but she had never heard before. It happened when Andy was six years old.  He was playing outside, and had been warned by his Mommy to stay away from the giant hole next door, where a foundation had been dug for a new house.  He could play anywhere else, but do NOT go near the hole.  Of course, he did, leaning over the edge just to peek, and his feet slipped on the gravel and he fell into the hole. 
For what felt like hours he tried to get out, tried to climb, run, scramble, and found he was stuck.  From his spot in the bottom of the pit he could see that the sun was beginning to go down, and he knew he was supposed to be home by now. He began to get very afraid. 
Finally, he stopped in the middle of the hole and he prayed. “Jesus, please get me out of this hole.” Then he ran to the side and right out – feeling as though he were being lifted, pushed, as he whirled his way up the wall.  From there he ran home and immediately told his Mommy what had happened.

When we talked about the story, the kids noticed two things (with a little help from their parents) – one was that Andy prayed.  He asked Jesus to meet him where he was afraid and stuck.  But they also noticed what he did when he got out – he ran and told someone, he shared how God had been with him, how God helped him. 
Like Mary, who runs to the disciples and throws open the door and shouts, “I have seen the Lord!” Like Thomas, unable to keep silent when he touches the holes in his living savior’s hands, yelling out in faith, “My Lord and My God!” these moments when God meets us are not ours alone, they turn us into witnesses of the resurrection.  They are meant to be shared, spread, to help others recognize their own encounters with the Risen One, to testify to hope and life. 
Resurrection happens, in big and small ways, and we are called to tell the story.

But the funny thing about resurrection…
We never actually see it. All four gospels are pretty explicit about the death of Jesus, lots of details, lots of words and images, we can see, painfully, his death progressing, and when it is over, when “It is FINISHED,” we know he’s dead.  It’s been verified and proven with a spear in the side, an earthquake and darkened sky and a temple curtain torn in two.  Death is a hard, cold fact. No doubt there.

But the resurrection… now there’s a murky moment.  We don’t get a word about it, the actual resurrection itself, I mean.  Did he just suddenly open his eyes? Did angels resuscitate him, unwrap him, help him to his feet? Did he suddenly begin breathing or was it a gradual process? We have no idea at all what went on in the darkness of that tomb that day. We have no sense whatsoever of the moment when death gave way to life.
Death we can prove, death we can even cause.  But Resurrection we take on faith, and can only be caused by God.  Resurrection is an enormously doubtable thing.

While we don’t have a single eye-witness or description of the resurrection itself, what we do have in abundance are stories of encounters with the Risen Lord.   Run-ins with the Resurrected One.   Moments of meeting Jesus, life-changing, world-shaping moments with the one who was dead and now lives, drawing life out of death as he goes.  But how it happens remains a mystery. 

In my own life, I have known this to be true. There was a time in my life when I was drowning in grief, caught in despair and could see no way forward, God was dead to me.  I was in what 16th century Christian mystic John of the Cross called, “The dark night of the soul”. It didn’t matter what I did, who I spoke to, what went on around me, I could not change where I found myself.  Locked in the dark tomb. 
I was living in Southern California at the time, and one day I was jogging around the Rose Bowl, trudging along in the same gray fog I had been in for months, and suddenly the wind stirred the leaves above my head, and I looked up, and for a split second it was like someone turned the color on in the world. I saw in startling contrast the bright green of the leaves above me, and beyond that the brilliant blue sky, dotted with gentle white clouds, I saw the sun shining down and heard the birds and the breeze and voices of those around me and I stopped running and stood there, astonished by it all.  
I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was as though I had stopped seeing color, or that my hearing had dimmed.  But for a split second it was all vivid again – just for a second. 
And that moment, it’s as though a voice spoke right into me, through the colors and the sounds and the life: ‘You’re going to be ok.’
This will end, life is coming, and even now is creeping back in. 
It didn’t fix or solve anything, and looking back I am not certain when or how resurrection happened, surely it unfolded somewhere amidst the love of those on whose shoulders I cried; I suspect it must have been through the support of those who stood by me through the months as I adjusted to what was dead and gone, as forgiveness began creeping in unannounced, surely those were the times Jesus was with me, even when I did not recognize him.  But in the fog of it all I have no idea that resurrection was happening, or how it began.  I do, however, have that moment.  When the silence and absence of God seemed to break open and I knew that God was still there.  I believed suddenly what I had doubted for some time: that God still held it all – that I was still alive.  I have the moment Jesus whispered to me, “You’re going to be ok." and my faith returned and so I know Resurrection happens.

Last week we saw Mary’s Resurrection story. Which is to say, we saw the moment Mary encountered the Risen Christ.  Jesus spoke her name; Jesus called to her and she saw him, and it changed everything.  This week we have Thomas’ story.

I have always liked the story of Thomas. The one who wont be satisfied with heresay.  He had given his all to this Jesus and now that Jesus is dead, gone, Thomas isn’t going to blindly believe on the word of others.  He wants his own encounter, to see Jesus and touch him, just like the others got.  
We call Thomas “the doubter,” but the Gospel of John never calls him that.  In fact, he serves, for John, as a model of faith.  “Faith without doubt is dead faith”  said Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Thomas’ savior is dead; he wont tolerate a dead faith too. Thomas doesn’t crave answers, he isn’t looking for foolproof facts, or persuasive arguments.  He needs the person of Christ to say his name, like Mary, to take his hand and speak to him.  He needs his own resurrection moment with the Word made Flesh.

So when Jesus comes again, the first thing he does is speak to Thomas, “Reach out your hand, put it here, Thomas. Do not doubt, but believe.” He meets Thomas right where he is, in his need and his doubt, and even his stipulations, and invites him to meet Jesus. 
Resurrection isn’t about pulling ourselves out of holes, it isn’t about mustering up faith or resuscitating our own life or fixing our brokenness or guarding against doubt.  It is about the Risen Christ meeting us in the places where we are dead. The person of Jesus, showing up in the places we are trapped and stuck, where we’ve let go and given up and where there is no hope of recovery. Jesus, appearing behind locked doors and outside empty tombs, calling our name, reaching out and reconnecting us, turning the lights back on, and the color and the sound, bringing hope.
When Thomas has his encounter he doesn’t get an infallible answer to his doubts – “See? He has risen. That PROOVES this one is the Lord, THE God.”  No, when Jesus speaks to Thomas he believes – which means, he trusts, he abides in, he finds his very life in, Jesus. And he cries out in resurrected faith, “You are MY Lord and MY God!”

Our journey of faith begins at baptism – at the moment our future death and all the little deaths in between are taken into Jesus’ death, and our life – in all its fullness and possibility - is hidden with Christ in God.  This journey is filled up with pain and loss, brimming with doubt, and chock full of Resurrection. But not resurrection as a doubtless dogma, or a provable principle.  Resurrection as that which causes your breath to catch in your throat and your eyes to well up and your heart to cry out in recognition, “My Lord and My God!”

Too often, we’ve thought faith means that we come to a building and sit in a pew and listen and absorb what someone else tells us. We take their word for it and try not to doubt.  We forget that the Risen Lord walks among us, that we see and hear him in the love of those around us, in the doubts that push us, in the moments where we reach out to others in their need, or pray desperately from the bottom of a hole. 

And when we do see him, when we hear him call our name and he becomes for us MY Lord and MY God, we forget that from there we are to share the story. To tell others what we have seen, how God has met us, what God is up to in our lives, what we see God doing in our world.  We forget that we are witnesses to the resurrection.
And so, to help us remember, and help us to recognize the Risen One, we tell the stories.  Last week it was Mary. This week it is Thomas. Next week it is the despondent disciples on the road to Emmaus, and encounters from lives of some in our own congregation.

There are many other stories, John says, so very many! But these are shared with you, so you may learn to recognize the Risen One, and that by putting your trust in him you might have life, abundant and relentless life in the one whom death could not contain. Amen.


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