Sunday, January 22, 2012

The Wilderness of In-Between

Image from a stunning collection by Clare Benson



This reflection draws from all of Exodus...
but especially Exodus 1:6-22 



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 lÄ«men, 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 yearsLetting 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?

Sunday, January 15, 2012

It begins with a bath




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.


Friday, January 13, 2012

Reflecting on a year...

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.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Rise and Shine, you seekers of mystery and hope



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.

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

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