What is God's

 

Devotion for Being Apart -
October 18

I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

Our text today was Matthew 22:15-22
 
Jesus was no stranger to the drama of politics.  In this scene we encounter Jesus in the hot seat during a multi-day town hall. He was camped out in the temple fielding questions from various people, both genuine and smarmy, those curious and wondering, and those playing “stump the rabbi.”   
When the scene opens, these two opposing groups, (imagine Team Pelosi and Team McConnell, for example), no fans of each other by any stretch of the imagination, but allied in their mutual contempt for Jesus, dreamed up between themselves the perfect question to entrap Jesus by his own words.  They’d offer up a lose-lose scenario, a question with two possible answers, neither one good.  There’s no way to answer without pissing someone off or getting into trouble. Jesus would be trapped.  It would be delicious.
 
So they start by pouring on the compliments – Jesus, you are so sincere, and so truthful, and you treat everyone the same, so how would you advise us in this difficult question?
And then, faces falsely earnest, they pop their prepared question: Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?  
 
But Jesus, seeing their malice… refuses to play along.  
 
Lead us not into temptation, the Lord’s Prayer says, but deliver us from evil.  In the Greek, it’s is this same word - deliver us from malice.  Set us free from the desire to cause pain, injury or distress to another.  We pray this every week.  Deliver us, Lord, from malice.
 
Jesus calls them out.  Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin you use to pay taxes.  And so, right there in the temple, where they are not supposed to have or use money from the empire but only temple coins, they rush to pull out the coin stamped with the image of the emperor Tiberius and the words, son of the divine Agustus, in other words, Son of God. And they show it to Jesus.
 
Whose image is shown there?  he asks them.  That’s who this belongs to.  
Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s – give to God the things that are God. 
 
The image of the empire is stamped on nearly everything we touch and do.  It looks like credentials, status, salaries and titles, insurance and credit ratings, ranking and reputation, grades and credit scores, how much we have, how we look, what we achieve.  We live as though everything belongs to the empire – and indeed, there is no way to escape it.  We ourselves are part of the broken system; even in the temple Jesus’ questioners could readily pull out the coin with the emperor’s face on it, money claiming who is really god.  We too are at the ready – to defend ourselves, to advance ourselves, to rank and compare ourselves.  Even if we don’t like it, even as we disagree with big parts of it, we function pretty comfortably within the empire.  
 
But I keep coming back to the malice…to the desire to cause someone else pain. I keep returning to the hope to entrap someone so they will destroy themselves with their own words, to wish ill on another person, to take pleasure in their demise.  I’m not going to lie – I can muster me some malice. What makes this such a great temptation for us that we are guided to pray against it every time we say the Lord’s Prayer?
 
I think it’s that we forget that we ourselves do not actually belong to the empire.  We are so often locked in the mindset of the way of fear, where our worth is earned and can be taken from us, where our security is up to us, where we believe that some must lose so others can win.  
The Pharisees and Herodians believe that discrediting Jesus somehow makes them more secure.  In the way of fear there is not enough respect for everyone, only enough security and wellbeing for some. We become convinced that we must compete for our humanity to be upheld.  We mostly live in fear of loss, so we turn on each other.  
 
Whose image is stamped on this? Jesus asks, holding the coin out to them.  That is who it belongs to.  
 
We are not stamped with the image of the empire. It does not own us. We are made in the image of God.  God’s image is stamped on us at our birth, traced on us at our baptism.  We are all children of God; we belong to God.  We are formed in the image of Love Incarnate, God beyond constricts and boundaries of nation and need, even time and space, who has given humankind to one another to care for each other, with the mandate to care for the earth and all its creatures.  This is God’s world – every mountain and river and ocean and desert and creature of it.  We are God’s children.  Every single human being is precious and valuable to God.  
 
Jesus says, Give to God the things that are God’s.  That’s everything, friends, that’s everyone.  And specifically, that’s us – we give each other to God, we give ourselves to God.  Jesus not only opts out of the game, he exposes the empire for the false god it is, and calls his questioners to a deeper, harder, truer realty, with a much farther horizon and a much greater God.  
 
So we pay our taxes, we vote, we get grades and pass tests, we use insurance and build retirement funds, and fill our homes with nice things, and dress for success, we pick the things we support and the things we oppose, we contribute to what we think is good and reject what we think is evil, we make our way in this life, trying to shape a good life for ourselves and those who come after us, by using the tools of this economy in the systems, structures and institutions we live in, with the good and bad all mixed up and impossible to separate. Life is messy, and it’s hard, we’ve got the emperor’s image in our pockets all the time. But at the same time, our citizenship is in a deeper Kingdom, we belong to a greater reality, so we pray, Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from malice… 
 
We’re complicit, Lord, forgive us.  Free us from the temptations of fear and competition, to live as Christ is accused here of living - with sincerity, trusting in the way of God, speaking truth, and regarding all people without partiality.   May we look at others, Lord, and see your image. May we give to you what is your’s.
 
This act of giving to God what is God’s is called blessing.  We can bless anything and everything –we can walk through the world recognizing the hand of the Creator in each minute detail of the natural world.  But most of all, we can bless one another, recognize the image of God in one another.  No matter who the person is, we may say of the other, “Here is a blessed child of God.” 
We bless our enemies and our beloved, those we’re tempted to hold with malice and wish ill upon, as well as those we adore and seek with all our heart to protect from pain.  
“This one is yours’ God,” we say, “I give them to you. I release them to you.”  
“He is yours’ to do with as you will, to call into deeper belonging, fuller life, and truer love.”  “She is yours to hold in tender care, holy wisdom, unfailing connection.” 
“I am yours, God.”
 
Barbara Brown Taylor says “Pronouncing a blessing puts you as close to God as you can get.  To learn to look with compassion on everything that is…to make the first move toward the other, however many times it takes to get close; to open your arms to what is instead of waiting until it is what it should be, to surrender the justice of your own cause for mercy, to surrender the priority of your own safety for love – this is to land at God’s breast.” 
 
Give to God what is God’s, Jesus says.  
Today, when we confirm our tenth grader we are giving him to God.  We acknowledge his belovedness and affirm with him that he belongs forever to God.  Tonight when we gather online to pray healing for our sister from cancer we are giving her to God. We acknowledge her belovedness and affirm with her that she belongs forever to God. When we sing our benediction over each other, we give each other to God. And in a minute, when we lift up one another’s longings, joys and suffering in prayer, we are giving to God what is God’s.  
 
No matter how grim and entangled things appear at any given moment, beloved, we belong to God, not the empire, and we can opt out of the game.  Return to the real reality, find the quiet center, and embrace the generosity and fullness that Christ extends to us all: we belong to God and we belong to each other. 
 
Amen.

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Tonight, when we go to bed, whatever time that is in our home, let us pray in this way and so join our hearts:

God, I am yours.

My life belongs to you, I give it back to you.

I give my life to love. I give my life to hope.

I give my life to being part of your healing and joy in the world.

God, (name of loved one) is yours.

Their life belongs to you, I give it back to you.

I give their life to love. I give their life to hope.

I give their life to being part of your healing and joy in the world.

(Repeat as needed with other names)

God, (name of someone it's difficult to love) is yours.

Their life belongs to you, I give it back to you.

I give their life to love. I give their life to hope.

I give their life to being part of your healing and joy in the world.

(Repeat as needed with other names)

The deeper truth

 

Devotion for Being Apart -
October 4

I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been shared on this blog.

Psalm 19

This weekend I’ve been cranky and frustrated and weary.  I can feel it when "the insolent have dominion over me."  It churns inside me and I have to let it out by adding to the noise with my own rants of incredulity and horror.  Andy calls it, “The Kara Talks Over the News About the News Podcast.” But I can’t help myself.  The Psalmist, most likely King David, prays, “Keep me back from the insolent, Lord;” I say, “Let me at them!” 
 
Right now there are so many voices, so many words. Shouting over each other to be heard. And we are listening to them all, taking them into ourselves, letting them shape us, make us afraid, anxious and angry, tying us in knots, paralyzing us.
 
As the decibels get turned up and the rhetoric roars in these next couple of months, Richard Rohr last week advised we safeguard our souls by standing “as a sentry to the door of our senses” and limiting our news intake to an hour a day. He said, “It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.” 
 
Divine truth is always found in a bigger place. Bigger than opinion and counter-opinion. Bigger than fear and division. Bigger than viruses, and sickness, politics and fires, racism and power-mongering, bigger than all the words and voices that separate us into for and against, or seek to steal our hope.  But these days, I frequently feel pulled into the dualistic world. I often feel torn apart. 
 
This might be a good time to refresh ourselves on the Way of Fear and the Way of God that have guided us for a while.  Because this whole prayer, this poem, is celebrating the Way of God. It is resting in the confident peace of the bigger place, and by praying it, David is helping himself return to that place, being put back together. 
 
The Way of Fear begins in self-sufficiency and judgment; it curls us in on ourselves to seek security, self-preservation and personal glory, even at the expense of others.  Our worth is earned, having more makes us better, and other people are competition for resources or obstacles in our way –they exist to be used or discarded.  Every moment the world is urgent and dangerous so we can never let our guard down; and there is no stopping or resting or we will lose our place. In the Way of Fear, we walk through the world ruled by death, threatened always by the fear of loss - loss of dreams, plans, reputation, belonging, so we are dominated and held captive to isolation and suspicion.
 
The way of God begins in gift and abundance. This is the bigger place where the Divine truth is found.  We are created for connection and belonging, so the way of God opens us up toward the world and one another. We are loved just as we are, and meant to live fully this one wild and precious life we have been given. The people journeying alongside us are neighbors, friends, siblings, not threats, rivals or competitors.  We need each other to be whole, we have everything we need, and what we have is for sharing. We are meant to stop frequently and purposefully, to rest and receive this gift of a life, and because most of the things that really matter are slow and take time. The world is filled with beauty, infused with the life of the God who holds us all.  
Life in the way of God is shaped around the justice that means everyone has what they need, the kindness that means “I will stand with you,” and walking humbly—vulnerably, honestly—with our God, (Micah 6:8) who never leaves us nor forsakes us. We’re made for life—to seek life, and nurture life, and contribute to life for others—to feel joy in our deep abiding connection to God and each other. The love of God that breathes all life into being holds us and connects us, and nothing in all of creation can ever separate us from this love, so we are free to be with and for one another fully and wholly.
 
David’s Psalm reminds us that this message being proclaimed all around us, in ongoing expression, it’s being told every moment, just not with speech or voice.  Just not in the way we’re bombarded with.  The deeper truth is being told, from a bigger place than opinion and counter-opinion.
 
But the deeper truth is set at a different frequency. We have to attune ourselves to hear it. It sounds like music, and poetry, and windsong. It’s heard in children’s laughter, and snoring dogs and growling stomachs and sizzling food. It's expressed in quiet sighs, and unrestrained tears, and gentle pats, and falling rain. 
 
The whole cosmos declares the wonder of God, David writes, this vast, living container of a world witnesses to what God does.  Even though it’s not amplified voices and teleprompter speeches, God’s way is talking to us all the time; the deeper truth goes out to all the earth. When we forget there is a God, we quiet ourselves and listen for the voiceless voice, the speechless words of creation’s message. No matter how loud the noise of fear gets, we can hear the humming world to remember there is a God over all of this.
 
The second movement of David’s poem celebrating the way of God is for when we forget who God is and who we are meant to be with and for each other.  David gushes about the law of God – God’s way is not chaos and cutthroat; it’s not everyone in it for themselves. It’s ordered by love and designed for belonging. It revives the souls, and makes wise the simple, and rejoices the heart, and enlightens the eyes. It is pure and good trustworthy and true.  And at any moment we can turn to the wisdom of our faith, and immerse ourselves in scriptures - the words of Jesus, the prayers of Psalms, and the stories of the struggles and conflicts of the faithful who have gone before us, in their own forgetting and remembering that there is God who loves, and orders and intervenes in this world, we are reminded too. 
No matter how bitter the division and turmoil, and how disordered things appear, we can feed ourselves on the precious gift of scripture and words and writings of women and men of faith who’ve gone before, to remember who God is and who we are meant to be with and for each other. 
 
And David’s final moment is within, turning right toward God it shifts the mic from creation and scripture to our own mouths.  When we forget that we belong to God, and find ourselves overwhelmed by hopelessness or swept up into the discord, we speak to God directly from the heart.  God see me as I am. Clear out everything in me that gets captive and caught in the way of fear. I am being dominated by the disdainful and contemptuous; I might even be disdainful and contemptuous myself.  May the words that come from my mouth, and the thoughts that swirl in my heart, be part of your reality, be reflections of your love and care for all people and this whole wide earth.  Keep me in your way, O God. Keep me here.
No matter how badly we feel torn apart, polluted with and sucked into the fray by the undertow of despair and disgust, we can open our vulnerable hearts right to God and ask to be cleared out, put back together and set right to remember that we belong to God, and we can trust and rest in God’s reality.
 
In the midst of the fires and the virus and the crazy politicians, God is still good. In all things, no matter what they are, God is still moving the world toward goodness. 

We can choose to listen to the voices fighting for power, splitting us into my team against your team, and echoing sonorous speeches of doom.  But day to day pours forth speech and night to night reveals knowledge of a good God whose purpose for the world, for each one of us, is not hindered or stopped by the violence of our rhetoric or the damage of our actions.  And we can choose to listen to that instead.  
 
God’s way of love and justice and standing-with-you kindness moves through it all – in the middle of the suffering, right up against loss, not backing down from fear or the noise, and paying no mind to the mindgames or the power plays.  Because in Christ our God is right here with us, in the death, leading to life, the light shines that no darkness can put out.  Behind, underneath, through and always, gently and unceasingly, God’s way persists and prevails.
 
 CONNECTING RITUAL:

Before we go to bed, whenever that is in our home, may we pause pray, and so our hearts with each other and the world:'

God of all,
help me listen to Divine truth in the bigger place.
Attune my heart to your frequency, Lord.
I want to see hope, and feel joy, and recognize love
and share all these things with others.
I want to be grounded in the wisdom that transcends the noise.
I want to be brave to face suffering and pain,
knowing your love meets us there too,
there especially.
I want to see you, Jesus, here with us.

Free me from the way of fear.
Help me to live in the way of God.
Teach my heart to hear
the voice of truth.
Amen.

Prescription for the week:  Limit news to one hour a day.  Take some or all of these supplements: Read poetry, listen to music, spend time in nature, read the bible, read some of the mystics, or writers Henri Nouwen, Eugene Peterson, Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, sit in silence for five minutes, tell God whatever is going on in your heart.

Safeguarding our Souls

 

This was shared with my congregation, September 21, 2020, and worth returning to…

 

Some thoughts from Richard Rohr (from a September 21 email entitled, "Some simple but urgent guidance to get us through these next months")

 

"I awoke on Saturday, September 19, with three sources in my mind for guidance: Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the young Jewish woman who suffered much more injustice in the concentration camp than we are suffering now; Psalm 62, which must have been written in a time of a major oppression of the Jewish people; and the Irish Poet, W.B.Yeats (1965 – 1939), who wrote his “Second Coming” during the horrors of the World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. 

 

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. 
—Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp

Yeats' The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Psalm 62:5–9
In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
Human beings are but a puff of wind,
Mortals who think themselves important are a delusion.
Put them on a scale,
They are gone in a puff of wind."

PRACTICE

Rohr suggests, "Stand as a sentry at the door of your senses for these coming months, so 'the blood-dimmed tide' cannot make its way into your soul.

 

He continues: 

If you will allow, I recommend for your spiritual practice for the next four months that you impose a moratorium on exactly how much news you are subject to—hopefully not more than an hour a day of television, social media, internet news, magazine and newspaper commentary, and/or political discussions. It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.

 

Instead, I suggest that you use this time for some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above. You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all. And the world—with you as a stable center—has nothing to lose. And everything to gain."

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO FIND REST IN THESE TUMULTUOUS TIMES?

 

I love what Etty says about the deep well inside us that dwells in God. How can we keep returning to this well? How can we let God meet us in the midst of whatever tumult surrounds us?  

Rohr gives an excellent suggestion for safeguarding our souls in this time. My own media consumption has been an all-day trickle of news that tends to stoke the fear in me, rather than feeding my soul or bringing me back to rest in God. I can choose something different.

As we consider "standing as sentry at the door of our senses these coming months," I believe this is not a call to vigilance, to muster more might and internal fortitude, and it's not a frantic reaction to the fear of losing something.  

It's an act of kindness and truth for ourselves and for the world.  We are safeguarding our own souls - the really deep well within us where we can be present with God no matter what is happening within and without.

 

We are not safeguarding God - God cannot be lost. God is above and beyond all, and also closer than our own breath. At every moment. Kind and faithful, always working for redemption and healing through every circumstance, and leading all things toward love.  It's easy to lose sight of this. God never does. And God never loses sight of us. It's easy to get swept away by fear and exhaustion and worry, and forget to return to our own souls that dwell in God. That's where we come in for one another.

We are here to help each other find rest in God, our true source of hope.  We are here to help each other keep returning to God, and to the deep wells inside us that dwell in God.  Because in God alone our souls are at rest.  God is the source of our hope.  

Besieged but not beset

 

Devotion for Being Apart -
October 2

I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

What a strange and strained time this is.  The world feels chaotic and frightening right now.

I went on my mostly-monthly 24 hours retreat this week. My rules for these retreats include turning off my phone and reading no fiction, because I want to be as present as possible.  I broke my rules. 
Restless and tense, I walked four miles, some of that on talking my phone.  Then I came back and read a mediocre novel, and then went out and walked four more miles. Then, from a big chair at the picture window overlooking the tall pines, I watched the "presidential debate" on my phone.  

Afterwards, I took a deep breath and took stock. 

I could feel bad for doing it "wrong," for “wasting” my time.  Or I could have curiosity about my choices.  As NVC tells us - every No is a Yes to something else.  What was I saying Yes to? What need was I meeting?

I think what I was needing was ease, a sense that things will be ok. Right now in lots of ways, things do not feel ok.  And evidently right now, my go-to strategy for meeting that need is distraction.  

Getting away from the ever-present agendas, voices, bodies and demands of my family for 24 hours was supposed to help me be present with myself and God, and pray for the world from a grounded place.  

Instead, something in me panicked, and I chose distraction, numbness, avoidance.  I chose the diversion of watching an appalling debate and feeling the rushes of outrage and astonishment over sitting quietly in the night and letting my sadness come up and out of me.  I opted for the shallow amusement of an unsatisfying novel instead of being alone with myself and God, where the silence might feel too loud and the stillness too empty, and the words of contemplatives, mystics or scripture might feel too pointed and challenging. I took up the project of keeping my body in motion, racking up steps to feel like I was getting somewhere and achieving something, when all I was doing was walking the same 4 mile loop – one mile, turn, one mile, turn, one mile, turn...  

I didn’t actually want to be in time, in life. I didn’t want to feel it. I wanted to not feel it. I wanted to be inattentive, unfocussed, and unmindful of the realities of life right now. I wanted to be blissfully inconsiderate of what I was feeling.  Evidently, I was telling myself that it was too much to bear, and it was better just not to stop and let it in.
 
I’m tired of it all. I’m afraid. I am worried. I am heartbroken. And those feelings are unpleasant. So instead I choose distraction.
 
But I don’t really choose that.  

By the next morning I was able to slow down a little bit.  I had compassion for how tense we all are, day in and day out, and how much longer it takes us right now to unwind and relax.  I had a little more awareness, compassion and curiosity for myself, at least enough to sit still and journal and notice. At least enough to let my last walk be slower and more attentive - to smell the pine needles and feel their softness under my feet, to hear the birds and scurrying squirrels and wind in the branches, to feel my own heartbeat and breath - and to feel grateful at how the world persists and life moves on whether we notice or not.  
I choose to notice. 
 
Kristen gave me a wonderful book by David Whyte called Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. The word I read today was BESIEGED.  I was struck by this paragraph: 

If the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an identity that can live in the midst of everything without feeling beset.  Being besieged asks us to begin the day not with a to-do list, but with a not-to-do list, a moment outside of the time-bound world in which it can be reordered and reprioritized. In this space of undoing and silence, we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves. Beginning the daily conversation from a point of view of freedom, and being untethered, allows us to re-see ourselves, to reenter the world as if for the first time. We give ourselves and all our accomplishments, our ambitions and our over-described hopes away, in order to see in what form they return to us.
 
I can deeply appreciate how distractions are a helpful strategy to get through all of this.  But I don’t want my whole life to be a distraction. I don't want to be afraid to live this life.  

I choose to live and feel and be in time.  

So maybe a not-to-do list is helpful.  Like Richard Rohr’s suggestion of limiting news and social media to an hour a day. And maybe ‘beginning the daily conversation untethered and free’ is a helpful invitation.  Maybe this isn’t the time to be so concerned with accomplishing, but instead to be gentle with our own humanity, to greet our souls tenderly, to help ourselves start each each day by giving away our expectations, our fears and our 'over-described hopes...in order to see in what form they return to us.'
 
We are besieged, dear sisters and brothers.  This is an overwhelming time, and we are beleaguered and careworn.  Perhaps we can have some compassion toward ourselves, and curiosity about our actions, wondering what valuable needs we are meeting with our choices.  Perhaps we might give ourselves – when we awaken in the morning, or just before bed, or with an alarm on our phone or watch periodically pausing us in our day for a full minute – a moment of undoing and silence, to re-enter our lives, this life, having momentarily recognized ourselves inside the larger story, belonging to the deeper reality. Maybe this might help us come closer to living 'in the midst of everything without feeling beset.'
 
When I returned from my retreat and pulled my car into the the driveway, the carpenter who is working on the kitchen next door turned off his saw in their front yard and watched me get out of my car.  I said "Hello." He replied, “Hey, I really like your lawn sign. It’s such a good reminder.”
 

I looked at the sign and smiled, and thanked him.  

 
I need to be reminded.
He reminded me to be reminded.

This is part of the story.
This is not the whole story.
The world belongs to God.


CONNECTING RITUAL:

Look inside yourself with compassion and curiosity:

• What ways are you coping and making it through - what choices/strategies are you using?  
• What stories are you telling yourself with these strategies? (eg., I just keep moving because if I stop things will fall apart, or, My emotions are so big they will smother me if I let myself feel them).
• What needs are you meeting with your choices?
• Might there be more life-giving strategies to meet those same needs?
• After you've allowed yourself to be present to your soul, where does gratitude arise in you?

When you awaken to a new day, what can be on your not-to-do list?
What pauses can you give yourself throughout the day to remember the bigger picture and reorient?

PRAYER

Perhaps before we go to bed, whenever that is in each of our homes, we might pray this together, and so join our souls with each other and the world:

God, this life is hard.
I have never been through anything like this before.
Sometimes it feels like too much to bear.
Help me to be gentle with myself.
Help me to be gentle with others.
Help me to lift my head to the sky,
and sink my feet to the ground,
and let my soul return to its home in you.
I belong to you. This world belongs to you.
Amen.