Rest as our Home Base

 

Fourteen months ago our non-stop world came to a screeching halt.  Instead of hurrying about our normal lives we were suddenly hunting for toilet paper and hand sanitizer and stockpiling dried beans.  The goals, activities and realities of life were just…canceled. 

Time changed.  The kids didn’t need to be up by a certain time in order to be out the door and waiting for the bus. Lunches didn’t have to be made the night before. There was an avalanche of phone calls, text messages, and emails announcing that our appointments with the doctor/dentist/chiropractor/hair stylist were canceled. Those events we had been looking forward to (or dreading) like weddings, birthday parties, vacations, concerts were postponed, postponed again, and then…

We found ourselves constructing new, make-shift lives on screens and behind masks. It was weird. On the phone and Facetime and Zoom and social media we compared notes on just how weird it was. Like a collective improv show, we set about trying to create new routines. We looked for stuff to do. We doom scrolled.

A few weeks into the pandemic my friend Peter provided a helpful lens.  An American who’d lived and worked abroad, he said, "When you go to another place for a short time you’re a tourist, a bit longer and you’re a temporary resident. If you stay long-term in a place that’s not native to you, you’re an expat, or permanently, you’re an immigrant.  In all of these scenarios, every day you are waking up, walking around, living, relating, figuring out money, food, time, and rules for interacting in a culture other than your native culture. It’s exhausting. Everything takes work. Everything involves translation, reading the situation, trying to figure out if you’re doing it correctly. Everything is a negotiation."

We are all in a different culture: COVID Culture, Pandemic World.  This place we’re inhabiting is not a stable, steady culture that gets easier to adjust to as we become more familiar with it.  It’s constantly shifting and changing. Just when we start to figure out how to live here, the rules change, the expectations change, and here comes more negotiating.  

So for fourteen months, our poor selves have been constantly buffering; we’re walking around with “the spinning wheel of death” on our screens.  We may not be accomplishing a whole lot, but our battery is draining precipitously.  And while we’re constantly adapting, the exhaustion is compounding.

We didn’t choose to go on this trip. And we’re all desperate to go home. But where we go after this will not be home. It will feel a bit like home, but also uncomfortably different. While we’ve been here work and life were radically disrupted and altered: our country plunged into a long overdue and deeply painful national racial reckoning; over half a million of our loved ones have died of COVID, (and nearly 3 million of our global siblings), not to mention all those people who died of other things, or moved away from neighborhoods, or lost their jobs. Favorite restaurants are gone, favorite shops have closed down, and patterns of activity we relied on can hardly even be remembered. A lot of what made home home is no longer there. We’ve had to adapt to things we didn’t choose, to settle into a life we never intended to be living.  And it’s been a life of waiting, of killing time, of biding time, of resenting the passing of time. We are time-sick.

When we “go back,” it won’t be back, it will be forward into something new and different, a new home. It will take imagination, energy, and stamina.  And we are going to feel pressure to go harder than ever, to make up for lost time.  

Even though we are exhausted, it will be more difficult than ever to rest. We will think we don’t deserve it. We will assume we’ve just spent a year “resting,” for Pete’s sake!  So we had better get out there and get going!  How dare we stop, how dare we play? How dare we say “No” to the invitation or experience we’ve been waiting for, or refuse the person or opportunity that has been waiting for us?  How dare we waste time or squander energy on anything other than making up for lost time fixing what’s broken in the world? 

Jesus calls us back to Sabbath when he says, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Mt. 11:28)

The Bible often uses “the rest of God” as a synonym for “salvation.” Rest is what being saved feels like. Rest is being saved. Rest is returning to our deepest, most vulnerable selves, made in the image of a God who rests and who wove rest into the fabric of creation.  Rest is how we come back to our belonging to God and each other, it’s how we remember our own humanity and everyone else’s. One of God's main strategies for bringing us home is Sabbath.

God tells us to once a week power it all down, unplug and turn it off.  One day each week where we don’t seek anything, perform anything, produce anything, or prove anything. Just accept being accepted, receive God’s grace.  Sabbath is one day a week of practicing trust, trust that this world is held in God’s love. And God has to tell us to do it because left to our own devices, we wouldn’t rest. It’s a waste of time, we tell ourselves. Rest is earned, or claimed only by those who are sick, or selfish, or simply too exhausted to go on. So on we go, relentlessly, wearily, desperately.

But more important than our doing is our being. So to remember what is true, Sabbath says, we need to rest.  Rest lets us feel time, be in time, and be met by the One who is outside of time.  Rest is meant to be our home base.

Our relationship with time is so fraught. And yet, what if time were just one way to understand the gift that is life? What if we measured our days by presence instead of pressure?

For fourteen months we have been living as temporary residents in COVID World.  It has made us weary and wary, and it also has taught us some things and given us some unexpected gifts.  As we stamp our passports and set out to relocate our whole lives to the unmapped land called Post-Pandemic, what lessons have we gleaned? What souvenirs will we choose to carry with us? What will shape our lives going forward?

Sabbath invites us to shape our lives in a way that relishes abundance instead of grasping at scarcity.  As the restrictions from the pandemic lift, and life opens up again, maybe we can take this opportunity to rethink our relationship to time. Rather than trying to maximize time, we might chose to incorporate regular, preemptive, protected rest into our lives. We might begin to recognize time as the place we are met by God and held in love, rather than as a perpetually limited commodity that is either spent or wasted.  We may be ready to welcome the invitation to regularly return to God's rest as our home base.

(Updated from its original published form "Coming Home: An Invitation from the Pandemic" on Retreat Where You Are, a blog from Mt. Olivet Retreat Center).

The Story of Humanity

Acts 2:1-21, 38-47

One year ago we awoke Pentecost morning from a night with a curfew and closed freeways, to the smoldering remains of shops along Lake Street, and a palpable tension in the air along with the helicopters, smoke and ash, as the nation was reeling from watching the breath forced from George Floyd’s body in front of our eyes. One year ago this week our city, the nation, the world, ignited with pain. 
 
The end of our passage today calls the people who heard the word of God and joined in the work of God those who are “being saved.” Being saved looks like letting love’s fire cleanse us and burn away what is killing us, and fan to life what wants to live in us.  It looks like repentance of sins and honest acknowledgement of the ways we hurt each other, degrade each other’s humanity, or ignore the needs of our neighbors or their cries for help or justice. Being saved looks like forgiveness of ourselves and each other, the green shoots of new life budding between us. Being saved looks like courage (which is always vulnerability), and willingness to be changed. And it looks like showing up for each other with abundant generosity and our true selves, in whatever ways we can amidst life’s losses and upheavals. This being saved from fear and division for love and connection is the work of the Holy Spirit. 
 
The words for Holy Spirit in Hebrew and in Greek are: breath, wind, life force. The Spirit is the outflowing of the dynamic connection between Father and Son  - the verb of the Trinity’s relationship, love in action, the energy of life that binds us to God and each other. Where there is love, connection, comfort, healing, hope, there is the Holy Spirit.
 
The Spirit of God hovered over the great void of emptiness at creation, stirring up life out of nothing, bringing connection from chaos. So the Spirit doesn’t need some pre-existing material to work with.  Nothingness and loss is where God begins. This is the same Spirit that filled the lungs of the adam, the first creature of the earth (adamah), and initiated the first tiny human community with one man and one woman, now made in God’s own image.  This is the Spirit who inspired of the Psalms of David, quickened the womb of Mary, and descended like a dove to claim Jesus as Beloved in the river of John’s baptism.  
 
And this is the same Spirit who hovers over us now, in the strangeness of this life – the time that we are slowly leaving of upheaval and staying still, undergirding fear and excruciating languishing, and the Spirit is hovering over the season of transition and baby steps toward ‘normal’ we are just stepping into.  Into our exhaustion and worry, the unknown we are facing, the pain we are carrying and joy we are tasting, the Spirit of God speaks to our hearts the persistent invitation to life alongside each other.
 
In our Apostles’ Creed book, (the part about the Holy Spirit we haven’t gotten to yet) Ben Myers talks how in the bible – between the first tiny human family in Genesis and the final vast harmony of all tongues and tribes in the presence of God that awaits us in Revelation, sin breaks into the human story and disorders human relationships, making “each human being a fragment torn loose from the whole.” This culminates in the story of the Tower of Babel, where the in the distortion of their connection the people cooperated to undermine and mock God.  So God divided their language and suddenly they were no longer able to work together, to shape a shared life or mutual society. Splintered apart, they drifted off in separate groups to different places, and the whole is broken. 
 
But on Pentecost, when the Spirit comes on the fearful and languishing disciples grieving their loss and just stepping into own their season of transition, they suddenly speak all these different languages, and the human family that has been scattered and divided comes back together.  Myers says, “That is what happens when the Spirit is present. The Spirit fulfills the Creator’s original plan by bringing forth a universal community whose boundaries are as wide as the world.  The Spirit broods over the chaos of human nature, lovingly piecing the fragments back together so that together we form an image of the Creator.” 
 
We are in the middle of that story. We are made for belonging and being shaped for this human family, and we are distorted by sin and fragmented by division. But in every moment thee Holy Spirit is drawing us back into our belonging to God and each other, and is shaping us for a future of everlasting belonging and joy.  The power of the Holy Spirit, the energy of God’s love, comes into our places of death and detachment, bringing new life and healing.
 
One year ago, in the middle of a global pandemic that kept us separated, in the middle of a national outpouring of anguish and anger, the Holy Spirit was moving.  People who hadn’t been listening before started hearing the message of God’s love and connection in their own language, speaking to their own hearts, calling forth repentance and awareness. And in new ways, through different voices, our shared humanity was lifted up before our eyes.  
Communities came together to care for one another, artists and activists teamed up with grandparents and children, strangers gathered food, had conversations, shared tears, and made music, and art and good trouble.  A garden sprang up on George Floyd square, and rallies and marches sprang up all across our nation and the world, and people who had been isolated and divided began hearing and seeing each other.  People who had been settled became unsettled. People who had been ignored and marginalized, threatened and harmed were empowered to tell their stories, to speak truth to the world. Make no mistake, this is the Holy Spirit in action. 

In the past year we’ve been alongside each other in all sorts of ways, with laughter and tears and computers and masks and food delivered and prayers shared, and losses weathered and joys celebrated. And in our empty building hope is alive as walls have gone up, framing out a space of welcome for a community of children and teachers to share life with us. And the Holy Spirit continues to move.
 
We are one human family.  The children separated from parents at our border and the children hovering in fear of falling bombs are our children. The isolated and lonely who weathered the pandemic behind locked doors, seeing loved ones through closed windows, are our grandparents.  We all belong to God. We all belong to each other. 
 
God is forging a new community that reflects God’s own being. We are being saved into that love, for that love, to find our being in that love and live out that love in the world God loves.
 
But a reminder again: the work the Spirit does not come from us, and is not up to us. We don’t join in from our own competence or confidence; we join in from the connection that God has already made. The Spirit doesn’t need terrific pre-existing material to work with, nothingness and loss is where God begins. Remember, God’s Sprit hovers over emptiness, creates life out of a void and connection from chaos, and isn’t put off by a challenge. We are being saved.  The Spirit will give what we need when we need it.
 
All around us are stories of conflict, stories of human beings fragmented – torn apart in ways that seem impossible to mend.  But the true story of humanity is the story of Pentecost, scared people joining in and letting their voices be used by God.  Divided people from divergent backgrounds, experiences and places each hearing the voice of God in their own language, embraced in the fullness of their own person, and joined back into the unbroken whole human family by the Holy Spirit with the call to spread that hope to the world. Now we know in part, we get little tastes and small glimpses, but one day, in the very presence of God, we will experience fully and completely our belonging to God and each other without end.
 
Amen.
 
 

Perfect Timing

                                 

It's real! 

I've held it in my hands!

  

My book is on my front porch and will be in bookstores June 1! 

I can go fast. I can make decisions and get things done. But often I can go too fast. I can get sloppy, or miss the gift in something. I can process information and respond before things have a chance to settle in me, before I know how I am really feeling or what I really believe.  I can overestimate how much control or say I actually have.  

This book would not let me do that.  

All along, this project has gone slower than I wanted it to.  It simmered and languished meandered, making me wait, and notice and linger with it. Something I'd written twenty years ago would tap me on the shoulder and demand to be included.  I'd think the book was finished, then suddenly I would know the events of that very day were meant to be in this very chapter.  The book took a long time to reveal itself to me, to come together in the way it was meant to. It would drag me along, and I would follow, not knowing where we were going, until it suddenly fit pieces together and said to me, See?  It would not allow me to rush to conclusions; it wanted to tell me it when it was finished.  And when it finally did, we we were into a pandemic, so publication was delayed, and it took a long time to become ink on paper between covers. I had to surrender to the process. Over and over again. To release my agenda and be carried along in trust.  And so in this way, writing this book did for me what I am trying to talk about in the book: it slowed me down and invited me to be present in my life, in this life with others.  To find God right here.

So it is no surprise that this book dragging its little feet has turned out to be a gift in another way as well. A pastor friend in Australia read my manuscript several months ago, just as Australia was about to reopen from pandemic lockdown.  They said, "I returned to work this week... After the year that has been, I return feeling both overwhelmed and wondering just what will be left of us when all of this is over. Our church has been closed for close to 12 months now and we will regather for the first time in just a few weeks. On top of that, I don’t think I have ever felt so tired and wondering what I have to give.  You have reminded me, dear friend, in such a beautiful, honest and gentle way, just who I am and what I am called to do, regardless of all that is uncertain. I can’t thank you enough."

The years long simmer and slow release of The Deepest Belonging means it is arriving in the world just a many of us are arriving back in the world as well. We are taking tentative steps toward resuming "normal" life. We're beginning to be with people again. Congregations are beginning to be together again. Life is amping up and pressures are resuming and there is strangeness and newness and grief and joy, and it occurs to me with some wonder and delight that this is precisely the moment this story is meant to meet us.  

This book means to be a blessing.  

It is here to remind you that we are going to be ok.

That God is holding us, and this whole world, in love. 

That we are invited to slow down, and be present in our lives, 

to be in this life, as it is, with those around us.  And to find God right here.

I am so grateful to welcome The Deepest Belonging: A Story of Discovering How God Meets Us into the world!

___________

Here's some nice things some people have said about it:

You can get The Deepest Belonging wherever you buy books, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Christianbooks.com, (internationally at places like Waterstones, Foyles, Dymocks), independent bookstores (like Bookshop online) my own local Winding Trails Books, and, I'm particularly tickled to say, it's apparently also available at TARGET. So when you go to buy toilet paper and lawn furniture you can also pick up MY BOOK! (If you do this, please send me a photo).

 

The way we decide

 Acts 1:1-17, 21-26

Things have been a little weird and intense for the disciples since Jesus was murdered by the state and came back from the dead. Judas has died by suicide.  The community has been pretty much in hiding.  Then the risen Lord started popping up places.  He’s kind of the same but different, both unrecognizable and completely familiar, both available and not. For a little over a month, he’s been showing up here and there, walking along with some of them down a road, coming through locked doors and eating fish, hanging out with them day after day and teaching again like before. And now, he has just literally vanished into the sky before their eyes.  
 
This weekend we celebrate the Ascension – the day Jesus disappears into the clouds and leaves the disciples staring up into the sky with their mouths hanging open. They can feel his absence where his presence once was. And yet he promises he will be there with them in a different way, guiding them nonetheless.
  
So now a new adjustment, a new assignment: Jesus said to Stay Put and Wait for the Holy Spirit, whatever that means.  That’s their job.  So that’s what they are doing. Constantly devoting themselves to prayer, it says, coming together, helping each other learn to trust that God is here now, and God will lead them into what is next. 
 
And then we are given a bizarre and delightful illustration of this trust in action. They are trying to decide who should replace Judas in their leadership.  And they have two good options before them, Justus, and Matthias, both followers of Jesus, who knew Jesus in the flesh, both men of integrity, both willing to serve. Whom should they choose?  
 
Do they make pros and cons list? Debate with Robert’s Rules of Order?  Launch campaigns and take a vote, the 120 or so of them?
 
No! They draw straws! They flip a coin, roll the dice, “cast lots.” They use a game of chance to take things out of human hands.  
 
There is nothing intrinsically spiritual or holy about this.  We don’t think flipping a coin at the beginning of a football game is asking God to choose which team should start. We don’t think God is involved when we play paper, rock scissors over who has to put the kids to bed.  Casting lots was just used by the soldiers two months before to divide up Jesus’ clothes among themselves while he hung dying on the cross, so it’s not like lot casting is some inherently God-seeking process.  But when it comes time for the followers of Jesus to pick a leader in witnessing to Christ’s resurrection, they roll the dice.
 
They don’t ask themselves WWJD – What would Jesus do if he were here?  Because Jesus is here!  He’s as real among them, among us, as when he walked the earth in the flesh. They’re learning to trust that this is so.  So why not ask Christ to pick and then flip a coin? 
 
The Ascension means that Jesus can’t be captured and boxed up, marketed, claimed, or relegated to the past as a venerated historical figure we make reference to but never address directly.  Jesus is risen and ascended.  Now the community has to learn how to live in the paradox of our faith: that Christ is not here but is HERE. They have to look for Christ, learn to be present to the presence of Christ, listen for the voice of Christ, in and through, and alongside one another. We can’t see him, we can’t touch him, and yet, when we are present with each other, acting with and for one another, Jesus Christ is right here in that space, energy, connection between us.  We are the body of Christ.
 
How do we hear God?  Sometimes it feels like a quiet little nudge that leads us just the little next step, or the wisdom that sinks into our soul when something in us says, “Yes. That is right.” But mostly, we hear God by listening together. By surrendering together.  Waiting for the Spirit to direct us. And then acting.  
And then surrendering and waiting again.
 
This way of discernment is brazenly different than the world’s way – which is fast and decisive.  Wayne Muller reminds us (in his book Sabbath), 
 
"The theology of progress forces us to act before we are ready. We speak before we know what to say. We respond before we feel the truth of what we know. In the process, we inadvertently create suffering, heaping imprecision upon inaccuracy, until we are all buried under a mountain of misperception. But Sabbath says, Be still. Stop. There is no rush to get to the end, because we are never finished. Take time to rest, and eat, and drink, and be refreshed. And in the gentle rhythm of that refreshment, listen to the sound the heart makes as it speaks the quiet truth of what is needed." 
 
We talked this week in catechesis class about trust – how trust is the core of it all. Our security in life or status with the divine not about cracking a code, earning a prize, or figuring out the rules. To be in relationship with a living God must begin with trust—that God is real, and that God wants to lead us all toward love, toward healing, toward forgiveness, toward righting wrongs, and bringing justice, and birthing hope right in the places of utter despair.  
 
So maybe God makes the coin flip one way and not the other.  God is certainly capable of that.  May we too have such trust in God.  
 
Or maybe God thinks it is cute that they are so intent on replacing Judas, as though having 12 disciples like Jesus had originally chosen when his ministry began, a reflection of the 12 tribes of Israel, is essential for what is to come. As though their structures and containers are vital. Of course they have no idea that just days from now that wild Holy Spirit is about to bust the gospel out of its confines and jumpstart it’s spread to the ends of the earth through witnesses who have never seen the human Jesus with their own two eyes, nor heard his voice speaking in a language they wouldn't understand anyway, but who will definitely hear the message their hearts recognize beyond all else, and see the risen Lord transform their very souls.  And they don't know it yet, but the 12 are actually the 120 of them, and about to become 3,000 in one day, and Matthias is never mentioned again in the bible.  
 
So perhaps when they cast lots God chooses for them.  Or maybe it doesn’t matter one way or another to God, but God appreciates their intention just the same.  God is with them even now, as they faithfully seek to do God’s will, and that in itself is beautiful and holy. Whether their decision has any effect on things or not, that they would surrender and seek is shaping them all the same.  
 
Their imaginations can’t begin to grasp what is to come, and so they faithfully make their decision, and then suddenly the whole landscape shifts, and then they will seek God’s direction for the next thing. What more faithful way to live is there than that?
 
We are not building a movement, standing up for values, or shoring up an institution. We are joining in the Kingdom of God. We are witnesses to resurrection, learning to recognize and share in the healing work of the living Christ that is happening right now.
 
Yesterday the youth cleaned out the sanctuary, or got started, at least. After 14 months of emptiness and clutter, regular dust and construction dust, and spiders gleefully given free reign, it was a big, big job, and the youth made a big dent in it. When they peeled down the images of the bible characters we began journeying with in Advent 2019, and unpinned the Psalm river hanging on the back wall from not last summer but the summer before that, I was struck by the ways we’ve grown in our own faithfulness and discernment.  There are things we thought mattered a great deal that turned out not to be important at all. And there are things we had no idea would be significant that have turned out to shape us considerably. 
 
We are not the same congregation we were when we last sang and prayed together in that space. Case in point, when we left the building we had only just discerned, after a year of prayer and listening, that our building was indeed part of our mission, and we would say Yes to the preschool.  Now we will return to their presence already among us.  And we ourselves are different. We have lost beloved members and gained beloved members.  Our ways of feeling connected have changed and, in many ways, even deepened.  
 
When the whole landscape shifted we never, ever could have imagined what was to come, so we had to seek God’s direction, surrender and wait for the Holy Spirit, and then act. And here we are again, on the cusp of another huge shift, a new adjustment.  And our imaginations can’t begin to foresee what is coming.  But as witnesses to resurrection, who know the power of the risen Lord to bring new life into our lives and our world, we will keep helping each other learn to trust that God is here now, and God will lead us into what is next.  And we will keep learning to recognize and share in the work of the living Christ that is happening right now. 

And what more faithful way is there to live than that?
 
Amen.
 

Held in God's Love

 

1 John 4:7-21 & John 15:1-11 

“Abide in me as I abide in you.” Jesus says. And at first, what I hear is, “the dude abides.” In the Big Lebowski, Jeff, “the dude” Lebowski, ‘a Los Angeles slacker and avid bowler,’ played by Jeff Bridges, abides. He says so himself 160 time in the movie. What he means is, ‘the dude lives in his unperturbable state of dudeness.’ He simply is. He abides.
 
At my own baptism, when I was 13, this passage was read to me. My job, I was told, was to abide in Christ. I heard it as to hang on tightly to Jesus and work hard to not let go.  But there is no striving in abiding; nobody says, “I was abiding so hard.”  It’s a relaxing into, dwelling alongside, hanging out and lingering kind of word. So abiding in Christ is not about hanging on tightly and mustering doubtless faith, conjuring spiritual feelings, or displaying religious or moral tenacity. It’s kind of the opposite. It’s just being. Like the dude.  
 
I went on a retreat this week at a Catholic retreat center I had not been to before. They sent a welcome video orienting me to my hermitage and one of the things they said was how people often ask what they should do. You’re not there to do anything – you are just there to be. If you’re tired, sleep. If you’re hungry, eat. If you want to walk, walk. If you want to sit in the chair and rock and watch nature out the window, do that. You aren’t here to accomplish anything, they told me, you’re here to abide in the love of God.  

But the video went on to say something interesting. Once we finally settle into accepting we don’t need to do anything, we turn that doing energy onto God. I’ll just be, God, but you need to do something for me. Give me an answer, some insight, a mystical experience, a message.  But that’s not what this time is for either, they said. You are here just to be with God, who is being with you.
 
Abide. Linger. Be. Be connected. Be alive. Be here with God because God is here with you. 
 
In scripture, this word “abide” is actually not used for humans nearly as often as it is used for God.  God abides.  This is God’s word first: God loiters with us. God hangs out with us in and through it all.  We abide in Christ because God abides with us. 
 
And in this abiding relationship, there is something fierce and lovely about the message that anything dead will be taken off and burned, that we will be pruned, and that the pruning will be done by the vinegrower, and not the branches themselves.  It’s both a threat and a promise: God will take care of what needs to be released and let go, in us, between us. God will do the pruning that makes us healthier, more whole and filled with life. Sometimes it will feel like death to let go of what we thought we needed but was really holding us back from flourishing. 
 
 There is a particular concept in Christian practice that the mystics talk a lot about: holy indifference.  Whatever happens to me, I am ok. Because in life or in death, I belong to God. The most terrible thing will not destroy me. The most wonderful thing will not save me. I am held in God’s love. I abide. I can take in joy, and go through suffering, and they are both real and impact me, of course, but they do not define me, they do not sway me from my grounding in love. 

 
When session (our church board) works together to discern where God is leading the church, we seek this place of holy indifference before we begin.  Can we let go of our agendas and trust that God will reveal, through the process and each other, what is best for our congregation? I may think I know what is best, but I have biases and desires that I may not even be aware of, and so does everyone else.  So we seek to reach holy indifference, to face the question in front of us with humility and trust that God may have something better for us than what any one of us had in mind. Because ultimately we really do desire “God’s will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.” And God may prune us, or even fertilize us (!) —things may go differently than we had planned. But we are learning that if we can surrender into trust that we are held in God no matter what, it makes us brave to risk, and speak up, and reach out, and let in.  Holy indifference is this deep trust, illustrated by this little sentence tucked into the middle of our passage today, “…as he is, so we are in the world.”  As Christ is—inextricably connected to God and everyone else, held in love—so are we.  We can trust that. We can abide in that state of - if not unperturbable dudeness - then holy indifference.
 
But abiding is not a solo gig.  If these passages say anything to us today, it is that it is impossible to abide in Christ alone.  “God is love,” our scripture says, “and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Abiding in God means love. Loving, being loved, love.  And that requires other people.
There is no individual discipleship, no personal, isolated relationship with God. I do not experience Christ somehow apart from my life lived alongside, with and for others, because Christ IS God-with-us. That’s not to say that solitude isn’t essential, or that we can’t get away, like I did on retreat, to hang out with God.  But any connection I had to God there is inextricably woven into the connections I have with other people here. I am not me without them. I brought the joy and pain of those I love, and the sorrow of our nation and world, with me. And I returned from alone to together, to with and for, to alongside and in it – with my family, friends, and community, to the whole world of which I am a part. 
 
It is in and alongside each other that we find Christ. St. Theresa of Avila said, “Every face is an icon of Christ discovered by a prayerful person.”  When we abide in Christ, we will find ourselves living in love, loving others, receiving others, lingering in the joy and the pain with others, standing by others and finding others doing that for us as well.  God’s love is embodied in us, between us; God uses our voices, and our arms and our eyes and our hearts to 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.  Love is the energy of life – love fuels life, deepens life, builds life, grows life.  But fear is the energy of death, fear pushes us to shut others down, close them out.  Love connects and strengthens us; fear breaks down relationships and dismantles trust.  In love we open up and grow outward, but in fear we shrink down and shrivel up, isolated, falsely “protected” from hurt, insulated in self-absorption or blame.  Love is a blazing fire that lights up the world. But 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. “Hating” is letting fear decide how we see each other. 
But there is no fear in love.  Perfect love casts out fear; love is stronger than fear.  It is through love that God’s Spirit does the work in us of healing and freeing, beginning and redeeming, mending and forgiving.  
 
How do we feel God’s love? In the love of others. 

How do we feel God’s love? When we love each other.  

It’s not an abstract, spiritual and distant thing.  It is a concrete, real, tangible thing. If you want to see God’s love, then love somebody.  Say something, do something, for somebody else. See them. Hear them. Join them.  Love someone. Do it and you will find yourself held by it.  Live like it’s true and its truth will live in you.  
 
But lest we think we need to make ourselves into loving people, producers of love – we go back to the abiding, the holy indifference of trust, the being loved already and completely by God. Christ is the vine. We are the branches. It’s not even our love, after all. We’re recipients and conduits – we are just sharing it, breathing it and passing it around; we are just abiding in the love of God that sustains us all. 
 
So beloved ones, abide. Linger here. Be. Be connected. Be alive. 
God is hanging out here with us.  Our job is to hang out here with God.  And that looks like love. 
 
Amen.