Left Turn at Joy

Moving on

2011-07-23T16:40:00.001-05:00

This blog began with my journey to seminary, a journey that has now ended as another begins. I have chosen to retire this blog as well. You can follow me at my new writing endeavor Barefoot Theology. There the conversation goes on, exploring theology, spirituality, and religion in the real world. Come dig your toes in!

Holy Breaking

2011-06-28T15:27:00.000-05:00

This blog began in change. It was born out of a flurry of boxes and packing tape, of hurried sorting and storing, of hard choices made in minutes because there was never enough time for more. It began with a holy break, from one life to another. It grew up in the first days of my theological education (though not formation, that began long before, and will never cease).

Now that one time beginning has become an ending, and there is another beginning. All those endings and beginnings seemed to run rough shod over my ability to keep up with this space. Since I last posted here I have been ordained a transitional deacon in the Episocpal church, I graduated with my Master's degree, I got married to my dear husband, and we've moved from not one or two places but three!

"Change is hard," is perhaps the most overused phrase in our vocabulary today, and the truest. We are creatures of habit, yet one day we open our eyes to discover those habits no longer serve us. They have become a shackle. Shackles are never easy to break, no matter how confining, or damaging, for they were once beloved routines. They were the habitualized actions that brought us to where we stand today, blinking under a new sun, uncomfortable and wary.

But if change is hard, it is also holy. All things change, even in death change never releases its grip. The very universe in which our tiny marble spins is undergoing change on a scale we cannot even begin to imagine. Holy men and women have known this for millennia, and so the saying goes that the Spirit blows where she wills. The Holy that moves over the face of creation began change (might we call it time?); and while She moves throughout all that She has made, we must go on changing.

The holy cannot abide in entropy, and so our lives, when lived into the holiness of our calling as people of God, must be filled with change. It is in those long stretches of life when we settle comfortably into our shackle of routine and fail to heed the terrifying call to let go and step out into newness that we fall asleep, that we sink into unconscious sin. It is when we open our eyes, hear the trumpet call in our ears and heed it, that we being to live again.

The holy breaks old molds, old shackles, old safety, old beliefs, old surety and in pours the bright breath of God; the rushing tongues of purifying flame that will forge us into a new creation, always a new creation. The same story, new again: Let there be light...

Sermon: Lent 3A

2011-03-27T19:22:00.000-05:00

I ad-libbed quite a bit this morning so this is a basic structure, I'm afraid I can't reproduce the full experience!

After the warm glow of Christmas with its cooing baby, its choirs of angel, its sparkling lights and pretty paper come the majestic magi bearing fabulous gifts. The whole birth cycle of our church year is something that makes me want to snuggle down into those days and never leave. But just in case we were in any danger of deluding ourselves into believing that being a member of God’s family is easy, or comfortable along comes lent to remind us that life as a child of God is often distinctly uncomfortable.

Growing up in Michigan water was never something we lacked, in fact it was easy to take for granted. Water was so prevalent that any child who didn’t learn to swim by about six was in real danger of drowning. We were simply surrounded by the stuff. In big rushing rivers, and cheery little babbling streams, little shady ponds, medium size sparkling lakes, marshes, bogs, and of course those mighty inland seas the great lakes. So when I moved to Texas and discovered that my new home did not have a single natural lake I was shocked. And I learned to cherish water. I learned to get excited when the creek in the park down the street wasn’t bone dry, and to go outside and stand with my face toward heaven at even the lightest sprinkle. I learned to love the sudden burst of green in the dry brown hills when it rained, and to always carry a water bottle with me.

Water is life, living at the edge of the desert we know that in our bones. The big old live oaks with their roots down deep in the earth know it and keep on burrowing. The wildlife that flocks to any tiny puddle knows it, the leaves that are briefly washed of dust by each rare storm know it. The Israelites, and the Samaritan women knew it. Without water, all things die. Without the water of life, we might as well be dead. Living a life of following God is uncomfortable. For the Israelites it meant leaving the comforts and hardships they knew for entirely new hardships and comforts that looked very different. In their freedom in God they did not find an easy road.

I know a little how they felt. A few times in my journey I have wondered if God uprooted me from a good job and a good life to let me wreck on the hazardous shores of life, I’ve done my share of grumbling. Because a life lived to God’s call is not easy. Jesus knew it, but Jesus knew what we so often forget, that God is worth seeking. Because only with God will we find the living water we truly thirst for. We will not find it in all those things we surround ourselves with to ease the discomfort, not all the things we use to try to, as singers of my youth put it “to fill the hole in your soul.” Instead, we will find it in the freedom of God available if we are willing to leave our comfortable captivity, our everyday routine, our sureties and comfort zone.

The Samaritan woman who encountered Jesus could have simply filled her jug and given this bossy Jew a drink. She could have sighed at one more demand and gone on with her day. Instead she challenged Jesus. “Who are you, and why are you talking to me?” She had plenty of reason to ask. The Samaritans and the Jews had as little to do with one another as possible. Jesus breaks through the comfortable taboos that have maintained the status quo for so long. And he’s chosen the right person to engage, because she fires straight back. Intelligent, curious, and unintimidated by this strange man. She wants to know who he is, and how he can claim such power. Is he, she challenges, better than Jacob?

And yet how hard it is to break out of our comfort zone. How hard it is to see beyond the possibility for simple bodily ease, for one less chore. It is so nice to be comfortable. It is so comfortable to be nice. Even if that means living in captivity to things that don’t truly give life. Even if that means holding ourselves captive to our pasts, our prejudices, our comfortable lies.

But Jesus, instead of getting upset that she seems to have missed his meaning, turns the world upside down. What sounded like a conversation about water is suddenly something else. Suddenly this man is playing the role of the prophet, a truth teller. He isn’t chastising the Samaritan woman, or even implying that she somehow has loose morals, that isn’t the point. She was actually likely caught in a traditional marriage practice that passed wives on to other relatives like possessions until one refused to marry her, leaving her without status or security. Her life may well have been its own sort of captivity. What matters is that Jesus has caught her off guard, he has shown her something more than just daily chores to feed bodily comfort. And this woman goes beyond her ancestors, the Israelites in the wilderness, she takes God’s bait. She has seen that something is different and so she cuts straight into the divide that has kept her people and the Jews apart for hundreds of years, the dispute over where is the appropriate place to worship God. The answer is not what she expects, there are no easy answers here. Instead Jesus moves her once again out of her expected world and into a world where God dwells so close to us that there is no need for arguments over where God can be worshiped.

God does not seek to make us comfortable in the ways of the world. God seeks to make us true, bright, holy. God seeks to make us like unto God’s self. But it is so easy to be distracted. It is so easy to resist because where we are is OK. Where we are we can hang on to the little comforts we have built, and where God is prodding us to go is full of uncertainty. For the Israelites it was full of a frightening level of reliance on God. Like children they could provide nothing for themselves, their very lives depended on God. For our Samaritan friend the world God invited her too was full of truth, of immediate presence, of a call to let go of being “right” about a worldly argument. God invited her into a world where her life was not judged by her value to her latest husband, or by a man who had refused to marry her; but rather by her willingness to meet with God and speak without fear of what she found there.

What is the world God is calling us into? For some of us it might be a life like Abram and Sarai, called to leave our comfortable familiar surroundings and go. For some it might be to leave a comfortable job that does no good for our souls or the world and take a risk. For some it might be to re-envision the life of this place as something bigger and greater than any of us can imagine right now. For some of us it might be letting go of the surety that we are right, or have the answers.

In all things we are not just asked, we are required to trust. That God is enough, that with God what we are is enough. We are each being called into the desert, or to the well. We are each being given the choice between the water of life, and the everyday water of busyness and comfort. God asks that you struggle, that you cry, that you wrestle with God in the darkness, that you question with God at the well and that when the day dawns and you have tasted water that gives life that you GO and you TELL.

Writer's Block

2011-03-13T22:32:00.001-05:00

It happens to us all I suppose: writer's block. Sometimes frustrating, sometimes just an absence of words as if there is nothing clamoring for our attention. And despite the fact that meditative writing is part of my lenten discipline it seems to me that that empty silence is just as holy.

I am, after all, merely human. I am not God, and while sometimes the Spirit moves and words flow and something truly worth speaking pours forth, at other times there is just me. Just a woman, plumbing the depths of my soul for diamonds and occasionally coming up empty. And this is holy too.

We are, after all, merely human. And if there is to be room for the Spirit to flow there must first be space, emptiness, a womb or tomb into which the miraculous may move and create and flourish. So tonight I sit, cuddled up next to my dear helpful fiance (who is proof reading a very long paper for me) and find myself rather empty. Not uncomfortably empty, just still and quiet. The night sounds echoing a little in my heart, the songs of a few late birds dropping peacefully into my ears, and that dear familiar voice pondering to himself next to me.

So tonight I write not to express, but to welcome, to make room: to acknowledge that I am waiting for what will emerge from an empty tomb. I suppose if that is so, then writer's block is holy.

Holy One, breath of all that has the fire of life, come and sweep clean our hearts and minds. Give us hearts, joyful in waiting, and expectant of You. And make for Yourself a space where You may build your nest within that our lives may be so filled with the fire of your love that we may love others as you love us. These things we pray in name of our Brother and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Lenten writing, day 5

Collect for the Thursday after Ash Wednesday

2011-03-10T22:14:00.000-06:00

Lord of Mercy, tonight we come to you, with clean brows; yet with lives still marked by the darkness of sin. We have wandered far from you and our hearts cry out for the Peace of your presence. Be with each of us this night, and may our hearts be so filled with the knowledge of your love that when we are asked to choose life, or death, we may choose life.

Lenten writing, day 2

Ashes to Alleluias

2011-03-09T16:10:00.001-06:00

There is a great and simple mystery to Ash Wednesday. There is nothing so simple as smearing ashes on the forehead of a human being. Yet there is nothing so mysterious as being part of a room full of infants, children, and adults of all ages, all moving voluntarily toward the altar to have their face smeared with the gritty reminder of their mortality. No one escapes, no one demurs, an infant not yet three months old bears the same dark smudge as the oldest of us, long years fluttering about his head like the heavenly chorus.

It is a solemn, strange time. We who normally do all we can to hide ourselves away from the truth of our existence read aloud psalms and confessions, we kneel on unpracticed knees, we blink the ashes of mortality out of our eyelashes and onto our faces. We move through the rest of the day afraid to touch our foreheads as if by smearing that gritty dirt we smear our own existence away. Today we are fragile. And today, while we pondered the immensity of our mortal life, and our fallenness, a child sang.

I am sure his parents were embarrassed, I hope they were amused as well. The chapel recycles old bulletins as coloring paper for seminary kids. And this young boy had gotten a sheet with the gospel Alleluia printed on its reverse side. As we recited psalm 103, as we blessed the ashes of mortality and repentance, his clear little voice sang Alleluia. He sang the short little line of scripture, words of gladness at the promise of new life, and that word we give up for Lent: Alleluia; right through our severity and quiet, right through our ashes and darkness, right through our prayer and sorrow.

Straight through the reminder of the ways we have sinned, and the truth of our inevitable end, his song was Alleluia. The whole gospel story, the whole Christian life condensed into a few short minutes before his parents convinced him to quiet. In those moments we got a peek at heaven, at the Alleluias that roll on and on, through years of sorrow and darkness. The mystery of joy, and rebirth, and new life, and hope out of mortality and sin.

Out of the mouths of babes, the phoenix of joy, the blaze of the Holy Spirit who indeed burns us to dust that we might rise again in glory.

(Lenten writing, day 1, Ash Wednesday)

Ash Wednesday

2011-03-09T09:23:00.000-06:00

We've come round again, to another ash Wednesday, to another Lent. I'll begin today with a poem I wrote a few years ago. More should follow as writing will be part of my lenten practice, and sharing them will keep me accountable. Blessed and holy Lent to you...

(remember you are dust)

The tender scrape

of a sooty finger, marking me

the way another did, once

with oil, scented with the spice

of new life.

Gray smudges of the sort

my mother scrubbed clean,

until I discovered her worn

thumb stained with the ash

of life.

Feel it, that outer sign

of inner grace: the sacrament

of dirt, that rains into

my eyelashes and settles on

my lips.

(and to dust)

All the world has come

from where all the world

is rushing. But between

we are asked to remember

and to feel.

In a sooty finger the

gentle, powerful hand

of She who bore us and

makes us new out of

the dust.

(you shall return)

Beads

2011-03-07T19:20:00.000-06:00

I find them, everywhere I go
beads, shining black suns
in the cracks of the floor.
powdering under foot
with a crackle of fire,
rolled beneath a chair,
glinting in the sun.
all things that must be done
scattered in my wake
like little universes
surprising my feet, my eyes
eluding fingers catching
at the broken thread
as another goes spinning
off, out of reach.

Sermon: Epiphany 8A

2011-02-28T21:18:00.001-06:00

Will be a LONG time before I ever get to preach an Epiphany 8 sermon again!

Josephine Robertson
Epiphany 8A
Isaiah 49:8-16a, 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, Matthew 6:24-34
Holy Spirit, Dripping Springs

Jesus is talking about money again. Mamon, wealth, treasure, whatever we call it, Episcopalians are notoriously squeamish when it comes to talking about it. It just isn’t done. Money is a bit of a dirty word, or maybe our avoidance of the topic is linked more to unease, embarrassment, or anxiety.

Money: if we have a lot of it we’re afraid we’ll loose what we have. If we have very little we live with anxiety that it won’t be enough. For both of those possibilities, I have good news, and bad news. The bad news is, nothing much has changed since Jesus gave the teaching we heard in the Gospel today. The good news is: nothing has changed since Jesus gave the teaching we heard in the Gospel today.
Jesus knows the knots we tie ourselves into, and I want to be very clear that Jesus is not advocating irresponsibility, carelessness, or sloth. He is calling us instead to remember who we are, whose we are, and what we are called to do with our lives. With Jesus remember, its always about how we are called to live our lives, in response to the good news that we are God’s beloved children.

There’s the first thing we must remember, every day, every minute of our lives. We are God’s. As Isaiah tells us today, God has inscribed us on the palms of his hands. Not with a ball point pen like I did in junior high, not even with a permanent marker, but really inscribed us there; like the stone tablets of the law. We are carved into God’s palm, held there, protected there. There is nothing we or anyone else can do that will remove us from the hands of our divine parent.

Because of that truth, because of who we are, we are called to live differently than the world would have us live. Our worth, our value, does not come from what we can accumulate or amass. It isn’t about having the most toys when we die. Our success is not measured by how much we make, or save, or don’t. Our success is measured by how well we do what we were created to do.

The lilies Jesus praises, they were made to grow, to bloom, to scatter their seed and to die. And that is what they do, that and nothing more. They do not strive to take over the meadow, or to produce a red flower instead of a white. They are not worried about the bigger flower next to them. They simply are. Their lives are lived according to the nature they were given by God, to be lilies.

The birds of the air, who do not toil or worry. They were made to mate and raise their young, to dance on wind, to sing their own particular song, and when their days are spent, to die. The swallow doesn’t despair because her song is not as grand as the nightingale. The wren does not seek to compete with the nest of an eagle, or worry where his next meal will come. They simply are. Their lives are lived according to their nature, as it was given by God, to be a wren, a swallow, an eagle.
We worry, we are anxious. Not because money is evil, but because we have forgotten the nature God gave us. It isn’t hard to do in this world. It isn’t hard to get distracted, and it has been that way since Jesus and before. But something else has been that forever as well, our own nature. Created in the image of God, our nature is simply to love: God, and one another.

Did you notice what Jesus asked us about today? He asked us why we worry about three things: clothing, food, and drink. Jesus talks about these three things somewhere else. In fact these three things are asked in questions one more time in Matthew. Jesus tells us in that sermon that the Righteous will someday ask: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?” (Matthew 25:37-38)

And Jesus’ answer, of course? Each time a fellow daughter or son of God came to us thirsty, hungry, or naked.

Like the eagle was made to soar, the lily to bloom, we were made to love. To love God, and one another. That love is not about a feeling, though if we feel love as well that is a blessing, it is about the doing. God has loved us from the start through God’s actions, God’s doing. And we are entreated to love in the same way.
In order to give something away we must feel that we have enough of it to start with. This is what Jesus calls us to see: that our God is a God of abundance. That we are stewards of the God of abundance. Paul, writing to the Corinthians knew what Jesus knew. That we can forget who and what we are. We can forget that the whole world belongs to God, we can forget that we belong to God, we can forget that our neighbors belong to God, we can forget that all that we have comes from God. Not only for ourselves, but for the whole world.

Jesus is not asking us to stop making money, just the opposite. Jesus entreats us to become good, faithful, just stewards of the bounty of our God. And when what we have, or do not have, ceases to belong to us, when we see it for what it is: a loan; then our relationship to it changes. Some of that anxiety can ease. We can loosen our grip a little bit because really, it was never ours to begin with, so why hold on quite so tightly.

Jesus pries our fingers apart on our aching hands and shows us that with our God there is there truly is enough, more than enough. There is enough for our own hearts to be at ease. There is enough for us to open our hands and share what we have been given with those in need. Every human being is a steward, charged to care for the things of God until we are called upon to hand them back.

We too can be like the wren, singing his song on the fence post. We too can bring as much delight to our Father’s eyes as the lily opening in the warm sunshine. Look again at what you have been given. All of it, even our lives, belongs to the One who made it. Jesus invites us to rest easily, knowing that we are inscribed in the hands of a loving God, a God who has trusted us with his own image. A God who has trusted us each with a piece of this world, and who asks only that we live into our nature. God asks us to love, with our lives, and with all he has entrusted to us.

Sermon: St Brigid

2011-02-22T16:55:00.000-06:00

Josephine Robertson
Christ Chapel
St Brigid (Feb 2nd 2011)

It will happen eventually, a saint will wander into your kitchen. When she does, you will be unprepared. The pantry will be empty because there were papers to write, and work to do, or sermons to prepare, and parishioners to visit and you just lost track of time. The grocery shopping slipped, and the pizza boxes piled up. But now there is a saint sitting at your kitchen table, smiling.

So you will feed her from what you have, and sigh with relief that the leftover pizza was just enough and there were a couple of beers in the back of the fridge. And then she will speak with the voice of God, and she will ask you for something you know you cannot possibly do. Perhaps she already has.

1500 years ago, so the story goes, Brigid and her nuns descended on a king’s household, unannounced. The king and his whole entourage was away. So his sons entertained her as best they could without their father, or his court musicians. During their meager meal the the saint asked the young, and untrained, princes to play the bard’s harps for her. She insisted on the impossible.

God rarely asks for the possible. Instead we are called to joy in the midst of sorrow, to stillness while there is too much to do. God calls for calm in the face of looming deadlines, peace in the face of crisis. And sometimes hardest of all: for our time here in worship, when we are scheduled 27 hours a day.

Brigid whispered a prayer, and touched the hands of those frightened princes and they played music so fine it is said no well-trained human hands before or since have ever matched it, a gift they retained for the whole of their lives. The impossibly foolish, no longer.

Our unreasonable God, our foolish God, or Graceful God. That the foolish may be wise, the strong allowed to be weak, the wavering become rocks. For untrained fingers to bring forth heart songs. For human hands to give comfort. For the work to be put off until tomorrow, because the sun is shining. For the last of our larder, given away, to never fail.

Foolishness? Why not? After all, we are about to enter again into the impossible and foolish mystery of Eucharist. We are about to dare to join our own frail amateur voices to those of the angels. So, let the wise laugh. When a saint sitting comfortably at your kitchen table, enjoying the last of your beer, points to a harp and asks you to play; play.

Waiting

2011-01-27T14:25:00.001-06:00

If you haven't noticed, the well is dry.

It has been months, many of them, since a poem flowed from my fingertips. Months since any writing but what is required for my degree has bubbled up at all. This is what all writers dread, the desert. This great dry plain where the wind of doubt blows, scouring the earth down to bedrock. The rich fertile soil of creativity dries, and cracks, and powders and flies away on that wind.

It leaves us caked with the past, with remembered fragments and words that once tasted rich as molasses on our tongues but now seem tasteless and stale. And so I sit here on this great empty plain, waiting. Waiting for the rain, for the first seed, caught in a crack of rock to begin pushing out shoots, putting down roots that will slowly pry the rocks apart. Waiting for the glacial slowness that will break down this bedrock into new soil, wet it with the tears of experience, and begin the next flush with the rush of a flash flood.

The desert changes everything, what happened before it no longer matters. What will come after will be totally new. Perhaps a seed or two will have survived, perhaps they will begin the newness, but they will soon be overwhelmed in the riotous abundance that is sure to come. Even now that dry wind is softer, and it no longer carries away, now it drops little drifts of sand that smell of far off places and different dreams. Even now a bit of green is blooming here and there among this rocky plain.

But for now there is the writer's hardest task, the task every creative soul must learn, the waiting. For God to sweep things clean. For Her great broom to find the last speck of what we thought would last forever, swish, swish, and gone. For the slow process of starting again, as She did long ago - from scratch. I think I will sit here, in the shade of this stone, and watch this little shoot to see what it becomes.

Sermon: St. Teresa of Avila

2010-10-15T16:33:00.000-05:00

C. Josephine Robertson

St. Teresa of Avila – October 15th

Lessons: Song of Songs 4:12–16, Psalm 42:1-7, Romans 8:22–27, and Matthew 5:13–16

Christ Chapel

In the middle of a long, dark winter evening the power fails. The wind rattling at the windows, creeping in around the door, sucks the warmth out of the house with each minute. Beneath those storm clouds not a light shows, for miles farms and houses that had been little oases of light turn dark and seem to simply fade out of existence. And then we light the lamp. It hisses and flickers as the gas wick catches. Set on the table it fills the kitchen with warm, soft light. Not enough to drift away and do solitary things by ourselves, but enough to light the faces sitting around that table. The warmth of that little flame makes the cold wind fade, and the night seem far less frightening, because we see in the soft, flickering faces around it, that we were not alone.

St. Teresa did not sit alone in contemplation. She sat with the Friend who knew her, and loved her. She sat with Jesus, his presence as warm and alive as the face of my sister next to mine in the lamplight. And she tells us, he sang to her: “Enjoy Me.”¹ Like salt, tangy and refreshing, enjoy me. Like lamp light in the storm, enjoy me. Teresa did not find a burden in the Gospel, or in the contemplative life she pursued. She found bricks that laughed, and a sky that poured out mirth.² She found life transformed not into the burden her fellow nuns feared, but into an invitation: enjoy me.

The Spirit of God still sighs the song into our hearts, enjoy me. God has made us salty, bright, gleaming with the light of our baptism, vessels filled with shining water for a thirsty world. Teresa gave her wounded, chaotic times a Jesus who holds us close as beloved friends; we can give the world a God who still sings: Enjoy me! An invitation to come in out of the darkness of the storm, out of the cold burning wind and into the warm sweet light of the lamp God has lit for the whole world. Enjoy me. An invitation for all to taste the saltiness of life with God, tangy and refreshing, rich on our tongues as smoked salmon melting. Enjoy me. An invitation into light that cannot be hidden, as the great wash of the Milky Way, spinning impossibly above us. Enjoy me.

Teresa turned toward God and found joy after long nights, strength after long weakness, brightness amid the sharp pain of persecution, and the warm arms of a Friend. The Friend who sings with the joy of the sky a song no darkness or hurt can silence: Enjoy me! The Friend who calls us, crying: “Enjoy me, and be the laughing of bricks to another, be the singing of the sky to someone who has never looked up. Enjoy me, and be my light in darkness, the taste of life to someone who thought themselves dead.”

Lamps, and salt, you have your invitation, your burden, your call from our Friend, Jesus Christ: Enjoy me!

1 ”Laughter Came From Every Brick”, Teresa of Avila

2“Laughter Came From Every Brick”, Teresa of Avila

Sermon: God is Enough

2010-10-04T08:36:00.000-05:00

Josephine Robertson
Proper 22 Year C
Luke 17:5-10
Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit, Dripping Springs, TX
9/29/2010

Driving down a highway in American, you’ve seen the signs… Because the efficiency apartment is just too small, upgrade today to a two bedroom walkup! Don’t share walls with your neighbors, buy a starter home today! Need more room? Great houses starting in the low 200s. Lakeside living from the 300s! From the low 400s, you too can have the dream…

The disciples had seen those signs, we all have, they are written on our hearts. They tell us that if we just had a little more … what? Everything. A little more money, a little more space, a few more rooms, a few more plates, a few more pans, a few more power tools, a little more knowledge, a bit more power, a little more strength, someone who loved us more, someone we loved more, a few more friends, a little more understanding, a little more bravery, and just a bit more faith.

Just a little more, and we can do “it.” What? Anything. We can climb that mountain, win the race, get the promotion, graduate with honors, win the award, beat our coworkers, please our parents, keep up with the neighbors, work the miracle, feed the poor, secure peace, find peace, be happy, feed the sheep, bring about the kingdom of God.

What caused the disciples to cry: “Increase our faith!” Two thousand years ago Jesus gave his disciples one simple command: to forgive. Let me read the verse that just proceeds our lesson today: “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. 4And if tthe same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, “I repent”, you must forgive.’”
The disciples respond: “Just a little more, and we’ll do it for you!”

Just a little more. Just a little more faith, Lord, and we’ll do it. We’ve been praying the same prayer our whole lives.

“God, I know I can do it. I know this time will be different. I just need you to give me a little more skill, and I can do it this time. I just need you to give me a little more strength, and I can keep things together. Give me a little more wisdom God, and I can get this church on the right path. Just a little more patience… a few more resources… a little more trust… increase my faith.”

Jesus has asked for a hard thing. We have asked for a little more faith, to be a little better equipped for this struggle. And now Jesus is talking about impossible things. Trees planted in the sea for heaven sakes. If Jesus were into plain speaking he might have thrown his hands up in the air and cried “You just don’t get it! You don’t need more! God is enough!”

God is enough. That command to forgive one another? It isn’t about us. It isn’t about what we’re able to do by ourselves, because by ourselves we will fail, sooner or later. But God is enough. We don’t have to, no, we can’t rely on ourselves and our own store of faith, or patience, or mercy, or strength. Because those things, no matter how great or small they are, will always eventually find something too big to forgive, to hard to endure, to painful to face. But if we learn from Christ’s cry today, it will be our freedom. Because God is enough.

We don’t have to do this impossible thing called living faithfully on our own power. Which is good, because we can't. We cannot, by ourselves heal all the ways we have broken our relationship with God, and with the people around us. There isn’t enough human forgiveness to cover up our sins, to heal the broken relationship between ourselves and God. There isn’t enough human forgiveness to heal the broken relationships between and ourselves and one another.

But there is another reality, a reality beyond our limited resources and our world’s continual struggle for a little more. It is the reality that we live within, we who are members of the Body of Christ. We don’t need more, we have everything, because we have God. Or better, God has us. And God is enough. It is God who forgives the whole world, and who enables us to forgive one another seventy times seven.

Jesus’ admonishment of us, that we should be like the slave who works all day in the field, and returns to his master’s house to work all evening is not an affirmation of slavery, or even an encouragement to work ourselves to the bone for the kingdom. Rather it is a reminder that the work we have been given as the people of God is simply what we, who have been given such a grace, must do in joyous response. It is not something to boast of, we are not to labor at impossible feats for our own glory, or compete with one another for the best place as workers for God.

We are, rather, to remember Jesus. Who had enough because of his relationship with, and reliance on God. God, who is enough. God, who in the words of Paul's letter to Timothy today remind us that we are: “relying on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace. This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

The tiny mustard seed of faith that feels so small in our hearts, too small surely to be useful, is all God needs. Because God is enough. The tiny hint of courage burning in us is a raging fire for God. The drop of love on the parched ground of our soul becomes a torrential rain with God. The chink of forgiveness in our hurt is all the space God needs. Because… God is enough.

Do not be afraid, do not wait for “enough” faith, “enough” courage, “enough” love.

Do not be afraid of the impossible task before us. God has already done the impossible, over and over again. God has broken down the rules of this world.

What is left to us, is not to wait for enough, not to wait until the time is right, not to hesitate at all, wondering…

What is left to us is to do, to forgive, and give, and strive. To loose bonds, and hold together communities. To labor for the souls of our friends and family lost in the lies of this world. To share our mustard seed of faith. To give away every scrap of our love, to pour out all our meager strength, to heap forgiveness on our brothers and sisters and to trust that with God it will truly all be enough.

For God has bridged the impossible distance between our broken hearts and our true Home with God. And God’s Spirit is working change in us every moment of our lives, if we but let Her. God is shaping us, daily, hourly, into more Christlike human beings. God is calling us back, again and again to the Kingdom of God. The tiny seed of faith in our hearts is enough, enough for God to grow into a towering tree that will shelter one another, that will give shade and strength and peace to the world. In each of us the seed is sprouting, in each of us it is enough.

Proper 18C: The Potter

2010-09-07T20:42:00.000-05:00

Josephine Robertson
Proper 18, Year C
Jerehmiah 18:1-11, Psalm 139:1-5, 13-17
Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit, Dripping Springs, TX

The wheel stands in the bright morning sunlight, surrounded by clay dust that hangs in the air. The hunk of clay is wet and cool in your hands, as you work it against the stone, slapping and kneading until even the tiniest bubbles of air have been pressed out of the clay. As you work it it warms from the heat of your hands, growing softer and easier to knead. Finally comes the moment to throw it against the center of the wheel. You lean over the smooth surface, and start your feet running on the bigger wheel below. Slowly the wheel starts to spin, creaking as it goes. The first touch of your hands against the clay is a surprise. It is warm, wet from the water you pour over it, and suddenly seems resistant as a rock. It kicks back, tossing your hands away. You try again, leaning in, tensing your arms, pressing against its surface.

This is the part that always look so easy when you watch a master potter at work. But really the clay is hard and stiff, it rubs against your palms, abrasive, as if full of tiny pebbles. Even the slightest loss of center on the spinning wheel sends it slapping wildly and unevenly against your hands, wracking your shoulders. And then it comes apart in a lopsided mess. Time to start over: carefully, carefully. Re-center, restart the spin, cup the clay and begin to pinch. The sides seem to rise on their own, the clay growing and expanding always pressing back against your hands like a living thing.

A young child watching from the doorway might see the smooth easy creation of a new cup or bowl. But Jeremiah sees the aching hands, the hunched shoulders, the reluctant clay, the dance between the potter and what she forms on that spinning wheel. Jeremiah knows the awesome power of the God he serves. Indeed he might have stopped there, in the door to the potters shed and sung the psalm we prayed together today. Because in the steady, patient hands of the potter he saw the God who had searched him out and known him, who had been there through the long journey of his life, who had rested with him in moments of exhaustion, who knew him better than he knew himself.

In the powerful, patient hands of the potter Jeremiah knew a God who is utterly inescapable. Whose presence so pervades our world that the psalmist cried out in an agony of presence: “you press upon me behind and before, and lay your hand upon me!” Like clay, worked on a potters wheel, the presence of God can be so close it overwhelms us. And were the words of the prophet sung by a child peeking in at that potter’s door indeed, we might end there. Groaning under the fear of a God who stamps us into the shape she chooses. But Jeremiah sees more, and if we listen, so do we.

Jeremiah sees that the potter and the clay work together. Try it tomorrow, go down to one of any number of pottery shops in Austin and try to throw a pot. Do it roughly, with little thought for the clay, without feeling, without instinct, without discernment. Every time the clay will kick back your hands, slide off the wheel, or collapse into uselessness. This is not a parable of a God who forces our lives into the shape God desires. This my sisters and brothers is the story of a God who leans into our lives with strong steady hands. Who lifts, and supports and guides as we grow ever up, ever out, ever more beautiful, ever more into a life filled with the beauty of purpose and partnership with the potter’s hands.

We are indeed marvelously made, not because God has punched and prodded and pulled us into an arbitrary shape. But because God invites us to join in our own making. This God from whom nothing is hidden, who knew us before our birth, who sees into the deepest corners of our hearts, who treasures even the parts of our selves from which we hide our faces in fear. God whose eyes saw each part of us as we first began, and who has watched us grow and form ever since. Still being born, with every breath, with ever choice. God who loves each of us, to whom we are so precious she has recorded every molecule of our being in her book.

This God we cannot begin to fathom, whose very thoughts are as beyond our comprehension as the furthest galaxy is from our ability to reach out and touch. That God leans into our lives and catches the crumbling walls of our pot. That God scoops the mess from the wheel, and begins again. That God never gives up hope. Jeremiah saw, and trembled. Through his eyes I see my own life, each of our lives, our life as the Body of Christ, the church and I know the hope that Jeremiah held. That God waits patiently for the resistant clay to warm in God’s hands. That God waits patiently for us to begin to unfold, to look beyond our own narrow lives as the lip of that bowl rises and opens, no longer short and pinched but opening wider and wider to hold more and more. God patiently holds a hand beneath that growing rim, letting it rest against steady fingers.

The throwing, the shaping, it is none of it easy. It was not for ancient Israel, for those who fled from the safe known of servitude in Egypt into the unknown desert where they would be shaped by the potter into a people. It was not easy for the huddled band of disciples listening with wonder and confusion and fear to Mary as she told them of the empty tomb. They would become as they had never been before, and it was not easy. It was not easy for St. Columba, Brigid, Patrick, and more; who found their lives and purpose re-thrown, reshaped around the good news of a loving God.

It is not easy for us. To look within and realize God has lived in the deepest places in our souls, the wildernesses we have feared to tread. God has already been there dear friends, long before our courage grew strong enough to go ourselves. God was there, waiting, to reshape our lives. For many in this world, in this nation, in this place those changes could not have come too soon. We have lost jobs, loved ones, identities, security. We are told over and over again that the world is dangerous, frightening, unsure.

Let us remember Jeremiah, watching the potter work. Let us remember the Psalmist, trembling before the awesome power of a God beyond comprehension. Let us remember God, in Christ, marching peacefully toward his death to show the world a new way of being. The power that lifts mountains, and carves valleys, that ignites stars and speaks light holds our souls in patient hands. Pressing against our unwillingness, our fear, and our pain. We the clay are not passive, not powerless, not at the mercies of this world because God has shown us how thin the lies of it are. Through Jeremiah, though the Psalmist, through the life of Christ. We can see and know that our lives and our world rest not on uncertain economic forecasts, or tottering political systems, not on promotions, or grades, or titles. We rest on the hands of the potter, nudging, supporting, waiting for us to begin to unfurl.

We are invited here at the altar, every week, to begin, or continue, as cocreatorrs in our own remaking. God is inviting us as a church, as a people, and each of as a particular soul to trust that indeed we are being loves being beautifully and wonderfully made. That we are written in the book of life. That we are God’s, and one another’s. Grow, unfurl, rise. Follow those guiding hands with a heart that trembles only awe, never in fear, that we may become unflinching vessels of love and hope for this world.

Patience

2010-08-25T13:24:00.000-05:00

"To learn to live with the unavoidability of the other is to learn to be patient. Such patience comes not just from our inability to have the other do our will; more profoundly, it arises with the love that the presence of the other can and does create in us. Our loves, like our bodies, signal our death. And such love -- if it is not to be fearful of its loss, a very difficult thing - must be patient. Moreover, patience sustains and strengthens love, for it opens to us the time we need to tell our own story with another's story intertwined and to tell it together with that other. So told, the story in fact constitutes our love. (Hauerwas and Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues, 176-177)

It is said that 'God is love.' The phrase rolls off our tongues with the ease of a poet, with the glib assurance that no one is likely to ever ask us what those words might actually mean. God is love, and yet the world is full of pain and hurt. Most of us live our lives feeling isolated, lonely, and disconnected from God (whatever we choose to name her). Might perhaps a better appellation be that God is patience, or God is patient love.

As Hauerwas and Pinches point out it takes more than the first flush of endorphins to make a life of love. It takes patience. The patience to truly grow to know the other (and the Other), to allow the essence of another life to knit itself to ours. It requires the patience to walk old roads again, to tell our stories, and to learn the stories of the other. So that the new stories we create will not be rough graftings, but real tapestries woven together inextricably and beautifully. Patience. To set aside what we desire now for something more to come. Patience. To reign in our need to be known, while we grow to know. Patience. To explore bit by bit the foreignness of another until the fear of otherness lets go.

We have no better model than the God experienced by the Hebrews, a God who waited patiently through outpourings of fevered emotion, and long periods of forgetful wandering. Through betrayal, and carelessness, and sorrow, and repentance. Patient, present, waiting always for that turn back, for the wail of realization that we had wandered away and grown lost in the dark. Patience, not to force God's own will, not to demand love and fidelity, not to compel it. But to wait through each lifetime for the beloved to find Her at last, to turn to Him, to begin to tell our story and knit it at last to Hers. Such patience in the face of such horror.

The story of our love affair with the Divine Other is a story of patience, of a thousand steps forward and ten thousand back. Of patient humble love that waits always on the readiness of the other, loving the other in their fallible broken finitude. But our lives today are about not patience, but immediacy. Our meals are ready in seconds, our highways speed us past the "between spaces," our text messages fly across countries in seconds. Now, now, now, we chant.

Wait patiently upon the Lord, wait patiently upon one another, wait patiently upon your own soul. Wait, and weave, and listen as love weaves her slow tapestry of our lives, patiently.

Ressurection

2010-07-31T19:17:00.000-05:00

Human beings look for the extraordinary, we crave it. We want mountain tops, boiling sunsets, roller coaster thrills, and miracles. So it should come as no surprise that for many of us all the time, and all of us much of the time, resurrection is something that happened long ago or will happen in some nebulous future life. It will come with the end of the world, with angels bearing flaming swords and legions of horsemen, or at least our dramatic hearts secretly hope. And after? Ah, after, well all shall be unchangeable bliss.

Except that isn't how it really works. Ours is a world that runs on resurrection, a Creator and Source so exuberant and overwhelming that the world can't help but spring back to life in each tick between each instant. Every breath another life, every cellular mitosis a new dawn. Miracles, really, hidden within the ordinary by their extravagant frequency.

We are constantly being reborn, given in each moment the promise of another chance to choose to really live. Not to go through the motions until movement stops, but to live present and aware of the gift we are being given. No to grasp for the expected, or perfect, or ultimate, but the present. That gift that so frequently catches us by surprise when some part of us we thought long dead, mortally wounded, or simply expired from neglect, throws out bright green new shoots and glowing sweet smelling flowers. Wounded trust, reborn in a constant and reliable friend; a broken heart turned back toward love; a cerebral life suddenly delighted by the whole world.

And when we realize we are living in the midst of such miracles we begin to live with our hearts wide open, with our fingers curled through those of divinity and that empty tomb ceases to be a memory, or a promise and becomes instead merely a reality.

Of hearts and Eucharistic graces

2010-06-25T14:32:00.001-05:00

The heart is a muscle, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that exercise makes it stronger, though not perhaps in the way you are picturing. I mean the exercise of love, the exercise of that virtue that grows our hearts letting them expand, over and over, until they have overflowed our mere physical being, until they themselves become a grace. To us, and to those around us.

Love begets love, and as it does our capacity for it grows. This is often a secret thing, working on us while we least expect, sneaking up on us while we bend busily over the business of our lives. This is how it should be. But there are moments when I open my eyes and for a brief moment I realize how large love has grown.

The sun poured through the live oak this morning like liquid gold, it simply could not give enough of itself away. It turned every leaf and blade of grass and humming bird and flower into a shining gem. Looking too long at anything might have cut straight through our seeing, burned right through to the core. In the low shade of our tent/chapel, hard up against a cool Western wall we began singing. Just voices, no organ, no piano, nothing but the first instrument ever invented raised, in an act as old as humanity.

And I realized how big my heart had grown, how desperately I loved this place and each person in it, each in their own way. A thousand tastes and varieties of love, glowing as bright as that sun to reveal simply the beauty of each as unique gift. I watched and listened, seeing and hearing graces from the one who loves the gospel so much that her heart and mind have knit together to love it more. Caught up in the prayers of one whose gift is that quiet still center that draws us all in, and lets us let go and be. The quiet gifts, the shouting gifts, those bright as a thousand diamonds and small and precious as a single wave rounded pebble.

This is what it is, to have fallen in love with the one who breathes all things into existence. This is what it is to have fallen in love with all those breaths. Tomorrow it will be dishes to wash, a floor to sweep, and the ordinary will reassert itself again. But there are always moments, when the veil swings back and my heart knows you, Beloved.

Rejoice and Sing

2010-06-02T06:22:00.001-05:00

This is my second sermon for the Preaching Excellence Program, it was written in about two hours with zero resources. Good to know I can still remember a good bit of my Bible classes. It's rough, but enjoy.

Josephine Robertson
Proper 28, Year C (Sunday closest to November 16th)
Isaiah 65:17-25, Luke 21:5-19
PEP Conference

Easter has come and gone, a distant memory now. We are immersed in the business of living, and we are living in a world that does not look much like the promises of Isaiah. Would that it did. Would that those who worked for so many years to achieve the dream of their own home were not now loosing their homes to the lending crisis. Would that those who toiled in the heat of far away factories went home with enough to feed and care for their families. Would that disease and accidents never cut down a young person in the prime of their lives. Would that no one needed to know what it means to be terrified, brutalized, or persecuted.

We are a long way from Easter. We are two thousand years, and 32 weeks from the day a group of grieving women discovered an empty tomb. Their reactions, of mingled joy and terror, were as complex as our current waiting. Even our gospel writers aren’t quite sure, did those women go and tell, or did they run in terror? As our ordinary time draws to a close we live in that same frustrating ambiguity. We have yet to enter the waiting season of Advent, and yet, as Christians we are always waiting; because we live with the tension of Isaiah. We live in this moment, as did the Israelites who heard that great prophet, and the Jews who heard Jesus. We know that our world is broken, that our lives are not what God intended. And we know, with that desperate hope of all who follow the Living God, that things are changing.

You have heard me before speak of the already, and not yet, that is our Christian lives. It seems that the season of Pentecost has become the age of Pentecost. Years fade into years and this tired world continues to turn the same way it has since Isaiah came to his people rebuking, and comforting. Years fade into centuries since Jesus walked in the shade of the Temple and predicted its destruction, even as he promised that God was building something new. Prophets can be maddening.

Because God’s ways are never our ways. We want prophets to be Greek oracles, foretelling the future in a very concrete way. And in a way, they do. In a way Isaiah, and Jesus are telling us exactly what is to happen, exactly what God has planned. But not the way we expect. Rather what God is birthing into creation is something so counter to the world we have built with human hands that its birth will change everything. It’s birth will make it impossible to even remember the old ways. This is God’s steadfast promise. What God offers us is not what we expect. Not a Greek oracle, but a promise of a whole new way of being, a promise of a chance to participate, with God in that new reality.

Not just in the world to come, where justice at last reigns, but in this long painful birthing in which we stand as witnesses against the powers of this world. In which we stand with God, and God with us. Pentecost goes on and on, as each new generation is grafted into the Body of Christ, as each new generation comes to know that they are the beloved people of God. As members of that body we become the chosen people of God. But we must never forget that to be chosen is to bear a great responsibility. For we are Christ to this world, we are called to help birth the Kingdom that Isaiah and Jesus proclaimed.

As the great prophet says today, we are called to become those who strive for real justice, for that is what delights God’s heart. We are called to ensure that all who build and plant will benefit from their efforts. We are called to work for justice, real justice, not simply “lawfulness,” and to do it before a single mouth has been opened in protest, to act while the oppressed are still sunk in voiceless silence.

We are to rejoice and be glad forever, because we are called to be part of the birthing of a new creation. We are called to rejoice that we live in the already and not yet. To rejoice that we have a God of such extravagant promise who will not go on without us, who will gather us in patiently. Be glad and rejoice forever that we live in the promise of a steadfast God who knows what such steadfast love will cost, for God in Christ paid the price first.

If we have our eyes fixed on the promises of God, we will indeed begin to ask questions this world would rather not ask, we will begin to act in ways the world finds threatening. We will ask, why is this mother homeless? Why does her child go without bread in the morning? And just as Jesus was rejected and killed for his Kingdom acts we may be as well. Every year new martyrs for the kingdom are killed because of the name of Jesus. And yet, Isaiah and Jesus promise us, that not a hair on their heads has perished.

Sing, laugh, shout hosannas, and be glad forever. For God is doing a new thing. God is birthing a new creation through the Body of Christ, through the steadfast promises of the Covenant. Rejoice and be glad. For already we cannot remember the world that was, the world before God had walked the roads of Palestine, and fed us with his own hands, and paid the world’s price for newness. Rejoice and be glad. Come to the altar, see the broken body of Christ. Come to the altar, taste the sweet wine and the warm rich bread. Taste, see, and rejoice that we are the Body of Christ no longer broken. We are God’s promise to this angry, frightened, lonely, desperate world. We are Christ, and we know the goodness of God, and we will go on making Pentecost.

Preaching Jesus

2010-05-29T19:52:00.000-05:00

I will be spending the next week in Philadelphia at the Preaching Excellence Program. We were given homework before we even arrived, namely to write a sermon following the week's theme, that we would present to our small groups. The theme this year? "Preaching Jesus" This sermon is far more of a stretch than I would normally preach in a parish, but to a bunch of homeliticians, well I'd be silly to pass up the chance to really experiment.

This sermon was written in narrative verse. Unfortunately the lines wrap oddly on the blog, I apologize, it makes the poetry a little harder to follow, but hopefully it still works!

Luke 12:49-56
Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided:
father against son
and son against father,
mother against daughter
and daughter against mother,
mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, `It is going to rain'; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?"

Josephine Robertson
Proper 15, Year C (Sunday closest to August 17th)
Luke 12:49-56
PEP Conference

A man from Galilee, walking dusty roads, talking until he's hoarse.
I see him, begging a little water from a strange woman, and want to capture him
turn even that human thirst into a lesson, but if I even think about it
up he looks, eyes bright sparks burning with something you and I better never see face to face.
I can't gaze too long or I am sure I'll fall in to that fire.
So I go out into the darkness, calling,
out into the wilderness where the coyotes howl and the wind pushes at my back, still calling.
"Jesus! Jesus!" The wind answers rich with the smell of rain. I stumble, stop,
look up at the thunder clouds piling high above me, lit by licking tongues of flame.
I find him there, lit by lightening, sitting in the dust, waiting.
And I beg him to come with me, back to the light of civilization,
back to the pew, the living room, even the bar. I can
bring him back safe and familiar and tame. I can picture the scene, me at his feet,
and the rain beating down on the roof over head, cozy and safe where I could just listen
and worship, and be. He laughs, head thrown back, the fire in his eyes
lighting the dark horizon.
And I know, he sees my desire as the heavens open
and the rain comes down, hard enough to send me to my knees
wreathed in lightening.
He speaks with the voice of the thunder. “Why are you chasing clouds?”
I cry back, into the wind “I came looking for you, I have always been looking for you!”
“Why are you chasing clouds?” He calls again, and I cannot look away.
And still I do not want to understand.
He holds out his hands, filled with rain, cold and clear,
suddenly I am so thirsty I fear I will die,
and he asks me again, gently, with a voice like the rain.
“Why are you chasing clouds?
When this is what you need?”
And I cry, with all my heart, the right words: “I love you!”
“Follow me.” His words crack like the voice of a flood. If I but dare,
to do the hard thing, the hard thing he asks. I am lost suddenly
in that fresh sweet water, full of it, alive in it. And I know.
That he is going,
the dusty man from Galilee, but the rain still falls. “Follow me” he calls, going
between the drops and they turn to fire around him. In each I hear, with each step I know:
it is the water of life, not the clouds that soak the parched ground.
The wind is shifting. He walks on, under clouds driven
by the South wind building against my face,
I feel the heat that it brings and know it is the heat that warms the grain, that swells the grapes,
while I have been chasing the wind. He holds out empty hands to the rain.
“It is not me the world needs now, sister, I am just one.” Speaks
the voice of the shepherd, “it what I share, what you will share because of what you've found.”
Remembering, bread that filled my belly by the shores of a lake, bread shared
with a host who ceased to be strangers.
I looked down at myself, washed clean by that pure bright water,
warmed by the South wind’s furnace. “I love you,”
he never stops walking, beneath clouds that grow dark as moonless midnight
through hot dry wind that sucks me dry and steals my breath. “Then follow.”
No words then, for I understand the whisperings in the dark outside
the fire that kindles at each his word: I see now that we do not walk alone.
In the moment I look away, he is gone and there is only darkness.
“Good teacher!” I cry into the wind,
and a thousand voices echo my cry as the thunder rolls.
Now I seek, my taste of bread and water forgotten, desperate for
a glimpse, a word, a smile until I want to cry,
seeking through the crowd for those burning eyes,
that dusty face, wanting even his judgment.
At last I stumble in the dark, calling still “Good teacher!”
She lifts her head, a woman whose eyes burn the the same fire as his, she whispers:
"Only God is good."1 The dark wavers, a sparks leaps between us,
and I understand. I press the last of my bread into her hungry child’s hands,
and the flame leaps, multiplies. We walk together, gathering,
forgetting to chase, looking only for the next face, the next huddled form
and in each eye the flame kindles, with each breath it burns brighter,
at each touch it leaps hand to hand, and the dark falls back as the bright rain comes down
like fire, wreathing the head of nursing babies, crowning the hair of a strong young man,
illuminating the gentle hands that lift a stumbler.
And the fire spreads, burning in our eyes, on our tongues, falling all around us
blazing beneath the clouds we have ceased to chase. Calling instead
the name of the man from Galilee, it is their name, our name, my name, your name,
it holds no power anymore but what we give it, spreading the flame hand to hand,
in each crumb of bread, and sip of wine from chaliced hands. The clouds are clearing
but the rain still falls and I am standing before an empty tomb,
watching this great crowd, his disciples, breaking bread and crying out his name as they go.
But we are not chasing after the parting clouds,
and our feet leave trails of fire on the path.

To Ride Pegasus

2010-05-16T19:43:00.000-05:00

Pegasus gave Bellerophon wings.

Horses have given us the ability to chase the wind since the first person dared to sit on a wild pony's back, grab mane, and hold on. For those of us who have been given the privilege of riding these amazing beasts the mystique has never waned. Even a simple cow pony: brown and white and plain headed, becomes Pegasus as she drops her head, lifts her back, and responds with power and speed beyond human imagining to the almost invisible request of her rider.

It has been two years since I rode the edge of the wind. Two years with my feet planted firmly on mother earth, my speed what my own two feet could manage. (A vehicle does not count, it is not the same, trust me.) At long last, because of the generosity of a wonderful new friend, I mounted Pegasus again. It had been two years though, and I was no longer Bellerophon, no longer ready to leap without thinking onto a great white back, and soar.

So my steed instead was a rather sensible, handsome, and decidedly sweet, thoroughbred named Happy. A red headed gelding who considered me uncertainly, his own past such that he did not trust instantly. And this is where we come to the heart of what it means to ride Pegasus, trust. Not your mount, though that is a gift when it happens, but yourself. It was that trust in my own self, in my core of intention, will, and act, that kept me from eagerly claiming the great grey mount first offered. She was beautiful, proud, obviously opinionated, and talented. And I was unsure, not of her, but of myself.

Pegasus, white wings spread against the sky, powerful muscles straining, eyes flashing, is not nearly so powerful as he might seem. Horses are herd animals, they look instinctively for a leader, and if they do not find one they will take that place. If you are riding Pegasus, no matter what shape he may take, you must be Belleraphon, you must be his leader. For that you must trust yourself, or he will never trust you.

It was a lesson I learned long ago with Image, whose fear, spooking, and resistance gradually gave way not because I forced her to obey; but because I earned her trust. As I learned to trust myself, she learned to trust me, and slowly we learned to fly. Yesterday, red haired Happy asked me the same question as I brushed the mud from his coat. Can I trust you? Will you protect me when the wolves come? Will you find the way home? Will you be my Bellerophon and tame me, not with a golden bridle, but with soft confident hands and a seat that tells me what you are thinking?

It is perhaps the greatest gift Pegasus gives us, the way she truly teaches us to fly. For this powerful creature submits, willingly, if only we will trust ourselves and allow her to trust us in turn. It is the journey of a lifetime, and I am relieved to be once again in the company of Pegasus. Thank you Happy and (soon I hope) Bonnie, and Sue, who shares her wings.

Book Review: The Sparrow

2010-05-08T17:25:00.000-05:00

The semester is ended, and I have promised myself that this summer I will read whatever I like. The first book my hands fell on as this week offered a few moments of free time was a piece of fiction given to me by a friend who was cleaning out his bookshelves. I had not paid much attention to what it was at the time, figuring that by the end of the semester any fiction at all would be welcome.

That book was The Sparrow. Strangely, and appropriately, I began knowing nothing about the book. I didn't even glance at the back cover for the advertising synopsis. How appropriate then, that Mary Doria Russell keeps her readers similarly in the dark. The story unfold slowly, weaving backward and forward through time, the narrative crawling, then walking, then rushing headlong toward a precipice over which we might find...

But that would be getting ahead of myself. This is science fiction at its best. A story that takes us to the furthest reaches of space, into alien worlds, and deep into the depths of the human soul. It is not always a comfortable ride. Details are frustratingly sparse at the beginning, and the characters reveal themselves as human only slowly, tentatively, hesitantly.

While the plot follows an exploration team making first contact with an alien race, the real story plays out in the shattered soul left with only the questions of Job.

Once the action picked up and the details of the story began to unfold, a bit like a flower whose sent proceeds the unfurling of its petals, it became almost impossible to stop reading. The need to know, to see the thing through the end was too great. But of course "the end" isn't really, in life, or in a good book. From ethics, to theology, to politics, culture, and government, little is left untilled for Russell's characters, or the readers own late night musings.

In the end one is left with the overwhelming impression that to be loved, and to love, God, is a fearsome thing.

Experience

2010-04-22T19:05:00.000-05:00

Our chapel is a bit of an ugly duckling. Many look at it as a sad remnant of the sixties or seventies, a worn out old symbol of "modernism" that has had its day and should gracefully shuffle off. There are rumblings every year about bulldozing it and putting up a "proper" chapel.

I have never been among the "knock it down" crowd. I fell in love with the chapel the first time I saw her. The first time I walked through those doors, sang the first hymn, prayed for the first time, I was in love. There was never any question I would go anywhere else. But for all that even I frequently love her the way a mother loves her awkward, gangly, homely daughter.

After all, there isn't a right angle in the room. There is no way to center an aisle, to have a "traditional" church setup. The room is stark, all stone, and steel and plain glass. The lighting is poor, everything about the space is just odd.

Today we truly experimented. We removed all the chairs, stood, sat on the floor, and moved together. We processed in behind the cross, the whole congregation into a big empty chapel. We sat in the middle of the chapel on the red tile floor gathered around the ambo and preacher like a flock of chicks. We processed behind our offering of bread and wine to the altar. And we all stood together facing East out the great glass windows to the outdoor cross as we prayed the Eucharist. As we did I felt like I had met my chapel for the first time, and she is not ugly, or a duckling at all.

The architect was not crazy, he just did not care to build a little gothic church. And that is how we have been using her, cramming chairs in as if they were pews, forcing straight lines on a creature where no two angles are the same. Imposing order where she wants movement. This place, built as a great stone tent works when we move, when the shape we take is organic and natural. She simply will not allow us to be comfortable, settled, "normal."

But when giggling children can play with their parents shoes, or slap across the floor in bare feet through clustered bodies, I can see the beauty of this little place. When we can turn about whichever way to follow the movement and flow of the liturgy, I feel the beauty. When we sing, and our voices, unencumbered by wood and cloth, fill the space like a heartbeat in a tomb I feel the vibration of holiness down into my bones.

It makes me wonder, curled up on the soft carpet under the altar, the space still open and echoing, how many places, people, how many parts of ourselves we cram into a form they were never meant to wear, and then wonder when we call them ugly.

Cracks

2010-04-21T13:58:00.002-05:00

Perfection reveals the lie of things,
the bloom that will not fade, and the egg
that will never crack across its pure white
shell to reveal a shivering, exhausted chick.
Yet we are so afraid, of the flaws
that make us real, alive, powerful.
The Lover sees down into a soul laid bare,
and loves the cracked pot there in fading
autumn light. Frosted with winters spent
with collars pulled tight against the cold,
lined with all the moments, when life cracked
and we could only weep or laugh, and we chose
laughter. Love is born, out of the cracks
in perfection when two imperfect sets of eyes
meet and see in the other, truth and something
more, a perfection carried deep within
this paper thin shell, waiting for the final thrust
and crack through which will pour a yolk
of Glory, absurd and exquisite and impossible
without that breaking, in which I fall
desperately in love with You.

(Read Write Poem Prompt #21)

Eucharist should not be comfortable

2010-04-12T15:45:00.002-05:00

Eucharist is rarely an uncomfortable affair. In Christ chapel even less so, since instead of stale white wafers we tuck into loaves of home made bread. Today I knelt on the warm, honey colored carpet, chewing my bite of bread. I had not come to that moment exactly prepared. I had spent all morning fighting with insurance companies, care rental agencies, bureaucracy, and my own impatient nature. I had arrived at chapel late, and still frazzled and annoyed from the morning's unexpectedly long and complicated chore.

I chewed distractedly, far more aware of my empty stomach and the great desire to sit quietly for awhile with my eyes closed taking deep breaths, and a greater desire to not have class in a few minutes. The chalice bearers stopped in front of my neighbor and I, and the curly haired, bare footed senior handed me the chalice and whispered "finish it." Since I had arrived late I was it, the tail, the end. I glanced down into the chalice at the little well of dark red wine and, without thinking, tilted it back and swallowed.

Distraction ended instantly, as the heavy fortified port burned its way down my throat in a flood. I walked back to my seat, acutely aware of the fire burning its way toward my belly, of gentle heat radiating out through my chest, my shoulders, my limbs.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, in that simple efficient act I was forced to be fully present. I was reminded of the first time I knelt in that chapel, the first time I took the bread and wine at that altar. Then a very different person, a refuge from all the hurt and violence we as church can do to each other, felt her heart break open with a crack so loud surely her neighbors heard it.

This time there was only warm fire, only a divine hand taking hold of that now well worn-in, distracted heart and breathing fire. Would that Eucharist would never grow less painful.

Sermon: Mary's Witness

2010-03-29T14:50:00.000-05:00

Preached this morning in Christ Chapel, quite an honor for me.

Josephine Robertson
Monday of Holy Week, Year C
John 12:1-12
Christ Chapel, SSW

The wonder worker from Galilee turns his face toward Jerusalem. The clouds are gathering, the time is coming, the passover draws near. There is no stopping it now. Since the day Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, death has been stalking him, as if to snatch life for life. The men eating with him today look nervous. They talk too loudly, promise too boldly. Mary knows, watching them, that they will run, all of those huddled around this table with him. They will promise to fight, they will deny their own fear. But in the end they will flee. They will save their own lives for another hour.

Mary has no strong words, no promises of loyalty to the end. She has no sword or shield to protect and destroy. She has no power to delay what is coming. She has only a heart set on fire by this strange rabbi who opened her brother’s tomb, and opened her eyes, and opened her heart. And so she feeds him and all who came with him. Those who will betray him, those who will abandon him, those who will forget her as soon as they have swallowed the last of her good food, and drunk the last of her wine, and perhaps those who will remember and give as well, waiting at the foot of the cross.

She, more than any of them knows the pain that is coming. She has tasted the myrrh-bitter loss. She knows well the sorrow and tragedy of Jesus’ absence, Lord if you had been here... She sees his future, but she does not protest. Instead she witnesses to the overflowing love of God, to the abundance Jesus has brought into her life, to the love that binds her to him as friend, as sister. She will not wait until his eyes have closed, she knows the futility of holding a gift for the dead. She becomes disciple, and apostle, and rabbi. Kneeling on the floor in that close hot room, the meal’s hostess takes the place of a servant to serve the one who came to serve her. She pours the precious scent of love over feet that have known miles of hard dusty roads – over feet that will know the pain of nails and torture before the week has ended.

She overwhelms their conversation, their fear, their blindness, with the scent of joy and gladness. As she wipes away the oil with her hair its scent clings to her, it will follow her for days to come. It will be with her when the news comes, the horrible news that she already knew. And it will be with her when the second messenger arrives, fear and wonder written on his face. These men who laugh too loudly tonight cannot see. Judas speaks for all the hearts that cling to the narrow practicality, and propriety of a fallen world. Mary witnesses for her God, who knows no such bounds, who is extravagant gift.

I want to be Mary, not necessarily a prophet,
but a woman who listened to the stirring,
and saw what was needful on that night. 
I want to be Mary, not sitting anymore, listening 
not thinking, just doing, breathing the intoxicating
 perfume of love, massaging it into 
the feet, the legs, the hands, the arms 
caressing the sun burned neck, the wind chapped 
cheeks. I want to be Mary, blind to a room 
full of faces; deaf to a world full of whispers.
 I want to be Mary, heart so full it breaks
 and pours forth love as perfume without fear, 
without shame, without restraint. 
I want to be Mary, alone for that one brief moment 
in a crowded room drunk on the fragrance 
of adoration, freed by the intoxicating 
power of it. I want to be Mary, looking up 
as she massages tired feet with miles yet to go, 
and see that beloved face ease; the care go 
for a moment. I want to love so freely, 
give so tenderly, to pillage the larder of my soul; 
I want to be Mary.

Disciple, apostle, teacher: not with words that can be ignored, or forgotten, but with the scent of her perfume that is her Gospel. It proclaims freedom to all those who lie trapped, prisoners held ransom by death. It promises light in the dark places of our hearts, sweetness where lies only bitter myrrh, sight for the blind, a song of joy for the stopped tongue, overflowing baskets of bread for the hungry, a hundred gallons of wine for those who thirst. As we race toward the cross, helpless to stop what is coming the sweet triumphant scent of nard goes before us. It declares to all who will stop, and breathe, that God is acting. God is doing a new thing, the wonder worker from Galilee is anointed King on his way to die, servant on his way to reign. She pours out blessings and truth in a room full of the blind and deaf, can you smell it?

Breathe deep, let the new thing God is doing fill you, let it wash away the fear, the weariness, the pride, the certainty. See what is coming, see it and tremble, and choose to pour out your own heart. Choose to stoop and mingle the scent of blessing into your being. Pour out the oil of gladness, that the blind may see, that the deaf may hear, that the mute may shout: God is doing a new thing.