Whispers in the Wind

Tears ... An All Saints' Day Meditation

2015-11-02T17:51:00.002-05:00

Reflections on Psalm 56:8, John 11:32-44, Isaiah 25:6-9, Revelation 21:1-6a,

"You kept count of my tossing;

put my tears in your bottle.

Are they not in your record?"

Psalm 56:8

Recently, I officiated a funeral at an area funeral home and I noticed on my way into the room where the deceased was laid out in an open casket that there was a framed poem set up on a table clearly noticeable to those arriving to pay their respects. It was placed there, I assume, by the funeral home.

The poem may be familiar to you. It may even be special or meaningful to you. It begins … DO NOT CRY. And then it goes on to speak in the voice of the deceased, urging loved ones not to cry, because though he or she may be absent in body, they are present in spirit always. When I noticed the poem on my way in to officiate the service, I thought what a load of crap. I apologize it this poem speaks to you. I am not denying the truth that those we love remain close to us in memory and perhaps even in spirit, but DO NOT CRY … seriously?

Tears are sacred. They are in some way both human and holy. Tears shed at the loss of a loved one are a tangible sign of inexplicable grief, loss, and love. They speak when words fail. Tears come in our darkest moments and as result of our greatest joys. We cry when we are hurt, and we cry when joy overwhelms us. We cry when we are moved … deeply moved. Our tears connect us to the pain of others when we feel their hurt in a shared moment of common humanity. Our tears are our truth. They are vulnerable and honest … and we should not stop them from coming.

How many of you have read or watched the Harry Potter series? There is a scene in the very last movie where Professor Snape, a character who throughout the series has been dark and suspicious, who lurks the halls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with a scowl permanently attached to his face. He has, for all of Harry’s seven years at Hogwarts, been hard on Harry. At times it seems sure that he is part of the villain Voldermort’s plan to rule the wizarding world and destroy Harry. But in the last book it is Snape who is destroyed by Voldermort. I will not go into all the details. But there is a moment, as Snape is dying, when Harry Potter and his friends stumble a upon him, where he motions to Harry and forces out the these last words … “Take them.” … as he points to his own tears.

Harry looks to his friend Hermione for something to collect Snape’s tears, and of course she produces a small empty bottle from her pint-sized purse, a purse that could give Mary Poppin’s bag a run for its money. Harry collects Snape’s tears as he takes his last breath. Harry then takes the bottle with the tears to a large magic bowl found inside Dumbledore’s office. Harry empties the bottle containing the tears into the bowl, a bowl which already contains some sort of magical steaming concoction. Then Harry plunges his face into the bowl, and there Harry sees, and so do we, the story behind Snape’s tears. We learn Snape’s truth from those tears, a truth that changes everything we thought we knew about Snape. (And that’s all I am going to tell you, so read the book or watch the movie!)

There is something so very true, and very biblical about this scene. JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series out of her own grief at the loss of her mother. Harry, the orphaned boy who lost his parents as an infant, is faced throughout the series with the challenge of dealing with grief, and so, it turns out, is Snape. We learn this from his tears.

Our tears are our truth. They tell our story ... and they are sacred. And yet we encourage each other … DO NOT CRY. We are encouraged to hide our tears, or to hold them back. Especially prone to this nonsense are young boys and adult men. We have made crying a sign of weakness, when in fact it is the most raw and purest form of courage, the courage to share our deepest truth.

Jesus wept, in today’s lesson. He cried. Unashamed, he cried at the loss of his friend, Lazarus. He cried in the company of Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who also wept. He cried in the company of other mourners, who mourned with tear-streaked faces. Jesus did not hold back or hide his tears or his truth.

According to the psalmist, God keeps track of our tossings. I love the language of that. God is aware, intentionally aware, of our struggles, and we are told God collects our tears in a bottle. The psalmist then goes on to ask “are they (our tears) not in your record?” and we are to understand that the implied answer is of course, YES. Our stories, our truths are recorded. God acknowledges our tears and collects our stories … not for judgment sake, but out of love, respect and honor. Our losses, our pains, our struggles matter to God.

And yet they are NOT the end of our story. That is the lesson found in our readings from Isaiah and Revelation. There is reason to hope. God is aware. And in some divine, cosmic plan that is just beyond our reach, our sufferings are but a means to the end of eternal glory. God is working beauty from tragedy, good from evil, light from dark, life from death. And so we have been told that God will "swallow up death forever" and wipe away the tears from our eyes. That God will make her divine home with us, and among us, and “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things (will) have passed away."

Like Lazarus coming out of the tomb after four days of death and decay, we will shake off all the hurt and pain, confusion and death that has wrapped round us in this life, and the only tears that will be shed will be tears of joy.

Recently my family has been involved with an organization called Project ALS. My spouse, Laura, lost her brother three years ago to the disease. Tom lived thirteen years with ALS … losing the ability to walk, talk, eat and breath on his own. Eventually the muscle, which was his heart, gave out and he died in the early hours of the day Katy, Laura’s daughter, was to graduate from high school. As strange as it might sound, given that Tom had been sick for all those years and was completely paralyzed by ALS, we didn’t see his death coming. There was no indicator that it was immanent.

Recently, Laura has been working with Project ALS to raise awareness about the disease and to raise funds to further research for a cure. She had been working with the students at Watchung Hills Regional High where she teaches English. Her involvement has stirred up memories of Tom’s passing. A couple of week’s ago I heard her mother share a piece of the story of which I was unaware.

Tom lived with his parents for the duration of his battle with ALS. For most of that time he required round the clock nursing care. On the night that he passed, Sally, his mother, came into say goodnight, as she always did. Tom had long ago lost the ability to speak, but he could communicate through a letter board, which required spelling words by fixing his gaze on letters, one at a time. At that point even eye movement was becoming difficult. It was a painfully slow process for Tom to communicate. That night he spelled CD number 6, track 10. Sally knew what he wanted. He wanted to hear a song as he went to sleep. That night the song was Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven.

Eric Clapton wrote the song as he was grieving the loss of his own four-year-old son from a tragic accident. The song asks the questions we all have about what reunion in heaven will be like … Will you know my name? Will you hold my hand when I see you in heaven? the song recognizes how hard life and loss can be … Time can bring down. Time can bend your knees. Time can break your heart, have you begging please, begging please. But in the end Clapton knows there is reason to hope … beyond the door, he sings, there's peace I'm sure. And I know there'll be no more tears in heaven.

It was, was a pretty interesting pick for your last song before crossing the threshold from life to death and beyond. Tom died that night in his sleep.

There were lots of tears shed throughout Tom’s illness, from the moment he was diagnosed through every loss of muscle function. And when he passed at age 44 there where plenty of tears shed by family, friends and the community of nurses who cared for him. Those tears told many stories. They expressed sadness, grief, anger and frustration. They were, each and every one of them honest, because they came from the heart of those who shed them. And they were not wasted. I believe that God still has them … in bottle or bowl, perhaps cupped in divine hands. God has recorded them … committed them to memory, so that one day, in some way that is beyond my ability to fully imagine or anticipate, God will give those tears their do. God will dry them, healing the hurt, easing the suffering, answering our questions, drawing together with those we have lost in grand reunion. Oh what a day!

But for now, in the present, we ought not to hold back our tears. No need to feel ashamed or in some sense weakened by them. They are our truth. They tell our story. And not a single one is lost to God. We have not been forsaken, or forgotten, or ignored. Our stories are far from over, our losses are not forever, our hurts temporary, our questions will be answered, our fears relieved. There is a time and plan in place for all of that … for the bible tells us so. So take courage. Move forward. Live fully. Love deeply. Allow yourself to be moved ... even to tears.

Amen.

*It is not only our tears God collects, yours and mine, it is also the tears of refugees and immigrants, victims of poverty, injustice and terrorism, the lost and the lonely, angry and the sad, the confused and the self-righteous. God collects the tears all people. Their stories matter as much as ours.

We Don't Know What We Are Doing

2015-04-03T22:14:00.001-04:00

Reflections on Luke 23:34

Then Jesus said, “Father forgive them;

for they do not know what they are doing.”

There are occasionally moments in life that transcend time. Moments when the boundaries of past, present and future melt away and all that was and all that is and all that will be, come together on equal footing, without the advantage of hindsight or the excuse of ignorance. In those moments, even if only for a moment, truth is revealed. The truths that these events reveal are often of the bittersweet variety. The type of truth that strips humanity of pretense as if everything we have spent our lives hiding and denying has been laid bare for all to see. These moments are deeply personal and yet fully communal for the truths that they reveal speak to every human heart and every human community.

The cross is such a moment.

It doesn’t matter the year or the place, the culture or the creed, Good Friday takes us to a place, to a moment when time, as we understand it, is put on hold … suspended … transcended. The cross takes us to a time when ultimate goodness is brutally executed by the misguided good intentions of every human heart … yours, mine, theirs.

When Jesus speaks these words from the cross they hang in the air over every generation. It is as if Jesus, in the midst of unthinkable personal suffering, sees all of history, past, present and future laid out before him and speaks words of mercy and of judgment.

“Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

Isn’t that the God-awful truth that we all long to deny … we don’t know what we are doing.

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There is a powerful scene in a movie that was released in the 1992 entitled, The Power of One. It is the story of a white English boy growing up in South Africa during WWII. It is a long and complex story, far too complex for me to recount. But there is a scene midway through the movie that takes place in a South African prison camp. There native blacks, African men of various tribes, all prisoners are brought together to perform a concert for a visiting British official. It is to be an impressive display of the jail master’s ability to tame the so-called savages, the oppressor lording over the oppressed. It is a scene that that has been played out over and over again over the course of human history every time one person or one group seeks to dominate another.

In this scene the concert is conducted by the young English boy who is moved with compassion for the plight of these native African prisoners, men who have been treated like animals … beaten … spat upon … starved … ridiculed … tortured emotionally and physically. The young boy, inspired by the observation of one of the prisoners, a man by the name of Geel Pete, uses his words as the lyric to a song to be performed, a song sung in their native language. It is a song that cuts to the heart of the awful truth about their captors.

They run this way. They run that way. They are confused. They are afraid. They are cowards.

It is a simple lyric, sung as a round. The South African harmonies of men’s voices rise from the bare ground on which they sit, huddled under torn woolen blankets, enclosed behind barbed wire fences, with the guns of Afrikaner guards pointed at them. They run this way. They run that way. They are confused. They are afraid. They are cowards. It is beautiful. It is awful. It is true. But the truth of their words is lost on an audience that refuses to hear. An audience who in fact cannot hear a language their do not understand, a language they never deemed worthy of study or acknowledgment, a language of savages. And even as the music fills the night air, the truth of its message is being lived out just yards away as in the shadows a prison guard beats Geel Pete to death.

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We do not know what we are doing. We run this way. We run that way. We are confused. We are afraid. We are cowards.

We say we want peace … so we start wars. We do not know what we are doing.

We say that money isn’t everything, but then we pour our energy in to the making and squandering of more and more money. We do not know what we are doing.

We long to be loved, but we keep all those closest to us at a distance. We do not know what we are doing.

We break our promises and blame others for our failings. We do not know what we are doing.

We condemn what we fear and hate what we do not understand. We do not know what we are doing.

We seek to major in the minors, holding on to petty grievances and neglect the major joys and blessings that hold us together as the human family. We do not know what we are doing.

We chase after what we have yet to attain and we ignore what we already posses. We do not know what we are doing.

Jesus’ first words from the cross reach far beyond a hillside outside of Jerusalem. They reach back to the Garden of Eden when Eve and then Adam reached for equality with God. Jesus’ words extend forward to slavery in the United States and apartheid in South Africa, to the Jewish Holocaust, and modern-day fanatical terrorism both religious and otherwise. At the same time Jesus’ words reach out to grade school classrooms where one student, singled out by his classmates, is teased and bullied without mercy, and to American college campuses where rapists return to class and victims are shamed. Jesus words’ reach out to our nation’s invisible poor and those whose who refuse to see them, and to victims of racism and those infected by its hatred. Jesus’ words condemn American Christianity and its obsession with who we can and who we can't love. Jesus’ words expose all our frantic and misguided attempts to claim purity and orthodoxy while sitting in judgment of our Christian brothers and sisters who are seeking more truth and more light. Jesus looks at the whole of human history, start to finish, and sees us as truly are. He sees us as we run this way and that way. He sees us in our confusion. He sees the fear that motivates us. He sees that we are cowards. And he passes this judgment … “they do not know what they are doing.”

What is to be the sentence for our crime? An eye for an eye? A taste of our own medicine? A turning of the tables. No.

“Father forgive them.”

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There are occasionally in life moments that transcend time. In those moments, even if only for a moment, truth is revealed. The cross is such a time. And the truth is that in that moment and in its memory we stand exposed. The truth is that in that moment and in its memory we stand forgiven.

The Hornet's Nest

2014-04-16T06:59:00.000-04:00

A sermon delivered at the Bound Brook Presbyterian Church

Palm Sunday, April 13, 2014

When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil,

asking, ‘Who is this?’ The crowds were saying,

‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.’

Matthew 21:11

It is that time in the annual life of the church when we slow way down and focus in on one week of biblical time … looking at one extended story. We examine it every year, over and over again, from every angle, every character, because it gets our attention. It is like an accident on the highway. Everyone who drives by slows way down to get a good look. We are biblical rubberneckers this week as we walk with Jesus into Jerusalem, through the crowded streets, swollen with the frenzy of Passover preparations. We are rubberneckers when we follow the story to the steps of the Temple, and to the table in the upper room, to the Garden of Gethsemane and courts of the Chief Priest, to the residence of Pilate and to a hill called Calvary where were can’t take our eyes of the man, Jesus, dying on a cross.

This story still gets our attention. We can’t help it. We are attracted to uncommon acts of bravery, courage, self-sacrifice … in the face of injustice or violence or both. When tragedy happens especially in the face of the struggle for righteousness … goodness … the pursuit of justice, we take notice. We want to know more, more about those who have denied fear and chosen to take a stand, or take a bullet, or risk their lives to save a life. We are attracted to that stuff. We want to know what they were thinking, how they made their decisions and managed their fear.

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In 1950’s a twentysome year-old Martin Luther King Jr. took his first church in Montgomery, Alabama. He chose that church because he wanted a quiet little church where he could finish his doctorate. As soon as he finished writing his dissertation and had sent it in, Rosa Parks took her seat in the front of a Montgomery city bus and suddenly King became the pastoral voice of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a protest which lasted over a year. The response to the boycott, as you well know was not a good one. It had stirred up a hornet’s nest. One night, at home, he received a phone call … “We’re tired of your mess,” the caller said, “and if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow up your house and blow your brains out.”

King was not just a pastor at that time, he was also a husband and father to an infant daughter. That phone call shook him. He stayed up late at night and prayed and wrestled with what he should do next. That could have been the end of his civil rights work. He was considering packing it up and leaving town to keep his family safe. But as he tells it in a sermon, he heard another message that night … a divine message … audible or internal, I don’t know, … but he heard the message loud and clear … “Stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice.” In that moment he had a clear sense that God was with him and he would not be frightened out of what was right. He would not be run out of his home. Three days later his home was bombed, the debris just barely missing his sleeping infant daughter.

That is another story we can’t stop looking at, the courage and bravery of all of those who risked, and some who lost their own lives, to take a stand for racial equality … for civil rights. We want to know where that courage came from … we want to know about the prayers said, and the voices heard, because we are asking ourselves every time a story like this is told … WHAT WOULD WE DO? Would we dare to sit in the front of that bus, or stay in our home under the threat of a group of violent bullies? Would we still speak out, or would we pack it up and head out of town?

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I was talking to a group not too long ago about Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and the question was asked, why did he go there? Why celebrate Passover in Jerusalem if he knew how dangerous it was, what a hornet’s nests it was? Matthew’s gospel says, “…the whole city was in turmoil.” Why did he take that risk? Surely there were plenty of other people in other places who could have benefited from his healing touch, or profited from his teaching or storytelling about loving thy neighbor and the Kingdom of God. And if the gospels are to be believed, it appears that Jesus knew what awaited him in Jerusalem … so why did he go? How did he decide? How did he manage the fear of the consequences?

You have to know as the story unfolds that not only does Jesus know how dangerous the situation is, he behaves in a way that eggs it on. He knows that riding into town on a donkey is going to stir things up. He is mocking Pilate and the power structure of Rome, and that will get you the kind of attention that will lead you to a cross … yet he does it any way. Why? And of course we are asking in part because we know that in his action our inclinations are being judged. We look at Jesus and we see our own fear.

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I was watching a TED talk the other day online. TED TALKS are presentations by variety of speakers on a variety of subjects. Their tag line is … ideas worth spreading. The one I watch was by Ash Beckham. She is an equality advocate and she is a lesbian. Her TED Talk has been viewed well over a million times. In it she talks about closets, a subject she knows a something about. But she is quick to say her talk isn’t about just about being gay. She says instead ... "EVERYONE HAS A CLOSET. A CLOSET IS JUST A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION." It is that one truth which you, or I, fear to tell, because the potential consequences are too great. We know that if we open the door and let that truth out, we can’t control what will happen next … who will hate us and who will love us … who will leave us and who will stay. Who might hurt us and who will help us. But we do know that there will be people on both sides. Fear is what keeps our secrets in the closet. It is what keeps our heads down and our mouths closed.

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The crowd in Jerusalem gathered around the spectacle of a grown man riding on a donkey … and according to Matthew’s gospel, Jesus rides not only on donkey, but also on a colt, the foal of a donkey … simultaneously he rides them both. I am not sure how that is possible, but the point is perhaps the absurdity of that picture in light of the Roman Governor’s parade on the other side of town. Pilate rides into Jerusalem escorted my armor-clad soldiers on horses with weapons drawn. His point is to dissuade rebellion through intimidation. Pilate, you can well imagine, is received in silence. Jesus received with cheers, and palms, and coats thrown down before him. And some in the crowd were asking, “who is this?”

And the answer that Matthew records is this … “this is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee”. This is a prophet.

Prophets are called by God to live outside their closets … to have in public difficult conversations on behalf of God … to be truth tellers, without regard to the consequences. Their job description includes … standing up for righteousness and standing up for justice. The truth they tell is God’s truth not their own.

Jesus was a lot of things … healer, teacher, Messiah, Son of God, but today, on Palm Sunday he is a prophet. He is telling God’s truth. In his actions that day and moving forward through the week the inclinations of Rome were being judged, the inclinations of the religious elite were being judged, the inclinations of a corrupt temple system were being judged. And throughout history from then on, moving forward to the present, we find our own inclinations being judged … our societies, our culture, our power structures.

Jesus came parading into a hornet’s nest of corruption, injustice and oppression because he had a truth to tell. God’s truth to tell. And that truth was more important than the consequences … more compelling than the fear of those consequences. It was, in short, the right thing to do.

What was that truth? It was a truth which honored the inherent and equal value of all human beings as children of God. It was a divine truth that denied Caesar, and by extension Pilate, and by extension all those power structures in all places and in all time, the right to use fear and violence to intimidate and manipulate people into submission. It was the truth that there is, by God’s design, enough for everyone, if greed would only be exchanged for generosity. It is a truth, which no human being can bend to their own will. And to live short of it is to live to outside of the abundant life we were design by God to live.

That is why he came … into Jerusalem, at Passover, when the city was packed with every sort of humanity, a hornet’s nest ready to explode. No place needed that truth more.

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The question we can’t avoid in light of this story … is what is our Jerusalem? What truth are we called to deliver? And what closet must we exit? What difficult conversation must we have? We may not be prophets … but every human voice has a divine piece of the truth to tell. And we have all been faced with and/or bore witness to injustices: personal, corporate and structural … at home and at work, in world, in the community and even in the church.

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I am wearing this scarf as stole today as a part of difficult conversation … that has become a hornet’s nest within church. I am speaking of the larger church … churches of all sorts, all over the country and even the world. This scarf was knit for me by the Compassion-Knit group … we often refer to them as the Prayer Shawl Ministry. I received it last year at Christmas. It came with a note written by Val Yacik. If ever you need help finding the words for special note you need to write … call Val. She is an expert note writer.

Her note with this scarf reads in part …

Merry Christmas from your friends in the Compassion-Knits who took turns knitting on this rainbow scarf for you. In the struggle for gay/lesbian equality in the Presbyterian Church, the rainbow scarf represents God’s love for all of God’s children. We knit this scarf for you in recognition of your personal struggle in your professional life AND in gratitude for your leadership, especially with the youth, affirming God’s awesome LOVE for each of us.

That’s a great note, isn’t it? And this is a beautiful, colorful, extremely meaningful scarf that speaks to an injustice that I know personally. I am a lesbian. That is not news. I have known it for years. It is also by the way, not the most interesting thing about me. Nor is it the lone defining characteristic of who I am. And I have not hidden it here at BBPC. It was on the table when I was hired in 2001. Most of you know this about me. Maybe all of you know this about me. The youth know it. Their parents know it. The session knows it. I come with a partner, now of almost 16 years, and a blended family that is very much a part of this congregation … a congregation, which has become our home.

But outside these doors, not in the world, but in the world of Christendom, in the world of the larger church … it is problem. It is a closed door in my face. It is welcome withheld. It is a non-negotiable that makes living out my calling as a pastor almost impossible. I came here almost 13 years ago as your Director of Christian Education because there was nowhere else for me to go as a pastor. I was unemployable. I am so grateful for the welcome I have received here and all the fun we have had, and continue to have doing ministry together, I am not going anywhere … as far as I know … in part that is really up to you.

But I share this with you today because a couple of weeks ago World Vision, a Christian relief organization that this congregation has supported heavily over the past 10 years to the tune of over $100,000 in child sponsorships and deep-water wells in Zambia, announced a change to their hiring policy that would allow for the hiring of gays and lesbians who are in marriages. It was not so much theological issue as it was a conscious decision to allow gays and lesbian Christians to join with them in the work of making the world a better place for children … World Vision announced the change and a HORNET’S NEST EXPLODED!

Sure there were those who’s applauded their announcement and the apparent courage it took a Christian organization to make it, but there were more voices that were angry and damning. Vitriolic voices of self-described lovers of Jesus tossing our words like “hell” and “depravity,” pulling their sponsorships by the thousands … taking food and fresh water, school fees and medical care from children and their families in need throughout the world, rather than let a gay or a lesbian person like me join them in their efforts to make the world a better place. Really, I am not kidding. The reports of cancelled sponsorships is somewhere between five and ten thousand.

So dramatic was the response against World Vision’s policy change that they reversed their decision within two days … with long apologies and groveling, aimed at placating the angry voices of so called disciples of Jesus Christ.

That makes me so angry I don’t know where to put it all. It is an injustice disguised as righteousness. Nowhere in scripture does God deny anyone the privilege of doing right, extending aid, helping a child or a family or a community, because of who they love … not who they hate … who they love.

This is just a piece of a larger and even more difficult conversation, you and I know that … but I can’t sit here any longer, under the umbrella of our welcoming and inclusive statement, tucked unobtrusively in our weekly bulletin, and pretend that the whole church is like this church. It is not. As a member of the larger Christian community, I have to speak my truth. I have to stand up for what is right and what is just. I can’t keep my head down and my mouth closed under the threat of ecclesiastical consequences. God alone is Lord of my conscience … and your conscience too.

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What is your truth? What piece of divine truth do you have to tell? What difficult conversation must you initiate? What fear must you overcome? What hornet’s nest will you risk stirring up in order for this world, our world, to look a little more like the Kingdom of God … a little less broken, a little more kind?

Jesus, the one who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and hung from a cross five days later, said, “If anyone wants to be my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

Hear what the Spirit is saying to us. Amen.

Here I am with one of my sponsored children in Zambia in 2007!

POSTSCRIPT: My family sponsors three children through World Vision in Zambia, and we will continue to sponsor them. If you sponsor a child, I would urge you to do to continue your sponsorship too. The work World Vision does is good. Those who desperately need the help that World Vision provides ought not to suffer in the midst of these theological and social justice squabbles. If you would like to sponsor a child I would be happy to help you, or you can follow the World Vision link on the right.

Pixie Dust

2012-11-09T10:58:00.000-05:00

Reflections on Isaiah 11:6, Matthew 17:20-21 & Romans 8:28

“… and a little child shall lead them.”

On Tuesday nights youth gather in the basement of my church, in an area we call THE CAVE. They come to share a meal and to hangout, maybe do homework or play pool or even study the bible. This week some youth came with whole families in tow. There are many families throughout New Jersey and New York who are still without power as a result Hurricane Sandy. Tuesday was day eight of no power, no lights, no heat, no technology, for some no water. Temperatures inside those homes were registering in the 40s. It was getting old as well as cold. The church was warm though. Its power had been restored on Friday (day 4). So our Tuesday night gathering was a chance to warm up, charge phones and iPods and share a meal … in the light!

While many of us were eating manicotti and swapping lights-out stories, seven-year-old Lila was gathering pixie dust. She had found a handful of old Halloween confetti on the floor of a small storage closet. She carefully scooped it up without attracting any attention and began quietly handing it out to those seated around the kitchen bar. When she got to me, she tapped me on the arm and unfurled her hand, inviting me to take a look. I saw Halloween confetti, but Lila saw pixie dust, magic pixie dust.

She invited me to make a wish, but not at the bar. I had to sit in a magic chair that she had positioned under a recessed light. I was not familiar with pixie dust etiquette, so Lila explained that I needed to sit in the magic chair, while she sprinkled the dust on the top of my head. My job was to silently make a wish. So I did. When my wish was made, I shook my head and let the pixie dust fly, then I went back to the bar to finish my dinner.

Lila invited a couple of others to make wishes and it was no mystery what those silent wishes were. Everyone was wishing for power. Not magic power or financial power or even political power (it was election night), we were all wishing for electrical power, for life to return to some sense of normal.

“For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Life in the Cave went right back to normal. Making wishes to satisfy the exuberance of a seven-year-old was fun and cute, but came without expectation or any renewed sense of hope. We all returned quickly to conversations about generators, gasoline and electric companies and Lila moved on easily too, ditching the pixie dust for a princess puzzle. But then the cell phones began to ring; first one call, then another. Power had returned for Michele at her home and then Kira got the call and Kyle. There was an instant change in mood in the room and all eyes began to turn to Lila. Silent wishes were revealed, all having been granted via a handful of confetti and the faith of a child. Call it coincidence or luck or serendipity, whatever your want, but the circumstance and the timing were pretty wonderful. The only one who was unmoved, who was not surprised, was Lila. With the nonchalance of certainty, she simply responded to our amazement with the matter-of-fact reasoning of faith; “I told you it was magic.”

Pixie dust and mustards seeds aren’t magic and Halloween confetti can’t turn on the lights, but faith can move mountains. And faith, it appears isn’t surprised when the mountains move. Faith expects God to act. Faith trusts that our hopes and our wishes matter of God. Faith knows that with God all things are possible. Faith also frees us to let go, once the wish is made, allowing us to move on to other matters, other puzzles, knowing that our prayers are resting in God’s merciful hands and while all might not be resolved quickly or even exactly as per our request, the assurance that God works all things together for the good is enough. Faith is the light that makes living in the dark possible.

“We know that all things work together for the good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”

*Please know that this in no way seeks to make light (no pun intended) of those who lost so much more than power as a result of Hurricane Sandy. There is no magic pixie dust that can bring loved ones back or repair a home that has been swept way by the ocean. But faith tells us that life does not end with death and the story, our stories are not yet fully written. God has more to do and we are never without hope that better is on its way. My prayer for all those who are still suffering is that God will bring good out of loss and frustration … maybe by way of a miracle or a stranger or by the power of community. May this storm bring out the best in those whose hope is in the Lord. Amen.

A True Hallmark Moment

2012-10-12T23:43:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Matthew 13:44,45 & Isaiah 11:6

Every God-fearing Christian family ought to have a family bible, but we did not have one. The local Hallmark Store had one, but my mom was not interested and I couldn’t afford it. In the eyes of my twelve-year-old self, it was beautiful and awe inspiring, and necessary for gaining God’s benevolent attention. A large, white, leather-bound volume with an embossed gold cross and gold-gilded pages that crinkled when you turned them, and of course a page in the front of the bible for your family tree, as if to say … our family is rooted in God. I was certain that we needed to have one, for by having one it would be so. We would be safely root in God’s good graces. But alas, my mother was not interested and I could not afford it.

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

We were familiar faces at the local Hallmark Store and with every visit, I asked the store clerk how much that bible was. Every week it seemed the price was lower, but never low enough for a six grader’s allowance no matter how long I saved. Weeks had past and with each visit, I feared that the Bible would be gone, sold to some other God-fearing family.

One bright sunny summer day, we had yet another occasion to return to the Hallmark Store for yet another greeting card. While my mom shopped up and down the isles of cards, I searched the shelf next to the front counter. A rush of relief washed over me when I found that the bible was still there. I could not help thinking that this bible was meant for my family. It was waiting for me, for us. At twelve, I was not in any way outgoing or even comfortable with strangers, let alone store clerks, but I had to ask one more time; “How much is that bible?”

The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding on pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

The clerk, who had been asked that question by me many times before, hesitated for a moment and then responded to my question with a question; “How much money do you have?” My heart sank, because I knew I didn’t have enough, but I told her anyway. She nodded, and with a hint of a smile, simply said, “sold.”

***************

I miss that twelve-year-old. I miss the naiveté and simplicity of faith that longs to be found in God’s good graces and is willing to give all that one has to receive it. While her theology makes me cringe just a little, there is something that still rings true. God’s grace, while by its very nature free, is best received when we are willing to give all that we have, or better yet all that we are, to experience it.

The kingdom of heaven, the very kingdom whose coming we were taught to pray for, is worth investing ourselves in fully. And whether we believe that we have a lot to offer or very little, it is always enough. What is expected of us isn’t more than we can give, but only all we have to give. Adulthood has made that truth hard to grasp and even harder to live. We are jaded and risk adverse and poor judges of our own value. That makes God’s grace seem too good to be true and the kingdom of heaven too impractical, too impossible, to fully embrace. What then are we to do?

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

Perhaps every God-fearing adult ought to be led into the kingdom of grace by the hand of a young child.

Bologna Sandwiches

2012-10-05T07:29:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Luke 22:14-20 and Ephesians 2:14

When I was a kid, my bologna had a first name. If you are in your forties or fifties, then I bet yours did too. O … S … C … A … R, right?! It came from the Oscar Mayer bologna commercial, because back then bologna was cool. My mom packed it my lunch regularly. If I close my eyes and focus just a little, I can still remember the smell of bologna and mustard on white Wonder Bread as the plastic wrap is pulled away. Sometimes for dinner, my mom would put it in a skillet and make fried bologna sandwiches. That was a treat. But somewhere between the early 1970’s and today, bologna fell out of favor. It has become the Spam of lunchmeat in these post-modern times.

When the hour came, Jesus took his place at the table, and the apostles with him.

A few years back, I was working with several other adults and eight high school youth to repair a home for a family in the Tennessee Appalachian Mountains. We were volunteering with the Appalachia Service Project on our church’s summer youth mission trip. The home was a trailer that had been abandoned for several years, before the Jones family laid claim to it and set up home in it. It was in major need of repair and we would be but one of many crews who would work on the home over the course of that summer. Our assignment was to replace the floor and walls, run new plumbing and install a new toilet in the trailer’s only bathroom and to build a front porch from scratch, so that the front door would be accessible. The adult leaders, myself included, were novices. We were totally in over our heads, doing work that we believed was totally beyond us, but the Jones family believed we could get it done. They watched us scratch our heads and conference with the youth and the ASP staff. They overheard us mumble sentences that almost always started with, “I have no idea, but maybe we should ...” They greeted us each morning with smiles and encouragement and trusted us to do right by their home.

On Thursday the weather was really hot and humid. We were making progress, but our tempers were getting shorter with each other and the work. We had seen enough progress to know that we were capable, but not enough to assure us that we would be able to finish our projects by the end of the day Friday. By noon, some of our team had already stopped working, hoping that a lunch break would soon be called, while others refused to quit. It was then that Melinda Jones called us all to the front porch. We had completed enough of the porch to be able to gather there. Even those who found it hard to put down their hammers and saws stopped what they were doing to heed her call.

Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them and said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

Lunch on Melinda's porch.

Throughout the week we had brought our own lunches, sandwiches we had made back at the center where we were staying. Nothing special, just peanut butter and jelly. But Melinda wanted to do something special for us. In an act of enormous generosity, for this family was truly just getting by, she wanted to surprise us with a lunch made just for us … all twelve of us. She didn’t have a table to call us to, so we gathered on her new porch, a porch in progress, where we sat on coolers and toolboxes while she served us bologna and tomato sandwiches with freezer pops for dessert. It was one of the best lunches I ever had.

This act of kindness was sacramental. Its effects were tangible. As we sat and ate, the tensions that were building between us began to dissolve. Eased with laughter and vulnerability. Stories were told. Funny stories and poignant stories and stories of struggle and stories of survival. They were Melinda’s stories. She opened a window for us into her life with her husband and young son. It was a gift given to us and we understood it to be an honor to receive it. We were sitting in the midst of true communion. Something special, something spiritual was happening in our midst. In that moment, we knew that we were part of something bigger than ourselves.

For Christ is our peace, in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.

This Sunday, October 7^th, is World Communion Sunday. On this Sunday, Christians of all stripes and flavors, will be called to gather around communion tables all over the world and break bread together. Some will come in great faith and others in barely no faith at all. Some will come in abundance and some in dire need. All will be feed with the simplest of elements, a little bread and a sip of wine or grape juice, while the real meal is a story so big that it has the power to heal us all … the power to break down all the barriers we have built to divide us … the power to dissolve all the differences that we use as reasons to separate … the power to remind us that we are all welcomed, all loved, all children of a loving God. Our communion celebration reminds us that we are indeed part of something much bigger than ourselves.

***************

Today, if I were to give bologna a first name, it would be G … R … A … C … E.

In Search of Eden

2012-09-28T16:54:00.003-04:00

Reflections on Genesis 2:8-25, and Acts 2:44-47, 6:1

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.”

Photo by k_myers@flickr.com

When I was in college and things got tough, I would take a walk … a walk off campus. I attended a small liberal arts college in a sleepy, little, western Pennsylvania town. One side of the campus rubbed shoulders with main street, while the other side transitioned easily into a quaint, tree-lined neighborhood. When I missed home, when I was overwhelmed by academic pressure, when the drama of campus life seemed too much, I always chose to walk the tree-lined streets. I was attracted to the picket fences and manicured lawns, the front porches and bicycles in the driveway. I was attracted to what life could be, but wasn’t yet for me. When I was at odds with my own life, when I felt lost, confused, and out of place, I went in search of home.

Then the Lord said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make for him a helper as his partner.” … And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

I was in my late teens and early twenties in college. I was in my late twenties and heading for thirty when I attended seminary. I was still single. I had yet to establish myself. I was still working toward a career, still discerning a call, rather than living one out. I had returned to dormitory life and there were times then too, when I felt at odds with myself. Not so much lost or even confused, but impatient, as if life hadn’t truly begun for me yet. In those moments of frustration and disappointment, I would go for a walk. And just like my college days, my feet didn’t turn toward town, but headed east, in search of tree-lined streets, with well-worn homes and toys in the front yard. I went as one on the outside looking in. Looking for what had continued to elude me, in search of a sense of home. I was looking for some idealized place where I could be my bathrobe and slippers self, my true self, not the self my professors expected or I assumed the church would demand. I was looking for connection, vulnerability, trust, partnership and a common call. I was looking for home. I was looking for Eden.

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God …

I have long since passed through my thirties and my forties and have recently welcomed fifty. I am well into my career and trying each day to live within my call. Still, occasionally I feel at odds with my life. There are still goals and dreams I have yet to reach and I am at times very impatient. But I live on a tree-lined street, in a quaint New Jersey town, in a neighborhood with bicycles in the driveways and manicured lawns. I share my home with a family that I love dearly, who sees me at my best, but just as often at my worst. And still on occasion, I feel lost and confused. There are bills to be paid and decisions to be made and demands on me and my time and attention that I often fail to fulfill. Perfect is always just two steps beyond my reach. It is home, but it isn’t Eden. It is reality not fantasy.

Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected …

Those first believers, who gathered together sharing everything in common; life, faith and mission, must have felt that they had rediscovered Eden, a perfect world of connection, vulnerability, trust and a common call. A world that looked at first well manicured and protected by a picket fence of God’s design. But soon reality came to call. Those who had so freely shared all they had with one another began to questions whether they and their people were receiving their fair share. There was complaining and grumbling and finger pointing. It was still home, but it was no longer Eden. Or was it?

We will never know how the Eden of Genesis would have faired if Adam and Eve hadn’t gotten themselves thrown out. Would it have remained all sweetness and light forever? An unbreakable connection, rooted in mutual vulnerability and secured in total trust, the perfect partnership sharing a divine call. Maybe fifty years have jaded me, but I don’t think so. I think that they would have found something to quarrel about, demands made and demands ignored. Eventually there would be complaining and grumbling and finger pointing, because we are human and that is how we roll … even in Eden.

Home isn’t perfect and it isn’t a place. It doesn’t require tree-lined streets and front porches or even 2.5 kids and a dog. Home is a community of people, family in one sense or another, who share a common faith, a common commitment to love in the face of difficulty from without and even more so from within. Home is the place where we can grumble and complain and point fingers, trusting that at the end of the day we will still be loved, forgiven and valued.

I had a home in college and one in seminary too, I just didn’t always recognize it for what it was. And at fifty I have stopped looking for the fantasy, because the reality of home is by far better still.

A Wide Welcome

2012-09-21T09:00:00.001-04:00

Reflections on Emily Dickinson and Matthew 7:1

A great hope fell

You heard no noise

The ruin was within.

Emily Dickinson

Mae was born in Scotland to a single mother almost 100 year ago. Because of the circumstances of her birth, she was deemed beyond the God’s good graces, born from sin and without hope. She was denied the sacrament of baptism in the Church of Scotland. Her mother, in response to her perceived misfortune, left Mae to be raised by her grandparents. For many years, Mae thought her grandparents were her birth parents. Her mother eventually fell in love again and married this time. She raised a new family, one that never included Mae. Mae never met her biological father, never had a genuine, mother-daughter relationship with her birth-mother and never joined a church, even in her adult life, because she was too ashamed to admit that she had never been baptized as a child. The truth of her birth and its consequences haunted Mae her entire life. She was 86 years old before she revealed this shame to her own daughter and granddaughter.

Judge tenderly of me.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was baptized. The famed nineteenth century poet was raised within the framework of New England Congregationalism at a time when faith was being challenged and stretched by the likes of Darwin. With her family, she attended church regularly and participated in daily, family, devotional gatherings as a child. She was a student of the bible. She was spiritual, but she was not narrow. She was intelligent, but not rote. At the age of 16, Emily entered the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, a prestigious academic institution. She studied a broad range of subjects from science to Latin, algebra to philosophy. She excelled academically, but it was her moral and religious constitution that was called into question when the school’s principal, Mary Lyon, came to the conclusion that Emily was a no hoper. Emily refused to profess her faith publically at a school revival. According to principal Lyon, there were three types of student at Mount Holyoke. There were those who professed their faith publically and narrowly, those who hoped to one day profess publically and those, like Emily, who had no hope of making a public and dogmatic profession. Whose to say for sure what the consequence of such a label was for a young Miss Dickinson, but as an adult, Emily never chose to formally join a church.

“Judge not, that ye may not be judged.”

Matthew 7:1 (KJV)

We need not look back to the time of Jesus, or nineteenth century New England or even early twentieth century Scotland to find the human finger of judgment scarring the hearts of its victims. We know all too well its destructive power, the way human judgment seeks so narrowly to define who is in and who is out. And when our judgments presume to speak on behalf of God, the damage extends both ways. Our victims are prone to losing hope in God’s unqualified love and we, as a consequence of our own bad behavior, lose all hope of seeing the image of God, the beauty of the divine, in every human heart. The finger that we point, points back to us. The good news is that God is not defined nor limited by our human judgments. Grace and welcome extend in all directions and reach us in ways untold.

Baptize before without a choice,

But this time consciously, of grace

from Love’s Baptism by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson found the divine apart from the church, grace found her in the beauty of the world seen outside her window. And what of Mae? She died at the age of 92 having never felt the welcome of a Christian congregation. Still, she was by all accounts a woman of deep faith. Her family sought to give her in death what she was denied in life, an official Christian welcome. They wanted for Mae a Christian burial, officiated by a Presbyterian pastor. I was that pastor. As we gathered at her graveside for prayers and words of comfort, a gentle rain began to fall covering her casket with streaks of holy tears. All gathered understood that this was a baptism of welcome, an extension of divine healing, a lifelong shame dissolved and grace upon grace extended.

What the church gets wrong, what humans twist and mangle, God heals and sets to right. No human being can restrict God's wide welcome. Thanks be to God!

Half Truths

2012-09-14T07:13:00.000-04:00

Reflections on John 16:7-13

“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong …”

Four-year-old, Amanda asked her mom how babies got inside their mother’s tummy. Amanda’s mom told her a half-truth or maybe even a quarter-truth. She said that it was miracle, a special gift from God and left it at that. That worked just fine for little Amanda. It was just enough truth to make her feel loved and special and connected to God … all good things and of course, absolutely true. It was also just enough truth to ease the uncertainly of welcoming a new baby brother or sister in a couple of months. If it is God who is giving her a baby brother or sister, well then it must be a good thing, she thought to herself.

Eventually, Amanda would need more truth. She would ask her mother that very same question, worded differently of course, at ages six, seven and ten. At age six she asked because her mom was pregnant again, at seven because her best friend’s dog was about to give birth and at ten because she was picking up some conflicting information from the older girls at the school bus stop. Each time the topic came up, Amanda’s mom doled out a little more of the truth.

Michael too found himself in the business of doling out the truth. As a family physician, he was often in the position of calming the panic of internet self-diagnosticians and sounding the warning alarm for those who thought it could never happen to them. He found himself, on a patient-to-patient basis, deciding with every appointment how much truth to tell. It is a fine line between inspiring healthier living and stirring up unhealthy anxiety. Most of his patients can’t handle the truth, at least not the whole truth.

Life is series of unfolding truths. The whole truth never comes all at once. It is always just beyond our grasp. It is too big. We cannot take it all in. We can’t handle it. It slips through our fingers like water. We cannot contain it, nor can we harness it. We cannot manipulate it or own it, because it doesn’t belong to us. It is beyond us and yet from time to time we bump into fragments of truth that satisfy us for a time. Like the tale of the blind man who encounters an elephant bit by bit, our experiences expose bits of truth, quarter truths and half truths. As we age and grow, as life knocks us around a bit, as our vision expands along with our questions, more truth lies waiting to be mined.

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now^. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…”

Photo by Jaime Owens

Jesus was preparing the disciples for his departure … for his death. He had shared so much with them in the time they traveled together. So many miracles, so many memorable moments, so many bits of truth, but there was still so much to say, so much to do, so much to experience and yet their time together was about to come to an end. Change was in the air. A storm was brewing. Things would not be the same, but not even death could stop truth from coming. Truth telling would not end with a Galilean Jesus. The truth would continue to unfold. It would continue to find them just as it continues to find us. Jesus had more truth to tell. And even now God has more truth to tell and it is the Holy Spirit who guides us to it, shines the light on it and stirs within us a hunger for it, if we will just pay attention.

People grow and societies grow. Experiences and experiments, getting it right and getting it wrong, all carry within them treasured truths to be mined and embraced or rejected and ignored. No one has it all right and I venture to guess no one has it all wrong. Those, who in their arrogance, believe they have it all, the whole truth, revel in their ignorance. While those, who in humility, discover that the more they know, the more they don't know, grow closer to the whole truth with every question they ask. For God is in the business of doling out the truth, bits at a time.

Why?

2012-09-07T06:57:00.001-04:00

Reflections on Matthew 5:4

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

There has been a lot of death of late in my circle of friends, family and acquaintances. Some unexpected, some welcomed, and a few drawn out. Regardless of the circumstances, the result has been the same … shock, an overwhelming sense of loss, anger and a confrontation with the mystery of life and death. The grieving process seems a lot like a tornado. Whether it comes with or without warning, the damage is the same. It tears things up. It rearranges things. It sets things down in new places. Its effects can be felt for a very long time and as we are engaged in cleaning up the mess, we ask again and again, “Why?”

“Why?” is an unsatisfying question, because we know, before we even ask that it has no final or complete answer. It is and will remain, on this side of death anyway, a true mystery. Not that that stops us from asking. It is the perpetual frustration of our own human limitations. We want, we need, things to make sense and so often the circumstances of death just don’t make sense. Death reminds us that we don’t know all we think we know. It exposes our plans and our dreams for the future for what they really are … wishful thinking. Death reminds us that there are some things that we just can’t control or manipulate. What comfort is there in that?

***************

In my blog entitled Passing Through, I told a story about Lisa, who lost her husband in a kayaking accident. She was left to wrestle with the whys of that tragic loss while parenting two very young daughters. When the shock of that loss was still very fresh, Lisa received a letter from Roy, one of the pastors of her church. He was vacationing when the accident happened, but word reached him quickly and he responded as follows:

Dear Lisa,

It is early in the morning here on the pond, very quiet – save for the loons cooing more than usual. The fog hasn’t lifted yet, so I can’t see the other shore – even though I know it is there! It is an old and hackneyed analogy, I know, but this view of nature seems to mirror what’s going on in many of our hearts.

Last night I received an email from Ilse talking of Brian’s death. In an instant, a fog-like veil closed over the future, and all those future type questions you both partially answered are urgent and alive again: Why? What now? How? What about the kids? All of us are asking these questions which are so especially yours to answer.

We know that Brian has the answers, that he rests in the promises of God and no more sees through a mirror darkly.

But for you, and for all of us who love and care about you, there is still the fog – and you know and we all know we just need to stand together and wait – knowing that this grey stuff will clear away (as it has here, now) and we shall see that God, who has been standing and waiting with us, will make of all this heartache a good and new and even joyous thing.

Roy

Words of comfort in the wake of loss, not answers, but hope. A reminder that what we see only in a mirror dimly, God sees clearly. What we can’t know, God does know. That there are promises, steeped in the goodness of God, that we can’t control or manipulate or fully understand, but can find comfort in, because the one who promises loves us so very much. These are promises that are bigger than our losses, that are not limited to our length of days, promises that extend beyond the grave.

***************

Roy passed away this summer. It was unexpected, not his death, but the cancer that claimed him. Family and friends, those Roy loved and those Roy ministered to, where left shaking their heads and looking for answers in the fog. When the word of Roy’s death reached Lisa, she found that letter, written almost ten years ago, and delivered it to his wife. Comforting words from Roy’s own hand, delivered from one widow to another. She also sent me a copy. Roy’s words were read at his memorial service … one last sermon of sorts, delivered from the bank of an invisible shore.

Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are those who in the face of loss weather the storm and fear not the fog, for they will find comfort, not in answers, but in promises. Promises extended from God, through the pages of scripture, interpreted by friends and strangers and even pastors, in moments of compassion and sympathy. Blessed are those who rest in those promises and trust that God indeed is not absent, but near and “will make of all this heartache a good and new and even joyous thing.”

Dedicated in gratitude for the life and ministry of the Rev. Dr. Emyrus Royden Weeks.

Great Expectations

2012-06-01T06:31:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Isaiah 40:28-31

Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.

Margaret cares for her four grandchildren, three boys and a girl, ranging in age from 8 to 16. She lives not far outside Zambia’s capital city of Lusaka, but her village is a world apart from that modern city.

Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted

Me & Margaret in front of her new house.

I visited Margaret in the summer of 2005. World Vision had built for Margaret a three-room brick house to replace the mud and thatch hut she shared with the children. We were there to see the work that World Vision had done with the money raised by youth groups such as the one from my church. We were also there to see how HIV/AIDS has taken the lives of so many young parents, leaving grandparents, such as Margaret to raise children left as orphans. We saw as well how many young children have fallen victims to this disease as it is passed from mother to child. It was a sobering and powerful trip on many levels … a true mix of tragedy and great joy. Margaret was so pleased with her new home. She invited us in and showed us around. We saw not only the new house, but also the old one-room hut that had been their home for so many years. You could see a lot of sky through the gaps in the thatched roof. I wondered what it must have been like to weather the rainy season in such a hut.

We also saw a silo type structure for storing corn grown in the summer months, but that was not all we saw. Just to the right of the new house was a miniature hut on stilts made from tree trunks. It was thatched on top too, but without gaps. It was well cared for in a way that the other mud and thatched structures were not. Maybe it was new or maybe it was special, but what was it for? It was raised an inch or two above my head. Perhaps it stored food of interest to local African wildlife, like the way we have to protect our food from bears and raccoons and other critters when we camp. Still something didn’t add up. I had to know what it was for. I asked our Zambian translator to ask Margaret. I was not prepared for what I heard.

… but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,

The hut was certainly special. She had made it to welcome doves that might be on their way to somewhere else, but might also like to rest and take shelter for a time. Doves, she continued, symbolized the Holy Spirit, the power of God in the world and she wanted God to know that she expected the Spirit and welcome its presence. She was ready to receive whatever God sent her way. She had great faith that God was good and that God wanted good for her and her grandchildren. Even in the face of all that they had suffered, God had provided for her and she, in this unusual way, wanted to provide something in return. She was ready for God and she expected the Spirit to come.

they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

While I was there, Margaret had a visitor.

I think of Margaret often and wonder how my expectations of God compare to hers. Have I created a life of welcome for the Spirit to have its way with me? Have I trusted fully in the goodness of God, even when my circumstances seem to the contrary? Certainly, I have not suffered as Margaret has suffered, nor have I had to trust as Margaret has trusted. In so many ways our lives are apples and oranges. In my comfortable first-world life, I have yet to fall exhausted and I have yet to fully mount up with wings like eagles, but thanks to Margaret, I know that it is possible and for that I thank God!

The Music of God

2012-05-25T07:16:00.000-04:00

Reflections on John 3:1-9

If you want to see a miracle watch the video below. I bumped into it on facebook and I was truly moved. In the church we throw around words like transformation and rebirth and even phrases like born again, but what do they mean and what do they really look like? This clip, from the Alive Inside Documentary Project sponsored by Music and Memory, details the awakening of Henry, an elderly nursing home resident. Years of seizures have sucked the life out of Henry and left him curled up and wheelchair bound, depressed and at times incoherent and unresponsive. But when headphones are placed over his ears and plugged into an iPod loaded with music from his younger years, Henry comes back to life. The proof is in the video. Transformation, rebirth, awakening, this is what it looks like.

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about a rebirth, an awakening of the human soul necessary for life in the kingdom of God. Don’t mistake the kingdom of God for some eternal heaven in the clouds. Jesus was far more earthly minded than that. Jesus spoke often of a kingdom of God that was being ushered into a flesh and blood, here and now world that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, but was real nonetheless. He spoke of a kingdom with no borders or boundaries, limited only by our refusal to recognize it. A kingdom ruled by love, divine love and characterized by peace and joy, generosity and grace. A kingdom that is our divine right, our divine call, but which we can’t embrace without an awakening, for who can embrace what they cannot see?

Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, “You must be born from above.”

Henry’s body kept him alive. His heart beat and his lungs took in air, but seizures robbed him of the person he was created to be. He was alive, but there was little to no life in him. Perhaps that is what Jesus saw in us, in humanity. We are alive, but there is little to no life in us, for we have made our home in a kingdom with borders, ruled by fear and characterized by greed and selfishness, prejudice and hatred. A kingdom that is the very human consequence of a broken humanity seized by a one-dimensional blindness which confuses the tangible and the real.

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’

Who will wake us up? Who will breath life back into us? Who will open the eyes of our souls to a greater truth? Jesus is clear. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to transform, to awaken, to breath new life into us. The Holy Spirit is the music of God. It was the power of music that brought Henry back to himself, back the person he was, the person he was meant to be. The songs of his youth animated him. They engaged him physically and mentally. They lit him up and connected him to others. Dr. Oliver Sacks, world-renown neuroscientist and author, has been quoted as saying; “music brings back the feeling of life when nothing else can.” The Holy Spirit does the very same thing for us spiritually. The Holy Spirit breaths life into curled up, bound, depressed, incoherent and unresponsive human beings. It restores us to the people we are created to be. It connects us to one another and to God. It helps us to see the bigger picture, the greater truths. It animates us, calling us into action, inspiring generosity and grace. It transforms us in an instant and over a lifetime, in big ways and small as we give ourselves over to the power of the wind.

Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’

I am with Nicodemus on this one. I do not know how the Spirit does it, just as I do not understand how music does what it does. Music moves me emotionally and often physically, even without my consent, I find my foot tapping or my head bobbing to the left and to the right. Music winds me up. Music calms me down. Music inspires me, speaks for me, makes me laugh and makes me cry. In short, it lights me up. And just like music, the Holy Spirit, the wind of God, the power of God, lights me up too. It is the agent of epiphanies, the source of inspiration, the impetus of good works. I am the person I was created to be when the Holy Spirit has its way with me.

That is what we mean when we throw around the words transformation, rebirth and born again.

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Music and Memory is a non-profit organization that brings personalized music into the lives of the elderly or infirm through digital music technology vastly improving quality of life.

To learn more visit ... http://www.musicandmemory.org/index.html

Inner Princess

2012-05-18T07:30:00.002-04:00

Reflections on Luke 12:12-21, 2 Corinthians 9:6 & Robert Frost’s Mending Wall

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.’

My youngest niece is a real pip. When she was five-years-old the whole world revolved around her and she was not shy about it. Once, at a family gathering, I reminded her that I was not only her aunt, but also her godmother, which she interpreted to mean fairy godmother and immediately sought to make a wish: “I would like to be a princess.” Not wanting to disappoint her, I replied, “It is done.” And so we spent most of our week together poolside, where my niece ruled her kingdom … the shallow end. She was not yet confident in the water, and so she proclaimed the shallow end her area, her kingdom. As princess and sovereign she granted, and occasionally denied, the rest of the family access to her kingdom, stretching out her arms in a wide sweep to define its borders. That sort of behavior in a five-year-old is oddly endearing for a day or two, but as the week stretched on, I saw how it wore on her mom and her older sister and the rest of us … her royal subjects.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall …

Photo from BBPC Appalachia Service Project Trip 2011

or a border or a boundary when it seeks to keep us out. And yet it is in our broken and very human nature to build walls, to claim borders and to set boundaries to separate what is mine from what is yours.

Then Jesus told them a parable: ‘The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?” Then he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”

We all have a little five year-old princess or prince inside who longs to build walls, to claim borders, to set boundaries around what belongs to us. There is a little something in each of us that longs to stretch our arms in every direction and say, “This is mine! My time. My vacation. My space. My talent. My opportunity. My energy. My relationship. My money. Mine.” That little inner princess or prince is self-centered and stingy, wanting to close fists around what she thinks belongs to her, what she thinks she in entitled to. Sometimes, even adults let their inner princess get the better of them, drawing boundaries and building walls like the rich man in Jesus’ story. He thought bigger barns meant a better retirement, but who can relax, who can eat, drink, and be merry with their fists clenched?

But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

Of course you can’t take it with you. It doesn’t matter how tight you hold on, how big your barns or how high your walls. All the worry and the security put in place to guard what has been gathered means nothing in the face of death.

So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.

It is what you give away that you get to keep. You reap what you sow. If you give nothing, you get nothing. If you build walls, claim borders or set boundaries, nothing gets out, but also nothing comes in. If instead we are generous towards others, generous towards God, generous with our time and our energy, our resources, our talents, then in ways we cannot even begin to imagine, we reap what we sow. Rarely do we reap tangibles, nothing that can be stored in barns or behind walls, but a reaping of great value nevertheless, sometimes even eternal in nature.

The one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.

The best moments poolside with my family, were the moments when my niece curbed her inner princess and welcomed us in to share fun and laughter in the shallow end, when her kingdom became our playground. We splashed and played and giggled together, all of us. Those memories and the relationships built upon them cannot be stored or kept secure behind a fence, but they we will last and even grow ... of that I am sure.

Defining Moments: A Casserole Epiphany

2012-05-11T06:30:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Isaiah 43:1, 4 & Psalm 139

Mary was the fourth of five children and often felt invisible. Sara was the baby, five years younger than Mary. Sara was doted on. Everything she did was “darling.” Charles was the eldest and heir to the family business. Jane was mother’s favorite, although mother often said that she didn’t have favorites. Still, it was obvious to everyone, Jane included, that she was it. Michael, the third child, was more comfortable in his skin then any child had a right to be. He played to the tune of his very own drummer, always engaged, rarely flustered. Mary was just eleven months younger than Michael, but they could not have been more different. Michael was brave. Mary was timid. Michael moved forward in the world, always exploring. Mary held back, unsure. Michael exuded confidence. Mary had none.

But now says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.

The eldest four use to play hide and seek with the neighborhood kids after school. More times than Mary would like to remember, she was not only never found, she was never sought. The sun would set and the kids would all have gone home for supper and Mary would still be hiding behind a tree or a shed, waiting to be found or for her name to be called. It wasn’t that the others were mean or playing a cruel childish trick, Mary was just so quiet that you could easily forget she was there or just as easily fail to notice that she was not there. The end result was always the same.

I have called you by name, you are mine.

There were plenty of more important moments in Mary’s life, but hide and seek as a child became for her a defining moment. It was who she had come to believe she was, someone who was neither lost nor found. Someone easily overlooked. Someone often forgotten. It is funny what memories stick and what ones fade to nothing. And it is sobering to realize how what sticks has the power to shape us for better or for worse.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

Mary did not seem the better or the worse for her memories of hide and seek. Her life was ordinary and safe, like white toast with butter. Nothing risked meant nothing lost, but also almost nothing gained. Mary faded easily into the background at work and at home. Her colleagues moved quickly by her, up the corporate ladder, making names for themselves along the way. Her husband lived comfortably in a world that centered around him, his needs, his interests, his friends. Mary created that world for him and he loved her for that. Her children, now teenagers, took her for granted, as teenagers are apt to do, expecting from her meals, laundry and cash without accountability. She never raised her voice, because she had yet to find it.

Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

One day all that came to an end. It was silly looking back on it, but it was her watershed disguised as a casserole. Mary was active in her church’s women’s guild. Quarterly the guild hosted church suppers. In theory, they were offered in an effort to draw the whole church family together, to foster fellowship and reinforce the ties that bind all hearts in one accord. But in reality they were showcases for the fanciest dish and most creative table settings. Mary always did her duty by these suppers. She made casseroles and stayed out of the fray … until one night in September. On that evening, Marsha and Naomi were throwing verbal jabs disguised as compliments in the kitchen as they compared dishes. Marsha had brought her brown sugar sweet potatoes, topped with miniature marshmallows, lightly browned and served in a speckled blue ceramic dish that had once belonged to her mother. Naomi brought the very same sweet potato dish, but served in a clear Pyrex dish, nestled in a woven wicker basket with leather handles. Someone had not checked the sign-up sheet, but who? This was a huge faux pas and it was clear that the fallout would not be pretty. Mary, a witness to this crime, quietly dropped off her chicken broccoli and rice casserole and quickly disappeared into the dining hall. She had yet to rise in the ranks. She was only welcome to make dishes, not to organize them on serving tables. That task had to be awarded.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

After the grace was said and guests were invited to the buffet spread, Mary noticed that everything was set as it always was with two exceptions. First of course, there were two sweet potato dishes, served side by side, where there should have only been one, and her casserole was missing. It wasn’t on the table. It wasn’t on any table. On any other night she would have stuffed her disappointment, unwilling to stand up for herself, but that night something snapped. For reasons only God knows, a switch was thrown and the gates that seemed to have rusted shut over the course of a lifetime of perceived insignificance, burst open. Out came anger and indignation aimed in all directions. Perhaps for the first time in her life she walked with her head up, her shoulders back and her chest out. Pushing past Naomi and Marsha in the kitchen, she grabbed her casserole and brushed back by them straight to the serving tables. She plopped her casserole on the main table, making extra room, by dumping both sweet potato casseroles, dishes and all, in the garbage.

I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; I know that full well.

In that moment, Mary became visible ... to all. For the first time she was certain of her own worth. In that moment she was both found and noticed. In that defining moment, she understood what she had been told since childhood …

… you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.

***Writer’s Note: Okay, so this is a little tongue and cheek and yet so often the big moments, the epiphanies, the defining moments, come is the midst of the ordinary or even the ridiculous. And hey, God can find us in the midst of the best and even the worst that church has to offer.

Angel Unaware ... A True Story

2012-05-04T06:31:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Hebrews 13:2 and Amazing Grace

One summer about twenty years ago, Kimberly Borin rode cross-country with fifteen others from Seattle to Atlantic City. It was a fundraising effort for the American Lung Association. Her group traveled on average eighty miles a day and made the trip in seven weeks.

On one of those eighty-mile days, Kimberly had fallen behind. That was unusual for her. She liked to be out ahead of the pack. But on that particular day, for some reason, she had chosen to take her time, to slow her pace and enjoy the getting there. She was traveling through the hills of Idaho, up and down and up and down, truly in the middle of nowhere. That’s when it happened, or more accurately stopped happening. Having descended down a fairly steep hill and just beginning to make the ascent up another, her pedals stopped pedaling. They simply refused to engage. In a valley between tall hills, Kimberly looked her bike over. At first she couldn’t find anything wrong. It all looked as it should, until she noticed the absence of a very small screw missing from her derailleur.

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers …

Having passed a small town at the top of the previous hill, Kimberly walked, bike in hand, up the steep incline and found at the top of that hill, in the center of town, an auto body shop. The shop owner took one look at the derailleur and told Kimberly that he didn’t have a screw that small. He suggested that she might find one at the sewing machine shop around the corner. As they talked, Kimberly explained her mission, how she was riding cross-country with a group raising funds for the American Lung Association and added, as an afterthought, that she was from New Jersey.

As if to make sure he had heard her correctly, the shop owner repeated, “You are from New Jersey?!” Without waiting for confirmation, he continued, “wait until I tell Fred!” The owner then walked Kimberly across the street and around the corner to the sewing machine shop. Having explained her situation, Kimberly was invited inside to search through boxes and boxes of assorted sewing machine parts. Meanwhile the auto body shop owner left to find Fred. It took quite awhile, but Kimberly did find a screw small enough to fit the derailleur. Once the screw was in place and the bike was in working order, she returned to the auto body shop where her team’s van was to pick her up and return her to the group. As she rounded the corner between shops, a group of locals greeted her as if she was a celebrity. Word of her presence spread quickly. “Wait until you meet Fred!” they said to her.

It was beginning to feel a little unsetting. Here she was a stranger, traveling alone in an unknown town with no backup if things got out of hand, and it was beginning to feel like things were getting out of hand. At the auto body shop, she waited anxiously for the team van to arrive. As she waited an old, rusted pickup truck pulled into the shop. An older man, maybe sixty or so got out with two bags of garden vegetables in his arms. It was Fred. He approached Kimberly, put down his bags, and gave her an uninvited hug. “I am so glad to see you,” he said. “You are like an angel to me.”

… for by doing that some have entertained angels …

Kimberly was taken aback. Something was happening here and she was a big part of it, but she didn’t know what it was.

It seemed like a silly question at this point, but Fred asked her where she was from. She was sure by now that the whole town knew she was from New Jersey, but it seemed important to repeat it. She replied, “Flemington, New Jersey.” At the mention of Flemington, Fred’s gaze turned from expectant and hopeful to amazement and awe. Tears began to form freely.

“I am from Flemington too!” he replied. Whatever was happening between them, it was getting bigger. They actually knew people in common. And as they talked about their hometown, Fred’s story began to unfold. He had left New Jersey in the late 70’s because he had done something he was not proud of, something he was ashamed of. He didn’t say what, but it was clear he didn’t choose to leave. He felt he had to leave. He had to find a find place far from New Jersey, where no one would find him and where he could start over. This was that place, an Idaho town, in the middle of nowhere, population 300. He had been there ever since. Over the course of his exile, Fred had been praying for a sign of forgiveness, an assurance that forgiveness was possible for him. He had asked God to send someone from his hometown, from Flemington, New Jersey. He had asked God what seemed perhaps not impossible, but certainly highly unlikely. And here was the answer to his prayer standing right in front of him.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.

Kimberly was a stranger in a strange town, on her way to somewhere else. Nevertheless, she was also the bearer of grace, through no intention of her own, but clearly by the intention of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. We cannot manufacture epiphanies for one another, but sometimes we deliver them nonetheless. Sometimes we are angels unaware. And sometimes a stranger is the answer to our prayers.

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Writer's note: I was able to reconnect with Kimberly as a result of this blog. She granted me permission to use her real name and to encourage you all to visit her blogs and website:

http://theencouragingworks.blogspot.com/

http://seeingbeautifully.blogspot.com/

http://www.theencouragingworks.com/

"A Man Named Fred" will be published in a book by SQuire Rushnell and Louise DuArt. Their book is called, GODWINK LETTERS: A Devotional and will be published by Howard Books/Simon & Schuster in the fall of 2012.

Wiggle Room

2012-04-28T15:30:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Matthew 16:13-23, 1 Corinthians 13:12 and Isaiah 43:19

I use to pride myself on being a light and efficient packer. I was meticulous about folding and organizing, so as to maximize what could be packed in a small amount of space. I could afford to spend time on folding and arranging, because I didn’t have children, or pets, or other obligations for whom I had to pack. At that time, I packed in a traditional suitcase with sturdy sides and a molded, slightly curved top. There was little to no wiggle room, a finite amount of space for all my essentials and that is how I liked it. I would not have preferred a soft-sided duffel over the solid framework of a suitcase. My belongings felt protected in my suitcase … protected from the outside elements, from careless airline employees, from the wind and the rain of the tarmac. Protected also from damage within, from wrinkles and disorganization. You can’t protect your clothing from wrinkles in a duffel bag. Neatness and organization are virtually impossible ... too much wiggle room.

Image: geishaboy50

Life is a lot like packing. We want everything to fit neatly in rectangular boxes, in a finite space that feels secure and safe. Whether we are packing clothing or organizing our thoughts on life and faith, most of us prefer solid boundaries … toiletries, undergarments, shirts, pants … black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. Life is just easier that way. There is safety and certainty in solid boundaries and who doesn’t long for that?

“But who do you say that I am?”

Peter was certain of his answer when Jesus pulled the disciples aside and asked them that question. Without hesitation he proclaimed, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And he was right. Jesus said that that insight came straight from God. That's a suitcase you want to pack your faith in, solid, clear boundaries, no wiggle room, or so Peter thought. In Peter’s mind, he knew exactly what was packed within the framework of “messiah.” He was certain of what that title meant and where it would take Jesus and those who followed him. So when Jesus started going on and on about going to Jerusalem where he would suffer and die and on the third day be raised, Peter rebuked him. Peter REBUKED Jesus. There was no room in Peter’s messianic luggage for the suffering and death of the messiah. That did not fit within the clear boundaries of his hard-sided suitcase.

“ … you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.”

Peter went from hero to zero in a matter of several verses and Jesus called him on it. He said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” (I hope never to hear that from Jesus, but who knows.) It seems that Peter, while receiving one truth from God, took that truth and imposed his own solid and safe boundaries around it, leaving no wiggle room for God to work, no room for mystery or surprise, no room for things to get a little messy. And that is a very human thing to do, imposing safety and certainly where none is provided.

"For now we see in a mirror dimly ..."

Today we live in a world that has been created out of the fear and uncertainty that was born from the events of 9/11 and resulted in a world at war against terrorism abroad and at home, as well as a huge economic meltdown right in our own backyard. We don’t feel safe and little seems certain. In such a world how do human beings tend to respond? We respond by shoring up our boundaries, not just our geographical ones, but intellectual ones, pulling tight our framework, boxing in our thoughts, creating certainty were there is none. We draw lines between right and wrong and us and them. We create a false sense of certainty, a false sense of security with opinions that we have packaged as truth. It doesn’t really matter if you fall on the right or the left, both sides are so sure they are right (that they are correct) that they can’t hear each other. So tight are our boundaries that there is no wiggle room for conversation, for dialogue, for new possibilities. All that is left is animosity and finger pointing.

This is not a new phenomenon and it isn’t just political. It is what we humans do when fear and uncertainty get the better of us. We are just as likely to impose false boundaries around our faith, as we are our politics. Why does God allow bad things to happen? Why another flood, an earthquake, continued economic hardship, why? It must be God’s judgment on what we are doing or allowing. God is trying to get our attention. We need a reason that will make our circumstances make sense. We need a box to store what we see happening around us, so that it will seems less scary and we will feel, in some small way, empowered to do something about it or at the very least to explain it. Out of fear, Christians are digging in their heals on marriage and issues of sexuality, on the person of Jesus Christ and the authority of scripture. The same way Christians of the past had dug in their heels around slavery and the role of women, on issues of the person of Jesus Christ and the authority of scripture (some debates are timeless).

We have always longed for safety and certainty. And it has always been true that faith, just like life, is neither safe nor certain.

Faith is the opposite of fear. Fear draws boundaries and refuses conversation. Faith has soft-sides and wiggle room which fosters dialogue. Fear closes us off. Faith opens us up. Fear manufactures answers when none are given. Faith learns to operate in the midst of ambiguity and mystery. Faith takes risks. Fear takes none. Faith says, “yes” to God, without inflicting our will on God. Faith holds what God has given us in a duffel bag, not a hard-shell case.

"I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?"

With reluctance, I have traded in my sturdy, plastic suitcase with the rounded top, for a discounted, canvas duffel bag with someone else’s initials on it. I am cautiously risking uncertainly and surprise and even a little wardrobe chaos. I am learning to leave a little wiggle room for God to work.

Picking Up The Pieces

2012-04-20T06:23:00.001-04:00

Reflections on Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, Matthew 19:26 and Patsy Cline

I fall to pieces …

Terri’s life was beginning to feel like a country western song. While that certainly wasn’t her taste in music, it was the music she was raised on, with a father who yodeled to bluegrass and a mother who loved The Grand Ole Opry. Of late, the radio in her head kept repeating Patsy Cline’s, I Fall to Pieces ... just the chorus, as if there was a skip in that old record. It was no wonder really. In the fall of her forty-second year, the business that she had started with her husband failed and they declared bankruptcy. It wasn’t long after that that his drinking, which had always been a problem, became abusive. In May, Terri had left her husband and moved in with her parents. As if that wasn't enough, within a month, Sammy, her twelve-year-old Jack Russell terrier, had to be put down after a sudden series of seizures. In between jobs, in the midst of a divorce and having lost her most loyal companion, Terri’s life had indeed fallen to pieces.

The First Lisburn Presbyterian Church had fallen to pieces too, in an instant. The year was 1981 and Northern Ireland’s troubles were well established and flashes of violence were not uncommon. On a Wednesday evening in August, as local shops were closing, a car, that had been parked on Market Street, just around the corner from the church, blew up. In that instant, shops and offices and the church were devastated. Of greatest concern to the members of the Presbyterian congregation was the lost of seventeen stained glass windows, some shattered and in pieces and some left twisted in unimaginable formations of lead and glass.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

The writer of Ecclesiastes understood life’s propensity for ups and downs. There is a time and season for everything: the good, the bad and the indifferent. There is a time for success and a time for bankruptcy. There is a time for love and a time for marriage and even a time for the divorce, cutting your loses and demanding better for yourself. There is a time to enjoy the unconditional love of a canine companion and a time to say goodbye. There are times for love and times for loss. There are times for independence and leaving your parents’ home and occasionally times to return. There are times when you have it all together and times when it all falls to pieces. Life is just that way. And although it seems at times meaningless and haphazard, there is something more, a thread that weaves hope in and through the broken pieces.

God has made all things beautiful for its time.

The members of the First Lisburn Presbyterian Church couldn’t bear to toss the pieces of broken stained glass in a dumpster as if they were trash. Even before a plan was hatched, the pieces were gathered, because what was broken was still highly valued. It wasn’t long before the way forward became clear: these colored shards of glass, once beautiful could be beautiful again and this time more profound in their beauty. Soon a new stained glass window was commissioned, a window to be made from the broken pieces. In 1987 the new window, entitled The Resurrection Window, was dedicated with the following inscription:

The Resurrection Window

“This window is a memorial of the bomb-blast of 5^th August, 1981 and the subsequent restoration of our church and halls. It is a tribute to our neighbours in shops and offices and their will to overcome disaster. It is an echo of the motto of this town: EX IGNE RESURGAM (I will arise from fire.) It is a witness to our faith in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Terri too had broken bits of her life to contend with, her heart and her dreams had taken a hit. They were in fact shattered, but she was not willing to throw them away either. Her heart and her dreams were still of great value and so she picked up the pieces and kept them safe until the times and the seasons began to change. And change they did.

…with God, all things are possible.

God indeed can make beauty out of broken glass and broken people. In God’s time, seasons change and beauty is crafted out of pain and even loss. I don’t know how God does it, but I have seen it again and again. Broken hearts and broken dreams pieced together by a loving and purposeful hand. The result is never what is expected, but always beyond what one could imagine. However, God can’t heal what we toss away, only what we gather up. Sometimes all that separates one season from the next is the picking up of broken pieces.

Bluebonnets

2012-04-14T17:30:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Luke 24:8-11

Having found the tomb empty and being told that Jesus had risen, the women share their epiphany with the other disciples:

... returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

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In the spring every region has its particular beauty. I am from the northeast and we glory in the tulips and the hyacinth and then the forsythia, the rhododendron and the azalea. And that is not even to mention the flowering trees, the dogwoods and the cherry trees. We are spoiled in the northeast. There is so much color to our spring. In other parts of the country spring comes less auspiciously.

I was in Austin, Texas in April of 2010. I was attending a conference with friends, two of whom are Texas natives. I wasn’t expecting much from Texas in April. What kind of spring could Texas possible have? I confess, I came with prejudice in my heart. Texas and I are not on good terms. I have yet to forgive the state for the disaster that was my sixth grade year. (That is another story) So suffice it to say, I was not expecting much from my visit to Austin. However, I had been told, more than once, that Texas bluebonnets were a sight to see.

I flew into San Antonio, where my friend, Katheryn, pastors a church. She picked me up at the airport and we traveled together by minivan to Austin, north on Highway 35. We had a lot of catching up to do. There was talk of the glory days of seminary and of course crazy church stuff, friends we had in common and enemies too. Pastors so rarely get the chance to vent, it was a shame we didn’t have farther to travel. There was so much to say. In the middle of one long tale, out of nowhere, Katheryn gasped. Literally G A S P E D. I was looking out the passenger side window, away from Katheryn, lost in thought, focused on the trials and tribulations of church service, when Katheryn unexpectedly took in a whole lot of air. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. I was sure that I was no more than a second or two from meeting Jesus face to face and I didn’t want that to happen while I was telling tales out of school. I snapped my head to the left, in Katheryn’s direction. She was pointing to her left, out the driver’s side window. “BLUEBONNETS!” she exclaimed.

Are you kidding me?! It took a moment before I could make the transition from impending death to wildflowers. It took more than a moment for my heart rate to drop back to near normal. In the mean time, before I could respond, I saw them. Little specks of blue scattered in and among the tall grass on the median strip that separated the northbound and southbound lanes. Little flowers, not in mass, not bunched together in a blaze of glory, but scattered randomly, haphazardly, maybe two-dozen peaking out in a sea of tall grass.

All I could say was, “oh,” with a tone of relief, rather than awe. While it was certainly better than death on a Texas highway, and it obviously meant something to Katheryn, to be honest, it was underwhelming. I have to say, the build up was better than the reality. I expected a sea of blue outlined in grass, not a sea of grass with specks of blue. I expected a wildflower patch like you see on the highways in the southeast where dense, purposeful swatches of color are framed by highway on-ramps and exits.

That is the nature of an epiphany. It is as individual as our taste in wildflowers. The Holy Spirit opens one person to a truth, a revelation, through a walk in the woods or the words of a song or a happenstance at work, any of which on any other day or for any other person might convey nothing out of the ordinary and even if that walk or song or happenstance is shared with another, one might have an enormous God-moment, while the other remains unaware and untouched. Katheryn’s reaction to the beauty she saw in the bluebonnets drew from her a physical and audible reaction, a gasp, as if to say, "If you saw what I just saw, surely you would gasp too." But I did see what she saw and I was not moved in the same way or even moved at all.

There is a truth in that simple scenario that speaks to our desire to force our epiphanies on others. We believe that if we can lead someone to the place of our own revelation, if we can point to what we saw or heard, put words to what we felt or what we had, in a holy moment, come to understand, then others will see or hear or feel or understand it too. If I was moved, you will be too. We want to share our epiphanies and we think we can make it happen. But an epiphany is a work of the Holy Spirit, not a human creation. It finds us when the time is just right. It finds us in God’s time. We cannot manufacture or control it. It happens to us, not because of us and subsequently we can not make it happen for others.

We can’t force the Spirit’s hand, just as the Spirit chooses not to force our will. The Holy Spirit woos individual hearts and minds toward holy truths at God’s pace, a timing synched to our own individual personalities and circumstances. It may take a lifetime for some to see the beauty of God’s creation on the median of a Texas highway, while others seem ready to oooooh and ahhhhhh at birth. This, should we grasp it, gives us cause to be patient with those who cannot share our epiphanies, who fail to be impressed with what moves us to the core. The Holy Spirit isn’t finished with them yet, just as the Spirit isn’t finished with us. Epiphanies come when we are not looking, not expecting. They take us by surprise. They make us gasp. If a co-worker, acquaintance, family member or beloved friend, cannot share the enormity of your revelation or inspiration, it doesn’t mean that they never will, only that this time is your time not theirs. This epiphany is for you, a gift from the God who loves you, who knows you, who created you. Their time will come and perhaps already has with a different message, another insight, something you can’t quite see yet, but perhaps someday you will.

Our epiphanies are individual affairs. The truth is, you can lead a person to bluebonnets, but you can’t make them gasp!

Katheryn sent me this picture just the other day.

Apparently a rainy winter has made for a spectacular spring in Texas this year.

Had I seen this, I may have GASPED!

Easter ... Dreams Lost and Found

2012-04-07T23:03:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Luke 24:5

Carrie and John had talked about having children from their first date. It seemed presumptuous then, but quickly it was clear theirs was a lifetime romance. They were married within a year and started trying to create the family they had dreamed of right away. Within six months, Carrie was pregnant and shopping for baby paraphernalia on her lunch hour and John was busy making ready a nursery. The miscarriage came as a shock. It just never occurred to Carrie that things would not go as planned. But her doctor told her it was not uncommon to miscarry a first pregnancy in the first trimester. So they tried again right away. Four more pregnancies and four more miscarriages. The door to the nursery was kept closed and Carrie no longer shopped on her lunch hour. It was clear that something was wrong. Still, it felt like a death when her obstetrician sat them down together and told them they would never be able to carry a baby to term. A dream, their dream, their vision for their future was laid to rest in a doctor’s file.

Mike dreamed of a career in business, one that would start as soon as he received his college degree, but in the fall of his junior year, his father was severely injured in a tractor accident and he was needed at home to work the family farm. His dream died and was buried in a cornfield.

Terri loved to dance. She often said she lived to dance. Her childhood was a blur of classes and recitals. Her parents insisted she attend college, so she picked one with an excellent, extra-curricular dance program and majored in dance and minored in her studies. Her dream was to dance at Lincoln Center. Upon graduation she went straight to New York City. It turned out that her dreams were bigger than her ability. Audition after audition ended in bitter disappointment. After two years, she buried her dreams in a city dumpster along with her lucky ballet slippers and headed for home.

Paula simply dreamed of growing old with Jack, her husband of 19 years. She loved him more than she thought possible, but it wasn’t enough for him. Her dream died in family court, the Honorable Judge Raymond Walters presiding over a divorce decree that freed Jack to marry Emily, his co-worker and mistress of nearly three years. Paula’s dream was laid to rest in the home she was forced to sell in an effort to split their assets.

***************

Jesus wasn’t the only thing sealed behind a large stone, laid to rest in a dark tomb. With him were buried the hopes and the dreams of all those who had left behind hometowns, jobs, even families to follow the itinerant rabbi who spoke of the coming of the kingdom of God. Those who followed Jesus had dreams about how Jesus would make the world, their world, better. Some dreamed of a land freed from Roman rule. Others dreamed of justice. Some simply dreamed of enough ... enough food, enough shelter, enough cash to be secure. Some thought, that with the coming of the kingdom of God, the end must surely be drawing near. They dreamed of being found on the right side of God’s certain judgment. Maybe some just dreamed of God, drawn to Jesus because he made them feel close to the divine. Maybe some were thrill seekers or the chronically curious, regardless, each person had a dream, a vision of how life would be for them, for Jesus, for the world, as they followed him into Jerusalem. And each of them watched their dreams die with Jesus on that Roman cross just outside the city. Those dreams where buried with Jesus, as surely dead and he was.

And then came Easter morning. According to Luke’s gospel, the women, who had followed Jesus’ body to the tomb on Good Friday, whose hopes and dreams had also died with him, having observed he Sabbath, returned with spices to anoint his body. What they found was the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. The body was gone. In its place, two men, perhaps angels, tell them:

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”

Photo by Jaime Owens

It would be an understatement to say that they didn’t see that coming and neither did the other disciples, who received the news from the women as an “idle tale.” Yet the truth, God’s truth, a truth beyond all hope or expectation, won out in the end. The one who had escaped the tomb appeared to them again and again over the course of forty days. And with him, was born, in the hearts of those who followed Jesus, new dreams, bigger dreams, dreams that they could never have dreamed on their own.

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Sometimes we have to let what is meant to die, die, so that what is meant to live, can live. What was laid to rest in that tomb was not what emerged. The resurrected Lord was glorified; the same, yet changed. He appeared and disappeared at will. At times he was recognizable, with the marks of his suffering plain to see, but at other times he appeared incognito, revealed only in the breaking of the bread. And what of those dreams that were buried with him? They too had been transformed, changed. The disciples could never have dreamed of how the world, their world, would change after Jesus’ death. They didn’t see the resurrection coming … and neither do we.

Our dreams die too. Things don’t always go as expected. Life doesn’t unfold as planned. But letting die what must die, leaves room for resurrection and with resurrection comes new dreams, divinely inspired dreams that will surely carry us beyond what we could ever imagine on our own.

That is how the kingdom comes. Dreams lost. Dreams found. The world, our world ... changed. Resurrection!

Good Friday ... A World Without God

2012-04-05T23:33:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Mark 15:34

It did not begin with the absence of God. It began with good news of God’s kingdom come near. Good news for the poor and the blind and the sick and the weak. It began with light and life and God was not absent. But in this last moment, as the story appears to be coming to an end, the light goes out and the miracles cease, no power is left, there is only a cry … a cry so painful that it is hard to hear for what it is.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

In this last moment, God was absent. Jesus was abandoned. Through Jesus there had been miracles for the sick, the lame and the blind. There was power to calm the sea and to heal the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. There were words to confound the self-righteous and feed the down trodden, but on this day there were no miracles for Jesus. There was no power to escape this end or ease his suffering. There were no words to make sense of it. No words for those who mocked. No words for those who grieved. No words to make it all better. There was only a cry, a cry of abandonment. My God, my God … why?

There is something very human about wanting to know why. We are cause and effect people with the intellectual capacity for reason. And so we push beyond the bounds of our immediate circumstances and we look back and we look forward and we wrestle with the why, so that we can make sense of it all. That’s all we want really. We want everything to make sense.

In that moment, Jesus wanted his pain, his suffering, his torment to make sense. And we want that too. Why God, would you turn your back on an innocent man, a man whose life was given in the service of you? Why would you be so fully present in Jesus, only to abandon him in that last hour? It is not how I would have done it, if the script were mine to write, but of course that is silly. It is neither my script to write, nor yours and so we sit uncomfortably at the foot of the cross wanting to know why.

I have no answer for that question. The why of God’s abandonment is left to dangle before us like a moldy carrot on a stick, one that we would like to do away with and be done with it. I do not know why. I only know the affect that the anguish of that moment caused on those gathered around the cross and those who through out the centuries have dared to take a long hard look.

Matthew says that the light that had dawned with Jesus arrival had gone out. He writes that darkness fell over the whole land and with Jesus’ cry the earth shook and rocks split as if the whole created order felt in that moment the absence of God. It was as if the rejection of Jesus was the rejection of God. And in that moment we were given a glimpse of a world without God in it. A world where miracles cease and words fail and humankind is left to grope alone in the darkness and how great is that darkness.

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I remember as a young child when things weren’t going my way. I would fantasize about running away. I would pack a small bag and leave. I would be free to do as I wanted. Free to play when I wanted and eat what I wanted. I would just go. I must have dangled that carrot out in front of my mother a time or two too many, because one day my mother had had it. “If things are that bad” she said, “so bad that you feel you need to leave, then I will spare you the trouble. I will go.” And she did go. She packed up a small bag and walked out the front door. She got in her car and she left. And I got a little taste of life without my mother in it. Before you bring my mother up on charges of neglect, my father was home at the time, but that was of little consolation. I was devastated. I experienced a rush of emptiness that took my little breath away. I dissolved on the spot and was inconsolable.

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The affect of God’s absence, God’s abandonment of Jesus, in that moment was so palpable that all of creation felt the loss. The weight of that loss came crashing on all those around. So great was the terror of that moment that the Roman centurion was heard to say, “Truly this was God’s son.” As if to realize what they had done. As if to realize what they had lost.

No doubt, I realized what I had done as a child. My father was on the phone to my mother within minutes. She was at the neighbor’s waiting for the signal to return.

This last moment, this last cry from the cross was, thank God, not the end of the story either, but to embrace the end of the story, to find the true wonder and joy in Easter morning, you have to sit in the darkness of Good Friday in a world without God in it.

It did not begin with the absence of God and it will not end with the absence of God. But in that dark moment, when God was absent, the whole world changed.

Time-Out

2012-03-30T07:44:00.000-04:00

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 7:14-25 & John 6:31

I knew that if I could just get out of the car I would be free. It was an unusually warm February morning, almost fifty degrees. The sun danced on the waters of the Delaware River just a stones throw from the parked car. Leafless trees and a blanket of week-old snow, marked only by the restless wanderings of squirrels and deer, made the invitation to come almost tangible. There is something about bare winter trees, all bark and branches, unencumbered by summer’s leafy greens, which exposes a truth that is both shameful and beautiful. These are the days postcards are made of, I thought to myself. And still I sat, buckled in, keys in the ignition, windows up and doors locked.

I do not understand my own actions.

For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

1 Corinthians 7:15

I had come with the intention to walk, just to walk. I had come to shake loose the cobwebs that had grown thick around my once active imagination. I had come seeking inspiration … motivation. I had come to take a first step toward something bigger than the laundry list of daily chores that had occupied so much of the past several months. It is amazing how fast you can lose yourself in the details of day to day living. Picking up this and that, keeping three children in clean clothes and erasing fingerprints and toothpaste splatters from bathroom mirrors. It is a dangerous endeavor to pay too much mind to the details. Details can be the undoing of creative promise, a convenient distraction, an excuse to hide behind when fear gets the better of us. Like so many leaves on a tree hiding the brokenness and the beauty that lies beneath, petty details hang like scales before the eyes of those who have forgotten their dreams.

***************

Jesus had big dreams … kingdom-of-God-sized dreams. Big dreams require lots of work and Jesus was no slacker. He logged a lot of miles in those sandals, traveling from town to town, healing and teaching and gathering those who longed to share his dream. Everywhere he went he drew a crowd and soon word of his coming preceded him and crowds formed in anticipation of his arrival. There was no end to the people who wanted and needed something from him; a dying child, a leprous man, a bleeding woman, the blind, the accused, the cheaters, the religious leaders. There was so much to do on any given day that twenty-four hours just wasn’t enough. And still Jesus found time to get away, time to put the to-do list on hold and take a walk around the lake or a hike up a mountain to pray, to think, dream, to find a little inspiration … a renewed sense of motivation. He gave himself permission to walk away for a short time and he taught his disciples to do the same. I could be mistaken, but I think those little time-outs provided fuel for the dream. They helped keep the dream alive and in focus.

***************

I had almost forgotten my dreams. Had I forgotten them altogether, I suppose I wouldn’t have been sitting in a parked car facing the banks of the Delaware. I almost didn’t come at all. There were so many pressing reasons to stay home. I had several years’ worth of medical bills to file. The kitchen floor needed to be mopped. It always needs to be mopped. The basement was a disaster. It has never been otherwise. The doors to the bedrooms needed to be scrubbed. Why hadn’t I seen that before? And when was I going to get around to painting the molding around the new front door … the one that was installed almost a year ago? I am, it seems, passive aggressive toward my own best interests, subconsciously manufacturing reasons to delay doing the things I most want to get done, so that the anxiety that results renders me unable to get my lazy rear in gear. It is a cycle of subversion that spirals faster and deeper, until I am dissatisfied with everything and everyone with of course, only myself to blame. I am aware enough to know that I am, at times, my own worst enemy and that is enough for me to compound guilt with a twinge of self-loathing.

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

1 Corinthians 7:19

The upside is that this is only me at my worst. There is another side to my slightly complicated self and that was the side that I was hoping to rediscover along the river’s edge. I just needed to get out of the car. I had driven fifteen miles from my home with every intention of getting out of the car. I was dressed for success … sweatpants, sweatshirt, sneakers and my favorite fleece vest with an inside pocket for my iPod, which was charged and ready to go. There was some forethought here and that was encouraging. So, even I was surprised when I pulled in the parking lot and found my body at odds with my plan. Why was it so hard to get out of the car?

Wretched one that I am! Who will rescue me from this locked car?

1 Corinthians 7:24 (sort of)

***************

The disciples had been busy, very busy. Jesus had sent them out in pairs to preach and cast out demons and heal the sick. There was no end to the people who wanted and needed something from them. When they returned and submitted their reports to Jesus they were spent, but the work was not done. That is when …

Jesus said to the disciples, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure …

Mark 6:31

There was a Time ...

2012-03-23T07:46:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Mark 10:13-16

Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

There was a time when I could go to the moon or sail an angry sea or hide from the bad guys all from the inside of a cardboard box. There was a time when a blanket was all I needed to be a super hero or to build a fort. There was a time when the whole neighborhood would gather around the back of my house, to the spot in the corner of the driveway, where new gravel was delivered. All we needed were a few Hot Wheels cars, some Tonka trucks and a garden trowel to build an entire city in one day. There was a time when my friends and I spent hours and hours in the woods tracking Mr. Brown, the neighborhood nemesis, who hated children and carried a shotgun. There was a time when I delivered the Gettysburg Address, balancing precariously on the arms of a fire hydrant in my front yard, because President Lincoln’s train was delayed. There was a time when my best friend and I went on dates with the Mickey Dolenz and Davy Jones riding on the backs of our bikes (remember the Monkees?). Davy always rode with me. There was a time when anything was possible.

***************

People were bringing little children to Jesus in order that he might touch them and the disciples spoke sternly to them.

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There was a time when cardboard boxes were for throwing away and blankets were just for keeping warm. There was a time when the only hot wheels I was interested in where the four wheels of my mother’s gold, Buick Skylark. There was a time when my biggest nemesis stalked the hallways of my junior high school, armed with words that could really wound. There was a time when delivering a speech in class made me so self-conscious that I would tremble and stammer and break out in a cold sweat. There was a time when those I wanted to date, didn’t want to date me and those who wanted to date me, I had no interest in. There was a time when all the pretend of earlier days seemed silly and strangely shameful.

Childhood was for play. Adolescence was to be survived. And then adulthood came crashing down. Imagination, long ago replaced by reality, was now but a wistful dream. Adulthood is the time when cardboard boxes store mementos of my childhood in a dark and damp basement. It is a time when curling up under my own blanket at the end of long day is the closest thing to free. It is a time when the reality of owning and maintaining a car or home or anything for that matter is a weighty responsibility. It is a time when finding my voice and the courage to use it is mandatory. It is a time when accepting and embracing me, the good, the bad and the various degrees of ugly, is a pre-requisite for relating to anyone; friend, family or foe. It is a time when how life is takes center stage over how life could be. It is a time when possibility seems limited.

***************

But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them,

“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them;

for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

***************

Something is lost and something gained when we leave childhood for our grown up lives. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t go back to age 5 or 8 or 13 or even 30. But there is something we know as children that we forget as adults when we trade imagination for maturity. There is something about imagination that unlocks the kingdom of God in a way that reason cannot. Henry Ward Beecher once wrote, “The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.” The kingdom that Jesus ushered in cannot be seen with reason. Our adult eyes are far more attuned to all that is wrong and broken in the world, but the eyes of imagination, the eyes of children, look beyond what we see. They see hope when we impossibility. They see potential in those we have learned to judge. They see magic and wonder where doubt has clouded our vision. With God, we are told that all things are possible and so too with children. Imagination makes it so.

In the apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth he wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” That, I think, is a shame.

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“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And Jesus took them up in his arms, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.

The Plea of a Concerned Parent

2012-03-16T07:51:00.000-04:00

Reflections on Mark 9:7

This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!

It happened quickly. First, her husband of 63 years passed from cancer of the everything and then her children took over. I mean took over. It had been years since all five of them talked, let alone worked on a project together. And what was the project that brought them together … MOM. With the death of their father, who was going to take care of her? There were going to be decisions that needed to be made and by God, none of them wanted to be left out that.

Five siblings, five opinions, but the one thing they all agreed on was that mother couldn’t make it alone by herself in the house she had shared for 53 years with her husband, Ed. She was going to have to move somewhere where she would not be alone. She couldn’t live with Vicky, her eldest, because Vicky has a job that requires sixty-plus hours per week, including a Saturday every now and then. Not to mention the 3 grandchildren that she sits for on Sundays. Jen can’t take her, because she lives on the other side of the country, too far from the rest of the family. Mike is out because he has his new younger wife and her three teenage daughters to think about and that would be too much to ask of of them. Kevin is flat out irresponsible, has been his whole life. Nice guy, but no help. Sue, the baby at age 43, is willing to take mom in. She is recently divorced and economically strapped, but willing. If she takes mother however, the rest will have to supplement her income to make it work, including financing an addition to her home so mom can have a bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor. The others suggested she sell her home and move in with mom. But Sue isn’t willing to give up the home she fought to keep in the divorce or to move her twelve year-old son to a new, less accomplished, school district.

photo by Chalmers Butterfield

So Marilyn sits quietly in her living room, next to an empty chair that was Ed’s, as her kids discuss her future in the kitchen. They think that she is napping. She has been known from time to time to sleep in her chair, but she is not napping and she hears almost every word. She hears Jen argue for an assisted living facility and already has several in mind. Mike and Kevin seem to agree. Kevin always agrees with Mike, so that is no surprise. Vicky would like to see her mom with Sue, but is worried about her own retirement and cannot commit to indefinite financial support. Sue of course has made her pitch and has dug her heels in when Mike suggested, yet again, that this would be so simple if she would just move two towns over and live here in mom’s house. Kevin wants Mom and Dad’s 1994 silver Ford Taurus and that turns the conversation to who gets what, since it seems a forgone conclusion that mother will have to move.

Marilyn can’t help but tear up as she listens without comment from the living room. She knows that her children love her and she is so grateful that they are all here, but not one of them has asked her what she wants, what plans she has made, and she has made plans.

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Jesus had plans. He had his sights set on Jerusalem. As the gospel writers tell it, he knew what awaited him there and he tried to share what he knew with his disciples. But they would have none of it. Peter even went so far as to pull Jesus aside and rebuked him. No doubt the disciples had been talking on the side, plotting and predicting great things for the Jesus they had left their homes and families for and those great things did not include arrest and suffering and death. They refused to listen to what Jesus was trying to tell them.

Then one day Jesus went on a hike with Peter, James and John. They climbed a high mountain for a little quiet time, a chance to get away, but when they reached the peak they were not alone. First, Jesus transfigured before them, framed in light and dressed in clothes dazzling white. Then Moses and Elijah showed up and engaged Jesus in a conversation as the mouths of the disciples dropped to the ground. That is when Peter took over. He started to organize. “James you go to Home Depot. John you get the others. I will lay out camp with three dwellings, one for Moses, one for Elijah and one for Jesus.” And Peter knew he was right. Jesus wasn’t going to Jerusalem to die. He was going to Jerusalem to shake things up, with Moses and Elijah by his side.

But before Peter could hand the credit card to James, a cloud overshadowed them. A strange combination of darkness and light swirled around them and the voice of God could be heard as if being spoken not in front or behind them, but all around them … as if God where cupping the faces of the disciples with God’s own hands in an effort to get their attention. “This is my Son, my Beloved; listen to him!”

“Listen to him!” the plea of a concerned parent and the command of an omnipotent God.

How often do we make our plans and set them in motion without listening to the divine whisperings of the Holy Spirit longing to get our attention? How often do we stumble into a future that is not meant to be, like bulls in the proverbial china shop, leaving hurt feelings and broken promises in our wake, making messes that damage and stain us and those around us? How often do our actions serve as a rebuke of God and the life that God has called us to? How often do we refuse to listen because we are afraid of what we will hear? How often do we think that we know better?

***************

Marilyn has a plan. She and Ed had finalized it in those last weeks of his life, but no one has bothered to ask. As her children go on and on in the kitchen, she sits in her chair and wonders how she will ever get their attention and if, in the end, it will matter.

Life Lived in Reverse

2012-03-09T08:15:00.001-05:00

Reflections on Luke 17:32

Remember Lot’s Wife.

We moved a lot when I was a kid. Pittsburgh, Houston, Kansas City and back to Pittsburgh all in the three and half years between sixth grade and the end of the first semester of ninth grade, the prime wonder years. I was excited to leave the neighborhood I had grown up in in exchange for what my mother promised to be a grand adventure. Only it never occurred to me how hard adventures could be. I was shyer than anyone imagined I would be. I didn’t mix well at my new school, in a new state, in a new neighborhood with no kids my age. I was miserable and I think I made my parents miserable too. In six months we were off to Kansas City … another new school, new classmates, and a new neighborhood. This time I tried a little harder. The end result was that I was cornered on the playground by a welcome wagon of bullies who promised to make the new kid miserable, and I was, for a time.

Sixth grade turned to seventh and things got better. It took awhile, but I made friends, good friends. In Kansas City my neighborhood was huge and my school friends lived within a short bike ride of my house. It was the seventies so you didn’t need a play date scheduled by your mom to visit your friends. My new posse of girlfriends expanded with the onset of puberty to include boys. On weekends we gathered in rec rooms and basements playing records and dancing to the Bee Gee’s Saturday Night Fever and Gary Wright’s Dream Weaver album. There was always drama, but it was harmless, junior high, drama …who liked whom and who asked whom to dance. We passed notes at school and tied up our parent’s phone lines. My first official boyfriend was the older brother of a member of my posse. We didn’t talk. We just slow danced at night and passed notes by day. I was in love.

Then it was time to move … again. Chuck and I had finally found each other and my Dad wanted to move us back to Pittsburgh. I pouted, slammed doors, refused to be pleasant, isolated myself in my room for days, maybe weeks, but we moved anyway. We packed the Ford Grand Torino Station Wagon and drove east for two days. I cried the whole way. I wrote Chuck Gibson all over by white Keds sneakers between sobs. I was determined to me miserable in Pittsburgh. And of course I was.

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Jesus would have told me to remember Lot’s wife, just as he reminded the disciples in Luke’s gospel. Of course that wouldn’t have meant anything to me as a fourteen-year-old. My Sunday school education was not substantial. It would be a few years or more before I would become aware of the fate of Lot’s wife as they packed their bags and headed for the hills. God called them forward, told them it was time to move on, but Lot’s wife looked back. She lost sight of the present and the promise of the future and instead looked longing over her shoulder and ceased to exist. She crumbled on the spot.

I get it. There is nothing worse than the feeling that the best is over … that the best times have past … that the best love is lost … that the best success has been had … that nothing will compare with days gone by. There is nothing sadder than the conviction that nothing ahead of you will match what is behind you. I understand her need to look back. She wasn’t fleeing bad times. She was saying goodbye to the good times. She was leaving behind the home her children grew up in and her own circle of friends. She was leaving what she knew and heading into the unknown. Okay, so Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t the ideal location to raise a family, but still so much of her life happened there. And besides, the minute the present becomes the past it is open to reinterpretation and of course romanticization.

It is the sin of nostalgia. Nostalgia comes from the Greek roots meaning homecoming and pain. It is an ache for the past, often a past that did not exist, at least not as we remember it. Many of us are prone to selective memory and embellishment that paints the past rosy in comparison to the present. As a result we move through life not face forward, but with necks stretched back, looking over our shoulders and longing for the good old days. It is a life lived in reverse, which come to find out is no life at all, if the lesson of Mrs. Lot is to be believed. She looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

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I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt, but I missed out on much of the life that was happening all around me. I remember little of the end of my ninth grade year and even less of my tenth grade year, because there isn’t much to remember. I spent the better part of that time mourning what I had left behind … remembering, recasting, projecting a future that would never be. I was a silly adolescent, but this lesson isn’t just for the young. It speaks to anyone who believes that the present pales in comparison to the days gone by; who fears that life has little left to offer. It is a lesson for all who are living life in reverse. God calls us to face forward. God gives us life in the present and hope in the future and what is left for the past? Simply gratitude.

I am about to do a new thing: now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Isaiah 43:19 NRSV

Passing Through

2012-03-02T17:50:00.000-05:00

Reflections on Luke 19:1-10

Jesus was entering Jericho and was passing through it.

Almost ten years ago now, Lisa lost her husband in a tragic kayaking accident. She was left alone to raise their two young daughters. It is one thing to be a single mother by choice, but this was not Lisa’s choice. It is also one thing to be single by choice, but this again was not Lisa’s choice. In one catastrophic moment Lisa lost her husband and her parenting partner. She was, in an instant, both alone and playing the role of mother and father. It was clear that life was not going to wait for her to grieve. The work of grieving would have to been done in tandem with changing diapers, shuttling to and from play dates, packing school lunches and answering the question, “where’s daddy?”

Every day is hard in its own way when you are grieving the loss of your spouse, but Lisa found Valentine's Day to be particularly painful. A day that celebrates love and companionship only pulls at the emptiness, which now each day must be negotiated. Somehow that day would need to be redeemed.

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Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. He had a divine appointment. According to Luke’s gospel he knew what was waiting for him there. He knew he was both following God’s lead and heading into a hornet’s nest. He said as much to his disciples.

“See, we are going to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be handed over to the Gentiles and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.” (Luke 18:31-33)

It was a tall order and he was resolved to see it through. He was on his way to Jerusalem when he passed through Jericho. He didn’t have an appointment in Jericho. There was nothing recorded in his calendar, no reason to stop. He was just passing through on his way to somewhere else. Still, a crowd gathered to get a look at the guy whose reputation preceded him. The miracle-working storyteller was a hit wherever he went. Even Zacchaeus, that dirty, rotten, rich, Roman sympathizing, crooked tax collector came out to get a look. He even climbed a tree to get a better look (add short to his resume). But Jesus didn’t have a story or a miracle for the crowd. Jesus was just passing through. He was just passing through on his way to somewhere else when he noticed Zacchaeus in that tree.

The rest, as they say, is history … or perhaps legend … or whatever. It is the stuff of Sunday school songs. Jesus, who came to bring good news to the poor, spots the one the rich guy in the crowd, sees something redeemable in him and invites himself to dinner. Zacchaeus was changed, maybe even transformed by the encounter, for Luke tells us that salvation came to Zacchaeus’ house that day.

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For a widow on Valentine’s Day it would be easy to plow through the day, just passing through with blinders on, filling it with all the routines of just another day in order to survive the day and move on. But you can’t redeem what you don’t acknowledge.

For seven years now, Lisa has made it her habit to embrace the day, to live fully in it. Not in the arms of a new husband. Lisa has not remarried. Still, she has found in Valentine’s Day an opportunity to reach out to others who have lost a spouse and know the irreparable emptiness that that leaves behind.

This year on Lisa’s list was a secretary at her daughter’s school. Last fall, Lisa became aware that the woman had lost her husband. She was one of four stops on Lisa’s Valentine list. Lisa stopped at her house with flowers in hand only to find no one at home. She debated about leaving the flowers on the front step and that would be that, but decided otherwise. She was going to check with a neighbor to make sure she wasn’t away, but halfway up the neighbor’s driveway she changed her mind and decided to head home where she would give the woman a call.

At home with the phone book in hand, she discovered that she had visited the wrong house. Without hesitation she jumped back in the car. The woman was at home. She thought Lisa was a florist making a delivery on behalf of her grown children. Lisa explained that her own daughter was a student at the school and that she had become aware that the woman’s husband had passed away the previous year. Lisa explained further that she too was a widow and knew firsthand how hard Valentine’s Day could be. She invited Lisa in and burst into tears. She shared with Lisa what Lisa already knew about how hard the day had been, filled with the ghosts of the past, memories, good memories that made her heart ache all the more with the loss. She was wrapped in a prayer shawl that some friends had knit for her and had been praying just before the doorbell rang that God would give her some relief.

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You can’t redeem what you don’t acknowledge. Jesus was just passing through on his way to Jerusalem when he acknowledged that wee little guy in a tree. And Lisa, rather than merely surviving another Valentine’s Day in order to get through it, acknowledge it, embraced it and found a way to redeem it, for herself and for a stranger.

Whispers in the Wind

Tears ... An All Saints' Day Meditation

We Don't Know What We Are Doing

The Hornet's Nest

A sermon delivered at the Bound Brook Presbyterian Church Palm Sunday, April 13, 2014

Pixie Dust

A True Hallmark Moment

Bologna Sandwiches

In Search of Eden

A Wide Welcome

Half Truths

Why?

Great Expectations

The Music of God

Inner Princess

Defining Moments: A Casserole Epiphany

Angel Unaware ... A True Story

Wiggle Room

Picking Up The Pieces

Bluebonnets

Easter ... Dreams Lost and Found

Good Friday ... A World Without God

Time-Out

There was a Time ...

The Plea of a Concerned Parent

Life Lived in Reverse

Passing Through

A sermon delivered at the Bound Brook Presbyterian Church

Palm Sunday, April 13, 2014