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“Let
the Waters Calm…”Romans 8:31-39July 25, 2010 The only problem with a great vacation is coming
back to work. I trust you know what I mean! It’s not that there is anything wrong
with work. I love my job. It really does feel like a privilege to do what I do.
It’s more a pacing issue. I’ve said to several people this week who have asked how re-entry
is going that it feels a little like trying to step onto the treadmill but it is already going at top speed. You
step on and “Boom!” you just get shot off the back side.
Part of this feeling certainly has to do with the kind of vacation that Tracy and I choose to take. I
know that there are folks who go new places and do new things every day. They are going, going, going all
the time. That’s just not what we do. We go to the same place and spend time with
the same friends because we love that place and those friends. While we’re together, the time is
filled with traditions and rituals: the occasional breakfast at our favorite little breakfast place; time
spent singing (and sweating) in the sauna; reading great books late into the night. Vacation for us is
all about slowing things down. It’s about rest and restoration. It works for us.
In all honesty, it always takes a little time for it to work on the front end. There is a challenge
in slowing things down. Lots of people don’t like quiet because they are afraid of what they might
hear when the noise that surrounds them dies down. Part of what you hear in Northern Minnesota when things
quiet down are the late night calls of the loons, which isn’t all bad. Part of what you hear, though,
too, is the voice from inside of yourself that is conducting the annual life review: “How’s
the church? How’s our family? How am I doing here?” It
would be no surprise to anyone who knows us that part of that review this year is the simple question, “Where did the
time go?” as we get ready for Emma to head off to college. I made the mistake of asking myself that
question just after turning out the lights one night. That night didn’t feature all that much sleep!
In “Taoism” there is a bit of wisdom that I’ve always carried with me, mostly to challenge myself.
A question is asked, “Who can make the muddy water clear?” Then the question is answered:
“Let the water calm and it becomes clear.” It is entirely possible to live at such a
pace that we are constantly thrashing and making the water muddy. And when we do, it is really tempting
to think that the way to clear the water is to pick the mud out... which of course just makes for more thrashing, which of
course just makes the water even muddier. My sole vacation goal is to let the muddy water
clear. What makes that spot and that time and those friends so sacred to me is that somehow, sooner or
later, that clarity does happen. I remember a trip up there a few years ago when I was utterly exhausted,
not just from the drive but from the challenges that had been faced in previous months. I arrived and my
friends weren’t home yet. I walked down to look at the lake. I stopped at the
screened porch of the sauna house and sat down in my favorite chair. There was a little chill in the air.
After a moment or two, I just closed my eyes. What I heard was the incredible sounds of the woods:
the rustling of the popple leaves; the clicking of branches, the calls of more birds than I would ever be able to name.
I could literally feel the peace washing over me. This year, the moment when the muddy water cleared
was out on an island in that lake. My friend and I had gone to do a little late afternoon blueberry picking.
We had picked some earlier in the day, fighting the flies and sweating in the heat, picking plenty of berries for the
much anticipated first wild blueberry pie. At the end of that excursion, we had stopped at another island,
just to scout things out. My friend was the scout. I heard him groan with delight.
That island was brimming with berries. For the rest of the afternoon, each time there was a lull
in the activity, he would look at me and whisper, “Blueberries!” And I would playfully suggest
that there was probably a family of 8 people picking the island as we speak. The urge to go got the best
of us.
We got to the island. The day had cooled. The flies were gone. There
was a wonderful breeze. We grabbed our pales and went to work. Now, blueberry picking
is always work. You have to climb hills and climb over deadfall trees. You have to bushwhack
your way to the perfect patch. I was doing this by myself when I came upon the mother of all patches.
Like most blueberry patches up there, it was surrounded by sweet fern, which is one of the most fragrant smelling plants
you can imagine. These plants were even kind enough to grow in a spot with a really nice view of the lake
on a hillside that was at a perfectly comfortable angle to recline. I laid on my side on that hill.
I looked at those wonderful plants that were bent over with the weight of the berries. I just absorbed
that beautiful blue of the berries which is nothing like the blue of the berries in a store. And then I
closed my eyes and smelled the sweet fern. I could feel the muddy waters clear.
When the muddy waters clear, what we do see? I can only tell you the truth to which those times
of clarity lead. Almost always, what I am led to is a world that is much broader and deeper and larger
than the world of my concerns. I didn’t turn on some sprinkler or some sun lamp to make sure that
the berries would be there and be ripe at that moment. Nature took care of that. (And,
of course, there are years that the berries don’t ripen. Somehow, though, that makes the years when
they do that much more precious.) I didn’t plant the sweet fern. I didn’t
spray to keep the flies at bay. All of these things together were a gift, a gift received in part because
we were willing to do a little bushwhacking, but a gift just waiting to be discovered.
The message for me has never felt like, “Don’t bother doing what you do.” Rather,
the message seems to be a reminder that what I do or what you do or what the loon or the blueberry plant does are all part
of something so much larger and perhaps even so much more dependable than how I or you or the loon or the blueberry plant
do today. All of God’s creatures need to do what we do. Yet, every now and then,
we need to remember that we are one more small and occasionally wonderful part of the order of things and not the one who
orders them. We need to remember how much of life is a gift and how much appreciating those gifts matters.
The challenge, of course, it to see that the stream of gifts in this life are not limited to vacations but are flowing
our way every day. Tell me about a day when you weren’t blessed? (Let’s
start here: “Did you wake up?”) Tell me about a day that was so bad or so
hard that there weren’t blessings that came your way. ( I spend a lot of my life with people who are going through hard
times. What they speak of again and again is not being alone abandoned but of the caring people who come
their way, of the comforts that reach them even in the greatest distress.) No matter where you go, no matter
what you have to go through, blessings will come your way. I say that with utter confidence because it
has happened over and over again in my life. Of course, we can be deaf and blind to those
blessings. We can be so busy manufacturing and manipulating people and things and situations to be what
we want them to be that we can’t see what we’re being given. Of course, we can be so stubborn
that we refuse to accept what we’re being given because we liked what we were given yesterday, better. (Think
of me rising each morning after vacation for a few days, muttering to myself, “Today would be a good day to go fishing!”)
Of course, we can be hurt enough by what we’ve done to ourselves or what someone else has done to us that we
are lost in a sea of pain. Yet, even awash on that sea, sooner or later, some little “bird”
will fly over us, reminding us that “land” is near, that the pain won’t last forever.
Paul asks, “What can separate us from the love of God?” The Taoist answers, “Only
our own thrashing.” A key part of training a life guard is teaching them how not to drown in the
panicking hands of the drowning person whom they are trying to save. Thrashing is a serious hazard, to
ourselves and to those who would save us. “Let the water calm.” Sometimes
the right thing to do is to do nothing, or at least to do what looks like nothing which is often, in fact, listening or feeling
of just doing whatever it takes to get back to the present moment. It is standing and actually feeling
the point of connection between your feet and the rest of the earth. It is breathing and realizing that
you are sharing that breath with all the other creatures who breathe on this earth.
Paul asks, “Who can separate us from the love of God?” He asks that question of people
whom he knew and loved who were deathly afraid of the power of those in authority. Paul had once been one
of those people, the people who hunted Christians down and persecuted them for what they believed. They
all knew someone who had lost a brother or a sister or a friend. Most of them would have lost someone dear,
themselves. Awash in a sea of grief and pain and fear, Paul offered these words: “I
am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor
height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord. “Who can separate us from the love of God?” Paul answers, “No
one!” What can separate us from love of God? Paul answers, “Not a thing
in this world!” Hearing that truth from Paul, I’d like
to invite you to do two things. First, do some inventory work. What it is that helps
the muddy water clear for you. What helps you calm things down? What helps you focus?
What are the experiences and practices that have allowed you to remember that life is not just one big “to do”
list. Now ask yourself, when is the last time you gave yourself permission to experience or practice those
things? What are you waiting for? How long will you be content to thrash?
Second, nothing probably blocks us more from being receptive to the blessing of this day than fear. Paul
meant to speak to the people whom he knew and loved about their fears. To a persecuted people, he spoke
about the “powers that be” and death. Ask yourself, if Paul knew you as well, what would he
be saying to you? “Not even drop off day for college can separate you from the love of God!”
“Not even having to change jobs or even losing a job can separate you from the love of God!”
Not even failing to get everything done that you absolutely, positively had to get done yesterday can separate you
from the love of God!” It’s not that life will be easy or that it will work out exactly as
you want. The promise is that even the things you fear the most cannot change the fact that you are not
alone and that you are and always will be loved. “Let the water calm and it becomes clear...” “Sinners and Saints”Luke 19:1-10July 18, 2010
I haven’t offered a sweeping generalization form this pulpit for a while. This morning, let
me break with that trend. Let me offer two. First, although Jesus taught and preached
and healed, what united those very different activities was redemption. Someone had a problem, either through
no fault of their own or through years of poor choices. Someone had a misunderstanding, either because
some authority had taught them some untruth or because they came up with their own “truth” to justify their prejudices
and hates. Somehow, in some way, things were less than what God intended them to be: a
man was blind or a person was blinded with hate; a woman was sick or Jesus was sick of seeing how women were treated.
Jesus waded into whatever was wrong and did what he could to turn things around. Wherever he went,
whomever he touched, his efforts were redemptive. Here’s the second sweeping generalization:
trying to be a redemptive force in life is perhaps the main calling of a Christian. Knowing that
we are, ourselves, less than we could be, knowing that we live in a broken world that is filled with broken people like us,
even if they are broken in different ways, knowing that some of what is broken is built into the very fabric of our institutions
and our understandings, nevertheless, Jesus calls us to wade into the mess, to roll up our sleeves and try to make ourselves,
or someone else’s life just a little better. We are called to believe in the possibility of change.
We are called to offer the chance for change to those who, to the rest of the world, seem hopelessly stuck.
We are called to never forget who it is that we follow: the man who stood between the adulterous
woman and those who would have stoned her, who tried to heal a blind man and when it didn’t work, tried again, who took
plain old, weather-beaten fishermen and turned them into disciples.
This morning, we are called to remember what Jesus did when all he had to work with was a mean-spirited little tax
collector in a tree. By all accounts, Zacchaeus was a lousy rendition of a human being. To
start with, he wasn’t much to look at: a short, ugly man. Well, he was short,
anyway. To tell the truth it was hard to tell if the “ugly” part was a physical attribute or
was a character trait, discovered almost as soon as you met him. His eyes would shuffle from side-to-side,
signaling the way in which he was always “angling” for a way to take advantage of the situation. Because
Zacchaeus would cheat his own mother not to mention his best friends, he had no mother who cared about him anymore and certainly
had no friends. His only companions were the coins that he assembled and counted nightly, the riches he
had hoarded by acting as the local tax authority and mercilessly cheating the masses. He gave Rome what
was Rome’s (even Zacchaeus realized that you don’t cheat those boys!). All the rest, he kept
for himself. He was a selfish, self-centered, lonely man. If you find yourself wondering
occasionally at this world that seems so full of sinners and saints, trust me, when I tell you that Zacchaeus would occupy
most anyone’s category of “sinner.” On the day when Jesus came to town, it is hard
to know what was motivating Zacchaeus. Clearly, he climbed the tree to get a better view of the proceedings.
Yet, you have to wonder what he was looking for. Was he just scoping things out, searching the crowd
for data that he could use about who might have more money to squeeze? Was he watching for the authorities
and their response to this Jesus so that he could match their response and stay in their good graces? Or
was there somehow, against all odds, some rumbling deep inside him, some flicker of hope that there might be something less
lonely, that there might, in this life, just be something more?
For any human being, if we walk a wayward path long enough, there is a transition that happens. At
first, we might work our denial as long as we can: “I’m just doing what I have to do and what
I’m doing’s not so bad; I can stop any time I want.” The transition
that comes at some point is grounded in despair: “Who am I kidding? This is just
who I am. I don’t like it but it is what it is and I am what I am.” Resignation
is a powerful thing, powerful enough to keep a person stuck for a whole lifetime.
If the denial was working for Zacchaeus that day, maybe he had no problem leaving his home and wading into that sea
of people. After all, he had done nothing wrong. The contempt filled glares of the people
would have bounced right off of him. After all, who would feel shame when you’ve done nothing shameful?
What if, though, the shields were down? What if Zacchaeus couldn’t keep the shame at bay?
What if every glance that came his way screamed the truth that Zacchaeus couldn’t deny? What
if Zacchaeus was at the peculiar moment in life when denial is in the rearview mirror and the only thing he can see ahead
is resignation? “Okay, crowds...your looks, your spitting, your gestures all are correct.
You are the saints and I am the sinner. So what...nothing is going to change.”
Now, step back for a minute and consider just how toxic the presence of someone like Zacchaeus can be for the community.
Yes, it’s true that he cheated them each out of some money. Yes, it’s true that he was
in “cahoots” with Rome and everyone hated the Romans. It wasn’t that their frustrations
weren’t legitimate. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been wronged. However,
the insidious, poisonous truth was that having someone like Zacchaeus in their midst distorted the vision of truth for them
all. If they all could join together and hate this man then they could all avoid taking a hard look at
themselves. After all, Zacchaeus was the sinner, the broken man, the one who wasn’t what any person
should be. Conveniently, by comparison, that made them saints. As long as there was
someone so contemptible in their midst, they didn’t have to worry. There was someone worse.
As long as there was someone worse, they didn’t have to take responsibility for what kind of people they were.
Think of reality television and the way that it puts pathetic people in front of us whom we can laugh at and ridicule
and who leave us feeling better about ourselves. Think of the cruelty that you watched on whatever playground
in which you grew up and the closeness that folks felt when that one kid was picked on and everyone else was in.
Think of the craving that happens in a nation for a common enemy, the enemy whose presence out there somewhere in the
world leaves us feeling a little better about ourselves and a little closer to one another. Consider, for
a moment, that the Zacchaeus story may not just be about Zacchaeus but may be our story, that for as long as there have been
human beings, the “saints” in order to feel like saints have always needed to find a good sinner.
And, if you’re following me, consider how the community can have a real stake in subverting any chance that the
sinner might change.
In walks Jesus... He sees the saints and walks right by. He offers a few words
here and a smile there. Somehow, though, in retrospect, it seems like he was making a “bee line,”
straight to the tree where Zacchaeus was, straight to the man who most needed him, maybe to the one person in town who actually
knew that he needed to change and who was ready to jump at any glimmer of hope. Jesus looks up into that
tree and speaks to Zacchaeus: “I want to come to your house for dinner.” Other
visitors might have sought out the nicest house, the nicest person, the nicest dinner. Other, visitors
might have sought out “four star” accommodations. Jesus was looking to spend the evening with
the town’s “trailer trash.” Other town residents might have been ranking everyone in
his or her mind’s eye to see who would have the honor of being Jesus’ host because, after all, that honor was
supposed to go to the “best” person. Jesus was having none of that.
Jesus choice should not have surprised anyone
who had been listening to what he had to say. Jesus kept telling people that he had come to save the lost,
that he was like a physician who came to heal the sick, the he was like a shepherd who left the ninety-nine sheep behind to
find the one sheep who had strayed. Jesus is all about inviting people to discover what it means to really
live, to see that change is possible, to discover that hope is real. Jesus sought out people who were broken
and marginalized: the poor, the sick, the despised. He started with the people who knew that things couldn’t
continue the way they were even if they struggled with the notion that things might actually change. Like
Zacchaeus, these people jumped at the chance to change when that change was put in front of them.
Zacchaeus takes Jesus home with him. He shows Jesus real hospitality. He shows
every sign of changing, of choosing to no longer be Zacchaeus, the cheat. Shockingly, Judas even says that
he’s going to make amends, that he will repay everyone he has ever cheated fourfold. The cynical
listener, aware of the power of relapse in people’s lives, might well, say, “Well, let’s check back on Zacchaeus
in a few weeks.” An A.A. veteran might hear about Zacchaeus’ effort to make amends and recognize
one of the steps. A casual listener might hear the story and think, “How nice! Jesus
cared.” The community, though, is furious. They are furious at Jesus for caring about someone
who clearly was not worth caring about: “Why would he be dining with sinners?”
Any messiah worth his salt would care about them, not him. The crowd is furious at Zacchaeus for
daring to change: “Where does he get off thinking that you can just suddenly change?”
And yet, whichever direction the crowd’s anger runs, an outside observer can’t help but wonder if the real
function of their anger doesn’t have less to do with who Jesus is or who Zacchaeus is than it has to do with who they
are. Without the convenience of a Zacchaeus worth hating, they are cordially invited to take a hard look
at themselves and what might need to change. They would love nothing more than to refuse that invitation.
Maybe there is value to the notion of a “saint.” Maybe hearing about a noble life lived
faithfully can inspire us to try to live something more. However, that value is lost the moment when we
are ready to see ourselves as the saints and some person near us as the sinner. Not for the sake of guilt
but simply for the sake of honesty, we need to be able to tell the truth: we are all broken; we are all
less than what we are called to be. That truth can set us free, free from searching in life for someone
whom we are better than, free from spending our lives trying to prove something about ourselves. Rather
than trying to prove ourselves perfect or trying to prove some other to be perfectly imperfect, the truth that we are broken
can free us to work to make things a little better. How can I help this person in front of me grow?
What do I need to take responsibility for in my life so that I can grow? How can God be a partner
in that growth?“Born to Run”Luke 9:57June 27, 2010
I like to read books about people doing things that I could never do. For a long time, I read a
lot about mountain climbing, specifically, books about Everest and K2. I love to read about the superhuman
determination of those climbers and the risks that they are willing to take. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t
come close to what they do physically. What I know for sure is that I couldn’t leave my family waiting
and worried in the face of the risks I was choosing to take. Still, the human spirit of those climbers
makes for a wonderful read. I love the pictures they take at the summit with smiles that are a mile wide.
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of running books. Knee injuries in basketball ended my running
days long ago. Nowadays, I go and “run” on my arc trainer at the rec. center. The
books I’m reading are ultra marathoning books, most of which are shared with me by a friend who actually has run ultra
marathons. His races were 50 miles. Some of the races are well over a hundred miles,
often through the mountains. One of those races takes place in Death Valley, where temperatures reach 130
degrees and the runners have to run on the white line on the side of the road or their shoes will melt on the scorching asphalt.
The best book that I’ve read along these lines is called, “Born to Run.” The author,
Christopher McDougall, has never been much of a runner himself. However, he hears about a tribe in Mexico
that runs incredibly long distances through the mountains together purely for fun. In fact, he hears a
story about a 90 year old member of the tribe who comes in third place in one of their 50 mile races. (And,
by the way, they run either in very thin sandals or barefoot through some of the world’s toughest terrain.)
In relative isolation from modern civilization, this tribe has almost no cancer, no heart disease, no blood pressure
problems--none of the plagues of modern life. McDougall is intrigued enough to go spend time with them.
The lasting impression for him is the smiles on their faces as they run.
Later, the author goes around the United States finding the great competitive ultra marathoners. He
meets a woman from San Francisco who treats herself (her words) to two twenty mile runs a day. He meets
the greatest ultra marathoner in the competitive world, a man from Minnesota who was the worst runner on his cross country
team until one day as a high schooler he entered a fifty mile race and won going away. Cross country races
were just too short! Now, that man wins every race he enters but stands at the finish line and congratulates
every runner who finishes. He stands there until the last runner crosses the line--often hours upon hours
after his victory. In the cast of characters that he meets around the country, the one thing the author
notices is the look of joy on the runners faces as they are running. 70 miles into a race, these elite
runners are beaming!
I won’t spoil the ending of the book, but I will tell you that the author manages to gather the best of the best
in this country and stage a race with the tribe in Mexico. Despite all the differences between all those
runners, they share a common passion: the simple joy of running. Because they share
that passion, there is a powerful connection that is built across cultures. Even the author runs the final
race. For a while, he too, discovers that joy. Running long distances is what those
people were born to do. My question for you this morning is this:
“What were you born to do?” The Population Reference Bureau estimates that in the history
of the earth, there have been 106,456,367,669 humans born. (We’ll grant that as a “ball park”
estimate!) Of those 106 billion or so humans, there has not been one exactly like you. This
statement is genetically true (unless you have an identical twin.) Even if you have that twin, personalities
are different. Each of us is unique. You are the one chance the world will have to experience
you!
At the same time, we share things in common. The distinguishing thing we share as human beings is
the awareness that we will not live forever, that the world existed before us and that it will exist after us.
That awareness, whenever it fully enters our hearts and minds (and based on the teenaged driving I see, it does take
time to grasp the whole notion of “mortality”), becomes a driving force in our lives. We can
deny it. We can be haunted by it. Or, we can decide to live as fully as we can for whatever
time we might have. Of course, “whatever time we might have”
is the key part of the great unknown. We know our lives will have a beginning, a middle and an end.
However, since we don’t know the end, we also don’t know the middle. That’s why,
on behalf of all of us “50 somethings,” I want you to know that 60 is the new 40! There is
a fundamental insecurity to being a human being. Everything that is alive will also die. We
seem to be the clearest example among living things of the beings who are both blessed and cursed with this knowledge.
It is a really human thing to ask oneself at 3:00 a.m., “I wonder how much more time I have?”
And a question like that can start a person on quite a slippery slope.
Of course, the much more fruitful question in life which is actually in our control to answer is, “When am I
going to start really living?” Yes, that can lead some folks to make some pretty self-serving, narcissistic
choices. It is possible to mistake pleasure seeking for really living. However, I don’t
think we should throw out the question because some people answer it incorrectly. “When am I going
to start really living?” The goal isn’t to stay alive forever.
Yes, we have to take care of ourselves. However, like most everything else in life, when it comes
to time, quality, not quantity seems to be what matters. The goal should be to live with purpose and meaning,
to squander as little of this precious life as I can, to stuff as much life into this life as possible. And
to do that, we have to watch very carefully for the clues about what we were born to do. Maybe you weren’t
born to climb. Maybe you weren’t born to run. However, the smile on those runners’
faces has been on your face, too, however fleetingly. There was a day when you were doing something that
was hard, that many people would never want to do, that required you to pour out your energy. And yet,
what you felt was not drained but fulfilled. You felt whole! And when you felt that
way, you beamed.
What if it is not too late to feel that kind of wholeness again? One of my favorite runners didn’t
run until his 30th birthday. He was depressed and just started running into the night. He
called his wife in the morning because he had run too far and couldn’t get home. Much later, he ended
up running a 212 mile relay race. The other teams entered had 12 runners who alternated legs of the race.
He ran by himself--non-stop for 212 miles. (He consumed over 27,000 calories while he ran!)
I suspect that you might well have a clue as you sit here this morning to the answer to the questions, “What
is it that I would do if I could do anything? What would I love to do? What would make
me feel whole?” Of course there would be sacrifices if you tried, for you and for those who love
you. Of course there would be defeats along the way. Could you give yourself permission
to find out what it was that you were put on this earth to do?
Again, we don’t have to be talking about climbing mountains and running ultra marathons. What
if you feel whole helping kids? What if you feel whole caring for senior citizens? What
if you feel whole when you fight against some injustice? What if you feel whole caring for and connecting
with a friend? The question I’m asking this morning is, “What if your particular source of
wholeness in life is your calling?” And the question that goes with it is, “What if you don’t
have forever to respond?” A lot of what stands between us and our calling
is our desire for security. We want to be safe. We want the people we love to be safe.
We don’t want any bad things to happen. The truth though is that beyond the reasonable, responsible
measures that we can take, security is really an elusive thing. I remember a tacky poster that was in my
junior high counselor’s office. It had a picture of a ship tied up to a dock and it said, “Ships
in harbors are safe but ships were not made to sit in harbors.” It is really easy to live our lives
as if our goal is to just keep checking the lines that hold us to the dock. In our text for this morning, Jesus offers one
of those phrases that ought to haunt us. Someone cries out to him, “I’ll follow you wherever
you go!” Jesus answers, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man
has nowhere to lay his head.” Now, often when we hear a reference to the Son of Man, we think of
Jesus. However, that is not the original meaning. The Son of Man was a reference to
all human beings. All the other animals have a place to lay their heads. They get to
feel secure. They get to live worry free. Of course, any of us who have ever watched
a nature show know that they are not secure. The wildebeest doesn’t know the crocodile is only inches
away. The baby bird can’t see the snake coming. Try as we might to convince ourselves
otherwise, we know that we are fundamentally insecure. Jesus is saying, “If you’re ready for
life to be about more than security, then come and follow me.” What if the reason to follow him is
not that you’ll live forever but so that you will discover what it means to really live?
Obviously, this last week has been driven by thinking about David Genger and his completely unexpected death.
He was 47 years old. There’s nothing right or fair about a life ending like that.
I spent a lot of time at Woodland’s basketball games with David because Emma and his daughter Coley played together.
He was a friend. He was a Dad. He was a husband. He was a
teacher. He loved being all of those things. There were times when being all those things
made life very difficult and challenging. And yet, at his memorial service, what a wide array of people
kept discovering was how much life and how much living he just plain stuffed into his 47 years. He wasn’t
a saint. None of us are. What he was, though, was a passionate, caring man who really
lived. His life was full of life until the very day he died. And what everyone talked about what his smile,
not unlike the smile of those born to run or those standing on the world’s peaks who were born to climb.
The world needs someone just like you...or you...or even me. In the lazy days of summer, in the
wake of the loss of a dear friend, it is time to take stock. How much energy is going into checking the
lines to the dock, into looking for a place to lay my head, into making sure things are secure? What would
it take to really give yourself permission to do what you love and pursue your passion? What stands between
you and your calling?
“Children of God”Galatians 3:23-29June 20, 2010
So, today is Father’s Day, 2010.
On Mother’s Day, I spoke about our relationship to our mothers. On Father’s Day, a great deal
of what I have to say is about the role a father plays. This leads to a few words to my fellow fathers.
Let’s work our way together toward that end… On this Father’s
Day, there are a lot of fathers who are just plain missing in action. The good news is that many of those
children have incredibly loving mothers who raise them or incredibly loving grandparents who raise them or incredibly loving
adults who enter their lives as surrogate fathers. The bad news is they still don’t have a father. Fatherless children in our society are incredibly at risk.
It’s not that being fatherless determines their destiny. Many kids without a father do okay.
However, there are tendencies which are statistically undeniable.
•
63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (U.S. Dept. Of Health/Census) – 5 times the average. •
90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes – 32 times the average. •
85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (Center for
Disease Control)
• 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes
– 9 times the average. (National Principals Association Report) •
75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes – 10 times the average. (Rainbows
for All God’s Children)
• 70% of youths in state-operated institutions come from fatherless
homes – 9 times the average. (U.S. Dept. of Justice, Sept. 1988) •
85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (Fulton Co. Georgia, Texas Dept.
of Correction)On Father’s Day, there are just facts that we need to face about the costs—financially, morally,
and spiritually—of the absence of fathers. If a mother abandons her children, the story is headline
news. Sadly, fathers disappear all the time. On Father’s
Day, we also need to acknowledge all of the folks who might have been better off (seemingly) if their fathers had been absent.
We remember those whose fathers were physically or emotionally or sexually abusive. (After years
of life as a therapist, I am still appalled at the prevalence of such issues.) We remember those whose
fathers were held by the throat by addictions who had to absorb the consequences of his life. We have to
remember those whose fathers simply were not up for the job. Let’s be honest: just
because you grew up with a male in the house doesn’t mean you had a Dad. It’s just the truth...
Here’s something else that is true, though: whether your father was absent or whether your
father was not much of a Dad, when people are honest with themselves and with others, even those with the worst of fathers
search their whole lives for some way to redeem who that man was. Those with the absent fathers so often
go looking for them or go looking for whatever facts they can learn. Those with the broken fathers search
their memories for some single memory--something to hold onto--that was just positive: “I’ve
learned to be honest about all these broken aspects of my Dad...but there was this one day...” I
remember a person whom I talked to who endured more at the hands of his father than we could ever imagine. He
found that one memory though from that one day when his father was a real Dad and somehow that was healing.
The vast majority of us, I suspect, had the good enough Dads, the ones who paid some attention to us, who provided
for us, whom we knew cared for us and loved us. Given everything we know, that ought to lead us on a day
like this to say, “Thank you and thank God!” We were lucky! As we grow older,
those of us who have become fathers ourselves have even grown to understand and forgive and even appreciate the quirks:
“Yes, I am wearing these shorts with these shoes!” “Yes, I have been assembling
this grill for several days now!” “Yes, I do want you to do this, even if no other kid on the
planet is required to do this!” In retrospect, we forgive the quirks because we realize how impossibly
hard the job really is, at least if the job is to get everything right. We won’t and we know it.
On our best days, we are doing the best we can. On all of
our days, God is with us, on the days when we mess things up and don’t even have a clue as well as the days when we
triumphantly fulfill our role. God stands beside us, whispering things like, “Take another look”
or “Be patient” or perhaps even, “Maybe the kid has a point about the Bermuda shorts and those black shoes!”
Obviously, I’m biased but I think our best work as fathers happens when the internal, prayer-filled, conversation
between ourselves and God is alive and well. There are a lot of good fathers for whom the “mantra”
in prayer may be, “Help me to be the best Dad I can be!” The best fathers are humble.
And, of course, there’s nothing quite so humbling as asking God for help.
That humility, though, is grounded ultimately in the wisdom contained in our text. A lot of people’s
answer about what it means to be a father would have something to do with being a disciplinarian. It’s
the old, “Just wait ‘till your father gets home” point of view. (What an awful thing
that must have been for a lot of fathers!) What Paul acknowledges is that there was a time when that was
seen as God’s role. God gave the law. God punished those who broke the law.
A faithful person’s job was to never break the law. If you didn’t break the law, then
God wouldn’t get mad. An awful lot of patriarchal homes were based on a similar view of a father.
Dad makes the rules. We follow them. The goal is to keep Dad from getting mad.
In our text, Paul discards that view of God.
The problem was the same, whether thinking about God or thinking about a home. People were involved.
People are broken. People don’t do well following rules. Besides all that,
maybe people were meant to spend their lives doing some positive things other than just trying to keep God (or Dad) from getting
mad. Maybe God (and Dad) really longed for a relationship other than anger on a bad day or on a good day,
some form of neutral. Paul says that Christ came as a gift into the
world so that we might be set free from the prison of the law. In Christ, we become God’s children.
We are loved. We don’t have to prove ourselves anymore. We are free.
Paul says that love changes everything: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer
slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Everyone
is loved. Everyone is in. For Paul, God seems to have come to the point of deciding
that the best way for us to grow is not to t control us or to ask us to control ourselves. The best way
for us to grow is to love us and be with us and see what we become.
When I think about God as being like a father, I think about the loving God, not the controlling, authoritative God.
A careful reading of the Bible provides ample evidence that not even God could make the controlling, authoritative
model work. People aren’t built to play that game. Seeing that such a relationship
wasn’t working, God decided to love us instead. I wonder why it has taken so long for our understanding
of what it means to be a father to incorporate that truth? In the light
of our faith, the bedrock foundation of what it means to be a father is that your children are not yours. Rather,
they are God’s children. They have been given to you in trust. Your sacred job
is not to make them what you want them to be but to help them discover who God created them to be. They
will make mistakes and have bad days and endure setbacks along the way. They will take steps along the
way that are real growth. Your job as a father is not to control them. Your job is to
love them. Your job is to help them. Your job is to do what you can to encourage them
to become a person of faith, a person of integrity, and a loving person. And the best way you will do this
is by being that kind of person yourself. It’s not that there won’t
need to be rules. It’s not that there won’t need to be consequences when rules are broken.
It’s not that we won’t offer guidance along the way. Those things (like the religious
laws) endure. However, those things are put into context. The rules and the consequences
and the guidance are not statements about our authority but are our attempts to be helpful. When they don’t
work, our egos aren’t at stake. In fact, when they don’t work, maybe that becomes something
we can discuss honestly. Maybe we search together at that point for a way of being a parent and a way of
being a family that we all think might contain some love and some integrity and some faith. Maybe fathering
as an expression of faith can give us some perspective and can even lead us to value others’ perspectives.
A few weeks ago, on Mother’s Day, I suggested that maybe it is time to forgive what is past and let it go.
What I’m suggesting this morning when it comes to fathers is that maybe it’s time for fathers to stop trying
to control what we can’t control. The greatest influence we will have will be our example.
The greatest chance we have to shape a life will be by loving our children (however old they might be) as they go through
the complicated business of trying to live their own lives. In a world in which so many fathers are absent,
in which so many fathers are a destructive force, the job is to be there and be loving. The job is to take
care of God’s children.
“He Had Compassion”Mark 6:30-44June 6, 2010
So, I haven’t taken you on a canoe trip with me for a while. Pack up...let’s go.
This trip actually happened a long time ago. On this particular trip, there were the usual suspects:
my friend, Joe, his wife, Mary, another friend whom we called Roube, and a very enthusiastic young friend of mine.
In fact, this friend was the youngest person we’ve ever taken along--16 years old. His youth
and exuberance made for a lot of funny moments. To show you how long ago the trip was, one of his favorite
things to do was find a place where there were cliffs and an echo and then do his best imitation of the announcer for the
Bulls game: “And now, let’s welcome...your Chicago Bulls!” I’m
pretty sure the loons hadn’t heard anything like that before. His other favorite thing to do, since
he was in withdrawl from all the music he usually listened to, was to provide his own drum soundtrack to fill the quiet moments:
“Dmmm...dmmm, dmmm....dumm, dmm, dmm.” My friends just laughed.
No one was laughing though a little later. Of the many cherished items on a canoe trip, none is
cherished more than the toilet paper. It’s all you have for the week! Enough said.
There is a shared understanding that the t.p. is treated like gold. Somehow, my young friend hadn’t
gotten that message. He left to take care of business and returned with half a roll less toilet paper than
when he left. This was serious! My friend, Roube, a man of few words, took matters into
his own hands. He pulled him aside, pulled out the toilet paper and peeled off one square.
He handed that square to our young traveler and told him to come ask when he needed more. Everyone
else in the group got the giggles as we watched. Over the course of the week, values were taught
and lessons were shared: how you camp and leave no trace that you’ve been there; how you start a
fire in the rain; how you learn to value silence because there really is no silence, just the quiet things you wouldn’t
hear if you were making noise. Our young friend got the hang of things (so much so that we rewarded him
with not one but two squares of toilet paper.) He grew comfortable in the wild which was a really wonderful
thing to see.
Over the course of the week, one of the welcome things that happens is that the food pack, which was a huge burden
to carry at the outset, gets lighter and lighter. Having carefully planned what we needed (Joe’s
job) and having eaten what we’ve brought (more my job than anyone else’s), you begin to run out of food.
All of this leads to a great final meal on the last day. It is the “eat whatever is left”
end of the line. Still, though, there is a rule attached to this moment: whatever is
left should be shared. It’s not a fighting, hording moment. It’s much more,
“Hey, we’ve still got cheese and it’s only a little green around the edges. Who wants
some?” On that particular day, we were sitting around,
sharing the food, and laughing and telling stories. What we all knew, regardless of what we were eating,
was that there was chocolate that was still left in the pack. We knew that this glorious meal would be
topped off by just a nibble of sweetness for each one of us. We knew that until, in a moment of horror,
we looked over at our young friend, just as he was polishing the last bit of chocolate off. He smiled at
us, a nice big smile that was just big enough to display the chocolate stuck to his teeth. It was a moment
that recalled the climax of the movie, “Apocalypse Now:” “The horror...the horror!”
Now, one understanding that has existed for a long time among my friends is that revenge is a dish best served cold.
Very little was said at that meal, other than a question, “Hey, how was the chocolate?” “Dude...that
chocolate was soooo good!” came the answer. At that point, his fate was sealed. We
finished the trip, got cleaned up and headed into town. We went to our favorite restaurant for a post-trip
pizza. We feasted! Toward the end of that meal, my friend, Joe, turned to our young
friend and casually asked, “So...we’re down to one piece of pizza. Want it?”
He said, “Sure!” Joe grabbed the pan and slowly held out the piece of pizza out.
Then, just as the young man was about to grab that piece, Joe pulled the pan back, grabbed the piece of pizza and wolfed
it down in one bite. He looked our young friend in the eye and said, “Dude...that was soooo good!”
You could almost hear the light bulb of insight click on. The lessons on canoe trips aren’t all that
complicated and make sense once you’ve learned them: help each other; do your fair share; and share
what you have. You learn the rules but you don’t think about them as rules. It’s
just how things work. Often, I think about how much better life would work if we followed the same rules
the rest of the time and how infinitely much better life would be if we followed those rules not out of fear but simply because
we knew that this was the way life works best. The interesting thing about our text, the feeding
of the five thousand story from the Gospel of Mark, is that we’re not told what lessons Jesus was teaching.
Presumably, he was teaching the kind of lessons he taught at other points along the way: love your
enemies; forgive others and seek their forgiveness; love your neighbor as yourself. However, Jesus’
words are not what’s remembered from that day. Mark simply tells us that the crowds found Jesus,
that he taught and healed all day and that the day was coming to a close.
The turning point in the text is when Mark tells us that Jesus has compassion for these people. He
cares about them. They are people with real needs, needs like hunger and thirst and rest. He
tells the disciples to give these people something to eat rather than just sending them on their way. The
disciples, not surprisingly, are miffed. They’re not rich. They don’t have
some endless supply of food. Jesus asks them how much they have. The disciples answer,
“Five loaves and two fish.” Jesus looks them in the eye and says, “Perfect!”
Jesus takes the loaves and fish and prays over them and then divides them up. He tells the disciples
to start passing the food around. The funny thing about the final meal on the canoe
trip is that often the things that taste best would hardly register if you were eating at home. We take
so many things for granted. I remember my old friend Borge Smidt telling me about growing up on a farm.
His family would pack away apples for the winter in barrels, carefully packing them in sawdust. He
said that no apple ever tasted as good since as one of those apples from that barrel. Why would an apple
be special when you can always get more at the store? Why would a slightly green piece of cheese be a treat
when you would throw it away if you were home? Why would a piece of chocolate matter...well, let’s
be honest here...chocolate always matters--but you get my point. Maybe the disciples had things sized up and were
feeling pretty comfortable about their fish and bread supply until Jesus made them share it. Maybe all
day long, they felt a little compassion for those people but thought to themselves, “Oh well, we’ll have enough
to eat.” Maybe the most important lesson of the day for the disciples was that crossroads moment
when they were asked to share everything that they had that day with the crowds. Maybe, in order to do
that, they had to give away their now unbelievably treasured fish and make themselves insecure. The disciples
shared what they had, without reservation. It’s a really basic question in life:
when something feels scarce, do you share it with others or do you horde it for yourself. I know
what you would say if I invited you up here and asked that question in front of everyone else. We would
all give the same answer, “Why...I would share, of course!” However, the truth is that people
struggle mightily with actually making such decisions. Of course, we don’t struggle if we really
don’t care about what’s in short supply: “I would gladly share my green olives with everyone!”
(The secret is, I don’t like green olives.) Of course, we don’t struggle if we are convinced
we have more than enough: “I would gladly share my golf shirts with anyone who needs one!
(The secret is that I haven’t thown away a golf shirt in years and they seem to be multiplying in my closet each
winter.) But take something that we care about and convince us that it is in short supply and we struggle
mightily to share.
There is a really instinctive drive to horde things in such circumstances. I remember the two year
old’s birthday party that I attended. She wouldn’t let go of any present she opened because
someone might take it. The present opening took hours. I remember when the power went
out in Ely, Minnesota. That place has more drinkable water than just about anywhere. However,
the first thing many people did--many nice MInnesotans--was head to the store and buy water. I remember
all the times when in the midst of a crisis the prices for essential goods suddenly skyrocketed.
Now, let’s complicate things even further. What if what’s scarce in your life is not
food but something else that is precious. What if you know that God is asking you to give what you’re
convinced is in short supply. There’s not enough time but somehow you know God is calling you to
give your time to someone else. You don’t feel secure at all but you know that God is calling you
to do some things that would make you feel even less secure--to share some money or to love an enemy or to forgive someone
with whom you have quite a grudge. Or, let’s be honest, maybe you are just pretty convinced that
there’s really not enough love to go around. Yet, God keeps putting the invitation in front of you
to care, to give, to have compassion for the people who are put in your path. We are all going to struggle.
And yet, the truth is that when we give what’s hard to give, when we share what we’d really rather not
share, we discover one of life’s great truths: the “treats” in this life are far better
when we share them than they are when we hide them and gobble them up for ourselves. Life is better when
we are in it together, when we share the good stuff and the hard stuff, when we think about others and what they might want
rather than just walking around thinking of ourselves. When we live that way, we learn the difference between
a need and a want. We discover that we really don’t have that many needs. We realize
that “enough” is not defined by the largest quantity we can imagine but rather by the minimum amount needed to
bring us a little shared joy. The disciples share what they have.
Everyone is fed. And once all is said and done, there are leftovers. The secret
is that there is more than enough. “Help Me, Holy Spirit!”Galatians 5:22-26May 30, 2010
Last Sunday, with new members joining, with lay preachers in the pulpit and with a congregational meeting following,
it completely slipped past me that it was Pentecost Sunday, the day on which we remember the entry of the Holy Spirit into
the life of the early church. Oops! As I’ve said before, along with Christmas
and Easter, Pentecost is one of the three most important days in the church’s liturgical year. Somehow,
I don’t think we would forget the other two! As I’ve thought about it this week, maybe the
error is tempered a little bit by how lively and full of the Spirit last Sunday morning was.
Today is Trinity Sunday, a morning set aside for recognizing the three experiences of God’s presence, as creator,
as the incarnate one, and as the Spirit. Now, there may be no Christian doctrine that can turn quite so
quickly into an abstract theological discussion as the notion of the trinity. I believe, though, as I’ve
already suggested to the careful listeners, that before there was a doctrine, there were experiences. Faithful
people first had distinctly different experiences of God’s presence. Later, faithful theologians
tried to describe how our experiences of God could be so different and still be experiences of one God. For
better or for worse, what we were left with was the notion of the trinity.
This morning, I want to talk about the experiences, not the doctrine. You know the language:
“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...Amen.” You hear that
language every Sunday. The question I want you to ask yourself is this: “Where
in your experience do you meet God, the Father (or Parent or Creator, if you want)? Where in your experience
do you meet God, the Son? Where in your experience do you meet God, the Holy Spirit? The
question is not how you conceive of that God. The question is how you meet that God in the course of a
day. I have a theory but I’m not going to share it with you until we talk about experience first.
I’m guessing that we have all experienced God the Father (creator or parent) though we may or may not have named
our experience that way. My mother tells the story about the day I ran home from school to tell her, “God
sure made a wonderful day today!” Lots of other kids may have felt the same way about that day and
not used the same words. I grew up with faithful parents. I learned the language of
faith by osmosis. It was beautiful outside. There was no question God was responsible
for that. (In retrospect, the kids I feel the worst for are not necessarily the ones without the faithful
parents to teach them the God language. The kids I worry about are the ones whose parents taught them that
a beautiful day wasn’t worth noticing!) Most of us meet God the Father (creator/parent)
in nature. The moon rises out of the lake. The sunrise or sunset catches our eye.
The seasons change. We experience this form of God when we stand and hold our newborn child.
We experience this form of God when we finally get wise enough to see what a gift it is to open our eyes in the morning.
We experience this God when we finally realize what a miracle a healthy day really is. God the Father
(creator/parent) is responsible for all that is and for the fact that I am. God the Father (creator/parent)
is the Source. You can buy into or not buy into creation in seven days as far as I’m concerned.
The far deeper, far more important question is can you get in touch with the gift that this life and this world really
are. If so, then you may want to toss the complaint list in life and learn what it means to live gratefully
and responsibly and carefully. I go to the lakes of Northern Minnesota, in part,
to get reacquainted with God the Father (creator/parent). Although we live in a wonderful place that is
filled with great people and awesome beauty, sometimes I have to go to a different place to remember this. I
need to hold a fish and see a moose and swim in cold water. I need to wake at 3:00 a.m. and feel the breath
knocked out of me be the vastness of the night sky. I need the things that remind me of how much larger
the world is than my little point of view. I need to be reminded that the world doesn’t revolve around
me.
This last trip, after an incredible morning of fishing, after an unbelievable shore lunch of walleyes, the morning
was topped off as we sat in our canoes, ready to fish again. Two eagles came gliding down the lake to swoop
by the spot where we had cleaned our fish. Talons grabbed a little fish guts on the pass, food to be carried
back to their nest. The four of us there were cordially invited by life to realize that we are a part of
something far larger, far deeper, far more majestic than ourselves.
We also experience God, the Son in our lifetimes. In part, we meet this form of God when we go far
enough into the New Testament to have Jesus of Nazareth come to life and jump off the page. We meet this
God when the stories of who that man was become a part of who we are and how we see the world. However,
concretely, we meet that God, here and now, in the moments when our struggles and conflicts in being a human being line up
with the very struggles and conflicts that Jesus addressed. Jesus pointed out the gaps between
who people thought they were and who they actually were. Jesus pointed out the gaps between whom God intended
for them to be and who they were choosing to be. We meet God, the Son, in those very same gaps.
Most importantly, though, we meet God, the Son, not just in those gaps but in the grace that comes our way, in the
hard work of learning to love ourselves, in the unspeakable awe of God’s presence coming to life through someone who
loves us, and in the slowly dawning realization that we don’t have to hide who we are because God knows exactly who
we are and loves us nevertheless. I suspect most of you know what I’m talking about.
Okay...now for the theory. My theory is that most people can connect to God, the Father (creator/parent)
and most people can connect to God, the Son. However, my theory is that most people have a more difficult
time connecting to God, the Holy Spirit. I remember when I went to seminary, there were Spirit driven people
there. I would listen to them and think, “What are you talking about?” Sadly,
somehow, I think it has become almost taboo to ask that question. In all honesty and to my utter amazement,
in twenty-five years of ministry, it is the experience of God as the Holy Spirit which has turned out to be most powerful
for me.
Jesus spoke during his life and in that strange interlude period between his resurrection and his ascension about the
one who would come after him, about an advocate, a counselor, a helper. This one would be a guide to his
followers. This one would be the one to lead them. In the earliest days of the church,
our ancestors talked about the presence of the Holy Spirit which seemed to lead to things that are so foreign to us:
speaking in tongues and interpreting tongues and prophesizing, to name some of the most uncomfortable activities.
We get pictures in our minds of the Pentecostals on television, rolling in the aisles and dancing and waving their
arms for dear life. We think to ourselves, “If that’s the Holy Spirit at work then I hope the
Holy Spirit keeps her distance from me!” However, I invite you to go back to those names
that Jesus used: advocate, counselor, helper. Life is complicated enough, just
trying to hold onto a job and put food on the table, just trying to raise decent kids, just trying to be a halfway respectable
version of a husband or a wife or a friend. Take all those complications and try to live something deeper,
something more faithful, something with more integrity than just getting through moment to moment and you make the complications
exponentially harder. Is there anyone here who couldn’t use an advocate, a counselor, a helper?
Is there anyone here who couldn’t use a guide? Sure, there’s a lot of cheap, shallow
advice available. Sure, there are plenty of folks who might be more than happy to make your decisions for
you. What Jesus is talking about, though, is an intimate, comforting, guiding relationship with God.
God wants to be that close. If you listen to our text with those “ears”
on, you might begin to hear the promise of the Holy Spirit in a different way. The promise is not that
you’ll speak in gibberish or that you will have the gift of interpreting gibberish. The promise is
not that you’ll be able to quit your day job and open a little home office predicting the future. The
promise is that God understands what a struggle this life can be and God is ready to join us in that struggle.
God wants to be that close. God wants to help. In our text this morning, Paul is writing to
the church at Galatia, a group of folks who were having a real struggle just getting along, much less being all that Christian.
Toward the end of that letter, Paul writes to them about the fruits of the Spirit. Those fruits
are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I suspect
that the Galatians, just like us, heard that list, took one look at their lives and thought, “I don’t see a whole
lot of fruit around here!” Maybe, like us, they were haunted by the knowledge that such things were
what God intended for them to live. However, they had to be acutely aware of how far they were falling
short. Part of being a faithful person is being honest enough to see how we are falling short.
However, Paul’s message wasn’t that they should give up. Paul’s message was that
they should be guided by the Spirit toward such things. Our connection to the Holy Spirit rests in the
moments when we can take stock of our lives and pray, “Help me, Holy Spirit!” I’m losing
my patience here. Help me, Holy Spirit to be more patient. I’m so tempted to be
anything but loving right now. Help me, Holy Spirit to be more loving than I would otherwise ever be.
I’d love nothing more than to attack this person who just attacked me. It would feel so good
to just let them have a dose of their own medicine! Help me, Holy Spirit, to be gentle instead.
Or, in a moment of particular challenge, I realize how driven I am by impulses and wants. Help me,
Holy Spirit, to demonstrate just a little bit of self-control. If we are willing to be honest with God
and with ourselves, the Holy Spirit helps us. We still have to struggle. There are things
which God can’t do for us but there is not a thing which God can’t do with us.
The trick, of course, is that you have to learn to recognize God’s help. Maybe that light
turning red was a gift so that I’d slow down long enough to think what I just thought. Maybe that
person who called me was God’s gift because they made me laugh which gave me a chance to breathe. Maybe
the demands of caring for this person are a gift of the Spirit, a chance to learn what love really is. And
maybe one of God’s greatest gifts through the Holy Spirit is that I feel peaceful and whole even in the midst of a life
full of struggles.
On Trinity Sunday, I invite you to ask how your life might change if you opened your heart to being guided by the Spirit.
Help us, Holy Spirit!“Who is my mother?”Mark 3:31-35May 9, 2010
Before you could do a single thing for yourself, maybe because you couldn’t do a single thing for yourself, before
you could even utter the word, “God,” you had one: your mother. She held
you and comforted you and fed you and changed you. Her goal was to meet your needs. She
slept when you slept. When you woke up, even in the middle of the night, she woke up with you.
In those infant days, she knew you like no one else knew you. Or, then again, maybe, for some of us here this
morning, that wasn’t the story of your mother. Maybe you were the last in a long line of children
and she was worn out. Maybe she wasn’t mothered all that much herself and wasn’t quite sure
what to do. Maybe being a mother wasn’t her strength. Maybe her own struggles
got in the way. The interesting thing, though, is that even if this was the case, when you were an infant,
before you reached your teens and decided it was your job and your right to judge your mother, she was just as much your “God”
as anyone else’s mother was theirs’. You didn’t know any different. What
did you have to compare her to? Whether you were blessed with the incredibly
competent, attentive mother or the incredibly limited mother or, like most of us, you had a mother who was somewhere in between,
as an infant, your mother was the focal point on which your world turned. And, of course, whichever mother
you had, there came a day when that mother disappointed you. “Why can’t I have all the cookies
in the cookie jar? Why can’t I draw with markers on the wall? Why can’t
I run across the street?” We wanted whatever we wanted and our mother’s had the audacity to
say, “No!” The nerve of these women! And when they did, we stomped our feet
and crossed our arms across our chests and cried out to the heavens, “You are a bad, bad mother.”
Of course, at this point, our mothers longed for the days before we had words. Of course, also at
this point, our mothers began their descent from their Godlike status. And, of course, we were on to something
true: Moms aren’t God. Long after infancy is over, a lot of people still
struggle to forgive their mothers for being human beings. Kate Braestrup, in her wonderful book, “Marriage
and Other Acts of Charity,” asks this question: “Why is it so difficult to recognize your own
mother as a human being?” My answer is that it is so hard to accept my mother as human because we
spend some of the most formative years of our lives believing she isn’t. We believe this not because
she told us she wasn’t but because the net total of the caring, loving, kind and comforting things she did for us convinced
us that she wasn’t like anyone else. She was there for us in such amazing ways that we got used to
it until the day when the unforgivable happened: when she failed to do what we wanted or she failed to
be who we wanted her to be. Bad mommy! Sadly, there are still a lot of grownups walking
around devoting a certain amount of their daily energy, one way or another, to uttering that plaintive cry: bad
mommy! Maybe that cry limits the ways you are available as a parent, whether you’re a father or a
mother. Maybe that cry shapes the choices you make as you accumulate all the creature comforts you can
grab as compensation. Whatever the impact of those “leftovers” might be, I’d like to
offer some deep theological and psychological advice on this mother’s day: let it go! Chances are
that your mother did the best she could, a notion that most of us have to come to grips with as we evaluate our own adult
efforts in this life. Chances are that if you could see the videotape of what your mother had to grow up
with, you would understand the videotape of the time you shared with her so much better. Chances are that
if you could crawl inside her skin and feel the fears and doubts inside her and feel her struggles, you would know that she
didn’t do what she did to make you crazy. She did what she did out of her own brokenness.
And if you came to understand these things, you would finally begin to see that even Mom was one of us, a “piece
of work,” a character, a one-of-a-kind, genuine human being. Your mother was who she was and is who she is
still, even if she “is” simply in your heart and in the memories you carry of her. Two interesting
things follow if you can accept who she is and not resent her for not being God. First, the loving, comforting,
kind, attentive things she did (and probably still does if she’s still with us) are even more amazing. It’s
one thing for a God to be such things. It is entirely another thing for a broken human being to show up
and love like that. In fact, what you might start to see is that though your mother wasn’t God, she
might well have been, at least for some of us here today, the first experience we had of God working through a human being.
She wasn’t God. What she was in her best moments was a channel of God’s grace--which
is an amazingly powerful thing to be. Second, beyond even being a channel of God’s
grace, what you come to see in the unique character of your mother is the singular person she will always be in your life.
No one knows you the way she knows you. Unless you had a mother who was really, really limited in
the attention she was able to give, she knows the truth about you. Whoever you’ve convinced yourself
and the people around you that you are, your mom knows the deeper truth. She knows better.
She literally has the pictures--the ones when you had no teeth or happened to be wearing no clothes and running around
in the back yard. She also has the one of that awful tux you wore to the prom! Shockingly,
rather than blackmail us with those photos and memories though, rather than get angry at us for being fully human and broken,
what mothers tend to do is find very clever ways to gently remind us that we are human and that in the end that is okay.
If we can forgive them for knowing what they know, what we come to see is that they forgave us a long time ago for
being who we are.
Having said all this, I invite you to consider for a moment yet another connection between you and Jesus of Nazareth:
he had a mother, too. If you listened to the text, he also had brothers and sisters, as well.
(For those of you who have struggled with having an older brother, imagine what it must have been like to have Jesus
“leading the pack.”) As our text unfolds, Jesus is teaching a large crowd of people.
He’s a grown man (probably thirty years old.) He has left home (which very few people did
in those days.) As the oldest son, he has left his family and all their needs behind (which would have
put him very much at odds with the culture’s expectations.) He has abandoned a good career.
Having once been a carpenter like his father, (we think), Jesus has started his new “career” as a homeless
teacher, preacher and healer. Though it might be really hard for us to admit, most people in Jesus’
day would have viewed him as a bad son. I suspect, though, that Mary had never forgotten
the things she had heard before Jesus was born: that he would be the Prince of Peace; that he would be
a Mighty Counselor. Though she may not have grasped what such things meant then or even thirty years later,
she must have still wondered when such prophecies would be fulfilled. She must have known in her heart
that Jesus was meant to be more than a carpenter. She must have remembered Simeon’s words to her,
spoken when Jesus was only a week old, that this child would break her heart. These would have been the
things that she, as a mother, knew that no one else knew. And because she knew them, she must not have
been all that shocked when he left home. Chances are that your mother understood in her
heart when you left home, too. She understood, not because you were destined to be the Prince of Peace,
but because she knew that her job in raising you and loving you was ultimately to let you go discover who you were meant to
be and what you were meant to do. Whatever the leftovers might be that we need to let go of when it comes
to our mothers, once again, our mothers likely got their first: they let us go when it was time to go.
Jesus is following his calling. He’s being who he is meant to be. Then,
his family shows up. Just before they show up, he is arguing theology and the law with the Scribes.
He’s doing battle with folks who don’t like him or his ideas one bit. In fact, in the
end, those Scribes, who had a lot of authority in the eyes of many people, declare that Jesus is possessed by an unclean spirit.
He’s nuts! He’s bonkers! He’s satanic!
At that moment, his mother and brothers and sisters show up. Are they there to point out what a
bad son and brother he was, to chew him out for the ways he has abandoned them? No...they just want to
see him. They send word into the room through his followers that he is there. Would
it have been tempting to run to his mother and his brothers and sisters for comfort given the declarations that the Scribes
had just made? It had to be. What he was already doing was hard. It
was only going to get harder. I suspect that the thought that he should just pack up and go home had to
occur from time to time. Instead of speaking to his family, Jesus speaks
to his followers and tells them that they are his family, that anyone who seeks to do God’s will is his mother and his
brother and his sister. Around here, we suggest this truth all the time when we look at each other
and say, “We are a church family.” What Jesus was saying and what I think we are saying to
one another is that when it is God who brings us together and when we are bound to one another in being God’s servants
we become channels of God’s grace for one another. God is at work through broken human beings.
We are bound to one another as family. I like to think that Jesus eventually met with
his family. I like to think that his family was high functioning enough and loving and caring enough to
recognize that he was doing what he needed to do, whether they understood that calling or not. I like to
think that the “family” connections among those followers were powerful enough to be a healing force for those
whose families had not been so high functioning, just as the “church family” has been a healing force for some
of us. What I know is that wherever there is care and comfort and kindness and grace, whether given or
received, a mother is honored and God is there.
“Shelter
from the Storm”Revelation 21:1-6May 2, 2010
This last Monday, I went to an appointment at Rush Hospital with Barb Mortimer. As we made the drive,
cars whose drivers clearly seemed to be on some sort of urgent mission whizzed past me and a semi seemed bound and determined
to not let us merge into traffic. Welcome to the cutthroat, “dog-eat-dog” world of the Kennedy
and the Eisenhower. I just tried to stay in my lane and avoid the potholes.
The chaos was slightly less when we pulled into the hospital entrance: “Barb...let’s
splurge. Let’s use the valet parking!” In a moment that still strikes me
as odd, some man I’ve never met walked up to me and held out his hand. I gave him the keys to my
car. He gave me a tiny piece of paper. Some trade, huh? Is he really
the valet? (Come on...tell me that thought hasn’t crossed your mind!) Then, of
course, there is that secondary fear when you wonder, “How much will this cost?” In Chicago,
you have to be prepared for just about anything: “Sir...that’ll be sixty-five dollars!”
Turned out the valet was the valet and the parking didn’t cost that much.
Everyone in the hospital was on a mission. On another day, it might have been the crowd outside
Wrigley Field before the big game. Not this day. People weren’t looking for their
seats. They were looking for their doctors, for elevator one or elevator three. They were looking for relief
or a cure or a little hope or just some simple compassion. We found elevator three.
The doors on the elevator opened with a “Bing!” and we walked down to a main entry: “gynecological
oncology” read the sign. “Do you have an appointment? Do you have insurance?”
Two great fears invoked at the same time: What I got the wrong day and what if I can’t pay
for what’s about to happen? Forget cancer...can you pay? Of course, the questions have to be asked. Yet,
in the sequence of moments of getting there--the traffic, the parking, the search, the arrival--the cumulative effect was
that my stomach was churning. I remember I’m just the support person, not the patient, and I’m
churning that way. “Barb, how are you doing?”
We’re invited to find a seat in the waiting room. In just a few steps, the narrow corridor
of the entryway opens into a room that is roughly half the size of our sanctuary. We find two seats together
on the other end of the room. It’s a relief to sit down. Then, I begin to look
around. The room is packed. The crowd is a complete cross-section of human beings.
There are African-Americans and Asians and Hispanics and plain old white folks like us. If you look
carefully, you’ll see the signs of all the religions: the Star of David on a necklace, the rosary
beads in a hand, an Islamic headdress on the person sitting a few feet away. Folks are old and young.
Some look completely healthy and others are clearly having a hard time. If you listened carefully,
you could pick out languages from around the world. All the things that divide people in the rest
of life were there and visible. And yet, the feeling in that room was not one of division but of what was
shared in common: a cancer battle for the patients, wherever they were in that journey, and the struggle
for the care givers to figure out how to help when someone you love is in the fight of their lives. In
other circumstances, we might have feared each other. In other circumstances, we might have fought each
other for a place in the highway’s fast lane. In this room, though, when people made eye contact
what was communicated was compassion: “I don’t know you but I know something powerful about
you. Maybe for a moment, just as human beings who are struggling, we’re connected.”
This compassion and connection was reflected in the care of the staff. When it was time for an appointment,
I watched the nursing staff come out and greet the “veterans” as old friends, hands held hands, the hugs were
sincere. And when it was our turn for an appointment, we were met by a doctor and a nurse who weren’t
going anywhere until all our questions were answered. They kept looking Barb in the eye and saying, “You’re
a person. We care more for people than treatment protocols.” They cared.
We felt cared for. It wasn’t until Tuesday that I read this
morning’s text. On Monday afternoon in the middle of the city, for a little while, Barb and I shared
a glimpse of what our text this morning calls, “the New Jerusalem.” Having had the experience,
I smiled as I read those words. Every now and then, the veil is lifted and we get to see how the world
would work if it functioned as God intends it to function. Of course, sitting on that cancer floor, it
wouldn’t be hard to say, “Well, if that was really true then wouldn’t all the cancer in that room just disappear
and wouldn’t those patients rise up and dance together?” As our text says, wouldn’t the
breathtaking, bone-chilling pain be gone and wouldn’t it be God right there in person, wiping away the tears?
Some day...and what a day that will be! In the meantime, for a moment or two, we are cordially invited
to see what it looks like when God works through human beings. We are invited to ease each other’s
pain. We are invited to wipe away one another’s tears. When we do so, we create
shelter from the storm. My storm shelter of choice in life seems to be
a tent. At first glance, it looks so fragile, just thin metal poles and some fabric. The
truth is that it is temporary and mobile by design. It is meant to be used on the move with ease.
And yet, with the darkest clouds I’ve ever seen bearing down on us (and remember, I grew up early on in St. Louis
and have seen plenty of dark clouds), we have fought the rising winds to get that fragile tent up and then thrown ourselves
in, just in time. Flopped inside that tent with a friend, I feel safe. The tent stays
dry. It collapses and expands with the wind as if it is breathing but it does not break. We
have shelter from the storm. Life is full of storms and struggles.
Like the people in that waiting room, the storms come in every possible form. As I’ve said
many times before from this pulpit, faith does not provide immunity against the hard things of this life. Faithful
people lose their jobs. Faithful people get divorced. Faithful people pull their hair
out in frustration over trying to raise a challenging child. Faithful people get cancer or Parkinson's
or Alzheimer’s disease. Faithful people’s hearts break. Faithful people cry, one tear at a
time. Faithful people feel pain and the pain is real. The storms come. The question
is, “Where will you find shelter from the storm?” Another word for shelter is “sanctuary.”
Before Christian churches were large buildings with beautiful worship spaces, a church was a gathering of people.
Sanctuary was what people experienced when they gathered and discovered that God was in their midst. Sanctuary
was what people experienced when despite the ways that the world worked, the veil was lifted and people got a chance to glimpse
the world working just the way that God intended for it to work. Like the tent, sanctuary was something
as temporary and mobile and fragile as the willingness of human beings together to live as God intended for them to live.
And however briefly people were able to sustain that effort (because, after all, people are people), for that length
of time, people found shelter from the storm. At the time of the writing of the Book of Revelation,
the storms were raging and Christians were suffering, not only suffering through the maladies of all human beings but suffering
specifically because they were Christians. 200 years later, Christianity would become the official state
religion of the Roman Empire. However, in the present, Christians were being persecuted. After
decades of being hunted down, the latest Emperor, Domitian, insisted that all people address him as, “My Lord and My
God. All people were required to pledge allegiance to him. Those who refused (most of
whom were Christians) would be arrested, persecuted and killed. Imagine the pain. Imagine
the fear. Imagine the tears. The writer of Revelation’s message to the
seven churches he was addressing was that in the midst of the storm, the job was to be the church. Even
if the Emperor reigns in the world, God reigns within the faith community when we deliberately and intentionally create a
sacred space that is about joy and care and compassion and when we banish fear and violence and doom and gloom and death from
the premises. When we make the choices to live this way together, whether we happen to be in a church or
we happen to be in a waiting room in a hospital or we happen to be on an expressway in Chicago and dare to let someone merge,
God is in our midst. The veil is lifted. With God’s help, we create shelter.
With God’s help, we weather the storms. There are wonderful sanctuaries in churches that
are truly sacred spaces. The question, though, is how we create sanctuary in the rest of our lives.
Our daily choices are the brick and mortar with which sanctuaries are built. Out of a heartfelt
desire to live as much as possible in the New Jerusalem, in a world that works as God intends it to work, we are challenged
to make our choices deliberately and consciously. How can I help? How can I demonstrate
that I care? How can I create space for God’s presence? What would it look like
if this moment worked the way that God would have it work and what’s my part in making room for that to happen?
By asking such questions, the chance to live in the New Jerusalem comes with us, wherever life takes us, whatever storms
may come our way. “Shelter
from the Storm”Revelation 21:1-6May 2, 2010
This last Monday, I went to an appointment at Rush Hospital with Barb Mortimer. As we made the drive,
cars whose drivers clearly seemed to be on some sort of urgent mission whizzed past me and a semi seemed bound and determined
to not let us merge into traffic. Welcome to the cutthroat, “dog-eat-dog” world of the Kennedy
and the Eisenhower. I just tried to stay in my lane and avoid the potholes.
The chaos was slightly less when we pulled into the hospital entrance: “Barb...let’s
splurge. Let’s use the valet parking!” In a moment that still strikes me
as odd, some man I’ve never met walked up to me and held out his hand. I gave him the keys to my
car. He gave me a tiny piece of paper. Some trade, huh? Is he really
the valet? (Come on...tell me that thought hasn’t crossed your mind!) Then, of
course, there is that secondary fear when you wonder, “How much will this cost?” In Chicago,
you have to be prepared for just about anything: “Sir...that’ll be sixty-five dollars!”
Turned out the valet was the valet and the parking didn’t cost that much.
Everyone in the hospital was on a mission. On another day, it might have been the crowd outside
Wrigley Field before the big game. Not this day. People weren’t looking for their
seats. They were looking for their doctors, for elevator one or elevator three. They were looking for relief
or a cure or a little hope or just some simple compassion. We found elevator three.
The doors on the elevator opened with a “Bing!” and we walked down to a main entry: “gynecological
oncology” read the sign. “Do you have an appointment? Do you have insurance?”
Two great fears invoked at the same time: What I got the wrong day and what if I can’t pay
for what’s about to happen? Forget cancer...can you pay? Of course, the questions have to be asked. Yet,
in the sequence of moments of getting there--the traffic, the parking, the search, the arrival--the cumulative effect was
that my stomach was churning. I remember I’m just the support person, not the patient, and I’m
churning that way. “Barb, how are you doing?”
We’re invited to find a seat in the waiting room. In just a few steps, the narrow corridor
of the entryway opens into a room that is roughly half the size of our sanctuary. We find two seats together
on the other end of the room. It’s a relief to sit down. Then, I begin to look
around. The room is packed. The crowd is a complete cross-section of human beings.
There are African-Americans and Asians and Hispanics and plain old white folks like us. If you look
carefully, you’ll see the signs of all the religions: the Star of David on a necklace, the rosary
beads in a hand, an Islamic headdress on the person sitting a few feet away. Folks are old and young.
Some look completely healthy and others are clearly having a hard time. If you listened carefully,
you could pick out languages from around the world. All the things that divide people in the rest
of life were there and visible. And yet, the feeling in that room was not one of division but of what was
shared in common: a cancer battle for the patients, wherever they were in that journey, and the struggle
for the care givers to figure out how to help when someone you love is in the fight of their lives. In
other circumstances, we might have feared each other. In other circumstances, we might have fought each
other for a place in the highway’s fast lane. In this room, though, when people made eye contact
what was communicated was compassion: “I don’t know you but I know something powerful about
you. Maybe for a moment, just as human beings who are struggling, we’re connected.”
This compassion and connection was reflected in the care of the staff. When it was time for an appointment,
I watched the nursing staff come out and greet the “veterans” as old friends, hands held hands, the hugs were
sincere. And when it was our turn for an appointment, we were met by a doctor and a nurse who weren’t
going anywhere until all our questions were answered. They kept looking Barb in the eye and saying, “You’re
a person. We care more for people than treatment protocols.” They cared.
We felt cared for. It wasn’t until Tuesday that I read this
morning’s text. On Monday afternoon in the middle of the city, for a little while, Barb and I shared
a glimpse of what our text this morning calls, “the New Jerusalem.” Having had the experience,
I smiled as I read those words. Every now and then, the veil is lifted and we get to see how the world
would work if it functioned as God intends it to function. Of course, sitting on that cancer floor, it
wouldn’t be hard to say, “Well, if that was really true then wouldn’t all the cancer in that room just disappear
and wouldn’t those patients rise up and dance together?” As our text says, wouldn’t the
breathtaking, bone-chilling pain be gone and wouldn’t it be God right there in person, wiping away the tears?
Some day...and what a day that will be! In the meantime, for a moment or two, we are cordially invited
to see what it looks like when God works through human beings. We are invited to ease each other’s
pain. We are invited to wipe away one another’s tears. When we do so, we create
shelter from the storm. My storm shelter of choice in life seems to be
a tent. At first glance, it looks so fragile, just thin metal poles and some fabric. The
truth is that it is temporary and mobile by design. It is meant to be used on the move with ease.
And yet, with the darkest clouds I’ve ever seen bearing down on us (and remember, I grew up early on in St. Louis
and have seen plenty of dark clouds), we have fought the rising winds to get that fragile tent up and then thrown ourselves
in, just in time. Flopped inside that tent with a friend, I feel safe. The tent stays
dry. It collapses and expands with the wind as if it is breathing but it does not break. We
have shelter from the storm. Life is full of storms and struggles.
Like the people in that waiting room, the storms come in every possible form. As I’ve said
many times before from this pulpit, faith does not provide immunity against the hard things of this life. Faithful
people lose their jobs. Faithful people get divorced. Faithful people pull their hair
out in frustration over trying to raise a challenging child. Faithful people get cancer or Parkinson's
or Alzheimer’s disease. Faithful people’s hearts break. Faithful people cry, one tear at a
time. Faithful people feel pain and the pain is real. The storms come. The question
is, “Where will you find shelter from the storm?” Another word for shelter is “sanctuary.”
Before Christian churches were large buildings with beautiful worship spaces, a church was a gathering of people.
Sanctuary was what people experienced when they gathered and discovered that God was in their midst. Sanctuary
was what people experienced when despite the ways that the world worked, the veil was lifted and people got a chance to glimpse
the world working just the way that God intended for it to work. Like the tent, sanctuary was something
as temporary and mobile and fragile as the willingness of human beings together to live as God intended for them to live.
And however briefly people were able to sustain that effort (because, after all, people are people), for that length
of time, people found shelter from the storm. At the time of the writing of the Book of Revelation,
the storms were raging and Christians were suffering, not only suffering through the maladies of all human beings but suffering
specifically because they were Christians. 200 years later, Christianity would become the official state
religion of the Roman Empire. However, in the present, Christians were being persecuted. After
decades of being hunted down, the latest Emperor, Domitian, insisted that all people address him as, “My Lord and My
God. All people were required to pledge allegiance to him. Those who refused (most of
whom were Christians) would be arrested, persecuted and killed. Imagine the pain. Imagine
the fear. Imagine the tears. The writer of Revelation’s message to the
seven churches he was addressing was that in the midst of the storm, the job was to be the church. Even
if the Emperor reigns in the world, God reigns within the faith community when we deliberately and intentionally create a
sacred space that is about joy and care and compassion and when we banish fear and violence and doom and gloom and death from
the premises. When we make the choices to live this way together, whether we happen to be in a church or
we happen to be in a waiting room in a hospital or we happen to be on an expressway in Chicago and dare to let someone merge,
God is in our midst. The veil is lifted. With God’s help, we create shelter.
With God’s help, we weather the storms. There are wonderful sanctuaries in churches that
are truly sacred spaces. The question, though, is how we create sanctuary in the rest of our lives.
Our daily choices are the brick and mortar with which sanctuaries are built. Out of a heartfelt
desire to live as much as possible in the New Jerusalem, in a world that works as God intends it to work, we are challenged
to make our choices deliberately and consciously. How can I help? How can I demonstrate
that I care? How can I create space for God’s presence? What would it look like
if this moment worked the way that God would have it work and what’s my part in making room for that to happen?
By asking such questions, the chance to live in the New Jerusalem comes with us, wherever life takes us, whatever storms
may come our way.
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