From the Intersection

Don't Miss the Rising Sun

2012-02-09T21:37:00.000-05:00

For many years now, I’ve had a growing conviction that the great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner was right to have claimed: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.” He meant that people will either have a dynamic, immediate, and experiential relationship with God, or they will be bereft of faith. Faith will either affect ordinary awareness, create new ways of living, and energize every dimension of life, or it will be formulaic, superficial, and empty.

The rapid pace and relentless pressure of our lives, the questions of truth raised by unavoidable pluralism, the explosion of knowledge and technology, and the ongoing dilemmas of the human condition all conspire to make belief difficult. It’s always true but, it’s especially true in such a climate: faith can’t survive on the meager nourishment provided by the mind alone--by ideas, doctrines, and arguments. Faith needs the nurture which comes from encounters with the Divine and experiences of the Holy.

In his 1993 memoir, Life Work, poet Donald Hall admitted that some of the New Testament’s claims about Jesus left him with questions and confusion. “But,” he wrote:

. . . when Jesus feeds multitudes; when he routs the money-changers; when he despairs and when he thirsts; when he tells parables and explains them; when he tells the crowd about to stone a woman to death that the man without sin should throw the first stone; when he eats with his friends the tax collectors; when he dies crucified--then I believe he rises again . . . It is all present or it is nothing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 123)

Mysticism is a way for “it all” to be always “present”—for God to be immediately and palpably near--at the level of visceral and emotional experience.

We don’t simply decide, of course, that we will become mystics. Instead, we learn to spend time in shared worship and solitary silence; to listen; to open our eyes and hearts to the wonders of creation; to pay attention to our feelings, longings, fears and hopes; to share our lives with those who need our love and whose love we need; to surrender to, rather than attempt to conquer, mystery; and to expect the embrace of the sacred Spirit. These practices open us to awareness of the God who is always present with us.

Anthony de Mello described the role of such practices in this brief exchange between a wise teacher and a disciple:

Disciple: “Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?"

Teacher: “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning."

Disciple: “Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?"

Teacher: "To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise."

What to Do with the Time that is Given to Us

2012-01-30T07:11:00.000-05:00

At a critical point in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, the Hobbit whose burden it was to carry the Ring toward its destruction—the destruction that would save Middle Earth—has grown weary and disheartened. He’s afraid and uncertain. He says to the wise wizard, Gandalf the Grey, “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened." Gandalf replies: "So do all who come to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

We don’t get to choose the times we live in, and we can’t completely control, no matter how strong and vigilant we are, what happens to us. None of us chose to live in the wake of terror attacks, a foreclosure crisis, and the collapse of real estate values. We didn’t choose an era of high unemployment, growing homelessness, and alarmingly expensive health care. We didn’t choose these times and conditions.

And, some things have happened to us that confuse, frustrate and disappoint us. They feel undeserved and unfair.

Disease intruded or disaster struck and dashed our dreams just as we were starting to live them.

Failure came and took away our confidence.

Or, we gave everything we had to give—our hardest work, highest hopes, and deepest yearnings—to people who did not, would not and, for that reason, could not know and love us.

There are times when we understand Frodo: “I wish this had never come to me. I wish this had never happened.” And we need Gandalf’s wisdom: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Life isn’t so much about what happens to us as it is about what happens in and with us as a result of what happens to us. What happens in us and with us can be hopeful and healing, joyful and renewing, if we make decisions that are consistent with who we are and what matters.

We are children of God, and what matters most is finally and always love. The overarching priority for any follower of Jesus is compassionate, creative and tenacious love for other people and devoted, growing and grateful love for God. The Great Commandment is also a constant invitation: keep learning how to love God with all you are and your neighbor as yourself."

So we ask, over and over again: what responses can I make that will help me to become more empathetic, understanding, open, and giving? More committed to the ways of peace, mercy, justice and joy? How might the circumstances I face stretch my heart, widen my mind, clarify my values, and strengthen my courage? How can the challenges and opportunities I face become my teachers in the ways of love?

Dr. King and The Beloved Community

2012-01-16T18:03:00.000-05:00

I grew up in Atlanta—Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hometown—during the most intense days of the civil rights movement. The center of the movement was in Atlanta’s “Sweet Auburn” district, a vibrant African-American business and professional district, where the Ebenezer Baptist Church also stood. Ebenezer was, of course, the church in which Dr. King shaped his message and found his strength Also in Sweet Auburn were the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the organizations that helped to guide and coordinate the movement. From my earliest days, therefore, I knew about Marin Luther King, Jr., but not all of the people among whom I grew up honored him. Many of them in fact feared him, because he called into question almost everything they had been taught about race, class, and status.

Since I was in Atlanta, Dr. King’s image and voice were often on television. His speeches were broadcast on stations that were probably reluctant to carry them, but the eyes of the nation were on us, and they had no choice but to cover this local phenomenon who riveted the attention to the rest of the nation. I remember the power of what he said. There was, of course, the sheer dynamism of his voice, his poetic gift for choosing precisely the right word, his impeccable sense of timing, and his unmistakable passion—a passion that burned in his heart and radiated from his life.

And, there were his eyes, I was always transfixed by his eyes. They seemed simultaneously sad and hopeful. They were trained on a distant vista which he could see, but I could not yet perceive.

Even more, though, there was the sheer truth of what he said. As a child, I knew deep in my soul that, no matter what the grown-ups around me though of him, his words echoed what they had taught me to sing in Sunday School: “Jesus loves the little children/ all the children of the world,/red and yellow black and white,/they are precious in his sight./Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I also knew that his words resonated, with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag we said every morning at school; that pledge had convinced me that America was supposed to be a place where there was “liberty and justice for all.” Dr. King was speaking the truth, and I knew it, and his truth, slowly at first, and often painfully, is, setting me free.

Notice, that I said “is setting me free,” not “has set me free.” Unlearning fear and prejudice—rooting bias and hatred out of one’s heart—requires a lifetime of work. It takes discipline to make room for people against whom we have been taught to slam the door. Dr. King’s message is not something we can hear once, agree with intellectually, and be done with it. Instead, we have to ponder it over and over again, take it into our hearts, and struggle with it in our day to day living.

These days, I am challenged more and more by Dr. King’s vision of this nation as a “Beloved Community.” In his last book, he wrote:

When I speak of love, I am speaking of that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another; for love is of God: and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God: for God is love . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

In our shared life, we have to learn more about what it means to create and sustain a community of genuine and mutual love.

Dr. King knew, as we know all too well, that there are real differences between us. He wrestled with the fears caused by our racial differences, by our vast varieties of background and culture, and by our dizzying diversities of experience and conviction. He also warned us about our economic and class disparities—the chasm between rich and poor, insiders and outsiders.

You and I know all about our differences; in fact, we seem to dwell on them: black and white, red and yellow, Democrat and Republican, Occupy and Tea Party, First World and Third World, East and West, male and female, straight and gay, county kids and city kids, conservative and liberal, agnostic and seeker.

These differences are real, and we cannot pretend that they do not exist. Precisely because they do exist, unless we are very careful, they will divide us from each other. If our nation is to be a Beloved Community, we are going to have to be vigilant about our own hearts, refusing to let fear win out over love. We have to find a way to live with our differences, by pressing past them to what we share in common.

Here is what we share: we are all created in God’s image, we all deserve respect and freedom, we all crave opportunity and need support, and we all have hopes and dreams that cannot come true if we fear and mistrust each other. In the Beloved Community, these things we share in common transcend what might otherwise divide us. Our differences do not have to be a reason for suspicion; they can be an invitation to learn and to grow.

In the Beloved Community, we are free to disagree with each other vigorously, but we are bound by love to treat each other with dignity. And, in the Beloved Community, no one fears that he or she will be shunned or excluded because he or she is different, because love is always greater than fear.

Head and Heart

2012-01-09T22:20:00.001-05:00

I surely understand the opening lines of Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Self Portrait”:

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can’t get along. . .

My head says: “I think.” My heart says, “I feel.” Head says, “I’ve concluded”; heart says, “I wonder.” Head says, “I know”; heart says, “I’m curious.” Head says, “I’m planning”; heart says, “Who needs a plan? Let’s just go.” Head says, “We ought”; heart says, “We can.” Head says, “This is very interesting”; heart says, “Wow.”

When it comes to faith, the head wants to think its way to God; the heart wants to be carried on the wings of love. The head wants it to make sense; the heart wants it to make joy. The head wants logic; the heart wants love. The head wants to be challenged; the heart wants to be delighted. The head wants ideas; the heart wants experience. The head is looking for evidence, proof, and understanding; the heart is reveling in mystery, surprise, and astonishment.

There’s a tension between head and heart, but we need them both. Our challenge is to make it a creative tension, so that head and heart, mind and emotions are vitally connected with one another, enriching and helping each other.

Historian Garry Wills wrote about “two force fields” in American religion. He called one the force field of the head, of the Enlightenment, and the other the force field of the heart, of the Evangelical. He noted that these two ways of approaching faith push and pull against each other in our public life, but he claimed that we need them both. A religion that is dominated too strongly by the head, the mind, becomes, “desiccated and cerebral, all light and no heat.” A religion that is driven too powerfully by the heart becomes “mindlessly enthusiastic, all heat and no light.” (Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities, pp. 550-551)

We don’t need cold light. As Miguel de Unnamuno said: “Warmth, warmth, more warmth! For we are dying of the cold and not of darkness. It is not the night that kills but the frost.” But we don’t need dark warmth, either—not fevered, fervent feeling without the guidance of reason and wisdom.

We need both, together: head and heart, mind and emotions, logic and laughter, truth and tears.

Your head—your mind, your intellect—is a great gift. I urge you to think as searchingly as you can, ask all your questions, voice your doubts, and ransack the world for knowledge.

I also urge you to open your heart. Take down your defenses; let yourself feel the glory and pain of life. Be honest about your hunger, thirst, and yearning for love, hope, and joy.

On the Threshold of a New Year

2011-12-31T09:51:00.000-05:00

Thresholds can be frightening. Our ancient ancestors felt that thresholds were dwelling places for evil spirits. They believed that stepping on a threshold made them vulnerable to the spirits which lurked there, so they were careful to avoid them. Often, they posted icons or talismans on doorposts and doorframes to ward off those dangerous forces.

Thresholds still cause us anxiety. Standing at the end of the familiar and on the verge of the new, between the comfortable and the unknown, we feel a strange mixture of both risk and opportunity—of both eagerness and reluctance.

We’re on the threshold of a new year, and we don’t know exactly what lies ahead. A lot, of course, will be the same. The writer of Ecclesiastes was convinced that “there is nothing new under the sun. What has been is what will be.”

Not everything will be the same, though. We’ll be both surprised and shocked; there will be unexpected delights and unanticipated disappointments. So, on the threshold of this new year, I am wondering: How do we prepare ourselves for a future we cannot foresee? How do we get ready for a tomorrow we cannot fully predict?

I think the answer has to do with purpose and meaning. Victor Frankl, the brilliant psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor believed that human beings can endure any what as long as we have a sense of why. We can bear-up under adversity if we feel that it isn’t useless, and we can shoulder the burden of trouble if we feel that it isn’t pointless.

Frankl knew that meaning and purpose are not found in the events of life themselves. In themselves, many of the things we experience are random, cruel, and senseless. Meaning and purpose come from the interpretations we bring to life’s events and from the stories we tell ourselves about what happens to us. Life isn’t so much about what happens to us as it is about what happens in and with us as a result of what happens to us.

To be prepared for whatever lies ahead of us in the New Year means to gain, or regain, clarity about the purpose and meaning of our lives. I've come to believe that life’s purpose has to do with the kind of people we become as we live it.

The life and teachings of Jesus have convinced me that God intends for us to experience fullness of life, which means a kind of life which is as free and joyful, as passionate for peace and justice, and as radiant with compassion and love as the life of Jesus.

I’m learning that life’s events can be bent to deepen our passion, heighten our awareness, and broaden our compassion. Everything can be lived and prayed in such a way that frees us from illusion and liberates us from denial. All of life can become our teacher in the ways of empathy and understanding and in the practices of mercy and love.

We don’t know what will happen to us in the year ahead, but we don’t need to be afraid. Together with people who care for us, and held by the God who loves us, we can use whatever happens as catalysts for growth into abundant life—life as we dream it could be and life as God means it to be.

Christmas Music Mashup

2011-12-26T07:17:00.000-05:00

Some Christmas music, like Rutter’s and Vivaldi’s magnificent Glorias and Handel’s “Hallelujah” from Messiah, is transcendent and transfiguring. It takes us to places we could never otherwise go and changes us in ways we could not otherwise be changed.

Some Christmas music, like Alvin and the Chipmunks’ “Christmas, Don’t be Late” and Alan Jackson’s “Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas),” is, well, let’s just say NOT transcendent and transfiguring. Some of it is trite, trivial, and trifling; some of it is maudlin, mawkish, and mushy. It doesn’t change us, necessarily, though sometimes it makes us change the channel.

So, when it comes to Christmas music, we’ve got (with apologies to Dickens) “the best of tunes and the worst of tunes, the music of wisdom and the music of foolishness” and a lot in-between. Listening to the radio, or hearing Muzak at the mall, sacred and secular songs of the season get all mixed up together. A classic carol gets followed by a country tear-jerker. There’s Jesus, then Santa. There are angels and elves, shepherds and snowmen, Bethlehem and the North Pole. They all stream our was as if they were somehow of the same story. If the randomness of a popular playlist framed the Christmas story for us, it might go something like this:

O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant, to see three ships come sailing in, come sailing in. Who knows where these three ships docked, since Bethlehem is landlocked? But, on the three ships are three regal-looking men, who rent camels to ride to visit Jesus and chant as they travel, “We, three kings of Orient are bearing gifts we traversed afar.” Along the way, they pick-up a hitch-hiking Little Drummer Boy, who has no gifts, since he, like Jesus, is a poor boy, too; but he says “I will play my drum for him.” A rumpa-pum-pum. Along the way, a snowstorm kicks-up; it such a bad storm that the Three Kings and the Little Drummer Boy trade their camels for a sleigh. While they wait on the sleigh to be loaded with their gifts for Jesus, they build a snowman and pretend that he is Parson Brown who says “Are you married?” They say, “No, man.”

When they’re ready to resume their journey to Jesus, they’re delayed again by cloudy, foggy skies which have hidden the star, the star, shining in the night. So they turn to a reindeer (don’t ask how a reindeer got to the Middle East) and say, “Rudolf, with your nose so bright, won’t you guide our sleigh tonight?” He says he will, but he also says his liability insurance has been canceled because, on his last gig, some child’s grandma got run over by a reindeer, namely by him. The three kings have no other options, because it would be a blue, blue, blue Christmas if they didn’t make it to the see Mary’s little boy child.

Finally on their way again, the Little Drummer Boy, tired of traveling, asks over and over again, “Are we there yet? How much longer?” The more he whines, the more the three kings wish for a silent night, holy night, when all is calm and all is bright. When, late in the night, they finally get close, they point to the city in the valley and say to each other and the tired, fussy, and impatient little boy: “O Little Town of Bethlehem!” The Drummer Boy, glad the trip is nearly over, says, “Well, joy to the world, the Lord is come. Let heaven and nature sing.” He bangs his little drum above the deep and dreamless sleep of the city, hoping to wake everyone up and get them singing, since, away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head, and Santa Claus is coming to town. When his drum isn’t enough to wake up the groggy residents of Bethlehem, he adds silver bells, silver bells and sleigh bells, so that it’s jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. With his drum, it’s actually jingle bell rock.

Once in Bethlehem, they find the road to the manger and to Mary, Joseph, and the baby. They bump into some shepherds who have already paid homage to Jesus and are on their way back to the field where they had left their sheep. The shepherds tell the kings and the Little Drummer Boy that that upon that very night, a midnight clear, they heard angels from on high, sweetly singing oe’r the plain, and the mountains in reply, echoing their glorious strain. That glorious strain is the news, news, that, right here in royal David’s city, the world’s Savior has been born. So, they say, we’re going to go tell it on the mountain, go tell it on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is born. Before they go, however, they say: We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Well, that’s not quite how it went!

Hope you enjoyed this bit of silliness which was my lighthearted attempt to help us realize how jumbled “Christ” and “culture” are in our minds and hearts. The jumbling is inevitable, I think, in a faith that is incarnational: the Word dwells among us and becomes part of everyday life. But, the trouble is when the jumble causes us to lose track of the gospel narrative, the narrative by which we sort and sift our culture and experience.

A little quiet would help

2011-12-22T18:24:00.000-05:00

In It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty and her friend Marcie argue about who will play the role of Mary in the annual Christmas pageant. Since their teacher already asked Marcie, she’s sure it will be her. But such trivial facts never bother Peppermint Patty; she says: “I'm going to ask the teacher if I can be Mary in the Christmas play this year." Marcie answers, “She already asked me, sir.” As if she hadn’t heard Marcie, Patty says, "I think I'll be great in the part." Marcie repeats, "She asked me yesterday." Ignoring her, Patty goes on, "I really like the part where the angel Gabriel talks to me." Frustrated, Marcie blurts out, "Why would Gabriel talk to you? You never listen!"

There’s more than a little bit of Peppermint Patty in some of us; we’re so full of our own ideas about how things should be that it’s hard for us to hear from the angels. The volume on our own plans is turned up so high that it drowns out the news of God’s surprising and transforming dreams for us.

For some of us, it’s not so much our own ideas and plans, but our anxiety and fear which keep us from hearing. Gnawing worry makes it hard to hear “good news of great joy.”

For some of us, it’s the pace and pressure, or the 24/7 stream of noise and images, or the constant bombardment of messages, all marked “urgent, for immediate attention.” In an 1890 Christmas column for the New York World, Mark Twain wrote:

It's my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us—the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage—may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss—except the inventor of the telephone.

These days, we might add, “except the inventor of the smart-phone, email, and text messaging. There are so many clamoring demands and jangling distractions. No wonder it’s hard for us to hear “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace.”

Thankfully, the good news keeps coming to us. Bethlehem was not the kind of place you’d expect the God of the universe to appear, but in that unlikeliest of places, Jesus was born. Christmas means God can show up anywhere, including in our lives, our families, our circumstances, and our communities.

Since the “sign” of God’s presence into human history was a baby, wrapped in bands of cloth, and lying in an animal feeding trough, God is likely to speak to us through the tender, vulnerable, and needy people in the world—the people who, like an infant, need our care and nurture. And, it is in our own experiences of vulnerability and availability that Jesus is born, and born again, in us.

That good news—that God comes to us anywhere and everywhere, especially in the places and experiences we least expect—is the news the angels want us to hear. A little quiet would help! Maybe that’s why we sing “Silent Night” . . .

Up-Close and In Detail

2011-12-15T07:20:00.000-05:00

Love is in the details. The God made known to us in Jesus takes delight in our individuality, is lavishly attentive to our hurts and hopes, and is involved in the everyday, mundane details of our lives. God embraces all time and space, but God also holds each of us in strong and tender arms. God’s love is vast and cosmic, but it is not vague and general. God loves the world, and God loves me and you and everyone.

Several years ago, just before school let out for the Christmas break, a high school history teacher invited me to come to his European history class to talk about “religion.” I told him I’d be glad to come but that “religion” was a broad topic, covering everything from Babylonian Zoroastrianism to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, with Buddhism, 12-step Groups, and Major College Football in-between. Did he have anything more specific in mind than just “religion”? Not really, he said. Then he told me the reason for the invitation: when they had studied the Reformation, his students had had a lot of questions about God, and he thought it would be good for them to hear from a few “experts,” so he was inviting me, a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, and a Unitarian minister to answer their questions.

So, I went. At one point, a student asked me, “What do you think about atheists?” I told her that I had known surprisingly few real atheists, since an atheist is a person who has a settled conviction that there is not a god—a faith that there isn’t a god. I just don’t know many people who have staked their lives on the non-existence of god. On the other hand, I said, I have known some people who are agnostics—people who aren’t sure about God. They are curious but uncertain, perhaps even hopeful but unconvinced. Most of them are searching, as all of us search, for a way to make sense out of life, to affirm that it is worth living, and to discover enough love and hope to make life’s harsh realities bearable.

After I left the school, I kept mulling over this whole question of what we believe about God. I thought about those periodic opinion polls that are a kind of snapshot of Americans’ religious beliefs. They regularly show that most Americans, well over 90% of us, affirm the existence of God. That doesn’t impress me much, because telling a pollster you think there is a God is nowhere close to the same thing as betting your whole life on the conviction that God is with us and cares about us. I came to the conclusion that, while I don’t know many comfortable agnostics—and even fewer committed atheists—I know plenty of practical atheists and functional agnostics. Day to day, in contrast to what we say, many of us live as if there were no God, or at least as if God were so aloof and disconnected from our real concerns that God doesn’t make any actual difference to us.

Do you remember the Bette Middler’s hit song, “From a Distance?” I was intrigued and even troubled that it was so popular with many Christians, because it was little more than a insipid hymn to a disinterested god. Its simple refrain summarized its lackluster faith: “God is watching us, God is watching us, from a distance.” Apparently, there are a lot of us whose real faith is in a remote, passive, and merely observant god. Our actual god, not the god of our polite and expected professions of faith, but the god of how we live day-by-day, doesn’t surprise us, disturb us, delight us, or save us.

The God revealed in Jesus gets into the middle of everything. This God loves us too much to leave us alone. God intrudes, disturbs, and delights. God shakes things up and make things happen. God is unpredictably but reliably involved in all the dimensions of our lives and the life of the world. God loves us, up-close and in detail. And, God invites us to open ourselves to that love, to yield to it, to cooperate with it, and to experience the lasting and transforming joy it brings.

Ordinary Peacemaking

2011-12-08T01:58:00.000-05:00

The Advent season puts us in touch with our yearning for peace. Sometimes, when I think about peace, my mind goes global. I consider large-scale and long-boiling cauldrons of conflict. When I do, I often go numb, because there doesn’t seem to be much I can do to make a difference in those complex dilemmas.

So, lately, I’ve been paying closer attention to the opportunities for peacemaking which are closer-by—to the conflict and misunderstanding which are part of the give-and-take, push and pull, of our everyday, work-day, and school-day lives.

Over the last month, for example, I’ve had conversations, sometime intense conversations, with people who would like to “occupy Asheville” and with people who would like to see Asheville occupied exclusively by people who are like them.

I’ve fielded emails from people who have tagged me as an old-style liberal, as a new-style evangelical, and as an out-of-style member of an old and fading religious establishment.

I’ve dealt with adult siblings who are tearing their relationship apart over disagreements they have about how to care for aging parents.

I’ve had conversations with managers who are trying to help employees who don’t like each other to work together more effectively, and with employees who think their managers are clueless.

I have listened to the pain of spouses who don’t share each other’s hopes and fears; of parents who can’t reach and touch their children’s hearts; and of children who can’t get their parents to see and hear them for who they really are.

Too often, peace eludes us. To live in peace—and to make peace—would require us to change our ways; and, many of us either resist the discomfort which change would cause, or we doubt that, for us, real change is possible.

We put peace into practice, and we we live-out our calling to be peacemakers, when we do some simple but powerful things:

o When we see and respect everyone as a human being and as a creation of God
o When we listen until we understand
o When we speak in tones and words of love

I wonder if we could link the ways of peace with our breathing: breathe-out the things that make for conflict and breathe-in the things that make for peace. Breathe-in, over and over again, the glad truth that I am a child of God and so is everyone else. And breathe-out, as many times a day as it takes, fear and envy, rivalry and jealous, the need to control and win, comparison and competition, shame and guilt.

Praying with each breath, and finding peace in each moment.

Never "Always Winter" and Never "Never Christmas"

2011-11-27T16:20:00.000-05:00

Famously, when Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy stepped through the wardrobe in the old professor’s house, they entered the fantastic land of Narnia. It was winter. In fact, Mr. Tumnus, the Faun, said to the children: “It is winter in Narnia, and has been ever so long.” A bit later, over tea, Mr. Tumnus said to Lucy that it was the White Witch “who makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”

That little phrase—“always winter and never Christmas”—evocatively describes the captivity of Narnia, and it also gathers up some of our own discouragement and uncertainty.

We know what it is like to live in the chill of a winter which threatens never to end. No hope of spring: the grass will remain brittle and brown, the trees will always be spare and barren, the flowers will never again bud and bloom, and birdsongs will never again float through the air.

Endless winter: the broken relationship that will not mend no matter how hard we try to put it back together, the knotty problem that all our intelligence and sweat can’t seem to untie, the sins we can’t forgive ourselves for, the grief that blinds and deafens us to everything but our losses, the ghost of depression that will not leave us, and the prayers that seem not just unanswered, but unheard.

Always winter and never Christmas. Always the threatening iciness of isolation, never the warm comfort of love. Always laboring under heavy burdens, never dancing with the joy of freedom. Always eating the bread of adversity, never savoring a feast of peace. Always waiting, never arriving. “Always winter and never Christmas.”

But, because of God, it is never “always winter” and never “never Christmas.” During these weeks of Advent, we’ll remember that God always finds a way through the labyrinths of history and the mazes of circumstance to bring Jesus to life among us. We’ll rediscover the humility of God, who is like a newborn infant, a peasant carpenter, and a dying savior: easy to overlook and disregard, but powerfully present and changing the world. Joy will rise in our spirits, and hope will flourish in our hearts, as the good news about Jesus transforms “the bleak midwinter” of our souls into Christmas.

Hope as Comfort and Protest, Mercy and Justice

2011-11-21T22:32:00.001-05:00

Hope is always paradoxical. It offers tender comfort and stirs restless protest. It embraces those who suffer and insists that suffering will not have the last word. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann said that: “Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but also the promise of the divine protest against suffering” (Theology of Hope, p. 21).

I think, in fact, that there is no consolation in suffering apart from such a divine protest against it. Only when we know that God does not actively will our pain is it possible for us to trust God with it.

In Jesus, God identifies with our pain, so hope comes in the form of comfort. It touches us with mercy. Jesus also shows us that God means to transform our pain, so hope comes in the form of protest. It makes us believe in the possibility of justice.

Hope comes from God’s compassion for our wounds and from God’s resolve to end the conditions which wound us. It comes from the confidence God is with us and for us. God is our companion and our advocate—our friend and our liberator.

As people of hope, we visit the elderly in the nursing homes, hold their hands, hear their stories, and take the community to them in the form of news and Communion. We offer them the assurance that they are not alone and forgotten. We ought also to protest against the cult of youth which demeans the humanity of all who are scarred, wrinkled, limited, and burdensome. We lament their marginalization, grieve the loss of their wisdom, and work for a culture that respects their dignity.

We run soup kitchens, but we ought also to work for an end to hunger.

We tutor at-risk city kids, but we ought also to work for better schools, more stable families, and safer neighborhoods.

We counsel the family which is cracking under pressure, and we also question the consumerism and materialism which intensify the pressure they feel.

Our mission of hope is to show mercy and seek justice--to hold and heal the broken and to pray and work for a world where the breaking does not happen.

A Fearful Courage

2011-11-16T20:37:00.000-05:00

I wrote the following reflection as a guest post for Stan Dotson's blog, "In Our Elements":

The cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz went searching for courage, and all of us, in anxious and fearful times, scramble to find it. Unlike the lion, though, it’s not always the case that the courage we need is already inside of us, simply awaiting discovery. Often, courage comes only when God generates it within us, putting in our hearts the strength we desperately lack and need.

We need courage when our decisions are unpopular, when our commitments cause us to stand in the minority, and when faithfulness has us cutting against the grain of our culture. Courage energizes us not to give-up when disheartened and not to give-in when we are under pressure.

Ancient Greco-Roman philosophers classed courage among “the cardinal virtues.” While their central image of courage was a soldier on the battlefield, they recognized that ordinary people who intend to live meaningfully need courage to overcome the inward inertia and outward opposition that array themselves against conscientious living.

Novelist and historian Steven Pressfield’s helpful book, The War of Art, describes the challenges and that are a part of any creative endeavor and especially details the subtle power of resistance to sabotage anyone who seeks to do something important and worthwhile:

Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify, seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is a process. It will assume any form, if that’s what it takes to deceive you. It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience. It understands nothing but power. Resistance cannot be negotiated with [Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2002), p. 9].

Against such resistance, courage is the settled practice of pressing-through; it is pursuing what is right despite the physical pain or psychological discomfort it may bring. Courageous people don’t allow fear and anxiety to keep them from standing-by their commitments or to hinder their doing what has to be done to preserve their integrity.

During the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights, Baptist minister, Bible scholar and farmer Clarence Jordan, along with his wife Florence and some friends, organized Koinonia Farm near Americus, GA as an experiment in racial reconciliation. Koinonia Farm generated stiff opposition and outright persecution in the form of economic boycotts and violence against property and persons. Jordan and his partners were sustained by courage, which he believed to be a dimension of all authentic faith. He wrote: “Faith is not belief in spite of the evidence, but a life in scorn of the consequences” [Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith and Other Sermons (New York: Association Press, 1972), p.42].

Psalm 27 is the song of a person who both has courage and searches for it. Verses 1-6 sound strong notes of assured confidence, arising from a heart convinced of God’s presence: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (27:1). Verses 7-12, on the other hand, are the shaky prayer of someone who is nearly overtaken by the fear of being forsaken by God and abandoned to his or her enemies: “Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger, you who have been my help. Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation! . . . Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing-out violence” (27:9-12).

The contrast between the confidence of verses 1-6 and the fear of verses 7-12 have caused some scholars to speculate that they are the words of two different people, placed together later by the compiler and editors of the Psalter. Others suggest that, if the words do come from the same person, then they must be from vastly different times and circumstances.

While the psalm does begin on the heights (27:1-6), plumbs the depths (27:7-12) and then climbs again (27:13-14), I don’t think it’s necessary to conclude that the contrasting sections come from different people or even from divergent circumstances. In my own experience, courage and fear often coexist or rapidly alternate in my mind and heart. There are times when I am both sure and unsure. There are challenges which have me, with one breath, giving thanks for courage that comes from feeling God’s presence; and, in the next, asking for courage in the face of the fear that God has moved away, fallen silent, or gone into hiding.

Verse 1 sounds the theme of the whole psalm, which is that “nothing we may think of is severe enough to shake confidence in Yahweh who is light, salvation, and stronghold” [Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1994), p. 152]. Verses 2-6 unpack that theme, first by naming the forces and circumstances which that make courage crucially necessary: “evildoers,” “adversaries,” “foes,” an encamping “army” and raging “war” (27:2-3). These threats, while filled with danger, do not cause the psalmist to cower in fear, because he or she has centered life on the presence of God, symbolized by the “house,” the “temple,” of God (27:4). It is possible, the psalmist tells us, to find sheltering faith in the “beauty of the Lord” (27:4) and under the “cover of God’s tent” (27:5).

From the place of trust and strength “high on a rock” (27:5), the psalmist plunges into near-despair (27:7-12). Nevertheless, in the closing verses, the psalm returns to faith: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (27:13) and invites others to live confidently and faithfully: “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (27:14). “Wait” could be translated “hope,” a rendering that reminds us that courage comes from the hope that, as we actively engage life’s challenges, we will discover that God is engaging them along with us.

Many years ago, I found myself embroiled in controversy over the issue of race. My friendship with an African-American pastor, the late Mack Charles Jones, had made many of the people whom I served as pastor anxious and nervous about what I intended to say and do about relationships among blacks and whites. My actions, in the grand schemes, were quite modest. I did nothing more than make some public statements about God’s love for everyone and participated in a few quiet but visible demonstrations which called for understanding and reconciliation. Those modest acts were enough to generate opposition from some people in the community, and their opposition was enough to cause fear in me. One night, when I felt very unsettled, I got a call, about midnight, from Mack, who said, simply: “Hey, man, just want you to know I’m here. I’m here.” That night, Mack’s voice sounded like God’s to me. “I’m here.” That promise, of God’s presence, is the source of any courage we might muster and of all the courage we will need.

Paradoxical Hope

2011-11-12T08:12:00.000-05:00

Novelist John Hassler wrote about a conversation he witnessed between two aging novelists, Frederick Manfred and J.F. Powers.

Manfred, at seventy-one, had just finished novel number twenty-five and knew what the next four were going to be about. Then, he intended to start on his nonfiction.

Manfred: “Do you write in the evening?”

Powers: “No, hardly ever.”

“You go to bed early?”

“No, I go to bed at one-thirty and get up at nine. I get to my office around eleven. I fiddle around. I come home around five.”

“What time do you do your best writing?”

“Never.” (Good People. Loyola Press, 2001, p. 91)

Powers’ answer because could be taken, on the one hand, as the harsh self-criticism and weary pessimism of a man never satisfied with himself or his work: “When do you do your best writing?” “Never: nothing I write is good enough.”

On the other, it could be taken as an expression of hope: “When do you do your best writing?” “Never—my best writing is still out in front of me.”

Nothing is easier to come by than pessimism. There are plenty of reasons for it. The economic outlook is (still) gloomy: scarce jobs, skyrocketing healthcare costs, and crashing retirement investments. Political discourse is relentlessly coarsening. Leaders can’t seem to put the common good ahead of narrow self-interest.

There are our personal anxieties: a family member struggles against cancer and endures treatments which seem as threatening as the disease. A colleague at work buried a loved one whose death came sooner than seems right to anyone. Friends worry and weep over close relationships which are fraying, even ripping and tearing. Others live with an unending loneliness.

Pessimism is plentiful and cheap, and it makes for a lousy life. Researchers in the area of “emotional intelligence” have demonstrated that while people with a “pessimistic explanatory style” have a firmer grasp on the facts and the givens of life, they also lack the will to take action in the face of those realities. Optimists, while not as realistic as pessimists, tend to be more engaged in the search for solutions to the problems they confront than are pessimists (Not being confused by the facts appears to have some adaptive value!). This research confirms what most of us know intuitively: pessimism drains away the energy we need to do something about the problems we face.

Optimism serves us better. Optimistic, positive people are more fun to be around, are more likely to be our leaders, and, most often, enjoy greater success than pessimistic.

The trouble with optimism, though, is that is depends on the idea—the illusion—of progress: the belief that things are improving and people are getting better.

And optimism thrives on denial of the hard truths we know about the persistence of evil, the randomness of tragedy, and our own flaws, weaknesses, and failures.

We need hope instead of optimism. Hope does not traffic in denial or depend on progress. It faces truth and depends on God. Hope does not hinge on things moving onward and upward; it turns on the dying and rising of Jesus from the grave.

To have hope, we need a story, a narrative, that gathers up yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the time beyond time. We need the story of Jesus which unfolds against the backdrop of the history of God’s faithfulness to Israel.

In the life and death of Jesus, God has undergone everything which drives us to despair. God has come to our sides and entered into our experience. God has embraced all our diminishments and limitations. God has shouldered our burdens and frustrations. God has been touched, even wounded, by our failures, sins, guilt and shame.

But God does not come into our desperate conditions merely to identify with us: God means to redeem and renew us, by raising us up just as surely as God raised Jesus from the dead. Resurrection means that we live, not under judgment, condemnation, and death, but in mercy, grace and life. Not in anxiety, despair, and fear; but in faith, hope, and love.

Hope is not resurrection in isolation from the cross; it is resurrection made necessary and possible by the cross. Hope is not a wholeness unacquainted with brokenness; it is brokenness made whole by grace. Hope always bears the marks of prior wounding, and walks into the future on legs once paralyzed by fear. Authentic hope is always paradoxical: embodied by the risen, but eternally scarred, Jesus

The Apostle Paul expressed the paradoxical nature of hope in this way:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Romans 5:1-5).

A Vastly Loving God

2011-11-08T07:36:00.000-05:00

The title of J.B. Phillips classic book got it right: Your God is Too Small. He was right. Many of us have, sometimes without our knowing it, substituted a paltry and puny God for the great and gracious God made known in Jesus.

We’ve manufactured a god from our fears who is limited, narrow, and tame—a little god who does nothing saving, surprising or amazing. This god of our own making is easygoing, predictable, safe—and boring.

This small god we have made diminishes our souls and shrinks our world, because this meager god is strictly local.

The little god is stingy with mercy; there is only enough for our kind of people—our nation or tribe or race or family or social class or religious group.

This diminutive deity can’t change anything in our world or in us; the best we can hope for from such a god is sympathy and advice.

This tiny, tin god is a totem for the status quo, so we hope less and less for the justice and peace which would rearrange and transform everything.

What many of us need is to recover, or to discover for the first time, a sense of wonder at the mystery and magnificence of God.

The God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is vast beyond our comprehension, beautiful beyond our appreciation, and wonderful beyond our imagination.

God encompasses everything we understand and fail to understand, what we have discovered and what remains hidden, what is near and what is far. God is above and beyond, among and within, high and holy, close and compassionate.

And God’s love is breathtakingly all-embracing. This compelling prayer comes from the New Testament Book of Ephesians:

I pray that, according to the riches of God’s glory, God may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

The prayer asks for the capacity to know what is always beyond full knowing: the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love, a love which includes everyone and everything. It radiates with grace that envelopes all our shame and guilt, and it shines with dazzling glory that fills every dark corner of our hearts and our universe with hope.

Running Lessons

2011-10-16T10:29:00.001-04:00

It has been odd but good: over the last month or so, when I have been jogging through town, people have spontaneously decided to join me. I’m still not sure why. Maybe it’s because I was moving so slowly, they liked the idea of winning an easy race. Or maybe I looked so winded and in pain, they thought I might need them to call 911. I don’t know why they joined me, but I am glad they did.

I was running on Hilliard, just past the Orange Peel, and a young man carrying a backpack jogged with me for about five minutes. I couldn’t understand very well what he was saying to me as we went up and down the Hilliard hills, but he said something about being in training for the army and something about not being in very good shape. When he decided to drop back to walking, he thanked me for the company.

I was running up Market Street, near the Thomas Wolfe House, and an older man I know from the streets called-out, “Hey, Rev, let me run with you.” I said, “Come on.” He had on heavy shoes, and he seemed to have had a liquid breakfast and lunch, but he ran with me for a couple of blocks. We talked briefly about how getting older, with all its aches and pains, is better only than the alternative. We mostly laughed at ourselves.

Then, this past Thursday evening, as I was coming down College Street, I passed a young man and a little boy, father and son, who were walking. The boy was 4 or 5 years old. He was wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, a leather-like jacket, and tennis shoes that lit-up with each step he took. As I passed them, the boy started running, too. It stunned his dad, who started jogging along behind us, and it surprised me. His dad said, “He’s just so excited to run; I hope you don’t mind.” I told him I thought it was one of the best things that had happened to me that day. I matched my pace to the little boy’s who would run like crazy for a while and then slow down almost to a walk. I told him how fast he was and how cool his shoes were. As with my older friend on Market Street, more than anything else, we just laughed. I’m not even exactly sure what we laughed about what, other than how weird but wonderful it was, that three people who didn’t know each other at all managed to play for a few minutes.

I’ve been surprised how much those runners have been on my mind. That young man with difficult speech, reporting to the army: What will happen to him? Will he make it through basic training? If he does, what kind of role will the army give him? I’m guessing, from the quick impressions I got, that there won’t be a lot of options for him. Will he, before long, be doing grunt work of some kind in harm’s way in Afghanistan? Did he enlist because he wanted to or because it was his last chance, a kind of forced choice? Do his parents know he’s enlisted? What are they feeling?

And, my friend from the streets is someone I have been seeing around town for some years now. I don’t know a lot about him, but I know he’s a Vietnam vet who saw bitter action in Cambodia, and that he was never the same after he came back home. I don’t think much is going to change for him; I am not even sure how much he believes things can or should change. I know that he sometimes drinks too much to forget for a while his days in the killing fields and to numb the shock he still feels over how those days changed him.

When the air turns cold and the wind howls through downtown, I will be worried about him and the other homeless men and women who will scramble to stay warm. I wonder what it feels like to spend most of everyday trying to figure out how to get enough of whatever it is they think they need.

And, what about that little boy and his young father? What will their futures be like? I don’t know, but I hope and pray that, whatever happens, whatever success they enjoy an d failure they endure, they will always feel free to break into a run and to laugh for no reason at all with a complete stranger. The pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson said that the one gift all children should have is “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” I hope that little boy will keep his sense of wonder. I know he won’t always wear light-up shoes, but I hope he will always know that he shines and the world is radiant. Such wonder belongs, though we lose track of it, to all God’s children—all of us.

In my every-day life—hurrying in and out of stores and restaurants, hustling from one meeting to the next, rushing from one event to another, and scrambling to get tasks crossed-off my to-do list—I run past people. I miss their stories, their hurts and hopes, their disappointments and dreams. I miss chances to cry and to laugh, to listen and to talk, to know and be known, to help and be helped, to love and be loved. I’m busy and preoccupied, so I miss a lot. I especially miss opportunities to experience Jesus, to offer and receive him, in encounters with the people I run by.

How much of my hurrying—how much of yours?—is driven by confusion about the purpose of life and by a distorted understanding of what it means to be successful?

So loved

2011-10-09T10:09:00.001-04:00

Maybe you will find this hard to believe, but, from years and years of paying attention to the fears and hopes which people carry deep in their hearts, I know it to be true: More people than you might guess are sure that God is mostly unhappy with them, endlessly frustrated by their flaws, and couldn’t possibly like them very much, much less love them. They’re convinced that God is ready to pounce on them and punish them for who they are, what they have done, and what they have failed to do. They believe that the pain and frustration they feel in life are, somehow, God’s the result of God’s guilty verdict on the ways they’ve gone wrong. If they’re church people, they might say that God loves them—that’s what they’re supposed to say, after all—but down inside, they feel that God works mostly by threats, intimidation, and fear

During my elementary school years, my family was active in a church where I heard , over and over again, the words of John 3:16. I heard them most often in the King James Version: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

God so loved the world. So loved. I hope you know what it’s like to feel such overwhelming, glad, and grateful love for another person that you can’t simply say “I love you.” You have to add, you want to add so, “so much. So so much.”

God loved and loves you and me and everyone and everything so so much.

God loves the world; you probably know that the word which we translate world is the Greek word kosmos. So that, what John 3:16 actually says is, God so loved the cosmos. That means there is not a corner of the universe, not a pocket of space, untouched by God’s love. Everything on the earth, plant or animal, animate or inanimate, is here because, at the dawn of time and in every moment since, God’s immense love, a love God takes joy in sharing, has been overflowing in the ecstasy of creation.

It is all here, we are all here, because of love. God lavishes love on every human being, young and old, men and women, “red and yellow, black and white,” rich and poor, male and female, friend and enemy, Christian, Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist and searcher. There is not a person on the earth whom God does not love and no one whom God does not want to welcome into God’s own tender heart.

Jesus and Leadership

2011-09-22T15:30:00.000-04:00

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this question: In what way does Jesus inform, and perhaps transform, our understanding of leadership? As we answer that question, we need to resist the temptations to make him over in our image, domesticate him, and limit his reach. We don’t need to dress him up in a dark blue suit, white shirt and red-toned tie and think of him as “Jesus, CEO” He isn’t a leadership guru, management consultant or marketing strategist.

Jesus informs and transforms our leadership by making it unmistakably clear that real leadership is a way of serving. He calls us to live with authentic humility and a genuine desire to serve, qualities in tension with our culture which is so fascinated by power, preoccupied with success, and enamored with image and status.

Jesus once said to his friends: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you.” He then underscored his own understanding of greatness: “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”

In the circle around Jesus, there is no “over and under”; there are no insiders and outsiders. Since he is Lord over all, there is no room for “lording” over others. Jesus shows us that we climb to greatness on our knees—knees bent to serve and honor others.

Followers of Jesus have the responsibility and opportunity to learn right uses of power. Power can either be creative or destructive; it can be used as a weapon of domination or a tool of liberation. Power is safe only in the hands of those who view it as a stewardship, who engage in power-sharing, not power-wielding and who desire to empower not overpower the people around them.

Authentic power is not Donald Trump grinning into the camera and saying “you’re fired.” It’s not Enron executives raiding their company’s assets, forfeiting its future, and hiding it all behind smoke-and-mirrors accounting. It’s not a minister who manipulates the fears and hopes of people through cheap emotionalism and theatrical melodrama. True power is the power of Jesus, which is the power of truth, compassion, forgiveness and hope. Real power is the power of serving.

Servant-leadership has one great and overarching purpose, and everything else a leader does contributes in some way to that purpose: to help people to become everything God has given them the capacity to become. That means that the most important thing about your corporation is not its strategic plan or its third-quarter profits or next year’s revenue projections. Instead, it’s the people who work in your corporation and who rely on its products and services. The most crucial thing about a church is not its buildings or programs or standing in the community; it’s the people who have been and will be touched by the love and grace of Jesus Christ.

All the things leaders worry about—design, strategic plans, profits, revenue projections, products, services, buildings, programs, and influence—matter in many ways; but, as important as they undeniably are, however, people matter more and most of all. A servant leader is riveted by and committed to the needs and potential of people. He or she never lets the organization put secondary things in the place of those people.

Instructions for Living a Life

2011-09-07T09:38:00.000-04:00

"Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it" (From Mary Oliver's poem, "Sometimes").

I would only add: Love God. Love your neighbors. By so being and doing, you will also discover love for yourself.

What I Keep Learning

2011-09-06T08:31:00.002-04:00

Sometimes, the “right” thing—the thing we learned from custom, culture and tradition—conflicts with the loving thing, by which I mean, the “Jesus-thing.” Here’s what I keep learning: it isn’t loving, if it isn’t something we imagine Jesus would do or say, it isn’t right.

We're All Connected

2011-09-02T06:39:00.000-04:00

We’re all connected. That means you affect me, I affect you, we affect them, and they affect us. In fact, in the truest sense, there is no them—only us.

Late in his remarkable novel, All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren offers this compelling metaphor of our interconnectedness:

. . . the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle. . . It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things (p. 260)

Whether we know it or not, we’re always sending ripples of influence across the web of things. Because we endlessly affect the world around us, our choices and actions matter far more than we usually realize. Even in the smallest things, if we live from love, rather than from fear, we make the world more compassionate and welcoming. If see and treat each other, and all people, as sisters and brothers, rather than as strangers and enemies, we send waves of understanding and peace across the web of things.

Like it or not, we’re connected. Earth is our shared home; we breathe the same air; and we all look to the sun for light and warmth. Our choice is not whether we will be together, but the kind of world we will have. We’ll either be stuck together by fear or knit together by love.

The Church and Shindig on the Green

2011-08-15T21:49:00.000-04:00

Saturday night, when my work on Sunday’s sermon stalled-out and my mind had gotten stale, I walked from my office over to the city park, found a place to sit in the grass, and soaked up the sights and sounds of “Shindig on the Green.” I was pretty far back from the stage, so the music was hard to hear; but it wasn’t hard to hear the laughter of children, who were running in and out of the crowd, and the bright chatter of friends who were glad for the cool breeze and a break from their routines.

I was amaze by how diverse the crowd was: young and old—very young and very old. There were white collar, blue collar, no collar, and even dog-collar people. People clothed in all black, with tattoos and piercings covering their bodies, sat alongside people in overalls and bright cotton dresses. There were apparently rich and pretty obviously poor.

There were people who knew a lot about the traditional mountain music they were hearing, and people who knew not much at all. But no one was going around conducting tests about how much people knew or asking for commitments to the music. The people who staged the festival trusted that the music itself, well played and graciously offered, would do its own inviting and generate its own commitments.

That diverse crowd at Shindig is in contrast with the congregation that gathers in the congregation I serve. We’re more diverse than we look, but not nearly as diverse as the community in which our church is located.

There was something about Shindig that made everyone feel welcome and glad to be there.
When we who follow Jesus are most like him, there is something about us, too—something that makes everyone feel welcomed and included. We freely play the music Jesus is teaching us—the music of love and joy—and it reaches out to all kinds of people—to everyone.

Everyone, including people who struggle and are uncertain. Everyone, including people who are searching and seeking. Everyone, including people it is hard for some of us to accept. Everyone.

Our town is filled with spiritual seekers. They, we, have a hunger for God, even when we don’t know that it’s God for which we are hungry. That hunger shows up as a desire to live a life that is worth living and makes a difference; as a craving for wonder and mystery; as a gnawing need for forgiveness; as the feeling that we ought to say thanks; and, most of all, as a longing for love. These are pangs from our primal, sometimes unconscious, hunger for God, the hunger that has so many people searching.

The church can be a place where people who search, seek, question and wonder know they are welcomed and where they can find help and hope for their quest. It can be, at least, when the Spirit of Jesus is the spirit of the church.

Truth for Love's Sake

2011-08-09T06:57:00.002-04:00

Canadian humorist and journalist Richard J. Needham once said: “People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.”

By contrast, the Apostle Paul said: “Speak the truth in love. . . . Say only what builds up.”

Practice

2011-08-03T07:37:00.000-04:00

Artists of life and love need to practice. We learn by doing, hone our skills by repetition, and improve by training. Regular practice conditions us to become better—more competent and more effective—in the ways of authentic life and genuine love.

In her book, Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg compared writing to running, both of which require a commitment to practice:

. . . the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days, you don’t want to run and you resist every step of three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It’ll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it. But if you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. Just do it. And in the middle of the run you will love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time (p. 11).

Educator Ken Robinson’s brother ian is a musician who “plays drums, piano, and bass guitar.” Once Ian was in a Liverpool band with a very talented keyboardist named Charles. After one of the band’s gigs, Ken told Charlie how much he enjoyed hearing him play and said that he would “love to be able to play keyboards that well.” Charlie responded, “No you wouldn’t.” Ken insisted that he would.

“No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “You mean you like the idea of playing keyboards. If you’d love to play them, you’d be doing it.” He said that to play as well as he did, he practiced every day for three or four hours in addition to performing. He’d been doing that since he was seven” (The Element, p. 24)

How many free throws, I wonder, do you have to shoot in practice to make two with three seconds left on the clock and your team down by one? How many times does a choir rehearse the final movement, the Ode to Joy, of Beethoven’s Ninth’s Symphony so that they can sing it with the kind of glad abandon the composer intended? How many first lines does an author write, erase, delete, revise and replace before she feels that line welcomes you to her story the way a gracious porch welcomes you to a home? Or until he feels that the first line hits you like a roundhouse punch and knocks you off your feet, so that you’re fairly warned about the trouble ahead?

A friend told me about a T-shirt she saw which said: “Hard work wins out over talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”

To be artists of life—to be and become people who experience, explore, and express love more fully, freely and beautifully—calls for practice.

With the Eyes of an Elder

2011-07-29T09:02:00.002-04:00

James Hillman suggested it’s the vocation of grandparents to search “for grander possibilities” in children (The Force of Character, p. 188). What if we cultivated the practice, whatever our age, of imagining how a wise and tender grandparent would see and hear others and us? If I looked at him or her with the loving eyes of an elder, what would I see?

Like Children?

2011-07-27T10:15:00.000-04:00

Maybe this all-too-common loss of wonder is why Jesus (and other wise spiritual guides) told us that we need to become like children to experience God and fullness of life:

A young rabbi once said to his teacher that, in the evening, he could see the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and, in the mornings, the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. “Yes,” said the teacher, “In my youth, I saw that, too. Later on you don’t see these things anymore.” [adapted from Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim]

Myth Made Fact, Word Made Flesh: Art and Truth

2011-07-24T14:39:00.000-04:00

I talked this morning about how closely connected are our capacities for imagination and for faith. I also gave thanks for how great art, of whatever medium or genre, helps us to imagine a different world than this one: to see, for instance, how good could triumph over evil or to hear and feel how our lives could have greater purpose if we lived them bravely and boldly.

Great stories, in particular, enable us to encounter other, brighter worlds and better selves; and, simultaneously, to see this world and our present selves more clearly, more truthfully and more hopefully. They also give us inspiration and energy to make our world more like the world of our best dreams and visions.

With all my talking about art and story, some people have wondered aloud if I think Christian faith is “only art, only story.” I think that’s an odd way to put it, because wonderful art and compelling stories can’t be “only” anything—just as there’s no such thing as a “mere” symbol. By its very nature a true symbol can’t be “merely” anything. Art, including narrative art, is our highest and best way of discerning and describing the truth.

But I understand what people who worry that I think faith is “only art, only story” are worried about. So, here’s a bit of a response to their worries.

Christian faith hinges on historical reality. We claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were actual events. These things, Christianity has said, happened. We also know that the stories about what happened are remarkably resonant with the themes of the classic legends, myths, tragedies, comedies, and fairy tales of myriad cultures. It does no good to pretend that our stories do not sound like such stories. They do.

The earliest tellers and writers of the stories were not just reporters. They were artists, too, often very gifted and imaginative artists. Both because the events behind the stories were remarkable, and because the stories about those events are so artfully crafted and deftly told, the Bible’s stories have great power.

A significant dimension of their power is their ability to meet the yearnings in the human spirit. One of my favorite Christmas carols, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” has this line: “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in the tonight.” The Christian story meets and fulfills the hopes and fears of our hearts, which means that the Christian story also meets and fulfills the dreams and needs which give birth to all great stories. In Jesus, history meets story. Event meets art. What God has joined together, let us not cast asunder.

On this point, I am with C.S. Lewis, who said, essentially, that Christianity is myth made fact, which sounds like the Gospel of John’s claim that Jesus is the word made flesh. The Christian story is as compelling as any legend, as encompassing as any myth, as tragic or as comic as any drama, as enchanting as any fairy tale, and as gripping as any work of fiction. Indeed, more compelling, more encompassing, more tragic, more comic, more enchanting and more gripping, because the gospel story is, quite literally, grounded. These things, we claim, not only inspired us; they happened.

And, in the deepest and most profound sense, they keep happening in God’s “eternal now.” All great art, including the art which is God’s good news in Jesus, reveals to us that there is here, and “that” is "this,” and then is now.

Seeing but lacking vision?

2011-07-21T21:39:00.000-04:00

Toward the end of Helen Keller’s remarkable public career, after a speech at a Midwestern college, a student asked her: “Miss Keller, is there anything that could have been worse than losing your sight?” Helen Keller replied: “Yes, I could have lost my vision.”

Not all of the sighted see, and not all of the blind lack vision.

When it comes to paying attention to what is really going on, there are plenty of people with 20-20 eyesight who cannot see at all. Some of us grope and stumble through our lives as if we were trying to make our way through a strange house in the dark. We’re legally blind in the ways that matter most—unable to see ourselves honestly, or others lovingly, or God truly.

Mark’s Gospel tells us that about a time when Jesus aired-out his frustrations with people, including his close followers, who were so slow to “get it” about the ways of God. He asked: “Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear?”

Jesus’ words jostle and jolt me out of inattentiveness and call me to self-examination. In what ways do I see, but lack vision for what really matters? In what ways do I hear, but fail to listen? In what ways do I not notice the signs and sounds of God, neglect intimations of beauty, truth, and goodness, and fail to hear the sighs of people who yearn for love, hope, and joy?

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Case of Identity,” Watson praised Sherlock Holmes for his observational skills: “You see everything.” Holmes insisted that anyone could do what he did: “I see no more than you, but I have trained myself to notice what I see.” Watson pointed out that Holmes had an eye for details which were “quite invisible” to ordinary people. Holmes replied: “Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important” (See Stephen Kendrick, The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes. NY: Vintage Books, 1999, p. 32).

If we will let it, great art (whether visual or written or musical) can arrest, focus, and hone our attention. Art can teach us to see more clearly, hear more deeply, and feel more fully. The arts help us to experience life, each other, and God in fresh ways. They teach us to notice what has slipped by us before.

And, I have learned to trust that Jesus is an artistic genius, who shapes human beings toward the glory and radiance God intends us. He guides us to encounter, to notice, and to delight in the wonders and mysteries of life. He shows us depths and heights we would have missed had we not learned from him how to see, hear, and feel.

Far too easy. . . and empty

2011-07-12T15:58:00.002-04:00

It’s easy, far too easy, to lose track of what matters.

It’s easy for lawyers and judges to lose track of justice. In modern-day legal systems (there’s more than one), career-building, deal-making, and system-gaming can push a concern for justice to the periphery and make winning central--just winning, no matter the cost to one’s character.

It’s easy for doctors and medical institutions to lose track of health. In the entanglements of the red-tape of insurance and Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, under the pressure of aggressive marketing directly to patients by drug manufacturers, with the increasing threats of malpractice, in the face of patients who expect miracles, not medicine, and pressed by demands for constantly-rising institutional profits, healers and caregivers can forget that health—wholeness—is their profession.

It’s easy for educators to lose track of the pursuit of truth and the nurture of their students in the swirl of society’s pressure that they fill the gaps left by the unraveling of families and the fraying and coarsening of our culture. Educators often feel pressed to produce children who test well whether or not they learn much.

It’s easy for political leaders to lose track of the common good in the constant drive for the publicity, power and money that ensure reelection.

It’s easy for ministers to lose track of God’s salvation, the heart of which are God’s radically transforming love, justice and mercy. Too often, our focus is on building and maintaining a religious institution, on propping up the status quo, and on scratching the itches of would-be consumers of “spiritual” goods and services.

These days, I am aware of how, If we’re not paying careful and prayerful attention, we can lose track of what matters most amid the pressures, distractions, and anxieties of life. Secondary things become primary; major energy goes to minor concerns; pettiness overwhelms greatness, and we are left with jobs that are drudgery, homes that are lonely, communities that are harsh, and hearts that are empty.

It doesn’t have to be that way. But, to give primary energy to primary things requires alertness, awareness, and courage. I am persuaded that such qualities come from time away from the noise and confusion of our loud and busy lives—time to remember who we are and who God is, to recall what matters, to re-root our lives in prayer and thoughtfulness, and to reclaim our most central and important commitments.

Fear and Love

2011-07-07T21:52:00.000-04:00

We’ve all known, and some of us have been, people who are hard to love. Some people send contradictory signals: “Go away” and “Come closer.” “Leave me alone” and “Why don’t you ever call me?” “I need help” and “Do you think I can’t do that myself? I heard one man described this way: “Loving him is like trying to hug a porcupine.”

Whenever I encounter someone who is frustratingly difficult to love, I try to remember the ancient wisdom of Philo of Alexandria, who said: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” Sometimes, those who are hardest to love are the walking wounded, casualties of their own internal warfare. They have fashioned their fears into defensive armor, and they have also shaped and sharpened their pain into a sword.

Sometimes people aren’t hard to love because of something in them but because of something in us. Our fears hold us back from them. Maybe we’re afraid to know who she really is because her gifts and talents, were they fully known, would make us feel inferior or jealous or competitive in some way. To keep ourselves from feeling “beneath” or “below” her, we only let ourselves know a limited version of her—our caricature of who she is—rather than who she most wonderfully is.

Maybe we’re are afraid of his dreams. They seem too risky and adventurous. What if his dreams take him away from us?

Maybe we’re afraid that we have caused some of the hurt they carry or inflicted some of the wounds they bear, and truly loving them would push us to face the truth about ourselves.

Maybe their needs overwhelm us and we can’t manage the temptations either to do too much and make them dependent on us, or to do too little and not help them at all, so we just walk away and do nothing at all.

Maybe we’re afraid that love by itself won’t help them. We think we need a good cop and a bad cop, a carrot and a stick, a reward and punishment. We worry that love, by itself, isn’t enough. So, we try to boost and bolster love with stronger and sterner stuff. Trouble is, whenever we try to help love out this way, we end up shoving it out the door.

To love other people is to respect their dignity, honor their worth, and recognize their potential as God’s creations. As Jean Vanier, who has spent his life working with developmentally disabled people puts it: “To love someone means to reveal to them their beauty and value, to say to them through our attitude: ‘You are beautiful. You are important. I trust you. You can trust yourself.’ To love someone is not to do things for them, but to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them.”

To love others is to learn who they most truly are by listening to their stories, taking delight in their brightest and most joyful times, and weeping with them over their hardest and most hurtful times. Those moments of wonder and wounding are the moments when they are, were, most vulnerable and therefore closest to their deepest and highest identity.

To love others is to discover their dreams, their God-given dreams, and to support, encourage and cheer for them as they go after the fulfillment of those dreams.

“Perfect love,” the Elder John said, “casts out fear.” Once we realize that God loves us past our own fears, we can move past them, too, and love those hardest to love—including ourselves.

" Critical Patriotism"

2011-07-03T17:30:00.000-04:00

Maybe you’ve heard it said that the United States is often caught in the cross-fire of its uncritical lovers and its unloving critics. I try for a third way: to be a loving critic—to practice what Lutheran-turned-Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus once called “critical patriotism,” [see The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America].

Critical patriotism recognizes that followers of Jesus are citizens, at one and the same time, of two orders: their homeland and the kingdom of God. Most of us the people who will read this post are citizens of the United States, and, in the strictest and most original sense of the word, we are “patriots.” The root meaning of “patriot” is, simply, “a lover of the place.” We love our homeland. We are grateful for the freedoms it affords us, and we are loyal to its highest and best ideals.

But, we are not only citizens of the United States; we are, most of all, disciples of Jesus. Our ultimate and final loyalty is to the rule and reign of God. We love our nation, and we love it in the name and spirit of Jesus, which means we love it enough to hold it, and ourselves, accountable to his will and way.

It is not a denial of love for our country to admit that it sometimes fails to live up to it ideals and honor its promises. A nation is a a collection of human beings; and, like all things human, is limited, fallible and flawed. No nation is perfect, not even our own. We are not immune, as a country, to infections of greed and corruption. That is why I resonate to the stanza in “America the Beautiful” which includes this honest prayer for national reformation:

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

What’s more, the will and way of God always transcend, sometimes judge and sometimes affirm, our “political” arrangements. There isn’t a political party which perfectly matches God’s agenda for the world: not the platform of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or the Libertarian Party, or the Tea Party. Politics is an arena of compromise where the art of the possible is the highest art. When we pursue our political commitments, we are not pursuing something ultimate; and the world does not stand or fall on elections and policies. The world stands or falls in the power and mercy of God. When it comes to politics, we are doing our best to live-out our convictions and commitments in the give-and-take of diversity and difference and in communities comprised of nothing but fallen and sinful human beings.

On this Independence Day weekend, citizens of the United States aren’t, at least I hope we aren’t, simply grilling hot dogs, enjoying fireworks and engaging in the great American pastime—shopping. I hope we are remembering the founding and guiding documents of this always-fragile experiment in liberty, among them, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Lincoln’s potent summary of both, the Gettysburg Address.

The nation has its founding and guiding documents. And, the Kingdom of God has the foundational and shaping words of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ manifesto for his revolution of mercy and love; his charter for God's new order of justice and peace, and his constitution for God's new society of holiness and wholeness.

We are citizens of our homeland; but, even more, we are disciples of Jesus. Our overarching loyalty is to him, to his will and way, to his voice and words.

Row Like Crazy

2011-06-29T22:09:00.000-04:00

Mary Oliver’s prose poem “West Wind, 2” intrigues and moves me:

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it .

There is life without love, but it isn’t real life, because it is misses the very thing that matters most about life: being known and knowing, being loved and loving. When you feel the mist of God’s Spirit, when you hear the churning of compassion, and when you feel your heart pounding with the sheer thrill and joy of anticipated love, row—row like crazy—toward the source of the spray and the sound. You will be rowing for your life toward your life, for love toward love.

Love in the Place of Shame

2011-06-20T23:30:00.001-04:00

In his novel, Miss Wyoming, Douglas Coupland recounts an exchange between a young woman, Vanessa, and John Johnson, a “debauched, disillusioned movie producer who has given away all his possessions” in the attempt to start a new life—to “reinvent” himself.

“Do you think,” Vanessa asks, “that I’m capable of—“
“Of what?” says Johnson.
“This is embarrassing. Okay, I’ll say it: of being loved.” Vanessa looked as if she’d suddenly discovered she was naked in public.

Johnson tries to reassure her that she is lovable, but tells her that she has to expose her heart “to the open air, let it get sunburned.” Vanessa responds: “I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice. Like a flop move. Or they’ll borrow your heart and forget to return it to you.”

Vanessa's words are tinged with a shame most of us recognize, and the shame creates a primal fear: if we are honest and open about who we are, including about our vulnerabilities and weaknesses, then we will get hurt. How could anyone love us when they see us for who we truly are?

Martha Nussbaum, who teaches at the University of Chicago, says that shame comes from a realization we first have when we are still babes in our mothers’ arms; in fact, it comes precisely from the fact that, early on, we had to be carried in her arms. It is the realization that we are, for all our lives, in ways we’d rather not acknowledge, dependent and needy: we can’t stand on our own two feet (See Upheavals of Thought, Cambridge, 2001). From our earliest days, we learn that we are limited, weak and vulnerable, and we spend the rest of our lives running from that realization. Eventually, though, it catches up with us.

Something beyond our control, something we can’t manage, happens. An injury knocks us off our feet. Illness sidelines us. A family member gets trapped in a vicious cycle of self-destruction. The plant closes down, and all the jobs go to Mexico. A drunk driver crashes into your husband’s car and you’re left alone to raise three children. Something happens, and we are overwhelmed by it all. No matter how smart we are, how hard we work, how much money we spend, how many experts we consult or, even, how much we pray, it, whatever it is, doesn’t go away. We find ourselves wanting someone to hold us like mother did, to protect us like father did, and to listen to us like our grandparents did. We look for someone to cry with us until we can laugh again, to feed us until we are strong again, and to carry us until we can walk again.

Our helplessness embarrasses us, and our neediness makes us afraid. The shame of it all makes us want to hide in the shadows. We don’t have to hide; we don’t need to be ashamed. Love is the alternative to shame. Love admits that “I” can’t be “I” without we— without you and without God. We need each other; we can’t make it without love. So, when we can finally admit that all of us are human, that all of us are limited and vulnerable, then we can, at last, open ourselves to receive love—from God and from others—and to share our love freely and joyfully in return.

Learning to Love by Loving

2011-06-11T07:46:00.003-04:00

We can’t learn very much—not much that matters, anyway—about love by gathering information about it. Sure, there are mountains of books about love: elaborate philosophies and theologies of love; thorough psychologies and sociologies of love; moving stories about the search for love; and illuminating memoirs about love’s power to heal. There are seminars, websites, Facebook pages, broadcasts, and podcasts about how to nurture love between spouses, in the hearts of children, and among people divided against each other by hurt and fear. And, no doubt, all this information can help; but, we learn most about love, not by mastering theory or amassing information, but in the everyday experiences of opening ourselves to love and of taking risks to share our love with others. While information can surely help, it is no substitute for the concrete practices of love.

We notice the moist tears beginning to pool in his eyes, see the sag in his shoulders, and hear the slight catch in his voice; and, instead of rushing home to see the next round of American Idol, we sit back down and ask him to tell us about it.

We remember that next week it will have been a year since her mother died, and we write her a card about how we have not forgotten about the lingering grief she carries.

We learn that the floor of their porch has weakened to the point of being dangerous, so we get a friend or two to work with us to repair it.

We hear that her husband is in the hospital, so we cut her grass or drop food by or let her tell us again, for the fifth time at least, what the doctor has said, because she is saying it in an attempt to accept it.

We risk telling him the habit he thinks is a secret is actually written all over his face—the reddened, puffy skin, the lines of worry, the creases of fatigue, the bloodshot eyes, the vacant stare, the rigid jaw, and the constant frown.

We forgive her again, because we know that her sins come not from the heart of her heart but from the scabby scars on its surface—from the wounds that never seem to heal before they are picked open again.

We give up an afternoon a week to tutor a kid who, without someone’s help, will never get out of high school or out of the projects.

We forego a golf game to serve soup to the homeless.

We love through what we do—the practices in which we engage. Loving teaches us about love: how to share it and how to receive it. Before long, our hearts are filled with love as well.

Fall: Midlife and the Season of Harvesting

2011-05-25T07:20:00.000-04:00

Midlife is the autumn, the fall, of the human journey.

Who knows precisely how young or old a middle-aged person is? Chronologically it starts within sight of 40 and ends within range of 70. But, chronology is not the main marker of midlife. The realizations and emotions, the challenges and invitations, of this season come to some people when they are younger and never dawn on others, even though they draw Social Security checks and take annual distributions from their IRAs.

Fall comes when the harvest comes. Whatever our age, midlife begins when we know that we are reaping, as Paul puts it in Galatians, what we have sown: what we have sown, not what our parents or our teachers or our culture planted in us—not merely the inevitable results of the unconscious assumptions and habits we received by inheritance or instruction and not the by-products of patterns we simply breathed-in from the atmosphere in which we lived.

Midlife begins when we taste the fruit, however sweet or bitter, that we planted: choices and decisions we made; results, however good or bad, which we produced by what we did and did not do; and consequences, however pleasant or painful, that we can trace to our own behavior.

There comes a point in life where the statute of limitations runs out on blaming other people for what our lives have become. Mature adults don’t keep protesting against the distant past and drawing up indictments against people who, long ago, failed them, hurt them, or disappointed them in some way. When it becomes clear that we can’t shift blame any more to “them”—to parents or teacher or bosses or spouses or children or God—then we are in midlife.

At midlife, we begin to see, if we haven’t before, that we are more responsible for who we are and for how things are with us than anyone else is. Yes, of course, people sometimes do maddeningly frustrating things: they let us down, betray us, and wound us. But, we choose how we will respond. We decide, even when we do not know we are deciding, whether to stew in the cauldron of resentment or to remove ourselves from their boiling anger. We decide, consciously or unconsciously, to be frozen in loneliness by their insensitivity and self-preoccupation or to seek the warmth of love. We decide, intentionally or unintentionally, to let ourselves be taken for granted or taken advantage of or to put in place the boundaries which protect us from having our lives leached away from us.

In the fall of life, we “get-it” that we are the only actor who is present in all the comedies and tragedies of our lives. If most of the reviews of our varied roles and life-performances say that we are too intense or too serious or too flighty or too passive or too aggressive or have problems with authority or have a tendency to procrastinate, then it might not be that all the reviewers are novices and amateurs who aren’t worth listening to; it might be that are lessons for us to learn and improvements for us to make.

If I keep running into the same kind of brick walls, whether at work or at home or in friendships, then it’s likely that I am the wall-builder, not someone else. If I continue to make the same kinds of mistakes, get the same kinds of feedback, and deal with the same kinds of problems, it’s probably the case that the issue belongs, not so much to “them,” but to me. It’s a midlife realization. We say, as the old spiritual says: “It’s not my mother or my father, not my brother or my sister, not the preacher or the deacon, but it’s me—me— O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.”

Midlife—fall-- is the season of harvest, of reaping what we have sown, and of assuming fuller responsibility for the shape and direction of our lives.

The Promise of Home

2011-05-18T06:42:00.000-04:00

Since my college days, I have had a recurring dream: On a rainy Sunday night, my car breaks down in a small town in rural south Georgia. The only gas station that boasts a real mechanic won’t be open until Monday morning. The only food available is at a combination quick-market and fried-chicken stand. And, there is only one motel. The elderly woman who runs it has curlers in her hair, wears pink house slippers on her feet, and isn’t pleased that I am registering for the night. She reluctantly hands me a room key and brusquely sends me on my way. When I open the door to the room and walk inside, I find a twin bed with a very flat pillow, thin sheets, and a rib-cord bedspread; a broken down and none-too-clean recliner; a burnt-orange shag rug on top of a worn linoleum floor; one threadbare towel and a single wash cloth; two plastic cups; a bathtub streaked with rust stains; a shower curtain barely hanging by two rings from its rod; and a black and white television set.

Once more or less settled, I take a shower with no hot water, give up on finding anything on television, and try to get comfortable in the saggy and lumpy bed. Somehow, I manage to fall asleep, but I am blasted awake about two hours later when the people who have rented the room next door start a loud party that lasts the rest of the night.. Morning comes, and I have slept very little. In the dream, I never check-out of the motel and never get my car fixed..

Dorothy Day, that delightfully difficult and remarkably faithful woman who pioneered the Catholic Worker movement among the poor in New York City, helped me to understand this dream. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she said that when things got tough for her, she was helped by remembering some words from St. Teresa of Avila: “Life is a night spent in an uncomfortable inn.”

Unlocked by Teresa’s words, my troubling dream holds a treasure deep inside, the same treasure an old Spiritual carries in its words and music: “This old world ain’t’a my home, I’m just ‘a passin’ through.” Why do I call that a treasure? Not because all of my life feels like a night in a cheap motel: I’ve had more than my fair share of “Ritz Carlton” moments. Not because I’m in a hurry to leave this life behind; in fact, I believe that God wants us to live this life fully, gratefully, and joyfully by drinking-in its wonder and savoring its glory.

The treasure is this promise: “Don’t be surprised when life in the here and now leaves you feeling restless, anxious, helpless and out of touch. You weren’t made for life under these conditions. So, don’t be surprised, but don’t despair either, because there is a place where your tired spirit will find rest and your anxious heart will find perfect peace. There is a home for you—the home you have yearned for all of your life. That home is not exactly a place; it is a person. Your home is with Jesus.”

According to John’s Gospel, on the night before his death, Jesus gathered with his friends and attempted to prepare them for the intense and immediate bewilderment they would feel in the wake of his death and for the eventual and breathtaking wonder they would experience in the afterglow of his resurrection. Chapters 13-17 of John tell us about the things Jesus said to his friends, about the promises he made to them and that he makes to us.

The first promise Jesus made that night was about home. He told his friends that, even though he was going away, he would come back for them and take them to a great, good place—to God’s spacious house of welcome, to God’s gracious home of joy: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:1-3). The promise was for them and is for us: a home with God, a home far lovelier than this world at its loveliest, a home where joy grows because hurts are healed, and a home where laughter continues but weeping ceases.

(Written for CBFNC's e-newsletter, May 18, 2011)

A Faith that Embraces all of Life

2011-05-01T20:31:00.002-04:00

This week, a fairy tale came true in London; and a nightmare became tragic reality in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and across the south.

People in this country who struggle to be a work by 8:30 in the morning set their alarms for 4:00 AM and rolled out of bed without complaining to watch the Cinderella story which unfolded in London: Kate, the commoner, became Princess Catherine of Cambridge, when she and William exchanged their vows in the soaring sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. Thousands of flowers, millions of cheering well-wishers, a carriage ride to Buckingham Palace, and a balcony kiss—two of them, actually—made “happily ever after” seem possible.

Then there were those painful images of devastation and sounds of anguish from tornado-ravaged regions of the south. Piles of sticks and bricks, mountains of rubble and ruin where once stood homes, schools, churches and businesses. Towns and neighborhoods blown violently off the map. Lives cut short. Hope for the future lost, for now, in the debris of destruction.

We live between fairy tales and nightmares, don’t we? Between breathtaking wonder and heartbreaking misery? Between good news and bad? One day, the mail brings a picture from old friends of their newborn granddaughter, and the next morning’s paper has in it a classmate’s obituary. Your neighbor loses her job, and your nephew finally finds work. Wedding bells ring; divorce decrees get issued. You get accepted to your first-choice college, on into governor’s school, or into the honors program, and you can’t wait to tell your friends. You don’t make the team or get-in the top choir or land a role in the play or get the scholarship, and everyone knows, though you wish no one did.

Most days aren’t fairy tales or waking nightmares. Most days are just in-between kinds of days: normal ups and downs, common delights and disappointments, ordinary opportunities and challenges. Most days, thank goodness, we don’t wake up to the aftermath of killer storms. And, most days, there isn’t a royal wedding. The mail doesn’t bring a birth announcement or a letter from the admissions office , just catalogs, advertisements, and bills. Most days, we aren’t getting test results or a performance review or an audit notice from the IRS. We’re just living our routine, everyday kind of lives, hurrying from one thing to the next, trying to get it all done, and doing the best we can.

We need a faith, a way of life, that embraces all of it—a faith that faces honestly life’s hardest and most painful things, a faith that knows how to walk in the dark, how to cry without shame and to ask for help without embarrassment, and how to bear the heavy burdens of trouble and struggle without being crushed by them. We need a faith which trusts that God holds onto us, even when we don’t have any strength left for holding on.

We need a faith that celebrates freely and fully life’s fanfare and festival moments, a faith that knows how to laugh and dance, play and rest, bless and affirm, a faith that says “yes” to life’s joys welcomes its gifts. We need a faith which knows that God delights in our truest selves, is glad about our successes, yearns for our fulfillment, and is committed to our becoming everything God dreams of our becoming.

We need a faith that shows us how to discover extraordinary meaning hidden in life’s the ordinary details—a faith that causes us to pay attention to the surprises tucked into routine, that helps us uncover the treasure hidden just beneath the surface of the same old things, and that opens our eyes and ears and hearts to the glory— sometimes disguised and disfigured, but always there, of every human being we meet.

We find that kind of faith in the company of Jesus, who has scaled the heights and plumbed the depths before us and for us. And, Jesus is a poet of ordinary life—of all the everyday kinds of days between the peaks and the valleys. He shows us how live receptively—how to welcome possibilities waiting to greet us, the joy waiting to find us, and the meaning waiting to enrich us in every moment and each encounter.

Good Friday Prayers

2011-04-22T22:26:00.000-04:00

At noon today, we gathered in the chapel to be called to, and accompanied in, prayer by our Adult Handbell Choir; they rang so well, as they always do. Among the prayers we offered on this Good Friday (and Earth Day) were these:

Creating and Sustaining God, whose word called the earth into being, whose breath gives life to all living things, and whose energy flows in rivers and streams, veins and arteries, accept our praise for the good gift of your world, our home. Give us a vision of your creation healed, freed from poverty and pollution, filled with plenty and beauty, and overflowing with peace and goodness.

Your Son, our Lord Jesus, shows us that your love encompasses the universe and embraces each heart. Your mercy is vast, and your grace knows no limits.

You are the Source of all good and perfect gifts, and we praise you.

You gave Jesus to be our Savior, and we thank you.

You send the Spirit to guide and gladden our journeys, and we love you.

As Jesus prayed from the cross, so we pray:

Reorder our priorities. Rearrange our commitments. Remove the armor of apathy from our hearts. Restore the joy of our salvation. Fire our imaginations with bright visions of the world made whole. Make us passionate for your kingdom to come, your will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

We ask for peace for those who are caught in conflict of whatever kind: conflict between their dreams and the realities in which they live, tension between their hopes and their circumstances, difficulty and misunderstanding among family and friends, divisions in communities and cities, war among nations. Heal the wounds of our conflicts; order our relationships and our world with your justice, and give us the courage to work for peace.

Fathering and mothering God, remind us that we are your beloved children. Jesus, our Brother, walk beside us. Holy Spirit of Divine Love, fill us with joy. Amen.

Resisting Resistance

2011-04-15T23:30:00.002-04:00

Insider. . . outsider
Male. . . .female
Light. . .dark
Weak. . . strong.
Faith. . . doubt
Life. . . death
Courage. . . fear
Love. . . hate.
Yes. . . no

These tensions rest close together in our minds; many of them are also entangled, like interconnected roots, in the soil of our soils. Pastoral counselor James Dittes wrote: “Our deepest longings are locked together with our deepest fears, our strongest likes readily unravel into strong dislikes. The same persons and situations to which we are most fiercely attracted and attached can trigger astounding antagonism and aversion.”

The interconnection of these opposites--the interplay of light and shadow—helps to account for the ambivalence and unsettledness we often feel.

Ambivalence attaches to everyday kinds of things. So, there’s the part of me that wants to take care of my health: to eat wisely and well and to get enough sleep and exercise, but there’s this other force at work, apparently: the one that puts the Ben and Jerry’s carton and a spoon in my hands, that lands me on the sofa in front of the TV, that convinces me that watching other people play sports counts as exercise for me.

Maybe there’s a desire in you to make a difference in your community, and you agree to serve on a volunteer board or sign up to help in a soup kitchen or to tutor kids one afternoon a week. Maybe you even go to a training session or show up the first few times; but, soon, just about any excuse will do not to be there: too busy, too tired, running late, stuck in traffic, relatives in from out of town, whatever.

A salesman can fritter away the day in busyness; in the morning, drinking coffee with the sales manager, talking with suppliers, and making lists of potential customers. In the afternoon, trying to decide whom to call first and dreaming about what he’ll do with the money when he makes the big sale. The salesman is busy, but he never sells.

A writer can spend hours anxiously preparing to write—sharpening pencils and lining them up on the desk, arranging resource material, reviewing what others have written, and making coffee and adjusting the thermostat—but never write.

Parents can run themselves ragged and their children into crankiness, hauling their kids to various enrichment opportunities and never actually get to know their children as people with their own ideas and perspectives, their own hopes and fears, their own hopes and dreams. They are busy on behalf of their children, work for their children, and provide for their children, but are not involved openly, at the level of the heart, with them.

And, how many relationships do you have in which you are avoiding talking about the one subject you most need to discuss—the one question you know you have to ask, the one answer you know you have to give?

All this procrastinating, avoiding, dodging, being consumed by busyness, trafficking in trivia, and living on the surface of things—all of it, I am convinced—grows from a deeper-than-meets-the-eye ambivalence we feel about life itself: we want to engage it and embrace it, and we also want to escape it and run from it. We have a deep down resistance to love and grace, to healing and health, to light and joy.

I can’t fully account for this resistance, where it comes from and why it is so hard to push through. I know it has something to do with fear—maybe the fear of assuming fuller responsibility for our lives.

Stephen Pressfield said: “Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard or smelled. But it can be felt. . . . It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aims is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.” (The War of Art, p. 7).

This resistance causes us to say “no” when we could, should, say “yes”; and “yes” when we could, should, say “no.” We dream of success and sabotage ourselves. We yearn for freedom and the shackle ourselves. We reject what would give us life and welcome what diminishes us.

Pressfield suggests this crucial “Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it” (p. 12).

We can resist our resistance—to sabotage our sabotaging. And we do that by surfacing it rather than denying it and by facing it rather than running from it. Resistance cannot withstand, for long, being known for what it is. It will put up an intense, temporary fight, but it melts away when we expose it to the light of truth and the warmth of awareness.

I need help. I was wrong. I don't know.

2011-04-07T21:05:00.000-04:00

I need help. I was wrong. I don’t know.

Those three statements are crucial to emotional and spiritual maturity. All three of them are confessions of our humanity—of the limits on our strength, goodness, and knowledge.

I need help: I can’t go it alone.

I was wrong: I didn’t follow through. I didn’t do the right thing.

I don’t know: I have questions I can’t answer, problems I can’t solve, and puzzles I can’t put together.

I need help. I was wrong. I don’t know. A couple of years ago, I saw a book I had been telling myself I would someday write: What I’ve Learned Since I Knew Everything.

As time goes by, a few things become more and more certain, but many other things grow more mysterious. I know more now about what I don’t know.

Why is it so hard for us to believe that God loves us? Why do so many of us have this hard, cold, inner resistance to the very thing—love—we want most of all? Why do we do what we intend not to do and fail to do what we meant to do? Why is it so difficult to change self-destructive habits and patterns?

And, the hardest question our faith confronts: If God is a God of power and love, why do evil and suffering exist? Why do children die from leukemia? Why does a beloved friend suffer from breast cancer? Why do car crashes change and even take life in an instant? Why does the sea, so immense and beautiful, suddenly rise up like a wild, raging beast of a tsunami and swallow thousands and thousands? Is the risk of human freedom worth the price we pay for it—terrorist attacks, warfare, rape, murder, physical and emotional abuse in the home, theft, and dishonesty?

I have some clues, hints, insights, stories and metaphors that help throw some light on these mysteries, but I don’t have fully satisfying answers—not the kind of answers that put the questions finally to rest.

I don’t know.

Toward the end of his lyrical lines about love (1 Corinthians 13), the Apostle Paul confessed his own ignorance: “We know only in part, and we prophesy (preach) only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end . . . For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

There will be a day, Paul says, when we will know as fully as we are capable of knowing; we will see as clearly as we have the capacity to see. For now, though, we see only dimly and we know only partially. There are some things we do not know and cannot know—about God, about life, and, even, about ourselves. “We know only in part; we see in a mirror dimly.”

The mysteries remain; the questions continue. The greatest mystery of all, of course, is not a question or a problem. The greatest mystery, which can never be fully comprehended, is God. And that Divine Mystery surprises us over and over again with what we need to live, not just somehow, but with hope. Because of God, even with all our questions, “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

Never Crossed

2011-04-03T14:28:00.000-04:00

I wrote the following poem in response to something I heard from my grandmother over supper one night and to a glimpse of a faded black and white photograph of her husband, my grandfather, standing in front of a motorcycle.

Years after my grandfather died, at a dinner where my grandmother was present, my son, Eliot (who was a boy at the time), said something about wanting a motorcycle when he got older. My grandmother said, “Well, when I met him, he owned a big Harley-Davidson motorcycle and was about to take out across the country and back on that thing. After he met me, that was all over. I told him that motorcycles was dangerous—I seen a man get kilt on one.”

Here’s the poem. It’s not actually about my grandparents; it’s more about where her story and the photograph of him took my imagination. The poem is called “Never Crossed”:

As free as you can,
As long as you can.
Then a while longer. . .
Those eyes, faded flat,
drab on black and white,
begged me to find my
way: out on the road.

Tough cracked black cowhide,
Thin white cotton shirt.
Blue Levi’s, no belt,
Cuffs stuffed in scuffed boots.
Behind him, low slung,
mirroring chrome, stood
The Harley: road ready.

Not him, after all.
She seen a man kilt
on one of them things.
Said: too dangerous.
And she was. For him.
He never crossed her,
Never crossed the hills.

Recently Read and Currently Reading

2011-03-29T21:36:00.002-04:00

A sampling of the books I have read in the last month or so and/or am currently reading.

POETRY
I recently finished Christian Wiman’s new book of poems, Every Riven Thing and Galway Kinnel’s Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past. Wiman is the editor of Poetry Magazine and a fine poet. His language is spare and luminous. There isn’t a wasted word in any of these poems.

Kinnell’s poems in this collection are, for me, like the sound of owls, crickets and frogs in the night. I wouldn’t want to be without them, because they “belong” there and provide music for the darkness. It’s also true that those sounds can keep me awake or awaken me, and that is also a gift of Kinnell’s words. But, just as I rarely see any of the night-music makers, I can’t quite account for why these poems affect me as they do. I just know they do.

I am now reading Billy Collins' Ballistics and Thomas Lynch’s Walking Papers. Both solid, for different reasons.

BIBLE, THEOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY
For the course on the Gospel of Mark I am teaching at First Baptist Church of Asheville, I am re-reading Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, an amazing study of that gospel. It’s guaranteed to engage, enrich, unsettle, evoke and provoke.

I am also reading a new commentary by William Placher in the “Belief” series (Westminster/ John Knox Press). I have always respected Placher, who is a good theologian. His Narratives of a Vulnerable God is an intriguing theological question-raiser, but Mark hasn’t lit my imagination. I am not far into the book yet, so I am still reading with hope.

Hands down, the best “new” commentary on Mark, which I am also reading, is Ben Witherington’s The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans). Witherington is a careful—sometimes overly cautious—interpreter, but a faithful and interesting guide.

On the stack, but all I have read are the preface and introduction, Stanley Hauerwas’ new book, Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (Wipf and Stock, 2011).

A Time to Plant (Sorin Books) by Kyle T. Kramer is subtitled “Life Lessons in Work, Prayer and Dirt.” This memoir is about Kramer’s quest for a sense of place, purpose and meaning as a farmer-teacher-writer. He’s good with words, very good. Here’s a sample from early in the book: “Although I am anxious and yearn for answers, my more immediate concern in how not to live in fear, or, more to the point, in the paralysis, grumpiness, and rigidity that fear can create. I want to live with a sturdy, resilient hope rather than the much flimsier attitude of mere optimism.” Me, too!

LEADERSHIP
For a leadership seminar I have been teaching at the Gardner Webb Divinity School, I read The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Harvard Business Press, 2009), by Ronald Heifitz, et al. In a series of books, beginning with Leadership Without Easy Answers, Heifitz and has collaborators have given form and popular expression to “adaptive leadership,” which, in brief, is a way of thinking about and practicing leadership in times of unprecedented change—times when the challenges and opportunities leaders face are largely new and beyond their current repertoire of experience and expertise. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership helpfully summarizes the theory which undergirds adaptive leadership, and it also serves as a kind of handbook to guide practitioners of it.

Also for that class, I read two brief monographs which are aimed at helping leaders effect change in their organizations: The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry and The Thin Book of Naming Elephants (both by Sue Annis Hammond). Appreciative Inquiry (AI) grows out of the research of David Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University, and operates on the simple, but often ignored, idea that focusing on a person’s, or an organization’s, strengths will be more likely to nurture change than will riveting attention to weaknesses. AI says, in essence, find out what works, find out why, and then do more of those kinds of things. Of these two “thin books,” the one on "Appreciate Inquiry" is more helpful than the one on “Naming Elephants.” The second book runs out of gas halfway through, and it isn’t such a long book to begin with!

BECAUSE
And, “just because” (which means “for no good reason”) I wanted to read it again, I recently re-read E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan. The young boy, Sam, who is central to the story, likes long excursions into the deep woods. Early in the book, White says of Sam: “These were the pleasantest days of Sam’s life, these days in the woods, far from everywhere—no automobiles, no roads, no people, no noise, no school, no homework, no problems except the problem of getting lost. And, of course, the problem of what to be when he grew up. Every boy has that problem.” Do you suppose it ever gets finally solved? Or do the question and a person just wrestle each other to a tie, with the match “called” after both of the wrestlers—the question and the person—are ready to retire?

Ask Me What I Am Living For

2011-03-22T23:36:00.000-04:00

It was a long time ago now, but I clearly remember the day one of my seminary professors came into the classroom, put his lecture notes and books down on the lectern with a thud, scanned the room with an intense and serious look on his face, and asked: “How many of you are ambitious?” and then waited for those of us who would admit to such a thing to raise our hands. None of us did, of course. After all, we were in seminary and whatever else we knew or didn’t know about ministry, we had sense enough to know this much: if we were ambitious we had to hide it under a veneer of modesty and humility. We all sat on our hands while our teacher continued to stare intently at us. Then, he said: “You are all lying. If you are alive and breathing, you are ambitious for something. Ambition, by itself, can be good, or it can be bad; it all depends on what or whom you are ambitious for.”

Obviously, it was one of those moments of truth I’ve never forgotten. All these years later, his voice is still a part of my conscience: “Be honest with yourself, Guy; you are ambitious. But are you ambitions for the right things?” Along with his voice, surprisingly enough, is the voice of actress Lily Tomlin’s, who once admitted: “I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.” We all have ambition. We all want to do something, to be somebody. But, specifically, what and who?

Our word ambition has interesting origins. It comes from the Latin word ambio, and had its first home in the world of Roman politics. Candidates for office walked—ambled—their way toward Rome, campaigning for the support of voters. At its core, then, ambition is the drive toward position, influence, and power. More broadly, it is the boldness to take risks for the sake of a purpose, the will to work toward achievement, the energy to pursue a goal, and the tenacity to push through obstacles.

The ingredients of ambition—drive, boldness, will-power, energy and tenacity—serve Donald Trump in his deal-making, celebrity-seeking, and money-accumulating. They also serve an inner-city teacher in her attempts to convince young people that she cares for them even if many of the other adults in their lives don’t, to cut through bureaucratic red-tape so that her students have books, supplies, and a decent lunch, and to resist the cynicism which threatens her commitment. Ambition—like intelligence and talent—can be competitive or cooperative, selfish or altruistic, ethical or unethical. The issue is not ambition; it is where we place it, where it takes us, how we use it, and what it does to us.

In his chilling novel, The Devil’s Own Work, Alan Judd tells the tale of a prominent author who got his talent from a shadowy transaction with an unseen but tyrannical muse. “Edward had every success an ambitious man could wish; it was the cost that got him. Of course, when he purchased that particular ticket, he had no idea—which of us could have?—of what compound interest can mean over a lifetime” (p. 3). What does the object of your ambition cost you? Are your dreams driving you into a nightmarish existence? What are you giving in exchange for your achievement, your success, your image? Is your level of consumption consuming your spirit? Is your lifestyle costing you your life?

The remarkable Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, once said: “If you want to identify me [to know who I am], ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.” (in My Argument with the Gestapo. NY: W. W. Norton, 1975, pp. 160-161). So, what are we living for? The truth is in the details. What does an honest look at them—how we spend our time, our money, our attention and our energy—tell us about our ambitions, about the kinds of people we want to be, and about the purposes for which we are spending our lives?

Who are the best leaders you have known?

2011-03-14T06:36:00.000-04:00

When I say leader, what images flash across your mind?

For me, the word conjures up quite a crowded room full of people, many of whom are so different from each other that they wouldn’t be very comfortable with my having gotten them together.

There’s George Patton (actually, George C. Scott as George Patton) standing in front of an enormous American flag and giving a stirring speech to troops about to go into battle.

Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are there; they’re are deeply involved in a discussion about the power of nonviolent resistance to effect social change. From time to time, they look nervously and warily over at George Scott/George Patton

Sojourner Truth, former slave and tireless crusader for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights, is there, ready to recite “Ain’t a Woman?” to whoever is willing to listen and even to the few who aren’t willing at all.

Marlene Holland, my junior high school social studies teacher is there, because no one before or since has led me as far into a realization of my potential as did she.

A few business leaders are there: Lee Iacocca, one of Detroit’s great car guys; Steven Jobs, founder of Apple Computers and an extraordinary designer and marketer; and Max DePree, retired chairman and CEO of the Herman Miller Company.

Robert Shaw, legendary choral and symphonic conductor, is there. Some great coaches are there: Dean Smith, Vince Lombardi, Bear Bryant, and Bobby Dodd (Georgia Tech actually won football games during the Dodd years!).

Ken Haag, my pastor when I was a boy, who shaped my understanding of what it means to be a pastor more than anyone else, is there—as are two pastors whom I never really knew except through their writings: Harry Emerson Fosdick and Carlyle Marney.

There are many others, of course, including a handful of political leaders: Lincoln, of course, and FDR and Winston Churchill.

When I think of leadership, those faces crowd into my mind, because they were able to inspire, motivate, and move people to be and do more than they would otherwise have been and done.

Whose faces do you see? Who are the most effective leaders you have known? What made them so effective? How have they influenced your view and practice of leadership?

Listening is Love's Finest Art

2011-03-06T22:31:00.002-05:00

Love depends on knowledge and acceptance. Love takes the time to find out who you really are: what you think and believe, what you question and doubt, what puzzles and perplexes you, what delights and enlivens you, where you’ve been, what’s happened to you, where you think you’re going and what it means to you.

Love takes the time to imagine what it is like to be you, and so love asks:

What was it like to grow up in that home, at that time, in that place? How much laughter did she hear? How much screaming did he endure? Who helped him, who hurt him? Who believed in her? Who put her down and held her back?

What did he learn about how to handle failure and success? What did she learn about being herself, being strong, and being accepted?

Did she learn to rest in the arms of a loving God? Or to run from the reach of an vengeful God?

What makes her heart sing? What makes it break? What opens his spirit? What shuts it down?

What is it like to live in his mind and heart? What voices does she hear when she is alone and vulnerable? What do they say to her? What is like to see the world through his eyes and experiences? How much light does he see? How thick and dark are the shadows around him?

Is she growing stronger and more confident, or more tentative and uncertain? Is he on the way to his dreams, or has he lost his way?

Love sees you as you are; your potential and possibility, your limits and frustrations, and welcomes you into a refuges of rest, a shelter of understanding, a haven of encouragement. Love celebrates your successes gladly and holds your failures tenderly.

Since love depends on knowledge and acceptance, it hinges on listening. Swiss physician Paul Tournier was right when he said, “No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person. It is impossible to overemphasize the immense need humans have to be really listened to, to be taken seriously, to be understood”

Listening, receptively and responsively listening, is love’s most generous gift, its finest art, and its most healing balm.

Instead of Worry. . .

2011-03-01T09:15:00.002-05:00

Fear is faith’s adversary. Fear makes us see the world as a dangerous place, shrouded in darkness and stalked by death. So, we build thick walls around our hearts and high-fences around our loved ones. To protect ourselves from hurt, we push aside adventure. To minimize risk, we shrink our world. To insulate ourselves from pain, we isolate ourselves from love. We play it safe, so safe that life becomes stale, dull, and empty.

Anxiety keeps us on edge, uneasy, and restless. It makes our heads throb and our breath shallow. It makes us feel like something’s wrong but we aren’t sure what, it’s an itch we can’t scratch, and a problem we can’t name, much less solve. It’s the sense that a storm is brewing, even though there isn’t a cloud in the sky. It’s the feeling that the world’s going to fall apart—at least our little corner of it--unless we remain on high alert.

Worry is our way of trying to control those things and people over which we actually have no control at all. If we can’ solve a problem, we can at least surround it without our fretting and corral it with our fussing. If we can’t make people do what we’re sure they need to do, at least we can warn them constantly about how wrong they are. We can caution them again after each misguided step they take. We can show them the previews of the disaster they’re headed for—previews we’re watching over and over again. .

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invited us to live with peace, confidence, and trust rather than fear, anxiety and worry: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? . . . Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today”

Instead of worrying, Jesus said, look again at wonders of life teeming, growing and blooming all around you. “Consider the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.” We live in God’s vast, intricate, bountiful and beautiful world; but, we blind ourselves to it, and to the generous God whose life and love course through it, by narrowing our gaze to the tight confines of our little lives and our immediate concerns.

So, Jesus said: Open your eyes. Broaden your vision. Deepen your awareness. Get outside, and see the vast world God has made. Nature doesn’t worry: flowers don’t fret and birds aren’t weighed down by fear. They do what they are made to do. They bloom and they fly; and they live the life God gave them to live. Get outside your pride that you are self-made and your fear that you must be self-sufficient. Get beyond the illusion that your life is in your hands and that it is all up to you. Your life is a gift that God gave you, a gift God wants you to enjoy and will certainly sustain.

To jostle us into awareness of God’s love for us, he asks: “Aren’t you more valuable than the bird of the air and the flowers of the field?” Jesus asks us. “Of course we are,” is the answer Jesus wants to trust. Because God loves you, Jesus says, “Do not worry; God knows what you need.”

Arriving Where I Started

2011-02-21T21:46:00.000-05:00

Early on, I bought the idea—maybe you bought it, too—that the older I got and the more I learned, the more I would know for sure. As time went by, I’d have more understanding and fewer questions. I liked that idea, so I stocked the warehouse of mind full of facts. By now, I’ve got a storehouse of information. So, in one way, I know more than I used to know. But, in another and more important way, I know less.

As Alice in Wonderland puts it, things have gotten “curiouser and curiouser.” Questions have multiplied. Edges have blurred. There’s more grey, less inky black contrasting with shiny white. Mysteries have broadened and heightened.

I’m especially more perplexed about us—about human beings—about what makes us tick and ticks us off, about how we are wired up on the inside and what we transmit and conduct on the outside. I am simultaneously awe-struck and troubled by our capacity for both good and evil, compassion and cruelty, creativity and destructiveness, love and violence.

We perpetuate war and famine; we maintain racism and oppression; we deprive children, robbing them of their future and ignore the elderly, stripping them of dignity. But we also selflessly sacrifice for peace, tirelessly work to feed the hungry, courageously cross boundaries of race and class; energetically teach tutor and coach children; respectfully honor and help our aging neighbors. I am just coming to understand how little I understand about the workings of the human heart.

Since I know less than I used to know about the things that matter most, I hold on for dear life to the few things I’ve got. I hold on like a child hugs herself close to her mother after a bad dream in the middle of the night. Here’s what I hold most tightly: God is love and God loves the whole world.

I find it ironic that the truths I am holding onto now are the ones I learned before I knew that I was learning. Maybe you remember what T. S. Eliot said in The Four Quartets:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

All my exploring keeps bringing me back to the beginning; my search has me arriving where I started. And in the unfamiliar-familiar place, I hear the voice of a new old calling: the call to love.

At the beginning, the good men and women of the First Baptist Church of Conley, GA told me to memorize two Bible verses: the fragment from 1 John 4—“God is love” and the phrase from John 3: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

We didn’t call memorizing memorizing. We called it “learning by heart.” How right and true that is: they wanted me to learn “by heart” the things that I would need to sustain my life: God is love and that God loves the whole world.

Those wonderful folks who shaped my earliest faith also taught me to sing: “Jesus love me, this I know/for the Bible tells me so” and “Jesus loves the little children/all the children of the world/red and yellow, black and white/they are precious in his sight/Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

I got it early, but I still haven’t gotten it as fully as I need to: God loves the world. There is not a corner of the world untouched by God’s love. Everything on the earth—plant or animal, animate or inanimate—is here because, at the dawn of time and in every moment since, God’s immense love, a love God takes joy in sharing, has overflowed in the ecstasy of creation.

It’s all here, we’re all here, because of love. God lavishes love on every human being, young and old, men and women, “red and yellow, black and white,” friend and enemy, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist and searcher.

There is not a person on the earth whom God does not love. God sent Jesus for all of us, and God yearns for us to respond to the love God keeps pouring out on us.

My Witness: The Way of Jesus is a Way of Hope

2011-02-16T10:31:00.000-05:00

A final post about “my witness,” brief reflections on truths I have learned from my experience with Jesus.

Our world, torn asunder by division and hostility, needs people who will embrace Jesus’ calling to be peacemakers, not just peacekeepers and conflict-avoiders. Peacemakers go into situations of misunderstanding and work for understanding, pray for their enemies until they are no longer enemies, and interrupt the cycle of violence and vengeance by renouncing violence in all its forms. This interrupting of the cycle of violence includes a refusal of the forms and tones violence takes in many interpersonal relationships: subtle and not-so subtle manipulation, intimidation, and passive aggressive attempts to undermine other people. Jesus called this refusal of violence “turning the other cheek.”

Our world, confused and betrayed by deception, needs people who will speak simply and straightforwardly, without the fog and smoke of hype and spin. Jesus described this plain truthfulness as “letting your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ ‘no.’”

Our world needs people who see and feel the presence of Jesus in the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the stranger, and the prisoners and, therefore, will see to it that they are fed sheltered, welcomed, visited, and loved.

Our world needs people who know that the poverty they see in the world mirrors the poverty in their own spirits, who hunger and thirst for justice, and whose response to brokenness and sin is never condemnation but always mercy.

This way of Jesus is a way of hope; it is light in our darkened world.

My Witness: The Story of Jesus Makes Sense Out of Life

2011-02-13T14:34:00.002-05:00

A fourth post about “my witness,” brief reflections on truths I have learned from my experience with Jesus.

For me, no other story makes as much sense out of the perplexity and mystery of life as the story of Jesus. His story fires my imagination and warms my heart. I am convinced that he is the way of truth into life as God means it to be. Because of what I have experienced in the company of Jesus, and because of what I know about the yearning, beauty and brokenness of the world, I am also convinced that we need Jesus.

So does Ashville. Over the years I have been here, in different ways, I have been asking our church: do we really love Asheville as it is, or do we love it as it used to be or as we wish it was? Are we willing to serve and love the actual people who live here, or are we going to reserve our love only for people who look, think, act, and live like us? Are we willing to acknowledge that people don’t change quickly, but that they don’t change at all until they know they are respected and accepted as they are?

Do we truly believe that the people whose lifestyles we find most distasteful and whose values we least understand are people with whom God wants to share life and friendship? If God wants friendship with them, what about us? Are we willing to welcome everyone, EVERYONE, give them the respect they deserve as bearers of God’s image, listen to them, hear the cries of their hearts, and patiently, tenderly love them into the willingness to hear from us about our experience with Jesus?

My Witness: God's Love Gentles our Fears

2011-02-11T07:50:00.002-05:00

A third post about "my witness"--brief reflections on truths I have learned from my experience with Jesus.

God made all people and gave everyone an ineradicable dignity. God loves all people unconditionally and passionately. And, God’s love, made known in Jesus, gentles our fears.

I’m convinced that, more than anything else, it’s anxiety that twists and tears our hearts and fear which distorts and diminishes our authentic selves.

We’re afraid that we won’t have what we need to survive and thrive: that we will starve for bread or for beauty, that we will be unsheltered or unloved, and that we will be deprived of freedom or opportunity.

We’re afraid that we will live our whole lives and never know why: why we were made, what our purpose is, and what our possibilities are.

We’re afraid that we are alone and on our own: that when we are weak or needy or vulnerable, then we will also be abused or neglected or abandoned.

We are afraid of what others think of us, or, even worse, that they don’t think of us at all.

We’re afraid of dying and of death: what will my ending be like? Will I face it with poise and peace? What, if anything, lies on the other side? Who, if anyone, will greet me there?

Jesus tenderly and powerfully deals with our anxieties and fears. He urges us to trust that we live in a world of abundance, a world made and governed by a generous God.

Jesus tells us why we are here, the purpose of our lives: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind and all your strength; and love your neighbors as yourselves.” We are not here, primarily, to produce and consume. We are here for love. We’re here to experience the love of God—to feel the acceptance, delight, and blessing of God; to accept and enjoy the love which comes to us from the hearts of other people; and to join God in loving the world—serving our neighbors, caring for family and friends, and laboring for the healing of creation.

And, Jesus has pledged to walk with us through our dying and to take us to the great house and heart of God.

Nothing, finally, can separate us from the love of God which comes to us through Jesus (Romans 8). He always—always!— cradles us in love, shelters us in tenderness, and embraces us with joy. And, as we rest in him, he gentles our fears.

My Witness: God Loves All People and the Whole World

2011-02-08T09:34:00.000-05:00

A second post about “my witness,” brief reflections on truths I have learned from my experience with Jesus.

In the last post, I wrote about my core conviction all people bear God’s image and have, for that reason, ineradicable dignity and inestimable worth. A reading of the gospels makes it clear that Jesus had this exalted view of human beings. He treated people with respect, honored their freedom, and responded to their needs with compassion. He was not naïve about humanity’s potential for going wrong and doing great harm; but that capacity for evil did not, in his view, completely erase anyone’s essential identity as God’s creation.

Jesus has also persuaded me that God loves all people and the whole world freely, passionately, and unconditionally. Jesus lived and died among us to make that love unmistakably clear. He lived a life of astonishing and even scandalous openness: he was constantly criticized for, as the country song says, having “friends in low places.” Jesus enjoyed the company of people whom polite society clucked its tongue. He shared his heart and his table with sinners, welcomed the shunned, embraced the excluded, and lifted-up the downtrodden. He crossed boundaries of race, class, and gender to show mercy toward the broken and bruised. He set-aside his religion’s preoccupation with dividing the world and its people into clean and unclean, pure and impure, sacred and profane. By so doing, he redefined holiness and moral perfection.

For Jesus, perfection was not flawlessness but compassion. Righteousness was not to separate oneself from the world; it was, instead, to live in the world with an open heart and open arms. In his death, Jesus took pain, sin, and death into God’s heart. Through the cross of Jesus, God absorbed all that is twisted and torn about us and the world. And, when God raised Jesus from the dead, God poured out a saving stream of forgiveness and restoration—a stream that washes away all our wrongs and wounds. Jesus is God’s voice, God’s word, saying to the world: “I love you—I love you more than you know and more than you can ever know.”

My Witness: Everyone Bears God's Image

2011-02-05T08:51:00.001-05:00

A wise teacher told his disciples that the wonder and mystery of God are too vast for words. So they asked him, “Then why do you talk about God at all?” He shrugged and answered: “Why does a bird sing?”

The novelist Nikos Kazantzakis wrote: “I said to the almond tree, ‘Sister, speak to me of God.’ And the almond tree blossomed.”

During the Epiphany season at First Baptist Church of Asheville, we are exploring the theme “We are Witnesses.” We are pondering how to pay attention to the signs of God’s presence and how to live in such a way that we draw other people’s attention to what we have seen, heard, and felt. In my view, all authentic speaking about God comes from deep within who we are and what we have experienced. A witness blossoms with the life that is in her; he sings the song he has been given to sing. Witnesses tell what they have seen, heard and felt.

In a brief series of posts over the next several days, I will write about dimensions of faith which my experience has convinced me are true. What follows, then, are part of my “witness,” my song, about God and life.

First, all human beings are created in God’s image. The Bible makes that claim, of course, and I have also seen the truth of it written on the faces of boys and girls, men and women. Many years ago, that remarkable Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, was in downtown Louisville, at an intersection I know well from my years in seminary in that town, watching people hurry by. He later wrote in his journal:

In Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. I have the immense joy of being human, a member of the race in which God himself became incarnate. The sorrows and stupidities of the human condition can no longer overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. If only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

I have caught glimpses of that radiance which God has given to all of us, and, though Merton says there is no way, I keep looking for ways and words to help us see that we are shining with the image of God. Here’s my witness: beyond and behind whatever brokenness and shadows human beings bear, all of them, all of us, have an undying dignity and an imperishable worth.

Jostled into Joy

2011-01-30T13:45:00.002-05:00

He shuffled slowly along the sidewalk, stoop shouldered, holding tightly to his walker. He had tried to comb his hair, but some of it had resisted going into place. His shirttail was more untucked than tucked, but I could tell that this was a man who, at one time, had taken great care with his appearance. He had an air of gentle dignity about him, but he also seemed confused and disoriented. He wasn’t frowning, exactly, but his face was clouded with something. Sadness, maybe or boredom or wistfulness.

He was moving south along the Biltmore Avenue sidewalk, down from Pack Square, and nearly in front of Marble Slab Creamery. A little girl came darting out of the ice cream store; and, before either she or he knew what was happening, she jolted into his walker. Even thought the bump knocked her off her feet, it didn’t hurt her, and scrambled quickly back up. And, thankfully, the jolt only unsteadied the old man. He managed to stay on his feet.

The little girl, standing in front of the man, looked into his eyes. She was a little afraid of what he might say or do. I was a little anxious, too, on her behalf. A bright, broad smile spread across his face, and, though he didn’t say a word, his smile said everything the little girl needed to hear. She ran back toward her mother. The old man stood still, watching her run and, as he did, his big smile became a gentle laugh.

After just a bit, he started shuffling along again, but his shoulders weren’t quite as stooped and his pace wasn’t quite as slow. What was it, I wondered, about having a little girl bump into him that made him smile and put energy back in his step? Did he remember fondly a daughter or granddaughter he loved ? Was he carried back to own days of running and playing on the sidewalk or in a field?

I am not sure; I simply know that grace bumped into him in the shape of a little girl. And I know that, whatever our ages, we sometimes find ourselves shuffling along, shoulder-stooped and back-bent, slowed by the weight of too much, and leaning on whatever we can to stay on our feet. And, then God darts across our path and jostles us into surprising joy.

Between Experience and Words

2011-01-24T11:01:00.001-05:00

I spend a lot of my time in-between experience and words. By experience I simply mean whatever it is that happens to, in and around me: the events I participate in, the people I encounter, and the thoughts and images that arise, invited or not, in my mind and heart.

Those experiences generate an array of feelings: from joy to sorrow, hope to despair, clarity to confusion, anticipation to anxiety, love to loneliness. Often, my feelings are not at either end of a continuum, but, instead, somewhere in-between. If I were painting my feelings, I would occasionally use bold primary colors; but, more often, I would use mixed shades and melded hues. The feelings can puzzle, delight, mystify, guide, discourage, motivate, deflate or inspire me.

Having had the experiences, felt the feelings, and sensed the direction of their movement (feelings do move within us and move us; that’s why we sometimes call them emotions), I face the challenge of putting the feelings into words. The words can be shaped into questions, affirmations, protests, prayers, blessings, testimony, or statements of fact. The more crucial the feelings are, the more I will need and want to take care and precision in the crafting of my words. The more significant the feelings are, the more likely and important it will be for the words to be richly metaphorical, or playfully parabolic, or searchingly poetic, or lightly lyrical.

Translating experiences, which have become feelings, into words is hard work. It is wonderful work, but, for me at least, it is always exacting and demanding. In his essay, “Feeling into Words,” poet Seamus Heaney, said: “Finding a voice means that you can get your own feeling into your own words and that your words have the feel of you about them.” When we say about someone that he or she has a “distinctive voice,” a deeply integrated and personally coherent way of communicating, what we are recognizing is that he or she has developed the capacity for meaningful translation of feelings into his or her own words.

Reynolds Price, that marvelous writer who died last week, had found his voice. He was consummately skilled at the craft of putting his experiences and feelings into words. I offer as one example the final lines of his poem, “The Eel,” which he appended to his memoir of illness and recovery, A Whole New Life. Written as it became clearer that spinal cancer would not immediately take his life, Price gave thanks for “long years more”

To use what I think I finally glimpse—
The steady means of daily love
In daily life: the patience, trust,
Suspended fear, to choose one soul
And stand nearby and say “Be you.
Be near but you “
And thereby praise,
Thank, recompense the mind of God
That sent me, Mother, through the straits of your
Own hectic womb and into life
To fight this hardest battle now—
A man upright and free to give,
In desperate need.

A good question can make all the difference

2011-01-16T22:04:00.000-05:00

I am sure you have heard about the wise and respected rabbi whose student once asked, “Rabbi, why is it that you answer all of our questions with a question?” The rabbi replied: “What’s wrong with answering your questions with a question?”

There have been times in my life when the right question has made all the difference. Years ago, I was invited to a conference for church leaders sponsored by the Lily Endowment. About thirty of us gathered in Chicago for three days of seminars and conversation. I remember a question I was asked over dinner the last night we were there. The fellow who asked the question was one of the speakers: a wiry, intense, and crusty older man who had spent most of his career as a negotiator for the United Auto Worker’s Union. He told stories about the rough and tumble of union politics, about marathon negotiating sessions, and about Lee Iacocca. He was funny and wise, and I sat close to him at dinner so that I could hear more.

Not long into dinner, however, he turned to me and said, “Reverend Sayles, whenever I sat across the table from Lee Iacocca, I knew what his bottom line was: return on investment for Chrysler’s shareholders. That was thing he was most committed to. Reverend Sayles, in your ministry, what’s your bottom line?”

I remember another important question. In St. Louis, after Sunday evening worship, I went with some friends to a little Chinese restaurant for dinner. I had just started on my hot and sour soup, when one of them asked me, “If you could be guaranteed that, adjusted for inflation, you would have your current income for the rest of your life, what would you do?”

And, I will never forget the time a friend brought me up short with this probing question: “When you get where you are going in such a hurry, will you be glad you got there?”

In John’s Gospel, the first words Jesus speaks are a question. John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by and declared, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” Two of John’s disciples, one named Andrew and the other unnamed, fell into step behind Jesus. Jesus turned and asked them, “What are you looking for?” It’s the same question he asks you and me: “What are you looking for? What do you want?”

Writer Raymond Carver struggled his way to freedom from alcoholism and, not long after, discovered that he was suffering from cancer. As his life was ebbing away from him, he wrote this poem which he called “Late Fragment”:

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

I think Raymond Carver knew what we all want: to know ourselves beloved—to feel love in the marrow of our bones, coursing through our veins, filling our lungs, gentling our fears, inspiring our hopes, and shaping our dreams. More than anything else, love is what we are looking for.

Getting Your Voice Back

2011-01-09T22:43:00.000-05:00

I was in San Antonio this past week, a great city in which I once lived and worked, for a meeting of pastors and seminary professors who are exploring together new models for the relationship between local congregations and seminaries/divinity schools. We’ve been called together by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship; the Lily Endowment has invested in the conversations, and Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School guides our explorations. I am glad to have been included in the conversation.

The week in San Antonio was good. We met at the Oblate Renewal Center on the campus of the Oblate School of Theology. The Oblates have a vocation of missions and education within the Catholic Church, and they were wonderful hosts to us. A group of young Franciscan monks were on retreat at the same time we were having our meetings; it was a joy to see them walking across the campus in their brown cowls, belted by simple ropes. I felt connected to the broader Christian family, especially to our Catholic brothers and sisters.

At morning prayers one day, our guest musician was Johnny Bush, who is a member of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio. Johnny Bush is a honky tonk and country music legend, having written hit songs and played and sung with folks like Willie Nelson. Johnny plays the guitar with soulful sensitivity; and, at one time, he had a smooth voice with a tremendous and seemingly easy range. Then, in the mid-1970s, that amazing voice left him. For a season, he could hardly talk. His range was gone. His vocal chords were irreparably damaged.

Johnny Bush spiraled downward. Eventually, his trouble was correctly diagnosed, and, slowly, he learned a new way to sing. He doesn’t sing the same way, or with the same ease, as he did when he was a young man. But he’s singing again, and his voice resonates with his suffering and recovery, with the depths he’s plumbed and the heights to which he has soared.

At our morning prayers, I could hear Johnny’s heart bouncing off the strings of his guitar and feel his soul in his voice. He touched me deeply. And, Johnny Bush challenged me: sometimes we have to learn a new way to sing, because we’ve lost the original way. Life takes away our voices for a season, and we need to regain them. We need to relearn how to sing and tell our stories. It’s never too late for us to get our voices back.

Small Things

2011-01-02T08:15:00.000-05:00

I’m convinced that we’re most likely to make a positive difference—to contribute to meaningful development and lasting change—if we pay close attention to small things over the long haul. Real differences emerge when we consistently tend to details without losing sight of the larger vision of which they are a part.

In his fine book, A Way of Ignorance, Wendell Berry said: “I think the great problems call for many small solutions” (p. 65). Sociologist James Q. Wilson said:

If we decide the little things—like graffiti on all subways or buses or un-repaired chinks out of sidewalks or a bit of litter here and there—do not really matter and we let them slide, it makes it easier for the big things—brazen assaults on person in broad daylight—to emerge and take hold. Why? Because letting the little things go, ignoring the beginnings of deterioration an decrepitude is a sign that we no longer care about this place—we do not mind if people start to trash it. This has an insidious effect on our hearts and minds.

Small things matter. Even though it isn’t strictly logical for us to do this kind of thing, we often draw sweeping conclusions based on our impressions of seemingly small things. As management guru Tom Peters once commented, if we see coffee stains on an airplane’s flip down tray, we’re likely to think the airline does shoddy engine maintenance, too. Poor grammar means sloppy thinking. Untucked football jerseys mean undisciplined athletes. Trash in the yard means trashy people in the house. A run down church building means a careless, declining congregation.

None of these impressions is strictly logical. It’s possible to have great airline mechanics and a poor janitorial service. It’s possible to have brilliant ideas and massacre the king’s English. Trash in the yard might mean that someone inside is injured or ill. Even though it isn’t logical to make those kinds of connections, we do it all the time. We sense that a leader or an organization which is really on the ball will be on top of even the smallest details.

Many of our most pleasant experiences with leaders, companies, and organizations can be traced back to the little things. A hotel that turns down the sheets, fluffs the pillow and leaves a chocolate; the gas station that puts handi-wipes beside the gas pumps; free samples at Sams; the greeter at Wal-Mart.

From the Cajun country in southern Louisiana, we’ve gotten a delightful word for going the extra mile and doing the unexpected. The word is lagniappe. It comes from words in Louisiana French and American Spanish which mean, essentially, “the gift” and “to give more.” It describes a little bonus that a friendly shopkeeper might add to a purchase. By extension, it may mean “an extra or unexpected gift or benefit.” You’ve heard the old saying: “Give 17 ounces to the pound, 37 inches to the yard and thirteen pieces to the dozen and people will beat a path to your door.” Do the extra, unexpected things that will set you or your organization apart.

Small things. Return phone calls. Answer emails. Say “please,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” Celebrate good things. RSVP. Don’t leave things “almost done”; finish them. Communicate clearly. Honor deadlines. Imagine what it’s like to be the other person. Clean up after yourself. Pick up trash. Turn off lights when not in use. Recycle. Shine your shoes. Send flowers. Write a note. Read to a child. Care for a neighbor. Help a stranger.

In Every War Has Two Losers, poet William Stafford says, “To hold the voice down and the eyes up when facing someone who antagonizes you is a slight weight—once. But in a lifetime it adds up to tons” (p. 27). Small and right things, over time, add up.

In the year ahead, I want to pay closer attention to the details; I want to pay more attention to the nuances, subtleties, and quiet opportunities which offer me the chance to make a positive difference.

Know more clearly, love more dearly, follow more nearly

2010-12-30T08:41:00.000-05:00

For me, there’s an almost irresistible pull toward evaluation and resolution in the ending of a year and the beginning of another. I know there’s something artificial about it, since there isn’t, after all, any particular magic or significance about one day's being the last of 2010 and another's being the first of 2011. Never mind. This week, I am thinking and praying about the pace and direction of my journey, wondering about possible course corrections, and pondering the quality of my relationships with fellow-travelers.

My reflections push me to face the truth that, during the year which is ending, I have traded 365 unrepeatable days of my life for whatever I have to show for the trade. Part of what I am doing this week is trying honestly to answer questions like: “Was it worth it? Has my use of time been consistent with what I say I believe? Have I become more loving, joyful, peaceful, and patient? Am I kinder, gentler, and more compassionate? Am I more awake and responsive to the presence of God in the world and in other people?”

Questions like these remind me that life isn’t so much about what happens to us as it is about what happens in and with us as a result of what happens to us. And, for followers of Jesus, what happens in and with us can help us to become more like him. That is, after all, the overarching purpose of life for Christians: to become more and more like Jesus.

As I understand it, being like Jesus means to live as passionately and compassionately, with as much commitment to justice and mercy, and with as much joy and delight in God and the word as Jesus did. I believe that nearly everything in life can be bent to serve that purpose. Everything can deepen our awareness of his presence, spirit, and his love. Everything can be lived and prayed in such a way that our connection to him is deepened and strengthened.

We don’t know what will happen to us in the year ahead, but we do know that, whatever happens, it can draw us into greater and greater identification with Jesus. A prayer for the New Year which God is sure to answer is the one offered more than 750 years ago by Richard of Chichester: “O Lord Jesus Christ, most merciful redeemer, friend, and brother, may we know thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, and follow thee more nearly.”

Snow Decisions and the Worship of God

2010-12-26T09:01:00.002-05:00

I made the decision to cancel our gathering for worship today at First Baptist Church of Asheville. As a safety decision, I am nearly certain it was the right thing to do. Getting to the church campus would be treacherous today, and I don’t want to put people at unnecessary risk.

But, I have theological convictions that are in conflict with safety considerations. There is, I am sure, nothing more important than the worship of God, and the best worship happens when a community of faith comes together, regularly and faithfully, to sing and pray, to hear and respond to the Good News, and to offer and receive the encouragement and support of fellow followers of Jesus.

Because worship matters so much, a church has a glad obligation not to let anything interfere with it. One of the most significant ways the church has, throughout history, borne witness to its faith is to gather on Sunday, no matter what, to worship God. I have heard now-elderly Londoners describe the worship they shared in bombed-out cathedrals during WW II. I have listened to citizens of the former Soviet Union speak of assembling for worship each Sunday despite the harsh realities of government persecution. Snow isn’t nearly as great a problem as war or persecution, for goodness sake, so I am always hesitant to let weather keep us from shared worship.

When the church gathers for worship even when it is difficult or even dangerous, it is a way of saying that the God we praise transcends all the challenges and problems we face. It is a way of reminding ourselves and gently telling the world that, as little sense as it might make in strictly rational ways, there really is nothing that matters more than our faithful and joyful response to the love of God made known in Jesus.

I “get it” that we can worship God anywhere anytime. And, I don’t believe God is disappointed in, or frustrated with, a church which can’t gather on a Sunday. God has no need for us to prove our faithfulness by running foolish risks. Faith calls for real risks, but not stupid ones. Being “heroic” when heroism isn’t really called-for is a kind of pious charade, not faithfulness. We need heroism when we face injustice, violence, idolatry and cruelty--not wintry roads. We are, always, “saved by grace and not by works,” including the “work” of worship.

I also understand that, for most of history and in most places, driving to worship was not an issue. If we all lived close enough to the sanctuary to walk (or ride a horse!)—if coming together didn’t involve cars and slick roads—many of us would be there today.

Here’s something else I need to admit: A missed December Sunday adversely and seriously affects our church’s finances. December is a crucial month for giving, and, when we miss a Sunday toward the end of the year, money we vitally need to fund the mission and ministry of our church is far less likely to be given. I know that this concern can sound superficial or even greedy; in fact, what I think about are mission and ministry projects that don’t get fully funded; music, youth and children’s ministries that end-up under-resourced; and senior adult ministries that get trimmed because budgets aren’t completely met. I think about people and their needs, not about budget targets and balance sheets. We will need folks to send their contributions to the church this week, or we will end the year in a very difficult position.

The snow is, in so many ways, a gift: it is so beautiful, for one thing, and, for another, it allows us (or forces us, depending on our temperaments) to slow down, to stay closer to home, and to “be” more than “do.” Enjoy the day and its gifts; and, in whatever ways you can, offer your worship to God.

Christmas "Gifts"

2010-12-23T06:18:00.000-05:00

There are so many things I like look forward to during the Christmas season:
“A Charlie Brown Christmas,” especially that scrawny and scraggly Christmas tree Charilie Brown brings to decorate the set of the Christmas pageant, scrawny and scraggly but green, fragrant and alive, rather than big, flashy, aluminum and dead.

Remembering The Grinch Who Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss and A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, because they warn me to tame my own inner Grinch and Scrooge; they caution me about what happens when cynicism and loneliness rob us of the Christmas Spirit.

Watching children talk to Santa Claus.

The scents of cinnamon and clove and evergreen.

Normally serious and no-nonsense men who show up in public wearing Santa hats and sporting ties that light up or sing Christmas carols.

Christmas music of all kinds, and the carols most of all: “Away in a Manger,” “Joy to the World,” “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

Gaudy lights on doublewide trailers, inflatable snowmen in the yard, and red ribbons or reindeer antlers on the grills of huge, rusted, and rickety old pickup trucks.

Salvation Army bell ringers, toboggans on their heads, high-pitched tinny bells in their hands, kettles (now plastic), beside them, reminding me as I go in and out of stores to spend money on me and mine that the world beyond me and mine includes people who don’t have enough to eat or warm clothes on their backs or shelter against the storm.

Candlelight in an otherwise darkened sanctuary.

The prayer and the plea, the yearning and the hope, that the world will, at last and always, “sleep in heavenly peace.”

Early, early Christmas morning—when not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse—
I sit down with a cup of coffee and let the story wash over me again: a young woman and her carpenter husband giving birth to their firstborn son in a borrowed barn; startled shepherds and the angel chorus’ a shining star and journeying wise men. It is the most improbable and most important story I know, because it reminds us of the truest truth there is: God loves us. Love is the heart, the center, and the soul of everything. We are not alone after all. God comes to us, wherever we are, and Jesus is born, over and over again, to us and in us.

Lost in God and found by joy

2010-12-16T06:56:00.000-05:00

When the angel Gabriel told Mary that God had invited her to become the mother of Jesus, the angel also gave her the news that her (much!) older cousin, Elizabeth, was pregnant. The news about Elizabeth was astonishing because Elizabeth was well into her Polident and Geritol days. She was eligible for Social Security and Medicare, but Gabriel said she was busy converting the guest room into a nursery: "Even Elizabeth, your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month."

Mary packed some things in a suitcase and caught the first caravan to Judea to see Elizabeth. Together, these women laughed with wonder: God had chosen them--powerless peasant women--to be partners in divine redemption of the world. God had unsettled them with delight. They had been, in Wordsworth's phrase, "surprised by joy."

The greatness and gladness of it all set Mary's heart to praising and her lips to singing the beautiful hymn we now know as “The Magnificat”:

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God
my Savior."

Her hymn (see Luke 1:39-56) shows us the way to a celebrative and expansive life. We have a distressing way of getting far too wrapped-up and bogged-down in the narrow confines of “self.” Our lives become smotheringly small and cloyingly constricted. Mary’s song draws us up and out of ourselves into God; she teaches us to soar, to lose and find our lives in the Holy One. She points us toward a pattern of life in which, as theologian David Ford put it, "Our whole life is continually thrown into the air in praise in the trust that it will be caught, blessed, and returned renewed."

Praise rises from the awareness of God’s goodness and greatness; it comes from the heart of one who trusts that God is the center of reality. When we are free from the illusion that life orbits around us, when we realize “it” is not all about us, then we are liberated to experience joy.

I am perplexed at how glum and grim many of us are. Too many of us go through our days without singing. Could it be because we are not sure, as Mary was sure, that God is present and involved in our lives? Leander Keck, a former dean of the Yale Divinity School, wrote:

I do not know why so much of mainline Protestantism has become a joyless religion. Perhaps we are more impressed by the problems of the world than by the power of God. Perhaps we have become so secular that we indeed think that now everything depends on us; that surely ought to make us depressed. Perhaps we have simply gotten bored with a boring God whom we substituted for the God of the Bible. We sometimes sing the Doxology as if it were a dirge. Even the Eucharist. . . .is rarely the thankful, joyous foretaste of the Great Banquet with the One who triumphed over Death, but mostly a mournful occasion for introspection. A joyless Christianity is as clear a sign that something is amiss as a dirty church (The Church Confident)

In my opinion, Keck is right about many of us. We have lost vital and compelling interest in God, because long ago we settled down with a tame and manageable god who would do nothing we deem to be unexplainable or unexpected. We do feel over-burdened with responsibility, because we wrongly believe that the weight of the world rests more on our shoulders than it does on the cross of Jesus Christ. We are more impressed by the problems of the world than we are by the power of God.

My hope is that the Advent and Christmas seasons will help us recover a sense of God's grandeur and love, of God's majesty and grace, because, "when the greatness of God becomes real, the church is renewed, and there is joy in the heart and a song on the lips of the people of God" (Keck). I hope we will remember that to be "lost in wonder, love, and praise" is to be found, surprised, and saved by joy.

Bad decision. . .

2010-12-12T09:59:00.001-05:00

Bad decision. . . At 6:00 this morning, it looked to me like I needed, very reluctantly, to cancel services today. I was especially concerned about the impact anticipated falling temperatures and predicted further snow would have on people trying to get home, especially senior adults. Only one other time, in over 30 years, have I ever canceled, completely, Sunday services. Looks to me like I wrongly picked the second time! Third Sunday of Advent is Joy Sunday. . . Bad snow decisions make that an uphill climb! Thankfully, real joy is largely independent of circumstances. It is much deeper than shallow snow.

"Yes" to Love

2010-12-10T06:07:00.001-05:00

On an otherwise unremarkable day, in the unremarkable backwoods town of Nazareth, God sent the angel Gabriel to interrupt young Mary’s life with some startling news.

As far as we know, Mary had no advance warning and no special preparation for the surprise God sprung on her. There’s no reason to think that she was precociously religious or unusually pious. She was a young woman from a peasant family who wasn’t looking for a heroic life. She was, instead, looking forward to her wedding day and dreaming of her life with Joseph, the carpenter.

We don’t know very much about how the unsettling encounter between Gabriel and Mary occurred. Luke doesn’t tell us whether Mary was awake or asleep, whether Gabriel slipped into her dreams, or knocked on the door, or crawled in the window, or materialized in front of her as if he had been beamed-in, Star Trek style. All Luke seems to care about is the angel’s message and Mary’s response.

Somehow, though, Gabriel came to Mary and said, “Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you.” Mary was troubled by what she heard. Not so much by the angel's appearance; she seems to have taken that in stride which might mean that this angel looked a lot more like a college kid delivering a singing telegram than he looked like a fearsome heavenly warrior. For whatever reason, it wasn't his presence that disturbed Mary; it was his words: "She was much perplexed by his words."

Her anxiety drew this response from Gabriel: “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.”

Mary must have had a thousand questions but she asked only the most obvious one: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Gabriel’s answer was, essentially, “Because of God.” Mary's objection was clinical in its reasonableness: facts were facts. The angel answered, not clinically, but mysteriously: facts were facts, but God was God.

Mary was speaking of gynecology; the angel answered with theology. The angel said: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God." The angels spoke of wonder and miracle, not of logic and science: "You are a virgin. You will have a son. The reason is not reasonable. The reason is God."

Then the angel spoke words that Fred Craddock has called "the creed of all creeds," the faith which gives rise to faith: "For nothing is impossible with God." Parker Palmer, a Christian writer and educator tells of a difficult decision he faced. The option he most wanted to pursue seemed the hardest. A friend he turned to for advice said to him: "The thing you don't seem to understand, Parker, is that just because something is impossible doesn't mean you shouldn't do it." (The Active Life, p. 76)

God asked Mary to yield, to open herself to God’s immediate and intimate presence, to allow herself—her identity as well as her body—to be shaped and reshaped by God’s purpose for her. Despite her misgivings and reservations, and despite what seemed the sheer impossibility of it all, Mary said “yes” to the will of God.

God asked Mary to say “yes” to love. God did not ask Mary to embark on a self-improvement plan so that she would be a fit mother for Jesus. God didn’t require her to show references and credentials that would qualify her for this honor. God didn’t expect her to prove that she was worthy of the grace God had chosen to give. God wanted Mary’s consent and cooperation, her vulnerability and trust—her “yes” to love.

Mary consented. She could have said “no”—God would not have forced her against her will. She chose to yield to God's creative presence: "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me according to your word." Mary said “yes.”

Martin Luther once said: "Before Mary could conceive Him in her womb, she first had to conceive Him in her heart." You and I are called to open our hearts to Christ just as surely as Mary opened her heart to God's will and her body to the infant Jesus. God wants our “yes,” too—our trusting openness to the mysterious and life-giving love God wants to nurture in us.

Prayers for Peace

2010-12-05T19:22:00.000-05:00

This Advent season, my prayers are for peace.

Peace in our world. God’s good world is divided by controversy, rent by conflict, and torn by warfare. A bittersweet memories of my teenage years is watching USO-sponsored “Bob Hope Specials” performed before American troops in Vietnam. I have never heard more poignantly the words of “I’ll be Home for Christmas” than when I heard them against the background noise of falling bombs and screaming mortar shells.

This Christmas, as has been true for nearly a decade, we have sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, celebrating Christmas in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know, as do you, that the issues which surround our ongoing military presence in that part of the world are vexingly complex. But here is a simple, difficult truth: the Prince of Peace, for whom Isaiah yearned and of whom the angels sang, wills for war to end.

Jesus intends to reconcile what is divided and to heal what is broken, not just in war zones, but also in our communities, schools, and workplaces. We spend far too much energy on maintaining our differences and invest too little in understanding our common hopes and dreams. Let’s hear again the good news at the center of Christmas: “Peace on earth, goodwill to all.”

Peace in our families. We have such high expectations that the holidays will be times of warm and cozy togetherness—times when we can tell and hear cherished family stories, see the world’s magic through the eyes of children, savor long meals around the table, and share love and laughter in the exchange of gifts. So often, those expectations are dashed by pressure, stress, and misunderstanding. In a way, those dashed expectations are intensifications of long-simmering family issues: our relationships with one another are time-starved, overloaded with competing demands, and made more difficult by broken communication. I am praying for peace in our families, the kind of peace that enables our homes to be havens of renewal and love.

Peace with God. The kind of peace we yearn for in our world and our homes grows out of peace with God. Some of us lack peace because, in ways difficult for us to acknowledge, we fear that God is “against” us instead of “for” us. Maybe we are shadowed by guilt, or we are shouldering a heavy burden of trouble, or we are carrying a sense of shame. Jesus is God’s flesh-and-blood demonstration that our sins are forgiven our burdens are shared, and our shame is lifted from our backs.

These words, from the Book of Common Prayer, express my longing for peace:

Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness and no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one God, to whom be dominion and glory, now and forever. Amen

Time and the Advent Season

2010-11-29T07:13:00.001-05:00

Christians have an odd way of keeping time. Most of the time most of us think of Sunday as the last day of the week and the cap of the weekend; it’s the day before the grind of work and school cranks back up on Monday morning. But, Christian faith invites us to think of Sunday as the first day of the week, not the last. If we think of Sunday as the first day, then the week begins not in work but in rest, not in noise but in prayer, not in worry but worship. We begin not with our goals and ambitions, but with “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The week does not start with Monday’s priorities and to-do lists; it starts with Sunday’s surrender of our whole lives to God.

The church’s year doesn’t begin on January 1, either; it begins four Sundays before Christmas, in the season known as Advent. In our culture’s way of marking the calendar, the year ends on December 31, with old and weary Father Time making a quiet midnight exit and with the bouncing baby of a new year screaming into the world.

Advent is a season of waiting. We look forward to celebrating again the birth of Jesus and to experiencing a rebirth of hope, joy, peace, and love. We don’t rush madly to the manger in Bethlehem, like early-bird shoppers running through a store to snap-up scarce bargains. We take our time. We remind ourselves that we are not the first people to wait for the Messiah to come. Israel waited, and we have lessons to learn from their yearning for the appearance of God’s saving presence and redeeming power.

And, our waiting has not ended: the Christ who came at Christmas will come again to finish the work he decisively began in his death and resurrection. We wait for that good work to come to completion, for death to be swallowed up in victory, for every tear to be wiped from our eyes, and for there to be no more mourning, or crying, or pain.

Advent is a season of anticipation: as these weeks unfold, the light grows brighter in our souls and the songs of the angels, faint at the start, resound more loudly at the end. We can feel Christmas coming and Jesus being born again in us and our being born again again in him.

Advent is something like the moments just before sunrise. Although the sun has not yet crested above the eastern horizon, the light has already begun pushing back against the darkness. Advent is when the shadows and the sunlight struggle against each other; some things remain hidden, but we know they will be seen. The chill remains, but we have the promise of warmth. As the great German theologian Jurgen Moltmann said: “The believer is not set at the high noon of life, but at the dawn of a new day, at the point where night and day, things passing and things to come, grapple with each other” (Theology of Hope). Advent is the season when it all begins, when the night ends and morning dawns, and God’s people feel the stirrings of hope.

God is Great, God is Good

2010-11-24T07:29:00.000-05:00

One day, when his daughter Karen was still a young girl, writer Chris de Vinck, popped an Enlgish muffin in the toaster and went out the kitchen to check on a couple of things. He left Karen in the kitchen. A few moments later, he heard her cry out in pain, and he rushed to the kitchen to find out what had happened. He found Karen

. . . curled up on the kitchen floor sobbing. “Ow! Ow! It hurts. Daddy, it hurts so much.” I quickly knelt on the floor and embraced Karen. “Karen, what happened?” I asked between her weeping. All she managed to do was hold her mouth and weep. Just above my head I saw the toaster on the counter’s edge, and I saw two distinct lip prints. Karen had kissed the toaster, the still burning toaster. . . .she saw her reflection in the toaster and kissed her own image. I have seen her do this often while dancing before her bedroom mirror (Christopher de Vinck, Only the Heart Knows Where to Find Them, p. 111).

When children, like Karen, innocently admire their reflection in a mirror or even painfully kiss their image on a toaster, we can overlook, maybe even celebrate, their growing awareness and love of themselves. But, as the old myth of Narcissus warns us, healthy self-love can quickly become dangerous self-obsession. Narcissus turned aside from the love offered to him by Echo, the wood nymph, and instead fell in love with his own image, reflected back to him by a pool of water. Narcissus leaned over to embrace himself, fell in the pool, and drowned.

We live in a culture that has many of us drowning in ourselves. We live now, according to Christine Rosen, in “The Age of Egocasting,” (See The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, Fall/Winter, 2005), an age in which technologies like TiVo and the I-pod make it possible to have the images and sounds we want, and only the images and sounds we want, whenever we want them—without commercials, without annoying disc jockeys, without having to see or hear anything we don’t already like. Egocasting is all me all the time: my tastes, my preferences, and my viewpoints.

The phenomenon of egocasting is simply the latest illustration of how nearly everything in our culture gets tailored and marketed to our hungry egos. The old McDonald’s ad was blatantly honest about it: “You deserve a break today,” and it wasn’t long before Burger King chimed in with “Have it your way.” Baseline political rhetoric, for both parties, has moved from John F. Kennedy’s lofty idealism: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” to “Ask yourself: ‘Am I better off than I was four years ago?’” Sometimes it seems that we have become a nation of two-year olds: our inner child wants everyone and everything around us to figure out what we want even if we don’t know what it is and give it to us as soon as we want it. Then, if it—whatever it is—isn’t as tasty or interesting or fun or exciting as we hoped or as they promised, our inner two-year old throws a tantrum and sulks in the corner.

This egocasting, ego feeding, ego inflating, and ego-pampering culture of ours makes genuine worship nearly impossible; because, when we worship, we say, in essence, “It’s not all about me. It’s all about God, all about Jesus, and all about the world God loves.” Real worship is oriented to God, and moves us beyond ourselves. In worship, we humble ourselves in thanksgiving and surrender, and we lose ourselves in wonder, love, and praise.

There’s something about gathering around the dinner on Thanksgiving Day that makes me feel like a child again, so much so that, when it comes time for the blessing, the words that will leap to mind (I won’t say them out loud; I will try to sound more like an adult!) will be the first table prayer I learned. It began: “God is great, God is good,” and those two simple affirmations capture the essence of worship. God is great, wondrously so; and God is good, marvelously so. That childlike prayer, taken deeply to heart, cuts the nerve of silly, impatient, and childish self-centeredness. Maybe that prayer for children holds the secret to growing up.

Bring Back the Magic

2010-11-17T22:17:00.001-05:00

I enjoy Jimmy Buffet’s music, even though I know he’s only an average musician, but one who has an above average ability to know what his audience wants and deliver it to them. I doubt there will be a symposium some day at which the works of Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and Jimmy Buffet will be compared and contrasted. Never mind all that; I am a Buffet fan, mostly because, for years, has helped me chill-out when I am nearly worn-out.

One of Buffett’s songs has long been a kind of prayer. They lyrics aren’t all that lyrical, but in a simple, straightforward way they have expressed, on many occasions, the yearning of my soul:

Nothing can tear you apart
If your keep living straight from the heart
Though you know that you’re gonna hurt some
The magic will come

If you keep living straight from the heart
You will know where to stop and to start
Once you see than no one really wins
Then the magic begins

Bring back the magic
Don’t make life so tragic
Bring back the magic
Don’t make life so tragic.

“Bring back the magic” is just another way of praying as David prayed in Psalm 51: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” It is a way of asking God to renew our faith and reestablish our hope. It is pleading with God for a rebirth of our spirits, a revitalization of our souls. O God, enchant us again. Astonish us again. “Bring back the magic.”

We’re headed into the blinding busyness of the holiday season. It would be wonderful if followers of Jesus could make of the Advent and Christmas seasons a time to seek a return of the magic—a renewal of the mystery and joy of faith. Advertisers and retailers will try to convince us that the magic of this season is to be found in the stuff they have to sell us. We will be pressured by our wistful desires to cast a spell of nostalgia and put a Norman Rockwell-Martha Stewart-Thomas Kincade aura around our less-than-perfect homes.
However, the truth is that what we are looking for will come as a gift of God. All we can do is open our hearts by being honest with ourselves and with God about our hopes and dreams, our sins and fears, our strengths and possibilities, our hurts and disappointments. God brings back the magic; we are responsible for living straight from the heart.

Joy instead of anxiety

2010-11-12T21:19:00.000-05:00

Anxiety keeps us preoccupied with the future; it is the unsettled and unsatisfied feeling that comes from our worries and fears about tomorrow. At its root, of course, anxiety is our “dis-ease” over the fact that we will, one day, die; but most of the time it manifests itself as nagging questions like: “What is going to happen to me?” “Am I going to have enough of what I need to make it, to be safe and secure?” “Will the people I love be alright?”

Some of us respond to the anxiety we feel by refusing to engage life fully. Theologian Paul Tillich noticed how we try to avoid “non-being by avoiding being.” We use only a part of our powers, act on only a few of our dreams, invest only a fraction of our energies, and release into the world only a part of our truest selves. It’s almost as if we believe that we will live twice as long if we live only half a life.

Otto Rank described people who try to defend themselves against death by refusing to live: “they refused the loan (of life) in order to avoid the payment of the debt (of death).” Or as Ernest Becker put it, “The irony of [the human] condition is that [our] deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens [this anxiety], so we must shrink from being fully alive.” Because we are anxious about the future, especially about the death that awaits us there, we never really live in the present.

Others of us become obsessed with the things that seem to promise to sustain life. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invited us to let go of our anxiety about life. He said, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” And, “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.” He also asked a crucial question, which reveals the futility of anxiety about life: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to the span of your life?” Jesus wanted us to know that God is aware of, and generous with, the things we need to sustain our lives: “God in heaven knows that you need all these things.”

Jesus also urged us to give more attention to the meaning of life than to the means of extending it: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.”

So, anxiety breeds in our fears of an unlived life--our dread that we will die before we ever discover why we were born. To accumulate the material things that prop up existence will never drive-out that anxiety. As the naturalist Bill McKibben put it: “The consumer society has one great weakness, one flank left unprotected. And that is for all its superficial sugary jazzy sexy appeal, it has not done a particularly good job of making people happy.” Jesus direcs our gaze beyond these things to their source and ours—to God who gives us what we most need: freedom to live with trust and with joy.

All Saints' Day, Grief and Gratitude

2010-11-08T23:13:00.003-05:00

Yesterday’s All Saints’ Day service invited us remember and give thanks for people whose deaths have brought us grief and invited us to find, in Jesus, comfort, reassurance, and love.

Grief is, to say the least, complex. It keeps close company with other strong emotions. For instance, we often feel, simultaneously, grief and gratitude: our loss makes us sad, but it also reminds us how blessed we have been by the lives of the people we have lost. Grief and anger travel together: it’s not at all uncommon for someone’s death to cause us to feel a kind of rage at how life’s pain and suffering seem so random and unfair. Grief and faith are close cousins: we release our loved ones into God’s good care with both doubt and trust, with uncertainty but also with confidence. We even feel grief and joy at nearly one and the same time, which is why we say we “laughed until we cried and cried until we laughed.” When we grieve, powerful feelings come rushing to the surface, demanding to be faced.

It’s crucial, then, as Shakespeare put it, that we “give sorrow words”—that we say honestly how we feel. We need to voice our feelings to each other, and, especially, to God. Sometimes we’re reluctant to be honest with God about what is really in our hearts. We fear that there is something “wrong” with our feelings of hurt, disappointment, and anger. But, God is not surprised by what we feel, and God can handle our questions, frustrations, and doubts. People who risk being truthful with God discover that great relief and, eventually, healing, come from telling God what they feel without dressing those feelings up in Sunday clothes and disguising them in polite clichés.

People who are dealing with difficult losses often feel disoriented and confused. Occasionally, they find themselves to be unusually forgetful, or they have difficulty concentrating, or they deal with significantly more anxiety than they normally have. When their grief is most intense, folks sometimes tell me that they worry that they are “going crazy.” Those feelings of disorientation mean that it’s important for grieving people—and grieving communities—to take time to heal, to gather wisdom, and to regain a sense of equilibrium before making significant decisions.

Grief can, if will let it, become our teacher, reminding us about the fragility and strength of the human spirit, the wisdom of our being tender and patient with each other, the value of genuine and mutual friendship, the healing power of honest prayer, and the crucial significance of shared worship.

Better Together

2010-11-04T06:27:00.001-04:00

Several years ago (July-August 1999), the magazine Fast Company ran a brief sidebar article that suggested people needed to create for themselves “an anti-bummer squad”--a team of friends and mentors—who would help in low times: “When you’re feeling uncreative, call the people on your anti-bummer squad and take them out to dinner. They’ll tell you how wonderful you are and how much they love you.’”

My first reaction was to groan! It just sounded like a bunch of shallow psychobabble. But, I had second thoughts: isn’t that what friends, real friends, do for each other? We get the chance to remind each other that, no matter what happens, no matter how much of a mess we make of our lives, no matter how badly we blow it, God still loves us, God forgives us and offers us a new start. We get the chance to reassure each other that we are all made in the image of God and held in God’s love.

We’re better together. We need each other, which is, by the way, why the church gathers week by week. We show up for ourselves and each other and for God, too. We tell stories about the world, God, and ourselves. We sing, pray, share fellowship around food and drink, and offer ourselves to care for one another and the world. We call-out the best from each other, listen to each other, and encourage each other.

I think the earliest human communities were created when the sun went down, the shadows lengthened and people didn’t want to sit in the darkness by themselves, surrounded by the unknown. They would come together around a campfire, and huddle up close to each other as a defense against the cold. Somebody would sing a song and the others would join in. Somebody else would tell a story and the rest would listen. They would talk about their challenges and their blessings. They’d sit in silence for a while, staring at the fire. Someone would pass around a loaf of bread and a skin of wine. Someone else would offer a prayer of thanks. Being in the circle around the light, knowing that their neighbors were with them, and learning who they were from the stories they heard—these things made a community and made life worth living. Something like that is still what we need.

Wendell Berry, in his novel, Jayber Crow, describes the little church in Port William, KY, that Jayber, the town barber, served as janitor:

The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but they still liked it. What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and be forgiven, their need for one another's help and company and divine gifts, their hope (and experience) of love surpassing death, their gratitude.

Reminding myself about politics

2010-10-28T07:51:00.000-04:00

The air is thick with anxiety these days: many people are tense, on edge, and agitated. I am sure that the ongoing economic uncertainty is part of it. The news about the economy, especially about employment, isn’t solid and positive enough to give people durable hope that things are getting better. The length and breadth of this economic shockwave has left many folks unsteady on their feet, and increased their feelings of frustration, feelings that find an outlet in their harsh reactions and sharp responses to the people around them. It’s understandable, and it’s difficult.

And, the run-up to the midterm elections also has people nervous. The mudslinging and negativity between candidates is wearisome, and those ways of “debating” important public issues make the rest of us think that there is value (there isn’t) in characterizing complex issues with oversimplified sound-bytes. Negative campaigning also coarsens our ways of interacting with each other. It subtly but surely convinces us that it’s OK to attack people with whom we disagree, because we have concluded that we don’t just disagree with them, but they are personifications of all that is wrong with the way things are.

As the election approaches, I keep reminding myself of some important truths:

God is neither an American nor a Democrat nor a Republican.

The “agenda” of the Kingdom of God transcends, something judges and sometimes affirms, aspects of all “political” arrangements. Abraham Lincoln once told some visiting ministers that he did not worry whether God was on his side or not, “for I know that the Lord is always on the side of right.” It was, Lincoln said, “my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”

The “charter”—the platform— of the Kingdom of God is the Sermon on the Mount.

Our understandings and interpretations of that Sermon, and all other texts, are partial and incomplete.

What’s more, the implementation of our understanding is complex. There are gaps, which leave room for ambiguity and disagreement, between our understanding of what is right based on our following of Jesus and how that understanding finds expression in politics and governmental policies.

Political alignments are not, for the Christian, “ultimate.” We make those alignments, and we engage in the political process, in full recognition that politics, politicians, and policies, like all things human, “fall short of the glory of God.”

The most important task for Christians and for the church is to live in our world with the spirit, character, and commitments of Jesus. Greg Boyd, pastor in Minnesota, said wisely: “The distinctly kingdom question is not, ‘How should we vote?’ The distinctly kingdom question is, ‘How should we live?’”

The way of Jesus leads us to work for justice and peace and to demonstrate compassion and mercy. It is also, in my experience, a way of life that makes it difficult to be entirely comfortable with the political process.

Questions about Faith

2010-10-25T22:35:00.000-04:00

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to evaluate the quality of one’s beliefs. What questions do we need to ask about the faith we hold and which holds us? How do we go about taking stock of our faith’s ability to make sense out of life, to guide the ways we live, and to help us live with meaning?

As a way to start, I suggest that we ask these questions about whatever faith or framework of belief we have:

Does our faith have a truthful, realistic and hopeful view of the human condition and the nature of the world? In other words, does your faith recognize that human beings are of infinite worth and value, but also capable of doing great evil? Can it deal with sin and guilt, shame and alienation? Does it teach you how to deal with what has gone wrong with the world without giving up on the world? Does it face despair honestly but call you to hope nonetheless?

Does your faith show you how to forgive—how not to be consumed by the hurts done to you or bound by past unfairness and injustice?

Does your faith view human suffering with compassion? Does it motivate you to treat those who struggle and hurt with sincere tenderness and to offer them concrete help?

Does your faith acknowledge mystery and transcendence, leaving you breathless at the vastness and greatness of the universe and the Creator who is its Source and Sustainer?

Does your faith teach you real humility, the kind that celebrates but does not idolize who you are, which reminds you that you don’t know everything, that other people deserve respect and dignity, and which teaches you that you don’t get to “play god” by controlling and judging others?

Does your faith speak meaningfully to your longing for love? And does it call you—and transform you—to be a person who loves and serves the world?

Does your faith give you a reason to live that is bigger than yourself?

Does your faith give you a vision of the world healed and made whole? Does it cause you to dream of justice and peace and then put you to work on making those dreams come true?

Does your faith dance and sing with joy, joy which is not finally stilled or silenced by trouble or pain?

That’s what I’ve got so far. What do you think? What would you suggest?

When Indifference Strikes

2010-10-18T07:16:00.003-04:00

Novelist Walker Percy once said that his greatest fear for America was not that the nation would be defeated by some external enemy but by “weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.”

I have that concern not just for our nation, but for the church, for a wide variety of community organizations, and for our lives as individuals. Call it what you will—indifference, apathy, or the old-fashioned word “sloth”—but there are far too many of us who are shrugging our shoulders instead of rolling up our sleeves in the face of problems and opportunities; reaching for the remote and settling into the sofa instead of reaching out to one another and the world in love; cocooning rather than connecting; staying busy with things that matter only a little so we can be distracted from the things which matter most; and chasing empty goals as a way of running from our emptier hearts.

The early church fathers and mothers called this problem “acedia.” It has many moods and nuances. “Acedia” can be listlessness and boredom which show up as the inability to summon energy to do what we most need to do. It can be the familiarity which breeds contempt—the kind of disinterestedness that strikes us when we have been somewhere long enough that it no longer seems to hold the possibility of surprise or the promise of grace. Acedia is the nauseating, numbing dullness of the routine; it is what we feel when we are sick and tired of the sameness of everything: the same bed to make, clothes to wash, same problems to solve, same phone calls to make, and same people to love. It is what makes us want to scream if we have to do one more of the same old things. “Acedia” makes us want to get out and get away; it causes us to crave something new and shiny, something we don’t already know too much about, and something where the problems are still hidden from our eyes by the temporary cover of novelty.

Sometimes “acedia” shows up in us as a kind of escape, either through frantic activity which keeps us from paying attention to things that really matter or through equally frantic pursuit of leisure, pleasure and entertainment. We live in the age of the workaholic and the couch potato—often the same person: running, hustling, hurrying; collapsing, hiding, disconnecting.

“Acedia” isn’t about the pace (slow or fast) of our lives; it’s about our purposes and priorities. It is possible to be busy to the point of burnout and still be slothful, because we are busy at the lesser and not occupied by the greater.

A salesman can fritter away the day in busy-ness; in the morning, drinking coffee with the sales manager, talking with suppliers, and making lists of potential customers and in the afternoon, trying to decide whom to call first and dreaming about what he’ll do with the money when he makes the big sale. The salesman is busy, but he never sells.

A writer can spend hours anxiously preparing to write—sharpening pencils and lining them up on the desk, arranging resource material and reviewing what others have written, and making coffee and adjusting the thermostat—but she never writes.

A minister can spend hours leafing through a lightweight journal and fussing over the fine print of the Sunday bulletin, and never actually study.

Parents can run themselves ragged and their children into crankiness, hauling their kids to various enrichment opportunities and never actually spend time in conversation with their children. They are busy on behalf of their children, but not involved, with them.

Our lives can become so cluttered and complicated that we don’t have time to be quiet, to pray, and to hear God’s voice through the scriptures. We can’t find the time to sit with distraught friend or to care for the disadvantaged.

We’re busy, but when it comes to the things that matter most, we’re cocooned away in our comfortable justifications: How could we possibly do anything else?

When “acedia” strikes, and it hits almost all of us from time to time, it’s wise to step-back from our routines and remember what matters most in life:

It matters that God loves us with an everlasting love. When our caring is at low ebb, it helps to remember that God’s caring is inexhaustible. Giving ourselves time and space to remember that Originating Love will renew our own energy for caring.

It matters that we remember that love—love for God, neighbor, world and self—is the purpose of life. Whatever blocks our loving and being loved is draining energy and power from our lives.

It matters that we realize we have some choices about how we use our time. None of us has absolute control of the calendar or the PDA, but we can exercise more control than we often do. Sure, we might disappoint some of the people who benefit from our always saying “yes” to their ideas for the ways our lives should go, but only we know what uses of our time reflect the deepest desires, callings, and priorities of our lives. And, only when we are doing what we are meant to do will our energy flow again.

Not "more" but "beyond and within"

2010-10-15T07:37:00.004-04:00

Catholic priest Ronald Rollheieser says that there is, in all of us, “an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache.” He also believes, and I agree with him, that “spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. . . about what we do with our unrest . . . about what we do with the fire that is inside of us” (The Holy Longing, pp. 4-5)

Our yearning is ultimately and finally for God. We experience that yearning as a hunger for meaning and a thirst for joy. It lures us to search for wonder and mystery. Most of all, I think, it drives our desire to be known, understood, accepted, and loved.

Of course, thirst is a question, not an answer. Hunger is a need, not a satisfaction. Desire is a drive but not a destination. So, it’s crucial to ask: What am I doing about my thirst? Where am I feeding my hunger? Where am I taking my longing?

We are all tempted to squander the longing—to misspend the yearning. Most often, we spend it on “more,” when we need what James Hillman describes as “beyond and within.” We push ourselves into more activity, when what we need instead is a sense that what we do matters. We go for more money, when what we need instead is a feeling of worth. More control, when what we need instead is be released, to be free. More consumption, when what we need is fulfillment.

We mismanage our longings when we invest them in symbols of success, alcohol and drug abuse, workaholism, mindless eating, loveless sex, neurotic religion, and unhealthy relationships.

More--no matter how much more--will not substitute for the beyond. Beyond, in the mercy and magnificence, the beauty and love, of God, is where we find significance, worth, freedom, and joy. With God and the friends of God, we find the welcome we yearn for and the love we crave.

How expansive?

2010-10-11T16:35:00.000-04:00

When I was five or six years old, my Sunday School teacher suggested I memorize John 3:16. I did as she suggested and committed that familiar verse to memory (in the King James Version, the “approved” version in the church I attended): “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Martin Luther said of this verse that it was shallow enough for a mouse to wade in and deep enough for an elephant to drown in. At age eight, I was wading: what John 3:16 said to me then was all I could hear: God loved me. God loved me more and God loved me better than anyone else ever had or ever could. God loved me enough to give Jesus to me. All I needed to do was trust Jesus and Jesus would take care of me.

At 53, I am nearly drowning in the depths of these words, trying to lean into them and live them. Here are the kinds of things John 3:16 has me pondering today:

How expansive is my love? God loved the world. The word which we translate world is the Greek word kosmos, so what John 3:16 actually says is, God so loved the cosmos. There is not a region of the universe, not a corner of space, untouched by God’s love. Everything on the earth--plant or animal, animate or inanimate—is here because, at the dawn of time, and in every moment since, God’s immense love has overflowed in the joy and ecstasy of creation. It is all here, we are all here, because of love. God lavishes love on every human being, young and old, men and women, “red and yellow, black and white,” friend and enemy, Christian, Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist and searcher. There is not a person on the earth whom God does not love.

God loves the cosmos. But what about me? As a follower of Jesus, how far does my love reach? Does it reach beyond my race, my gender, my socio-economic class, my religion, my nation? There are days, I must confess, when I find it hard to love those closest to me and nearly impossible to love that intimate stranger who is my own self. God loves the cosmos, but I have to work at just loving all of Buncombe County! John 3:16 started working on me a long time ago but it still has many lessons to teach me: How expansive is my love?

How expensive, how costly, is my love? In other words, how much of myself am I willing to give away in service to other people? Jesus died on the cross: he gave himself completely. How much of myself do I hold in reserve? How much do I hold myself back, keep myself aloof, and remain detached? How much am I willing to risk in order to encourage a friend, help a stranger or reconcile with an enemy? How much does it matter to me that people are hungry and homeless, that people are dying in loneliness and of loneliness, and that the physically sick and emotionally ill go untreated or under-treated? Does any of it matter enough to me that it affects how I use my time, money, energy, and influence?

John 3:16 tells me about a God who loved so much, and it causes me to question the both the extent and costliness of my own love.

Rest

2010-10-07T06:58:00.001-04:00

"Busy and tired." That’s how many of us describe ourselves. Harried, hassled, hurried. Tapped-out, stressed-out, and burned-out. Overbooked. Overworked. Overcommitted. Overwhelmed. Busy and tired.

David Steindl-Rast has reminded us that the Chinese pictograph for busy is composed from two symbols: the one for killing and the other for the heart. In ways we don’t often stop to acknowledge, constant busyness hurts our hearts. Listening and loving, learning and growing, experiencing wonder and giving thanks all require unhurried time, time to notice, savor, and ponder our experience.

You’ve likely heard that the legendary Green Bay Packers coach, Vince Lombardi, said that “fatigue makes cowards of us all.” I have learned from painful experience that I am a different person when I am deeply fatigued, and the difference is not a good one.

We’re busy and tried, because almost all of us who can run are on the run, and even when our bodies aren’t in motion, our minds aren’t at rest. We’re fast-forwarding to the next things on our to-do list, and our hearts are racing with adrenaline.

It’s crucial that we find ways to press pause and mute; to stop our frenetic activity; and to enter into stretches of time which aren’t dominated by time, but are, instead, given over to the timeless. We need seasons in which we are not tyrannized by the urgent and immediate, but are, instead, in touch with the important and the eternal.

We weren’t made for nonstop, breakneck speed. We need rhythms of engagement and disengagement, activity and passivity, work and rest. The Bible’s favorite name for that kind of rest is “Sabbath.” We are called to “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy”—to remember the important of rest and renewal and honor them.

The Hebrew Scriptures (Exodus 20:10-11, echoing Genesis 1) tell us that we are invited to rest,to keep the Sabbath, because God did: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.” Not even God can do everything by doing. Sometimes, even for God, “not doing” is the way to get things done. Keep the Sabbath, Exodus tells us, because you may and you must: if God’s labor ceased, if God rested, who do we think we are never to stop, never to step back, never to recover and renew?

God knows when enough is enough, knows about “being” not just doing, and knows how to savor and enjoy a job well done. That seventh day, that day of rest, is called “Sabbath.” Sabbath reminds us that not even God can do everything by doing. God rested. And God invites you and me and all of creation to rest.

We don’t have to be plugged-in to the productivity machine 24/7/365. Stop. Breathe. Listen. Pray. Play. Savor. Enjoy. Sleep. Recover. Rest.

Good News not Good Views

2010-10-04T07:01:00.001-04:00

We live in a time of upheaval and confusion. The world doesn’t look like it used to look. We wrestle with bewildering questions and deal with threatening issues. Rock-solid certainties have eroded before our eyes. Anxious for ourselves and afraid for our children, we scramble to find or to create places where we can be comforted and reassured. Many people want the church to be that kind of place, a place where they can be insulated from ambiguity and protected from difficulty. They look to the church to be a place, maybe the one place, where the hard questions do not intrude and where disagreement does not disturb. They want their experience of church to confirm and support what they already think and feel about life, God, and the world. They want to have their current views affirmed, not challenged.

I understand that desire, but I also understand that it wreaks havoc in the church, and it keeps us from experiencing the kind of growth that can only come when we question our assumptions and have our biases challenged. For well over a generation, churches have fought one misguided ideological battle after another, dividing into warring camps usually labeled “conservative” and “liberal.” What we have failed to see is that both camps share a flawed assumption in common. Each believes that what matters most are our opinions on controversial issues rather than the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ. Each forgets that the church lives on “good news,” not “good views” [see Jack Haberer’s book GodViews]

For Christians, what matters most are the love, mercy, and grace of God given to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The gospel of Jesus creates a community of friendship in which his love binds together diverse people. His “good news” unifies us, not our agreement on “good views.”

What would it mean for the church to take its stand in the gospel, rather than merely on contemporary controversial issues? It would mean that grace and acceptance would matter more to us than judgment and agreement. We could relate openly to other people, even the people with whom we disagree and of whose behavior we disapprove, because we would remember that all us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. It would mean that we could extend compassion rather than insist on conformity. We could embrace those who struggle to walk in the ways of Jesus Christ, even those who haven’t come very far, because we would know that we and they are still in process. It would mean that telling the story of Jesus would be more important than crusading for a particular agenda. We could open the Bible and share fellowship with all people, even the people whose politics and opinions are vastly different than our own, because we would recognize that the power to persuade and convince belongs to the Holy Spirit and not to us. We could live in peace and joy, knowing that all of us have limited knowledge and understanding but that God’s love for us is unlimited. And, we could have confidence that, if we will remain open and questing, we will find our minds and hearts stretched to embrace more and more of life in all its variety and mystery.

Beyond dualisms and stereotypes

2010-09-30T17:04:00.000-04:00

Journalist, actor and humorist Robert Benchley once said: "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't." These days, almost everyone does. We seem addicted to dualistic and either/or thinking. Such thinking draws line of separation between people, creates and maintains hierarchies of worth and value, and fosters feelings of inferiority and superiority: blue collar or white collar, polyester or wool, labor or management, Republican or Democrat, black or white, brown or white, male or female, single or married, rich or poor, literate or illiterate, healthy or sick, old or young, sinner or saint. We label ourselves and each other, and those labels hide what is truest and most important about human beings.

We don’t have to view each other through dualistic lenses. We can, instead, see one another more generously, more individually, and more graciously—a way of seeing which, as a Christian, I would call “with the eyes of Jesus.” From this point of view, everyone of us individually and all of us together are created in the image of God and of infinite value and worth. We have dignity and value which are independent of our background, experience, achievements and failures. And, if we believe that each of us has value regardless of superficial differences, we will take the time and care to hear the details of one another’s stories, learn of one another’s strengths and wounds, see one another’s potential and possibility, and feel the contours of one another’s dreams and needs.

Our essential identity is not found in our genetics, our race, or our family of origin; we are not defined by the houses we live in, the cars we drive, the jobs we have, and the amount of money in our bank accounts. We are not locked-in by our prejudices, biases, and fears; we are not trapped by our mistakes, failures, and sins. We can see and hear ourselves and one another beyond dualisms and stereotypes. We can discover the beauty and wonder of unique and individual people. Such discovery is the precondition for a better and more peaceful world.

"To see God's image in one who is not my image"

2010-09-27T21:59:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, we had the memorial service for my friend and, until her death, our current Deacon Chair, Dorothy Murphree. Dorothy was one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever known. She had a keen and agile mind, an insatiable curiosity, and a passion for learning. She had deep compassion for the hurts and struggles of other people, and finely-honed leadership skills. To say the least, we will miss her.

Earlier this year, on a Saturday afternoon, I called her home to check on her. Her husband, Garvice, answered, and I asked to speak to Dorothy. It took a few moments longer for her to get to the phone than it usually did, and when she said “hello,” she also said: “I was out on the back porch reading the Koran.” After a slight pause, during which I repeated her words to myself, I said, “Dorothy, I think it’s safe to say that you are the only Baptist chair of deacons who has said to her pastor this year that you were reading the Koran!” That’s just one of many stories I could relate about her intellectual curiosity and about her commitment to understanding people whose views and experiences were different from her own.

This summer, when Dorothy preached in our Wednesday Chapel series, she said:

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of Great Britain, in his book The Dignity of Difference, reminds us that our supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image. (p. 60) . . . .

And how do we see “that Other One” as one of the faces of God? I think that we have to begin with an intentional mindset that we want to do it and then mentally and continually asked God to help us see with the eyes of Jesus. I am not talking about just looking for someone different to strike up a conversation with or invite home for lunch, but persons we see day in and day out in the ordinary course of living--persons who long to be acknowledged as persons of worth. Maybe they sit beside you on a bus, or at a park. Maybe they bag your groceries or hand you your dry cleaning or give you a deposit slip at the drive-in bank. Maybe they even sit beside you in a Bible study class but don’t have the courage to say: “My hurts are too great to share. But please see me. Touch me. Acknowledge me. Smile at me.

. . . My challenge still remains ever before me today in the words of Rabbi Sacks “to see God’s image in one who is not in my image.” Amen.

That challenge was also her vocation; it was at the heart and soul of who she was. As much as anyone I have ever known, she was able to see God’s image and likeness in diverse people. I believe it’s a crucial challenge and vital calling for all of us.

Faith is a Free Response

2010-09-20T06:54:00.001-04:00

A person’s soul is like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon: its development should not be hurried; its emergence should not be rushed; its walls should not be forced open. Each soul has its own God-given rhythm, its own fullness of time. No one else should take a human soul into his or her hands and manipulate it; because, when a human soul is manipulated—whether by flashy charisma or high-octane emotionalism or pious moralizing—that soul gets abused, twisted, and distorted. It withers at the touch of force.

When it comes to your faith and life before God, no one has the right to tell you what you must believe or how you must behave. Only God has that right. No one else can pass final judgment on your heart. Only God knows enough about you to judge you, and God’s judgment always arises out of holy and saving love.

That’s why I believe that churches should seek to persuade, encourage, and invite, not to prescribe, demand, and insist. Devotion is to be voluntary, not mandatory. Faith is a free response to the love and grace of God, not a forced response to the authority of a creed or the power of a person.

From time to time, people ask me, “What does your church believe about . . . ?” or “What is your church’s stand on. . .?”, and my answer, which frustrates some people, is basically this: “We believe that you should study the Bible, learn about the ways of Jesus, listen to the viewpoints and opinions of other people, enter into debate and even disagreement, and make up your own mind about what you believe.” Our stand is for your right and freedom to take the stand you believe God wants you to take. If you want to be told exactly what to believe, how to think, and what to do, then you will find freedom, the freedom we try to extend each other in this church, to be bewildering.

That does not mean we have no standards. Jesus is our standard. We are his followers; he is our Lord. We don’t think and do whatever we want to think and do; we want our minds to be shaped by the truth of Jesus and we want our behavior to be shaped by the love of Jesus. The Bible is central and crucial for us; because we believe that, when we listen to the Bible, we are hearing the voice of Jesus, who is the flesh-and-blood Word of God.

But, no one understands Jesus completely or interprets the Bible perfectly. We are limited and prone to bias. Our experiences and our prejudices color how we read the Bible. The truth of Scripture is too important to place in the hands of the few, so we place it in the hands of the many. We trust people to interpret the Bible for themselves, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit and in dialogue with other Christians, including scholars who have given their life to its understanding. We are not only free to do this work of interpretation; we are responsible to do it. Then, we are also free and responsible to live by what we have understood, especially for trying, however stumblingly, to be like Jesus in our love for other people and for the world.

Blessed mourning

2010-09-15T00:28:00.000-04:00

After Deacons’ meeting Monday night, I drove to Atlanta so that I could be at the Mercer University School of Theology on Tuesday morning to be the guest presenter in a couple of classes and to preach in chapel. In the first class, I talked about the leader’s role in helping a congregation discern and articulate a vision for its mission and ministry. In the afternoon, I talked about staff relationships, and, since many of the students will soon be looking for ministry positions, about the process of candidating for a job. In both classes, the students were good conversation partners, and their teacher, Larry McSwain was a gracious host.

During worship this fall, the seminary community is exploring the Beatitudes of Jesus, and I was asked to reflect on “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” It’s a startling and countercultural claim which Jesus makes: people who take time to enter deeply the pain of the world and to grieve honestly their losses are the ones who find themselves filled with surprising energy and hope. Mourning, Jesus taught, opens the heart to comfort, and tears wash away hurt. Jesus invites us to lament the shattering of the world and to mourn the breaking of human hearts.

We can only lament and mourn if our eyes, ears, and hearts are open to the pain around us and within us. That openness becomes the entranceway for God’s grace and mercy. Hurt faced and felt becomes, in the alchemy of God’s love, healing.

"The Heart of the Matter"

2010-09-07T21:37:00.000-04:00

We eventually learn that there isn’t much hope for us without forgiveness. Without forgiveness, we are bound to our failures, trapped in our guilt, and locked-up in isolation, with nothing to hold onto but our anger. That’s why, I think, the now-aging rock and roll singer Don Henley said that, even though his song, “The Heart of the Matter,” took him only four minutes to sing, it took him 42 years to write.” What he learned from the loves and losses of those years is that the heart of the matter is forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn’t easy and isn’t simple. When we forgive those who hurt us, we give up our quest for revenge. We surrender our right to get even. We try to see them as human beings again, maybe not as people we will ever be able to trust but as people nonetheless: people with their own disappointments and dreams. We wish them well and even hope and pray for their healing and happiness.

Forgiveness might not mean getting back together. It might not mean reconciliation, because that depends on the other person as much as it does on us. Forgiveness doesn’t disregard justice, either; it means that justice is tempered with mercy and that hot anger is cooled-down by compassion.

Novelist Wally Lamb ends his book I Know this Much is True with these lines: “I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark wood of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness, that mongrels make good dogs, that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.”

Was is not is

2010-08-31T23:00:00.000-04:00

Walter Wangerin’s charming fable The Book of the Dun Cow is set in a chicken coop. One of my favorite scenes has the rooster Chauntecleer try to figure-out who has been stealing and eating the hen’s eggs. His prime suspect is John the Weasel, who has a long track record of such nefarious behavior. Chauntecleer charges him: “I know what you have done in the past, John . . . I know what you are capable of doing.” John the Weasel answers: “Past is past. Past is not present. Did is not do. Was is not is” [Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow. New York: Harper & Row, 1978, p. 19]. While it’s not wise to trust a weasel with a track record, John’s words are profoundly true: Past is past. Past is not present. Did is not do. Was is not is.

There is always a future on the other side of failure, forgiveness which is stronger than guilt, a new beginning amid the ruins, and a home for those who, for a while, have lost track of what or where home is. Grace means that “Past is past. Past is not present. Did is not do. Was is not is.”

Wisdom: Having Things Right and Knowing Why

2010-08-23T07:07:00.000-04:00

From time to time, I am drawn back to this brief poem by William Stafford. He offers wise words about wisdom. It’s not easy to be wise about wisdom, since, when we presume to be wise, we are often, at just those moments, blinded by our own folly; or because it’s hard to resist the temptation to be trite, offering the equivalent of fortune cookie sayings or greeting card bromides. At any rate, Stafford says:

Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why.
If you do not have things right in your life
you will be overwhelmed:
you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.
If you have things right in your life,
but you do not know why.
You are just lucky, and you will not move
in the little ways that encourage good fortune.
The saddest are those not right in their lives
who are acting to make things right for others:
they act only from the self—
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom. (William Stafford, The Way it Is, p. 141)

If you’ve ever been the target, the project, for someone who’s “acting to make things right for others” without having things “right in their lives,” you know how much chaos they can create and how much damage they can do. Jesus warned about this kind of thing: “take the log out of your own eye before trying to do anything about the sawdust in your brother’s or sister’s eye.”

The greatest challenge Stafford offers me, though, is the connection he makes between feeling “overwhelmed” and not having “things right in your life.” Feeling overwhelmed is like a warning light on the dashboard. It’s not just a sign that my schedule is too tight, my days are too full and the expectations I feel are too demanding. It’s deeper and more important than un-jamming a jammed calendar. Feeling overwhelmed calls me to both reflection and action: it invites me to figure-out what’s not right, how it got that way, why it got that way, and work my way back to the place and pace of wisdom. I often can’t do it alone and I certainly can’t always do it quickly; but, then, wisdom includes the willingness to ask for help and the acknowledgement that real change almost never happens instantly.

Too Long in a Cage

2010-08-20T07:23:00.001-04:00

Did you hear about the monkeys who forgot how to climb and swing through the trees?

Near the center of the country, there is a Dutch zoo where the orangutans had been kept from the trees for so long that they could not remember how to do what orangutans naturally do. According to Reuters, The zoo had “renovated its orangutan enclosure to allow the long-limbed, hairy, auburn-colored primates to swing from tree to tree in an outdoor setting above the viewing public—but the animals appear to have lost the knack of it.”

So, that Dutch zoo has hired an Olympic gymnast, Epke Zonderland, hopes to re-teach the monkeys what they have forgotten. Zonderland told a radio reporter: "It is said that we can learn from apes how to climb, but this time they've asked me to get the apes back into the trees."

Apparently, the monkeys are a “little afraid” of their new environment. Zonderland will “use a school playground-type installation” to climb and swing on, providing an example to the orangutans. Zonderland said: "I hope. . . they well be relaxed enough to copy me. I have no experience with apes. . . . Hopefully they will start swinging nicely from the trees." (Reporting by Aaron Gray-Block, editing by Paul Casciato, Copyright 2010 Reuters Life! Online Report)

Too long in a cage, and monkeys can forget how to swing through the trees. Too long in isolation and fear, and children can lose their freedom to run and play. Too long without laughter, and you can feel that joy is no longer possible. Too long without singing, and you will think there isn’t any music in you. Too long in the shadows, and you will be sure there isn’t any light.

The Risk of Faith

2010-08-10T18:37:00.000-04:00

The writer of Hebrews said: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is trusting that there is more to life than meets the eyes, but faith is not being gullible and unthinking. Christians are not like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland who believed a thousand impossible things before breakfast each morning. Faith is not belief in spite of the evidence; it is trust without complete evidence. It is not against reason; it is above, beyond, before, and after reason. Faith is trusting in what we have not yet seen because what we have experienced gives us confidence that God will one day bring the unseen things to light.

Trusting what we have not seen is difficult for us, because modern science has taught us that what is most real, most true, can be seen and measured. Since the Enlightenment, Western culture has thought the truest truths and the most real realities are those which are demonstrable by the methods of science. Almost everything faith cherishes can’t be proven in those ways, and the result has been that many people have thought of faith as a retreat into ignorance.

Please understand: I’m not bashing science. I don’t believe that science and faith are rivals to each other. I’m simply pointing out that they have different methods and purposes. Science approaches reality with observation and experiment, to test it and put it to use. Faith approaches reality with wonder and worship, to discover its depths and to give thanks and praise. Faith does not have to decrease as science increases, because science is not the problem.

Instead, the problem is “scientific rationalism,” or “scientism,” which makes claims for science and in the name of science that science itself cannot support. Scientism is science which has transgressed its legitimate limits. Science, for instance, does a fine job of responding to questions about what and how, but has very little to say about why and who.

When we ask science questions about purpose and personality, about meaning and destiny, about love and hope, we’re asking it questions it can’t possibly answer. It isn’t equipped to do so. How many of the things which matter most to us can be proven by the scientific method? Can loyalty or love? Beauty or goodness? Duty or delight? Heroism or sacrifice? Friendship or forgiveness? None of these things can be viewed under a microscope or replicated in an experiment. None will be captured in a test tube or in a CAT-scan. Each is a part of the mystery of life, and seems more significant to us than any mathematical maxim, logical syllogism, or experimental outcome.

The things which matter most lie beyond the reach of science; they can’t be proven with absolute certainty. That applies especially to what matters most in life: the love and friendship of God.

Because faith is trust in the unseen but real, it always involves risk. That’s why Soren Kierkegaard called it a “leap” into the darkness, trusting that God’s arms, which we cannot see, are there and will catch us and embrace us. Blaise Pascal called this kind of faith a wager, a gamble, a bet.

Faith which involves risk must also involve prayer—the kind of prayer modeled for us by Thomas Merton, who gave us the gift of this beautiful and bracing prayer:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone" (Thoughts in Solitude).

A Wake-Up Call

2010-08-01T23:33:00.003-04:00

Success of any kind—more money, greater achievement, more recognition, more praise, and, especially, more power and influence—can (it doesn't have to, but it can) put us in a precarious place. Success can turn us in on ourselves. We begin to believe our own press releases, or think that our glowing performance reviews are the whole truth about us, or become convinced that our worth comes from the awards we’ve won and the bonuses we’ve received, or fall for the illusion that our shiny, public persona is the sum and substance of who we are, conveniently forgetting our darker motivations, our gnawing fears, and our festering sins. Our success can make us blind and deaf to the truth about ourselves, the needs of the world, and the presence and will of God.

We often think of failure, setbacks and disappointments as wake-up calls, as times to reevaluate what we are doing with our lives and why, to remember or discover who we are and what matters to us, to look ourselves in the mirror and to come to terms with what we see, to open ourselves to the counsel of others, and to see what hard lessons our struggles might have for us.

Success and wealth should similarly be wake-up calls—times to be sure that money or power or recognition aren’t going to our heads and hearts, to touch base again with our values, to ask about our responsibilities to the world, to listen even more carefully to the voice of God.

A Ray of Light Doesn't Seek the Sun

2010-07-22T17:40:00.001-04:00

I recently read Martin Laird's Into the Silent Land: An Introduction to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. Laird teaches at Villanova University, and he draws, in this book, on his academic specialty, patristics (the early centuries of the church, particularly the desert fathers and mothers). Into the Silent Land is gentle and wise, filled with sensitivity to lived human experience and with awareness of the healing and transforming power of silence, prayer, and contemplation.

The healing energy of prayer comes from the confidence it nurtures in us that we are "one" with God--in union, communion, with the One who made us and loves us. Laird wrote that the "God we desire has already found us, causing our desire" (p. 9) and "Union with God is not something that needs to be acquired but realized" (p. 10). He makes this point beautifully in the book's epilogue, where he imagines an older monk's encouraging a younger one with these words:

You say you seek God, but a ray of light doesn't seek the sun; it's coming from the sun. You are a branch on the vine of God. A branch doesn't seek the vine; it's already part of the vine. A wave doesn't look for the ocean; it's already full of the ocean(p. 139).

God is in us, we are in God. There is "no separation"; we are connected, always, to the Love for which we long, the Spirit for which we thrist, and the Grace for which we hunger.

Outside Time?

2010-07-15T06:13:00.000-04:00

I am slowly working my way through Sara Maitland's intriguing memoir of her exploration of solitude and silence, A Book of Silence. Maitland is an accomplished writer, known primarily for her novels, who writes with a kind of musical grace. In in A Book of Silence, she also demonstrates a wide-ranging familiarity with philosophy, theology, and poetry.

During a season of change in her late forties, Maitland spent a good deal of time alone in a cottage on the Isle of Skye, far north in Inner Hebrides of Scotland. She was not fully isolated from human contact, but she had long stretches of solitude and quiet. Her memoir beautifully describes the varied tones and textures of silence, and recounts the the emotional surprises and spiritual discoveries it made possible.

Early in the book, Maitland writes about those moments of silence in which she was freed from her usual awareness of the passing of time. We commonly describe those moments with phrases like "time stood still" and "losing all sense of time." Maitland would occasionally feel like she had stepped beyond time into a realm of timelessness in which she was particularly aware of God: "If you believe in a God who is eternal, that is to say, outside time, there is a sense of being nearer to, being more permeated by, God as time recedes in both importance and sensation" (p. 68).

I thought of Elijah on the mountain who heard God speak in the "still small voice--the thin silence" which followed violent wind and raging fire. And I thought of the psalmist who said: "For God alone my soul in silence waits."

I think it is also true that God waits for us in that healing silence that is God's home--in that radiating and joyful stillness that surrounds and prepares us for the dancing delight of God's own heart.

A God to Love

2010-07-12T06:05:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's sermon explored Jesus' familiar Parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus told the story as part of a conversation with a "lawyer" (a teacher of Torah, the Law of Moses). Early in that conversation, Jesus and the teacher agreed with each other about the heart of faith: love for God and love for neighbor.

I've been thinking more about the remarkable command-invitation to love God: "You shall love the Lord your God with all you are." The love God seeks from us is an echo of, a response to, God's astonishing love for us. God loves us lavishly, takes delight in us, and nurtures us tenderly toward wholeness. God's love is a gift which enters our brokenness to heal it, confronts our sinfulness to forgive it, and embraces our shame to overcome it. It inspires our dreams, energizes our strengths, and intensifies our joys. It is a breathtaking marvel: God loves us here and now, as we are, without condition.

God longs for our love in return.

It's crucial, therefore, that those of us who talk about God do so in ways that make it clear the we have a God who is lovable. Dallas Willard put it well:

The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that may be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is “Not really,” then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God—a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible and totally competent being—before ordinary people, we have gone wrong. We should not keep going in the same direction, but turn around and take another road. (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p. 329)

The Key of "B-Natural" and "I am not asleep"

2010-07-02T07:59:00.000-04:00

James Dixon is a friend who lives in metropolitan Washington, D.C. and serves as pastor of a very vibrant African-American church. When I worked as pastor of a church in the same area, our two congregations would, from time to time, worship together and share in ministry projects to the community.

James had two phrases he used often: "They think I don't see and hear what they are doing, but I am not asleep" and "I try to live my life in the key of "B-natural."

"They think I don't see and hear, but I am not asleep." The first time James said those words, I resonated with them and adopted them as my own. A wise leader (or parent) often sees/hears/knows more than he or she can act upon in the present moment. He or she pays close attention to the behavior of others, often without commenting; remembers what people say and do (or what they don't say and don't do); adds that information to the mix of facts and impressions he or she considers when relating to them; and waits for the right time to act. Wisdom is not always in a rush; "now" is not always the right time to respond to what one sees or hears. But it is important for a leader not to be asleep.

"Live in the key of B-natural." I am not a musician, so I have no idea whether or not "B-natural" is actually a musical key and, if it is, what it sounds like. But, I do know that being natural, genuine, and real is part of what it means to be authentically human and transparently Christian. Pretense, posturing, game-playing, status-seeking, power-grabbing, and mask-wearing keep us from knowing and being known, accepting and being accepted, loving and being loved.

"B-Natural"--vulnerable, honest, open, and loving--is a beautiful key and tone for a human life.

Eschatological Preaching, 2

2010-06-22T23:08:00.000-04:00

One of the finest examples of what I mean by “eschatological preaching” is the address Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. That address concerned, of course, very real problems which confronted the nation in 1963, but it spoke to those problems, not from midnight but from the dawning; not from the valley, but from a mountaintop vista on another world. From there, he saw the racist south replaced by Christ’s beloved community: little black boys and little black girls joining hands with little white boys and little white girls, and a new heaven and a new earth. His sermon, of course, hinged on a dream: “I have a dream today,” he said.

Eschatological preaching traffics in dreams, visions, and imagination. It has, therefore, an essential aesthetic or poetic dimension. It imagines the beauty and goodness of God’s dominion; fashions or finds metaphors, images, symbols, and stories which give voice to what it has seen; and invites people to experience for themselves what their lives will be like in that saving order of things.

I think preaching these days should risk both boldness and breadth in these narrative descriptions. It should go cosmic, mythic, and mystical. Have you seen The Matrix, Signs, Pay it Forward, Artificial Intelligence, The Sixth Sense, and The Lord of the Rings? These movies do not lack mythical ambition; and all of them to some extent, and The Lord of the Rings to a great extent, draw on “our” central stories. I think it is time for us to tell those stories again, to allow their grandeur and mystery to speak for themselves. It is time for us to tell those tales which speak of beginnings and endings, of adventure and pilgrimage, of purpose and destiny, and to do so without our feeling the need to over-explain what they “really mean” (as if we knew).

I recognize the risks in this kind of preaching: it can overreach, claiming to know more than we in fact know about matters which have not been revealed to us. It can tempt us and our listeners to an insipid literalism which relaxes the tensive nature of the analogical imagination, tries to nail down symbols which must be, if they are to have power, partially elusive, and freezes into immobility the essential dance of metaphorical speech. I think the risks are worth taking, however, because I am deeply concerned about preaching which is earthbound, flat, pedantic, and utilitarian.

Much of the preaching I hear trades in language that the preacher has borrowed from motivational speeches delivered at a management seminar or lifted from the pages of the latest self-help bestseller. Such language is easily heard, immediately relevant, temporarily helpful, and quickly forgotten. The kind of preaching I have in mind seeks to exercise the atrophied imagination, to reawaken our capacity for wonder, and to honor our intuition that there is more to life than meets the eye and ear.

Eschatological preaching also goes local and communal. It believes that the future which is rushing toward us is already arriving; its leading edge breaks-in to the mundane, quotidian and ordinary. So eschatological preaching says, “See the kingdom of God is among you; it is within you. Let those with eyes to see, see and those with ears to hear, hear.” The eschatological preacher lingers over life in the current order of things, searching for sights and sounds of God’s alternative order. She laments the ways in which we now sin and fall short of that glorious realty and she celebrates the ways in which, by grace, we now rise, however momentarily, to the dignity that will be completely ours when we fully realize our status as citizens of the divine commonwealth. He pays particular, prayerful and loving attention to life in the Christian community, seeking to shape it as an outpost—a colony—of that commonwealth.

Eschatological preaching is, in my view, a response (surely not the only and probably not the best response) to the challenge of postmodern culture. It does not ignore either reason or subjectivity; but points to ultimate realities which embrace and transcend both thought and emotion. We do not debate dreams; we describe and declare them. We do not subject visions to logical scrutiny; we express and experience them. The debate and scrutiny come later, when the brightness of the vision has faded and the intensity of the dream has diminished. Eschatological preaching trusts that faithful dreams and visions, born out of devoted and disciplined encounters of the preacher’s imagination with God’s Word, seen and heard in Jesus, have a self-authenticating character. In a sense, the dreams and visions will speak for themselves; the Word will not return empty and void; the foolishness of this kind of preaching will be vindicated by the same Spirit who granted the dreams and inspired the visions.

I do not see a way, in the postmodern world, of making a broadly or deeply persuasive case for Christianity as more “reasonable” than other worldviews. The best arguments we can muster will serve, as they always have, to strengthen the faith of those who already have it, rather than to create faith in those who do not. In post-modernity, as in pre-modernity, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God—or, if the speaking and hearing are aesthetically full and rich enough, by dreaming and envisioning the world which the Word creates.

In the fullest possible sense, then, eschatological preaching is counter-cultural; it counters our culture with the sights and sounds of a culture completely responsive to the will and way of God made known in Jesus Christ, an alternative culture so shining with truth, so bright with beauty, and so radiant with goodness that it illumines the mind and warms the heart—appeals to the mind’s search for reason and to the heart’s need for love.

"Eschatological" Preaching

2010-06-17T17:56:00.000-04:00

Whenever I have stopped to ponder my practice of preaching, as I have lately been prompted to do, I have returned, almost always, and again just now, to a late-19th century classic, Phillips Brooks’ Lectures on Preaching, in particular to his well-known description of preaching as the “bringing of truth through personality.”

That phrase remains the best brief characterization of preaching I know. “Truth through personality” acknowledges that preaching is irreducibly incarnational. In preaching, the word continues to become flesh; the message is inseparable from the messenger; and the treasure is both hidden and revealed in a clay vessel.

Truth remains mute without the person/personality who gives it voice. Without truth to seek, serve, and say, the preacher’s personality can be an interesting but also unruly collection of quirks, perspectives, and drives.

As compelling as Brooks’ description of preaching is, it strikes me that both major terms of it are now contested in our culture and in my own mind and heart. Just what does it mean to speak of truth in a culture of multiple and conflicted truths? And, just what is the significance of the preacher’s personality in an age which, simultaneously and paradoxically, demands and distrusts “personalities”?

A plethora of thinkers now tells us that, as a culture, we have worn-out the dominant worldview which characterized Western civilization for the last 500 or so years. We now live in a world we’ve not lived in before; it is a post-something world: post-modern, post- Enlightenment, post-liberal, post-Constantinian, post-Christian. At the very least, it is a “post-familiar” and “post-comfortable” world.

In this post-something world, our culture’s most basic assumptions about how the world is ordered are up for grabs. We aren’t sure how to be sure about what is true, right and good. We don’t know what, if anything, constitutes legitimate authority; therefore, the only ethics we have are inescapably situational.

I think that preaching in a time like ours needs to be something like prophetic, but I don't have in mind merely a kind of issue-driven, style of preaching. I don’t envision what I have heard called “Christianity and” preaching—Christianity and Hunger, Christianity and War, Christianity and Cloning, and so on. A better term might be eschatological preaching, not in the sense of preaching about “last things,” but about ultimate things.

I mean, instead, preaching which addresses our current conditions from the vantage point of God’s promised future, which lifts our gaze beyond the brokenness of this world and gives us a vision of the world made whole, and which gives us reason-against-reason to hope. Jurgen Moltmann wrote, in his groundbreaking book, Theology of Hope:

From first to last, and not merely in epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. The eschatological. . . is the medium of the Christian faith. . . . [T]the glow that suffuses everything here is the dawn of an expected new day. For Christian faith lives from the raising of the crucified Christ, and strains after the promise of the universal future of Christ. There is only one real problem in Christian theology, . . the problem of the future.

Eschatological preaching announces the dawning which has occurred and anticipates the flooding of the whole cosmos with light. It knows that the darkness has not been completely vanquished, but refuses to deny the light we have. It shines light back into the receding but real darkness and points toward the bright city which “has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:23).

Eschatological preaching does more than thunder for a more just, more peaceful, and more humane ordering of things in the here and now; it envisions and describes an all-encompassing and all-embracing reality which transcends and, ultimately, replaces the here and now. Eschatological preaching is not other-worldly. It isn’t escapist; it doesn’t counsel retreat from engagement with the so-called “real world.” It is, though, another-worldly. It does not imagine rearrangement, however radical, of the present order, but the realization of an utterly alternative order.

Its vision of a new world constantly impinges upon our present lives and creates in us a holy restlessness for complete transformation of ourselves and all things. That restlessness encourages us to live as if our world were that world, and it imparts energy, not just for coping with, but for changing the world by assuring us that we live toward, not the sputtering end of things, but toward the day when “all shall be well.”

My Wish and Prayer

2010-06-03T07:26:00.000-04:00

The environmental crisis gushing up from the Gulf of Mexico, threatening marine life and the delicate, vital, and beautiful ecosystems of marshlands and shorelines is, among many other things, a cause for grief, a call to prayer, and a summons for thoughtful leadership.

More and more, I feel the suffering of the earth--what Paul calls in Romans 8 "the groaning of creation." The earth seems burdened beneath the weight of the consuming pressure we put on it. We ask it to hold us and hold us up, to provide abundantly and increasingly for our need and greed, and it faithfully tries to do what we ask. But our unrelenting use and abuse of its resources is exhausting; we seem to forget that the earth, too, is our neighbor, worthy of love, nurture and care, and not just an endless warehouse of commodities. Sometimes I hear weeping in the wind and feel tears in the rain.

I do not have a well-defined political philosophy, nor am I particularly interested any longer in the endless civil wars that grind on between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, blue states and red states. The screaming, labeling and name-calling of our civil and political cultures seem to have two overarching effects: (1) They dumb-down our understanding of complex issues, reducing very difficult challenges to sound-bytes and slogans which fill the air with sound and fury but not much light or substance. (2) They paralyze our leaders and the rest of us; not much that matters gets done because leaders--in government, business, and, yes, the church--are too concerned about the short-term reactions of constituents who are agitating for leaders to do their immediate and, too often, superficial bidding.

So, as the oil gushes from the gulf and the earth shudders in response, the risk is that we will turn this crisis into yet another occasion for political posturing. I know it is naive on my part, but I wish, and I pray, that on issues like caring for God's good earth, providing decent health care, housing, and education for our citizens, and ensuring equal access and opportunity for everyone, we could turn down the rhetoric, take the long view, listen, truly listen, to the views and wisdom of all people of good-will, and get something done, actually done, to make this a more just, more peaceful, and more beautiful world.

Church Music--The Way to Heaven's Door

2010-05-25T08:17:00.000-04:00

This past Sunday, First Baptist Church of Asheville had a service of dedication for our new hymnals, a significant event for us, because it reaffirmed the centrality of God-focused, joyful and reverent worship for our community of faith. Our music ministry led us to sing "psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs" in a service filled with praise, prayer, energy, and passion. What follows are remarks I made as a part of that service:

Annie Dillard once said that “The Creator loves pizzazz!” Church music is praise and prayer, gratitude and longing, with pizzazz, which is why our pizzazz-loving God is also a music lover.

After all, music rises up from God’s majestic and wonderful creation. “This is my Father’s world/ And to my listening ears/All nature sings and round me rings/the music of the spheres.” Biologist Lewis Thomas heard the music of the earth and its creatures:

Termites make percussive sounds. . . “like notes of a tympani section. . . .Fish make sounds by clicking their teeth, blowing air, and drumming with special muscles against tuned inflated air bladders. The thrush in my backyard sings down his nose in meditative, liquid runs of melody, over and over again, and I have the strangest impression that he does this. . . for pleasure. Some of the time he seems to be practicing like a virtuoso in his apartment. . . It is a meditative kind of music, and I cannot believe that he is simply saying, “thrush here.”

Nature is pulsing with pizzazz and alive with song, ceaselessly thrilling with joy and clamoring in need. You and I, though, get out of rhythm, fall into disharmony, and lose our voices. Guilt or grief silences the music. Hurry and noise drown it out. Fear and worry leave no energy for poetry and pipe organ, searching words and soaring tunes.

In worship, though, we turn our attention from ourselves to God, open our souls as we open our hymnals, and lift our hearts as we lift our voices. In worship, offered to God, music becomes a means of miracle: Anthems announce the birth of joy in the place of sorrow. Doxology declares that God rules the world with truth and grace. Hymns herald the new creation, bursting to life amid the waste and ruins of a groaning, grieving earth. Songs slip past the sealed tomb of our despair and raises hope from the dead. Worship restores our pizzazz, and, while I am not sure exactly sure what it takes to brew up a batch of pizzazz, I know that two of its crucial ingredients are God’s Spirit and our music.

How impoverished would our sense of God’s grandeur be without “The Hallelujah Chorus? How much harder would it be to believe the Easter good news without “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”? Imagine a candlelit Christmas Eve without the wonder and peace of “Silent Night, Holy Night.” What merely spoken words of assurance could we substitute for “O Love that Wilt Not Let Me Go” What sermon could carry us through grief like “O God our Help in Ages Past”? How much grace would go unfelt, unknown, without “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound”?

God’s Spirit and our music spark pizzazz, and that pizzazz takes us where words alone cannot take us. Like all things human, words fall short of the glory of God which shines from the face of Jesus Christ. Words fashioned into poetry and carried along by music get us closer to that divine radiance. Music wings our thoughts and feelings and sets them soaring to heights words alone could never reach. It takes us to depths that mere ideas and bare facts cannot plumb.

In his poem addressed to “Church Musick,” George Herbert said, “if I travel in your companie/You know the way to heaven’s door.” I don’t always know the way, can’t always see the next step, or, if I see it, I don’t always have the will and the strength to take it. The Spirit of our music knows the way. Hymns take us to bright joy and blazing beauty. Songs accompany us to shining wonder and shimmering hope. They take us home; they takes us to God. How can we, why would we, keep from singing?

Freedom and Resurrection Faith

2010-05-17T06:57:00.000-04:00

Montezuma, GA, the little town where I once lived and worked, is only a few miles from Andersonville, site of the dreadful Confederate prison-camp where Union soldiers were kept in horrific conditions. The air is thick with the ghosts of suffering and hostility, but the once-scarred and wounded earth has recovered, and the land is beautiful once again. Andersonville is now the national Prisoner of War Memorial, and American veterans who were held captive may be buried there. I was honored, on several occasions, to commit their bodies to the ground and their spirits to the care of God. The local funeral director would call and ask me to meet him and a flag-draped casket and a family member or two in the cemetery and say whatever I could to help them. I often wondered about the soldiers I buried. What had it been like for them to be behind bars or barbed wire in a foreign land, cut-off from family and friends and unsure that they would ever set foot again on their native soil? How had they summoned the courage to endure and the strength to survive? I would also be struck by the paradox of their imprisonment in the name of freedom. They were locked up in pursuit of liberty.

Most of the time, we think freedom has to do with the ability to call our own shots: the right to say what we want to say and do what we want to do. Sooner or later, though, life takes us into experiences which strip from us our illusion of complete independence and unmask our charade of absolute autonomy. We lose control. The conditions of life prove stronger than our ability to resist them. Illness incarcerates us. Grief locks us up. Tragedy traps us. Crisis confines us. We feel chained and caged.

What does freedom mean then? Victor Frankl wrote, out of his experience in a Nazi prison camp,: “Everything can be taken from a [person] but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” (Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 104). Freedom rests, finally, not on the conditions and circumstances of our lives, but on how we respond to those conditions and circumstances. And, our responses are shaped by the god we serve. If we serve the God who raised Jesus from the dead, then we will draw on hope that can be born in the most desperate circumstances, love than can rise from the ruins, and joy that can flourish amid the withering conditions of sadness.

We Don't Have to be Orphans

2010-05-10T07:28:00.002-04:00

From years and years now of conversation and counseling and from my own experience as a son and a parent, I am convinced that very few of us live with any active regret about material things our parents could not or would not provide for us.

Hardly anyone grieves the fact that her parents sent her to kindergarten in clothes from Sears and Wal-Mart instead of in designer duds, or that her family vacations were to Myrtle Beach instead of Maui, or that his parents could only afford for him to drive, when he turned 16, a secondhand, scratched and dented Toyota instead of a new sports car.

I can’t remember handing the Kleenex box to an adult who, looking back on his childhood, was in pain over a stereo he didn’t get, or, remembering her relationship with her father, regretted that he could only afford to send her to a state school.

But, rivers of tears have flowed over games of catch that never happened, stories that never got read, walks in the woods that didn’t get taken, and questions that never even got asked much less answered. I know adults who feel that their parents never saw them clearly—never saw their talents, their dreams, their possibilities, their needs, and their problems—because those parents always saw them through eyes weakened by fatigue, blurred by hurry, dimmed by trouble, blinded by fear, or swollen by envy.

And, since their parents never saw them clearly, they never felt valued and cherished for themselves. In other words, I know plenty of emotional orphans: people who are convinced that any love they receive will soon be taken away from them, who are determined to “go it alone” and “do it themselves” because they have felt on their own for so very long, and who live with a low grade fear that makes them vulnerable to infection by the manipulations of those who seem to offer them safety and affirmation.

Jesus said to his friends on the night before his death: “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. My Father and I will make our home with those who love me.” It is a promise, which, if we can remember and trust it, assures us that we have been adopted into the family of God, where we are seen, known, and loved for who we truly are. We don't have to be orphans.

The Broken Heart of Humankind and the Loving Heart of Christ

2010-05-02T21:11:00.001-04:00

One of the fine pleasures of a few days off (which I had last week) was, at last, having the time and space to savor Marilynne Robinson's novel Home. Robinson's two earlier novels, Housekeeping and Gilead (to which Home is intricately related), are among the most well-wrought novels I had read, so I eagerly anticipated Home. It is a stunning book, filled with tender and truthful realism about faith and doubt, home and homesickness, our craving for, and resistance to, love, and, as Faulkner once described it, "the human heart in conflict with itself."

Early in the book, Glory Boughton, daughter and now caretaker of her aging father, Reverend Boughton, reflects on the meaning of "church" for her--a meaning informed by her experience of growing up in a church her father served as pastor:

For her, church was an airy, white room with tall windows looking out of God's good world, with God's good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.

Whatever the shape and size of the room, I think church is, or can be, exactly that: the place, the community, where all of us "parse the broken heart of humankind and praise the loving heart of Christ." Church is where we give honest voice to what breaks our hearts and where we open ourselves to the healing, restoring, and joy-giving love of Christ.

Humility and Growth

2010-04-21T06:38:00.000-04:00

At the heart of all genuine faith and all authentic change and conversion, whether sudden or gradual, dramatic or quiet, is humility. Spiritual growth and maturity require us to acknowledge that there are limits to our own strength, goodness, and knowledge. We need to be able to admit: “I was wrong. I don’t know. I need help.”

I was wrong: I am not going to build elaborate justifications, not going to hide behind pseudo-holiness, not going to wear the mask of self-righteousness, and not going to insist that the fault is always someone else’s.

I don’t know; I didn’t know: I acted out of ignorance I thought was wisdom. I understood too little and too late. I said yes when I should have said no. I failed to listen. I failed to see.

I need help: strong as I am, and strong as I want you to think I am, I still need a place, a person, a community where I can receive as well as give, be sheltered as well as shelter, to rest as well as to work, to play as well as to serve, to worship as well as to lead.

I was wrong. I don’t know. I need help. God always, always, meets that kind of spirit with the truth that sets us free, peace that gives us rest, and joy that finds us, over and over again.

Heavenly Muse

2010-04-13T22:34:00.001-04:00

In his novella "Remembering," Wendell Berry includes this moving poem/prayer that I often have in mind as I move to the pulpit or lectern to speak or pick up a pen or press my fingers to a keyboard to write:

Heavenly Muse, Spirit who brooded on
The world and raised it shapely out of nothing,
Touch my lips with fire and burn away
All dross of speech, so that I may keep in mind
The truth and end to which my words now move
In hope. Keep my mind within that Mind
Of which it is a part, whose wholeness is
The hope of sense in what I tell.

Berry's words remind me that the Spirit which hovered over the face of lifeless chaos and stirred it to creative life is, ultimately, the only Spirit that makes life-giving and life-sustaining communication possible. And, Berry challenges me to trust that my mind can, after all, participate in (not fully encompass or comprehend) the wholeness that radiates from the Mind of God. Moving into that light of God's truthful love and loving truth really is the only "hope of sense in what I tell" or write.
(Three Short Novels. Washington, D. C. : Counterpoint, 2002, p. 121)

"I am not dead"

2010-04-05T15:30:00.000-04:00

Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a poor black woman whose husband, Albert, is violent and abusive. Albert isolated Celie from her family, censoring the mail so that she never heard from them. Celie’s sister, Nettie, a missionary in Africa wrote to Celie faithfully, but Celie didn’t see the letters. Albert hid them. Over time, with no word from Nettie, Celie resigned herself to the believe that her sister was dead. . One day, though, Celie found a bundle of letters from Nettie that Albert had hidden. One of those letters said:

Dear Celie,

I know you think I am dead. But I am not. I been writing to you too, over the years, but Albert said you'd never hear from me again and since I never heard from you all this time, I guess he was right. Now I only write at Christmas and Easter hoping my letter
get lost among the Christmas and Easter greetings, or that Albert get the holiday spirit and have pity on us.

There is so much to tell you that I don't know, hardly, where to begin, and anyway, you probably won't get this letter, either. I'm sure Albert is still the only one to take mail out of the box.

But if this do get through, one thing I want you to know, I love you, and I am not dead. . .

Your loving sister,
Nettie

I don’t’ know who or what “Albert” is for you, who or what it is that stands between you and the news of God’s love and grace, who or what it is that interferes with, makes difficult your trust in the resurrection. Is “Albert” grief or fear? Guilt or shame? Learned helplessness or practiced hopelessness? A bent toward cynicism? A habit of letting the unruly reason of the mind trump the longing reason of the heart?

Whatever or whoever “Albert” is, God is determined that, in spite of Albert, you will discover the liberating and gladdening of resurrection. God will not give up until we hear this Easter Gospel, which is the voice of Jesus saying: I love you and I am not dead.