A Prayer for Would-Be Good Samaritans

May God grant us enough love that we can no longer contain it;

Enough joy that we can no longer keep it to ourselves;

Enough hope that despair has to shout to get our attention;

Enough courage that we forget to be afraid;

Enough faith that we take to the Jericho roads;

Enough peace to befuddle the forces of alienation;

Enough confidence to trust God to meet us in our neighbors

And the audacity to act accordingly.

Preparing for the Best

Behind a little magnet on our refrigerator is a yellowed cutout from a handout one of our girls brought home from Broken Ground School about ten years ago.  The words, “Strategies for Resolving Conflict” surround a drawing of a circle that looks a lot like the spinner that accompanies your old game of Twister.   In the center of the circle are ten words inviting kids to remember that there are alternatives to violence:  “Compromise.  Take turns.  Share.  Change.  Postpone.  Avoid.  Get help.  Apologize.  Humor.  Fight Fair.”    The words “assume the worst” are not listed as an option.

The deep tragedy of the death of Trayvon Martin is that it could have been easily avoided.   Had George Zimmerman chosen option five, six or seven on that list, Trayvon might still be living, and Zimmerman’s life might not now be so radically altered.  Instead, armed with a gun and Florida’s Stand-Your-Ground law, Zimmerman assumed the worst, ignored the dispatcher’s warning, pursued Martin and rather than resolving a conflict, created one.

“Blessed are the peacemakers.”  And blessed are the teachers and the parents and the guardians who teach us strategies for resolving conflict with smarts.  And hearts.  Blessed are those who remind us that life is too precious and too complex to be addressed by black-and-white, either-or, good-guy-bad-guy thinking. 

One of the teachers in my congregation is one such peacemaker, although she would surely deny it.  She would have done cartwheels this spring if even half the kids in her class had mastered just one peacemaking behavior.  It was a tough year for her: there were days the bad behavior inside her classroom bordered on anarchy.  It can’t have been a comfort either, that the behavior outside her classroom was even worse, revealed over and over by images of Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the brutal murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in London.  Yet, by dint of sheer determination, she taught her small flock that just because some people are behaving badly doesn’t mean that you have to.

Surely we can all agree, regardless of our race or ethnicity, that security for our children is of utmost concern.  Preparing for worst-case scenarios is part of the process.  But in these times of heightened surveillance, increasing fear, and broader applications of violent means of solving problems, we’re fostering a culture in which worst-case scenarios may be the only scenario we permit ourselves to imagine.  Good peacemaking rests on the ability to imagine something good.

You’ve heard the saying:  “if all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.”  Too steady a diet of negative thinking naturally morphs into paranoia.  I am convinced that part of creating a safer world is teaching one another to learn to look and hope for the best in others.   To call upon our shared “better angels,” and to learn to, well, compromise.  Take turns.  Share.  Change.  Postpone.  Avoid.  Get help.  Apologize.  Humor.  Fight Fair.

Growing up, I had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with adult Quakers.  They didn’t need a cutout on a refrigerator to remind them.  They had it instilled in their hearts that “there is that of God in every person.”   With that stance as their starting point,  these good people are deeply devoted to non-violent approaches to problem solving.  The are adept at seeing the good in others and hoping for the best in them.  You’d think that would lead to overly-rosy approaches to life, but most of the Quakers I know are very practical people who just happen to developed a far wider range of responses to difficult and sometimes confrontational than the average person. 

Tony Campolo once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that the line between good and evil does not separate one type of person from another:  it runs right through the middle of each human being.   With that in mind, let us pray for the Martin and Zimmerman families.   And perhaps, too, for the courage to imagine something good in the next stranger we meet in our neighborhood.

Palm Sunday Prayer

O Depth of love, You who dwell in both the light and the shadows,

Enter with us into the Holy Week festival of our own inconsistency.

For we are part-time disciples who are, ourselves, part light and part darkness,

Part Peter and part Pilate;

Part praise and part lament,

Part sacred and part secular,

Part resurrection and part Easter Bunny,

Part here, part there, part everywhere, part nowhere;

And here at the gates of Jerusalem we cry out to you to take our many parts

And make us whole again.

           

We gather with the throngs in praise today:

For  planetary orbits and gravitation and Higgs Boson particles,

For children and stories and bedtime;

For parents whose courageous living and tender hearts will always be with us;

For lovers found and loves that once were;

For the miracle of life in us and around us,

And for the infinitely impossible probability that all the conditions needed for life exist in just the right proportions here on earth.

But we gather too, at the wailing wall, conscious of our pain as well:

Mend, we pray, those hearts here today that are torn by loss or betrayal;

Soften again those hearts here today that have hardened by the heat of too much cynicism, that they may be molded again for beating hope;

Sew together what is torn in us, and frayed;

Integrate that in our spirits and in our lives that is fragmented;

Sing to us in our places of darkness,

And whistle us toward the light –

Even if it means trusting what is near impossible for us to trust:

That Good news lies on

the other side of the midnight garden,

the far side of abandonment

the dark side of the cross

the shadow side of our selves

The other side of all we know

Take our Palm Sunday selves, O God, this week, and hurl us across the shadows of Holy Week, that we might be singed by the fires of our own faithlessness, just enough to open our mouths in a gasp…that we might breathe in the breath of Resurrection life.

For you are a God who would wash and kiss the feet of the prisoner;

Would feed us a meal of celebration in the presence of death itself;

Would sit with us in a midnight garden and keep vigil while all others had fallen asleep,

And would roll away the stones that hold in the stench of our own deaths…

O God of shadow and of light…..we believe!  Help our unbelief.  Amen.

A Responsive Litany for Advent

The following was created for, and used on, the Fourth Sunday in Advent, 2011 at South Congregational Church, UCC in Concord, NH. It is "woven" together using the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 25, and John 1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, OUR FATHER, and the Word was God, WHO ART IN HEAVEN. He was with God in the beginning, HALLOWED BE THY NAME. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. IN HIM WAS LIFE, and that life was the light of all people.

And when the Son of Man, THY KINGDOM COME, “comes in his glory, THY WILL BE DONE, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry ON EARTH and feed you, AS IT IS IN HEAVEN, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, YOU DID IT FOR ME. Lord, forgive us our debts AS WE FORGIVE OUR DEBTORS.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for THE LIGHT SHINES IN THE DARKNESS, and thine is still the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. AND THE DARKNESS HAS NOT OVERCOME IT.
AMEN.

Deliver Us

Fourteen months after that fearful morning
we gazed down through plate glass
and brimming eyes
on the chasm 57 stories below us.
An unexpected, tender scene amid
twisted steel and concrete ash:

construction workers with rakes and shovels in hand,
tenderly, reverently, painstakingly sifting,
searching for those whose screams had been silenced
by ash and time.
Even the bulldozers went about their work
gingerly and with great kindness.

Here was holy ground, suspended in thick, sacred air.
This was lower Manhattan, but it harkened back to
the prison in Germany I’d once heard of,
and the town in Poland,
and the wall in Europe
and the bridge in Selma, Alabama,
where evil did its best
only to be bested by something more tender
and vastly stronger
than burning jet fuel or ideology.

This tenderness below us now,
like the tenderness strangers offered one another then,
is still-living testimony:
yes, you can take our lives after all,
but our humanity belongs to us,
our compassion for one another belongs to us,
our shared purpose and destiny
belong to us.

Give us your best shot and we’ll raise you ten,
bring us down, and we will rise,
only not because of missiles and might;
we’ll rise instead by dint of hands outstretched
in vulnerable strength to offer what we can.
We’ll rise not as zealots bent on martyrdom,
but rather as nameless neighbors doing unto
other nameless neighbors
what we would have done unto us.
Ten years have come and gone.
Gnarled steel and chunks of concrete have long since
been barged away.
Fountains reside in their place.

We have learned much.
And much has also been forgotten.
Our unity is fragmented,
and we do not tolerate one another well of late.
Villains have died, but so have civilians.
And so the prayer that rose in me silently that day,
rises yet again today:

Deliver us, Lord, from the consuming fires of hatred
to the illuminating fire
of compassion.
Deliver us from evils, both without
and within.

Deliver us to that good and tender place
where strength makes room for the vulnerable,
and we see one another the way we did on September 11th:
covered this time, not in ash, but
in the sacred light
of your love.

Debt Crisis

“But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth…If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish.” Deuteronomy 9:18-19

Yesterday, in the eleventh hour, Congress struck a deal ending months of brinksmanship over the nation’s debt crisis. The deal succeeded in extending our ability to pay down our national debt, and may well provide some measure of comfort to our personal portfolios but it failed this simple Deuteronomic test of remembrance.

The ancient religious ethic asserts now, as it did then, that wealth and well-being are not private matters. They are market shares of grace entrusted to us by a generous God who expects grace, gratitude, and generosity of spirit from us in return. As God has remembered us with the dividends of a perpetual love, so we are called to remember God and God’s people each and every time we look at the bottom line.

Our financial debt crisis may have been averted for the time being, but our spiritual debt crisis will linger as long as we say to ourselves, “my power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.”

All that Glitters is Not Gold

It was Christmas Eve several years ago. The church was packed. About ten minutes into worship, a woman came through the rear door and sat down in a pew in the back. Judging by her many layers of oddly assorted clothing, I guessed she was homeless.

Later that evening, an usher sought me out, holding something in her hand. “A woman in the back of the church put this in the offering plate,” she said, holding up a half-used bottle of sparkly green Revlon nail polish. “I think she was homeless.”

While others that night had casually tossed large bills into the offering plate, this woman had, quite possibly, given away the most valuable thing in her possession: the one thing which could remind her that she was still a beautiful woman in God’s eyes.

Perhaps she gave it out of pure adoration: a wise woman's gift brought from afar and laid at the manger. Perhaps it was an offering of solidarity with Mary’s travails. Or maybe, just maybe, she gave it in the hopes that a little of what made her more beautiful might make the world in which she, and we, live a little more beautiful too.

Who was she to think that a little green nail polish would help make the world a better place?! Then again, who was she not to?”


-An excerpt from the 2010 Christmas Eve meditation.