A Fool's Feast

A Responsive Litany for Advent

2012-01-02T22:08:00.003-05:00

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

2011-09-12T22:00:00.001-04:00

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

2011-08-03T10:07:00.001-04:00

“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

2011-01-04T18:33:00.000-05:00

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.

Let Us Love One Another

2010-10-06T22:25:00.001-04:00

By now most of you know the story: on September 22nd Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clemente, a quiet, talented violinist jumped off the George Washington Bridge, taking his own life after two classmates secretly and illegally taped and then posted to the web a video of Tyler having a sexual encounter with another male student. Tragically, Tyler was not the only young American to end his life after being exploited, teased, bullied or harassed. September alone saw at least three other tragedies like this. 13 year-old Asher Brown in Cyprus, Texas, was repeatedly bullied and accused of being gay by classmates. He shot himself in the head. 15 year-old Billy Lucas of Greensburgh, Indiana ended his life after classmates repeatedly mocked him and questioned his sexual orientation. Seth Walsh of Tehachapi, California, died after attempting to hang himself in his back yard after years of being tormented because he was gay.

It is important that we as a people of faith take steps in our own lives and circles of friendship to let others know that victimization of anyone is morally wrong and reprehensible. Bullying in schools remains a significant and scarring issue for countless American children, as we well know from recent events right here at Concord High. It is particularly toxic and dangerous, however, when the victims also happen to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. We at South Church, in Concord, NH, have committed ourselves to work toward a world where all persons will be affirmed for who they are. Let us speak up wherever a voice of compassion and justice needs to be heard. Let us pray for the victims’ families as well for those whose harassment contributed to these needless losses of precious life. Let us find ways to instill in the young people in our lives a deep and abiding sense that, as the Quakers say, “there is that of God in each one of us.”

If you have not already seen it, I recommend a recent commentary posted by Ellen Degeneres. While she does not speak from a religious perspective, she certainly offers a timely challenge to us all: http://www.tubehome.com/watch/ellen-degeneres-tyler-clemente-suicide.

Banquet Logic

2010-08-26T23:12:00.001-04:00

“But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be paid at the resurrection of the righteous.” Luke 14:13-14

Sometimes the only way to fight idea is with another idea. In his very first sermon in Nazareth, and then again at this banquet hosted by the religious elite, Jesus was offering up a new idea: like it or not, God belongs to other people too. He was up against an ideology as old as the first human inklings of the divine: the logic that God would never consort with those the “devoted” consider unworthy. Yet over and over, lovingly, stubbornly, Jesus countered this logic by eating with sinners and preaching sermons about heavenly banquets at which outcasts sit in the honored places.

The idea that the Islamic faith is a mortal danger either to the West or to Christianity is hardly a new one, but it has certainly enjoying renewed favor in recent weeks near Ground Zero and far beyond. One church in Gainesville Florida has decided that the proper Christian duty with respect to Islam is a large-scale burning of copies of the Qu’ran. Fortunately, across town, Rev. Larry Reimer and the United Church of Gainesville and several other communities of faith in that city have decided to apply a little of their own banquet logic. Rather than join in burning the Qu’ran, they are going to begin reading it. Now there’s an idea!

Banquet logic is effective because it is so disarming. It abides by the apostle Paul’s warning that our real enemies are not flesh and blood, but the “powers and principalities” which usurp our spiritual judgment, especially in times of fear. It knows that when we invite our “enemy” to the table, or even into our houses of worship, we are not dishonoring Jesus or defiling God’s vision. We are simply doing what Jesus did.

Prayer: Dear God, as you have done for me so many times, help me learn what it means set a table of welcome and mercy for others, even when – especially when – I think they are my enemies. Amen.

What’s The Bottom Line?

2010-07-25T22:21:00.001-04:00

I can’t say I was surprised, but I was mildly concerned. Here we were, twelve members of the same UCC church engaged in a class on the history of the traditionally “orthodox” understandings of Jesus only to discover that our beliefs were all over the map. Some participants confessed that they were struggling to accept the assertion of Jesus’ divinity while others felt it was absolutely central to their faith. Still others found the whole discussion somewhat unsettling because they had always assumed people in the same tradition would believe generally the same things. At one point, one of the participants asked the question: “Jed, what’s the bottom line? What must we believe to be called a Christian in the United Church of Christ?”

I sat with the question for a good half a minute as I considered the freight of her question and felt the weight of anticipation in the room. Fortunately, in that moment, the words of Sam Solivan, a former professor, came back to me: “In the end, what counts more than orthodoxy is orthopraxis.” In other words, “right practice” is more important to the Christian life than “right belief.” So I replied, “I suspect Jesus might answer your question with two short sayings: ’Love one another as I have loved you; ‘ and ‘Come, follow me.’”

A week later, the evaluation forms rolled in and I opened them with a hint of trepidation. Had the class helped people grow in their walk with Jesus, or had it only unsettled them? To my relief, the responses were filled with gratitude. Apparently, the very act of coming together and engaging our questions and hungers in an atmosphere of love and non-judgment was not only eye-opening: it left them hungry for more. They wanted to continue the journey together.

For those of us seeking to follow Jesus, Frederich Beuchner wrote, “You do not come first to understand a person fully and then to love him, but love comes first, and then it is out of the love that understanding is born.” (The Magnificent Defeat, HarperCollins, pp 98-99.) It’s as true with Jesus as it is with one another. Love comes first. That is the genius of moving beyond the question “what must I believe?” to the question, “what must I do?” The answer isn’t complex: love your neighbor as yourself, and strive in all you do to follow the way of Jesus.

What a gift it is, to call the United Church of Christ home. Here, we are called beyond the black and white of creeds to the color of deeds, beyond the anxiety of passing tests of faith to the joys of sharing our testimonies of faith. What a gift to have as our guide these words: “In essentials unity; in non-essentials diversity; and in all things, charity.”

On the Cusp

2010-06-05T22:34:00.006-04:00

Today on our ride home, my daughter remarked, "I'm trying not to grow up too fast, Dad, but it's hard." She's on the cusp between child and young adult, between self-awareness and self-consciousness, between free agent of the Holy Spirit and product of the world's expectations of her. As much joy as it gives me to watch her mature so beautifully, I find myself wishing the scales of her life would tilt a little in reverse, too...back toward her carefree days. But the wish is a vain one. As the hymn puts it, "time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons (and daughters) away." We are perpetually on the cusp of that which our journey has in store for us, and while change can be promise, we can all be forgiven the occasional glance in the rear-view mirror. That mirror, after all, can be one of life's greatest repositories - and reminders - of the wonder we have experienced.

Prayer: "God of the journey, help me to linger here on the cusp of tomorrow, just for a moment. Help me not to grow up any faster than I have to. Amen."

Foreseen in Joy

2010-04-26T20:39:00.000-04:00

“I am about to do a new thing;  now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” Isaiah 43:19

My friend Ignatius has foresight, but with a twist: he likes to prepare himself for events which have yet to happen. I’m reminded of this every time we go on a mission trip together: I pack for one, while Ignatius packs for many. Buried in his suitcase among the socks and the toothpaste are the items he can’t wait to give away to people he hasn’t even met yet: silly string and balloons for kids in San Salvador, McDonalds’ gift cards for hungry, homeless men in Boston. Even before he’s out the door, he is preparing for joyful moments of encounter long before they happen. Which, I’m convinced, is a big part of why they inevitably do.

It’s precisely that kind of foresight to which Isaiah invites us: that spiritual readiness to see beyond the stranger to the friend, beyond the lump of clay to the chalice full of wine, beyond the conflict to the reconciliation. It is that kind of vision of which Wendell Berry spoke when he wrote, “That which is foreseen in joy must be lived out every day.”

This afternoon I passed by a homeless man sitting alone on a remote city bench. His walker was sitting beside him, and in his hands, raised to his lips, was a flute. At first I thought it odd that he was playing without an audience. Then it dawned on me that perhaps he, like Ignatius, is gifted with foresight, and that his flute and he were simply announcing that there is more to God’s realm than sometimes meets the average eye.

Prayer
Visionary God, give me eyes to imagine what you have already seen, and to live it out every day. Amen.

A Poem for Sue Ann Martin

2010-04-22T06:08:00.000-04:00

We’d wave at you, and you at us,
each morning as kids piled off the bus,
my daughters and I would walk past your window,
fleetingly mindful of flowers and Crypto.

I’m remembering a Sunday not long ago,
that Sunday piled high with new fallen snow;
folks said, "close church," and I said, no, if you please;
and you showed up ~ one of a dozen ~ arriving on skis.

I remember many things, and truly, we all do,
your faithful following is a large, devoted crew;
your teaching and your life were masterful art;
borne witness by the fact that even when you sweat,
the stain made a heart.

That stain will cling to us, we will wear it with pride;
and we promise to engage the world with our curious side;
as you taught, we will not shrink from running the extra mile.
Your class, Mrs. Martin, lives on in us, and with it, your smile.

And so with sadness, and with joy, we salute every one of your 50 years;
the end of your class came much to soon, we confess, and with tears;
but we stand here today to say we love you, even more than you loved to run;
and we declare to you, well done, good and faithful servant, well done.

The Change We Seek Lies Within

2010-03-18T22:26:00.000-04:00

Lent is a bit of a paradox: it is, on the one hand, a cyclical invitation "back to the center," back to harmony with God and with others, back to what is essential. At the same time, it is an invitation to venture forward, a pilgrimage through the shadows of Holy Week and the rebirth of Easter - in other words, an invitation to change. Today I found myself wondering about change, and how real change happens.

In an ancient story of the desert fathers, Abba Lot seeks the counsel of the older, wiser Abba Joseph. Abba Lot seeks something more in his life, but has hit a dead end: he does everything he can by way of prayer and good works, but senses that these things alone are not helping him on his spiritual pilgrimage. "What more can I do?" he asks the older man. The older man raises his hands skyward, and his fingers become like flame. And he says to the younger man, If you will, you can become all flame."

I confess: the image appeals to me. So does the response: " If you will, you can...." Which is to say, the answer to new life - to real change - always lies within. It's not "out there" in the externals of the moment. It is not, as Elijah discovered, in the earthquake, wind or fire. It is a matter of being still enough to pay attention to what is going on in our soul; still enough to what it is that our heart wills. What does your heart will? Listen well. If you follow, change will come, and with it, new life.

Holy No

2010-02-19T05:07:00.000-05:00

Someone recently invited me to take on a leadership role in the community. Her request was simple enough, but it took me three weeks to ponder because of the ensuing internal wrestling match that went in in me. To begin with, she had invited me to a cause that was "right up my alley." The people I would have worked with are people of integrity. As I pondered the invitation my mind would wander down the path of imagining all the wonderful, exciting, meaningful things we might accomplish together. All of which, I soon realized, would entail more meetings, more planning, more work, more time....more than I literally have to offer. The "external" sense of calling was strong indeed ~ even seductive. But somewhere inside, I knew that saying "yes" to the invitation would pull me further off course.

In those moments when I allowed myself the quiet time to sit with that invitation in prayer, another voice....a stiller, smaller voice, began to speak from within. A voice which was quietly eager to remind me of the long list of things I've been wanting to do and have been putting off over and over because there have been too many other important things competing for attention. And over and over I kept hearing in my mind a refrain from a poem that was given to me more than twenty years ago. The author's name has long since vanished, but the essence of the poem has remained with me: "to live well, build only one barn." In other words, choose carefully and simply. Invest yourself in fewer things so that you may invest yourself in those few things more fully.

There are those scintillating times in life when the internal sense of call and the external work together as one. And then there are those dissonant times when they do not. This was one of those times when saying "no" to something good is the only way to say "yes" to something holier and better.

When Jesus came out of the wilderness, he gathered up those who would follow him. "Come, and follow me, and you will be fishing for people." He invited them to a mighty "yes!" But the only way to get there was through a thicket of "no's." Perhaps this kind of "no" is akin to blowing the ashes off a coal: we remove the suffocating crust clinging to our lives in order that the embers within might burn anew.

So I'm beginning this season of Lent with a couple of "no's." I'm beginning by brushing off the ashes of those things which pull me away from my inner compass. Not only have I turned down that person's kind invitation, but I'm saying no to a few other things as well. It is, perhaps, a form of confession and repentance. It is a first, small step in turning yet again from death to life.

Prayer of Confession

2010-02-02T22:05:00.000-05:00

God of life, God of love, God of joy: I come to you today like a thirsty traveler to a well. In this age of overload, I thirst for life; in these days of animosity, I thirst for love; in this time of struggle, I thirst for joy. But you, O God, are the source of all these things, and I confess that my thirst must in part be a result of my having wandered from you. Forgive me for not taking the time to be with you more often. Forgive me for failing to nurture my own spirit, so that the life, love and joy I find in you might also flow back out of me. Guide my steps again toward the well of eternity, and there quench my thirst. Set me free from my sins, that I may once again dare to dream audacious dreams, extend audacious love, and be a little bit of light and life in the world, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Lament for Haiti

2010-01-15T08:18:00.000-05:00

How long, O Lord, how long? How long must the impoverished people of Haiti suffer before the rest of the world stops thinking of them as second-class citizens? How many lives must be lost to earthquakes, to unjust immigration policies, international double standards and economic embargoes before the channels of Your grace and our graciousness are opened to them? How many Restavek children need to be sold into servitude before there is adequate employment to keep parents fed? How long will Haiti's political polarities strangle the needs of the people? O God, hear the desperate cries of your Haitian people, and pour out your grace upon them. But let us hear their cries as well, and mourn as they mourn. Take our hearts in the wake of this horrid tragedy and open them, soften them to the centuries-long plight of these good and generous people. Help us to see them in the light of the suffering Christ, in whom so many of them place their stalwart faith. Let there be an "aftershock" in our souls, that we might change our ways and open our lives to their desperate need.

Bring It!

2010-01-15T08:15:00.000-05:00

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news…” Isaiah 61:1-7

At a recent girls’ basketball game, the home team was down by quite a bit and their frustration was rising. The visiting defense had stymied their game: each time they brought the ball down court they could do little more than pass it around the top of the key. Then, without warning, one of the girls dropped her shoulder and drove the ball right to the hoop, circumstances be damned. Lo and behold, she both scored and drew two added foul shots. The crowd went nuts, and in that one moment the whole game turned around.

The post-exilic Israelites had begun to wonder if they had been doomed to yet another losing season. After all, who were they to be “priests of the Lord” now that they were just a banged-up holdout from the past without a functioning Temple and while foreigners were still tilling their own land? Isaiah egged them on with this simple challenge: who were they not to be? The Spirit had anointed them to be a servant nation: to bring good news to others, circumstances be damned.

God has always dispatched prophets to bring good news before the coast is clear. We ourselves might be inclined to put off our own prophetic witness until the defense has turned sloppy. But Isaiah has a different idea: don’t wait to see the evidence that God’s good news is coming. Be the evidence that God’s good news is already here! It can turn the whole game around.

Prayer: Lord, grant me the courage to bring a little bit of your good news into the world today, whatever the circumstances may be. Amen.

Little by Little

2009-12-10T21:52:00.000-05:00

I was reminded today that William Sloane Coffin once wrote that the gift of the Incarnation isn't just about what God became in Jesus: it's also about what we can still become in the fullness of our own time.

For some, the "becoming" might be measured boldly: a grand stretching of wings, a courageous stepping out beyond safe borders, or a total commitment to integrating one's core values with everyday living. But sometimes, perhaps most times, our "becoming" is more reliably measured incrementally. An alcoholic in recovery may feel that twenty-five days of sobriety doesn't measure up well against years of addictive behavior. Someone who has a record of poor decisions may labor under the weight of self-judgment to the point of negating every good choice they do make. But the truth is that each and every new day of sobriety, each and every life-affirming choice, is a towering success that warrants celebrating with the angels.

Who are we to become? Every choice we make to listen to (and act upon) the still, small voice of God that speaks faithfully within us is an act of Incarnating God's Word for us. After all, Christmas reminds us that God is not only in the grand scheme of things, God is present in the details.

In the Twinkling of an Eye

2009-12-01T15:16:00.000-05:00

“I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” 1 Corinthians 15:51

It’s funny how some moments in life come and go without our hearts’ noticing, while others imprint themselves on our memories forever. One of those unforgettable moments came for me in the early evening hours of November 15, 1995. Laurie had given birth to Brynne a few hours earlier. There we were, the two of us, friends and lovers changed into parents! In the twinkling of an eye.

And time felt as though it had stopped, as time does when you’re surrounded by holiness. After being whisked off to the nursery for further observation, our firstborn daughter~all seven pounds and fourteen ounces of her~was wheeled up alongside the bed in which I was resting in a clear plastic bassinette, wrapped tight in her hospital blanket and beanie. There we were, father and daughter now, products of a miracle too readily forgotten all these years later. There we were, each of us on our side, looking each other in the eye. No words needed to be shared. We were wrapped in mystery and love.

It was in that moment that my mind flashed forward about forty or fifty years. I suddenly imagined us in reversed roles: I, much older now, lying in a hospital bed for some reason or another, nearing the end of my life, and she, a grown up Brynne, sitting by my bedside, holding my hand silently, the two of us looking one another in the eye. In both scenes, the real one, and the imagined one, there was a lump in my throat and I was on the brink of tears. Tears welling up from an overflowing of love: the first in awe of the birth I that had taken place; the second in awe of the countless blessings that rise to our awareness when death is near.

Those who know me know that I am a hugger. As I reflect back on this moment, I am struck by the fact that there was no hugging involved. I know why now: in both scenes, our relationship was being held in the embrace of God. Love’s instinct is to cling, and cling we do to those we love in both life and memory. But at times of transition, whether it’s adolescence of leaving home or getting married or dying, love is also required to let go. We do it reluctantly, of course. But as people of faith we do so in the deep, deep knowledge that the One who is beyond our grasp holds us – and our relationships – even when we can’t hold on any more.

On this cusp of Advent, I am especially moved by all the letting go that God did throughout the Gospels. God let go of control over what would happen to Jesus from the moment Jesus was born right through the Crucifixion. And I wonder whether Mary had one of those “flash forward” moments too as she gazed on her son in the manger. All we know is that Mary pondered many things in her heart, knowing somehow that she too would have to let go one day. I suppose that’s what we’re doing here tonight: keeping vigil together somewhere between cradle and grave, between manger and cross, pondering it all in our hearts and hoping to make it through. Knowing that the One who is beyond our grasp holds us even when we can’t hold on any more.

Over the years my parishioners have taught me that one of the keys to making it through grief is letting go of the question “why?” and learning to ask the more relevant question, “what now?” And then you figure it out, a day at a time. You get up in the morning. You breathe. You brush your teeth. You brew your coffee a little stronger. You go to work or read the paper or go for a walk. You cry, you pound the walls, you say your prayers, you answer the phone a little more warily than you used to. You do whatever you have to do, often wishing you didn’t have to.

But most of all, you cherish the ache. That’s right, hug the ache you feel in your soul and in your chest close to you. That ache in your heart, as painful as it is, is an ache you would take any day and twice on Sunday if the alternative were to never have loved the one you love. Hug the ache close because deep within your ache are the seeds of the divine ache that was so great it compelled God to send a son…so that we here might feel God’s embrace as close to us as our love is to us.

Hug that ache, and let it move you from the old love into a new love, whatever form it takes. Because we were created for love. Paul said it well in First Corinthians: “As for prophecy, it shall end. As for tongues, they shall cease. But love never ends.”

I heard a story once about a minister who visited an elderly widow. Her home was extremely modest, and her health was failing. And yet she was full of smiles and kindness. And it struck the young man visiting her that here was a woman whose husband had deeply loved her. She reminded him of a rock that has sat out in the sun all day long absorbing the heat of the sun’s radiation: and that even after the sun has set, the rock retains the heat it has absorbed well into the night, radiating it back out into the world.

All the awesome things in life happen in the twinkling of an eye. Children are born and become lovers and parents who age and eventually die, and somehow the cycle keeps on going. Perhaps that’s because there is so much love still radiating from all of us, even in the middle of the night. Radiating because before we loved one another, God loved us. And loves us still.

The Wind Blows Where It Will

2009-11-16T11:23:00.000-05:00

I walked my daughter to the bus today. It was sunny, unseasonably warm and windy, the kind of day that always takes me back to Thanksgivings past. On the way back to the house I noticed that my neighbors' yards were once again covered in leaves. I'm used to my lawn being covered in leaves, but am not accustomed to the "leafy look" on my neighbors lawns. In a matter of just a few hours, the wind - ignorant of human constructs such as property lines and emotional boundaries - had rearranged the residual leaves all over the neighborhood. For a moment I was glad that I hadn't finished raking my lawn, since as of today, we all were going to need to get back out there and rake some more anyway, no matter how good our lawns looked yesterday.

I thought about the wind, and the leaves, and how Jesus reminded Nicodemus that those who live in and are born of the Spirit will experience much of life as wind, not knowing where it comes from. The leaves this morning mirror life. We clean house, we take care of whatever we conceive as "our responsibility," but occasionally the Holy Spirit, without so much as a social courtesy, playfully deposits the "debris" from other lives and other realities onto the lawns of our lives. A friend pulls her hair out over the burden caring for her mother has turned out to be. She didn't ask for this problem, and wishes that the Spirit would blow her mother's condition into her brother's back yard for a while so that he might know how much responsibility has fallen to her this past year. Shelter directors in town struggle with how to house the anticipated increase in New Hampshire homeless persons knowing that the Spirit has blown countless "transient" homeless into our back yard from all over.

Ask all we want, it is not ours to know the "why" of our struggles and responsibilities. Decay happens, and responsibility for life's debris pretty much falls, or blows to all of us sooner or later. The smart neighbors will find comfort in knowing that the unraked leaves of life will eventually compost into the soil of tomorrow's new growth. The wise ones will see in their frustration the Spirit's prompting to invite all the neighbors together next Saturday for a shared response to the problem, followed by a really nice dinner together to share some of the joys of life. We all spend so much time raking alone...why not share the load?

No Periods, Please

2009-10-16T14:56:00.000-04:00

Otis Moss, III said that in the grammar of this life, God alone has the right to employ the use of a period. No friend, no enemy, no human authority including us has the authority to declare “it is finished” about anything or anyone. God alone is Alpha and Omega. We do have at our disposal, however, a range of other punctuation: semi-colons for a pause; exclamation points for emphasis; and commas especially when we anticipate something more yet to come.

When our family moved to New Hampshire, people warned us that the climate is deadly to rose bushes, period. We planted a rose bush anyway, and while our first two winters here almost finished it off, something in its biological imagination refused to settle for a wintry end. It rejected the “period” and chose instead to grow steadily to a current height of three feet. A ninth grader I know well was diagnosed a few years ago with a rare bone disease, and was told he might never play contact sports again – period. Something within his soul, however, rejected the sentence of that “period,” and informed me just the other day that he is looking forward to his first downhill race this winter.

How many young people have wound up addicted, violent, depressed or homeless because a parent or an adult placed a period after their names, instead of a comma? Has anyone ever told you you weren’t worthy, beautiful, or talented? If so, God has taken that period, brushed a little tail onto in, and gleefully promised that much more is yet to come forth from your amazing life. All things are possible with God because God alone has the last word, and if we listen....is indeed still speaking!

Running in Circles

2009-10-08T22:09:00.000-04:00

I believe it was Mark Nepo who told a story about walking through a field one day and noticing at a distance a man walking his two dogs. The dogs seemed to be excited by the cool fall air, and were both running excitedly: one in a straight line, and the other in circles. The dog running in circles oddly kept doing just that: running in circles as he kept up with his master. Struck by this unique behavior, he approached the man and inquired as to why the dog would behave in this way. The man simply said that as a puppy, the dog had never ventured outside of a crate, and that even when liberated from his confines into the great outdoors, the dog had never learned any other way to run.

Earlier this week someone I admire referred to his faith as a tether - something which, through the course of his life, kept him from drifting too far off the track or too far into the storms of life. We all need the tether of faith - without it we can lose our way along the path or flounder adrift at sea. And yet, as the story of Jesus and the man who was unable to relinquish his possessions illustrates, it is all too easy to tether our faith to the wrong anchor and wind up running through life in constricting circles. When I tether my faith to any of the idols that give me comfort - possessions, security or self-image - I wind up chasing my tail. It is only in those moments when I have the courage to tether myself to the God of adventure, the One who calls me to "lose my life in order to find it," that I feel like my running has both joy and purpose.

Make Haste Slowly

2009-09-27T21:02:00.000-04:00

Yes, these are my sandaled feet on the threshold of the outdoor Labyrinth at the Mandala Center on a beautiful, moderately chilly day in New Mexico over a year ago. I'd walked Labyrinths many times before, but the walk this day, I realized, could take place without the pressure of any meetings or deadlines whatsoever. And with that realization came an idea: why not walk each circuit by taking a mental journey through each year in my life? I decided I would pace myself according to the flow of memories, making my way around the next turn only when I had remembered everything I could from that year. The year I was born, 1963, went by rather quickly: other than recollections of some old sepia prints of our home, what I remembered was what was going on in the wider world: the assassination of JFK, Viet Nam, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and lest we forget, the introduction of the VW Bus.

Yet as year led to year and circuit to circuit, I had to slow down my pace. The more I remembered, the more slowly I walked. The more slowly I walked, the more I remembered. And I remembered things, and people, I'd long since forgotten. By the time I'd completed the walk, over an hour had gone by utterly lost in contemplation and I was deeply moved by the recognition that my life, like most, is an ever-widening web of grace-filled connections, relationships and encounters, a work forever in progress.

I look at this photo now and then as a reminder that if I truly want to go deeper in anything: relationship, thought, prayer or understanding...I need pull back on the reins and slow down my own galloping life. It's a logical axiom: the slower I go, the deeper I go. Of course, who has the luxury of slowing down much these days? Still, even the brief moments are of great value to the soul.

There is a saying woodburned into a plaque at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico: Festina Lente. Or, in English: Make Haste Slowly - a little bit of monastic humor that somehow makes more sense to me with each year that passes. If life is, in fact, more like a series of circles around a sacred center than a linear vector, what's the real advantage of all this rushing anyway? If our paths all lead to the same center anyway, why sprint to get there? Why not savor the journey?

Hardwired for God

2009-09-21T10:41:00.000-04:00

Much of the wisdom entrusted to me during seminary has leaked slowly out of my bucket of memories, but these words still linger: "we are hardwired for God." This saying rings true for me. I am convinced that we are born, to varying degrees, with the necessary receptors for the divine. I remember as a young boy having trouble inhaling when I looked up at the stars and wondered with the psalmist, "who are we that Thou art mindful of us?" I remember my youngest brother, also at a very young age, contemplating the mystery of life and death, and declaring to the family, "I think when someone dies, God gets stronger." Surely the conditioning of language gives us new words with which to describe our experiences, but the experiences are there from an early age. God is not something we "study:" God is a power we experience. God is someone we just...know. The trick with us and God is that we grow up and "put away childish things," and with them, our fundamental ways of knowing and experiencing.

Every year I have my Confirmation Class respond to this question: "Describe a God you could really believe in." What never ceases to amaze me is that once they're given permission to forget about responding with the "correct answers" they think I'm expecting of them, I find words spilling forth from them that describe the very God I have come to know. A God described by words like, "love," "fair," "hopeful," "strong in unusual ways we can't explain," "forgiving," "challenging."

Faith is about what we know in our bones...or knew once upon a time, and have since lost hold of. Our faith precedes the outward forms of religion, the articulations of formal beliefs and statements of faith. Before we are confirmed, before we have read all the latest authors, we experience the divine without having to interpret. God is not in our heads, but in our hearts, in our hands, and in all the world around us.

U2's lead singer, Bono, once said that religion is "what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building." (Paraphrased from Ashley Kahn's "A Love Supreme.") Religion is our collective attempt to hold onto what we know so that it won't slip away. If only we could trust what children know....that God simply is, and if we open our hands, hearts and mind, God is still here. And always will be.

First, Emptiness

2009-09-14T21:27:00.000-04:00

There is a fable about a man who sought the wisdom of a guru who lived in a simple hut atop a mountain. The man was filled with a desire to attain spiritual enlightenment, and had spent many years preparing himself for the day when he would meet the wise man atop the mountain. Finally, his head filled with wisdom and his heart full of expectation, he made the dangerous ascent and found himself at the ascetic's door, whereby he knocked. The old man welcomed him in and invited him to tea. Beside himself with excitement, the visitor felt compelled to speak excitedly and without pause about all that he had learned, convinced that his wisdom would impress the guru. The old man said nothing while the younger man talked and talked, he simply waited for the tea to steep as he listened. The two sat down, the younger man still talking. The guru filled his own cup first. Then, slowly, still listening to the younger man, he reached across the table and slowly began to fill his tea cup, only he did not stop pouring: he kept pouring until the tea was generously overflowing the cup and the saucer and was forming a pool on the table, at which point the young man exclaimed, "What are you doing?!!" The wise man looked at him and said, you are much like this cup of tea...your head is so overflowing with your own thoughts that there is room for nothing new to enter. You must descend the mountain, return home and forget all that you have learned. When your mind is again uncluttered like that of a child's, you may return. Only then will you be ready to receive wisdom.

We need emptiness. More than we know. Emptiness is the precondition of receptivity. When I travel to the New Mexican desert and find myself standing in the midst of windswept mesas and mountains without another soul for miles around, an odd thing happens: I feel strangely filled. The cacophony of my digitized life turns to inner quiet and eventually to renewed alertness. I feel life with freshness. I am fully present to everything within and without. I rediscover the appetite for God that I had almost lost. I am again like a chalice longing to be filled with holy wine, or like a dry sea sponge anticipating the creeping tide, and with it, a joyful, original saturation.

Paul wrote that Jesus "emptied himself," taking the form of a slave and humbling himself. The work for "emptied" is kenosis: a pouring out. We know that he poured himself out for our sake. I wonder, though, if he did so also for himself. To empty ourselves is to make room for the only thing - the only One - who can truly fill us.