Mission Tripping

Six years ago one of my kids (then age 12) went on an all-youth mission trip with Strawbridge United Methodist Church.  She spent the week cleaning debris out of yards and repairing and painting houses.  It changed her life.

It’s not that any of the clean up work generalized to her personal life, because the floor of her bedroom remains covered in debris and her bathroom is an ecological disaster area.  What changed was her understanding of what it means to be a Christian, and how Christianity is inseparable from a life of service.

A few years ago I decided to tag along as an adult leader, although I’m abviously using the term “adult” loosely.  This year we took 232 people (mostly 12-18) to Gonzales, Texas for a week of building and fixing and painting.  The kids are split up into teams and lots of great mentoring goes on between the older kids and the younger kids.  This year my group replaced rotted wood and siding, built a porch, and painted for a woman who worked as a janitor and was raising her four year old grandson.  Her daughter (the boy’s mom) had been killed in an automobile accident two years ago.  We fell in love with the rediculously cute four year old and his wonderful grandma, and I think the feeling was mutual.

It was a week of miracles.  Let’s call them miracles of comission and miracles of omission, because sometimes miracles occur in what doesn’t happen.   It’s simply unreasonable to have nearly 200 adolescents using power tools (some of these kids are maybe a whopping 70 pounds) and return them to their parents intact.  Blisters and splinters, sure, but no spurting wounds or loss of digits.  Actually, in the last few years that I have been doing this we have had two significant injuries, and both occured during play time.  The first happened while we were jumping off a cliff into a river.  A young lady for whom co-ordination was obviously a struggle was about to jump, and I was excited about her growing confidence in her physical abilities.  My adult supervision consisted of saying “Good for you!  Make sure and jump out far enough like everyone else did!”

Yeah, didn’t happen.  Splat.  Broken ankle.

Last year’s major injury was the result of a game of Human Jenga.  The high school guys stack air mattresses to the ceiling, a guy gets on top, and the others take turns running into the stack and knocking out the mattresses one by one.  Get it?  Human Jenga.  Anyway, the guy on top usually goes flying and lands on the mattresses on the floor.  My ability to engage in any sort of adult supervision is still suspect, as I was standing there laughing hysterically as our Human Jenga victim his the floor with his head and required multiple stiches.

Thus endeth Human Jenga.

If you want to watch some great videos of us working (ahem) check out Strawbridge Youth on Youtube.  Their energy is contagious, and our high powered worship was great.  This is a church full of wonderful people with wonderful gifts.  This same church struggles with worship attendance every Sunday. Hello?  Is anybody out there in the Methodism paying attention?

One of the classes that I took at seminary was titled “Evil, Suffering, and Death.”  I took it because, hey, who could resist a title like that?  Anyway, I thought most of the class was total crap because I concluded long ago that we just don’t get to know why horrible stuff happens.  The only thing that made sense to me in that class is when the Professor said “Testify to love, and insist on hope.”  When people ask me questions about why God allows awful things to happen, the most legitimate answer that I can give is simply “I don’t know.”  I can say that I believe that God works in the midst of all situations for good.  I know that God takes the very worst stuff and uses it to change lives.   

My favorite part of every Strawbridge mission trip is the Bunny Stories and the man who tells them.  He always stays with the 6th grade boys at night, which is probably our toughest gig.  His name is Sam.  Sam tragically lost his 15 year old daughter this year.  She went on mission trip every year, and her absence was palpable.  Sam told his bunny stories and he loved on the kids and comforted them and he was fun and funny like always.  He is a living example of the very best part of Christian life; our ability to see the light of Christ shining though the darkness.  He helped change lives by testifying to love, and insisting on hope.

May we all learn to do the same. 

Lenten Study #5 Resurrection

Ed is dying from AIDS related wasting.  If you picture in your mind those grisly photographs of people who have starved to death in other parts of the world, you get the idea.  There isn’t much left of his body.  Ed is bedridden, but he likes to be wheeled out on to the porch at Omega Hospice when the sun is shining.  That’s where I first got to visit with him.  Ed loves the warmth of the sun, and as we talked I watched as all sorts of sunlight and shadows played across his skeletal face.

His daughter comes to visit Ed.  She is corageous and honest and loving and all of those things that I wish all of our hospice relatives were.  She had taken a picture of Ed as he sat in the sun outside, his face turned up toward the sun.  She showed me the picture and said, “Look how the light shines on his face.  It seems like he is looking right up at God.  Doesn’t he look beautiful?”

Yes, he looks beautiful.

“Dad and I have already agreed that this is the picture that we are going to use for the obituary, right Dad?”  Ed smiled and managed a weak nod in agreement.  She held his hand and said, “Dad, this is your going home picture.”

We are an Easter People.  We live the resurrection, with all of its love and hope, over and over again.

Other faith traditions have prophets or heroes that die as a revered religious figure – with all of the appropriate ceremony and hoopala.  The One who began our tradition died a painful and humiliating death without fanfare or honor.  If that sort of death was the final word, Jesus should have completely dissapeared in collective memory.  But something completely different happened.  Paul does a valient job of attempting to explain this extraordinary collective experience and how his life had been changed by the incarnation, life, and resurrection of Christ.  It is a change that defies reason, a change that has created and continues to create a new life for Paul.

There is a lot of wonderful variation in the resurrection narratives in the Gospels.  I love that about this story; the many ways that Christ appears to all sorts of people.  Jesus lives, and hope is rediscovered.  This is the glorious message of Easter, one that has defied our attempts to standardize and make it rational and reasonable.  I once had a professor at Perkins who said that if the dead bones of Jesus were ever found here on earth, he would no longer be a Christian, as either the resurrection or the ascension would have been proven false.  I had another professor who said that the idea of Jesus coming back from the dead was absurd, because “dead bodies don’t become alive again.”  Sadly, we often seem to be people of dogma instead of people of faith, failing to trust that with God anything and everything is possible.

A few years ago I lost a very dear friend to breast cancer.  As the end drew closer, she expressed over and over again that she was going home.  She knew that the lousy stuff of this life never has the last word, and that she had experienced the Truth of the Resurrection.  She returned to the One who gave her life, the One who loves her the very most.

We live with the mystery of life overcoming death.  We live and breathe and rest in hope.  We know that the resurrection is never limited to one moment in time, one life changing event, but that it occurs over and over again in a myriad of forms and times and places.  God comes to us and makes all things new.  We are an Easter People who know that the story continues, because “neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come, nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”      

Read Matthew 28

Mark 16

Luke 24

John 20 and 21

Might the diversity of the canon be the cannonization of diversity?

How do you live the resurrection? 

Bleeding

I listened to an Evanescence CD all the way to church this morning.  I love their music.  The band mixes driving rock and symphonic barkgrounds and Amy Lee’s amazing vocals with haunting lyrics.  My kids call it “Emo” music, but it’s a lot like the stuff I grew up with in the 70’s, only more polished.  

The song that is stuck in my head right now is called “Tourniquet,”  and it has the following lyrics:
Am I too lost to be saved?

 Am I too lost?

My God. My tourniquet

Return me to salvation

My God. My tourniquet

Return me to salvation

One of the sweet congregants here at Bering recently lent me a book titled “Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America” by Mel White.  White writes with clarity and tenderness about his struggle to reconcile his God-given sexual orientation with Christian teaching.  He endures a series of therapies and techniques designed to “cure” him of his homosexuality, even submitting to electric shock treatments as a desperate attempt to rid himself of his sexual orientation.  His long battle with self-loathing is heartbreaking.

I have discovered that it’s not hard to find “cutters” within the GLBT community.  Mel White writes of a young man who emasculated himself and others who repeatedly cut their own genitals to try to “cure” their homosexuality.

When I look at the Gospels, it seems that every interaction Jesus has with someone who is marginalized or even despised by the powerful and those in authority was designed to stop the bleeding a bit.  Each time Christ speaks, He comforts those who believe themselves to be unlovable.  But as I look around on the Internet today, I see that the Confessing Movement of the United Methodist Church is currently taking great pains to explain that homosexuality is not the issue divinding the Methodist Church because “That would be like saying that the primary issue facing a person with a staff infection is his fever.”  Homosexuality is merely a symptom of the problems that plague the church.  A symptom to be eradicated.

I have moments when I wonder if the Methodist Church is too lost to be saved.  I wonder why I am part of a denomination that blatantly targets gays and lesbians with words in its “official” book.  We tell them that their self-loathing is appropriate because they are “incompatible with Christian teaching.”  Good job, you’re on track, please continue despising yourselves.  It feels just a bit hopeless sometimes.

So, today I really love the idea of God as tourniquet, a presence to stop the bleeding.  When the annual conference and the book of discipline and the confessing movement cut away at the people I love, may we find ways to bind their wounds.  May God our tourniquet stop the bleeding and return us to life.          

Lenten Study #4 Good Friday

Edna had arrived without any teeth.  That’s the first thing that I noticed about our new patient at Bering Omega Hospice.  For many years,  Edna’s known address had been “under the bridge at St. John’s.”  St. John’s Methodist Church feeds homeless people, so I suppose that had been a strategic location for Edna.  We don’t know much about Edna’s life under the bridge, but we do know that at some point someone had noticed that she wasn’t moving around much anymore. She was taken to the hospital, and then she was referred directly to Bering Omega Hospice, which provides end of life care for AIDS patients. 

In addition to having AIDS, Edna had a rare form of TB, Hepatitis C, and Herpes, just to name a few.  Her body was riddled with untreated disease.  Edna looked like she was about eighty years old.  What was visibly left of her was a tiny shrunken body, a face wrinkled and leathered by the sun and the wind, and a lipless mouth curled around her gums.  Edna was forty-three years old.

The official Bering Support Network Services Report that I fill out says that Edna is a white female who is HIV positive and that I had visited her three times.  What it won’t say is the following:

Edna had no family.  She had been living alone under a bridge for many, many years.  Edna’s three weeks at our hospice were likely the first time that she had been bathed, fed consistently, or received medical care in many, many years.  She died and received a pauper’s burial from Harris County.  Edna had suffered in ways many of us cannot even imagine. 

Suffering is an uncomfortable topic for many of us.  For increasing numbers of Christians the Cross has become a source of tremendous embarrasment.  On Good Friday last year, I attended a service at a non-denominational Christian church for a class assignment.  There was no mention of crucifixion or even that Jesus had died.  As a matter of fact, we were wished a cheery “Happy Easter!” at the end of our Good Friday service.  I left the service utterly unclear on why we were there.  It got worse.  On Easter Sunday there was a giant Easter Bunny greeting us at the door of the church.  The costume was professional.  I think that the mall Easter Bunny had interrupted his children’s photo routine for a gig at a church.  I tried to interview the Bunny for my paper, but there was some sort of Bunny Wrangler/Escort who told me that the Bunny was not allowed to talk to me, and she seemed pretty cranky about it.  It was the closest I have ever come to a Mike Wallace moment. 

Last week both of our services here at Bering had the following line: “Our certainties make us brittle.”  I love that statement.  I believe that the heavily westernized, legalistic version of our atonment theology, that of an angry Father demanding the death of a Son for the punishment of sin, has made us brittle, and that we aren’t breaking in a good way.

Tracing the development of a crime and punishment atonement theology is much too big for the scope of this writing.  Suffice it to say that over the years we have become slaves to logic and reason, instead of stewards of the mystery of God.  The current backlash both within and outside the Christian Church has been substantial, and has managed to take us on a brand new path to nowhere.  In his book titled “Jesus for the Non-Religious” John Shelby Spong backpeadals off a cliff while explaining why the Cross just doesn’t work for us anymore:

“It’s the language of sacrifice, it’s abusive, punishing picture of God and its definition of human life as fallen, sinful, and broken, capable of only begging for mercy – has become bankrupt and now must be dismantled.”

Spong urges us to a life of pretense, a life that ignores our responsibility for the Edna’s under a bridge.  Who else but a fallen and broken people living in a fallen and broken world could allow this to happen?  In many ways, I am an agent of suffering. Good Friday calls me to coherence, calls me to lift up my eyes to the suffering of the Innocent on the Cross, as well as the suffering of innocents around the world.

The Christian word “salvation” implies two things: 1) That we are in some way in over our heads, in some way in need of assistance, and 2) That we need to be rescued or made well.  We all need to be saved, and we tend to operate best when we admit it.  I need the Cross.  I need to be reminded, over and over, that only God can save me, and that my efforts to be self-sustaining are doomed to failure.

Spong says that the story of the Cross should be deleted from Christianity because “constant gratitude, which the story of the Cross seems to encourage, creates only weakness, childishness, and dependency.”  How misguided.  I AM weak and dependent.  To pretend otherwise it to embrace our cultural illusions of self-sufficiency and deny our culpability in suffering.  And for that, I stand in need of the mercy of God.

Read:  Mark 14: 43-51

             Mark 15: 21-47

Optional:  Take a look at Irenaeus and recapitulation, John Calvin and the “blessed exchange,” Augustine and trapping the devil though bait and switch, Anselm and Christ paying our debt, Peter Abelard and Christ’s suffering as inspiration to a better life, and contemporary theologians Robert W. Jenson and Leanne Van Dyk. 

Lenten Study #3: Maundy Thursday

We went to a middle school track meet the other night; an event that I consider the secular equivalent of a visit to Limbo.  It involves a lot of purgatorial waiting around for something to happen, and there is very little information about when you can leave.  It was a four hour meet, and our kid ran the 200 meter dash.  It took him 27 seconds.  That gave us a good three hours and 59 minutes to work up some major enthusiasm.  We cheered like maniacs, because it’s all about pacing oneself.  It’s all about getting ready for the big show.

“Maundy Thursday” is (I think) one of the odder phrases of the Lenten season.  I suppose that “Maundy Monday” might have a better ring to it, but in the Christian Lenten season, timing is of the essence.  The word “Maundy” comes from the Latin for command (mandatum) and is usually tied to the new command given by Jesus at the Last Supper.  Two of the more commonly recognized ceremonies of the Christian Church are associated with Maundy Thursday: 1) the Eucharist, or communion, and 2) foot washing.  Despite the rather maudlin sound of a word like “Maundy,” this word commemorates ceremonies that are joyful.  The “other” ceremony established and celebrated on this day is that of foot washing.  The Latin word for the washing of the feet is pedilavium, and the moment I think it’s my favorite word.

Offering a basin of water for foot washing was a common sign of hospitality in biblical times.  People walked from place to place, the dirt roads were dusty, and their feet probably got filthy in their sandals.  The Maudy-Thursday story of Jesus’ washing the disciples feet is radically different; it is a ceremony, an act of humility and love that exceeds that of mere hospitality.

I have actually developed a deeper appreciation for ceremony since I have been here at Bering Memorial.  This is a congregation that LOVES ceremony.  We don’t do foot washing at each service, but we do practice pre-Eucharistic hand washing. It’s obviously not at all about pastoral sanitation, as there is no soap or other anti-bacterial product involved.  It’s about the ceremony.  As a matter of fact, if I were ever going to find a Methodist church that practiced capitalavium,  or the washing of the head, this would be it.  Capitalavium used to take place on Palm Sunday.   I suppose it would be a logistical nightmare, but I can just see us lined up for shampoos at the altar, and then waving each other’s hair dry with palm fronds.

We don’t practice the washing of each other’s feet at our house, but we do practice ceremonial toenail painting.  About seven years ago, the oldest kids in our family decided that my toenails were in need of assistance.  They both had huge containers of multiple colors of toenail polish, and they went to work.  I offered my toebula rosa (I’m quite pleased with myself right now) as a canvas.  I was instructed not to look until the toenail renovation was completed.

This tradition has continued for the last seven years, and the toenail painters are now nineteen and seventeen.  The nineteen year old does intricate designs with toothpicks.  During the Christmas season I was sporting some fine looking toe holly.  If she ever decides to dump her engineering studies, she can get a job drawing on a grain of rice.

I’ve never paid a lot of close attention to toe artwork because I am fairly tall and my toes are a long way off.  I’m not getting any younger, so I can’t see them particularly well, and actually touching them during any sort of exercise is pretty much out of the question.  What I have enjoyed the most is the  ceremony of it all, the wonder of watching the artists at work. 

Most of us have feet that are functional, but not particularly attractive.  When I read, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” I wonder how anyone’s feet can be considered beautiful.  It is a confirmation of the richness of our potential, the ability that Christ has to see in us what we may be unable to see in ourselves.  How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.

May we find wonder and richness in all of the small ceremonies of our lives.  May we find holiness in giving our children baths, reading them books, and waiting at track meets.  May we learn to look at each other with the eyes of Christ, eyes that see the beauty and potential in feet – even toenails.

Read: John 13:1-17

Isaiah 52: 7-12

Romans 10: 14-17

What ceremonies of the Christian Church are most meaningful to you?  Why?

What ceremonies of your life have meaning for you?

Lenten Study #2: Self-discipline

I am trying to muster the self-discipline to write about self-discipline.  This Lenten study is titled “The Power of Words” and I must say that the words “self-discipline” have very little appeal for me at the moment.  They tend to conjure up concrete images of self-denial; of refraining from eating that second piece of cheesecake or having a slice of pizza without a beer.  Its intimidation factor ranks right up there with “Paschal Triduum” and “Maundy Thursday” and calling the day we commemorate Jesus’ death “Good Friday.”  That’s an optimistic title if there ever was one, and pretty much tips off our big picture theology.  Now THAT will be more fun to write about.  

My eighth grade son got a “B” on a test the other day.  He was not happy.  He is a straight “A” student,  and you would have thought that Job had been unreasonably nailed by God all over again.  He promptly announced that “I need a sabbatical.  I just need three or four weeks so I can regroup.”  I said that I was fairly confident that a sabbatical was not an option offered by his middle school, and that he would have to “regroup” on his own time.  Besides, suffering through yet another week of school was a good thing, because suffering builds character.

We have said that to our kids a lot over the years.  They have exercised their considerable verbal skills to protest any perceived unfairness, and we tell them that suffering builds character.  A couple of them have managed (in earlier years) to sustain a magnificent oration about the injustice of homework for two hours at a stretch.  A remarkable accomplishment for any grade school aged child, but not one that you tend to share with the grandparents.  They were planted at the kitchen table with books in front of them (no wandering off allowed) but their gift for gab left them seemingly unable to accomplish anything until all of their FEELINGS about homework in general were fully shared.  It didn’t matter if they had an audience.  When they finally completed their exhausting diatribe, they would actually do their homework, which would take about half an hour.

Of course, the character trait that we are really talking about building here is self-discipline.  This has nothing to do with suffering.  If I had done their homework for them or said that homework in grade school was unreasonable they might still think that homework constituted suffering.  Instead, what they discovered, on their own time and in their own way, is that musterinig the self-discipline to accomplish what initially seems to be unpleasant is absolutely necessary.  For years now we can just trust them to come home and get their homework done, no questions asked (and no complainst heard.)

The concept of self-discipline as the denial of self exists in many religious traditions.  Often, as in Hinduism and to some extend Buddhism, the practice of self-discipline creates detachment from the finite self, detachment from the things of this world.  I would argue that Christianity differs from some of those traditions in that the ultimate goal of self-discipline is to enhance attachment what really matters, not simply to deny the self.

About five years ago I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery.  The monks there live a life of Lent, I think; always in complete self-discipline and holy expectation.  Their austere accomodations are not testament to their own self-denial, rather they emphasize the complete unimportance of worldly “stuff” and the ultimate importance of relationship.  Their vow of celibacy is not about “denying the flesh” as much as it is about making sure that they are equally available to everyone, without any strings attached.  I joined them in worship five times a day, and I joined them in their work throughout the day.  What I discovered is that they are the same thing.  Work becomes worship.  Benedict calls it obedience; this willingness to listen to the plan that God has for our life.  To recognize that the flowers and vegetables that you grow are gifts from God, to look at the intricacies of a leaf and marvel at the grandness of it all, to wonder at the face of a baby, to see God in the eyes of another; that’s the self-discipline of connection, and if your practice it enough, it begins to become automatic.  We begin to recognize that God is everywhere, all around us, and we begin to respond.  We begin to develop a holy attitude toward all of creation.  We connect, and we begin to see where and how God has created meaning for our life.  

Father Theodore taught me centering prayer while I was at the monastery.  At first, the holding completely still part was hard for me.  It got better, and now i find the practice sustaining.  It began as the self-discipline of centering prayer, but now it is simply connectional.  I realized that this sort of prayer wasn’t about finding God, but about finally being quiet enough so that God could get my attention.

I like what Joan Chittister has to say about all of this:

The ancients say that once upone a time a disciple asked the elder, “Holy One, is there anything that I can do to make myself enlightened?”

And the Holy One answered, “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”

“Then of what use” the surprised disciple asked “are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”

“To be sure,” the elder said, “that you are not asleep when the sun begins to arise.”

That’s self-discipline.

Scripture to check out:

Proverbs 4:23-26

Matthew 25:13

Matthew 26: 40-41

 Luke 12: 35-40

1st Peter 1: 16-17

Questions:

How has American culture embraced or failed to embrace the concept of self-discipline?  How important is self-discipline to Christianity?  Has it been overemphasized?  Underemphasized?  Do you agree that the goal of self-discipline is connecdtion?  If so, what types of behaviors might be considered both self-discipline and connective?

Lenten Study #1: Penitence

When I was a kid, I used to marvel at the Catholic kids when they arrived at school on Ash Wednesday.  Little sooty crosses were on their foreheads, often smudged into some other unrecognizable shape or simply joining forces with the other dirt that tends to cling to kids.  I was intrigued, but also thankful that I had been spared this sort of marking.

The other kids informed me that the smudges were “ashes for Lent.”  This only confused me a bit more, as the only ashes that I saw routinely were the ones in the bottom of the burn barrel in our backyard.  It was my job to haul the trash out of our house every few days and burn it in the burn barrel.  Cardboard cereal boxes, used paper towels, newspapers – you name it – all of it went up in flames.  For a budding nine or ten year old pyromaniac, this was sheer bliss.

Les tells me that our ashes for Ash Wednesday services here at Bering come from a company called SACCO.  You can order Ash Wednesday ashes on-line.  The place guarantees that their ashes are made from burning palm leaves, although I suppose that they could slip the occasional cereal box in there and no one would be the wiser. 

Ashes were a sign of mourning during biblical times.  Back then, if one of your loved ones died you threw ashes on yourself and maybe rolled around in the dirt for good measure.  It would have been considered quite gauche to show up at a funeral looking all neat and tidy.  So why do we use ashes on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, instead of Good Friday?

We begin Lent by recognizing the need to mourn our losses.  This is decidedly anti-American, where we celebrate our victories whole-heartedly and try desperately to ignore our failures.  We go so far as to tell each other to suck it up a bit.  Don’t dwell on losing.  We are separated into winners and losers; those who have learned to play the game well and those who have somehow fallen short.

The thing is, acknowledging the fact that we tend to screw up, that we do the wrong thing or fail to do the right thing, frees us in extraordinary ways.  To say that we are sinners, to throw ourselves upon the good will and mercy of God, is to acknowledge that we aren’t God, and what a relief that is.  All of the weirdness of fruit-eating naked people and talking snakes aside, the story of the Garden of Eden has remarkable insight into human nature.  We are screw-ups.  It ultimately doesn’t matter if Augustine says that we are sinful at conception (which is total B.S., in my opinion) or if social gospel theologians say that we are corrupted by the world or if other theologians say that we can avoid sin if we just tried a little harder.  We sin.  It is what it is.  The challenge is to examine ourselves and our actions with relentless honesty.  It’s not particularly pleasant.  What we inevitably discover is that we act in our own self-interest much of the time.  Our egos dictate our path.  God has taken a back seat, and so have others. 

As we examine our own actions and begin to fully realize their impact, we are filled with regrets.  Our failures are our losses, and we mourn them.

Psalm 51:6-17 has a great take on this.

Also take a look at Matthew 9: 12-13

Luke 18:10-14

1st John 1:9

I was visiting with a young man the other day who is very sick.  I asked him if he would like to pray, and he said yes.  I began praying for healing in the biggest and broadest sense, for courage and peace for the journey ahead, and he stopped me in the middle of the prayer.  I have never had that happen before.  The guy stopped me right in the middle of the prayer.  He said, “My Mom always told me to ask for forgiveness before I pray.” 

Wow.  This blew me away.

I realized how easily and often i skip over that messy part of prayer.  I can mumble the “forgive our trespasses” line with everybody else, but when it comes to personal prayer I sortr of skim over that “I have sinned, please forgive me” part.  I figure when God hears from me that God already knows that I am a total screw-up.  I forget the importance of saying and knowing it myself.  Once I empty myself in this way, once I adopt an attitude of humility, once I remove this man-made egotistic barrier between myself and God, I can begin to grow spiritually.  That’s why we prepare ourselves in this way on Ash Wednesday.  That’s why we do penitence.

A few questions to discuss:

How do you define sin?

Does the story of Adam and Eve help you with the concept of sin?  Has it created problems with your construct of sin?

How do societal constructs of sin and Christian constructs of sin differ?

Is it important to FEEL forgiven?

What else might the ashes symbolize?  What does Ash Wednesday mean to you?

Ms. Johnnie

Ms. Johnnie (not her real name) stopped by today.  I wasn’t sure quite what to expect (you never do with Ms. Johnnie) but she wasn’t angry or agitated and seemed to be pretty calm.  Ms. Johnnie knows that we cannot hand out money at Bering, so she doesn’t ask anymore.  She brought her two traveling companions into my office this morning:  A Bible and a Super Woman comic book.  She carries each of them tucked up under her arm, and as soon as she sits down in my office she consults both of them for sacred advice. 

The more I think about it, the more I like that combination.

Ms. Johnnie wanted to read me some passages from Isaiah and the Psalms about fortresses and safe places. They were already highlighted.  She was on the verge of being kicked out of yet another apartment for failing to pay rent.  Her Social Security would arrive in only two more days, so she was hoping that we might pray that her landlord and the sheriff’s office might be impeded in some way from tossing her stuff onto the curb.

The Psalmists were pretty good at asking God to kill their enemies, or at least maim them substantially. A good maiming was bound to teach their persecutors an important lesson.  I suspect that some of Ms. Johnnie’s enemies are the things that might plague many of us; the things that dwell in us, not outside of us.  In any event, we refrained from praying that her landlord might break a hip.  Instead, we prayed for acceptance and peace and shelter and safety.    

Ms. Jonnie also read a brief excerpt from the Super Woman comic book. I sat beside her as she showed me the illustrations and said that it would be dangerous for Super Woman to not remember that she has super powers and that she is different.  Ms. Johnnie said that Super Woman always has to be very careful about understanding that she is not like everybody else.

Ms. Johnnie is transgendered.

So, this Super Woman comic book has become, in this moment, a sacred text side by side with the bible.  Ms. Johnnie is not alone, and those are words of comfort.

A Higher Rock

from a sermon on January 20, 2008 

As a parent, one of the hardest things that we have to do in life is to begin to learn to let our kids go.  When a new baby gets here, our job as a mom or a dad is to love that baby and take care of it and protect it.  You know, relatively speaking, that’s easy stuff.  I have been a parent long enough now to know that it is much more difficult to let them go.  To give them wings to fly when you want to keep them grounded in your arms. 

We have watched one of our kids head off to college, and we have another one who will be leaving us in August.  It seems like it was just yesterday when I was walking them, hand in hand, to kindergarten.  This is tough stuff, this letting go.   

I brought one of my favorite paintings today.   This one was done by my Aunt Jean.  I adored my Aunt Jean, and I am thrilled to have it.  Jean, (or Jeano, as we used to call her) had been stricken by rheumatic fever when she was eight years old.  An active child who enjoyed gymnastics and dance, Jeano found herself with increasingly achy joints.  By the time she was in her late teens, a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis had completely changed her life.  She was able to walk a bit with her cane, but a wheelchair was her primary mode of transportation.  Her hands and feet were completely gnarled and distorted. She had difficulty getting up and down from a sitting position, so a stool like her red one painted here was essential.  At times her body was completely frozen by the severe inflammation in her joints, and she was bedridden.

She discovered that life is often a process of letting go.  She had to let go of gymnastics and dance.  She had to leave her studies at the University of Chicago.  You see, those were the days before handicapped access and wheelchair ramps.  She simply couldn’t get to her classes. She had to let go of her hopes for self-sufficiency and independence.  The barriers were numerous.  She often felt walled off from the rest of the world by her disability.  This picture, this self-portrait, illustrates the isolation, the loneliness, the distortions, and the patent unfairness of her life.

Today’s Psalm, (Psalm 40) paints a picture, doesn’t it?  It begins with “I waited patiently on the Lord.”  I would declare to you, my friends at Bering, that this is the biggest challenge of this Psalm.  To wait patiently.  I know that I don’t wait patiently often enough.  I get in the line at the grocery store and some goofball in front of me has 85 coupons that they are trying to cash in and all I’m trying to do is buy a lousy gallon of milk.  Does that sound familiar?  Or I sit in my car and squirm while waiting in traffic on 59. We struggle with waiting for the trite and mundane things in life.  How, then, do we wait patiently on God when the really difficult things happen?

Many Christians have written about the spiritual struggle of waiting for God.  They had gone through periods in their lives when God’s presence eluded them, when that peace that passes all understanding seemed unavailable.  St. John of the Cross wrote of his Dark Night of the Soul, an account of his long and painful spiritual journey of having felt the presence of God so powerfully, and then seemingly having lost that presence for so many years.  Recently, extensive attention has been given to the letters of Mother Teresa that speak to the ebb and flow of her spiritual experience.  She writes, “I am told God loves me – and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.  What tortures of loneliness.  I wonder how long my heart will suffer this?”   And yet, through all of these spiritual struggles, Teresa persevered and continued to do the extraordinary work that God had called her to.  She had no illusions of self-sufficiency.  She knew that all of her days were empowered by God.  She had no illusions of control.  God’s presence would be felt again on God’s time.  And, most importantly, she never lost the big picture.  Her worship and praise for the one who gave her life and empowered her service did not end.  She knew that she would eventually rest with the God that she had served so faithfully for so many years. She waited patiently on God.  

I recently headed over to Rothko chapel to attend a speech by war correspondent and writer Chris Hedges.  Some of the Bering Academy faithful were there as well.  His talk was provocatively titled “Why I Don’t Believe in Atheists.”  Hedges noted that atheists and Christian fundamentalists have much in common.  Both believe that they are capable of attaining a moral high ground.  Blind to their own inevitably sinful nature, both those who tout scientific reasoning and those who claim possession of moral absolutes fail to recognize human limitations.  To “know thyself” is to know that each of us has a dual nature.  We are inevitably broken, full of limitations and failures.  We simply cannot, through reason and science or through claims of biblical correctness, rescue ourselves by our own power.  To know that, to know that we cannot save ourselves, is to reject our illusions of self-sufficiency.  Instead, we wait upon God. 

I love the emotional honesty of the Psalms.  The Psalmist tells of waiting, and here is when waiting for God is incredibly hard.  When you are desperate.  When you are afraid.  When you are hurting.  When you are stuck in something that you don’t think you are ever going to be free of.  The Psalmist waits, though, and God comes.  See, you only are waiting when you know something or somebody is coming.  That’s waiting with confidence.  That’s knowing how our loving God will act.  Listen to the extraordinary imagery here, the way that the Psalmist paints a picture.  “God lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the miry bog.”  I’m picturing a great mixture of Texas gumbo, that heavy, heavy mud that sticks to you.  The kind of stuff that you step and in can’t pull your feet out of.  The muck of our lives; the loneliness, the separations, the rejection, the fear, and the desperation that threatens to pull us down and render us completely immobile.   We are stuck.  And the only way to get out is to let go of the idea that we can climb out on our own, and call on the One who lifts us up, the One who pulls us out of the mess and puts our feet on solid ground. 

The fact is, no matter how much we try, we can’t control the events of our lives. It takes humility to admit that.  We can’t stop some of the awful things that fly at us and hit us when we least expect it.  It’s like running through a field while a whole bunch of people are playing Frisbee.  You never know when you are going to get pegged in the back of the head.  We get nailed by stuff when we least expect it, and we learn that life is full of losses.  Life is full of Frisbees.  We get hit with a job loss, a loss of a relationship, the death of a loved one, the loss of plans and dreams, the loss of independence from AIDS and cancer.  The losses just keep piling up.  And we keep letting go.  And we wait patiently on the Lord. 

Every Wednesday morning I go to Omega House.  As most of you know, Omega House is our hospice affiliate for AIDS patients who are in the final stage of life.  I am blessed by the conversations that I get to have while I am there.  Often I find myself spending a lot of time trying to undo the damage done by Christians.  There is a horrible tendency deep within our faith tradition to depend upon human explanations for tragedy, illness, and loss.  Our limited understanding of the divine has led many Christians to wholeheartedly embrace a God who smites us.  Step out of line, and a good smiting is guaranteed.   These Christians may mean well, but their relentless judgementalism and their disconnection from grace makes them a destructive force of intolerance and cruelty. They are so busy trying to make God reasonable and controllable that they have forgotten that we all stand in need of God’s grace, and that God’s grace exists without regard to human boundaries.  

One of the ladies that I have been visiting with every week for the past five months will probably die soon from liver failure.  I adore her, and I will miss her when she is gone. Most of her family and most of her friends have rejected her and do not visit her at the hospice.  They believe that her illness was brought on by sinful behavior, and that God is punishing her with AIDS and Hepatitis C.  They have fallen into that illusion of control that we seem to want so desperately, some sort of explanation for life’s tragedies that somehow might lessen our chance of getting nailed by a Frisbee.  We have talked a lot about just where God is in all of this, and we pray a lot.  Sometimes the presence of God is so palpable that it fills the room, and we rejoice.  Sometimes it is not.  

What I can tell her, with absolute certainty, is that God loves her.  And I can say, without a doubt, that one of these days God will pick her up out of the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and she will be gently placed on a higher rock.  In the end, our loving God will give her a firm place to stand.    And so she waits patiently on the One who comes.     

I love the way this Psalm paints a picture.  There is power in imagery.  One of the best sermons that I have every experienced had no words.  I was in a bit of a pit, I felt horribly stuck, and I had attended a new church hoping for a word of hope, a rock to cling on to. The sermon for that day consisted of looking at the art that various congregation members had on display – both sculpture and painting.  And I was deeply touched by one of the paintings.  I seemed that I was finally able to see what I was unable to hear.  God used this painting to pull me out of the mud and the mire, and onto a high rock.  It contained images that said, I know where you have been, and I have been there too, and this I know to be true; there is redemption and healing and hope ahead of you.

Rev. Andy and Mark Albright are planning to establish a Heritage Hall here at Bering.  I’m excited about this.  Mark has been a steward of the rich history of this church, and the pictures need to be shown and the stories must be told over and over.  The thing is, folks, the history of this church is still being created.  The stories of healing and hope are still being formed.  Perhaps the act of painting or drawing or sculpting your story would be helpful for you.  I know that it was for my Aunt.  From the first day that I stepped foot in this church, I knew that we could have a visual arts ministry here at this church. Come and see who we, the people of Bering, are.  Come and see how God has worked within our lives.  Come and see.  We have long, beautiful hallways with bare walls with lighting set up to display pictures.  We have a community room with bare walls.  What if the walls of this church held the stories of your lives?  What if these walls testified to the redemptive power of God?  What if these walls drew people to this place who said; Look at this.  This picture cries out to me.  I am not alone.  

Over and over again, Jesus says in the Gospels, come and see.  Come and see who I am. He says that in our Gospel lesson today.  I know that this congregation welcomes and holds people who have experienced the very depths of the desolate pit.  People who have waited on God.  The walls of this church could become a Psalm, a testimony to the One we are waiting for, and the One who has come.   A testimony to hope and healing.   A testimony to the One who comes and places us on a high rock.  Come and see who we are. 

My Aunt Jeano died when she was only thirty-six years old.  I still miss her. We never stop missing the people we love. What I have left of her is the wonderful poetry that she has written, her stories, and (of course) the paintings that she left behind.  I take great comfort in this picture because of one fairly small element in the painting.  See that stream of water cascading over the barriers?  That is living water, a testimony to the One who comes.  The One who brings us living water.   There is hope and healing in this story.  I am blessed with memories of a woman who gracefully learned to let go, and who fully embraced the One who finally came to place her on a higher rock.   

And so, we wait patiently.  We know, thanks to a loving and gracious God, how it all <comes out in the end.  Patience comes from recognizing that we are not in control. Patience comes from losing our illusions of self-sufficiency.  We wait with the comfort and peace of knowing with absolute certainty how the story ends.  Through our frustration and our losses and our tears, we know that God will indeed pull us to a high rock.  We pray knowing that we will not be subject to the brokenness of our lives, because our future is with Christ.  God will lift us up.  God will carry us to a higher rock, in this world and the next. 

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