FMCSF Sermon Archive

Discernment: Future Trends

2012-01-29T09:30:00.000-08:00

MLK, Jr. Day

2012-01-15T09:30:00.000-08:00

Reflections

2012-01-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

Jean Janzen

2011-11-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

Covenant Signing Sunday

2011-11-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

MVS Sunday

2011-11-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

Levi and Steve Yoder

2011-10-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

Ken Nafziger

2011-10-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

35th Anniversary Service

2011-10-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

Sabbatical

2009-06-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

Luke 5:12-16, Exodus 20:8-11

If you’ve been following the news lately, you know that we’ve begun a national conversation about our health care crisis and how to solve it. I heard Obama, in a recent speech, succinctly sum up part of what the problem is: While we spend more money on health care than any other country, we are not the healthiest by any measure. At least part of the problem is that those who actually have health insurance are getting too much of a good things – too many tests, too many therapies, too many drugs. And the evidence has shown that more is often not better – the more tests, the more drugs given to patients, the worse their health outcomes and the unhappier they become.

This was in the back of my mind when I read a story recently about a doctor in a book called Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives, by Wayne Muller, a local author. “Charles,” says Muller, “is a gifted, thoughtful physician. One day…” (5)

Isn’t that fascinating, I thought? Perhaps part of the reason for the health care crisis, the reason for our soaring health-care costs, is because we are not allowing our healers the space and time and rest they need to actually heal us. Busy, tired, distracted, our doctors and health-care professionals are relying on machines to give them the information that their intuition can supply when they have the space in which to listen, to be present. If that isn’t a plea for the importance of Sabbath in our lives, I don’t know what is.

In the Jewish tradition, which is also our own, of course, Moses goes up, alone, onto a high mountain to be given by Creator God the fundamental moral laws that should govern our existence together. Christians have come to call these laws the Ten Commandments, and they include all the things you hope a wise God would have in such a list: don’t kill each other, don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, don’t lie. Most of these things we learned in kindergarten, right? But then, there’s this one (Exodus 20:8-11)

[8] "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. [9] Six days you shall labor and
do all your work, [10] but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On
it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your
manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. [11]
For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that
is in them, but God rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the
Sabbath day and made it holy.”

Right up there with not murdering each other or stealing, is: “Take a rest.” Take a rest. We learned that in kindergarten, too, didn’t we? Basically, God is saying, “Even I needed to rest after my labors of creating the planet. So, really, you need to do it to. In fact, I am commanding that you do it.” Perhaps our wise God knew we needed “take a rest” to be a clear-cut commandment or otherwise we wouldn’t do it.

Why is resting of such godly importance? Why would it merit its own commandment? There’s only 10 of them. Why give so much air time to this one? In fact, why do most of the world’s spiritual traditions include something like ‘take a rest’ in their own list of ethical imperatives?
I think the reason is, if we don’t rest, if we don’t observe Sabbath, we forget who we are. And there is nothing so alienating, or potentially dangerous for us, as this forgetting. We forget that we are beings made in the image of God. We forget that we live in a world with other beings also made in the image of God. We forget – in the words of the psalmist -- that the “earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” (Psalm 24)

When I go too long without a rest, I forget to kneel down and look into my son’s face when he really wants to say something important to me. I forget that we waited for three long years for him to come into our life, and that it was a miracle when he did, and that surely now I can give him 30 seconds of my undivided attention before he heads to preschool for the day. When I go too long without a rest, I forget that I am something more than a machine with a to-do list, that I am a body that needs a hug, a soul that needs a long walk at dusk, a spirit that needs to commune with God in prayer.

We forget. It’s so easy to do that. Even Jesus forgot. Or maybe he was afraid he’d forget. So numerous times in the Gospels he, too, departs to a mountain or a wilderness or a lonely place to pray – to rest, to be renewed, to remember: Who am I, really? Who are we, really? Why am I here? To what should I give my attention?

“Like a path in the forest,” Wayne Muller says, “Sabbath creates a marker for ourselves so, if we are lost, we can find our way back to our center. “Remember the Sabbath” means “Remember that everything you have received is a blessing. Remember to delight in your life, in the fruits of your labor. Remember to stop and offer thanks for the wonder of it.” The commandment from God assumes that we will forget. And so, we need to have those demarcated, set-apart times, in which we rest, and remember. Ideally, I think, we set aside a few minutes every day where we do this, a day every week or month, a few days every year.

Of course, if you are lucky enough to be a professor or an employee at Genentech or a pastor at this church, you get a few weeks every few years to take some Sabbath time. I know how blessed I am to have this sabbatical time. I know how many of you could use a sabbatical yourselves. And I know how blessed I am to have a congregation that recognizes the need for pastors to take a sabbatical. I just heard, the other day, from a Mennonite pastor applying for the same sabbatical grant that I got. He told me that some people in his congregation have said to him, “Your job isn’t very hard. Why do you need a break from it?” I couldn’t help thinking, once again, of how very blessed I am to be among you.

And so, I wanted to say a bit more about what I am going to be doing during my eight weeks away. The short answer is: meditating, gardening, writing poetry, hanging out with my family, reading good books, cooking good food. And I want to put in both a greywater and rainwater catchment system at my house. The longer, slightly more poetic answer is that I hope to become more fully an inhabitant of my home, my neighborhood, my community, my ecosystem. I read a story recently about a man whose farmer father, upon coming to a new place, would take a pinch of dirt, sprinkle it in his palm, sniff it, stir it, squeeze it, then taste it. When the boy would ask his dad “Why eat dirt?” his Dad would say, “Just trying to figure out where I am.” (From Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World by Scott Russell Sanders)

In a way, that’s what I hope to do on my sabbatical: I want to really figure out where I am. I want to pinch, stir, sniff, squeeze and taste the place I live. I want to know what bird sings every day at the first suggestion of morning. Is that a towhee? A robin? I want to know what that wild plant is that grows everywhere around our house. I want to know what kind of tomato my soil produces, and then I want to taste it – sun dry it, can it, simmer it into sauces and, of course, put it on top of a basil leaf and eat it standing up, right there in the garden. I want to go on long bike rides on the flat island where I live. I want to smell the tide as it goes out on the waterfront that is only a few hundred feet from my house, but to which I’ve rarely been.

I also want to more fully inhabit my marriage, and my motherhood. I am curious what I will discover about Jerome and Patrick, and my relationship to them, when I am able to be more present to them, when I will not be quite so preoccupied with the remnants of that day’s work. And I want to more fully inhabit my neighborhood and town. I am blessed to live on a street where people actually know each other and hang out together. I want to get to know my neighbors better. And I want to get to know the faith communities and clergy colleagues in my town of Alameda. I plan to visit several of them on Sunday mornings during my sabbatical time.
When I went to a workshop for other pastors who had received sabbatical grants, I was struck by the fact that so many of them were traveling to Turkey or Greece or Israel for their sabbaticals. Those not traveling overseas were going to drive across the country on various excursions. My own sabbatical plans – to not leave my house and neighborhood, to inhabit this one place even more – were rather ordinary in comparison.

But I have long known that when we are fully present to the ordinary, to the familiar, that begin to “hear how it all fits together” in the words of the physician, Charles. I have long known that when I am fully present to that which is “close at hand,” I begin to see the outlines of a realm that was there all along, but which I couldn’t see because of my busyness, my distraction. I’ve long wondered if this is why Jesus says so often that the “Kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” Maybe he didn’t mean that it was close in terms of time – just a few days or years or millennia around the corner. Maybe he meant that it was close in terms of consciousness or perception – a realm that is right here if we only have eyes to see.

Thank you for giving me this gift of time in which I can see, hear, taste, and remember. I am deeply grateful for this. I encourage each of you to see this summer also as a time of mini-sabbatical – as a time to more consciously set aside a few minutes or hours or days to rest, to renew, to remember. We all need it. And, if you need a further reason, the Creator of heaven and earth has commanded you to do it! Tell that to your supervisor! May we each be blessed by our times of Sabbath in these coming weeks. Amen.

"The Sappy Vine"

2009-05-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

Psalm 98, John 15:1-8

Of the 4 or so billion people on the planet, we are some of the few fortunate enough to live in a Mediterranean climate zone. While Mediterranean refers to the countries that rim the Mediterranean Sea, it also refers to a kind of climate zone found scattered throughout the planet that – to my mind – is about the closest thing one can get to paradise on earth. Only 2 percent of the globe enjoys our benign Mediterranean weather pattern, where warm, dry summers follow mild, wet winters – and where a profusion of plants grow. A docent at the Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco told me soon after I moved here, that even though the Mediterranean climate zone comprises only 2% of the earth’s surface, 98% of the earth’s plant life can grow in it.

Anyone who has gardened here can be, think, both excited and sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer number of plant choices we have in this area. With no freezing cold to kill off half of the plants and no baking heat to take down what remains, almost anything can grow here. It is a gardener’s paradise.

It is a small wonder, then, that the metaphor of the Garden of Eden sprung from the imaginations of a people who also lived in a Mediterranean climate zone known as the Holy Land. Some of humanity’s most ancient and widespread crops – figs, olives, grapes – were first domesticated in the rich flood plains of Syria and the Holy Land, and historians reckon that this is where the very idea of gardening and horticulture was invented about 8,000 years ago.

And so earthy, sensuous agricultural images inspired by the Mediterranean permeate the writings of the Old and New Testaments. Perhaps no agricultural metaphor was more often employed in these writings than the one we heard today – that of the grape vine, a plant celebrated and loved by the people of Biblical times. The grape vine, of course, is a plant also much beloved in the Bay Area. I read in the Chronicle a few years back that Bay Area folks spend more money on alcohol than any other city in the country. But why wouldn’t we? We are the only Mediterranean city in this country, the only city that knows firsthand the delight of the vineyards, the juicy reality of grapes and the wines they produce. Grapes and vineyards and wines inspire our imaginations, and provide one of the central metaphors of the good life here in California.

The people of Biblical times were similarly inspired by the grape vine. Over and over, the image of the vine occurs in scripture —evidence of an agricultural people who prayed their praise and laments through metaphors found in their native landscapes. In Genesis, vines were the source of life and prosperity. Prophetic utterances of doom foretold languishing vineyards and vines with withered leaves in Isaiah. The Song of Songs, that incredible love story, is set in a vineyard. The Hebrew Scriptures refer repeatedly to the House of Israel itself as the Lord’s vineyard, the soil from which the divine gardener longed to harvest good fruit.

It is no surprise, then, that Jesus took up the images of the vine and the vineyard and wove them into his own theological vision. More than once, Jesus explores the mystery of the kingdom of God through parables centered around the vineyard. And in the passage we heard today, John’s Gospel makes use of this metaphor to help explore and explain the identity not only of Jesus and his relationship to God, but of our identity and our relationship to God: “I am the true vine, and God is the vinedresser,” Jesus says. “Abide in me, as I abide in you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, with me in them, bears fruit in plenty.”

There’s a lot of meat in this metaphor. Or is it wine? I think we could spend a sermon series or two unpacking everything in it, but let me simply pull out two strands from this metaphor.

First, let’s look at what this metaphor tells us about our relationship to God and Christ. Let’s look particularly at verses 4 and 5: “Abide in me as I abide in you. (Some translations say this “make your home in me, as I make my home in you.”) Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me, you can do nothing.”

This image of the vine and branches calls to mind most vividly the idea of our fruitfulness in Christ – our calling to “bear much fruit,” to produce “good works” in the world. It’s a rich image that has been mined throughout centuries of Christian life and thought – but it is sometimes, I think, a misused metaphor. The focus within much liberal Protestantism (as well as in Anabaptism) has typically been on producing much fruit, rather than abiding in the vine – which is really the central point of the passage.

This emphasis on fruit production comes from a compassionate impulse. Faced with the urgent needs of the world, we feel compelled to “bear much fruit.” In our passion for justice, in our impatience for change, in our belief that “faith without works is dead,” we can come to believe that social change is more urgent than a rich, sustaining contact with the Vine, the Source of all life. We become quite ready to appropriate the aspect of Jesus’ metaphor that best affirms our own core values — productivity and effectiveness – while ignoring the contemplative element of simply “abiding” in God.

In fact, these verses are very clear as to what comes first. If you read them carefully, you’ll see that Jesus does not command his disciples anywhere these verses to bear fruit. They are simply asked to abide in the vine. Fruit-bearing is not a command here, it is a promise. If you want to bear fruit, Jesus is saying, don’t focus on bearing fruit. Focus on abiding. The fruit will follow. If you want to bear fruit, abide in the vine.

In our life as Christians, cutting ourselves off from the life-giving vine has many consequences, not the least of which is we may never develop much stamina for seasons of drought and failure. We risk forgetting that the image of the vine and branches speaks to the necessity of making ourselves available to the hidden depths of God – even if in fact there is no harvest. If we identify the life-giving goodness of God too closely with the fruitfulness of our own lives, we will be tempted to feel abandoned by God when calamity or spiritual drought occurs.

The prophet Habakkuk, writing in the 7th century BC during the worst of the Babylonian captivity, braved the question of why God seems to countenance the treacherous and is silent when “the wicked swallow those more righteous than they.” The answer he receives assures him that God is eternally present: “There is still a vision for the appointed time… If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.” And then the book ends with a song of serenity and trust in the face of utter desolation:

Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines…
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.

That’s what it means to abide in the vine, even when no fruit is present.

Second, I want to pull out the strand of this metaphor that tells us about our identity, about who we are. Basically, this metaphor speaks to our essential sappiness. I love to tell the story of the first time I visited one of the Napa Valley wineries, and some of you may remember me telling it before. While there, we were told that one vine can have branches extending 30 to 40 feet out in each direction. I decided to prove this fact for myself in a section of the vineyard in which we were free to roam and taste the fruits. I traced a branch from the base of the vine to its end and, looking back, I gauged that it was indeed close to 30 or 40 feet. Hanging at the end of this long branch was a huge cluster of grapes. I picked one and ate it: it was warm from the sun, sweet and juicy.

Obviously, such fruitfulness is possible only because the sap that animates the vine at its base is also the same sap that animates the branches 30 or 40 feet away. There is one and the same sap running through the vine and its branches. What this says about us is exactly the same. There is one and the same sap running through the capital V Vine (Jesus) and its branches (us), and that is the very sap of God. What this metaphor tells us is that the deepest thing I am is the energy of God, the life-giving, fruity force of God. I am animated, brought to life, made fruitful by the divine Sap of God. You are animated, brought to life, made fruitful by the divine Sap of God.

There is one and the same sap running through the Vine and its branches, even though the branches are different, even unique. I might not like your branches, but I have to love your sap. In fact, underneath your annoying tics and your overbearing personality and (fill in the blank here) underneath it all, you and I are made of the same sappy substance. Underneath it all, you are my Sap and I am yours, and we are all together in this unity of the sappy Spirit that Jesus loved to talk about. I live in you and you live in me, and together we live in God and – oh my– our identity is starting to get as complicated here as one of those twining, tangled far-reaching grapevines that spread their tendrils out in a maze of interconnected shoots.

There was an obnoxious Calvin Klein ad that ran a few years ago for a perfume called “Obsession.” The video showed two young heterosexual lovers mooning at each other, while the announcer said underneath: “I don’t know where you end, and I begin. Obsession.” Jerome and I thought this ad line so ridiculous that we still sprinkle it into our verbal banter from time to time, and it always makes us laugh. And yet, the true is, in our essential sappy substance, we really don’t know where one of us ends and another of us begins, for we are all tangled up with each other, animated by one and the same sap.

Perhaps the best place we experience our sappiness is in community. For if the deepest thing we are is the energy, the life-giving Sap of God, then when I bump into you, I am bumping into God. And one of the things we need to do, we must do, in spiritual community is recognize and reverence each other’s Sap. The medieval mystic Meister Eckhardt once said that the only blessing we can give each other is the glance of recognition – the glance that says, “I recognize your sappiness. I recognize that the same sap that animates me, animates you. I reverence you as the holy Sap that you are.”

There’s so much more in this metaphor. For instance, I discovered about a month ago that the Aramaic word for blood, “dami,” can also be translated as “sap.” It’s made me rethink all that language about the blood of Christ – the sap of Christ.

But for now, it’s enough for me to chew on the fact that we are to be abiders at heart – that our main job as Christians is simply to abide in Christ. And that the deepest part of our identity is our sappiness. So I guess you can say that when we are living the Christian life to the fullest, we are abidingly sappy people. May we know ourselves even moreso to be those people.

"The Shepherd’s Voice"

2009-05-03T09:30:00.000-07:00

Third Sunday of Eastertide

Psalm 23, John 10:11-18

The story goes that Tommy was sitting in his 3rd grade Sunday School class, getting ready to do a drawing. His teacher came up to him and asked him what he was preparing to draw. "God," he said. "I'm drawing a picture of God." "Why, Tommy, you can't draw a picture of God," said the well-meaning teacher. "No one knows what God looks like." "They will after I'm done with my drawing," Tommy said.

I like the sassiness of the imaginary Tommy, who has the audacity to draw God. But, in truth, we’re always doing that. God is Mystery, ineffable, beyond all imagining. And yet we have to imagine the Divine, we have to “draw” God some way. We have to use words, concepts and images because they're all we mortals have -- blunt instruments though they may be. In other words, all of our language about God is inherently metaphorical.

One of the most-beloved metaphors of the Divine, humanity and the relationship between us is that of the shepherd and the sheep. It was a common metaphor in the Bible, mentioned more than 80 times – sometimes referring to the King of Israel as a shepherd of his people, but more often referring to God as the good shepherd, the one who – in Isaiah – feeds his flock like a shepherd, gathers the lambs with his arm, carries them in his bosom, and gently leads those that are with young. It reaches its peak of metaphoric perfection it the 23rd psalm, which is probably the most beloved psalm in the Bible. I’m guessing many of us know that by heart, too.

In the New Testament, the author of the gospel of John picks up this potent metaphor from the Hebrew Scriptures and uses it to describe who Jesus is. This is Jesus speaking:

10:11 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the
sheep.
10:12 The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the
sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away--and the wolf
snatches them and scatters them.
10:13 The hired hand runs away because a
hired hand does not care for the sheep.
10:14 I am the good shepherd. I know
my own and my own know me,
10:15 just as the Father knows me and I know the
Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.

This image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd has become so beloved you’d be hard-pressed to find a Protestant church that does stained glass windows that does not have one of them devoted to a beautiful, pastoral image of Jesus holding a lamb. The problem with much-beloved metaphors, however, is that they can become old, hackneyed, sentimentalized -- too familiar. Metaphors at their best open a window into a truth we hadn't realized before or at least hadn’t realized that profoundly. They shake us up a bit. At their worst, metaphors dull our perceptions. Our eyes glaze over. We've heard it all before, and there's nothing there that makes us see things anew.

I fear the latter is more often true of this shepherd-sheep metaphor. It's been used a lot, and it’s easy to sentimentalize the idea, easy for it to lose its edge. For instance, have you ever noticed how pictures of the Jesus shepherd and sheep are always remarkably dirt-free? The shepherd, Jesus, is wearing flowing robes that look like they just came back from the dry cleaners, and the sheep are spotless, "white as snow." In fact, we usually don't even see grown sheep, just lambs. Innocent, playful, cute lambs, whom the shepherd is cuddling in his arms. It's a lovely -- and unreal -- pastoral scene.

Let's peel back the layers of this metaphor and see if there's anything new there. We can start with the shepherd: shepherds (both then and now) were dirty. They didn't bathe much, if at all. Gretel Ehrlich, a writer from Wyoming who lives on a sheep ranch, tells of one modern-day sheepherder named Fred who showered so infrequently that his body hair had grown through his long johns.[1] Now if that repulsive piece of information doesn't shatter the “shepherd as Mr. Clean” image, I don't know what will.

The reason shepherds are so dirty is that they live a hard life, away from any of the comforts of home, completely exposed to the ravages of both sunshine and storm. Sheep need grass to eat and water to drink, and lots of it, and the search for such will take a shepherd into far hills and meadows, whether we are talking about 1st-century Judea or 20th-century Wyoming. The same Gretel Ehrlich found herself one Wyoming summer serving as a substitute sheepherder when one of the regulars quit. And so at 5 o'clock one morning, with a mare and a border collie, she rode off to find the herd of 2000 sheep who were grazing somewhere in the middle of nowhere. For the next several months, alone, she let her flock wander over 90 square miles of pasture land, wherever they wanted to go.

And where sheep want to go is often where they shouldn't go, she found – down into crags or ravines or, if they are in a panicked run, which sheep seem to be in often, right over a cliff. Sheep become easily lost, and once lost they are defenseless. They are easy prey for wild animals and thieves. The idea that a shepherd might have to lay down his or her life for the sheep is not an exaggerated claim. In 1st-century Palestine, it was not uncommon for a single shepherd to have to fight off bands of thieves. In 20th-century Montana, Ivan Doig – another sheepherder turned writer – tells of his father fighting off a bear to protect his sheep, and almost getting killed in the process.[2] This is why today’s passage from John speaks so scornfully of the hired hand, who will not do what is needed – that is, risk his own life – to protect the sheep.

Perhaps there was more to this willingness to risk life than just economic concern. In ancient and present-day Palestine, at least, sheep are raised for their wool. And thus, sheep are often with a shepherd for years. The shepherd grows to care deeply for them, giving each of them names and knowing when even one of them wanders away.[3] As our passage for today says, accurately, “I know my own and my own know me.”

One traveler to the Holy Land wrote this description of a shepherd that beautifully summarizes all I’ve just said: “On some high moor, across which at night the hyenas howl, when you meet him, sleepless, far-sighted, weather-beaten, leaning on his staff, and looking out over his scattered sheep, everyone of them on his heart, you understand why the shepherd of Judea sprang to the front in his people’s history; why they… made the shepherd the ultimate symbol of providence.”[4] The people of the ancient Middle East were so impressed with the vigilance, courage, love and care of the shepherd that they gave that name -- shepherd -- to their rulers, to their God and eventually to Jesus.

What a beautiful, and gritty, metaphor of God’s or Jesus’ affection for us: fierce, protective, tenacious, willing to endure whatever it takes to see us through to green pastures and cool waters. It’s a metaphor you can climb inside, take comfort in. Put me under the care of this God, this Good Shepherd, and I shall not want.

There’s only one catch. If God is the Shepherd, what does that make us? Baaaaa. The sheep, obviously. And here the going gets a little more rough, in terms of this metaphor. Because there’s some hard facts to face about being sheep.

Sheep are easily thrown off balance and have difficulty righting themselves again, with catastrophic results. Ivan Doig tells a story of he and his grandmother being left alone for two weeks one summer to tend a herd of 4000 sheep, while Ivan’s father was away. No sooner had the father left, than grandma and Ivan noticed that not all of their new charges were happily grazing. A few were on their backs, legs stiff in the air, dead as stones, he writes. Soon, they figured out that the sheep had ticks and were rolling themselves on the ground to scratch themselves. “The roll easily carried them too far onto their deep-wooled backs to be able to get up again, and within minutes in the summer heat, their struggling would bloat them to death.” Gases build up in the stomach, and as these expand it cuts off blood circulation to the body. Sheep die this way, and fast if it’s hot. So Ivan and his grandmother spent every daylight hour of the next 14 days patrolling the sheep and heaving them over onto their feet when they spotted the kick of hooves in the air.

It’s not just ticks that cause a sheep to turn bottom up, by the way. If an extra woolly or fat sheep happens to lie down in a small depression in the ground, and roll slightly to its side to stretch out or relax, the center of gravity in its body can suddenly shift so that its feet no longer touch the ground. It panics and starts to paw frantically, which of course, makes things worse. It rolls over even further onto its back and now has no hope of regaining its feet.[5] Sound like any humans we know? There’s whole days when I feel like this.

Unfortunately, there’s more: As I mentioned earlier, sheep get lost quite easily and want to wander into places that aren’t good for them. They are also easily panicked. In one story I read, a tiny Pekinese pup jumping out of a car parked was enough to send the 200 terrorized sheep bolting across the pasture, away from the 8-pound menace.

And finally, sheep are notorious creatures of habit. If left to themselves, they will follow the same trails until they become ruts; graze the same hills until they turn to desert wastes; and we will pollute our own ground – I mean, sheep will pollute their own ground until it is rife with disease and parasites. I’ll leave it to you to draw any parallels between sheep and humanity.

However, sheep have one saving grace going for them – they are obedient. They know and understand their shepherd’s voice, and they do what she asks. In addition, they won’t listen to the voice of a stranger. Another traveler to the Holy Land, W.M. Thomson, writes this, “The shepherd calls sharply from time to time, to remind the sheep of his presence. They know his voice and follow on; but, if a stranger calls, they stop short, life up their heads in alarm, and if the call is repeated, they turn and flee, because they know not the voice of a stranger. I have made this experiment repeatedly.”[6] Can’t you just see W.M. Thomson scaring sheep all throughout the Holy Land with his experiment?

Now, so far, you may have been going along with this metaphor of humans-as-sheep. You may agree that is a large part of the human condition to be easily unbalanced, easily lost, easily panicked and that we easily make a big mess of things.

At obedience, however, we tend to draw the line and say “That’s it. The metaphor is over.” Our modern American temper not only celebrates individualism, in which we bow to no authority other than ourselves, and in the process, the idea of obedience has lost favor. In crossword puzzles, the clue “act the robot” is supposed to yield the four-letter answer “obey.” To obey is to not think for oneself, to mindlessly go along. And it is true that the excuse “I was just obeying orders” has been used to justify many an unjust act. Obedience, then, is yet one more pathetic trait that we hope to cure ourselves of so that we can enter true spiritual adulthood.

Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun who took the traditional three vows that all nuns and monks take, one of which is a vow of obedience. But she is anything but a mindless robot. She is a woman alive with passion for the poor and with indignation at any institution – especially her own church – that propagates injustice. She is a champion of women's rights and environmental justice. She is considered a renegade, and I'm sure most of the Catholic hierarchy would wish she would just be quiet. But, Joan would say, “I can't be quiet. I took a vow of obedience.”

Chittister points to the fact that the word "obedience" is derived from the Latin word that shares its root with the verb "to hear." So listening and obedience are very closely connected. In fact, to obey, Chittister suggests, means to listen closely to the voice of God in life, and then to act on what we hear. Like sheep, we need to become so accustomed to that voice that we hear it clearly over the others that call to us. So we hear the voice that calls us to the good, to the just, above the voices that call us to power, to respectability, to cynicism, to fear, to despair. Unlike sheep, however, there’s a variety of ways in which we can hear that voice. We may hear it in quiet times, when our spirits is stilled -- whether that happens on a church pew or on the Muni or in a city park. We may hear it in Scripture and other holy books. We may hear it when we listen to ourselves, paying attention to that ache in our back and realizing it may be telling us something about the stress and tension of our lives. And, we hear the voice of God in one another: in the “members of our communities, both old and young; in the person we married, all of whose jokes we know by now; in underlings and children; old parents and boring in-laws.”[7] If we get really good at hearing, we can hear the voice of God in the person we most disagree with, who pushes our buttons, whom we find it hard to love.

To be obedient, then, means to cultivate the spiritual discipline of listening – to listen in such a way that we develop a sensitivity to the call of Christ within the context of our daily interactions.

Because, like sheep, we do need a shepherd. We do need a guide. We know we can drive ourselves a bit crazy – over cliffs, into ravines, onto our backs, kicking wildly, fearful of the least sound. Obedience – the willingness and ability to hear the voice of God when we’re feet up, when we’re heading for that cliff – obedience is what will save us. Obedience is what will enable us to stay on the right paths, the paths that lead to life. May we hear the voice of the shepherd even more clearly. And may it guide us to green pastures and still waters, to the overflowing table.

Amen.

__________

[1] Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
[2] Ivan Doig, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978)
[3] William Barclay, The Gospel of John, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press), 1975.
[4] Quoted in Barclay, p. 53.
[5] Phillip Keller, A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996).
[6] Quoted in Barclay, p.57.
[7] Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages (New York: Crossroad, 1995).

“Gee, that was fun (I especially liked the music) but what does it all mean?”

2009-04-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

First Sunday of Eastertide

Acts 4:32-35, John 20:19-31

I’m so glad that Thomas, the Patron Saint of Doubters, always makes his appearance this first Sunday after Easter in our cycle of scripture readings. Because by now, the Easter afterglow has worn off. We’ve sung the hymns, we’ve enjoyed the choirs, we’ve digested the Easter potluck, and we’ve probably even come down off our sugar high from all those chocolate bunnies, peeps and jelly beans. By the way: Peeps? Those are Satanic. They should really be outlawed.

By now, if not before, some of us may be wondering, like Thomas: What the heck was that all about? Do I really believe that story? How do I make sense of this?

So, I’d like to attempt an answer to those questions, with the help of a wonderful book by the well-known Biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. It’s called The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem. They dig into Mark’s day-to-day account of the week leading up to Easter and, in doing so, give answer to many of the questions that doubting Thomases have.

So, let’s start with the question of Good Friday – Adam’s question from Palm Sunday: Why did they kill Jesus? Did Jesus really have to die? Did God want that to happen?

The most familiar explanation of Jesus’ death is called substitutionary atonement. It’s so familiar, I’m sure at least one of you can tell the rest of us what it means. So, one of you, tell us why Jesus had to die? Right. We’re sinners, and God is offended by this sin – sickened by it. There has to be a sacrifice or a punishment for sin before we can be forgiven, but one of us wouldn’t be adequate since we’re despicable sinners, right? So, it had to be a perfect human being. Only Jesus, the spotless lamb, could do the trick. Thus he is the sacrifice, and Good Friday is good because it is the day that makes God’s forgiveness of us possible. So, Jesus – literally – died for our sins.

A long time ago, I decided that I could not believe in a God that demanded this sort of sacrifice. That someone – namely, his own son – had to be tortured and murdered before God could get around to forgiving us. I knew I did wrong things, but I didn’t think I was so despicable that it demanded the killing of someone else. My own, mortal parents were capable of more love than God seemed capable of – they loved us more like the prodigal son’s father, unconditionally, putting up with our stupid behavior, ready to accept us even before we had “atoned.” If God was that sort of God – a divine child abuser – then I wanted nothing to do with ‘him.’

I think lots of Thomases feel this way, both in and out of the church. If you are one of those Thomases, you might be heartened to know that substitutionary atonement is not the only Christian understanding of “why Jesus had to die.” It took more than 1,000 years for it to become dominant, around the time that St. Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a theological treatise on it in 1097. Over the centuries, it has become the most common explanation. But it’s not necessarily the most Biblical explanation.

It’s true that the language of sacrifice is used in the New Testament, but it is only one of several different ways of talking about the meaning of Jesus’ execution. One way sees the death and resurrection of Jesus as the embodiment of a path of psychological and spiritual transformation that lies at the center of Christian life. Paul expresses this idea a lot, in writings such as “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” The old Paul has to die – has to be crucified – so that the new Paul, the one who is one with Christ, can live.

There’s a lot of truth, I think, in this spiritual and psychological reading of Jesus’ death -- one that many spiritual traditions affirm. It’s a natural human habit to become egotistic, centered in the “small self” with its anxieties and preoccupations. This small self can be both terribly anxious and fearful as well as preoccupied with its own accomplishments and successes. Part of our human task is to die to this small self, and rise again to a new, larger, more expansive self, one grounded in that which is ultimate, grounded in a compassion and peace that “surpasses understanding.” Grounded in God, who is the source of our “true self.”

There are also meanings behind the crucifixion that are much more political – Jesus countered the domination system of his day, a system in which about 1-2% of the population owned almost all the wealth, while the rest of the people lived in moderate to severe poverty. This economic exploitations was joined with political oppression and religious legitimation of the status quo. Jesus challenged the system, the reign of Caesar, with a vision and a passion for the reign of God, a reign where the least were first, and the first were last. A reign where all of God’s resources were distributed equitably among everyone.

Given how threatening this vision was to the status quo, the execution of Jesus was almost inevitable. Not because of divine necessity, but because this is what empires do to people who publicly and vigorously challenge them. Jesus’ passion for the reign of God to come on earth, as it is in heaven, got him killed.

I cannot affirm that Jesus died for the sins of the world. But I can affirm that Jesus was killed because of the sin of the world. I cannot believe in a God that demanded the death of Jesus to make “him” less angry at the rest of us. But I do believe in a God who wills the death of no one but who can turn even the worst thing into a very good thing.

Which leads me to Easter… just what was that very good thing?

Now, some people say that that very good thing was that Jesus’ corpse physically rose from the grave. God transformed his dead body into one that lived again – that was able to talk and walk with his friends, eat food with them, appearing in a form that could be seen, heard and touched. This unique event in history means that Jesus really is the son of God, and that Christianity is true. And it demonstrates once and for all that death is dead – that we, like Jesus, will also be resurrected in heaven after we die. I know that many people – some of us, I think – believe that this is the good news, and if you can’t believe this, then you aren’t really a Christian.

But what about the doubting Thomases among us who can’t quite say yes to this? Is this really the only way we can understand Easter? I don’t believe it is.

To start with, there are mixed messages from the biblical accounts about what form Jesus takes after his resurrection – does he have a physical body like ours? Or is it some sort of transformed spiritual body – one that still bears our physical traits (like scars) but one that is also capable of appearing suddenly in rooms and perhaps even being in more than one place at a time? Or a vision? Paul – Acts. (You know, we in modern Western culture tend to disparage visions. We see them as hallucinations, as deviations from reality. And lots of times, they might be. I’ve been around enough schizophrenics in my time. But I believe they can also be disclosures of reality.)

Some biblical scholars believe it’s quite possible that the Gospel writers are using the language of parable metaphor rather than of historical reporting to talk about the events around Easter. Maybe they’re not expecting us to take this as historical fact. Maybe they’re expecting us to take this as a profoundly true metaphor.

To me, at some level, none of this debate about what happened to Jesus’ physical body matters. Something spectacularly wonderful and earth-shaking happened on Easter morning. Physical body or not, vision or not Jesus lives. He continues to be experienced after his death, though in a radically new way. He lives. John Dominic Crossan puts it so well, “The essence of Easter is that despite his crucifixion, Jesus was for his followers alive, present, and empowering them to do the work of Kingdom still. That’s the only mystery and the only miracle and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s more than enough of both.”

Jesus lives, and because of that, his followers go from a group of dispirited, fearful people hiding behind locked doors to a group of bold, fearless “missionaries” – people who continue to announce and embody the good news of Jesus in the same way that he did while live. Listen to what Acts says about these early disciples (Acts 4:32-35):

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no
one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was
held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not
a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and
brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and
it was distributed to each as any had need.

This is the only miracle and mystery I need – that Jesus is alive and present enough to empower these people to throw off their fear and risk the same death Jesus had so that they could proclaim and live out his vision for the reign of God. The only miracle and mystery that I need is the that Jesus was alive and present enough to empower Ahmed, the guy from the children’s story, to do something as crazy as give away all his food to his hungry neighbors.

Jesus lives and that means that God has said “yes” to Jesus and “no” to the domination system that executed him. Jesus lives and that means that God has said that he is Lord of the earth, not the death-dealing powers that crucified him. Matthew puts it this way: That God has given the resurrected Jesus “all authority in heaven and on earth.” We may cringe when hear this, seeing in it a triumphalist claim that Christianity is the only way, that you have to believe in Jesus or else. I’m not at all sure that’s the way Matthew means it. I think he means, Jesus is Lord, which means that the Caesars of the world aren’t. Jesus is Lord, not the domination systems that oppress the poor to benefit the wealthy and the powerful. Jesus is Lord, not the religious systems that legitimate this oppression, nor the religious systems that marginalize and exclude whole groups of people.

I think I told you once about hearing Yvette Flunders, the lesbian African-American pastor of City of Refuge, here in San Francisco. She said, to a group of mainly white feminists, that she had been called on the carpet for using the patriarchal word “Lord.” But she refused to stop using that word because calling Jesus Lord meant that the homophobia that threatened to kill her spirit was not Lord; Jesus was Lord, not the racism that wanted to bring her down; Jesus was Lord, not the sexism that told her she couldn’t be a pastor, that wanted to keep her in her place. She went on to get ordained and to found a multiracial, multi-class church that has a vital, multi-million dollar foundation to aid those living with HIV/AIDS, especially in the African-American community. Yvette Flunders is one of the most powerful people I have ever come across and, I believe, it’s because Jesus lives and Jesus is Lord.

May this same Jesus be alive for us, present for us, continually empowering us to do the work of the Kingdom in our time and our place. Can I get an “amen” from the doubting Thomases?

Amen. Alleluia.

"Icons of Resurrection"

2009-04-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

Easter Sunday
Isaiah 25:6-9, Mark 16:1-8

When faced with disaster, with the death of your dreams and – more importantly – with the death of a real, live person whom you loved, whose warm hand you had just held days before – the first step is to bury the dead. Properly, and with love. This is what the three women know, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Salome, the ones who go to Jesus’ tomb early on the first Easter. You awake before dawn and carry pounds of expensive oils, spices and herbs a mile or more to the tomb. You go, despite the fact that you have no idea how you are going to roll back the stone, weighing tons, that sits in front of the tomb carved from rock. You’ll figure that out when you get there.

The important thing is to bury your dead. To unwrap the body – in this case, the bloodied and bruised body – and rub oils mixed with the perfume of herbs and spices all over it, caressing this body that is already stiff, loving for the last time this flesh, making the body smell sweet and fragrant again, giving the dead man back the dignity that he gave you in life. The important thing is to love bodies, to honor them even when you can no longer protect them from death.

Afterwards, the women will figure out what the next important thing is to do. Perhaps it will be to make breakfast for their grieving friends. Perhaps it will be to hold each other while they weep. Perhaps it will be to tell the story of how he died – sharing the horror they each witnessed. For these women were the only ones who stayed with Jesus while he died. It was excruciating to watch. Perhaps that was why his male disciples fled – or maybe they did so because it was too dangerous for them to be there. The Roman authorities didn’t expect women to be subversives as readily as men. In any event, the women were the only ones who kept vigil at the cross while he died. Most likely, they simply wanted this man, their beloved friend, to know that he was not going to die alone. The important thing is to know that you are not alone.

They were ordinary people doing the important work that needs to be done, that always needs to be done, even amid violence, confusion and chaos. They are so ordinary their three names are not mentioned in any other place in the Gospels save for at the crucifixion and on Easter morning. (Magdalene) And yet, these three ordinary women are one of two icons of the Resurrection found in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. You should all have this icon – it was in your order of worship. It’s called “The Holy Women at the Tomb,” although its more traditional title is “The Spice Bearers.”

The Orthodox tradition believes that icons can be as revelatory of spiritual truths as words are. Maybe moreso. Because of that, there’s lots of icons in the Orthodox tradition – except for icons about the Resurrection, the main event in Christianity. This is because the Orthodox faith sees the Resurrection as a deep Mystery, one that cannot be captured in word or picture.

Which means the two icons of the Resurrection they do have must be pretty important, pretty significant. They have to carry a lot of mystery, a lot of meaning. I shared the other one with you last Easter, the one called “The Descent into Hell,” which depicts Christ riding into the darkness of hell on the cross and bringing the Divine Light even there. You have in your hands the other icon of the Resurrection from this tradition: The spice bearers. Three ordinary women doing the important work of loving: Bringing the spice of their presence, the ointment of their love to the tombs of life.

We know these people. They rarely make the news. But they know the important thing to do, and they do it. They clean up after disasters. They soothe the scared child who wakes up from a nightmare in the middle of the night. They counsel the drug addict they know will use again. They invite a grieving friend over for dinner. They counsel students and employees in distress, even though that isn’t part of their job description. They plan vigils at the gates of San Quentin and Lawrence Livermore labs. They set up clinics in rural Indonesia. They bring the spice of their presence, the ointment of their love to the tombs of life.

When I was in Louisville, Kentucky recently, attending a workshop for ministers who had gotten sabbatical grants, one of the presenters mentioned a recent trip he had taken to Burundi, where he had the chance to meet a remarkable woman named Maggy Barinkitse. Maggy had encountered the tombs of death in a way I pray none of us ever will. In 1993, she tried in vain to protect her co-workers and friends from a band of murdering Tutsis who came to the Catholic bishops’ residence where she worked. Her punishment for trying to do so was to be tied up and forced to watch while 72 of her Hutu friends and co-workers were killed. Faced with violence and death beyond imagining, Maggy found herself in a tomb wider than the world. But I’ll let Maggy tell her own story. This a video made by the Opus Prize for Faith-Based Entrepreneurship, a prize sponsored by Catholic universities and a prize Maggy won last year. (Video can be found at http://www.opusprize.org/winners/08_Barankitse.cfm.)

Finding herself in a tomb wider than the world, Maggy did the first important thing: She buried her dead. Like Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome, she risked her life to care for bodies, even those she could no longer protect from death. And then, Maggy did the next important thing in her power to do: She scrounged up enough money to pay the Tutsi killers a ransom for 25 children belonging to friends they had just killed. She began to raise these children as her own, along with 7 other orphans – four Hutu and three Tutsis – she was already raising.

Maggy kept on doing the next important thing. She kept on bringing her presence and her love to Burundi’s tombs and -- years later – she has helped 30,000 orphans, giving them families and homes and jobs, a cinema, a swimming pool, a hospital. I’m sure Maggy could have imagined none of this in the devastating days and weeks following the massacre. Like the women walking to Jesus’ tomb, she had no idea how she was going to roll back the stone of death.

But she kept on showing up at the tombs of death – and, miraculously, she found that God was there. She found that the stones guarding the tombs of death kept getting rolled away, beyond her knowing how, beyond her ability make it happen. She found that Christ’s light could penetrate any darkness, including her own. She found that evil and death could never ever have the last word. She found resurrection. And she has become an icon of the resurrection. An icon of the light of Christ that can be found in the darkest places of death.

You know, this icon of the resurrection you have in your hands isn’t called “The Empty Tomb,” although the empty tomb is shown there. It would seem to make a great name for one of two icons of the resurrection. It would underscore the main point of Easter, right – that the body isn’t there?

Instead, the icon is called “The Holy Women at the Tomb,” or “The Spice Bearers.” The empty tomb is important, but maybe it’s not the only important thing. Maybe, just as important, is the three spice bearers, the three holy women doing what was in their power to do. Doing the next important thing. Loving bodies, caring for them. Bringing their spices, their presence, their love to the tombs of death. By doing so, they also found that evil and death can never have the last word. They found resurrection. And they became icons of the resurrections.

Look at these women. And see in their faces, your own face. For you are an icon of the resurrection, just as surely as Mary Magdalene, Mary and Salome. You are an icon of the resurrection, just as surely as Maggy Barinkitse. Christ descended into the darkness of death and brought to it the light that will always, always outshine the darkness. And now, we are the icons of that light. We are the ones who bring to the tombs in our lives the spice of our presence, the ointment of our love. We are the ones who – as Maggy says -- say no to violence and death, and yes to the love, yes to the life. We are the spice-bearers. We are icons of the resurrection. Amen. Alleluia.

"Descending With Jesus"

2009-04-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Palm Sunday
Mark 21:1-11, Philippians 2:5-11

And so it begins. We’ve been through Lent, our season of prayer, our season of preparation for this very time – this Holy Week we are now entering, the most sacred time of the Christian year, this week that contains the central teaching, the central Mystery of the Christian faith.

And we begin at the heights, as does Jesus. Both symbolically and literally. Symbolically, because Jesus is at the height of his popularity as a teacher and leader. After spending most of his ministry in the hinterlands — outside the Beltway as we might say in this country — he’s about to enter the seat of power: Jerusalem. He’s making plans for his triumphal entry into this “capital city,” where many of his followers expect him to foment revolution, take over, take charge.

And he’s making these plans, literally, in the heights — in the town of Bethany, which is located on the eastern flank of the Mount of Olives. Standing at this spot, you overlook the entire city of Jerusalem. It’s one of those places we have plenty of here in the Bay Area. The East Bay Hills along Skyline Drive, the top of Mt. Tamalpais, Twin Peaks — a place you go to get a sense of the big picture, to look out over your world and imagine you can see it whole. One of those places where you can see clearly and lay good plans.

And so, Jesus does plan. Quite a bit. Of the 11 verses Mark devotes to the story of the procession into Jerusalem, more than half of them are about Jesus’ preparations for the event. There’s plenty of political and spiritual symbolism packed into his plans. First, he’s starting from the Mt. of Olives, the location from which the Jewish people expected the final battle for Jerusalem’s liberation to begin.

Then he sends for his provisions, which are not what any other kingly leader would call for. Instead of asking for a horse — the animal associated with warrior kings — he gets a colt, not even a full-grown donkey! Can you imagine a grown man riding this? His feet probably are dragging on the ground. I think people right away would get that he’s mocking the grand processions of the Roman military as they march into Jerusalem, strutting their stuff — their massive war horses, their leather armor, their gleaming helmets. Here’s Jesus, in his procession, riding a little donkey, with his feet dragging on the ground, unarmed. It’s a grand bit of street theater.

And the crowds are loving it. They treat him just as they would a triumphant national hero. They spread their branches and cloaks before him as a symbol of honor. They shout “Hosanna,” which means “God saves.” “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David.”

It doesn’t get any higher than this. This is Barack Obama at the Democratic convention. The crowds are going wild. They’re hanging on his every word, his every movement. He can’t say a sentence that doesn’t get applause. What a high! Most public figures, most leaders, do everything they can to stay there. To keep their approval ratings as high as possible.

But Jesus doesn’t. Instead, he chooses to descend. Literally, he descends from the heights of the Mt. of Olives into the city of Jerusalem. And he also, symbolically, descends — from the relatively safe hinterlands into the place of power, into Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the place where the authorities levy taxes and create unjust laws that make the poor even poorer, even more hungry and hopeless. And Jerusalem is the place where this inhumanity, this death can be confronted. But this is what also makes it a dangerous place — because here, the powerful people threatened by Jesus’ teaching, can get to him.

I have a picture, which was on my wall the entire time I was growing up. It shows Jesus sitting on the Mt. of Olives, looking over the city of Jerusalem. He’s sitting in a remote spot, surrounded only by trees and rocks and sky, and he’s looking down, down into the valley where Jerusalem lies. Down into the streets crowded with Roman soldiers with hair-trigger nerves and Jewish peasants with revolutionary dreams, down into the palaces of cruel leaders quick to quell any sign of unrest, down into the cross-marked landscape where the Romans regularly execute troublemakers.

I imagine that Jesus is sitting there, wondering if he should do this. Wondering if he should descend. It would be so easy to choose to stay in Bethany, to stay in that simple little village. It would be so easy to choose to return to the Sea of Galilee, 90 miles away from Jerusalem, where he did most of his healing and teaching. He could go back there, be a beloved regional teacher and have a good, long life. But he chooses to descend.

Maybe it was a choice he made even before this. In what is thought to be one of the oldest Christian hymns ever written down, Philippians 2:5-11 says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” Jesus descends. He becomes one of us, to experience our bondage, to experience our pain.

We got it wrong this morning. We shouldn’t have been ascending the stairs waving our palm branches, we should have been descending them if we really want to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. But most of us avoid this descent, if we can. The crowds singing his praises don’t get this. In fact, some of the same people cheering him during this procession will turn on him later when it becomes clear that he is not going to be the conquering leader. Not even his disciples get it. They’re always trying to talk him out of this descent, no, you won’t need to suffer. You’re our leader! You’re going to save us — that’s why we’re shouting hosanna, right? You’re going to save us, to conquer the oppressor. Right?

No one really gets that the core choice of Jesus’ existence will be to descend, for the sake of love, into the mindless cruelty of the world. There, he will expose himself to the full force of the powers of death. For the sake of his befuddled disciples, for the sake of the fair-weather crowds, for the sake of the diseased, of outcasts, of women, of children, he descends. He descends to confront — with the full force of love — all that is unlovely and unloving.

Of course, we who choose to follow Jesus also must descend. It’s our existential choice, too. The Mennonite poet Julia Kasdorf had an uncle who, following Jesus, also chose to descend into the mindless cruelty of the world and meet it unarmed, with only his love:

Uncle
At nine I knew what Jesus would do
if he got C.O. just for being
born Mennonite. He’d go anyway, like you.

In the name of peace, he’d race
an ambulance through the screaming streets
of Saigon. He’d grow a moustache to show
he wasn’t a soldier – a speck
on the camera lens, Grandpa insisted.

He’d take a generator to a village
in the hills where golden children
would run behind him yelling, “Mother
F*****.”

He’d thrust brilliant green blades
of rice into the fields where men’s legs
and the torsos of water buffaloes exploded
when plows struck bombs in the mud.

When the planes returned, he’d
load whomever he could into the only car,
drive to a refugee camp, and
there give up at last, as you gave up bearing that war
on your tall, blond body.

Lost across the continents for months,
you returned to us,
the uncle of someone else,
gaunt as a corpse, pale and haunted.
and when you could barely finish
a child’s portion at Howard Johnson’s,
that was the only miracle I could grasp.
(From Sleeping Preacher)

Yes, we got it wrong this morning. We shouldn’t have been ascending the stairs. If we really want to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, we too need to descend. I don’t know what that means for you, but I have some idea of what it means for me. As much as I would like to stay in the heights, be above it all, to not look into the mindless cruelty of the world, I know that that is where I need to go if I choose to follow Jesus. It means I can’t avoid suffering — my own or yours or the earth’s. I’m not going to be called to Vietnam during a war like Julia’s uncle, but I am called to enter those places of pain when I come across them and be the presence of love as best as I can.

And it means I can’t avoid this coming week, as much as I want to sometimes. You know, I really don’t like Holy Week. I hate the passion story. Because I can’t hear it, and not think of all the people who have been and are being tortured, who have been and are being betrayed by those they love, who have been and are dying alone and forsaken. But we can’t avoid this suffering if we want to walk through Holy Week.

This week that is coming is holy but not because of suffering, even the suffering of Jesus. Rather, it is holy because of the inexplicable and immeasurable love that prompted that suffering. So, as we make our descent, onto the streets of this city, back to our homes, our workplaces; as we make our descent into the suffering of this time and this place; as we descend with Jesus into this Holy Week, may we carry with us that love — that central teaching, that central Mystery of our faith. Amen.

"How Do I Pray, and What Does Prayer Mean To Me?" Reflection

2009-03-29T09:30:00.000-07:00

Kenda Autumn

I was honored—and a little floored!—to be asked to talk about prayer during our Lenten series. The question from Worship Committee was, how do I pray, and what does prayer mean to me. As I was working on this, I felt like I was giving a “mini faith story!”

I think my prayer life has always been on a slightly off-balance journey. Growing up as a family, we did pray together before meals. In restaurants, I remember that we might have held hands for a moment, but that might have been more common at extended family gatherings. I do not remember praying before going to bed.

At some point in my adult life, my prayer life has come to find expression in lots of different ways. On this journey, I feel like I have been searching for a deeper connection with God. And I thought I might get to this place of deeper connection by spending time in prayer. That, “spending time in prayer,” is what has changed over the years.

Prayer started to become a major part of my life in high school. When I was a junior or senior, some of my friends and I started a morning prayer group. My interest in praying in a group probably came about because of my previous leadership at a Mennonite Camp, MennoHaven. I enjoyed leading staff devotions there, and decided to bring some of that to school. At any rate, it was like a club—we even had an advisor. This was right around the time of the “no prayer in public schools” debates. We would have some kind of devotional together, people would share, and then we would pray for each other. So here I was, carrying my Bible into school, and leading this prayer meeting. It only lasted for about two months—but our intention was good. I remember thinking that this was how a person needed to pray—with this kind of structure.

I do not remember if it was the changing of the law, or lack of interest, but at some point the group stopped meeting. My Mom was all about fighting these laws to keep this group going. That is when I pulled out the argument about “If you would fight for prayer in schools, than you would need to fight for a group that wanted to pray to Satan.” She never did know what to do with me!!

At some point, between high school and now, I started to realize that when I simply thought of people—that this is “praying” for them. It has helped me to see that I actually do have an active prayer life. It has allowed me to not beat myself up because I am not sitting and doing some guided devotional. At the same time, I also realized I would like that kind—and would find a peace with that type of prayer. But I know I do not need to berate myself for not having any meditative prayer practice, either.

Now, prayer for me is when I think of someone and lift them up to God. I hold people in my heart and wish or pray or think of God’s arms wrapped around them, loving them, and caring for them. For me, this is a meaningful way to pray. This way of holding people does not happen for me at any regular time of day. It may occur when I’m doing some repetitive function, and need a way to engage my mind. For example, when I’m working out at the gym early in the morning. I also do this form of praying when I’m biking through the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, on my way to work. Often, this turns in to a prayer of thanksgiving:

“Thank God for the beauty of nature.”
“Thank God for all the shades of GREEN!”

I moved to the Lower Haight last June. And in the rainy months, I ride the 21 bus to and from work. On my way home from work, I am blessed to get off the bus at Hayes Street—at the top of Alamo Square Park. I am always amazed when I look around. I stand and look out over the city skyline—as though I am seeing it for the very first time.

“Thank God I live in San Francisco!” is the thought that runs through my mind.

And every time I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge and enjoy the rugged landscape, I am in awe of creation, of God’s awesome power. I see these signs of beauty, and find them to be reminders of God’s love and care. I am reminded of the passage in Matthew, about the lilies of the field, and how God cares for them. And God’s care for me—for us—is much greater.

Moments such as this—a glance, a glimpse, a view—are very grounding for me. This form of “Thanksgiving” prayer helps me to remember my blessings in life. It helps keep the challenges of living and working in perspective.

I also think that it’s only been recently that this process has become true prayer for me. I think my turning point around this was probably my year of grief, when a previous relationship ended. At that time, I realized that my thoughts were the same as talking with God. It was the simple act of letting go of my control, and receiving peace. I felt like I was given a deep sense of peace when I was able to release my own thought processes and make this discovery.

During this time, I was writing a lot in a journal. I was writing about my pain and my loss, and for it to be taken from me. I wrote about wanting to be held. I remember asking to be held in an embrace of love and comfort. Not really feeling the comfort, but believing I was truly being held—like a parent would hold a newborn or a small child. The act of writing about it helped me realize that I would be fine. I had a strong sense that if I could get the negative thoughts out of my own head and heart, then they could not eat at me—or consume me—and grow. If I could release the hate and offer it to God, then I knew that it would not engulf me. So journaling, also, became a key form of prayer.

During this darker period in my life, I was spending a lot of time on the beach at Crissy Field. This, too, allowed me to find joy in God’s creation. I would stand on the beach and sing—lines of different hymns that would bring me comfort. “Great is Thy Faithfulness” is one that came to me frequently.

It was this time of remembering blessings that started to allow me to be thankful for the different parts of my life. It has shown me that prayer happens all the time when we allow God to be present in us. Prayer happens all the time, when I allow God to be present in me. For me, the still small voice is God—the Spirit of strength and peace.

"Prayer, Spirituality, and Surfing"

2009-03-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

Fourth Sunday of Lent: "Teach us, Lord, to Pray"

Benjamin Bolanos

"If I were called in to construct a religion I should make use of water." Phillip Larkin[1]

This might come to a surprise to you but I have some trouble with meditation. I really can’t do it. I can’t sit there and try to clear my thoughts, relax, and then feel present. I kind of just get sleepy. Don’t get me wrong; I see the value in it for other people, just not for me. I’m not good at prayers either. I find it forced when I do it or meaningless or almost too ritualistic and full of language that feels contrite and prescribed. I’m a disaster to my preacher father. But there is hope for me. I find spiritual discipline in a somewhat unorthodox but common way: I physically need to be in the ocean on a 15 to 23 pound board (depending on conditions), wearing a 4/3 thick wetsuit, in 55 degree water, using all my mental and physical abilities to read waves, calculate swell direction, triangulate my position in the water, check tide changes, wind direction, currents, locate channels, rate abilities of other surfers to avoid collisions, grade the force of each wave, and then paddle into position given all these factors. Not to mention the shark factor. This is my spiritual discipline. So I should probably explain.

Surfing is the hardest and slowest learning curve of any sport. It takes dedication, discipline, courage, and physical and mental conditioning. No one will ever master surfing. No one will ever master surfing since there are so many many variables to surfing. But that in itself is the very thing keeps us surfers going. Perfecting our abilities so that we may enjoy this strange closeness to the ocean and the wave. We strive to be close to the wave. It’s this relational part of surfing that is quite remarkable.

I think all of us feel a mysterious longing for the sea as some kind of secret to our own identity or existence, says Peter Kreeft, author of Surfing and Spirituality. We pay good money to be near the ocean. We buy property. We take vacations to the beach. When we think of a respite we usually think of lying on white sand near water, basking in the sun, doing absolutely nothing but being present in that moment.

Likewise, we surfers share a love for the ocean, our playing field. But we fear the ocean, we respect it, we honor it. We pay homage to it. It's a relationship we find sometimes find extremely hard to articulate to non-surfers.

Allow me to articulate that relationship via a story. Every surfer has a story that grounded him or her for life. Here’s mine:

Joan Didion once wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."[2] But sometimes those stories begin to fail us. So we need new ones to remind ourselves that life is precious.

Spring 2005. I had the day off and decided to head to Pacifica. I had checked the report and the tide was a mid tide, which is good for parts in Pacifica, swell was from the NW and I could tell from the wave intervals from the buoys that they had some size to them. It was raining too. I know when it rains the winds change and move south to southwest, which in Pacifica creates some clean glassy waves. Perfect ideal conditions. I checked the line up and saw where the peaks were breaking and paddled out. I was dialed in that day. I knew where to position myself correctly and I knew how much paddling speed I needed to match the wave velocity. It was as if I could tell the future and make it happened. I was catching wave after wave, bottom turning and ripping it.

Then it happened. I was getting cocky. Humility comes at a price sometimes. The wave roaring toward me was a "living memory." It was born some thousand of miles away when a change in temperature produced a change in pressure. Air moves from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. That’s wind. When the wind flickers on the ocean surface it creates small ripples. Then those small ripples become larger and larger into they become waves, which makes this whole thing weird since it’s not the water itself traveling across the ocean but merely the memory of the original wind’s energy transmitted from one water particle to the next. So as I was catching that fateful wave, I was really hearing the sound of the past arriving in the present with me directly in its path.[3] Ummm. That can cause problems.

Toward the end of my session, I paddled into that wave. Now ideally you want to position yourself so that you get close to the peak of the wave but not too close. The peak is where the lip of the wave is about to crash and here is where the greatest transfer of energy is and getting to one’s feet beneath the lip requires a little nimbleness. You need to move from a flat position to an upright position in the shattering "micro-moments" it takes for this transfer to occur. Technically this requires a leap of faith. You need to push yourself up from the front of the board with your hands and simultaneously pushing the board downward into the steep wave, in my case I was pushing myself off a cliff. I made an error. As I raced down the wave and tried to bottom turn, which is a taking the whole energy of the initial drop, turning from the bottom of the wave and hoping you have the momentum to race up to the top of the wave and speed down the line,[4] the wave began to pitched forward. I looked up and it was a lot bigger than before and my first thought were not "oh wow, what a cool physical representation of wind and memory." It was more like "Blank blank and blank. Sweet Jesus! Get me out of this now!"

It was bad. It was like a house falling on top of me. I was tossed around like a sock caught in a washing machine. When I came up for air, I realized I was in the impact zone. I went under 4 times and the whole thing repeated itself again an again. I was losing air. I was getting tired. I was scared. I needed to relax but couldn’t. After the last submersion I had to make a break for it. I mustered all my remaining strength and jumped on my board and paddled like a madman over the approaching waves. I don’t remember how I made it out but I did. As a soon as I went over the last wave, everything stopped, as if Jesus had outstretched his hands and in one moment, he stilled the waters. Silence. Panting, gasping, lying on my board, I looked around and everyone had the same look and position as I had. I then saw some dolphins a distance away. I saw a bird swoop down and hit the ocean surface and fly out with a fish in its beak. A seal popped its head up and just stared. It stopped raining. And I lay there dumbfounded, wondering how I managed to survive. I sat up, thanked God and in my own way gave my respects to the sea and honored it. I felt strangely centered and at peace.

The calm and the storm. Humility. Solitude. "From a Jewish perspective, the ocean, the first thing God created, is the most powerful force in the world."[5] Thus, the ocean is a natural force stronger than the individual, a force that requires the athlete to surrender himself. To give in, to submit to the will of the God, to be humbled, to understand that god is the ocean, the vast sea where we seek solace, comfort, and wisdom. Thus surfers are part athletes, artists, and spiritual seekers.

Rabbi Nachum Shifren, author of "Surfing Rabbi: A Kabbalistic Quest for Soul," is a tall bearded man who rides a longboard with such grace, writes "If you want to know God, learn to surf. Do you think Tennis players feel like they’re getting spiritual fulfillment out of their matches? Does the mail department at Gun World have a hard time handling the letters from readers about the spirituality of firing a .357?" Surfing is really a transformative spiritual journey. Surfers believe since the ocean is where life began on this planet, the act of riding a wave is momentarily a connection to this living memory. It’s the real deal.

"Surfing has more moving parts than any other sport, and because of that it requires the same laser pinpoint focused concentration to ride a wave as it does to meditate."[6] When you take off on a wave, you are now at the mercy of the sea. In a split second, those surfing variables disappear. You disappear. You begin to dance on the board on a wave as you move to stay in trim, stay in the wave. You shift your body, feet, your concentration is so sharp that for just 10 seconds you become one with the vast sea and now glide through water like birds in the sky. And that moment is breathless, powerful, and very transformative. You feel that power of the ocean; you can hear it roar behind you and simultaneously feel its gentleness. It is this "presence" that surfers yearn for over and over. It calls to them.

My favorite time to surf is sundown or sunrise. It’s quiet, no wind, no people, no sound but just the crashing of waves. Just me, my board, and hopefully God. I think about patience, harmony, my kids, my wife, my parents, love, fear, impermanence, death, my childhood, my purpose, joys, or sometimes nothing at all. I just sit, wait and catch a wave. And I understand that every time I take off on a wave, I am partaking in the last moments of a wave that began thousands of miles away. It’s an awesome transformative experience.

Every time I leave the ocean or surfers leave the ocean, carrying his or her board, head down, board in one hand pressed against the hips, slowly walking back across the sand, the movement of the walk is contemplative, as if in a trance. As if the body and mind were renewed. And if you wait long enough, you’ll see a surfer turn around, watch the ocean for some time and in their own way give thanks and then head home. That image speaks volumes to me.

"So I, the surfer, in the sea symbolizes the soul, with which I 'surf' in God. The sea is God. The beach is the path to God. Surfing is the experience of God, or the spiritual life."[7]

_________________

[1] First line from Larkin’s Poem "Water"

[2] Joan Didion. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. Collection of nonfiction stories. Piece is also in "The White Album." Some of the stories reflect her loss of both parents, spouse, then daughter.

[3] Living memory concept comes from parts of Steven Kotler’s West of Jesus Novel. Description of wave and wind memory was captivating.

[4] Ibid., writing about surfing technique is hard and I find it boring. Kotler wrote those pieces quite nicely. However, wipe out stories are so common that they inevitably have common quotes and descriptions. Oh well.

[5] From "SurfingRabbi.com: A Kabbalistic Quest for Soul"

[6] Most sports have this component to them but it’s labeled "in the zone" or some other term. It’s the feeling of completely letting go as if it becomes automatic.

[7] Peter Kreeft. "Surfing and Spirituality" Catholic Education Resource Center.

"Prayer Personalities"

2009-03-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

Third Sunday of Lent: "Teach us, Lord, to Pray"
[Psalm 119 ]

Last Sunday, I invited you to think about prayer as a wheel… All these spokes radiate into the center, the hub. The hub of the wheel of prayer is what I called intentional awareness. Or an awareness of the Divine Presence. I was intentionally trying to use very simple, almost untheological language, because I wanted to look at prayer’s essence.

We’re going to talk about the spokes today. What leads us into that hub? What leads us into this awareness, into this Presence? What concepts about God and Divinity will resonate most with us? Creator God, brother Jesus, Spirit? Do we think of God as our Ground of Being, as Beloved Friend, as Liberator? Do we tend not to think of God in personal terms at all? Or does it have to be made concrete for us? What forms of prayer will lead us into this hub, into an awareness of Presence? Will it be silent meditation, small group sharing, reading and journaling, acts of service or justice-making?

Fittingly, given our wheel metaphor, there is a way of talking about these different prayer personalities that also uses the metaphor of the wheel. It’s been made popular by a writer named Corinne Ware.[1]

I want to first talk about these horizontal and vertical lines and the four quadrants they make. Each of those four quadrants represents a different spiritual type. I’ll also explain the funny-sounding words like apophatic and kataphatic. I was going to replace these words with more common ones, but I have a great fondness for exotic words. I think we need to use them from time to time to make sure they don’t go extinct.

The vertical axis is labeled speculative and affective. These two poles pose the question of how one goes about knowing. Do we know through via our rational mind? That’s the speculative pole. Or do we know through accessing our feelings? That’s the affective pole. For those of you familiar with the Myers Briggs personality test, these poles would correspond with the thinking/feeling functions. “Head” and “heart” would be another way to describe it. So, a “speculative” or “head” person would tend to gain their information about God, and life in general, through emphasizing logic and accumulated facts. A “heart” or “affective” person would tend to gain their information via instinct and intuitive feeling.

The horizontal line represents how we conceptualize Divinity. On the left, you have apophatic, from a Greek word that means “negative.” It refers to a person or a spiritual discipline that tends to think of God in non-concrete ways. God is more of a mystery, and any attempt to box God in by confining the Mystery to a particular image or concept is resisted. The purpose of apophatic spiritual disciplines is to empty oneself, empty the mind of concepts so that the God beyond all concepts can be experienced. Apophatic folks tend to be drawn to meditation: Zen, forms of Christian meditation. An apophatic-type person might really love the name God gives to Godself in story of burning bush: “I am who I am.” Or “I am Who I am Becoming.” That can be quite meaningful to an apophatic person, whereas it might leave a more kataphatic person quite cold. God as “Ground of Being.”

Apophatic spiritualities do use symbols for the Divine —they have to – but they will tend to be less anthropomorphic, and not as concrete. Perhaps creation-centered. Those metaphors we use for Spirit will probably work better: Wind, Fire, Breath.

At the opposite end of this scale is the Greek word kataphatic, translated as affirmative. It refers to the method of thinking most familiar to Western culture, in which God is revealed and knowable. In this way of thinking, we tend to see God or the Divine in concrete, often anthropomorphic terms – God is friend, the one who walks with us in the Garden in the cool of the evening. (The Bible is quite kataphatic, although it has its apophatic moments.) Or God is incarnate in Jesus, who walks with us, breaks bread with us, whom we can know and talk to. The hymn “What a friend we have in Jesus” is a very typical kataphatic hymn.

I tend toward the apophatic, and when I first came here as pastor, I had a bit of trouble with the joys and concerns prayer. That sort of verbal prayer, addressed to a person-like God, was not completely natural for me. But I didn’t think it would be OK to come up here, have you share your prayer concerns, and then just stand in silence and say my mantra. So I adjusted. And, in fact, my own understandings of how I can pray and my concepts of God were stretched. Though you may identify with one type, it is always good to be stretched.

So, let’s talk about the four quadrants these two continuums create, and the different spiritual types they represent. These descriptions are, of necessity, going to be a bit overdrawn. No one, I’m guessing, is just one spiritual type. We may likely have a dominant type, but we’ll also contain some of the other quadrants, too. My sense is also that at different times in our life, we may gravitate toward a certain spiritual type more than other.

This typology is used not only to talk about individuals but congregations. Congregations will tend toward one or two types. Perhaps even whole denominations. This will of necessity be brief, but we can talk about it more during Education Hour.

Type 1: Speculative/Kataphatic. Head Spirituality. Theologian.

They want to understand, make sense. If God and prayer are not presented to them in ways that make sense, forget about it. The intellect, in a way, is a kind of gate that their spiritual self must walk through before they can get to anything else.
This person loves intellectual order. They like things to be logical and consistent. They will examine the texts of our hymns to see if we are singing what we actually believe.
Highest spiritual moments might have come when you heard something that stirred you to understanding or in reading a passage that seemed to say exactly what felt true to you.
Jewish ideal of study-as-worship. They like Bible studies that dig deep. What was life like for the Biblical community when a given book or passage was written? What does that word mean in Greek and where and in what context is it used elsewhere in the Bible?
While types 2 or 3 “experience the Holy,” this type tries to make sense of that experience and name it. They codify and so preserve the faith story from generation to generation. They are our theologians, our scholars. Denominations: many mainline Protestant denominations, especially Presbyterians, who do things “decently and in good order.”

Prayer/Spiritual Juice: They will seek spiritual guidance mainly from words – sermons, books, scripture, study groups. Prayer in this quadrant is almost always language or word-based prayer, whether aloud or silent. “Reading can be the avenue of God’s speech.” They may want to learn Hebrew or Greek so they can read Bible in original language.

Danger: The danger is that faith can become a “head trip,” overly focused on the rational or the intellectual; avoiding feeling, or an interior connection with God. They might come across as dogmatic or dry.

Type 2: Affective/Kataphatic. Heart Spirituality.

God is still view in kataphatic terms – concrete terms – but now we’ve dropped into affective, or feeling, half of circle. It is heart combined with the concrete, real-life stuff.
Lot of feeling here. Lots of devotion. Experiences highs and lows in religious feeling. They are looking for things that will give them an emotionally moving experience. Think charismatic churches, and evangelical churches, both African-American and white.
Their theology emphasizes the anthropomorphic representation of God. A type 2 person may talk about their “daily walk with Jesus.” Rumi, whom I like to quote, is, I believe,also a type 2 spiritual person. He talks about the Divine as his Friend, his Beloved, as the lap on whom he lays his head. Very relational, very intimate.

Prayer/Spiritual Juice: Worship may include a lot of music, and a feeling of warmth, energy and freedom of expression. Prayer is still mainly with words in this quadrant, but less formal than in type 1. Prayers in church or alone often extemporaneous, as opposed to the theologically correct prayers from the prayer book of type 1. Drawn to singing, use of memory and imagination.

Danger: Pietism. While a kataphatic of the mind may say, “My doctrine is purer than yours,” a kataphatic of the heart may say: “My walk with Jesus is closer than yours.”
Smugness about how real their relationship with Jesus/God is, and they may believe that anyone who doesn’t have their emotional energy is second rate. You have to relate to my God my way. If you’ve not had the “born again” experience then you’re not really saved.

Type 3: Affective/Apophatic. Mystic Spirituality.

Still within the feeling experience, but move into apophatic knowing. Instead of God that possesses characteristic to humans, God is ineffable, unnamable, vast. God’s statement to Moses: “I am who I am” makes perfect sense to this person. Or they may tend to see God as the Creative Force.
The aim is union with the Holy, even when one knows that this is not completely achievable. Ware: These people seem to be perpetually on a journey. In fact journey is one of their favorite words.
Contemplative, introspective, intuitive. Great gift is they can penetrate past the temporal, to engage in a “deeper sort of knowing.”
They are pretty comfortable with things not making sense, whereas type1 isn’t satisfied until they can understand. Prefer prayer group to study group.

Prayer: Like simplicity and silence in worship. Empty mind, simply be in presence of the Holy. Whereas type 2 might like the stimulation of praise band, this type might recoil. It’s too much. They can’t hear internally when it’s too loud out there. Prayer is less about what I’m expressing or saying, than it is about being receptive. Here “hearing from God” rather than “speaking to God” is prominent.

Danger: Quietism, an exaggerated retreat from reality and interaction with world. Go into my cave and be alone there. They have to guard against being too self-absorbed and self-protective. Not want to share gifts with world because that’s messy and distracting.

Type 4: Speculative/Apophatic. Kingdom spirituality.

Smallest group. The mystical, apophatic experience coupled with an intellectual mode of gathering data produces an active visionary who is single-minded – has a deeply focused, almost crusading type of spirituality.
They like intellectual stimulation – people with original ideas, especially on anything connected with issues they care about and social change.
They care less about affiliation with organized religion than either types 1 or 2 – many faith communities simply aren’t engaged enough in changing society for them.
Their aim is to simply obey God and to witness to God’s coming reign. Concerned with justice on earth, the transformation of society. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
They are the praying activists. Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King. Some Mennonites! Perhaps there’s a reason we’re so small…

Prayer: Action. “My work and my prayer are one.” “I pray with my hands and feet.” Need prayer more than they may think because action and hunger for results can overtake them. In prayer, they need to continue to give up control to God or they could become quite bitter and angry at how “uncaring” other Christians are, who are not as single-minded and focused on transforming society as they are. Which leads to the…

Danger: Encratism, a moralistic and unrelenting tunnel-vision. If you are not supporting the cause with the same selflessness and energy as they are, you are not a part of their world. They may make us feel guilty, even as we admire them. They offer judgment and cause others to be more responsible. But they can sometimes be overly critical, wounding, and lose support of others.

A wheel is stronger the more spokes it has. And the Christian community is stronger with all of these types. They each offer gifts. We need theologians, the exuberant witnesses to God’s love, the mystics, the crusaders. We need those people to be as fully themselves, and as fully connected to the Divine as possible. May we each come to know God deeply through our thinking, our loving, our being, our doing. Amen.
____________

[1] Discover Your Spiritual Type: A Guide to Individual and Congregational Growth, by Corinne Ware (Alban Institute, 1995).

“A Hundred Ways to Pray”

2009-03-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

Second Sunday of Lent: "Teach us, Lord, to Pray"
[Psalm 136]

A poem from Rumi:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer from the wall.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundreds ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. There are a hundred ways to pray. In fact, since I believe that it’s true that anything can be prayer – depending on what consciousness we’re bringing to what we are doing – then, certainly there are more than a hundred.

But, we tend to put prayer in a box. We limit it to just a few, religiously sanctioned activities. Unfortunately, I think the church may reinforce the perception that there are far fewer than 100 ways to pray. Most prayer in churches is done one way: verbally, in a prayer that is addressed to a personal deity usually known as God, although sometimes Jesus or Spirit. We’ve been practicing a different one, too, during Lent – the cave of the heart prayer. But if prayer is not just something that begins with “O God” and ends with “In Jesus’ name”…. if prayer is not just ringing a bell and sitting in silent contemplation… if prayer is not just pleading to God to heal our loved one who has cancer… then what is it?

I want us to imagine prayer as a wheel. At the center of the wheel is the hub, and radiating out from it are a spokes. The spokes represent the many ways of entering the hub, the center, of prayer. The spokes represent the practices or forms of prayer, and the theologies of prayer that get us into that center. There’s a lot of spokes that radiate toward that hub; there’s one hub.

I want to talk about that hub in the simplest way we can. I think it’s helpful to distill confusing things (which I think prayer is for some of us) down to its simplest form, so that you can see it more clearly. So I want to offer a distilled definition of prayer that we can dress up later with specific theologies and specific practices. First, a story.

As you know, years ago, I learned to meditate, and it changed my life. But, post-Patrick, I have simply not had the time. If I want to get in other forms of self-care, like exercise in the morning, my prayer life has to give. My compromise with myself is that I meditate or do some form of prayer three mornings a week and exercise the other two mornings.

I was talking about this compromise recently to a friend of mine from New Mexico, Geneva, who is studying to become a spiritual director at San Francisco Theological Seminary. She told me that that day, one of her professors had given her a definition of prayer. Prayer, at its most simple, was “intentional awareness.” At its core, prayer is simply about intentionally being aware – it doesn’t even say what we’re aware of. That’s the beauty of it. For you, it might be being aware of the presence of Christ; for you, it might be awareness of the present moment; for you, it might be presence of the animating force in creation; for you, it might be awareness of Love. Prayer is intentionally bringing our usual mode of perception or awareness or consciousness to another level.

When I heard this definition from my friend, I thought of my spiritual director saying that she prays while she is walking. Now, I’m sure in part, she’s walking to get exercise. But, as she’s walking, she’s not focusing her awareness on keeping her heart rate up, making sure she’s across the aerobic threshold, and she’s also not going over her shopping list or to-do list. As she walks, she intentionally centers her awareness on the Divine – on Spirit, on however she talks about that. And, as she walks, she holds her directees and others in that awareness, in that presence of the something more she’s aware of.

Now, I’ve heard this definition of prayer as intentional awareness before, and it always made sense to me. But somehow, hearing it again just recently, broke something open in me. Some boxes I had put around prayer in my mind fell apart. I started laughing, and I realize what a nut I had been to say that I pray three times a week, and the other two days I exercise. Because of course, my Jazzercise is my prayer, too. In fact, some of my deepest moments of prayer lately have come as I’m dancing to some idiotic Britney Spears song. I’ll be dancing, moving my hips, and I’ll find myself being so grateful. Grateful for a body that can still do this….

Those moments of grace – where I fall into prayer without intending to do so – made me realize even more that it was nutty to segment my mornings into prayer and nonpayer mornings, it could all be prayer. And so, I still go to exercise class, but now I intentionally do it with an “attitude of gratitude” and joy. I say, in my heart, “God, this is my prayer to you. Thanks that I can still pray in this way.” And on those mornings when I don’t even feel like I have time to pray whether through exercise or meditation, I try to remember to at least not go to the study right away and begin reading or answer emails or thinking about my sermon. I try to remember to light a candle or ring my meditation bell or say a small inward prayer, “God, this day is yours. Let everything I do today be a part of helping your realm come on earth as it is in heaven.” Or I try to feel my own breath, or hear the silence around me. To notice a bird singing. I stop, briefly, to kneel and kiss the ground. And then I begin.

That’s why I said last week that we always, always have time enough to pray. Because all it takes is setting our intentional awareness, of dropping our consciousness down to a different place. (Not that this is something you are going to get right awy – it’s why practicing a form of prayer over time is so helpful, because changing our consciousness to the “heart” level, to the “prayer” level, takes practice.)

Three hundred years ago, a man named Nicholas Herman, living in France, entered a Carmelite monastery and discovered the power of intentional awareness. Now, Brother Lawrence – as he came to be known – was perhaps not what you might have thought of as a very good religious person, as a very good pray-er. He himself said that books on the spiritual life only served to confuse him. He also, he said, was no good at the daily prayers the monks went through. While he “dutifully completed the three hours of prayer and meditation required of the monks in his order each day, he confessed that afterward he could not have said what it had all been about.”[1]

Because he found the usual talk and practice of prayer so confusing, he resolved simply to give himself wholly to God no matter what he was doing. And so, he made pancakes thinking of God, bought wine thinking of God, and cobbled shoes thinking of God. He kept his attention, as much as he could, aware of God’s presence. We don’t know precisely what “God” meant to him – what image or concept did that bring to mind? But it is clear that, whatever his image or concept of God, the presence was one of love.

By practicing the presence of Love, Brother Lawrence said that he discovered such joy “that in order to restrain it and keep from revealing it, I am forced into childish actions that appear more like madness than devotion.” If he had to describe this joy he experienced, he said, he would call it being nursed by God, for the indescribable sweetness that he experienced at God’s breast. Ironically enough, the man who was confused by spiritual books ended up writing a small volume called “The Practice of the Presence of God” that has become a spiritual classic.

The writer Barbara Brown Taylor was once called one of the top ten preachers in the English language. She calls herself an absolute failure at any sort of conventional prayer, and takes great solace in Brother Lawrence’s idea of “practicing the presence of God.” Prayer, then, she says, is simply “waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing. When I am fully alert to whatever or whoever is right in front of me; when I am electrically aware of the tremendous gift of being alive; when I am able to give myself wholly to the moment I am in, then I am in prayer. Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.”

Each of us is going to come into that presence, come into that state of awareness in different ways. Each of us is going to find that certain things we do, certain practices, help us enter that state of awareness more readily than other things. That’s where you get books like “50 Ways to Pray.” And each of us is going to name that presence, that awareness, in different ways. God, Christ, Spirit, Ground of Being, Compassion, Divine Mother, the present moment, the… We’re going to talk more those different practices and different theologies next Sunday, when we talk about our different prayer personalities.

Now, I am aware that this expansive definition of prayer as intentional awareness does not answer – in fact doesn’t even try to answer -- the most perplexing question we may have about prayer, namely: Does it work? And the question may even seem sort of nonsensical in light of the definition. Does intentional awareness work? Work what? Intentional awareness is the point in and of itself. (Joseph Campbell story, being interviewed by Bill Moyers.)

But, having said that – when our child is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease – you can bet we want to know if prayer works. It’s not an irrelevant question. So, we’re going to talk about this during Education Hour – because I think that question is best answered when we talk from our own lived experience, share our own stories.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Or confused, distracted. Or expectant. Happy to greet the day. Don’t open the door to your office, or the kitchen, or your car and begin working. Don’t immediately open your mind to all that must be done today, accomplished, faced. Take down the dulcimer. Sing a song. Walk in the park. Stroke your child’s cheek. Eat an orange. Go into the cave of your heart, and open it to the beauty of all that is. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Amen.
___________

[1] From Barbara Brown Taylor’s book An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.

"A Long, Loving Look at Prayer"

2009-03-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

First Sunday of Lent: "Teach us, Lord, to Pray "

Prayer changed my life. Two weeks ago, I told you about a time in my 30s when I was in a lot of pain. I was desperately trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life, and everything I was trying was failing. On a hilltop in Berkeley, about 14 years ago, I finally surrendered – I gave up. I poured out my need to a God in whom I didn’t even really believe. And help came, eventually. The “milk of loving” – to quote the poem Rumi whom I mentioned two weeks ago– began to flow toward me, and I opened my mouth wide and drank

Now, it was both that simple, and not that simple. Some of you may know that newborn babies don’t automatically know how to nurse. There is a basic suckling instinct that all human beings – indeed, all mammals – are born with. That instinct is very strong. Babies begin sucking their thumb in the womb, before they are even born. Good thing, too, that we’d have this instinct because we’d die without it. But learning to “latch on” is a bit of an art, and a learned skill. Some babies get it right away, some don’t. And for either sort of infant, nursing gets a lot easier with practice.

Like a newborn, I had to learn how to drink. And that happened primarily, for me, when I learned to pray. For years I had been drawn to silent prayer, to meditation. I would occasionally get a book, read it, and then attempt to do it myself. Those attempts lasted, on average, about two days. Sometimes more. Often less. I certainly had the instinct, the desire to be fed in this way – but I didn’t quite have the skill. I couldn’t quite latch on.

At least not on my own. Grace came into my life when, a few months after my hilltop surrender, I discovered Hesed, a Christian meditation community only 10 minutes from where I lived at the time. For almost four months, I went to Hesed two to three times a week to pray. And with just a bit of guidance and the supportive presence of other meditators, I got it. In this community of grace, I was able to practice praying until I could do it on my own.

I still inwardly gasp when I reflect on how much prayer changed my life. Within a year of taking up this practice, I heard a call to ministry. My vocation had found me. And I found myself released from the anxieties and compulsions that had hounded me for much of my adult life. When I read over my pre-prayer journals, I can almost not recognize the young woman who was so hard on herself, so unsure of the validity of her existence. Through prayer, I became aware of a desire in me that went deeper that even finding a vocation. A short poem by the writer Raymond Carver, written weeks before he died of cancer, summarized that desire. I kept the poem tacked on the shelf above my desk. Called “Late Fragment,” it read:

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

I wanted to call and feel myself beloved on the earth. I wanted the milk of loving to flow, and I wanted to know how to drink it. And, through prayer, I did learn. And I did – and feel myself beloved on this earth.

Prayer can change your life. Maybe not right away. But, slowly, over time, prayer can lead us into the deepest heart of God, into the heart of creation, into the heart of ourselves. I believe that, with all my heart.

But I also know that prayer, while simple, is not that simple. For we’re not newborns, after all, with an uncomplicated desire for prayer. Most of us have two, three, four decades of experience that cloud that simple desire, that make it difficult to just be present to the Presence in whom we live and move and have our being.

What keeps us from that presence? A couple of Sundays ago during Education Hour, Tina Rieman told of a remarkable practice at her workplace called “clearing.” At the beginning of every shift, each staffperson meets for 10 minutes with their supervisor to answer the question, “What is keeping you from being fully present here today?” It’s a chance to clear the air – to vent about something that happened on the way to work that day, to process a bad interaction with a co-worker from the day before.

So let’s do a “clearing” with prayer. Let’s name those obstacles to presence. We may not get rid of them, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is to make a prayer of them. To take a “long, loving look” – as one person has defined prayer -- at our obstacles to prayer.

(Pick up clock) Time. This is perhaps one of the first obstacles that pop up when we start thinking about prayer. We’re just too busy, aren’t we? Who has time to pray? Who has time to learn how to pray? Who has the discipline to get up early to do something they may feel ambivalent about doing anyway?

Let’s take a long, loving look at time. We wake up, looking at the clock, and already our mind starts spinning with the things we must do. Time tasks us. It trails us. We trail it. Like a cat trying to catch her own tail, we never quite get there – never quite get to that moment of spaciousness, that moment beyond time where we can just breathe and be. That time seems always beyond reach.

Let’s take a deep breath. Again. There. That didn’t take too much time, did it? That prayer of preparation we did? That was about five minutes. Can we trust that in the midst of our tail-chasing, eternity waits for us? Like the cat who stops running in circles and finds a soft pillow in the sunshine – we, too, can stop and bathe in the glow of eternal time any time we want. Can we trust that there is always, always time enough for prayer?

(Pick up bag). Baggage. Specifically, theological baggage (cross on bag). There’s a lot in this bag. Let’s take a long, loving look at it.

(gavel) Judgment. We may not want to pray to a God, or to be in the presence of a God whom we primarily see as a judgmental, authoritarian figure. And who can blame us? If that’s who God is for us -- a judge who is interested in us only when we are bad, a “parent” in whose presence we feel like a naughty child deserving punishment -- then not praying is a gift of grace. Can we turn a compassionate gaze toward that image of a judging God? Can we lovingly look at the child who was taught to believe in it? Can we attempt to see the God beyond this image, the one who weeps that Her face has been so distorted?

(photo) What’s this? Why, it’s a photograph of Rick Warren. Rick Warren, thanks to Barack Obama, is probably the most famous evangelical in the United States right now. I know that for some of us, his prayer at the inauguration made us want to cringe. If he represents what “Christian prayer” is about, then, please, can we just skip ahead to Joseph Lowery? That will make us feel less like putting a bag over our head for being Christian.

Many progressive Mennonites and Protestants have big baggage with prayer that has developed out of a reaction to evangelicalism. Joe Driskill, no relation to our Ed, is a professor at the Pacific School of Religion. He tells a story about a time he gave a guest sermon on prayer at a mainline Protestant church. Afterward, an older woman came up to him. For 25 years this woman told him, she had been getting up in the middle of the night to take care of a son with special needs. As she climbed the stairs back to her bedroom, she would often sit down to catch her breath. Over time, this rest became a time of prayer for her. In the quiet stillness of her home, she would draw near to God. It gradually became the most important time of her day, the time she received the strength she needed to carry on with her responsibilities.
“I have been praying this way for 20 years,” she told Joe, “and never once have I felt I could tell anyone in this church about this experience. I was afraid they would think I was a Bible thumper if I said anything about it.”[1]

I cringe when I think that perhaps some of you have a story like this woman and have felt unable to share it here, for fear of the same reaction. I pray that isn’t the case, but I wonder.

So, let’s take a long, loving look at this baggage about evangelicalism and prayer. One of the foundations of evangelical prayer is that a loving God pays attention to me; that I can have a personal relationship with a deity who cares about what happens in my life. So, we can go to this Deity in prayer. I think some of us have a problem with this. We have a hard time believing the Creator of the Universe would bother with the mundane matters of our life. How can we justify such a belief, especially when such great suffering in the world goes unmet? If God is not saving the victims of genocide in Darfur, then why would God mess around with my relatively little concerns?

If we look long enough, we see in these questions a deep compassion for those who suffer, a holy anger at all that is not right in the world, a longing for justice and peace.

I wonder, too, if we have a reaction to evangelical prayer because it sometimes seems a bit too certain, even idolatrous. How can they be so sure they know what God wants? How did they get a hotline to God? If we look long enough at this, we see a deep sense of the holiness and mystery of God. And we can also see a humble recognition of our propensity toward sin – that is, a recognition that we humans miss the mark. That we may think we know what God wants but may, in reality, we may be far off.

Can we hold onto that longing for justice and that recognition of God’s mystery and still believe that we can have an experiential relationship with the holy? Can we open our hearts to the possibility that this God of justice and mystery may, in fact, want to a relationship with us? Many of us love the hymn “I sought the Lord.” Perhaps our love for that hymn is testament to the fact that we do believe, or want to believe, this. Listen to its words, and sing with me if you wish…. “I sought the Lord and afterward I knew, He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me. It t’was not I who found, O Saviour true. No, I was found of Thee.”

And that brings us to our final obstacle. There are certainly more. The bag still has stuff in it. But this is the last one I’ll mention today. (get out mask). Perhaps we don’t want to be found by God or Jesus. Perhaps we don’t want to take off the mask and be seen for who we really are. Perhaps that just feels too vulnerable. Too scary. And so, let’s take a long, loving look at that fear. We don’t have to coax it, or convince it, or cajole it. But can we look at it? Can we, perhaps, love it?

“I find, I walk, I love, but oh the whole of love is but my answer, Lord, to thee! For thou wert long beforehand with my soul, always thou lovedst me.” (verse 3 of “I sought the Lord”
Amen.

[1] This story comes from Joe’s book Protestant Spiritual Exercises: Theology, History and Practice.

“God of the Waters”

2009-01-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

Genesis 1:1-5, Psalm 29, Mark 1:4-11

For the most part, our lives are low-key, routine, perhaps even a bit boring. We wake up, leave for work or school, come home, eat dinner and do approximately the same thing every evening: homework or helping with it, reading a book or watching TV, surfing the Web or dining with friends — some variation on a theme. Even for those of us with less predictable daily schedules, we have our menu of options, and rarely do we order off menu. And, for the most part, we like it this way. We like the safety and security of knowing what’s coming, of having our lives be predictable.

And then one day, the smooth fabric of our lives gets torn apart. We get a phone call telling us that both of our parents have been killed in a car accident. The doctor says, “I think it’s cancer. Can you come for a biopsy?” We find out that our unborn child has severe chromosomal abnormalities. We forget, when times are familiar, that all these unfamiliar times are also part of our lives, even though we are reminded each Sunday during our joys and concerns time of what could happen. Indeed, every example I just mentioned above was one we prayed about just last Sunday. We forget, as perhaps we need to, that there are those times when the heavens are torn apart, and we are battered by storms we couldn’t see coming. When we hear the roar of the thunder and the crack of the cedars breaking. When we feel stripped bare, like a forest after a thunderstorm. When the raging waters threaten to drown us or those we love.

These raging waters run through all three of our lection passages for this morning. Though coming very different parts of the Bible, they are united in a common fear of the waters of chaos. Water is a primordial force that is both something we need to live yet terrible and terrifying when uncontained. In Scripture, it is a common metaphor for the chaos of life. The sea is the “great deep” in the psalms, an “unfathomable and alien realm, its life swathed in darkness and mystery.”[1] In fact, in the beginning all is water, all is chaos, as we hear in our creation myth from Genesis: watery deeps, dark and formless.

The psalmist (who wrote our Psalm 29, our call to worship) uses the metaphor of water in the form of a fierce thunderstorm to talk about the fundamental powers that threaten human life. We don’t get many thunderstorms here in northern California, but I grew up in a part of the country that does. The last time I went home, a huge summer thunderstorm woke me up on night in the valley where my parents live. With a boom that rolled from one end of the valley to the other, with flashes of lightning that made half the sky purple with light, with winds that twisted tall trees, with rain so full it was if the sky had been slashed open — it’s no wonder that the author of this psalm chose a thunderstorm to represent the chaos that threatens us, that shakes us up, that upends our lives.

Interestingly, Hebrew liturgists who compiled the book of psalms lifted Psalm 29 almost without change from a Canaanite hymn to Baal, the storm god. As one commentator said, “Such blatant liturgical borrowing expresses a deep sense of legitimate religious commonality. Hebrew and Canaanite (people) expressed shared religious sensibilities in response to the human condition – dependence on the uncontrollable power that is both the source of life and (seemingly) a threat to it.”

In other words, the God who is seen as causing the raging storm is also the God that is supposed to be protecting us from it. The God who causes the thunderstorms that break mighty cedars is also the God that we are supposed to trust with out vulnerable lives. How do you trust a force so powerful it could snap your life in two without a thought? How do you give yourself over to the waters that you need to survive but that could also drown you?

For the most part, Jesus’ first years were pretty boring. There is almost nothing written about them, save for the time he stayed too long in the synagogue when he was 12. He was likely learning a trade from his father, and practicing it. Getting up, going to work, coming home. And then, one day, he visits a preacher in the desert, steps into the waters, and the heavens are torn apart. Finally, we have a response to our cry from Advent: “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” And what comes down on Jesus is not a storm, or a flood, but a dove, symbol of peace, and words of love: “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

Now, we know that Jesus’ life after his baptism is not going to be more peaceful, at least on the surface of things. In fact, his boring life is going to get very unboring, very unfamiliar, as are the lives of all who will follow him. When Jesus steps into the waters of the Jordan, he steps into the waters of chaos. I’m betting Jesus knew this. I think he had at least an inkling of what he was getting into. But I believe he also knew in the core of his being that the God of the waters was trustworthy, that the Creator God of power and might and thunderstorms and floods was also “Abba” — a Father God, a Mother God, of God of love. A power that could be trusted with his life.

For when he stepped into those waters, he would have remembered the old, old story — the one we heard today — that in the beginning, upon the face of the deep water, God’s Spirit moved. That God made light to illuminate the darkness and to border it. And that (in the part of the old story that comes right after today’s reading) God contains and controls the waters — installing a dome called to the Sky to separate them out and then gathering the waters under the sky in one place so that dry land could appear. So that solid ground could be formed. He would have remembered that God can bring order to what was dark chaos.

And Jesus would have remembered another old story — that he was stepping into the waters of the Jordan, the river that his people crossed as God led them from exile in the wilderness into the promised land, the land of milk and honey. He would have remembered, too, that this same God had once led them out of slavery through the mighty and dangerous waters of the Red Sea. He would have remembered that God leads Her people safely through deep waters.

As Jesus steps down into the waters of the Jordan, he steps down into the waters of chaos and trusts that God will not let him drown. He trusts the God who calls him by name — the “Beloved.” And he spends the rest of his life bearing witness to this love, and inviting us to trust its power.

None of us is a stranger to thunderstorms, to the things that shake the foundations of our lives and blow away our security. None of us a stranger to the floods that threaten to swamp us. But over against all that shakes us to the core, all that threatens to wash away the very foundations of life,” Jesus invites us to trust the God who says (from Isaiah): “I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” Amen.

[1] This quotation, and some of the ideas in this sermon, come from Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Volume 4.

2008-12-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

Third Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11, Psalm 126

A minister in Santa Fe tells the story of a drought she lived through in New Mexico. For ten long years, there was almost no rain, in a land of little rain to begin with. Centuries-old pinyon trees that covered the hills throughout northern New Mexico became susceptible to bark beetles and died by the thousands. A once green landscape turned grey with dead trees. For the people who lived there, she said, it felt like a death in the family.

Then one summer, it rained. Within days – days! – fields of wildflowers sprang up. Yellow cow-pen daises, purple asters. People couldn’t believe their eyes. Every patch of ground was covered with wildflowers that had not been seen in a century. It turns out that rain alone was not the reason for this riot of color. The needles of the dead pinyon trees provided mulch and nutrients needed by the seeds that had lain dormant for decades. The trees would never be restored, but their death gave birth to new beauty as far as the eye could see. [1]

We have been journeying with the ancient people of Israel during Advent, and today we are entering the devastated, grey desert of their former homeland with them. After decades of exile in Babylon, they have started to return home – but to a home that had been destroyed, sometimes down to the last block, by the Babylonian army. There is joy here, deep joy. But there is also an awful lot of devastation to repair, a lot of homes and cities to restore. Think of an Iraqi refugee coming home to a house reduced to rubble. How quickly could the joy turn to weariness over the sheer amount of work to be done, over how much had been lost?

And so we hear in the psalm, which was written after their return home from exile, both of these notes. That high note of joy: mouths filled with laughter, tongues loosed in shouts of joy. Returning refugees so deliriously happy they wonder if they are dreaming.

And yet, only one verse later, we hear the lower note of pain, of need: “Restore our fortunes, O God, like the watercourses in the Negeb. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.” It’s interesting to note the magnitude of the people’s request in this psalm. The Negeb is a desert in that region whose very name means “dry,” “parched.” It is one of the hottest, most desolate deserts around. The people’s plea is for not just springs, but watercourses – rivers of water – to flow again in this dessicated land. And they plea not just for gladness or mirth but for the Hebrew word rinnah – which means a loud cry, a proclamation of joy, a shout of victory. Three times in this short psalm, the writer refers to this rinnah – translated here as shouts of joy.[2] Not smiles, not quiet contentment. The people are asking for coursing rivers of joy -- for fields of long-dormant wildflowers -- in the midst of their desert.

In the passage from Isaiah, then, we hear God’s promise to these joyful, devastated people via the prophet: (read Isaiah)

Yes, the prophet promises, the seeds of their tears will bear a harvest of joy. In fact, the prophet piles on the metaphors in his attempt to communicate just how lavish this restoration will be: the community will no longer wear sackcloth and ashes but the festive dress reserved for a bride and bridegroom – rich robes, garlands of flowers, necklaces of jewels. The community will be like “oaks of righteousness” – long-lived, large trees with spreading branches. Their homeland will no longer be a grey desolate desert but a garden spot.

But there’s one more metaphor, one more promise. The restored people who were once themselves the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the captive will become priests, will become ministers to the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the captive. The renewed, restored people will serve as intermediaries between God and all who need God’s restoration. God will use them, use their pain, use their exile, use their oppression to comfort and free others. More than simply being restored, they will become the restorers.

When one of you tells me of a pain so deep it could devastate your life, I take note. I start watching, and waiting. What is going to grow from this devastated place? If the pain can be endured, experienced and finally embraced, something always starts growing. The tears of grief or bitterness or shame or loneliness water the seeds, and eventually flowers, long dormant, begin to bloom. The writers of the Psalms believed that weeping or keening while you planted the crops made them more productive. And I believe the same thing is true in our spiritual life. The tears of devastation can bring forth a vigorous, productive flowering… the fruit of compassion, the fruit of wisdom. They can bring forth the fruit of a ministry, sometimes even a calling.

Think of the person who has endured the death of a loved one who can then comfort those who similarly mourn. The abused child who becomes a counselor binding up the wounds of the next generation of abused children. The person scarred by the church who goes on to minister with a special sensitivity to those whose hearts the church continues to break. The gay man who spends the first part of his life in a fearful closet and spends the second part as a fearless liberator, freeing those captive to ignorance and shame, changing a city called San Francisco and the world. More than simply being restored, they become the restorers. Their former brokenness becomes the mulch that brings forth the new growth, the new creation.

The pinyon pines are dead. The houses are rubble. The promise is not that things will be restored to their original state. The promise given to Israel, and to us, is that from death, from devastation – even the devastations of many generations – a new creation can come. And the promise given to Israel, and to us, is that God has called us to be the community of priests, the community of ministers, that raises up the former devastations. Using our tears as long-needed rain, God causes a desert to bloom.

Amen.

[1] From Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary.
[2] Ibid.

“Complex Comfort”

2008-12-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-18

I thank God every day that I am still able to fix everything in Patrick’s life through simple comforts – a kiss where it aches, a particularly goofy facial expression, a cookie that magically makes all the hurt go away. These are the simple comforts of childhood and, thankfully, as we age, these simple things – a kiss, a joke, a sweet treat – can still provide comfort. During a rough patch, one of you said to me recently, “I just can’t wait to come to church on Sunday. I know I’ll feel better there.” The simple comfort of community – what a gift. A hand on the shoulder, a hug, a hymn. A listening ear. Thank God for simple comforts.

In our Hebrew scripture text for today, the people of Israel are finally getting some comfort. As I mentioned last week, this part of Isaiah – called Second Isaiah – was written after Israel’s homeland had been destroyed and the people deported into exile in Babylon. It is the lowest period in their life as a people thus far, made doubly harsh since they believe their exile it is due to their own sin. If only they had been faithful to God, this would not have happened. But finally, after decades in exile, they hear, these words: “Comfort, O comfort my people,” says the prophet.. “Speak tenderly to her. Tell her that she has paid her penalty, that she has served her term.” The prophet Isaiah is telling them that their time of exile is almost over, that God will save them, that they will be able to go home.

The author of Mark uses some of Isaiah’s words to speak his own words of comfort almost 600 years later. The person speaking these words is John the Baptist who, for Mark, is like the voice that announces comfort to the exiles in Babylon. “Although first-century Jews were not in exile, they were under foreign occupation. It was if the Babylonian exile had followed them home.”[1] And so John tells these people that a powerful one is coming, the promised Messiah, the one – so people thought – who would rescue them from occupation.

The people of Israel in both Isaiah and Mark’s time are a people defined by a tragic past, enduring a painful present. Isaiah and John both give them a future tense – they give them hope. You will be going home. Your savior is coming. But the comfort being offered is not a simple kind of comfort – like a kiss that makes it all go away. The comfort offered to the people is a more complex comfort.

True, God is coming to save them, says Isaiah. But this God is a complicated God – both a tender God, who feeds her flock like a shepherd, gathering the lambs into her bosom – and a God who “comes with might,” who demands that the “valleys and mountains of human inequality be leveled out.” This is a God “for whom bringing comfort can also involve upsetting those who have grown comfortable with status quo living”[2] – or, as the saying goes, a God who will afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. God’s future is coming – but, depending on who you are, you may not find it, at least initially, very comfortable. This is a complex kind of comfort.

True, your Messiah is coming, John says. But some paths need to be made straight in the meantime. John is not talking about political or military preparations here – straightening highways so that the liberator’s army can march through – cleaning up corrupt political establishments – in other words, preparations the people might be expecting to hear about, given the imminent arrival of a liberator. No, the paths needing to be straightened are much more personal. You need to take stock of your lives, John says – where are you living in wrong relationship? What needs to be healed? What needs to be confessed? What needs to be forgiven? This is a complex kind of comfort.

The people have been given a future tense. A hopeless people have been given hope. But they have a lot of preparation to do in the present, during this threshold time between what has been and what will be. And it is not easy, simple work. It demands the rearranging of priorities and relationships as they prepare for the inbreaking of God into their lives and their world.

And so this is the complex comfort of Advent, this threshold time between what has been and what will be. We are expecting the birth of Immanuel, God with us. We have a lot of work to do to prepare.

When I was pregnant with Patrick, after 2 ½ years of trying to conceive, my overwhelming emotion was ambivalence. I’ve talked to enough of us who have been pregnant to know that I am not alone in this. In fact, during my pregnancy I read a book by a midwife who said that the number one emotion pregnant women report experiencing is not joy but ambivalence. It was a great relief to me. I’d have fleeting moments of joy, but for the most part I was anxious and just sort of… confused. This thing that was happening in me and to me was bigger than anything I’d ever experienced before. It’s like my mind couldn’t quite make sense of it: Who am I? Who am I becoming? How am I changing? And in the midst of all these ponderings, I was busy preparing – doing the actual physical work of making space for a new person in our life.

Pregnancy is one of the classic “liminal” or threshold states, so no wonder it is the overriding metaphor for Advent. A liminal state – that place where we are in transition, where we are in between – is characterized by ambiguity, openness, indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed. It is a sometimes scary, sometimes hopeful, often unpredictable. It offers a mix of possibility and peril.[3] We needn’t have been expecting a child to have had liminal moments – being a teenager, being in between jobs, being on pilgrimage, moving to a new place, moving into a new phase of our lives – these are all liminal or threshold states. As a country, we are in a liminal state right now – not just between presidents but between two different visions for who we are as a people.

And as a people on a journey of spirit, we are in that place right now. Our Advent work invites us to open ourselves to the complex comfort of preparing for the promised one: What has to be made low and lifted up in you? What needs comfort, what needs challenge? What needs to be reprioritized, healed, forgiven? What future tense might God be drawing you toward? What way is God making within and through you? What way are you making for God?

[1] From Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary.
[2] From the Advent worship resources found in Leader magazine, Fall 2008.
[3] Some of the description on liminality was found on wikipedia.org.

"Alienation: Exile from the Garden"

2008-09-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

Back to the Basics: Caring for Creation
Genesis 3

When I was back in Ohio in July, I wanted to take Patrick to a little creek near our house that I remember wading in when I was a child. The creek is a small wonder — overhung with a canopy of young trees that form a green tunnel; dragonflies that dart millimeters above the water; groups of tiny minnows that flit so quickly through the creek you're not sure you just saw them. It was a place of beauty and wonder for me as a kid, and I wanted Patrick to have the same experience.

And we did. Although a housing development has replaced most of the woods I used to walk in to get to the creek, we found it quite unchanged. In fact, Patrick was enjoying himself so much that he decided to "swim" in this creek. We took off his clothes, and he laid down in the approximately six inches of water in the creek. He wasn't going to be able to swim, but he didn't want to anyway. He just wanted the feel of the cool waters on his body.

Later, back at home, I began to wonder if perhaps Patrick should have taken a bath after his little swim. Just what sort of pesticides or herbicides might be in that creek, I wondered? There's a lot of farming around here, and certainly the waterways carry agricultural runoff. And what else might have been in there? My anxiety level went up a bit: Did he get water into his mouth? Did he drink it?

Patrick survived his creek swim with no rashes or vomiting. But I was left with a lingering sadness that even in my childhood home — where horse-drawn buggies and plows are the norm, far from the exhaust-filled, industrialized area I now call home — even here, the waters may not be safe for a child to swim in. Is there no place on Earth we haven't harmed, I thought? The air pollution in the "pristine" Kings Canyon south of Yosemite is worse than in New York City thanks to the smog from the Central Valley. Is there anyplace untouched by us and our mess? Is there nothing left of that Garden we first called home?

If today is a typical day in our Garden, we will lose more than 180 square miles of rainforest, what one biologist calls the "lungs of our planet." Today, the human population will increase by a quarter of million people. Today, 73 tons of topsoil will be eroded. Today, 1800 tons of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons will be added to the atmosphere.[1] "Today, the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare."[2]

This outer devastation is mirrored by an inner diminishment that Thomas Berry mentions in the reading we heard: We no longer live in a universe. When's the last time you looked up and saw a night sky strewn with stars? Most of us live in a world of computers and cars and Ipods. These are wonderful devices, but they can't match the feel of cool creek water on your skin. When's the last time we felt that? Sixty years ago, there was a big swimming hole near where I used to live in Oakland. The swimming hole was formed by the waters of Sausal Creek, waters that have now been forced underground into a concrete culvert. If kids go swimming now, it is in a chlorinated pool surrounded by cement. No dragonflies or minnows or tree canopy here.

Whether we realize it or not, we have lost a sense of being connected to a greater cosmos. Whether we realize it or not, we've lost a sense of communion and kinship with the earth that sustained our ancestors. We feel alone in the universe in a way that would have been unimaginable to those who came before us, and still is to indigenous people.

How did we get here? How did we so badly mess up our Garden Home? How did we become so alienated from the earth? Thomas Berry talks of three defining moments in our cultural history that have led us to this place of alienation, that have led to our exile from the Garden.

The first of these moments occurred when Christianity met Greek philosophy, most notably the work of Plato and Aristotle. In doing so, Christianity — unlike Judaism — adopted the idea of the dualism of soul and body. Now bear with me as we get a bit academic. This idea of dualism is really important because it undergirds a lot of our thinking in the Christian West. But to explain it you have to sound a bit like a college professor — God forbid!.

Dualistic thinking considers the human soul to be a different essence than the body. The soul is an entirely spiritual or intellectual substance and the body is the inert matter that holds this spirit. Plato believed that the human soul first lived in the world of Ideas, an absolutely spiritual world. On entering the human body, the soul becomes the "master of the body," the thing that guides the ship. Christianity adopted this dualistic belief and expanded it by talking about a soul that departs the body and enters a heavenly realm after death. For both Plato and this form of Christianity, then, only the soul or spirit is really real. The body is just a temporary vessel.

Interestingly, in Judaism, this dualistic thinking never took root. That's why there's almost no mention of an afterlife within Jewish theology. Soul and body come into the world together, and they leave the world together.

It didn't take long for a hierarchy of value to get built around this dualism. Since the soul is eternal, it is good. Since the body is just temporary, it is bad. Women, animals and "dumb nature" became identified with the "bad" part of this dualism — the body. Men were identified with the "good" part of this dualism — the soul, or spirit. The perfectly disembodied, pure realm of intellect. Not that messy body realm, where things happen that we can't control. The body — and the women, animals and nature associated with it — became something to control, to subdue, to be "used" for the higher purposes of the spirit. So, that's dualism.

The second defining moment was the Black Death in Europe in the mid 1300s. In two years, one-third to one-half of the population of Europe died from the bubonic plague. We can not comprehend what it would be like to live through this. The closest we have is the first period of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s. Needless to say, such a cataclysm had a major impact on Western consciousness.

European civilization responded in two broad ways. One, Christianity began to embrace a strong redemption-based theology. To be redeemed and saved out of this world of suffering became the entire aim of the Christian message. Gone was the idea that we, and creation, are fundamentally good. Gone was the idea that the whole creation is the place for God's saving activity within history. Nope. We get right with God so that when we die, our soul can be with "Him" in heaven. What happens in and to this world doesn't matter. What happens to the natural world doesn't matter. What happens to our bodies doesn't matter. It is only our eternal soul that matters, and where it is going. This, as we know, is still the fundmanetal view of salvation for much of Christianity, and it has its roots in this period.

The second response to the agony of the Black Death came from the secular community, which sought to remedy the terror of natural events by studying the processes of the earth. If only humans could begin to understand natural processes, we might be able to exert more control over them. Eventually, this response helped bring about the Enlightenment — which celebrated human reason — and the scientific revolution.

Of course, this has been a wonderful development. We can't even fathom a world without the benefits of this revolution, and we wouldn't want to. But this scientific worldview also helped create a consciousness that saw us as the subjects and nature as the object — an object to be studied prodded, made to yield its secrets. An object that we can then control and dominate for our own use. And we did this. We live in a world unimaginable to a person of the 13th century because we gained knowledge about how the natural world really works.

But, as we've been finding out for the last few decades, there are severe limits to this knowledge. We have enough knoweldge to make a pesticide called DDT but not enough to know what releasing vast amounts of this chemical into the environment might to do ecological systems or human health. As it turns out, they cause cancer and kill birds. We have enough knoweldge to produce chloroflourcarbons but not enough to know what happens when we release them into the atmosphere. As it turns out, they thin the ozone layer that protects us from the sun.

The Earth is such a complex, interconnected life system that we make a change here, and a change over here happens that we can't anticipate. We can't dominate the Earth because we can barely understand how the whole thing works. And we've gotten into a lot of trouble for assuming we can. We thought we'd eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and be lords of the universe. But we find ourselves, instead, in exile from a Garden we are helping to destroy.

The last defining moment was in the late 19th century. In some sense, according to Berry, the destiny of the human community and of planet Earth were determined during this critical time. These were the years when we transitioned from an organic economy to an extractive economy. So just what does that mean?

In the 1850s, we were still largely a rural, agrarian country. Because we had to, we lived within what Berry calls "the bounty of seasonal renewing productions of the planet's biosystems." "But as soon as we established a way of life dependent on extracting nonrenewing substances from the Earth — oil, natural gas, metal — then we could survive only so long as these endured." Peak oil, anyone? Our petroleum powers our cars and airplanes and plows, makes up the fertilizers and pesticides used to grow the vast majority of our food supply, and produces the plastics that make almost everything. And most experts predict it's going to be virtually gone in 40-50 years.

What's more, transforming these substances into something we can use release terrible contaminants into the environment. The process of refining petroleum, for instance, releases toxic residues we still don't know what to do with. When I lived in Montana, we used to visit Butte, proud home of the largest Superfund site in the country. It's a sad, wrecked place. After extracting massive amounts of copper from the soil, the mining corporation left, leaving huge, gaping pits of toxic stew that have been meessing with the health of the residents and the ecosystem there for decades.

Another problem with this extractive economy is that it uses technology to turn renewing resources into nonrenewing resources. So, instead of allowing the soil to replenish itself through natural cycles, we exploit it by using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides to such a degree that we exhaust the soil or make it toxic. Using advanced fishing technology, we've so depleted marine resources that they are no longer able to renew themselves. Jerome's brother had to quit fishing 10 years ago because the cod he had been fishing for were, for all purposes, gone. They had been fished out, extracted.

So here we are — with a dualistic consciousness, a head full of just enough knowledge that we can really mess things up, living on a planet that's being mined and fished and fertilized and extracted almost to death. We have become, in geneticist David Suzuki's words, a "superspecies" — a species capable of disrupting the functioning of the Earth in such a way that its basic life support systems are imperilled.

In the story from Genesis, God says to Adam and Eve after they had eaten from the tree of knowledge: "Now they have become like one of us." We have become like God. We have this power to fundamentally change the planet, and we have. We have eaten the fruit of the one tree forbidden to us. And now, like Adam and Eve, we stand east of Eden, outside that Garden, wondering what happened to paradise.

We have some choices standing outside this garden: We can deny we are even here. There's a lot of that going on. We can look west and long for the lost garden, in a paralyzed grief. I don't know about you, but I feel that in myself at times. Or we can try to understand what happened, how we got here. And we can turn east, toward an uncertain future, but toward a morning sun that still comes bearing dawn.

Amen.

_____________

[1] From "Healing Our World Commentary: The Great Deception" by Jackie Alan Guiliano, on the Environment News Service website, Feb. 8, 2002

[2] David Orr, in "What is Education For?" in Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture, Winter 1991

"Original Blessing: Our Garden, Our Home"

2008-09-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Back to the Basics: Caring for Creation
Genesis 1 (excerpts)

[Four demi-altars have been set up, one each for Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. The earth altar consists of, in part, a large pot of soil. The air altar has a hanging dream-catcher. The fire altar has a burning lantern. The water altar has a small fountain.]

(Go over to earth) Do you know stuff grows from this? Did you know that you could plant a seed as small as this and it could turn into a plant that has bears buckets of these? (Pluck a tomato and eat. Pass around?) Or that a seed put into this stuff could grow into this. (Dahlia) Or that a seed could turn into a tree that can grow as high as a 30-story building? What is in this stuff that is so powerful? We really don't know. We can fly people to the moon and back, but our understanding of the first inch of soil underneath our feet is pretty limited. One teaspoon of forest soil can contain 40,000 species of bacteria and 20,000 species of fungi. The majority of these organisms have not been identified by scientists — maybe 5%. Much less do we understand how these organisms interact with each other. And yet, our life depends on this. Basically everything we eat comes from this amazing substance — whether it is the plants themselves or the animals who eat the plants.

God created the earth and it was good; indeed, it was very good.

(Go over to water) Do you know that this substance flows in deep rivers underneath us, and occasionally comes to the surface of the earth where we can swim in it or use it to wash dirt off our bodies? Do you know that it sometimes pours down from the sky? Do you know that if you are thirsty, you can drink this and feel a lot better? Once, Jerome went on a hike, alone, in the Gila Wilderness of southern New Mexico. He was carrying enough water to get him through the day. He planned to camp where there was a spring, so he could refill his jugs. But there was no spring there. During the night, he kept dreaming of water. He hiked out the next day, delirious, in the 95-degree heat, and finally got to the ranger station where he walked up to a faucet, turned a knob and out came water. We are about 60% water. The Earth's surface is 74% water. As far as we know, no life has ever evolved to exist without it, and wherever there is water, there is the possibility of life.

God created water and it was good; indeed, it was very good

(Go over to air.) We don't think much about air because it's invisible. We can't see it. But astronauts who have traveled above our atmosphere can see it in a new way. One astronaut said, "You see a thin, thin layer just above the surface of the Earth, maybe 10 or 12 kilometres thick. (That's 6-7 miles.) That is the atmosphere of the Earth. That is it. Below that is life. Above it is nothing." The first thing we do when we are born into life is gulp for this air, and during the course of our life we will take about 350 million lungfuls of it. Breathing air is so important that our bodies have taken over this function from our conscious control. We breathe whether we want to or not. You know what happens when you hold your breath. Your body starts demanding it pretty quickly — your heart pounds, blood vessels in your head begin to bulge. And then you breathe the air, again.

God created air and it was good; indeed, it was very good

(Go over to fire). The first words the Creator utters in our Scriptures are: "Let there be light." Fire is the energy of creation. It starts everything up. It gets the whole ball rolling. Every morning, the fiery engine that drives the Earth and all life rises over our heads. Our sun is just one small star in a cosmos that contains billions, and we get just a tiny sliver of its radiation. But it is enough to run a planet. When that sun rises, all life rises, too, so that we can receive its energy. Flowers turn toward the light of its fire, reptiles and cats warm themselves in it, trees and plants start to eat this sunlight through photosynthesis. When we eat those plants (or the animals that ate them), we eat sunlight, too. We take this energy of fire into our bodies.

God created fire, and it was good; indeed it was very good.

Welcome to our world! For fire, earth, air, and water all come together in varying proportions to make up me, and you, and this beautiful garden we call home. They are the building blocks Creator God uses to create life. And they form a garden that is unmatched in its diversity and complexity, in the "gorgeousness of its self-expression" (as one cosmologist put it). So far as we know, there is no other place in the universe like our planet Earth. We are the garden spot of the cosmos.

Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and priest puts it: "Earth seems to be a reality that is developing with the simple aim of celebrating the joy of existence. This can be seen in the coloration of the various plants and animals, in the circling flights of the swallows as well as the blossoming of the spring flowers; each of these events required immense creativity over billions of years in order to come forth as Earth."

This, then, is our Home, this garden that exists simply to celebrate the joy of existence. This is our Original Blessing. Our foundational story, our creation story that we heard today from Genesis reminds us over and over again that the essential nature of this home is good. Sun? Good. Moon? Good. Stars? Good. Oceans? Good. Plants? Good. Creepy-crawly things? Good. Animals? Good. Us? Good.

I wonder if we heard that growing up? I wonder if our families, our schools, our churches, spoke to us of the fundamental goodness of creation, of the fundamental goodness of ourselves. I wonder if they told us that long before there was sin and the fall and Adam and Eve and the snake and the expulsion from the garden, there was Original Blessing.

If we didn't hear that in our churches, well, that's odd, because this blessing is where God begins. In fact, in God's time (which is to say, in cosmological time), sin is a relatively new invention. There were 19 billion years or more of history and God's creative activity before human beings appeared on the scene and invented sin. So, it's hardly original. I'm not saying that sin isn't real. It is. But it's not the place God starts, and it shouldn't be the place we start.

Instead, we begin here, with the unimaginable blessing of creation. And this is where we start as we begin this series together. Many of us realize that big changes are coming. Our First World way of life, made possible by vast quantities of cheap oil and other natural resources, is coming to an end. The Earth just can't handle us anymore. I know that many of us have felt for some time the increasing urgency of the need to make changes, and of the possibility of this unimaginable blessing of creation somehow disappearing, or at least being irrevocably changed.

There's this amazing document called the Earth Charter, which was created by a large global consultation process, headed up by Mikhail Gorbachev, and finally ratified in 2000. It was originally started by the United Nations and it has since been endorsed by thousands of organizations representing millions of individuals. This is what is says in its preamble, "We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. We must form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life."

It's a pretty amazing time to be on the planet, folks. We've been born in a rather exceptional time in history. A time of great choice. A time that holds great peril and great promise. While this time presents technical and intellectual challenges for us, it is foundationally, I believe, a spiritual challenge. The consciousness that made possible the destruction of the Earth must give way to a consciousness that sees the Earth as a "communion of subjects, not a collection of objects" to use Thomas Berry's language. (repeat) This movement into a new consciousness and a new relationship with our Garden Home is the Great Work of humanity at this time in history. Yeah, it's really that big.

As we begin this journey together, may we carry in the core of our being the goodness of earth, the goodness of fire, the goodness of water, the goodness of air, the goodness of us, of each other. May we feel their support, their inspiration, their blessing as we do this Great Work together. Amen.

"Defiant Daughters"

2008-08-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Psalm 124, Exodus 1:8-2:10

The goings-on in Egypt that form the context of our story for today are grim and, sadly, all too familiar. A cruel and callous tyrant sits on the throne. He is also a bit paranoid – a lethal combination, that one, paranoia and cruelty. Whereas once the Israelites lived as honored guests in the best land of Egypt (as gratitude for Joseph’s service at the Egyptian court), the new Pharaoh recognizes no obligation to them. Indeed, the Israelites’ numbers and strength alarm him, and sees a threat to national security. They are becoming too numerous, they are producing too many offspring – they are multiplying, as God had promised to Abraham. He begins to devise ways to control them. His first idea is to makes slaves of them, slaves who construct buildings for Pharaoh’s supply cities.

But, still, to the ruler’s chagrin, this hard labor fails to check their vigor. The Hebrew people keep on producing babies. In fact, the verb “spread” used in verse 12 is the Hebrew word, parotz, which means to literally “burst forth.” It is a verb connected with fertility and wealth when it is used in Genesis. So, the Hebrew people are fertile, vigorous and, in this way, powerful. So the Pharaoh hits upon a solution tried far too often in the history of so-called civilization – genocide.

Enter, now, into our story our first set of defiant daughters. They are Shiphrah and Puah, midwives to the Hebrew people. Pharaoh calls aside these two women and tells them to kill all the baby boys in the name of Egyptian homeland security. We can tell Pharaoh is not thinking straight here. Like any ruler caught up in paranoia and cruelty, he is doing things that are ultimately not in his own interest. He is killing all the boys, the boys who will turn into men, the men who will provide the slave labor to build his cities.

We often assume that Pharaoh’s command is to kill the infant boys as they are born, but some scholars believe Pharaoh is telling the midwives to abort a fetus as soon as they know that it is male. Egyptians were known throughout the ancient world for their advanced gynecological practices, and so it is possible that the midwives did know how to at least somewhat accurately predict the gender of unborn fetuses. No matter what the exact order, we know that the midwives are not dutiful daughters of their ruler, Pharaoh. They will not participate in the killing of either fetuses or newborns. They blatantly disobey Pharaoh and then tell a bald-faced lie to his face: that the Hebrew women are so vigorous that they give birth before the midwives even get there. This defiance of the midwives has been called the “oldest record of civil disobedience in world literature.”

Now let’s just pause for a moment and consider what it meant for these midwives to participate in this act of civil disobedience. In the ancient world, the pharaoh had absolute authority. In fact, he was divine in that world, and so disobedience to the pharaoh meant transgressing the very order of the cosmos. But these midwives, these defiant daughters, tell an outrageous lie to the demigod, Pharaoh. One can only imagine the fate that awaits them if Pharaoh sees through their deception -- death, certainly, and likely a death that would not be swift and painless. Amazingly, though, Pharaoh buys their lie. The midwives survive their civil disobedience and, in fact, are blessed by God with their own families.

Whew. There’s one catastrophe averted through the work of some defiant daughters. But the story does not end there. Let’s read on. (Read Exodus 1:22-2:10)

Pharaoh isn’t done. Of course not. He turns around and issues an even more cruel decree: The average Egyptian is now to become the agent of Pharaoh’s repression, not just the specialists: that is, the soldiers who supervise the slave labor or the midwives who supervise births. Now, the average citizen is asked to participate in genocide and throw every Hebrew boy baby they encounter into the Nile.

Enter some more defiant daughters into this story. A Hebrew mother of a newborn and the baby’s sister craftily obey Pharaoh’s command to the letter of the law. They do “throw” their son and brother into the Nile. He just happens to be thrown into a papyrus basket. The Hebrew word used here for basket could actually be translated something like “little ark.” It is an allusion to Noah’s Ark, of course, the implication being that just as God saved Noah and thus humanity from destruction by water, so God will now save the Israelites through the little baby in the basket.

The sister stays behind and watches over the little basket in the reeds containing her brother. Of course, this defiant daughter could not just put her brother in a basket and then walk away. She watches, and waits. And what will she see? Will she see her brother drown? Will she see him captured and killed? Will the authorities then seek out the boy’s family and kill them too, for their disobedience? Imagine what it was like to wait, and not know. She eventually sees some women approach. Egyptian women. Can you imagine the girl’s distress? Why would she not assume that these Egyptian women are dutiful daughters of the Pharaoh?

And yet… enter some more defiant daughters. No less than Pharaoh’s daughter finds the Hebrew boy, pulls him out of the water and… has compassion on him. She recognizes the boy as one of the children her father intended to kill, and her defiant, compassionate heart will not allow her to follow her father’s genocidal orders. The baby’s sister witnesses this and, cool as a cucumber, walks up and addresses this royal woman: “Uh, would it be helpful if I went and called a wet nurse to nurse the child for you?” Yes, the Pharaoh’s daughter says. And so the girl does what she says she was going to do, and just a little bit more: The wet nurse happens to be the baby’s mother. Even more amazingly, Pharaoh’s daughter is now paying the baby’s mother to nurse her own son.

Now, let’s step back again and view this amazing scene. Pharaoh’s daughter is royalty, daughter of a god, and the girl is the daughter of a slave. In a crisis situation, a woman of rank, privilege and power listens to perhaps the least powerful person she is likely to encounter: the young female child of a slave. And she allows the child to offer the plan, to tell her what to do. Truly amazing. Truly amazing what boundaries of class, race and age defiant daughters will cross in the name of compassion.

Of course, the baby’s sister is Miriam and the baby boy is none other the Moses, the liberator of the Hebrew people. The rest of the story of the struggle and liberation of the Israelites from cruel slavery in Egypt will belong to men – to Moses, mainly, but also to Aaron. But the whole thing was kicked off by some determined, courageous women and their acts of no cooperation with authority. Puah and Shiphrah, Miriam and Moses’ mother, Pharaoh’s daughter – these defiant daughters practiced ordinary, everyday acts of resistance to evil. And these ordinary, everyday acts birthed a movement that liberated a people and have inspired similar liberation movements for centuries.

Now, what I take away from these stories is not the superiority of women, or that women have a special purchase on holy defiance. However, it’s worth noting that it is very often women in the Bible who exercise their moral authority through noncooperation with evil (other examples?). Interestingly, a woman is also the main figure in the Greek prototype of civil disobedience, Antigone. From the earliest narratives that we have in history, there is a sense that the politics of noncooperation is the special weapon of the very oppressed– and women, back then (as well as to do this day) are the oppressed people in any society. They are often the oppressed of the oppressed.

That aside, what I take away from this is how everyday and ordinary and spontaneous the women’s acts were. They didn’t wait for some leader to tell them what to do. They didn’t hold special meetings in a church basement to devise strategy. They didn’t figure out how to get out the word. Those things are all important, and those things would come later when Moses takes over this liberation movement. But the movement began because these women in the course of doing their jobs, going about their ordinary lives, decided that they could not go along with evil. And they made courageous decisions in the moment to resist it.

That isn’t to say they didn’t collaborate or go it alone—you can bet the midwives Puah and Shiphrah strategized and worked together. You can bet Miriam and Moses’ mother thought through the best plan to save their son and brother. And one can even imagine that Pharaoh’s daughter and her attendants might have put their heads together, scheming how to save this little Hebrew baby from the Pharaoh’s cruelty. The collaborate and conspire with each other, but do so without ay other directive from a leader or think tank or political party or even a Barack Obama telling them what to do. In fact, the text doesn’t even tell us they were doing what God told them to do in a dream, or through a prophecy. Perhaps, they figured, God had done enough and it was time for them to act. They drew their own line in the sand and say, over this I cannot cross.

The ordinary courage of these life-loving women forces me to ask myself (and us) some questions like… what may we be waiting for? Are we waiting for a movement to start before we take action? Are we waiting for some leader to issue “marching orders”? What opportunities may we have in each day to practice noncooperation with evil and cruelty? How are we called in the course of our day to be a defiant daughter or son -- to resist death and protect life?

Thank God we have people like Moses and Martin Luther King. Thank God for movement leaders. But let’s always remember that behind every movement leader are hundreds if not thousands of nameless, courageous people who helped birth the movement, if not the leader himself. Behind every movement for liberation and justice are thousands of nameless, courageous people of faith who worship a God of life and defy the gods of death ever day. Today, in the name of Puah and Shiphrah and Miriam, let’s celebrate them. And let’s also allow their memory to place a call on our own lives. May we have the courage to be an anonymous defiant daughter, an anonymous defiant son.

Matthew

2008-06-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

Shannon Koehler

Matthew 10:24-39

Before I start I'd like to say that I'll be using the words Jesus and God interchangeably. Just a heads up.

It's about 80 AD and a guy sits down with some old scrolls and compiles the information. He's got the gospel of Mark, which is pretty new at the time, and he's got a few other out takes. He figures he'll attribute his writing to the apostle Matthew, then some people might read it, after all the writer is just a scribe.

The writer of Matthew lives in a world of division. The Pharisees are stronger than ever before and it's led to a lack of communication between Jews and Jews who are following Jesus. Even the church has false prophets, already! You'd think the crazies might lay low till we hit the century mark. But the writer of Matthew lives in a mixed up world where living out faith is hard, oppression is common, and the truth is the only thing a person can hold onto.

Here's a scribe looking at the gospel of Mark and some other scriptures while right outside his window, the families of religion seem to be tearing themselves apart. But he's got a rock, he's got his truth, and Jesus is his truth.

Folks, Jesus tells it straight in Matthew. No knock knock jokes. He doesn't play hambone and he doesn't do yoga. I know what you're saying, why yoga? Well, it most certainly doesn't sound like he's trying to chill anybody out. In verses 24 and 25 Jesus tries to make the disciples understand that he is their only teacher and this road they are about to walk down isn't going to be easy. A disciple is not above the teacher nor a slave above the master. In the Jewish scholastic system of that day once a student had learned all there was to learn a student could either continue to study under their teacher or set themselves up as a teacher. This is parallel to the fears that the writer of Matthew had, people continue to set themselves up as teachers "false prophets" and go astray. Jesus makes it clear we are to continue studying under his supervision. But he parallels this with a slave being like a master. Slaves, recipients or cruelty, and students of Jesus. Jesus is preparing them. Being a students and followers of Jesus doesn't mean we'll be sleeping in beds of rose pedals. This is not a vacation. Jesus says If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! If the nay sayers can call Jesus Beelzebul, meaning demon or Satan, then what will they do to those who follow him? He continues to warn the disciples in verses 34-37 when he says: Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. He's come to divide families, set kids against parents, and just get people down right angry.

Remember, this is all on the disciples first day! Imagine you're at your first day of work at a new place and the boss calls you in and says: Look, we don't pay all that much, and we can't really offer you any perks because hey, what do you want from a paperclip factory? Oh, and don't feel bad that you don't get any health benefits because I don't either. I'm sorry but I don't want to work for a place like that!

Right after the warning in verse 25 Jesus says have no fear, and in verse 28 he says have no fear again. And in verse 31 he says have no fear again! We are not to fear in verse 26 because nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered. Jesus parallels what is covered and uncovered with his teachings. We are to proclaim his teachings, shout them, act them, yell them, get them out there! But that sounds a little weird because behavior like that can bring on persecution, and persecution is definitely something to fear! But Jesus follows with Verse 28 do not fear those who kill the body but kill the soul... The soul is the true self. Our true selves, our souls, are our lives. And Jesus goes on to say our souls are worth more than any other creature many times over. Within are souls are the teachings. If we let those teaching, those truths, become our identity, and make us who we are, then there is no persecution that can harm us. If we allow ourselves to freely act as we have been taught to live our lives, then there is no earthly consequence that can defeat us. By uncovering the teachings we uncover ourselves.

But Jesus draws the line, and the tension of the early church arises once again. We must acknowledge Jesus before others to have Jesus acknowledge us. This is about more than judgment. Jesus continues to ask us to give ourselves over to him as his followers. It's about releasing, it's about uncovering what was covered and shouting the teachings that were once secrets. If we make those teachings and the truth of those teachings the core of our souls and our way of life, then we need to let that truth flow through us. For the scribe putting together this text, proclaiming Jesus to others would be an offering of one's self. He would be open to ridicule, physical abuse. Jesus calls us to be free with our souls, and in return we still hold his teachings and the great truths of those teachings.

Jesus does it again when speaking about divided families. He warns the disciples. And he denies that he is the peaceful Messiah the Jewish people thought was coming from Isaiah 9: 4 For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian. Jesus doesn't come with force to break the oppressor, but once again, he's got a whole boat load of teachings. It is the teachings that tear these families apart. I had to get a new cardiologist because Kaiser said I was officially an adult. I was on me to make the phone calls, find the right doctor, get the appointments lined up, all stuff that I had never had to deal with before. So I ignored it. I don't like going to the doctors so I figured I just would worry about getting there all too quickly. But my dad got on the phone with me and he told me how it was. I need to make it a priority. Forget the band, school, dad even took a day off of work drove up from Fresno to San Francisco just to come and meet my new cardiologist. My dad knew what was important, and I started to really take responsibility over that part of my life. I had to figure out what was necessary, I figured my heart was pretty necessary. But it's about priorities. And it's about being committed to those priorities. Once we commit to priorities they become a part of our lives and our identities. I have to see my doctors. I have to be with my wife, I have to be with my husband, I have to be with my kids. We have to give back to the community. We have to make peace. We have to find a way to love each-other. Those are commitments that we make that we won't break for anything or anybody.

In verse 38 and 39 Jesus says "whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." It's clear now that God asks us to take the cross upon ourselves and then give ourselves to God. Once again, the writer of Matthew acknowledges the difficult split in his time. Jesus asks us again to offer ourselves to God, and release what ever it is that is hindering us from strengthening our understanding and immersing ourselves in the teachings. We need to lose our lives to it, and for the writer of Matthew he was talking quite literally. We need to lose our lives for God's sake. We lose our lives, which is also understood as giving up our souls for Jesus' teachings. The commitments we make to God's teachings are the foundation for the commitments we make in our lives. And the only reason why we have our lives back is by the grace of God. God is being gracious here. It's because we gave it up that we get it back. There is this circular motion that continues to appear in Matthew, if you give you get something back. God keeps asking us to give and give. And God's not just asking for us to give him a sandwich, God's not asking for a couple of bucks for muni, God's not asking for a big donation to pay the entire mortgage of the MVS house, God is asking us for our lives, our souls. Sometimes it's easy to say that we've found our life in something other than God, a lot easier than giving up our souls. My pastor at my Fresno church would say "what was life giving for you today and what was life draining?" Well, some of us feel that getting a new car is pretty life giving. A new apartment, flipping off your boss on your last day of work, or making out with a random person at a club, those can all seem pretty life giving. But while those things might give us temporary happiness, our commitments to God don't always entail the fleeting moments of happiness. We can feel drained, tired, depressed, and would love to break those truths, teachings, and commitments. But our rock of truth, and our EVERLASTING joy that comes from that truth pulls us in and brings us back to our uncovered relationship with God.

Just when you though God couldn't ask for anything more from 12 pretty rough dudes, fisherman, tax collectors; God asks for manors. In verse 40 Jesus says "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me." The word welcomes can also be interpreted as showing hospitality. Jesus seems to be giving the disciples a tip on how to spot good people. Not only will people say good morning, or what's up? They'll say come in, have a glass of what? Have you ever tried one of my home made cookies? A good helping of kindness is fitting for all people. Verses 41-42 say, "Who ever welcomes a prophet a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever given ever a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple –truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward." The term prophet can also be used as the term missionary. The word righteous can be understood as elderly, a teacher in the congregation. And the word little one's can be understood as the least of Jesus' followers. Jesus said welcome the prophet in the name of the prophet, help the prophet for the prophet's sake. This isn't just about us anymore. We need to not just welcome, but show hospitality to missionaries, elderly folks, children, everyone and everybody. Don't just say welcome to San Francisco, we're called to help eachother, and show a great sort of kindness.

Jesus stopped to talking to the disciples. That was enough, and that is enough. The writer of Matthew lived in a time where Pharisees didn't pull punches, so the Jesus we see in Matthew prepares his disciples for the difficulty to come. This is not easy, and it's not supposed to be. The people for which the book of Matthew was written needed to preach the gospel when they knew they would face persecution, they had to acknowledge God before others when those others could bring about bodily harm or death, they needed to understand that because of their commitments to God, because of the way the had shaped the minds, bodies, souls around Jesus' teachings, and because of their commitments, they could lose their homes, friends, families; and on top of that they had to be gracious about it with hospitality and wearing a big smile on their face.

Such is the tax for following a healer, a revolutionary, for following God. We have to be willing to open ourselves to God, and to do that we need to put our selves on the line for the whole world to see. We release our pride, we release our fear, and we release our lives trusting that God will give it back. We have to trust God. That means we have to trust in the teachings, in the truths that come from them, and the commitments in our lives that come from them. This is not easy, but it is enough. If we go back to the starting point of Jesus' discussion in verse 25 Jesus' says it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher. It is enough that we are like Jesus, not that we are Jesus. Being like Jesus is enough to be acknowledged by Jesus. And when we give our lives in doing like the teachings, and doing like the truths of Jesus, God will help us find our lives anew. And once again, in verse 42, Jesus says "truly I tell you none of these will lose their reward." The rewards of following God are ours to lose, God has given us our reward and in return we need to trust in it. Our trust is enough. And just as the writer of Matthew gave his trust and stood firm in the truth when faced opposition, so do we. God values us and has given us the teachings, truths, and a foundation to build our lives on. We need to trust and stand by our foundation. That's not easy, but do not fear because it is enough. It is enough.

"Lizkor: Remember" Reflection

2008-05-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

Barton Shulman

Job 23:1-12

Friday was Yom HaShoah, the Jewish “Day of the Catastrophe and the Heroism,” when Jews remember the terrible events and the many victims of the Holocaust. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what this means to me, and why I wanted to share with you my feelings about this day, this painful but holy day.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking and writing about the differences between Mennonites and Jews when it comes to remembering our histories of persecution. Russ and I discussed the difference between personal memory and memorializing, and I anguished over somehow coming across as “holier than thou,” as if somehow my experience is more potent, more persecuted, than yours.

I don’t believe this. I think we all carry our own experiences of pain, of persecution, of injustice. And I think it’s a blessing and an honor to share that experience together, even if we don’t experience it in the same way. So my purpose today is to share my experience, a piece of my culture, with you all, and I hope that when you reflect on this day, you bring your own meaning to it.

Jews are taught, from the very youngest age, to remember not just the lessons of our history, but our history itself, as if it personally happened to us. Not just learn it, not just memorize it, but personally remember the experience of it.

During the Seder, the Passover dinner, there are very few actual requirements – like much of Jewish tradition, there are lots of variations and individual practices. But one of the few absolute requirements is found in the specific language of every Passover service. When explaining what the Passover Seder is all about, we are taught to say “This is because of what God did for me when I was a slave in Egypt.”

It’s not what God did for the Israelites, or the Jews, or the Hebrews. It’s what God did for ME. We are taught to own this history personally, and to experience the memory each year. And this is referring to events that happened literally thousands of years ago – we remember that they happened to US personally.

If we start with these memories of the Exodus as an example, the Holocaust happened just yesterday, and its lessons, its wounds, its memories are fresh in our minds (or should be). It seems natural that we carry around a good deal of fear of loss; at any time, our property could be taken from us, our families could be separated; we could be imprisoned or enslaved; our very lives could be taken. After all, it’s not just that it’s happened for hundreds OR thousands of years, it happened just yesterday.

I’ve been thinking recently about why this is – why we are taught to REMEMBER rather than MEMORIALIZE. I think we probably all agree that a personal memory is stronger than a learned history. And I’ve been thinking about another aspect of this. As I look out at everyone here, it’s really difficult for me to guess how many people are in front of me. Are there thirty people here today, or a hundred? I’m really bad at that kind of perception, and could never get a job estimating the numbers in a crowd. Trying to visualize a thousand people all in one place at one time is strange for me. The thought of a hundred thousand? I can’t really get my imagination to hold that. And when I try to think of six million, it just goes away – it becomes so theoretical that it’s not real.

I can’t picture six million. I cannot conceive of six million. I certainly can’t feel for six million. But I can feel for one. I can have a personal experience, and own it, knowing I am sharing the experience of six million.

Recently, Jessica, my 16-year-old niece, participated in a student exchange program. Her exchange sister came from Austria to stay in Seattle for several weeks, and then Jessica returned to Austria with her and spent several weeks there. Jessica wrote a lot about her experiences there, and with her permission I will quote part of it here.

Her host mother, Birgit, took her to Mauthausen, one of the largest concentration camps in all of the Third Reich, and the second largest in Austria. This camp was the location of the deaths of about 119,000 people, the largest number of any concentration camp (as opposed to the extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 2 million or more were killed).

Quoting from Jessica:

“Birgit purchased two pamphlets, one in English and one in German, to lead us through our self-guided tour. We left the center and followed a path through a narrow doorway until I found myself standing among various memorials. Here the names of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, conspirators, and other victims of the Nazis filled variously shaped stones and monuments. I walked through the monuments, analyzing and comparing the average ages, ethnicities, and genders of the victims, resorting to my love of numbers and patterns to avoid the reality of what they represented. My cold calculations ended when Birgit led us into the main entrance.

“I stood in the doorway and forced myself to step onto the cobblestone path inside the camp. I entered and walked to the right. I referred to my pamphlet in hopes of avoiding my own thoughts. I looked at the wall about five inches from me, and saw a reference number. After locating this number in the pamphlet, I read in casual terms that at times when the camp’s population exceeded its limit, the weak, sick and old were lined up against this wall and shot one by one. My head darted up from the words I had read and stared out at the wall and then to the ground; the ground where people had stood, the same dirt, the same wall, where their blood had been spilled. Not just people, but my people, my culture, my religion, me.

“I backed away from the wall and entered the nearest building to escape. I went into a chapel that the brochure explained was where the Nazi soldiers would conduct prayer services. On the wall I read Pax, the Latin word for peace, and my thoughts wandered to the Nazi soldier who had just shot someone in the head and watched as their life slipped away, then entered church to pray for peace.

“Passing the Chapel, I made silent eye contact with Birgit whose eyes read to me ‘Are you OK? Can you handle this?’ I felt singled out, as if this was supposed to be harder for me to deal with than everyone else. After all, I was the Jew. I didn’t want to have to act OK for her or anyone, so I scurried off through the nearest door to the next room and on until I reached a set of stairs leading down.

“I found myself descending into the lower part of the building, to a set of smaller rooms. I approached a chamber with the word Gaskammer, and I could only imagine what was coming next. I entered a small, musty, dank room. The floor was covered in aged red paint that was chipping away, and I could see several drains. Along the walls there were pipes mounted low, running along all four walls. I felt myself choking to death on poisonous gas spewing from the pipes, and saw people being packed into this room around me and falling to the floor gasping for their last breath.

“I ran up a set of stairs, hoping to find some peace of my own in this insanity; only to find myself standing in front of two ovens that had been used for cremation and burning people alive that were weak or sick. I stood motionless, staring at the ovens. I saw dust and dirt on the ground surrounding the ovens that screamed to me as if it were human ash from people that once lived and loved as I do. I ran through several rooms until I was finally outside.

“I walked along the original cobblestone and felt the steps of those walking to their deaths. I searched for a spot where I could avoid touching any surface they had touched. Finally I found a corner of modern pavement and retreated there, mentally and physically, until Birgit found me and led me over to see the wall where they would throw people over onto the steep rocks if they didn’t feel like wasting a bullet.

“Finally, I asked Birgit if we could leave, and she looked at me with concern and agreed. On our way out we passed the stairs that victims had been forced to walk along day after day, cutting and gathering stones from the bottom of the hill to build the camp.”

Here I need to interject something that Jessica didn’t write about. These stairs, the 186 steps of the Wiener Graben from the quarry to the camp, are infamous.

Often Prisoners were made to run up and down the stairs until most were dead. Sometimes those remaining would be forced to jump off the top of the quarry, so SS officers cruelly nicknamed it “the parachute jump.” In 1941, a large group of Jews from the Netherlands were persecuted mercilessly. They were made to slide down the loose stones on the side of the staircase. Many of them died in the effort. The survivors were made to run up and down the steps with 50 pound stones on their backs. Any dropped stones fell on the people behind, and anyone who dropped their rock was beaten. For two days, the SS drove the Jews up and down the steps. On the third day, in an act of despair, the remaining Jews joined hands and leaped over the edge to their death.

I’ll return to Jessica’s story:

“We left again through the narrow doorway and got into Birgit’s car. My exchange sister Marlene, seeing that I had been affected, turned to me and said, ‘I wish I could feel sad from this. I know it is a sad place, but I don’t feel sad.’

“I didn’t understand how anyone could experience what I had just experienced and not feel anything. Then I realized that this site had been preserved for exactly that, so that these emotions could be evoked, in me and generations to follow.”

Jessica asks some great questions: Why didn’t Marlene experience Mauthausen the same way Jessica did? Why did Jessica go through all that? Why expose herself to that much suffering?

And is suffering a key to all of this? Is the fact that I grew up as the only white kid in my neighborhood, the only Jew at my school, the only gay person I knew of; does that experience of isolation, fear and pain inform my experience of suffering in others? Is that the reason I often feel I can literally remember events for which I was not physically present?

I often wonder whether this experience of my Jewish culture makes me deeply empathic, really co-dependent, or just neurotic. Being raised with the constant message of “live your history” affects me daily. I find myself experiencing the pain and angst of people who share no history with me. I feel like I can “remember” experiences not of my own people, but of those I care for. But can I truly “remember” being a slave in the hold of a trade ship? Can I remember being shot for standing against the military junta in Burma? If so, how do I carry this around without becoming so empathetic that I lose myself?

I wonder if the specifics of the memories are not the point. Learning to truly remember MY culture’s experiences, to experience REMEMBERING, seems to be the important lesson. The ability to do that seems to be the key to true empathy with any oppressed people.

Jessica didn’t say it, maybe at 16 she didn’t have the words to say it, but she personally experienced the Holocaust that day. She was shot, gassed, burned alive, and she was brutalized by the experience. She became a Holocaust survivor. And as much as I want to show people, explain, teach what the “Jewish experience” is, I can no more do that than I can know the experience of the Mennonite martyrs who died after agonizing torture at the hands of their captors.

But I wonder; what would it mean to personally experience Dirk Willem’s martyrdom? To feel the fear, the cold, the terror of running away from the thief catcher across the ice. To hear the creaking, the cracks and splash and screams of my pursuer as he falls in the freezing water. What would it mean to REMEMBER making the conscious choice to turn and save him, knowing it would mean my death?

How would it affect our spiritual and psychological journeys, if we didn’t just LEARN ABOUT our history, but if we REMEMBERED it?

So today, I remember the Holocaust.

I remember the disappointment of learning that new laws had been passed that affected my rights as an individual. I remember the anger at being forced to wear a yellow star of David at all times, give up the home my family lived in and move to a hovel in a Jewish ghetto. I remember the nagging fear at the disappearance of friends and families from other towns. I remember the rumors of horrific, unspeakable, unthinkable things.

Today I remember my store being looted and burned, the fear of un-knowing and complete lack of control. I remember screaming mobs roaming the streets, the sounds of gunshots in the dark. I remember being forced from my home with barely any possessions.

Today I remember walking past people I thought were friends; neighbors, acquaintances – people I knew from the street where I grew up. I remember seeing fear, anger, and hatred in their eyes. I remember them shouting filth at me as if they didn’t know me. I remember watching, as faces I recognized twisted in hate and spat on me. I remember realizing that they didn’t think I was human. I remember others standing in their doorways, staring, silent, doing nothing.

I remember being packed onto a freight car and traveling far too long with far too many others. I remember being led to a work camp with thousands of others, told we were going there to be “kept safe.” I remember seeing thin, ghostly people, hope gone from their hollow eyes. I remember everything being gray, and dirty, and dusty, and dying.

Today I remember my grandmother being led immediately to a horrifying building with a large smokestack. I remember her looking back at me to try to reassure me, when we all knew that as unreal, as impossible as this was, it was really happening. I remember my children being taken from me, screaming, terror in their eyes, never to be seen or held again.

Today I remember being stripped of my belongings, my clothing, my hair, my dignity, my humanity. I remember being scoured with noxious chemicals and forced to stand naked while strange angry men decided my fitness to work. I remember being handed rags to wear, still reeking of the sweat and misery of their former wearer.

Today I remember days, weeks, endless months of unbelievably harsh work. I remember an existence based on rocks; breaking rocks, hauling rocks, feeling the hard sharp edges of rocks, breathing the dust of rocks. I remember the fear that if I paused, tripped, or fell, I would be beaten or simply shot.

Today I remember losing the will to have friends, for friendships were fleeting and friends were killed without notice. I remember watching as that happened to others, and being completely helpless to even pray over the dead for fear of being killed myself.

Today I remember the lack of food, the foul soup that was inedible but was eaten anyway. I remember the stench of human misery in unlivable conditions.

Today I remember death. I remember the terrible, slow passage of time, standing above a ditch, waiting for the gunshot that would end my life. I remember being packed into a room with hundreds, and hearing the harsh metal clanging of the gas canisters drop. I remember the unique smell of crematory smoke, and the surreal terror of walking toward the building housing the ovens.

But today I also remember determination. I remember pushing when it seemed impossible to push. I remember being slipped the tiniest piece of bread when it seemed I was too weak to go on. I remember seeing small, almost invisible acts of kindness which helped someone live another moment, another day.

Today I remember the bravery of my neighbors. I remember them building hidden doors, hidden rooms, hidden sanctuaries. I remember them hiding me when hiding a Jew meant certain death.

Today I remember secretly, almost silently, sneaking and gathering to pray to a God who didn’t seem to be listening, but praying just the same, for there was no other choice but to pray.

So today, I remember.

"Many Mansions or One Way?"

2008-04-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

John 14:1-14

It is an old joke, one you’ve probably heard before, but nevertheless, it’s perfect for this Sunday, and I must tell it:

A man died and was ushered into heaven, which appeared to be an enormous house. An angel began to escort him down a long hallway past “many rooms.”

"What's in that room?" the man asked, pointing to a very somber-looking group of people chanting a Gregorian mass. "That's the Roman Catholic room," said the angel. "Very high church."

"What's in that room?" the man asked, pointing to a group of people with painted bodies and elaborate headdresses, drumming and dancing and singing loudly. "That's the Native American group," said the angel. "Very spirited."

"What's in that room?" asked the man, pointing to a group of people meditating to the sound of an enormous gong. "That's the Zen Buddhist group," said the angel. "They’re so quiet. You hardly know they’re here."

Then the angel stopped the man, as they were about to round a corner. "Now, when we get to the next room," said the angel, "I would appreciate it if you would tiptoe past. We mustn't make any sound." "Why'?" asked the man. "Because in that room there's a bunch of fundamentalist Christians; and they think they're the only ones here."

I’m not a big joke teller, but I knew I had to tell this one because it sets up perfectly a central dilemma found in this passage from John 14.

On the one hand, we have the infamous verse, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” For those Christians sitting in their own room in heaven, sure that they are the only ones there, this verse offers all the proof they need of the exclusivity of Christianity. Jesus seems to be saying very clearly here, “I am the way. Me. I’m it. I’m your only way to be saved.”

Interestingly, just a few verses before this one is the verse: “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” or some translations say “dwelling places.” Those who would argue that there are many paths to the truth, cite this verse. The many mansions may refer, they say, to the heavenly places in which Hindus and Buddhists and Jews will dwell – alongside Christians. Obviously, this is the setup of the joke I just told. There’s room – and a room – for everybody in the hereafter.

So, in about four short verses in John 14, you have the outlines of the great debate about religious pluralism that has raised for centuries: between those who argue for what’s called a universalist view (there are many paths to the Truth) verses those who argue for the particularist way (nope, there’s only one path – and it just happens to be mine). Many mansions or one way? Which is it?

Harvey Cox was one of my professors in seminary. He’s an ordained Baptist minister married to a Jewish woman for many years now. Not surprisingly, he locates himself on the “universalist” pole of the religious pluralism debate. He’s been very active in interfaith dialogues sponsored by groups like the World Council of Churches and he’s written a lot on the subject. OK, so he’s a “many mansions” guy through and through, right? Yes but… he’s also a “Jesus is the way” guy. In fact, he writes, “I do not believe these two (verses) are contradictory. From Jesus, I have learned that he is the way and that in God’s house there are many mansions.”[1] Huh? What he’s saying is that we’re using the wrong conjunction. It’s not “many mansions or one way.” It’s “many mansions and one way.” Huh?

It’s probably no surprise to you that I locate myself as a universalist. In fact, I would agree with the theologian Marcus Borg, that if to be a Christian meant that I had to declare other religions false, I don’t think I could be a Christian.[2] But for the true-believing universalist, no less than for the true-believing particularist, changing that conjunction to “and” poses a problem. What could that mean? What does it mean to say that Jesus is the way and also believe that he is not everybody’s way?

Marcus Borg tells the story of a Hindu professor whom he heard preach a sermon at a Christian seminary. As luck would have it, the text for the day was this “one way” passage. About it, the Hindu scholar said: “This verse is absolutely true – Jesus is the only way.” But he went on to say, “And that way – of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being – is known in all the religions of the world.”[3]

In other words, being “born again” is something that happens not just to evangelical Christians, but to people of every faith. At the core of the world’s great religions is this idea that we need to be remade, need to be transformed into a new person more fully grounded in the Divine Reality, more fully abiding in the Truth. So, in some Native American traditions, you have the vision quest – a person goes out into the wilderness for days and through a series of trials and challenges and dreams emerges with a new vision for their life. Buddhists, through a series of spiritual practices, hope to achieve enlightenment – a whole new way of perceiving the world and themselves. Islam is essentially a path of surrender to Allah that reorients the whole person.

So, “salvation” is not primarily about believing a certain set up things – what Borg calls “salvation by syllables.” No, redemption is actually a much more arduous than an intellectual assent to something. It is committing yourself to a path, a way, a process of transformation.

For Christians, Jesus is that way. “In Jesus, we see what this way of death and rebirth embodied in a person looks like. In Jesus, we see what the truth embodied in a person looks like. And in Jesus, we see what real life embodied in a person looks like. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life for those of us who are following his path.” (From Marcus Borg)

But why not follow another path then? Why not follow the way of Buddha or the way of Islam, if they are also true paths of transformation? Certainly, if you are called to one of these paths, then do it. To use a popular metaphor, they all lead one up the mountain, to the summit. But, to really be on the path of transformation, we can’t jump to another path as soon as ours gets steep or constantly be looking around for another way that seems more interesting, more scenic. If you do, you’ll never reach the summit. Huston Smith, the great scholar of world religions who is also a committed Methodist, says that if you are looking for water, better to dig one well 60 feet deep than to dig six wells 10 feet deep. We need to go deeply into a path if we truly want to be transformed by it.

(But, to nuance that just a bit. Smith calls Christianity his main meal. But, he says, he’s a strong believer in “vitamin supplements,” that is, learning from other faiths. His own immersion into other religious traditions has greatly enriched his faith as a Christian, he says.)

As we commit ourselves to a way of transformation, I believe we are increasingly able to access the “spiritual energy” of that particular path, or what Harvey Cox calls the “primal energy” of a religious tradition. One of the best stories I’ve heard about this primal energy was told by Eric Schiller, a volunteer with Christian Peacemaker Teams.[4] As many of us know, this is a group that puts their lives on the line to try to stop violence in places such as the West Bank and Colombia.

Eric was attending a Quaker conference, during which one of the key speakers said that for him God was revealed through Jesus Christ his Lord and Savior --- very particularist language, right? He then proceeded to deliver a very prophetic message about the effects of materialism and affluence. We are living in Babylon, he said, and the events of 9-11 were the first wounds given to the “beast” (a symbol for the unholy Roman Empire from the book of Revelation). We should all be girding ourselves to oppose the war in Iraq, he said. It was clear, Eric said, that passion and urgency of his message sprang from his deeply rooted biblical faith.

This was all even more interesting because this same speaker began his speech by saying that for him to be an effective instrument of the divine as he spoke, God must be present among them. But he did not pray to Jesus Christ and ask him to be present. Instead, he invited all of those there to invoke the presence of the divine Spirit in terms that were most familiar to each person. What followed, Eric said, “was a holy, blessed babble as persons called upon Abba Elohim, dear Lord Jesus, Hari Krishna, living Spirit within, the blessed Spirit of earth and water that sustains us” and on and on. This man was able to balance a deep, passionate faith in Jesus with an embrace of others’ religious paths.

“It is no small spiritual challenge to balance depth and breadth,” Eric concluded, but “I believe that it is a spiritual imperative. If we so concentrate on our own spiritual way, we can slip into an exclusive view of God that is in danger of leading to religious intolerance. If we lose our faith and roots, we may well lose our … spiritual energy and creative drive.”

In other words: Many mansions and one way. Yes, there are many mansions, and yes, Jesus is the way for us. Maybe this is the reason those two verses are so close together! Perhaps we need both. We need the open-minded tolerance of the one and the primal energy of the other. We need to acknowledge the beauty and truth of other religious traditions. And we need a deeply-rooted commitment to Jesus as the Way, the Truth, the Life if our faith is to be truly transformative. Amen.

[1] From the article “Many Mansions or One Way? The Crisis in Interfaith Dialogue” first published in The Christian Century August 17-24, 1998. Obviously, the title of my sermon comes from his article. Thanks, Harvey!

[2] From his book The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith.

[3] From Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally.

[4] From a posting found in a CPT chat room.

“Minimum Protection, Maximum Support”

2008-04-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

Eastertide

Psalm 23

There are probably no other chapters of the Bible that any of us know by heart other than the 23rd psalm. You may remember snippets of some other psalm, or a cluster of verses, but I’m betting that there is no other chapter that so many of us can still – to this day – recite from memory.

Shall we try it? If you need help, it’s in your order of worship. The psalm there is in the King James Version, since that’s the version I’m guessing many of memorized it in.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I
will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

What is it about this psalm? Why is it the only Biblical passage most of us can recite from memory? Several summers ago, I worked as a chaplain intern at Mt. Diablo Medical Center in Concord. As part of that job, I had to make – as we interns referred to them – “cold calls.” I would walk into a patient’s hospital room and strike up a conversation with them, hoping that I could be, in some small way, spiritually useful.

It was a very hard thing to do. I had no idea what I was going to encounter as I walked into a patient’s room – a person sitting up, perkily eating her tray of food? Or a man halfway to death, barely conscious, coiled up on the bed? Someone who wanted me to be there or someone who barely tolerated my presence?

One day, I started up a conversation with a woman who was going in for surgery in a few minutes. I can’t remember the nature of the surgery – it wasn’t life-threatening, but it wasn’t a tonsillectomy either. But it was clear that she was scared, as are most people who are awaiting surgery. We talked a bit, and I held her hand. She was still obviously frightened, and I felt pretty useless. Finally, it was time to go. I really wanted to leave her with some comforting image, some word of solace. And that’s when it came to me… “Do you want me to say the 23rd psalm?” I asked. Tears appeared in her eyes, and she nodded yes. I began, and almost immediately, she started saying it with me. By the end, it was clear that the psalm had worked its spiritual magic in her soul. She was at peace. After that, I recited the 23rd psalm with many people: families standing around the bed of a dying mother and grandmother, a person who had just received a diagnosis of cancer. It never failed to offer solace.

What is it about this psalm that can calm our fears? That can offer us comfort when nothing else can? It’s not just Christians who love it, by the way. Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote a book on the 23rd Psalm a few years ago, says that no matter how grievous a funeral was, no matter how tragic a memorial service, if he just started to recite he familiar words of this Psalm, it “tranquilized the congregation.” He referred to it often in the months after September 11. In fact, he says that “in just a mere 57 words of Hebrew, the author of the 23rd Psalm gives us a more practical theology than we can find in many books.”[1]

I have turned to this psalm myself as much as anybody. Even when I was going through a time of deep doubt and cynicism about the Christian faith, I would – almost reluctantly – find comfort in these words in times of distress or anxiety. What is it about this psalm? As I read and reread it this week, trying to figure out its magic, I wasn’t able to get past the first verse. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” The Lord is my shepherd – OK, I have no difficulty with that. But “I shall not want.” Excuse me?

Rabbi Kushner tells the story of a minister who sat by the bed of a dying woman. Having no words of his own – much like me – he took her hand and began reciting the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.” At which point, the woman opened her eyes for a moment and weakly said: “But I do want!” I’m really glad no one said that to me when I was a hospital chaplain, because at the time I’m not sure what I would have done with it.

Of course, we want. That woman wanted not to die. She wanted to see her grandchildren grow up. Of course, we want. We want to be healthy. We want to be healed. We want the pain – whether physical, emotional or spiritual – to go away. Of course, we want. We want our children to find their heart’s desires, we want our parents to not have to suffer as their bodies age and die. We want a lot of things, and having God or Jesus as our shepherd does not mean that all those wants are going to be supplied. Children die young. Our parents suffer. We will see many of our deepest dreams go unfulfilled. It seems that, rather than providing solace, the first sentence of this psalm should make us depressed – or angry. No, none of us is given all we want, so please don’t throw that “magic God” stuff in my face.

But is supplying our wants really what is promised here? Kushner says the original Hebrew of this verse is more accurately captured by some more recent translations, such as: “The Lord is my shepherd. What more do I need?” It’s a subtle shift, but it makes me ask a subtly different question. Of course, we want. We want many things, and none of those things are guaranteed to us. But what do we really need?

We must not need safety, protection, the assurance that everything is going to be alright for us and our loved ones. Because we don’t get that. And, indeed, I don’t think the psalm is promising that. The Good Shepherd does not keep the psalmist out of the valley of the shadow of death. No, the person who wrote this psalm had to walk through it. He or she had to walk through the death of a loved one, or the betrayal of friends, or loneliness or fear. There was no protection from that. The Good Shepherd does not keep the psalmist’s enemies away—no, they are there, watching as the psalmist is fed from God’s table. But they are there. The Good Shepherd does not even keep the psalmist away from the presence of evil – evil is present, it’s just that the psalmist doesn’t fear it. There’s no protection here. So what is there? What do we really need that this psalm offers?

Some of you are familiar with the name of William Sloane Coffin, who died two years ago. He is often talked about in the same breath as Martin Luther King, Jr., as one of the great moral leaders of our country. He was a relentless activist for peace and justice, opposed U.S. military intervention from Vietnam to the Iraq War and was an ardent supporter of LGBT rights long before other clergy were. He’s also one of the most eloquent preachers I’ve read. His most requested sermon is a eulogy he gave at Riverside Church in New York City for his beloved son, Alex, only 10 days after Alex was killed in a car accident.

“As almost all of you know,” that eulogy begins, “a week ago last Monday night, driving in a terrible storm, my son – Alexander—who to his friends was a real day-brightener, and to his family was ‘fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky’ – my 24-year-old Alexander, who enjoyed beating his old man at every game and in every race, beat his father to the grave.”[2]

“Immediately after such a tragedy, people must come to your rescue,” he said. “People who only want to hold your hand, not to quote anybody or even say anything, people who simply bring food and flowers – the basics of beauty and life – people who sign letters simply, ‘Your brokenhearted sister.’” In the eulogy, he contrasted those people with others – often his own pastoral colleagues -- who quoted some verse from Scripture as a way of offering comfort that was, he says, only thinly disguised self-protection – as a way to pretty up a situation whose bleakness they simply couldn’t face. “Like God herself,” Coffin said, “Scripture is not around for anyone’s protection, just for everyone’s unending support. That’s what hundreds of you understood so beautifully. You gave me what God gives all of us – minimum protection, maximum support. I swear to you, I wouldn’t be standing here were I not upheld.”

Minimum protection, maximum support. This is what we are promised, says this great man of the faith, and I believe he is right. And this is what we are promised in this great psalm. What we need is not for anything bad to ever happen. What we need is the assurance that we will not be utterly destroyed by the things that do happen. What we need is not protection from pain and loss – not even God can give that – but assurance that pain and loss do not need to define our lives forever, that on the other side of the valley of the shadow of death there is land of light and warmth. What we need is to know that, even as we walk through that valley, we are being accompanied by someone who is walking with us, grieving with us. “My own consolation,” William Coffin said in his eulogy, “was in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” Minimum protection. Maximum support.

God will not – God can not, I think – protect us from pain and loss, but this psalm assures us that we will survive the worst life, and death, can bring us. We will hurt, but we will heal. We will grieve, but we will grow whole again. For God – and God’s people – are surely with us. Amen.

_______________

[1] From The Lord is my Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the 23rd Psalm.
[2] See http://www.pbs.org/now/society/eulogy.html.

"New Life" Reflection

2008-03-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

Ann Speyer and Christopher DeJong

Greetings, First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, and we sure do miss you! From our vantage point in Cameroon, we figure we’ve taken the concept of ‘new life’ to a whole new level. For one year, we’ve literally chosen a life that is completely new to us. New country, people, culture, language, weather, foods, work, and everyday surroundings. This halfway point in our year is a perfect time to reflect on what we’ve been noticing around and within us, and we thank you for the invitation to do so with you. If you want to respond to this in any way, feel free to email us!

Poverty, AIDS, war, famine, corruption…the news most Americans get from Africa is not exactly brimming with resurrection and hope. But good news doesn't sell newspapers, as the saying goes, so maybe this says more about the media than about Africa. Where are the signs of new life in Cameroon, whose government is consistently recognized among the most corrupt in the world? The joke goes that they were voted the most corrupt country in the world, but paid to be moved to second place.

We're happy to say that in actuality, we see signs of resistance and resurrection here every day. Yaoundé, the capital city where we make our home, is bursting with new life and hope. Our neighborhood is near the southern edge of town, where the hillsides are dotted with half-finished houses, places where people hope to establish themselves and their families, each one a concrete investment toward the future. People flock to the city from surrounding regions, and from the dry deserts of the Far North, all hoping to find a better life in Yaoundé. There is a shadow side to this new life, as the city becomes increasingly crowded, crime increases, and there is never enough paid work for all. But the hope and determination that draw people here are beautiful, powerful forces. Like many others in Africa, Yaounde is a city of dreams.

We also see new life in the green and growing things that cover the immensely fertile regions of Cameroon. The markets spill over with fruits and vegetables and spices grown in the soil here, and even our urban area is sprouting with mango and papaya trees, banana and plantain trees, the huge leafy plants in the swamp behind our house, the riot of orange flowers in our backyard. Boys hack away roadside grass with sharp machetes, and land owners burn tangles of brush, but it all grows back eagerly. Even now, the rainy season is starting, and nature is staging an extravagant show of new life all around us. The glorious explosive rolls of thunder we lie in bed and listen to, so rare back home in San Francisco, remind us of our childhoods in Michigan, and herald new growth all around us.

The people we meet and the work we see going on here also resist the forces of death and discouragement and create more signs of resurrection. The neighborhood where we currently house-sit is full of expatriates and locals working together to translate the Bible into over 250 local languages. While we might not agree completely with the theology that motivates them, their work is important and empowering for the speakers of all these languages, as they work with local people to teach literacy skills and to capture African languages for the future, often writing them down for the first time. New life is breathed into each language as it is studied, written, preserved, dignified, and used in new ways. And those who do the work seem to find real fulfillment and positive collaboration in what they do.

RELUFA, the network of Cameroonian non-profits with which we work, also engages in numerous life-giving projects. We have some amazing and visionary colleagues determined to work for justice in their country, even when the odds seem insurmountable. Meeting beneficiaries of RELUFA’s micro-credit program, we’ve been impressed with their creativity and resourcefulness, and the way access to small loans gives new life and hope to people’s activities and aspirations. Granaries in the north help villages save their millet harvest to eat during leaner times instead of selling it off to speculators and then buying it back at a huge markup when times are lean. Lawyers and other advocates work hard to hold logging, mining, and oil companies accountable for how they treat the land and its people by confronting them with the human cost of their activities, and by persuading them to open their books to international public scrutiny. These truly are small resurrections in the face of death-dealing forces like poverty, hunger, injustice and exploitation.

Of course, the new life we notice here in Cameroon is not only around us, but within us too. As volunteer workers in a culture with a very relaxed attitude toward time, we find ourselves removed from the constant feeling of hurry that’s built in to our San Francisco life. For the most part, it’s been really lovely, allowing us to take time to read widely, cook meals together, explore the reaches of our neighborhood on foot, and (perhaps for the first time in our adult lives) get enough sleep – all the time! This unique opportunity to slow down for a year is definitely very renewing for us. We hope to bring home some enduring lessons about the value of living slowly.

Another effect we notice is our ability to be more present in our interactions with others, and to truly take time for conversations and social interactions. Everyone does this here, even foreigners, and people aren’t always thinking about rushing off to the next thing on their agenda. Although it took us time to get used to it, we now appreciate the fact that building relationships and interacting with others is an important part of life here, even of work and business.

Our relationship to each other also gets more time here, and consequently more growth. Here our work, home life, and social activities overlap almost completely, so conflicts and communication issues which would be easier to ignore in our busier and more divergent lives back home are pulled into the light. It’s hard work sometimes, but also a wonderful opportunity to face and deal with these things, getting to know each other and our marriage more fully in the process.

Another important area of growth for us has come through the challenges of adjusting to our ‘new life’ in Cameroon. We are certainly out of our comfort zones in various ways, whether it’s our inability to communicate well in French, the constant attention that comes with being a racial minority, increased safety concerns, personal requests for money and favors that would be out of place back home, or any number of other adjustments to an unfamiliar culture. While the everyday struggles of most Cameroonians serve as a good reality check, making our problems seem petty in comparison, it has been good for us to acknowledge our own struggles and accompany each other through them, widening our horizons in the process.

On a broader scale we are faced with gaping disparities of wealth every day, with the harsh realities of how many people of the world live. Our privilege is supported by complicated systems of exploitation that contribute to the misery of the poor, and the lack of simple solutions and clear courses of action is painfully clear. But even hard truths like these are laced with resurrection for us, in that we don’t want to give up. Being here has brought to life for us how important it is to engage with our world, and to act out of hope so that hope can remain alive. It's said that we can truly change only ourselves, so educating ourselves is a gift to the world, because from this can flow a lifetime of informed engagement and hope.

Finally, stepping out of our usual surroundings and into this new life has sharpened our perspective on what we’ve chosen to leave behind for a year. The relationships, the natural beauty, the food, the cultural opportunities, our spiritual home at First Mennonite, and the general vibrancy of San Francisco (as well as a mean temperature of about 60 degrees, as far as Chris is concerned) …our appreciation of all this grows deeper across the distance. There is much that we are excited to return to! When we do return, shaped by our experiences here in Cameroon, we hope to find ways to hold these new thoughts and spaces that this year is opening for us, to bring new life to the way we live and maybe to our community too.

We love you. Peace.

"Christ Has Descended! Allelujah!"

2008-03-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

Easter Sunday

Jeremiah 31:1-6, Matthew 18:1-10

Sheri Hostetler, Pastor

There is a darkness within us. It is strong, and it is deep. Yes, there is also a burning light, an Inner light as the Quakers call it, that of God in us. I’ve frankly seen more goodness come out of people than bad. And yet, the darkness is there, and the events of this past Holy Week force us to look at it. Morton Kelsey, who wrote one of essays Worship Committee provided for Holy Week, is a priest and psychologist. "Each of us," he says, "has underneath our ordinary personality, which we show to the public, a cellar in which we hide the refuse and rubbish which we would rather not see ourselves or let others see."[1] This darkness takes many half-shapes: fear, a sorrow so deep no balm can soothe it, shame, jealousies, regrets and grievances, an anger that can erupt out of seemingly nowhere.

It gets worse, however. Below this basement, Kelsey says, lies a sub-basement, a "deeper hold in which there are dragons and demons, a truly hellish place, full of violence and hatred and viciousness. Sometimes these lower levels break out, and it is to this lowest level of humans that public executions appeal."

Any of you who have ever been to a vigil outside San Quentin on the night of an execution and have seen the demonstrators holding signs saying, "Fry him," cheering as a person is put to death, will know what Kelsey is talking about. One only need read an account of Jesus’ crucifixion to know the same thing, as crowds clamor for him to die, as soldiers jeer as they press thorns into his head, as guards at the foot of his cross gamble to see who will get his robes. It’s why I can almost not stand to hear this story, because it reminds me of this sub-basement, of the cruelty that hides in some monstrously dark part of us. It reminds me that crucifixions – on a vastly larger scale – have happened so often in human history and continue to happen.

There is a darkness deep within us. From our personal demons to the collective ogre that can emerge at times, this darkness has the power to make life a living hell.

Holy Week forces us to contemplate this darkness. As I have done this, I have also at the same time been transfixed by an icon which you have it in your order of worship, and I invite you to take it out if you wish. This icon comes from the Eastern Orthodox tradition – one of the three great streams of Christianity, along with the Catholic and Protestant. The Orthodox tradition believes that art – in the form of icons – can be as revelatory of spiritual truth as words are. Perhaps even moreso. So, you find lots of icons in the Orthodox tradition. They are, literally, considered sacred texts.

Interestingly, there are very few icons for the Resurrection, the main event in Christianity. This is because the Orthodox faith sees the Resurrection as a deep Mystery, one that cannot be captured in word or picture. They point out that the Gospel accounts themselves are silent about the details of this central mystery of our faith – we come to the Tomb after Jesus has risen, not while he is being risen. So, instead of depicting the physical act of Jesus’ emerging from the Tomb, icons depicting the resurrection show the spiritual reality of what his death and resurrection accomplished.

You have one of those icons in your hand, commonly called "The Descent Into Hell" (although here called "The Triumph Over Death" – it’s the same icon, however). The Eastern Orthodox Church uses this icon all throughout the Easter season but primarily on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter. On this day, the Eastern Orthodox Church contemplates the mystery of Christ’s descent into Hades, the place of darkness and death. We don’t often say the Apostles’ Creed in our congregation, but this "Descent into Hell" idea is found in that creed: "We believe in Jesus Christ… who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended to the dead. The third day he rose again." So, somewhere between death and resurrection, there is this descent.

This icon shows this descent, shows Christ – often riding a cross, although not in the one you have – descending into the dark belly of the earth, breaking the locked door of the tomb (see locks on this icon), and exposing the deepest recesses of creation to the light of heaven. Christ is seen as entering so profoundly into the human condition and into creation itself, that he penetrates the deepest realms of sin and death. And once there, he brings to these dark places the light of God. This, the Orthodox tradition says, is the essential spiritual truth of the resurrection – that there is no place so dark that Divine Light cannot enter it.

In other words, Christ descends into our locked basements, where our fear, shame, and anger wait in dark corners, and exposes them to the healing light of his love. I have experienced this light in my life. Many years ago, I was going through a time of deep internal struggle. I didn’t like myself. I didn’t like my life. I couldn’t make it work the way I wanted to. It was during this time that I was drawn to meditation. I began attending a small meditation community in Oakland called Hesed. Almost every day for several months, I would go to that house on Elston Avenue and sit in the basement, where the Chapel was located.

Most of the time, I did what I was supposed to do – say my mantra and follow my breath, going back to that no matter where my monkey mind wandered. But some of the time, I did something else. I would imagine myself sitting there, in that basement, with a spotlight of Divine love enclosing me in a circle. The light wasn’t harsh or bright, but golden – much like the gold in this icon, actually. It felt like a warm, loving, healing light. And sometimes, as I sat there bathed in light, I would see shapes off in the darkness outside the circle. I would call them into the light, to sit with me. Sometimes, I would recognize them – there’s the 11-year-old Sheri. I know why she’s here. Sometimes, I wouldn’t know who they were or why there were sitting in the dark, but I invited them in just the same. Mostly, they seemed like parts of me, but not always. It didn’t matter. We were just sitting there, in the light of love. This Divine Light unlocked the door to my own darkness, exposing the deeper recesses of my own basement to the light of heaven. It healed me in profound ways for which I am still grateful.

Even more astonishingly, though, this icon proclaims that Christ descends even into our sub-basements, where our most dangerous dragons and demons lurk, and shines the light of heaven even there. Some of you may remember the story Ben told last Sunday during our joys and concerns time. He was part of a gathering recently where two Japanese kamikaze pilots shared their stories – kamikazes were aviators who would intentionally crash their aircraft into U.S. warship. Killing yourself was considered utter heresy, the pilots said. But the Japanese felt so weak military and so cornered by the U.S. – which they feared would take over their country – that they felt this heresy was the only way to prevent their own destruction as a country. One of the Japanese men described his transition from naval seaman to kamikaze pilot:

"I did not tell my father of what I was chosen to do. He knew I was off to war, but the only thing he could say to me was to "come home, just come home." Now I had to arrange what would happen to my parents (after I died). I had to overcome much suffering, and I suffered greatly internally over this issue. All of us in the program became very close because we had all been given one task: to die. We had to overcome that very instinct in all of us to survive, to live. We had to conquer death and plunge ourselves into an abyss of fire."

It turns out this man was shot down before he hit his target and was stranded on an island for 82 days before being found by his countrymen. Nevertheless, he did enter an abyss of fire some months later. When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August of 1945, this same man arrived the next day to witness the destruction. "What I saw," he said, "I will never forget until the end of my days. I witnessed the destruction of a people. Nothing was left. People weeping Children with no parents, parents with no children. Bodies twisted."

This man had descended into hell. He had entered the sub-basement of our species, and seen what we can do to each other. He could have decided right then and there that he would spend the rest of his life seeking vengeance for what had happened. It would be the normal response. In fact, it would be hard to blame a person for choosing this. Instead, he said, "That day I knew I could not be the person I was. I could not go on like this. On August 7, 1945, I renounced vengeance. I renounced war."

When I hear this, I think of the time Jerome and I drove through Yosemite National Park, about a year after a forest fire devastated much of the park, leaving a lunar landscape in its wake, a land of gray and black, a land of death. By the time we drove through that same area months later, patches of green grass, even some flowers, were growing beside the hulks of charred trees. When I hear this story of the Japanese man who renounced war on August 7, 1945, I see one small, green shoot rising through a scorched land. And I say: The darkness is strong. The darkness is deep. But there is no place that the Light cannot shine.

In fact, there was one more than one green blade rising through the devastated landscape of Japan. That pilot was not the only one to renounce war. The Japanese Constitution, drawn up after World War II under the guidelines of the U.S., formally renounced war and the use of military force in offensive ways. One can say this Constitution was imposed upon them, and very quickly after this, some in Japan – at the urging of the U.S. – wanted to amend the Constitution and rearm. But the people said no. They had had enough of war and death. To this day, the Constitution remains intact. Japan also refuses to export military hardware to other countries and is the only nation with a space exploration program, but no nuclear weapons.

The darkness is strong. The darkness is deep. But there is no place that the Light cannot shine.

For Christ has descended – and is still descending – into the deepest, darkest recesses of our humanity and is exposing it to the light of heaven. Christ has descended – and is still descending -- into the suffering we bear, the suffering we inflict on each other, and is working a new thing in its midst. Christ has descended – and is still descending – into the locked, dark places of our hearts and our world, and breaking down doors of violence, hatred, despair, shame and fear.

Christ has arisen! Alleluia! And Christ has descended. Will you say it with me? Alleluia.

[1] From Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, Orbis Books.

"Facing Jerusalem"

2008-03-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Palm Sunday

Matthew 21:1-11, Isaiah 50:4-9a

Those of you who have been reading Chris and Ann’s blog while they are in Cameroon may recall a posting from Chris from a few months ago, not too long after they got to Africa:

“Hi, friends,” he began. “So here’s a question for you, one that looms large for us here in Cameroon: What do we do with the massive disparity in wealth between us and the people we see around us every day?

“You can get an education here, but you can't get a job unless you know somebody. For those with a job, income seems to be about a tenth of what it is in the U.S. .. And while rent is about a tenth of what it is at home in San Francisco, food is just as expensive and gasoline is more than double… most people here do at least have family in the villages and enough to eat. I don't feel like I can change anything, other than perhaps myself. But is simply cultivating an awareness of other people's poverty, and living mindfully, really anything more than pious self-help? I wonder that about our choice to volunteer here.

“So what do you think? The question again is: ‘What do we do with the massive disparity in wealth between ourselves and the people we see everyday?’”

Well, what do you think? How do we eat breakfast, knowing somewhere that children aren’t? How do we rest between clean sheets, knowing somewhere that a family is sleeping on the streets?

So, friends, here’s another question for us: How do we live with the reality of the Iraq war, the unending human tragedy that our taxes have paid for and are paying for? In a recent interview, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-winning economist, projected that the total costs of this war would exceed two trillion dollars. Let’s put that amount of money into perspective, he says. We have a major crisis with our Social Security system, right? For somewhere between a half and quarter of the cost of the war in Iraq, we could have fixed all the problems associated with Social Security for the next 75 years and still have had a lot left over. Or, to put it another way: We are now spending something like $120 billion a year on Iraq. The amount the entire world gives in foreign aid each year is about half that.

So, what do you think? The question again is: “How do we live with the reality of the Iraq war?”

OK. Wait a second. Enough with the questions. This is Palm Sunday. It’s a celebration. It’s happy. We’ve just got done waving palm branches for the ice cream man and singing a happy song: Jesus is coming! Pave the way with branches! Yes, and we also sang “release for the captives, pave the way with branches, “ “hope for the downtrodden, pave the way with branches,” “land for the landless, pave the way with branches.” We could also have sung, “food for the hungry, pave the way with branches,” for along that highway that Jesus took into Jerusalem, there would have undoubtedly been hungry children waving palm branches. He lived in a time when the disparity of wealth between people was stark; a few people had it all, and most people struggled to get by. Daily, like us, Jesus faced the question: “So what do you think? What do you do with the massive disparity in wealth?”

He also lived in a time of empire. The Roman empire of his day exerted total military and economic control over the nations it occupied. Tax money was collected from the poor to fuel the Roman war machine. Daily, like us, Jesus faced the question: “So how do we live in an empire that funds its military at the expense of its people?”

What do we do? What is our response?

Jesus answered that question on a spring day some 2,000 years ago by deciding to turn his face toward Jerusalem. His ministry, up to this point, had been focused around the Sea of Galilee, a rural area almost 70 miles away from Jerusalem. In that time of travel by foot, he is a long distance away from this the seat of Roman power and authority. He doesn’t have to go to Jerusalem. He can where he is, at a safe distance, and still do his good work of healing and teaching.

But Jerusalem is where the suffering he sees begins. It’s where the taxes are levied that deprive poor people of even more of their meager resources. It’s where the unjust laws that kick poor farmers off their land are enacted. And it’s where those religious leaders who collaborate with the Romans provide the necessary religious legitimation for the empire’s unjust policies.

And, so, he turns his face toward Jerusalem, the place where suffering and oppression must be confronted and engaged. Did Jesus know what he would face there? Some say he knew that he was going to his death, knew that this had to happen. Others say, no, he didn’t know for sure, he was human. But certainly would have known that confronting the powers in Jerusalem could have consequences. He knew what fate could befall prophets. And he knew, as the prophet Isaiah said centuries earlier, that he would not hide his face from insult and spitting, from the persecution sometimes meted out to those who dare dream a new dream, who prophesy a world where the poor and the powerless are not condemned to suffer.

And so we begin this Holy Week with Jesus, facing Jerusalem and entering it. Confronting the darkness of human evil. Engaging the source of suffering. We don’t have to do this, of course, right? We could easily have this next week be just like any other week: a week where our immediate cares predominate, where the urgent but not necessarily important takes up most of our time and mental space. Like Jesus, we have a choice as to whether or not we want to turn our face toward Jerusalem. Whether we want to enter into it.

If we do choose to enter into it, we need to do so intentionally. We may need to turn off the TV, the computer, the IPod. We may need to say no to some emails or phone calls that urgently call to us. If we can do this, if we can slow down and create the space, we may begin to hear those questions that tug at our conscience, that claw at our heart. If we can do this, we may begin to see the outlines of our own Jerusalem, that place where we must confront and engage suffering and oppression.

There are no easy answers here, on the way to Jerusalem. The people who commented to Chris’ question on his blog – including myself – offered up no easy way to solve a complex moral question. There’s no quick fix to suffering and oppression. But there is the willingness to let ourselves by disturbed and undone by these questions. To continue to allow them to irritate us, overwhelm us, change us. That’s what it means to face Jerusalem – to face the suffering and pain that makes us uncomfortable and be willing to stare it in the face, even while we long to look away.

If we choose to enter Jerusalem this week, we will need to experience a small portion of Jesus’ passion with him – remember, passion means suffering. We will need to experience some of Jesus’ suffering with him. Who wants to do that? That’s not happy. It’s not palm branches or the ice cream man. But it is: hope for the hopeless, release for the captive, food for the hungry. Amen.

"Life Purpose" Reflection

2008-03-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

Randy Newswanger
March 2, 2008

Luke 10:38-42

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" "Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

When you lie awake in the middle of the night, do you wonder if what you do makes a difference? Do you wonder if what you do really matters?

I know that every person in this room is making a difference. I know that you give time and money to projects and committees of this church, and many other organizations. But how do we decide which time we spend doing what tasks for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, and for the world? How do we decide when to make a difference? How do we decide what really matters?

We each have a default mechanism for making decisions. Most of the time, on most days, we are able to flow through life responding to the world around us, with constant thinking and decision making. But we don’t stop at each decision and analyze the specific dilemma in front of us, pull out our systematic theology, consult our astrologer, read the tea leaves, flip a coin, or roll some dice. If we did that at every decision, it would be sunset before we finished breakfast. The basic framework that we each use to efficiently make decisions is our own personal ethic.

In my family, when a meal was eaten, the next step was to wash the dishes, dry them, and put them away. It was not until I was living away from my family, with roommates, that I realized some people don’t know the right way to do dishes. Their dishes might stay in the sink, unwashed, for days. And no matter how much passive/aggressive behaviour I exhibited, I couldn’t get some of my roommates to do dishes the right way at the correct time. Our basic framework for daily decision making was not the same. We had different ethics.

In the gospel reading, the sisters Martha and Mary clearly made different decisions. Martha opened her home to Jesus, and proceeded to provide hospitality. Mary, chose to sit and engage in relationship building. Why did they make these decisions?

How did you arrive at your framework for daily decision making? Well, you learned it, first from your family and your peers, from educational and religious communities, and from your experiences.

Maybe Martha was fulfilling a role in the family. She expected of herself the role of hostess. Mary, somewhere, had experienced that learning, or relationships, sometimes are more important than hospitality. Maybe she just thought jesus was hot and apparently single. The part of the story with which I resonate the most, is the desire for other people to have the same decision making framework that I do; to live from the same ethic. I get so annoyed when I have to be responsible and someone else gets to do easy stuff and have fun.

Sometimes we learn a new decision making framework based on our experiences. I’m a relative novice at using my cell phone for text messaging. On Friday I pulled into a gas station to fill up my truck, and after I parked, I sent a text to a friend asking if he was free for lunch in a few minutes. I was so distracted by the phone messaging task that I left the keys in the ignition, hopped out, locked the door, and swung it shut. It took fiddling with the truck for 15 mintues, a $5 taxi ride to retrieve a spare key, a 1 mile run back to the gas station before I was in my truck and driving again. My new framework for decision making probably includes not texting at gas stations. But I’ll have to wait a year or two to know for sure. Perhaps Mary was experimenting with a new behaviour, by sitting and talking to Jesus. Maybe she was in the process of learning if this is a good idea, or not.

I have a framework for decision making about my daily life. You have a framework. We have arrived at this framework through modeling, education, and experience. We also have a framework for decisions about work, career, major tasks, and making a difference in the world. Do you have any idea what your decision making framework is for the big stuff?

For some of the major dilemmas we might rely on words like the ones from Micah, “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” However, that doesn’t seem to be useful in choosing courses of study, internships, jobs, career paths, employers and partners. And it doesn’t tell us whether or how to have children.

I think we arrive at the larger life decisions with a framework that we learned in the same way that we learned our framework for daily decision making, through family modeling, peer relationships, educational and religious communities, and our own experience. Maybe Martha ran a guest house. Maybe she was a professional hostess. Perhaps Mary was a career philosophy student. One of those people who was 35 and still working on her PhD and teaching a few courses at the local community college. Maybe Martha hired her sister to work at the guesthouse part time. Maybe Martha was frustrated, not just with the fact that Mary wasn’t helping in the kitchen today, but that she was on the wrong path altogether. Have you ever thought your sister or brother was on the wrong path?

But back to the question of careers, partners, and making a difference. Garison Keillor in his daily radio show “The Writers Almanac” ends with the simple admonition, “Be well, Do Good Work, and Keep in Touch.” In some ways, this seems to be a more practical path to doing daily life than the text from Micah. But we still must each decide how to be well, which good work to do, and how to keep in touch. For one answers I’m going to turn to gurus, books, and pop psychology.

(Pulled out of bag: Your Best Year Yet, Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life, Harold Benders The Anabaptist Vision, Phil Porter Having it All, Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, John Dewey, Herbert Stein, Warren Buffet, Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin, Art Gish, Ron Sider, Living More With Less, Tracy Gary, Starhawk, Martyrs Mirror, the Bible, the Faerie Way, Friedman, The Path, and finally, Steven Covey.)

You may be familiar with Steven Covey who wrote the book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” I have not studied his techniques extensively, nor do I consider myself a highly effective person. In fact, I’m convinced that if I practiced any of his advice, my life would be more effective. But there is one of his ideas which I find useful in this discussion. Covey lays out two ideas for the tasks we do in our lives then combines them in four possibilities. The variables are Urgent versus Not-Urgent. And Important versus Not-Important.

Some tasks are both Urgent and Important. These are things that have to get done today. Martha’s preparations for dinner which would be served at 6. Paying a bill by its due date, and many of our daily task. It’s urgent. It’s Important. it’s at the top of my to-do list.

Some tasks are Urgent, but not actually Important. When my cell phone rings, it interrupts whatever I am doing with it’s urgent demand. But seldom is the actual call of high importance. However, I answer it anyway. These tasks grab our attention, and we do them, whether we should or not, because they are urgent, even when they are not important.

Some tasks are not urgent, and they are not important. For some of us, television is not urgent, and not important, but we watch it anyway. Computer solitaire, piddling around, twiddling our thumbs, wasting time, puttering, tinkering, lollygagging, loitering. Like the proverbial Eskimos with numerous words for snow, we have numerous expressions for tasks in this category because we have them in abundance. We all have tasks which we know aren’t really important, and certainly aren’t urgent, but we do them anyway.

And finally, we get to the tasks that are important, but not urgent. These are the tasks we are most likely to overlook. They involve preparation, planning, prevention and relationships. I think Garison Keillor’s admonitions fall into this category. Be well. Do good work. Keep in touch. Take a walk. Get exercise. Create something. Write, Dream, Sing. Call someone. These are not urgent tasks. They can be put off until later. But they are so important. Mary’s decision to spend time with Jesus might be in this category. She didn’t NEED to do it, but it was important.

Steven Covey says that if we spend time doing these tasks, the ones that are not urgent, but clearly important, we will be on a path to greater effectiveness. And the place to find time for this, is by not doing tasks which are urgent, but not important. He doesn’t say take the time from tv watching, lollygagging, and loitering. He says take it from not getting caught by interruptions and other tasks that are urgent but actually unimportant. when it really doesn’t have to get done at all.

But how would anyone actually do this? How do people do the important stuff. How do they do what really matters?

I think there are two approaches. The one small step at a time approach or one big leap approach.

The first task in both approaches is to spend a little time figuring out what we really think is important in our lives. What really matters. What makes a difference.

Some people, after deciding what will make a difference, make a big leap for that dream. I think of Kinari and her health project in Indonesia. I think of Helen Stoltzfus launching an arts non-profit for kids. I think of VSers who give a year or two of their lives. I think of everyone who becomes a parent. These are all big leaps in the direction of doing things that really matter.
The second approach is to find the way to just spend a little time, on a regular basis, on one of the things you think is important. I find there are some structures that make this easier. Committees and boards which meet once a month let me show up, do a little work, and take a small step toward doing something that really matters. Volunteering for a community organization, or giving money to a worthy cause also fall in this category. I think everybody here is doing some of this.

Some of these little steps don’t fall into a regular structure, and those I find more challenging. Here are some more of mine that I wish I did regularly.

Remembering to take a walk through my neighborhood park twice a week. Calling my mother and father on Sunday afternoons. Smiling at strangers.

Today, during education hour, we will have a chance to talk with Kinari Webb about her life and work in Indonesia. I believe she is so clearly someone who has made a huge leap toward doing something that really matters.

Next week during education hour, I will be guiding a process to help focus our individual understanding of purpose using the book “The Path” by Laurie Beth Jones. If you participate next week you may arrive at a one sentence purpose statement. Here is mine.

My purpose is to structure and encourage creative expression in spiritual communities. I arrived at this purpose statement over the past 5 years. Originally it was twice as wordy as this version. When I look at my life, I see that perhaps 10% of my time is actually spent in this core purpose. The rest of my time is spent doing things I enjoy, and things that will make me money.

But knowing this is my purpose statement, sometimes helps guide my decisions about how to spend my time. Eight years ago, in my second year here at this church I was invited to join the retreat planning committee. At the time I didn’t really know why I said yes to such a job. But now I see how it is in line with my purpose. Three years ago when I was invited to help plan the annual church retreat for Metropolitan Community Church, I knew why I said yes. My purpose statement. Since I have articulated my purpose statement, it has become easier to say yes to opportunities that fall directly in line with the statement, and to know that they will bring me satisfaction. It is these tasks that make me feel like I am making a difference in the world. When I’m in line with my purpose, then what I am doing really matters.

And the more I am able to line up my own efforts with my purpose, the less I worry about whether other people are getting to have too much fun, or slacking off, or sitting and talking with Jesus while I’m making dinner. When I align with my purpose, I become more compassionate and more loving. I don’t know how this happens. I don’t know why it happens. But it does.

So I offer my ongoing commitment to engaging creatively with this community. I hope to hear your stories about doing what really matters. I want to know what makes a difference. And this
week, I want to be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

"Sacred Speed"

2008-02-24T12:00:00.000-08:00

Third Sunday of Lent: Opening the Gift of Time

Ecclesiastes 3:1-14

Every fall, more than one thousand members of the Society for the Deceleration of Time meet for their annual conference in a resort town n the Austrian Alps. The members of this society do what many people do at conferences: network, present papers. Unlike many other societies, they also do a few publicity stunts. Not long ago, the Society for the Deceleration of Time called on the International Olympic Committee to award gold medals to the athletes with the slowest times.[1]

Interestingly, the motto of this group is not "Slow Down Now" or "Speed Kills." Their goal is not to do everything at a snail's pace. They don't hope to dismantle our speedy civilization and send us back into a slow-moving, agrarian past. Their motto is, actually, a German word — eigenzeit — which translates into "own time." In other words, they are saying, each person should be able to move at their own pace — sometimes going slow when that is what you want to do, sometimes going fast. In Italian, the phrase is tempo giusto, meaning the right speed for the right activity.

It seems sort of silly that there has to be a movement that fights for the right to determine our own speed of life. But such is the state we find ourselves in, huh? Says Carlo Petrini, the Italian founder of the Slow Food movement— the international movement dedicated to cultivating, cooking and consuming our food at a relaxed pace — "Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Food." And engage in Fast Sex, according to the founders of the Slow Sex movement. There is also something called the Slow Cities Movements, the Slow Design Movement and a handful of other such movements — all documented, by the way, the book In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed.

Speed is not intrinsically wrong. Sometimes, it's very fun to go fast. But speed can also be sort of addictive, can't it? I know if I've been going too fast, multitasking for too long, I can't turn it off. I start doing everything fast, including things that really need to be slow to be savored, like cooking and eating and playing with my son. And when we live in a culture that encourages and rewards that sort of non-stop speed, it can be easy to become "slaves of speed," as Carlos Petrini says.

So how do we find our tempo giusto, our eigenzeit — or, in English, our sacred speed? Fortunately, there are many resources in the Christian traditions hat can help us establish these sacred rhythms, to be in time in way that is more geared to the pace of our bodies and nature than the unyielding forward motion of the clock. So for the rest of this sermon, I want to talk about resources for shaping our day, week and year. We'll have a chance together to share some of our ideas about how we do this during Education Hour.

The day. Perhaps the most helpful thing we can do to shape our days is to pay attention to how we begin them. Do we wake up to the clock radio already blaring the days' bad news, roll out of bed and begin mentally rehearsing what needs to be accomplished that day? Doing so subtly communicates to our soul: "This is who I am — a producer, a worker, someone who gets things done." Or we could wake up and linger in bed, or in a comfy chair, for just a few minutes and receive the gift of the day by thanking the One who created it. I have spent quite a bit of time in Benedictine monasteries, and every morning prayer begins with this verse from the Psalms: "Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise." It is a wonderful way to begin the day. Doing so subtly communicates to our soul: "This is who I am — a child of God, who has received the gift of another day on earth from a generous hand."

I know some of us have a longer morning ritual, involving meditation, prayer, or journaling. Setting aside 30 minutes for this before we begin our work is a wonderful way to orient ourselves in time. But even if we don't have that much time, we only need a few minutes to be thankful that we have woken from another night. We only need a few minutes to mentally go over our day and offer up what is coming to God. I have a couple of prayer books for morning and evening prayer that I like to use, and they take only a few minutes to pray. In the past, I have sometimes put on a CD with a song that reminds me of the gift of the day, or I've sung the hymn from our hymnal, "Each morning brings us, fresh outpoured, the lovingkindness of our Lord." A well-known theologian says he always makes the sign of the cross over his body in the morning, to remind him of his baptism. Obviously, there are many small but real ways to claim the day as God's day and to remember that it is a gift.

How we end the day is also important. A prayer said or hymn sung as darkness descends can allow us to surrender the day's events to God's care — all that went wrong as well as all that went right. For awhile, I used to practice a short version in the evening of what is called the "examination of consciousness" prayer. I simply reviewed the day and thanked God for its blessings and then offered to God any parts of the day in which I felt out of right relation with myself, others or the earth. Eugene Peterson, a Christian spiritual writer, has adopted the Jewish practice of seeing the day as beginning at dusk, rather than at dawn. "Perceiving a day's beginning at the darkening point teaches us something about who we are as human beings," he says. "We go to sleep, and God begins (God's) work." God is growing the crops even before the farmer is up and knitting together the wound before the clinic opens. When the farmer and physician awake, they will join in (God's work)."

While I think it is particularly important to be attentive to how we begin and end the day, at these "hinges of the light and darkness," many of us also desire to have stopping points throughout the day where we change our pace. I know many of you use your lunch hour to refresh your spirit in some way: taking a walk, soaking up some sun. Adopting the Slow Food philosophy of making and consuming our food at a relaxed pace can slow down the day and connect us with our bodily selves and the world of nature. Taking ten minutes to eat our lunch without also working on the computer, cooking our dinner meal from scratch — all are ways of savoring the day.

The week. I'm not going to say much about the week, because I believe that Rabbi Angel said it all last week. The greatest gift Jews and Christians have in terms of shaping and sanctifying our week is the gift of Sabbath, of dedicating one day to God, a day of refreshment, of joy, of reconnecting with what most matters. Rabbi Angel said that she always tries to spend some time outside on Sabbath, or perhaps read poetry. I know one woman whose criteria for practicing Sabbath was simply, "Not doing anything I don't want to do." So, if writing a letter to a friend seemed appealing, she would do it. If not, she wouldn't. The point was to free herself from the world of obligation for just one day, and savor the gifts of creation.

Finally, the year. One of the main gifts that the Christian tradition can offer us in shaping the year is the liturgical calendar, the cycle of seasons and feast days that make up the Christian year. Instead of a calendar that flips relentlessly forward, punctuated briefly by Hallmark holidays and celebrations of national pride, the Christian tradition sees the year as a circle that celebrates the work of God in history. Instead of beginning with the bubbly gaiety of New Years', the Christian year begins with Advent: with our longing for light in the midst of darkness, for something new to come into our tired world. That longing turns into the celebration — not that Santa Claus is coming to town — but that God is here with us in the midst of our darkness. The year continues through Epiphany and into Lent — the season we now find ourselves in — a time to take stock and reflect more deeply on our lives. Lent culminates in the astonishing feast of Easter, the ultimate affirmation that life is more powerful than death. We celebrate Easter for 50 days until Pentecost, the day we proclaim that the Divine Spirit swept into the world via tongues of fire, and that this same Spirit somehow animates even us today.

Then we enter the long stretch of ordinary time, the long days of summer and fall, when we simply live our lives as ordinary people trying to follow the movements of this Spirit, trying to bear witness to the Light. And, finally, as we enter the dark time of the year again, we find ourselves once again longing for something new to come into our tired world. And so the circle turns again.

I did not grow up in a tradition that observed the liturgical cycle, and it was a gift to me when I came to this congregation and first encountered it. It gave me a rhythm of feasting and fasting, of letting go and starting afresh not given to me by regular calendar time. I also loved the way the liturgical cycle connected me to the cycles of nature for, of course, this liturgical year was first dreamed up by people who lived much closer to the earth than we do. And so, as spring bursts forth in new life, we celebrate Easter, and as the darkness deepens in December, we recall the birth of the Light. Of course, many religious traditions offer this sort of deep connection between cyclical time, nature and spirituality. But this is our tradition, handed down for thousands of years, and it is a rich resource for shaping our year.

In addition to this cycle, of course, are our own personal feasts and fasts: birthdays, anniversaries of loss and joy. Celebrating and noting these occasions well and with intention is a good way to claim the sacredness of time. Finally, I like something I read from Waverly Fitzgerald, the author of Slow Time that I mentioned the first Sunday of Lent. Fitzgerald began noticing that during different seasons of the year, different aspects of her own self emerged. She began planning her years' work around the seasons. So, for instance, she knows that she is most productive in the fall and spring, and so she uses those seasons to do big, creative projects (like write books). In the summer, she is more likely to be scattered and restless, and so she focuses more on relationships during this time. And, in the winter, she finds herself needing to hibernate — to sleep more than usual, to scale back activity, to incubate ideas and dreams that will come to fruition in the spring. "How do the seasons affect you and what is your relationship to them," she asks. "How could you plan your life so that you are not treating yourself like a machine that has to behave the same way no matter the set of circumstances?" These questions, it strikes me, are a good way to give sacred shape to our year. Even if our jobs or family life do not always allow us to live just the way we want, asking the questions makes us more attentive to the different seasons and may help us understand just why it is so difficult to keep up our usual pace, say, in midwinter.

The writer of Ecclesiastes famously says that there is a season for everything, and a time for every matter under heaven. Perhaps that should be the motto of the Society for the Deceleration of Time, for this simple truth from an ancient book is an antidote to the cult of speed. So may we go slow when we want and need to go slow. May we go fast when it is time to do so. May we find our own sacred rhythm for our days, weeks and years and, thus, more fully receive the gift of time. Amen.

[1] From In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed.