Category: Sermons

Tonight’s baccalaureate sermon on Mark 14: 3-9.

I’m going to tell you the opposite of pretty much everything everyone else is going to tell you this weekend.

You have probably already heard and will hear again tomorrow that you are the best and the brightest, that it’s your job to go out there and make the world a better place, that you are the leaders now and it’s time to take the helm.  You will be told that the sky is the limit and your dreams should be big.  You will be told to make something of yourself – especially through your professional accomplishments.  You will be told to enjoy the places your lives will take you – especially when they are far away, glamorous, unexpected, and can earn you more money.  You will be told, as you have been so many times already, that the impressiveness of your résumé is how you are measured and valued.

I’m not going to tell you those things.  Because you are UVA people and because I know that you will do big, amazing, impressive, world-bettering things no matter what we say to you.  It’s part of why you are here to begin with.  You are high-achieving, motivated, conscientious.  You don’t need encouragement to be who you already are.

But you probably need a lot of encouragement to consider living small.

I don’t mean miserly, shut-in, cut-off, or inhospitable.  I don’t mean afraid and cowering.  Just small.  Humble.  In proportion.  Manageable. Close to the ground and centered around the people, places, and things you really mean to have at the center of your life.

Like Ruthie Leming.  She was the younger sister of writer Rod Dreher and they grew up together in rural Louisiana.  From early childhood, Ruthie’s world was that town.  She married her high school sweetheart, taught school, and raised kids there.  Rod, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to leave town for some place bigger, faster, more “cultural.”  He felt trapped in that small town and he never understood why his sister seemed so happy there.  Even content.

In his book about their lives, he writes:  “I had somehow come to think of her living in a small town as equivalent to her living a small life.  That was fine by me, if it made her content, but there was about it the air of settling.  Or so I thought” (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:  A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life, by Rod Dreher, p. 194).

Then, in her early 40s she developed cancer and died within a couple of years.  In the course of her illness and during the weeks after her death, Rod developed a different relationship to the town.  By that point he and his family had moved around between Washington DC, New York City, and Philadelphia.  He was a widely-published writer, made a lot more money than his sister, and he lived in impressive, happening places.  But he realized during his trips home that he didn’t have any friends or neighbors in any of those places who would come take care of him if he got sick.  He witnessed the town coming together to support Ruthie, raising tens of thousands of dollars for her care, providing meals, watching out for her kids, and traveling back from places like California to be at her funeral.  He heard the stories of her former students, now teachers themselves, who said they would never have even finished high school if Ruthie hadn’t taken an interest in them.  And though the time was full of struggle and pain, his trips back home opened his eyes to what was missing in his own life and to what had been there all along in that small town and those small-seeming lives.  His epiphany was that Ruthie’s small life was bigger and deeper than he had ever grasped – bigger in some very important ways than his own well-crafted life.

Why am I telling you all this?  Your families here tonight will be pleased to hear that I am not trying to get you all to move back home and never leave.  But I encourage you to read the book (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming) and to think about what living a small life might mean for you.  As Rod makes sense of his sister’s death and their very different lives, he comes to terms with the fact that if he had never left he would have been bitter and always wondering.  He doesn’t come to the conclusion that his sister was right all along.  He had to take the journey he did in order to find his way back home – literally to Louisiana and his family but also to the kind of life God was calling him to live.

It’s not an either/or proposition, but graduation clichés and platitudes can make it sound that way.  Either you go “make it big” or you settle for something that pays the bills.  Either you make your mark on the world or you start a family.  Either you “use” your degree or you don’t.  Either you impress other people or you satisfy yourself. 

But it’s not an either/or choice between a big life or a smaller one that counts.  Some of your biggest most God-centered moments will not be televised or public or result in a bigger paycheck.  Some of the smallest-seeming moments will reverberate the loudest in terms of how you organize your life and live it out in the ordinary details of every day.

Jesus’ disciples protested and complained because they thought there was an either/or choice between big acts of justice – feeding the poor – and small acts of kindness – anointing one man’s feet.  Jesus doesn’t recognize this choice.  He says, You can (and should) help the poor regularly.  You have that opportunity every day.  But this opportunity is the one in front of you right now and it’s good, too.  She cared for me (vv.3-7).  He says, “She has done what she could” (v. 8).

We don’t even know her name.  It was an extravagant act but small, intimate, and fleeting.  Only a few disciples knew about it and even though we are still talking about it tonight, we don’t know her name.  If she were graduating tomorrow, people would advise her to etch her name into the jar of alabaster before she breaks it so everyone present will remember it better.  If she were graduating tomorrow, people would tell her to get more bang for her buck and organize an Alabaster Day on the Lawn or on the National Mall and have hundreds of people breaking jars and anointing feet all over the place in a synchronized and well-publicized movement.

She did one generous, personally-extravagant, but relatively small thing.  That is what Jesus noticed and praised her for and I suspect that at the end of her life, that moment was one of the highlights.  I suspect that throughout her life that moment was a touchstone that helped her make other generous, personally-extravagant, Christ-centered decisions.  It was small and, despite Jesus’ words, almost forgotten.  What was her name again?  But I am telling you, it was enough.

You are already on an amazing trajectory to do big, impressive, résumé-building things that I look forward to reading and hearing about.  You are also already enough.

What I want is for you to be on the lookout for the brilliantly small life, wherever you go next.  Be ready to get generous, personally-extravagant, and Christ-centered – even if hardly anyone else sees it and you can’t put it on your résumé.  Like you have been living here.  I know you have had mind-blowing classes, trips around the world, challenging internships, and incredible professors here.  I also know that some of your most important, memorable, reverberating moments have been the small ones.  Talking in my office or over coffee, offering comfort to a struggling first year, on spring break mission trips, in worship, trying to work out your beliefs in a hot topic forum, around the countless dinner tables, in late night car rides back to your dorm or on couches in the Cottage, in marathons or minutes spent in Study Camp…  You have done what you could.  You already know what the big, good, small moments can be.  Keep it up.

Thanks be to God!

 

©2013 Deborah E. Lewis

Praise, Palms, Silence, Stones

Luke 19: 28-40  (Palm Sunday)

Here’s the thing about English majors:  we believe in metaphors.  I don’t just mean we like them or appreciate them.  I mean we believe in them.  In Franz Kafka’s story, The Metamorphosis, when we read about Gregor Samsa waking up one morning to find that he has transformed into a giant cockroach, we are physically unable to sit back from the story and analyze it “as if” he’s a cockroach.  We don’t want to talk about the person who “thinks” he’s a cockroach.  We want to go deeper:  what does it feel like and how did he know and will his family accept him if he opens his bedroom door?  We accept the premise – the metaphor – and everything else follows from there.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When Jesus gets to Jerusalem, the place he’s been headed since the beginning, he sends disciples to procure a colt.  He rides the colt into town, amidst a throng of cheering, palm branch-waving people.  The crowd is throwing down cloaks on the road for his colt to walk on.  The excitement builds and the crowd starts shouting out about the miracles and wonders they have seen.  They reach back to the Psalms to praise him, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Luke 19: 38; Psalm 118: 26).

I imagine this scene as just shy of chaos.  The full press of crowds, the inner circle of disciples thrilled with the reception, thinking they are finally all getting the recognition they deserve, people shouting over top of one another, palm branches swaying and sometimes smacking people in the face.  I hear individual shouts that finally come together into this recognizable praise:  “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!  Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” (Luke 19: 38).  Everyone chanting this familiar poetry together in one booming voice.

It’s making the Pharisees nervous and a few of them get close enough to speak to Jesus over the roar.  They say, with concerned looks on their faces, Rabbi, you’d better tell them to stop.  This is getting out of hand here.  Please have them quiet down (v. 39).

And Jesus responds, “I tell you, if these [people] were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19: 40).  In other words, Even if I shushed them and they all fell silent, these stones here on the path would shout out in their place.  Those stone arches into the city would shout praises.  The stones would take their place and continue the chorus.

He doesn’t say The crowd’s too big and I’ll never quiet them down.  He doesn’t say Who them?  But they are praising me and it sounds so gooood.  He doesn’t say anything about whether he could or would quiet them; he simply says that someone else would speak up.  The stones would cry out.

Ah, metaphor!  What is Jesus trying to say by invoking the stones here?

What would that sound like?  Do they all know Psalm 118?  Would we recognize the words?  Would it sound beautiful and scary to us, the way the crowds sounded to those Pharisees?

 

Since our earliest days as Christians, Lent has been a time of preparation, of being intentionally formed into more faithful disciples.  Easter was originally when we baptized new members into the body of Christ and in the very beginning that was after 3 years of preparation.  One of our United Methodist liturgical scholars called Lent of year 3 “the home stretch” – after “three years of learning how to pray, how to listen to and learn from scripture, how to care for the poor, the sick, and the orphans, how to care for and advocate for the needs of older persons, and how to overcome addictive patterns in their lives…” (Taylor Burton-Edwards, 3/20/13).  Maybe some of you working on 4-year degrees can relate a bit to that kind of a home stretch.  It’s a long time to be focused on one life-changing goal.  It’s a long time to submit yourself to transformation and refining.

Some things take a long time and it’s hard to see what has happened until later.  Like becoming less human one moment at a time until you wake up and find you are a cockroach.  Or becoming more Christ-like one prayer at a time, one verse at a time, one relationship at a time, one visited prisoner at a time…  Some things take a long time.  Like water dripping onto stone, wearing it away drop by drop over hundreds and thousands of years.

Or like stones being formed in the first place.

One of my favorite songs is by Beth Nielsen Chapman and it’s called “Sand and Water.”  It’s from her album of the same name, written in her grief after her husband died way too young.  Her voice is a little shaky and vulnerable as she describes the shifting sands of life after his death, the crashing waves of grief, the difficulty in finding a solid place to land or stand.  But the chorus goes like this:  “Solid stone is just sand and water…and a million years gone by.”  Some things take a long time, maybe even a million years.

Maybe the stones know something we don’t.

It’s interesting to me that the stones are quiet in this story.  Jesus warns that if the people are hushed the stones will speak up.  That would imply that they are fully able to speak up and ready to praise.  Are they waiting for that moment, then?  Do they hear that the people have it covered so they’re just lying low for now?  I find myself thinking Hey, stones, Jesus is only coming by this way once, so if you’re going to join in the praises, you’d better pipe up.  But when it takes “a million years gone by” to exist, perhaps your perspective isn’t human.  Perhaps you have patience and vision that we humans don’t have access to yet.

One of my favorite writers is Annie Dillard and one of my favorite essays of hers is called “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” in a book by the same name (pp.67-76).  Annie Dillard is a novelist, essayist, professor, nature-lover, and friend of God.  In “Teaching a Stone to Talk” she tells the story of a man she once knew named Larry who was, truly, attempting to teach a stone to talk.  Dillard commends Larry in this, his life’s work recognizing his sacrifice and devotion, recognizing how much we long to hear from the rest of creation and how much we doubt that anything is being said.

She writes:

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.  It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind.  The very holy mountains are keeping mum.  We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we lighting matches in vain under every green tree.  Did the wind used to cry, and the hills shout forth praise?  Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few.  Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink, oink.  But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunders break the air in lightning storms.  I call these noises silence.  It could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water – and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town.  …At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready.  Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.  You empty yourself and wait, listening…We are here to witness…

I don’t know if Jesus meant that the stones would literally shout out praises or not.  But I believe he meant what he said.  I believe he meant that we aren’t the only ones who recognize the presence of God.  Surely these stones would cry out.  All of creation is part of this story and – silent or not – all of creation witnesses and praises along with us.  If need be, instead of us.

The arc of God’s story arc is long and we are somewhere in the middle of it all, thinking that 3 years is a long time to wait to be baptized.  We aren’t the first, we won’t be the last, and we aren’t the only ones right now.  The stones may be silent but they are biding their time.  Jesus is passing by today, on his way to scarier territory this week.  It’ll be tempting to stand here full of praise and then to stay here empty-handed, remembering the parade.  Don’t.

Follow where he goes, praising, silent, faithful.  Trust that the journey is longer than you know or think you can stand.  Keep following.  Trust that out of simple things like sand and water, God can make stone.  Out of a simple thing like dust, God makes you.  Submit yourself to transformation and refining, to the stony path of discipleship.  Know that whatever you did or didn’t do for Lent is one drop on the hard surface of your heart.  There will be others.  And know that you have all the time in the world to cry out in praise.

Thanks be to God!

©2013 Deborah E. Lewis

Sermon on Luke 13: 1-9   |  3 March 2013 – Lent 3

Apparently fig trees are like the scrappy underdogs of the tree world.  They have “aggressive root systems” that do whatever they have to do in order to find water and nutrients in the rocky, arid Middle Eastern soil where they grow wild.  These aggressive roots have a strong need for groundwater and will find it deep down, if it isn’t readily available from rainfall or surface water.   Fig trees can tolerate drought and make do in nutritionally poor soil, though they have been cultivated since ancient times and thrive with just a little tending (Wikipedia, “Common Fig” entry as of 3/1/13).

If fig trees wrote psalms, you could imagine one of them writing Psalm 63:  O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water (Psalm 63: 1).  I can make do with this rocky, dry, marrowless soil, but, God, I could really use you right about now.  I am holding on for dear life.  Can you come by here?

Don’t you think the fig tree wanted to bear fruit?

The one that Jesus tells about in the parable.  It had been fruitless for 3 years and though the tree’s owner wanted to get rid of it, the gardener intervened.  The gardener said, Give me a year with it.  See what happens when I dig up this hard, dry, compacted soil and add some fertilizer.  Wait another year and see what happens (Luke 13:6-8).

This is what happens.  Figs!  I’m going to pass them around so you can taste and see what we are talking about, so you can literally take it in.  This delicious, chewy, nutritious, surprising fruit is what comes from a place that just last year seemed lifeless and beyond hope.  Please keep passing them around – don’t be shy.

A fig tree is made to bear fruit.  That’s its purpose.  That’s the goal of its existence.  It’s important to remember that:  the parable is not about getting an apple tree or a pine tree to bear figs.  It is not about expecting something impossible.  It is not about expecting the tree to be anything more or less than what it is.

Again, I ask:  Don’t you think the fig tree wanted to bear fruit?  Its whole purpose is to make figs.  It’s not confused about its purpose.  It is not trying to write a novel instead.  It is probably trying to work itself up to a fig.  But for whatever reasons – drought, poor soil, neglect – it hasn’t been able to muster a single fig.  For 3 years.

It can be a little trickier for us to figure out our “fruit.”  What am I meant to bear or produce, that will show that I am fulfilling my purpose?  What is the goal of my existence?  How many years have I been fruitless and when is the nice gardener going to show up and help me out a little?  How much time do I have – gulp – before it’s Zero Fruit Thirty?

Even when you know your major or you are a fabulous fourth year “coasting” towards May with a job offer clinched, the fruit question can linger.  Is this what I am supposed to be doing?  How does this degree or job allow me to live out my calling as a disciple?  Is my whole purpose –  my whole fruitfulness in life –  measured by my work?  If not, how else do I engage in fruitful living?

Asking questions like these is your first step to bearing fruit, to living out of your purpose.  Remember that the fig tree had been fruitless for 3 years already?  And fig trees know what their purpose is!  For 3 years, this fig tree sat withering and suffering and not fulfilling its purpose, probably writing something like Psalm 63 while it waited for that gardener to finally show up and give it some help and encouragement.

Who knows what went on in the mind of the fig tree during that long wait, but you can imagine it, can’t you?  You can imagine working and striving and feeling a little lost and feeling pretty parched and wondering if God is paying attention.  Can’t you?

During times like that it can be tempting to look for signs.  That’s what the first part of tonight’s reading from Luke is about.  Were those Galileans who Pilate killed worse sinners than the other Galileans?  Is that why God allowed that to happen? (vv. 1-2).  It’s tempting but Jesus rejects this line of thinking.  He brings up another tragic event, when people were  crushed under a falling tower and he also rejects that as evidence of God’s wrath.   To questions about events like these, he says, No, that’s not how God behaves.  The lesson from those events is that life is fragile and unpredictable and the best path to fruitfulness is to repent – turn around – and go in the direction of God  (Luke vv. 1-5 and People’s New Testament Commentary p.231).

You might say that Jesus does give a flying fig.  Because after he’s gotten all that straightened out, he tells the parable about the fig tree.  Fig trees don’t wait for signs.  They use all of their energy to make figs.  And when they don’t have enough energy left for that, they wait – sometimes for a long, long time – for a gardener who knows his way around fig trees.

We don’t like that part, either, do we?  The waiting for a long, long time part.  The waiting while we are thirsty beyond our own abilities to quench our thirst.  The waiting when we are not sure what we are waiting for….Am I waiting to become an engineer?  A parent?  A volunteer at the homeless shelter?  The fig tree got at least 4 years to come up with some figs – 3 years plus the year ahead with the gardener’s help.  Hmmmm….What else takes 4 years?  College, anyone?

How much pressure do you put on yourself to have it all figured out by the time you get your degree?  Don’t you think we get at least as long as a fig tree?

And when the wait is over and the gardener finally shows up, it is still “up to the tree itself to feast on this extended care [it receives]”  It’s not like the fig tree can just put its feet up and wait for figs to be brought to it and placed on its branches.  The God-given work of a fig tree is to work with the God-given gardener to make figs out of itself, to bear fruit.  I don’t know how long you get to become fruitful but “[t]he parable is just as clear about the gracious intervention of the gardener as it is about the possible one-year deadline if no improvement is found” (General Board of Discipleship “Lectionary Planning” pages as of 3/1/13).  In other words, God is on our side.  God made us for fruitful living and God does not leave us to our own devices  either to figure out what fruit we are called to produce or to come up with it entirely on our own.

Neither is God inclined to thwart our fruit-producing abilities.  God wants our lives to bear fruit.  God sends the Gardener Jesus to give us some extra help.  You are not meant to do this alone, with no resources, endlessly relying on poor conditions and your own reserves.  You are scrappier than you think you are and God, with a trowel and some gardening clogs, is  just waiting to dig in and help you grow, thrive, bear fruit.  But you have to be part of it.  You have to do something, too.  You have to reach your aggressive roots as far as you can and take the life-giving assistance you find.

I don’t know that our deadline is a year from now but I do know that we all have deadlines.  Towers fall, cancer grows, floods rise.  Life is shorter than we think and a lot of things are out of our control.  But at each and every moment of life we are moving closer to God or further away.  Closer bears fruit.  Every time.  And you can repent/turn around/move closer even when you are still asking questions about what kind of fruit tree you are, and even when you are dying of thirst and writing psalms to God in the desert.

I know you want to produce fruit.  Like the fig tree, you are aching for it.  If that is all the path you have right now, then go with the ache.  It will take you where you need to go.  It will take you through and beyond the places that seem lifeless and purposeless.  It will take you closer and closer to God.  Go with that ache to be fruitful.  Who knows what delicious morsel your life will yield by this time next year?

Thanks be to God!

 

©2013 Deborah E. Lewis

 

Mama Jesus Or Jesus Is My Chicken

Luke 13: 31-35

 

I am completely fine with it if all you walk away with tonight is the thought that Jesus is your chicken.

It’s a gift from Jesus himself, this image of him as a mother hen and us as his baby chicks in need of protection.  It’s an exclamation of longing, Jesus’ longing for us to come to him, to nestle into the warm safe place under his wing.  Why don’t we use this divine chicken language more often?

He’s talking with his disciples and a few Pharisees approach to warn him that Herod wants to kill him.  Jesus says, Go tell that fox Herod that I am busy casting out demons today and tomorrow and on the third day, too.  But then I’m on my way from here (Luke 13: 31-33).  Does that sound familiar to you – “third day”?  It’s supposed to.  It’s for us, the readers, and it’s supposed to remind us that Jesus was crucified and then, on the third day, resurrected.  It’s a way of saying that Herod’s plan will eventually work – but so will God’s.  The third day is when the story makes sense and God has the final word.

Anyway, Jesus tells the Pharisees that that old fox Herod will just have to wait for that day and while he’s in the middle of going over all the days and his plans for prophecy and healing, he mentions that he’ll be killed in Jerusalem eventually.  And then, at the mere mention of the name Jerusalem, he completely sidetracks himself, like a lover who hears the name of his long-gone beloved, like a mother yearning for her children.  He stops addressing the Pharisees, and talks to Jerusalem instead.  He blurts out, with pain and longing, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Luke 13: 34).

I mentioned to y’all last week that my dad grew up on a farm.  I called him this week as I was working with this passage.  For those of us who haven’t been around chickens that much, there isn’t much to go on here.  Jesus wants to gather us up under his wing.  I wondered how often chickens do this and in what circumstances so I called to see what my dad could tell me about chickens.  He said, “They’re dirty and they poop a lot.”  When I explained why I was asking and reminded him of the story he said, “Any time it’s raining or overcast or the weather seems bad in any way, that’s what the hen does.  She opens up her wings wide and shelters her chicks.  She does it when she’s trying to hatch eggs, too.  Just completely covers them up in her feathers.”

Since before the eggs are hatched, the hen is mothering them, sheltering them, protecting them.  When the fuzzy little chicks are running around the barnyard in inclement weather she flaps open her broad mama wings and calls them back home again.  This is the image Jesus applies to himself.  It’s not like he was in a debate and got called a chicken and then made the best of it, bending the image to suit his own purposes.  He starts the whole thing.  He refers to Herod as a fox – sly, cunning, clever, a thief, chicken-hungry – and then continues the metaphor by calling himself the mother hen.

I am pretty sure that if any one of us in this room were writing the lines for Jesus, we would have chosen something fierce and fox-eating.  Herod’s a fox, but I have a taste for fox meat, Jesus retorted.  I’m an eagle/wolf/panther!  Not a vulnerable mother animal with babies to protect.  And if it had to be a mother with babies don’t you think we would have gone all mama bear on him?  But Jesus gives us a chicken.  Unglamorous, somewhat comical, not strong or fast.  An ordinary squawking barnyard mama chicken.

Jesus is our chicken.

Barbara Brown Taylor, the Episcopal priest and writer who lives on a farm in north Georgia and, I believe, has chickens there, has some insight on this image Jesus gives us.  She says (originally “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood” in The Christian Century, 1995, referenced online at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=638, 2/19/13),

“If the city were filled with hardy souls, this would not be a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, it is filled with pale yellow chicks and at least one fox. In the absence of a mother hen, some of the chicks have taken to following the fox around. Others are huddled out in the open where anything with claws can get to them. Across the valley, a white hen with a gold halo around her head is clucking for all she is worth. Most of the chicks cannot hear her, and the ones that do make no response. They no longer recognize her voice. They have forgotten who they are.

If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world –wings spread, breast exposed — but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.”

 

They no longer recognize her voice.  They have forgotten who they are – who their mother is.  Jerusalem, Jerusalem!  How often I have yearned to gather you up underneath my wings…but you were not willing.

Remember what I said last week about trying to do everything ourselves?  It would be tempting to rewrite this image and claim Jesus the panther as the one who protects us.  It would be tempting to try to protect the chicken herself, since she is so flappy and foolish-seeming.  It would be tempting to follow someone else or to fashion some other sort of god who better suits our needs, rather than accepting this Savior who turns the other cheek and embraces sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes, and who leads the way through death.  It is tempting to long for God to be more like we think God should be.

Remember Jesus, poised on the hill above Jerusalem?  Remember the moment when he interrupts his own train of thought to blurt out with messy love and longing Jerusalem, Jerusalem?  That’s the God we get – one who is thoroughly familiar with longing and who, despite all of the ways we little chicks go off running in the wrong direction, continues to emphatically yearn for us to come back and snuggle under his wing.  You want a different image, a different kind of god?  God gets that – God had something different in mind for us, too.

And you were not willing….we were not willing.  We go off half-cocked, like chickens with their heads…well, you get the point.  We like the stealth and sleek fox.  We admire his clever cunning.  We are easily lured into thinking he won’t hurt us, that we are exempt from his voracious appetite for chicken meat.  That’s how we start to think when Mama Jesus seems too exposed and vulnerable, too chickeny.  How can we give our lives to someone like that?  If not a panther, what about the fox then?  How are we supposed to build our lives around the one who just stands there, open, jugular exposed, loving us like that?

How can we not?

We know that love is stronger than death.  We know what happens on the third day.  It ought to be easier for us to build a life around this than it was for Jerusalem, living before the tale was told.  But it’s not, is it?

It makes no difference.  It has always been and is still very hard to live this way.  It’s why God keeps calling us, longing for us to come back to that embrace, where we can remember who we are again.  Living after this tale has been told makes no difference in how hard this is for us.  But it also makes no difference to God; it makes no difference in how God loves us.  The same God who stood with tears and longing on the hill opposite Jerusalem, calling our names with arms open wide, is the one who is doing that right now.  For you.

This is the God we follow.  This is the God who is our home.  This is the God who persists and perseveres in loving us, no matter how unlovable we sometimes are, no matter how stubborn, no matter how much we would rather be loved by a panther.

Jesus is your chicken but you can turn your back on Mama Jesus’ longing and try to follow or fend off the fox and the rain solo.  Or you can run as fast as your teeny chick legs will go into that embrace.  It’s raining but under those feathers it’s warm and dry and feels like home.  Like Mom.

Thanks be to God!

 

©2013 Deborah E. Lewis

 

Against the Self-Made Man…or Woman

Luke 4: 1-13

 

There is no such thing as a self-made man.  Or woman.

I hope you won’t tune me out.  I hope you won’t chalk this one up to “unrealistic preacher stuff” and let yourself off the hook.  I also hope that what I’m about to say will help you give yourself a break and help make your life more interesting.

This ultra-American idea of the person who is “self-made” can be inspiring.  He pulled himself up by his own bootstraps…He came from nothing and now he owns a company that employs 5,000 people…His grandfather used to be a janitor at that club and now he’s a member.  The self-made person is supposed to have come from nothing (usually meaning no money, no social connections) and worked hard and been promoted all based on his own hard work and ingenuity.  The self-made person is supposed to show us that if he can do it, so can we.  No one is barred from success – you just have to work long and hard enough to attain it.  Look at this guy!

Depending on your family, your schools, and your temperament, you may have been weaned on the self-made myth.  I suspect that because you are here at UVA, you’ve at least heard an ample amount of self-made talk, whether or not you fully embrace it.  And before I go any further, let me say that there is a substantial strain of this in my own family history:  my dad, who grew up in a sharecropping family, was the first in his family to attend college, which he did here at UVA.  So I get the power of this story.  I get that there is much to admire.

But I’m here to say that there is no such thing as the self-made man or woman.

Even in these inspiring American-hero stories, the individuals in question are not really “self-made.”  Sure, he got up early every day to go in to the office.  But where did his breakfast come from?  Who picked it or transported it or cooked it?  Who made his clothes?  The furniture in his humble apartment?  My own father would readily admit that without the hard sacrifices of his parents and the high school administrators that went out of their way to put in a good word for him, he would never have gone to college.  No matter how humble, we are made of connection and community and we don’t get anywhere completely on our own.

For Christians, we can blame it on baptism.  Just as we are born into human families whose stories lay claim to us and help form us, baptism reminds us of God’s unfailing love for us, marking us as part of God’s own family before we are able to claim this or anything else for ourselves.  Whether we are baptized as babies or when we are older, any belief on our part is preceded by God’s love for us and God’s grace in our lives.   As Bishop Willimon says, “[P]art of the point of becoming a Christian is that it is something done to us, for us, before it is anything done by us” (William H. Willimon, Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002, p. 27).

Let me pause here to say this is does not mean your life is predetermined.  This does not mean your life has nothing to do with you.  This does not mean you have a free pass because God is pulling the strings anyway.

What it means is that you have context and tradition and history – whether or not you are aware of it.  It means that you are given both roots and trajectory.  The rest is up to you.  But don’t be tempted to think you made yourself.

Jesus’ temptations are all about identity.  The devil is trying, desperately, to get Jesus to see himself and his role differently.  The devil says, You can feed yourself.  You can make stones turn into bread.  Why fast?  No need – just make what you crave.  The devil says, All you have to do to have power over all the kingdoms of the world is worship me.  Choose your own god.  Choose power, not servanthood.  Choose these shiny kingdoms, not that ephemeral kingdom of God stuff.  The devil says, See if God is really God.  Test God by jumping off of here.  I mean, if God isn’t who God claims to be, what’s that say about you?  I’m just saying.

Here’s the thing about the wilderness and temptations, this season we call Lent:  it’s about you and God.  It all starts there and spirals out like a magnificent galaxy of love and interdependence…to all the other relationships and communities we take part in.  If giving up chocolate or media helps you focus on this, great.  If taking on running or centering prayer helps you spend time with God, great.  But if not…If this whole giving up/taking on practice makes you feel like you have one more thing to prove, then let go.  It’s supposed to be about God, after all.

Spiritual disciplines and fasts can be extraordinarily helpful on the journey.  But sometimes they aren’t, and that is ok, too.  Sometimes, with some people, we can start to get competitive and proud and boastful about this internal journey with God.  There are no self-made men or women with God.  No matter how austere or creative or devout or unusual or arduous your Lenten discipline, the point is to open yourself up so that God can really get God’s hands in there and work on you in some new and interesting and life-giving ways.  The point is not to proclaim proudly on Easter morning I made it without chocolate! – especially before you even proclaim Christ is risen!

God is the primary Maker in your life.

Jesus has first-hand experience with how hard life can get.  Straight from his baptism, the same Spirit that descended on him there and filled him, led him into the wilderness (Luke 3: 21; 4: 1).  And after the 40 days of fasting and temptations, Jesus is filled up with the power of the Spirit as he heads back to Galilee (Luke 4: 14).  Clearly, the promise that God’s Spirit will be with us is not a wispy, easy gift.  The Spirit can lead us to dangerous and scary places…and it can bring us home again.  But notice that Jesus is not ever left alone – and neither are we.

God does not make us, wind us up, and leave us to run out our own courses on our own.  God’s loving, guiding hand and Spirit are with us even in the most dire places, in the spots when it seems we must be making it on our own because there is no one else around.  And when we empty ourselves of the notion that we are in charge, charting our own destinies, and instead work with God, letting the Wind fill our sails and change our course, we end up in surprising places.  We might even figure out that being self-made is a thin substitute for what God has in mind for us.  We might find we would rather keep being made – formed, transformed – by God, than created by our own wits in any other image.

Thanks be to God!

 

© 2013 Deborah E. Lewis

 

 

Three Essential Prayers: Wow

Luke 9: 28-36

 

I didn’t intend to end our Three Essential Prayers series on Transfiguration Sunday but it was fortuitous when things turned out that way.  There aren’t many better examples in scripture of the perfect moment for a “wow” prayer.

 

Today’s the day in the Christian calendar we call Transfiguration Sunday, named for the story we read tonight from Luke’s gospel.  For most Protestants it’s always the last Sunday before Lent begins, the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday.  And on this Sunday we catch a shining, blazing glimpse of Jesus right before we walk the long dusty road through the desert of Lent.  In some ways it’s the vision we can carry with us to sustain us during the temptations of the wilderness.

 

Jesus takes his inner circle of disciples – Peter, James, and John – high up on a mountain and undergoes a sort of metamorphoses.  Right before their eyes his appearance changes, his face begins to shine like the sun, and his clothes turn a bright, dazzling, impossible white.  As if that weren’t enough, suddenly Moses and Elijah appear and start talking with Jesus.  Never mind that, as my friend Jason points out, this was in the time before photographs:  the disciples recognize the key players immediately.

 

In fact, Peter recognizes that there is a certain significance to this event and quickly pipes up with an idea for capturing the moment.  Right over top of the conversation Jesus and the prophets are having, Peter blurts out, This is a great place to be.  I can make three huts, one for each of you.  I picture him warming up here.  He’s about to be on a roll, with many more anxious, quick-thinking plans to be revealed in rapid succession.  But before he gets further along and before even Jesus or the prophets have a chance to respond, God intervenes.

 

A brightly-lit cloud overshadows the mountaintop scene and God says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9: 35).  After that, the disciples look up at Jesus and suddenly he looks normal again; Moses and Elijah are gone.

 

The heart of this encounter for me is the babbling Peter overflows with once he sets eyes on this strange scene.  Overcome with emotion and dazzling light and fear, he just starts coming up with ideas of how to contain it all, tame it.  If he can just keep talking maybe the scene will sparkle less.  If he can hatch the perfect plan maybe he can encapsulate this event in a veneer that keeps the transfiguration over there where it belongs – and away from him and the other disciples.  You’ve probably heard other sermons about Peter trying to capture the moment, trying to hold onto it and stay with the mountaintop experience rather than going back “down” into normal life after it’s over.  I’ve probably preached some of those, too, but that’s not how I’m thinking of it today.  Today I’m thinking of it this way:  he’s trying to contain this experience the way an oyster contains an irritating grain of sand by covering it over in layers of pearl.  So he won’t feel it anymore, so it won’t be so noticeable and irritating.

 

I think the disciples would have been better off if they had said, simply, “Wow!”

 

Anne Lamott describes “wow” like this (Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Lamott, 2012, p. 73):

…Wow, because you are almost speechless, but not quite.

You can manage, barely, this one syllable.

When we are stunned to the place beyond words, we’re finally starting to get somewhere.  It is so much more comfortable to think that we know what it all means, what to expect and how it all hangs together.  When we are stunned to the place beyond words, when an aspect of life takes us away from being able to chip away at something until it’s down to a manageable size and then to file it nicely away, when all we can say in response is “Wow,” that’s a prayer.

 

 

See what I mean?  It’s like she’s describing poor Peter.  If only he’d said “wow” and then stopped and stared.

 

But hasn’t this happened to you – with or without the urge to build huts?

 

When I was newly in love with Woody and on vacation, I spent a whole Wow day, driving through Montana to meet up with a friend for camping at Glacier National Park.  My whole life I’ve had pictures in my mind of what Montana looks like.  I always dreamed that the Big Sky state would feel spacious and open, with huge clouds, and breathtaking.  It was just as I’d always pictured it, even better.  I drove for about 6 hours that day, windows open, radio playing, thinking about my sweetheart, smiling, and drinking it all in.

 

I realized at one point that I was talking to myself.

 

Every time I’d round another curve, there in front of me would be another magnificent and breathtaking view.  With each new gift of a view I was spontaneously exclaiming, “Great God!”  It arose without conscious thought, and came out sounding like awe and praise.  Great God!  After a couple of minutes wondering if I should come up with another phrase somehow more suitable, I realized I had stumbled onto the exact perfect exclamation.  I was simply, reflexively, wholeheartedly giving thanks to God and expressing my astonishment.  The day, the landscape, being in love, and the glory of it all created in me an eruption of praise to the One who created and gave it all.  It was the most apt and reasonable response I could have come up with – what a great God this is!  Thank you!  Wow!  (I don’t think it’s all that easy to separate out help, thanks, and wow.  In my experience, they bleed into one another on almost all occasions.)

 

Anne Lamott calls poetry “the official palace language of Wow” (Help Thanks Wow, Lamott, p. 79).  When I think of that day driving through Montana and when I think of poetry as the language of wow, I am reminded of the poem by ee cummings, called “I thank You God for most this amazing” (listen to ee cummings recite his poem here).  Listen (from E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962, by e. e. cummings, as credited 2/10/13 at http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/C/cummingsee/ithankYouGod.htm):

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

 

 

Wow sounds right in an unusual way, like cummings choosing “most this amazing day” – not the way we’d normally say it.  But somehow better than “this most amazing day,” as if the off kilter cadence is yet another thing keeping us oysters in touch with that strange little grain of sand instead of working ourselves up to a pearl.  “Most this amazing day.”  Fitting.  Right.  Wow.

 

Here’s the thing about Wow and the Transfiguration.  To be transfigured means to change shape or form.  Jesus looked like normal Jesus and then he was dazzling white and shining like the sun.  I think what happened on that mountain was more about how the disciples suddenly saw what was there all along.  They caught a glimpse of the glory – the wowness – of Jesus, the human-and-divine all in one “package,” shining, brilliant, breathtaking, awe-inspiring.   I don’t think Jesus put on an elaborate magic trick show for them up there; I think the “eyes of [their] eyes were opened,” as ee cummings would say.

 

For us, it seems that paying attention is our best, more successful avenue to Wow.  Even in order to see what is right in front of our eyes, we have to do more than walk around with our eyes open.  We have to be observe, really look, and be willing to see and receive what’s there.  We have to be present where we are.  We have to be willing to be wowed.

 

Anne Lamott again (Help Thanks Wow, Lamott, p. 85):

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention:  mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds.  This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible.  If you say, “Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,” you are in trouble.  At that point, you have to ask yourself why you are even here.  And if I were you, I would pray “Help.” (See earlier chapter.)  Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time.  Let it be.  Unto us, so much is given.  We just have to be open for business.”

 

 

Lent is a great time to practice Wow.  Or, at least, to practice paying attention, with a spirit that’s “open for business.”  Through the open door created by our spiritual practices this season, God works on us to change the shape of our lives and spirits, to transform us.  When we let go of our standard routines and clear space for God, we make room to see and hear and feel and notice and be wowed by God.  With less cluttering our vision, in the room we create or the longing we feel for what we have taken away this season, we find ourselves in the presence of the God who transforms us and who, from time to time, shines through our everyday to give a glimpse of the eternal.

 

Head down from this mountain into the season ahead with the full knowledge that what you saw is the real deal.  Make peace – or at least room –  for that irritating and confusing speck of sand; resist the temptation to safely encapsulate it in the prettiest pearly substance you can find.  Look up and look deep, and see the dazzling display God has for you instead.  Know that the most and the least you can say in response to God’s continual revelation is Wow – and that it’s enough.

 

Thanks be to God!

 

 

© 2013 Deborah E. Lewis

 

 

Three Essential Prayers: Thanks

Luke 17: 11-19

 

 

What are the magic words?  You know, the ones parents coach and coax out of their kids.  Until I read a certain book last year, I thought there were two “magic words” phrases and I thought they were “please” and “thank you.”  This is what I hear parents of small children endlessly reminding their kids to say at the appropriate times.  This is what I still rehearse with my stepson Blair, because autism takes extra rehearsing, too.  Please and thank you.

Then I read a thoughtful little book about the differences in American and French parenting, a book called Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman.  Druckerman is an American mother living full-time with her family in France, raising small children there, and encountering some interesting differences in our assumptions about and methods of parenting.  One of them is in the magic words category.  In France there are 4 magic words, or magic phrases.  In addition to please and thank you, they also insist upon bonjour and au revoir (hello and goodbye).  Every child is rehearsed in greeting adults as they enter a room and then again as they leave.

Druckerman explains that to the French, saying bonjour is “the first part of a relationship” (Bringing Up Bébé, p. 154).  She writes that it’s “crucial” to say bonjour as you climb into a taxi, enter a shop, or approach a salesperson to ask for help.  She says, “Saying bonjour acknowledges the other person’s humanity.  It signals that you view her as a person, not just as someone who’s supposed to serve you.  I’m amazed that people seem visibly put at ease after I say a nice solid bonjour.  It signals that – although I have a strange accent – we’re going to have a civilized encounter” (Bringing Up Bébé, p. 155).

When you get right down to it, that’s what our measly 2 magic words do also – they acknowledge the other person’s humanity.  Even with just please and thank you we are recognizing that we need one another.  I am acknowledging that I am not the center of the entire universe, that I depend on others and they depend on me.

This doesn’t come easily to us.  That’s why it takes so much rehearsing and coaching.  Grandma just gave you a pretty doll.  What do you say?…  I would be happy to get your some lemonade but what’s the magic word?  Children are just more transparent than the rest of us.  They want what they want and if they have to say thank you to get it, then that’s a small price.  But they aren’t going to start off saying it automatically, or even meaning it when they do say it.  It’s a “magic word,” after all.  Like “open sesame,” it’s the thing that magically transforms wanting into having.  For a while, that’s all they know about this strange transaction of thank you.

I don’t think we’re that different from small children in this way.  Two weeks ago I told you about Anne Lamott’s book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers and we considered the first prayer, help.  When the help comes, it is so easy to forget how desperate we were just a moment ago.  It’s so easy to forget to acknowledge from whence the help came and to pause again for thanks.  Like a child who wants to dig right into that cookie you gave him without saying thank you we sometimes have to remind ourselves, like parents with small children, to finish that transaction with the magic words.

According to Luke, even people healed of leprosy have this problem.

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem when 10 people with leprosy approached, keeping their distance and shouting out for mercy (that’s their help prayer).  Jesus sees them and instructs them to go and show themselves to the priests. “And as they went, they were made clean.”  One of them men, upon seeing that he has been healed, turns around and begins praising God loudly.  He prostrates himself at Jesus’ feet and thanks him.  Now Jesus notices that only one man comes back to offer praise and thanks and he asks, “Weren’t there 10 made clean?”… “Where are the other 9?”… “Didn’t any one of them besides this Samaritan think it was fit to turn back and give praise to God?”  He doesn’t wait for any answers to the questions but turns back to the one healed man and says, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well” (Luke 17: 11-19).

Ten people pray for help and all receive it.  One person – the foreigner who would be seen as the least likely candidate – returns to praise God and give thanks.  And Jesus notices.  He notices that praise and gratitude are not universal.  He notices that those who are supposed to already know God don’t seem to act like it.  And he calls it like he sees it.  He says to the one man, “[Y]our faith has made you well.”

We just heard the story.  Don’t we suppose that Jesus had something to do with this healing?  But what does he say?  Your faith has made you well.  Jesus loves to say this at healings!  (cf., Mt. 9: 22 and Mark 10: 52)  Your faith has made you well.  What did Jesus see and experience of this one man’s faith?  What did the man do in Jesus’ presence?  He turned around and came back; he praised God loudly; and he threw himself down at Jesus’ feet to offer thanks.  That’s the faith Jesus is referring to:  gratitude and praise.

This may be one of those chicken-and-the-egg things for us:  Is he thankful because of his faith or does being thankful lead to faith?

You could say this about children, too.  Just because I coax a thank you out of a three-year-old, it doesn’t mean she understands or means it.  But we start doing that with them even before three-years-old, don’t we?  We don’t wait until they are 8 or 10 when they can “understand” the concept of thanking someone.  Perhaps that is because part of how we learn to understand the concept is to engage in it before we completely understand it.  Anne Lamott calls this habit a “position of gratitude” (Help, Thanks, Wow, p. 50).  Perhaps putting ourselves in a posture of thanksgiving leads us to understand how to be thankful – something we might never learn if we sit on the sidelines and wait to “get it” before we say it.

This is where skeptics might say that we are just “going through the motions.”  Yes, and?  So what?  What if the motion itself helps prepare the soil of our hearts for growth?

It is no accident that we gather around this table each week for a meal, praying The Great Thanksgiving.  Eucharist – which also means “thanksgiving” – is the central act of Christian worship and the way we go about it is to make a “sacrifice” of thanksgiving.  Every time we gather for this meal, we pray that “we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving, as a holy and living sacrifice.”

Even on the weeks when we don’t feel thankful, when we feel angry or fearful or scared or doubtful.  Even then, we come back together and say thank you.  Thank you for all that is, even when it seems like crap.  Thank you for the things I don’t understand.  Thank you for being there even when I can’t feel you anymore.  Thank you for this long story of your relationship with your people – even though I don’t understand where the story is going right now.  It might feel less than inspired, like the rehearsed magic words of a small child but that’s ok.  Showing up to say thank you shows God we are starting to get it.  And, perhaps more importantly, the practice of thank you works on us until we start to actually feel thankful, too.

The truly hard work is cultivating a thankful heart.  Some claim that gratitude is “the purest measure of one’s character and spiritual condition” (NIB Commentary, Vol. IX, p. 327).  Gratitude, praise, thanksgiving.  This is a way of life and the primary orientation of a Christian:  praising lips and a thankful heart.  It’s our primary orientation, flowing from our baptism, that cleansing, quenching ritual when God acts – God gives – before we even know about or understand the gift.

Some days this work is harder than others.  Some days you have to really pay attention in order to see where you can slip in a thank you.  Some days it doesn’t seem likely…until you find yourself doing it.  I’m going to close with a couple of pages from the end of Lamott’s chapter, describing just such a day…     [Read except from Help, Thanks, Wow:  “This morning at six…” pp. 65-68, end of chapter].

Thanks be to God!

 

© 2008, 2013 Deborah E. Lewis

 

 

 

Three Essential Prayers: Help

John 2: 1-11

 

I can’t tell you how to pray.  I could tell you about styles of prayer and techniques but that’s not what this is about.  I’m also not going to tell you that you should pray. Thursday night at forum I said it wasn’t a “you fail” forum and neither is this a “you fail” sermon.  But I am going to talk about prayer because I think it’s often misunderstood, marginalized, and underestimated.

Last week I heard our bishop, Bishop Cho, say this about prayer:  “You learn prayer by praying.”  I know that can sound maddeningly like a riddle or a Zen koan.  I also know that for UVA students this may seem incredibly annoying and time-consuming.  A 5-step “how to” list might come in handy, but telling us to just go pray and figure it out – are you kidding?  Who has time to fiddle around like that?

You’re not the only ones.  There are a lot of us who will try something if we know we’ll get a certain result – and who won’t waste our time if we aren’t sure where it’s going.  That’s where prayer is tricky.  You almost never know where it’s going – or precisely how you got there once you do get somewhere.

Barbara Brown Taylor, the Episcopal priest and writer calls prayer “waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing” (An Altar in the World, p. 178).  Writer Anne Lamott has a similar take.  She calls it “practicing the presence of God” (Help, Thanks, Wow, p. 27).  Well, if that’s all it is then we’re done, right?  God’s present all the time, case closed.  Turns out waking up to and practicing the presence take a little more time and effort on our part.

Tonight is the first part in a 3-part series called “Three Essential Prayers,” based on Anne Lamott’s latest book called Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (Lamott, 2012).  It all begins with tonight’s prayer:  “help.”

Most of us pray “Help” at some point.  Without even realizing it or assuming a prayer posture or thinking it through.  We find ourselves in dire straits and we say Please help me.  Even when we don’t know what will help, we pray, Please help.  Sick family members, heart-wrenching break-ups, mass shootings, natural disasters, huge quandaries about majors and internships and The Next Step…Help.  Or maybe you are more directive with God.  Maybe you ask for healing for the sick person, a pox on the stupid ex, mercy and justice after a shooting, lives saved in natural disasters, and a big red arrow pointing the way to your next step and a congratulatory bell that rings when you choose correctly.

Either way, “help” is for many people the first and only prayer that ever comes to their lips.  Considering the concessions we have to make to get to that point, I can’t knock that.  Admitting that we need help, that we can’t fix it ourselves, and that, in fact, we have no idea how it can ever be fixed is a wise first step in the posture of this prayer.  Anne Lamott says that to begin you have to admit what she calls “the three most terrible truths of our existence:  that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little” (p. 27).  Oh, that’s all?

You might even begin this prayer in a not-so-thoroughly-convinced manner.  Anne Lamott has a prayer practice she calls the “God box,” an actual box into which she slips pieces of paper, after writing on them what it is she needs God’s help with (Help, Thanks, Wow, pp. 36-39).  She stresses that you have to have an actual, physical box of some kind so that you see yourself put the prayer into it and let it go.  She writes that after putting the paper in the box, “You might have a brief moment of prayer, and it might come out sounding like this: ‘Here.  You think you’re so big?  Fine.  You deal with it.  Although I have a few more excellent ideas on how best to proceed.’ Then I agree to keep my sticky mitts off…until I hear back.”

That’s the point where something starts to change – that point when we finally acknowledge that we can’t do it all and fix it all and we need help.  Lamott goes on (Help, Thanks, Wow, pp. 37-40):

“When we think we can do it all ourselves – fix, save, buy, or date a nice solution – it’s hopeless.  We’re going to screw things up.  We’re going to get our tentacles wrapped around things and squirt our squiddy ink all over, so that there is even less visibility, and then we’re going to squeeze the very life out of everything.

Or we can summon a child’s courage and faith and put a note with a few words into a small box in the hope that we can get our sucking, inky squid tentacles off things.

We do this without a clue about what will happen, how it will all turn out.  You may be saying:  ‘It’s so awful right now, and I am so pissed off and sad and mental, that against all odds I’m giving up.  I’ll accept whatever happens.’

Maybe after you put a note in the God box, you’ll go a little limp, and in that divine limpness you’ll be able to breathe again.  Then you’re halfway home.  In many cases, breath is all you need….

With a God box, you’re finally announcing to the universe that you can’t do it, that you have ruined things enough for the time being…This is what gets everyone off the hook, the hook being the single worst place to be…

So when we cry out Help, or whisper it into our chests, we enter the paradox of not going limp and feeling so hopeless than we can barely walk, and we release ourselves from the absolute craziness of trying to be our own – or other people’s – higher power.

Help.”

Simple, huh?  I guarantee you that the most stereotypical “church lady” old woman who looks pious and accepting on the outside is still talking to God like this on the inside.  If she’s been praying for a long, long time, she might be slightly less belligerent.  But it’s likely that while on the outside she seems harmless and sweet with her head bent in prayer, on the inside she has her dukes up and she’s throwing the occasional temper tantrum and she is annoyed that she, once again, has to admit that she’s not the one in charge.  This is why we have to keep asking for help over and over again, hardheaded humans that we are.

Though I’m not going to tell you how to pray, I do hope that as we consider these three basic prayers you’ll notice that maybe you have been praying at times without realizing it.  Like John’s story about the wedding, which I never thought of as a prayer before this week.  But what else is it?

Jesus, his mother, and some disciples were attending a wedding in Cana and the wine ran out before the party was over.  Jesus’ mother, Mary, tells him there is no more wine.  Jesus seems a little annoyed and says, basically, Why is this my problem, exactly?  Mary sort of ignores him and tells the servants to do whatever Jesus asks of them.  So Jesus says to fill some water jars and then ladle some out.  They do and they find wine instead of water.  His first miracle.

They are at a party and it’s not over yet.  Mary wants more wine so she asks Jesus for it.  It’s not an outlandish request.  Improbable, maybe, but not out of the question.  In fact, she doesn’t even ask for it in the form of a question.  She comments, really:  “They have no wine” (John 2: 3).  It’s as simple as that.

What if you have been praying like that without even realizing it sometimes?  What if part of what we have to wake up to is our own praying, going on all the time?  That homeless man looks so cold in the wind today…That mother is having a hard time with her crying baby in the checkout line…I’m worried about the children in Newtown being back at school again…Mom looks sad today…We need some laughter around here…Couldn’t these be prayers – like Mary saying, “They have no wine”?  Simple observations about where we are and who is around us and what is happening.  Simple, true statements that connect us to one another and to God.  Simple moments when we speak and God listens and maybe something miraculous even happens from time to time.  Kind of like the old woman in church having a different experience on the inside than what we might see on the outside, the simple things we observe can be some of our most ardent and profund prayers.  Might not seem that way to others but who cares?  We’re in the middle of an ongoing conversation with God.

If I were going to give you any “how to” steps for the help prayer, they would be simple ones.  Like this:

1. Notice where you really are.  Something isn’t right.  We can’t fix it.  God can, somehow.
2. Ask for what you need or want.  Comfort, guidance, healing, companionship….
3. Listen.  When you know where you really are and you’ve said your peace, then shut up and listen.  Shut up and wait.  I’m saying “shut up” a lot because I think that might be the hardest part of prayer for many of us.  A lot of prayer involves shutting up and waiting and watching and listening.  Don’t let anyone tell you that’s “doing nothing” – that’s faithful, hopeful living.
4. Be willing to accept the help that comes – especially when it is not what you expect it will be.  This last one is the doozy.  Admitting that this is the answer you get, being willing to give up on what you thought God would give, and taking what comes.  Some people give up on prayer then, as if they tried an incantation and it didn’t “take.”  But in some respects this is when prayer really starts to be prayer – when it works on us to mold expectations.  To quote our other friend, Barbara Brown Taylor, again, prayer is “to take what is as God’s ongoing answer to me” (Altar, p. 185).

 

You learn prayer by praying.  You learn what you really want and need when you pray “help.”  And when you put in enough prayer practice, it starts to work on you, refining what you want, and in turn, what you pray for.

We think of prayer as something we do but it’s really something that God does in us.  It’s something that takes hold of us and changes even the ordinary, obvious things we say.  It starts to seep out into the rest of the day.  Just as God won’t stay in the boxes we like to put God in, so prayer escapes the times and places we set aside for it, until more and more of our lives become prayer, conversation with God.

That’s the point, after all:  to spend some time in conversation with God, talking and listening, and resting in God’s presence.  It doesn’t have to be glamorous or eloquent or impressive or even spiritually mature.   Moments when we need help simply remind us that it’s time to get in touch again.

Thanks be to God!

 

© 2013 Deborah E. Lewis

20 January 2013

Wesley Foundation at UVA

 

Ponder

Luke 2: 1-20

Advent 3

 

Mary doesn’t say much.  Have you noticed?

We focus a lot of our attention on her seemingly simple “yes” to the angel Gabriel.  We also appreciate her response to her meeting with Elizabeth, her beautiful song of praise and joy and anticipation at what God does.  But by the time she gets to Bethlehem there are no more words.  The way the story is written we don’t even hear the heavy breathing or grunts of her labor.  We are simply told she delivers Jesus and then the tableau takes over – holy family gathered in close and humble surroundings.  There are other people talking:  shepherds, maybe some more angels, onlookers, even the lowing cattle, if we go by one of our favorite hymns.  But Mary has no more words by then.

It’s easy to think that the few words she says are her whole story.  I think that’s how many people encounter her.  But I think her quiet speaks, too.  It’s another way of entering the story.  Just hold onto that for a minute while we consider Elizabeth.

I was struck by the contrast between how I usually read and hear her cousin Elizabeth’s story and how I heard it told last week.  The first birth story we begin to hear about in Luke’s gospel is John’s and it starts with Zechariah and Elizabeth, who, we are told, was “barren” (Luke 1: 7).  I don’t know anyone who thinks that word sounds good or neutral.  I know a lot of people who cringe at it and feel personally hurt by hearing it.

But last week I heard someone tell the story by saying that Elizabeth found she would bear a child “in her wise years” (Jan Richardson, Illuminated online retreat).  Can you hear how different that is?  We know wise means old, so we know it’s unlikely and miraculous.  But it also means wise – she has the wisdom of one who has lived through much of her life already and she is someone useful and important to the family and community because of that.  Not washed up, dried up, useless.  But sage, a source of help, useful – and now useful in an entirely new and surprising way.  Hearing Elizabeth described that way opened her story up to me and kept the cringing out of it.

It also made more sense to me why Mary would make a long trip alone to visit her cousin after Gabriel appeared to tell her about her own unlikely pregnancy. Yes, Gabriel suggests the trip to her, but I don’t think Mary went all that way just to see the reality TV style spectacle of an elderly pregnant woman.  She went to see her wise cousin who, especially now, might be able to offer her some perspective and guidance and companionship and empathy.

How we tell the story matters and how we retell it and imagine it matters.  The wonderful thing about scripture and the cycle of liturgical seasons is that we come around to this story every year.  Back to the annunciation and the manger and the shepherds and angels.  Every year, Elizabeth barren – or wise – and Mary at the end of the night, no more words, treasuring and pondering.  Every year we are afforded another long look and a few reflective weeks to prepare for this scene and what meaning it bears for us.  Every year, our lives mingle with this old and ever-new story and sometimes the light shifts and we see wise where barren used to be.  And we go a little deeper.

Last Friday I was still reflecting and writing for today.  I was home playing Christmas music, making meals, and wondering about Mary and her quiet, pondering ways.  Then I heard the news about Newtown, Connecticut.  I had logged onto Facebook for a moment and immediately saw about 20 of my friends bemoaning violence and praying for Connecticut.  So I went to the news sites and turned on the TV and I saw the unfolding story about the man who killed his mother and then went into an elementary school and killed 26 more people, mostly children.  I watched and listened for a while.  Details were still hard to come by and I wasn’t sure if it was over yet.  It was the most unsettled I’d seen newscasters and commentators in a long while, many of them visibly and audibly shaken.  I went back to Facebook: more prayers, more bemoaning, even some links to helping children deal with trauma.  I considered posting something.  I saw several churches and campus ministries posting prayers and expressions of support for the people in Newtown.  But I didn’t post anything and I logged off and I turned the TV off.  Then I turned the Christmas music back on and wondered again about Mary.

She was minding her own business when an angel burst in to tell her she would be having a baby and that her wise cousin Elizabeth was already pregnant.  To the angel she said only How can this be, since I’m a virgin? and then Here I am, let it be as you say.  Then during her visit to see Elizabeth, when even the in-utero John could recognize what was happening and literally jumped inside his mother for joy, Mary burst into song praising God for the amazing, impossible, just, peaceful, world-changing things God was already doing.  She sings it like it has already happened, even while she’s just found out she’s pregnant and has many months to go. Then, through the rest of her pregnancy, the long trip to Bethlehem, the meager place she and Joseph find to camp out, the delivery in a barn, and the shepherds coming to see the baby with news that they’ve also spoken with angels – through all of that, no more words.  Even when the shepherds leave again, evangelizing along the way, what does Mary do?  “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (v. 19).

“Treasuring” has two definitions (http://www.merriam-webster.com/).  It can mean cherishing, which is usually how I think of Mary treasuring all those words in her heart, turning them around to look at them from all sides, valuing them, setting them apart from other words she’s heard.  “Treasuring” can also mean collecting and storing up for future use.  Maybe these words she treasures on this raw, intimate, promise-filled night are the ones she will come to again, for future use, when she is standing on a bleak hill watching her son die.

“Pondering” is deep reflection, staying with something as you consider it.  Not trying to think it through, necessarily, but rather giving it room to breathe and to see what you can make of it over time.  Pondering isn’t about decision-making and quick conclusions and getting right to the point.  Pondering is about following a winding reflection to see where it leads.  Pondering takes time.

So Mary treasured and pondered everything in her heart that night.  We don’t know what she thought.  We don’t hear pronouncements or conclusions or 5-point plans for what they will do next.  We only have a glimpse of her, from the outside, treasuring and pondering.

There was a rush to speak last Friday.  Even as the TV journalists weren’t sure how many were dead and they were foggy on many details, they were already conducting interviews with FBI detectives and psychologists and medical doctors.  They were filling up every bit of space and time with words about “what happens in these cases” and “the typical profile of a shooter like this” and “the scars that will be in this community forever.”  I know what they were doing.  I get that in some cases they probably even thought they were helping, but step back with me for a moment.  How can we talk about scars when the bleeding hasn’t even stopped yet?

In stark contrast to Mary, everyone was trying hard to fill up the shock and pain and airtime with words.  There was no way to reflect or consider or ponder in the midst of that.  There was widespread consensus that this happens too much and we can’t stand it anymore.  But right at that threshold the divisions would begin, with journalists and commentators talking about how we can’t have productive conversations about gun control because people on both sides of that issue have very strong feelings.

Remembering Mary, it was incredibly ironic to hear them talking about the strong feelings that would prevent us from figuring out how to stop killings like this – while still in the midst of an unfolding tragedy that was generating strong feelings right at that moment.  It was as if we wanted to trade in the unsettled, chaotic, unformed, still raw strong feelings of Friday for the strong feelings we know how to deal with:  I’m with the NRA or We need more gun control.

What did we think we would lose if we waited?  How differently might we have taken in what was happening if we had chosen to ponder instead of talk, talk, talk?

We need serious, straightforward, honest, non-political talk about violence in our communities.  But what we needed on Friday was fewer words, more silence.  Less pronouncing, more pondering.  We needed time to be with the pain and the prayers without having to know the way forward right then.  We needed to sit with the grieving and to feel the grief in our own hearts and to see where that would lead – rather than cutting off that process with a tumble of words meant to stave off our own fear.  We needed time to ponder.

I think we still do.

Just as Mary sang then, so God does now: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace” (Luke 1: 78-79).

There are no words that will make what happened Friday make sense.  Don’t think it made sense to Mary either, when she was at Golgotha and pulled those treasured words back out, the ones from the night of Jesus’ birth, looking for sense and meaning in the midst of her deepest grief.  Those must have been hard promises to continue believing in at that moment.

Days like Friday present us with the inescapable fact that God’s kingdom has not yet finished coming.  In the midst of Christmas light splendor we are so often still walking in darkness.  Days like Friday make that impossible to ignore.  This is the kind of world Christ was born into, our vulnerable savior.

In the rest of the time we have this Advent, let Mary be your guide.  As you remember and mourn with the families of Connecticut, try pondering.  Try listening and waiting to see and hear what will be revealed with time.  Because one thing is certain:  God can bring healing and redemption even out of a mess like this, but you have to pay attention to witness it.

Thanks be to God!

 

 

© 2012 Deborah E. Lewis

 

 

What Are We Waiting For?

Luke 3: 1-6 (Advent 2)

 

Here’s the thing I used to get confused about:  waiting does not have to mean waiting patiently.  I remember being in my grandmother’s kitchen waiting for something – for the fudge to set up or the timer to go off on the cookies.  I was eager for the payoff.  I probably kept asking her how much more time until it was time.  Finally she said to me, “Deborah, you have to learn patience.”

She was right.  Of course.  I did and still do need work on my patience skill set.  I get antsy easily.  When I know what I want, I want it right away.  When chocolate is involved, people can get hurt making me wait too long.

But that’s only part of the story.  That’s what it’s like when we know what we are waiting for – the timer on the brownies, the start of the movie, the grade to come back on the paper.  What happens when we aren’t sure what we are waiting for?

I started thinking about that this week after something Lacey said.  It was something like, “I know Advent’s different than Christmas and it’s all about waiting but what are we waiting for, exactly?”  Good question.

In the last reading we heard, John the Baptist quotes Isaiah.  The hills will be lowered and the valleys filled until the crooked paths are straight and the rough ways are smooth (Luke 3: 5-6).  When Isaiah wrote about that geographical rearrangement he was writing to people in exile in Babylon.  He was proclaiming that God would do the unimaginable:  bring God’s people home.  He was promising that God could and would make the crooked, scary, torturous road from life in Babylon a “wide, straight, flat highway [home] across the mountains and the desert” (www.gbod.org/worship, 12.9.12).  A way out of no way.

Maybe none of us has had it that bad, living in exile with no idea how or when we can get back home, but I suspect it might sound familiar nonetheless.  Have you longed for a crooked road to be straightened out?  For the way back home to appear, easy and straightforward?  Have you felt cut off from someone you love, praying for God to bring a way back to her?  Have you been looking for someone to love only to look out the door to roads leading nowhere and a lot of solo mountain climbing?  Have you looked out at the countryside and seen so many crazy, crooked, mountain-pass roads to cover between you and the end of exams – with no idea how to get to that place you see on the horizon?

You get my point.

So, what are we waiting for?  Are we waiting for the answer to our prayers – good grades, forgiveness, finding love?  Or are we waiting to be shown what it is we really want and how to pray?

This is where, with respect to Advent, I think my grandmother had it wrong.  There are no Brownie points for being the most patient person who makes it to Christmas morning.  God is not enticed to show up earlier or more obviously the more patient we are.  Isaiah and John don’t say Get quiet and patient and God will make that hard way a piece of cake and take you home.  They just say Wait and see.

It helps to have a picture – valleys raised up, a north star, a calendar to count down the days.  This is our Advent calendar from my house and this is how it looks on the last day of Advent.  In many ways, this is the image we move towards during this season…the manger, the star, the songs, shepherds, angels hovering…. [Start removing pieces here.]  But our long family history tells us that we don’t always get what we’re looking for.  We want to leave Egypt, then we don’t like the manna and we want to trade in our freedom for slavery again.  We were convinced God would come triumphantly, not with a straggling band of tax collectors and fishermen.  We didn’t know we’d end up at a cross.  Why would we think it would be different this time?

[Finish removing pieces until we are back at 9 days.]

The picture might come together again by Christmas and it might look a lot like we were expecting it to look.  But who knows?

Anyone with a television, computer, or a big box store can “get” the picture of Christmas – usually by Thanksgiving.  But we’re waiting for something familiar and wholly unexpected, like a king in the guise of a baby or God vulnerable as a newborn.  There’s an image, a picture, a light in the sky, a general direction we’re headed, but who knows what we’ll see when we arrive?  Who knows what sights will appear on the route and what God will say as we travel?

That’s what Advent is for:  clearing space as an act of hospitality to ourselves and to God.  Making room for God– patiently, with frustration, without an updated roadmap or GPS.  Making room for the unexpected.  Clearing space so we can see who we are dealing with – ourselves and God.

Jan Richardson’s poem-prayer called “Prepare” says it well (www.theadventdoor.com, 12/5/12):

Prepare

Strange how one word
will so hollow you out.
But this word
has been in the wilderness
for months.
Years.

This word is what remained
after everything else
was worn away
by sand and stone.
It is what withstood
the glaring of sun by day,
the weeping loneliness of
the moon at night.

Now it comes to you
racing out of the wild
eyes blazing
and waving its arms,
its voice ragged with desert
but piercing and loud
as it speaks itself
again and again.

Prepare, prepare.

It may feel like
the word is leveling you
emptying you
as it asks you
to give up
what you have known.

It is impolite
and hardly tame
but when it falls
upon your lips
you will wonder
at the sweetness

like honey
that finds its way
into the hunger
you had not known
was there.

Hollowed out and worn down to your essence.  Clearing space, waiting until you are shown “the hunger you had not known was there.”  Sometimes you don’t know what you are waiting for until it arrives.  It’s OK.  God blesses the time you spend – impatient, polite, sulky, screaming your head off in the desert glare and heat, knowledgeable, or totally lost.  You receive the blessing you need for the time and space you have available.  Next year could be completely different.

Wait any way you need to, any way you know how.  Keep your eyes open and pay attention.  Ask questions.  We’re not waiting to develop patience and we’re not even waiting for the baby Jesus in the manger.  We’re waiting for God to show up, along the path and in our hearts, now and when we get there.  Wherever there is.

So, what are we waiting for?

Thanks be to God!

 

 

© 2012 Deborah E. Lewis