Family and Vocation

I am struck in the Jeremiah text for Proper 23 that the "practices" Jeremiah announces as God's word for the reframing of the Exile experience are what might be considered traditional (in the sense of historic) family values: building houses, planting gardens, wedding spouses, having children, celebrating the generations, praying for the city in which one resides. The depression and anger attending deportation might cause the exiles to react differently--might prompt the atomizing of life and culture. But if the bad news is that Exile has separated the remaining Jerusalemites from their foundations, it has not cut them off from their essential roots of being a holy people, multiplying and fruitful, recipients of blessing in the hope of once again being the channels of blessing.

This word is vital to me right now in my place of service. Many of our new believers (though some of them are "believers again") are struggling with the energy church requires, the (oft-times self-imposed) challenges of small group meetings, work areas, services, etc. They want to be a part of it all, but it is dividing husbands and wives, parents and children, if only in terms of time and place (though the stress seems to go deeper among some). This text reminds me that "family" can be an essentially spiritual reality, the locus of spiritual development and transformation. As Luther said, famously, the family is but the smallest of congregations.

Many preachers, while eager to preach on the corporate nature and communal dimensions of the gospel, can for various reasons overlook the family as one aspect of those realities. Perhaps Jesus' own ambivalence toward his mother and siblings is the theological excuse for our inattention. Or perhaps the recent political manipulations of "traditional family values" has been (rightly) pegged as a form of judgemental nostalgia and summarily dismissed as one of the apt candidates of the gospel's formational and political ambitions.

But Jeremiah seems to say that the family is a place where God will work to maintain the identity and survival of the elect in the midst of a pagan culture. Indeed, this is where God has put them--another reframing of the Exile, not as godforsakenness but, emergently, as the place where God and God's people may enjoy new intimacy and the reforming of covenant.

And so the historic tasks of families become themselves spiritual practices; this word of the Lord becomes a summons, answering in obedience a spiritual vocation as sacred as any other.

the sad truth

I have heard this week that my book, Praying for Dear Life, is a worst-seller, meaning that it is not selling at all. NavPress has a policy that if anyone buys one of their books and does not like it, they can fill-out and return a coupon in the back for a full refund. Keep the book itself but get back their money. Apparently, 437 coupons were returned last quarter and it is "not likely, unless something dramatic happens with this book," that I will ever receive a bit of royalty beyond my advance.

I guess I am not surprised. Heartbroken, but not surprised. The book is a real hybrid--a "sepia toned memoir," according to the publisher's own marketing materials, but dressed in bluebird colors. PDL is a book on the hours of prayer published by a very conservative evangelical house. I am certain the sales people did not know how to pitch it. In addition, there was a major shuffle in marketing and other turnover in the house. The book is, admittedly, too sacramental for evangelicals (not a "how to" that would lead one to sleep outside in bad pajamas and jump on a bed as if it were a trampoline--that is a description of the cover), and at the same time too evangelical in both appearance/publisher for the mainline. The book fits nowhere.

I had good endorsements--from Buechner, Lauren Winner, Tom Long. But NavPress, when they finally did run an ad for it in Christian Century, did not include the blurbs and so no one took much notice. I have had a couple of nice emails from people who have read it. A few friends have commented that it was meaningful for them. I got a five star review on Amazon from one reader and a reviewer calledit "one of the four or five best books...of the last four or five years" on Goodpreacher.com. Perhaps if I can get an invitation or two to speak here or there things will pick up--maybe something dramatic will happen. I have a new book coming out in a couple of months, more traditional but not nearly so heart-felt. Maybe if it gets noticed a little it will throw a little light on the first one.

It is hard, though--putting yourself so out there in a way and to be so thoroughly ignored. "Love me, please"--that is what every memoirist is asking: know me and love me. Alas. My good friend and editor, Liz, says that I need to take comfort from the fact that it is a good book and that some have been blessed by it--that most books do not, in fact, sell very well. I guess.

With my self-esteem shattered the other night, my amazing son said, "How are you doing, Dad?" Okay, I told him. I am doing okay. He said, "It's all right if you aren't." I started crying, lamenting that it feels, feels, as if I am one of those guys who can work and work, try and try, and never catch much of a break. He says, "Yeah, but lots of folks can't even say they have had a book published, much less four." I do remember, God knows, the ache of wanting to publish a real book, the joy of seeing it happen...but as Stephen Donaldson says, the only way to hurt someone who has lost everything is to give a part of it back to him, broken. I have part of what I had thought I'd lost, but it is broken somehow.

Few care. But a few do. No one is buying the book, many are returning the ones they have bought, but some have been blessed. A few sentences of the first chapter formed the conclusion to a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day sermon by an Episcopalian priest in Washington, DC. That is huge, at least to me. To be mentioned in the same context as Preacher King is an incredible notion unto itself. The priest, a black woman, said mine was her "new favorite book."

Pieces. Pieces of satisfaction. Bits of significance. I will have to content myself with that. And wait patiently for the purposes of God to enfold.

I said long ago that if this book were to be published, God would have to help make that happen. The confluences of absurdity above seem to have God's fingerprints all over it. I also said that if the book were ever to have an audience, God would have to do something about that too. The harried and confused sales people at NavPress might ask the same. Will I write more? Publish more? I would like to think so, that, as Frederick Buechner has pronounced on my upcoming work, I "know how to read and know how to write," but I will have to wait. Just wait to see if God has further work for me to do, given that I obviously don't know how to sell.

Bobbing the Waves Alone

I have been to Charlotte this morning, to the hospital to see a member of my church who is having surgery. I told her a few stories about John Wesley, of his frustrated love affairs and his encounter with the Moravians. She and her husband, himself a former Moravian but both of them Methodists for twenty years or more, had never heard of such and thought them really funny. I hope it relieved the stress a bit.

Who will tell me stories on Friday? Anyone?

The other night Jo and I went to a 50th anniversary party for a new couple in our church. Their kids had put together a video...the story of their lives in pictures. I made the observation the next morning in my sermon that the Bible affords us the picture of our lives, in stories. The stories are the fascia, the connective tissue, that hold us together and give our bodies cohesion. If we lose our stories, we cease to be the body...

I wept at the beach last week, looking at all the young families--moms and dads with their
kids--praying for them, remembering when my little ones were little. I cried in the ocean, too, knowing I would never bob a wave with Bethany again, or not likely, or maybe I will but who knows? Jacob came into the water with me once, and Jo did the last time I went out on Friday. I told her I wished she would. She does not like the water in her face and so she has always been very resistant. To her credit she stayed with me about 15 minutes. Mostly I was out there by myself. Bethany would have gone with me, I think, but she was not able to come down at all.

I am sure I spend way too much time pondering what I have lost or never had, what I do not expect to experience again if I ever did. When I look at our bulldog Chester, or rub his ears, I fear almost above all other things the prospect of his death. It will come. How will we cope? We will, but he has been the primary glue in our family for a long time. Sad, but in many ways true.

I have surgery again this week...my seventh on my poor knee. A revision of my replacement done last June. They will go in a third time through the largest of my scars...and isn't that an image? The doctor keeps opening the old wound in hopes of fixing my joint. "The tissue has failed," he said. "It's a real mess in there." The fascia is torn, my knee cannot work as a knee because the tissue has failed. Knees, joints, bodies, Body...

This surgery, as my last, has put me deeply in touch with my mortality. I am doing everything this week as a kind of "if I never can do it again..." Silly, probably, but I dread Friday with a perfect dread.

Anyway, as I was weeping at the beach I prayed, thankful for the time now past, sad that it is past--that my time too is shorter than yesterday. I do not begrudge anyone their youth or the time they spend with their beloved children; that time goes away so quickly and does not return. Indeed, it does not. But, as Luna Lovegood (in the movie version of Order of the Phoenix) says her mother said, "The things we lose have a way of coming back to us, just not in the ways we might expect." I hope that, would like to think that, about a lot of things.

Via Negativa (Father's Day, 2007)

Luke 7:36-50, C; June 17, 2007

I

My word processor has a nifty little capability—I am sure yours does, too: the “find and replace” function. I use that particular tool when, for instance, I am preparing to perform a wedding, as I am now. I did a wedding in Florida three weeks ago; I have another coming up in two weeks more; and so the other day I opened the “wedding” file on my computer and typed in the command—find “Michelle” and replace with “Jaime;” find “Lucas” and replace with “Clifton.” I am so thankful. I remember when every single word had to be retyped every single time. The “find and replace” function saves both time and aggravation.

I thought about doing that kind of thing for this morning, a little “find and replace” with my sermon from Mother’s Day. You may remember it, how I mentioned that for some mothers and their children Mother’s Day is a great day, a day to celebrate all that is good about family life, while for others—those for whom their family’s life was and is no Hallmark card—it can be a very hard day indeed. Kind of like today, and not just across the street. So why not just open that sermon file, type in the command: find “mother” and replace with “father,” and preach the same sermon over again? A very nice day for some, and very difficult for others…

Except today is even more difficult, I suspect, than Mother’s Day—for all of us, here in church—if only because “Father” is one of the ways we refer to God and “father” is not always a positive image, sad to say. “A father’s love” is one of the many ways we try to describe God’s care for us and that comparison, too, can be disturbing.

“If God is like my father then I want no part of him…” I have heard that so many more times than once. And should the father be a preacher, then even more’s the pity. But preacher’s kids or not there are many wounded children out there, and maybe many wounded children in here—of all ages—who cannot disengage those realities from one another, God and father. And so, for worse or for better or for worse the images get all tangled up. God, father. Father, God.

And for some of us, surely, God as Father proves a comforting image. But for some, if they can hold at all to the idea of God as Father, it has to be via negativa, which is to say by way of negation and contrast, with a profound hope that God as God is, that God’s care as God cares, will prove to be other and different than their fathers as their fathers were or are.

II

I have been thinking this week about when I was a new father, of one moment in particular and soon after Bethany had first come to us. This was long ago, now, though fresh in my memory, in the days when car seats were newly mandatory (and rightly), but before what we might call “car seat awareness” was very high—by which I mean before parents realized that car seats had to face backward in order to be properly secured, and before car seat manufacturers knew that all exposed car seat surfaces needed to be plastic or, better, covered with fabric.

Anyway, Jo and I were loading-up to take Bethany for her two-week check-up—two weeks she had been on our watch. I brought her carefully down the back stairs of the house where we were living, put her gently into her car seat…and saw her tiny face contort immediately with a silent scream. She was in instant agony. I immediately grabbed her up to my heart, cradled her, and only then could see that the car seat’s metal buckle, exposed through the front windshield to a July sun, had burned her newborn leg, had in fact blistered her leg in three places.

I cannot tell you everything I felt in that instant—what I still feel when I think of it: horror, panic, guilt. Nausea. I was an unfit father, I knew, incapable of protecting this small life entrusted to me by God and instead horribly able to harm her in a host of ways. It was an accident, of course, but I appreciated both immediately and upon reflection the terrible power a father possesses to wound a child, to leave lasting marks not only on legs but also on hearts, on minds and lives, on spirits.

Bethany is scarred there, still, on her leg. Sadly, the scar has gotten larger with time; gladly it has faded, too, through the years. It is not so very noticeable to anyone else, perhaps, except me. But I can see it—with my eyes and my memory. How many other scars I have left on my left on my little girl, the rest of them invisible, I fear to consider.

I have blessed her, too, of course—yes, I know that—and Jacob, my son, as well. Surely. But just to finish that part of the story, I have to tell you that on the third Sunday of the following June, when Bethany’s not-quite year-old hand had scrawled an unintelligible crayon signature on the inside of a card that read something like, “To the greatest dad ever,” I knew better. Still know better than that—have known, painfully, since that July afternoon long ago, how impotent I am to protect them, my children, how powerful I am to harm them, and sometimes with just a word—words are the cruelest, both the sharpest and the dullest of every parent’s weapons.

A parent’s words can carve a child into pieces, can warp a child with pride or prejudice. A parent can skew a child’s way of looking at themselves or the world, can color the way they look at or relate to others. Garrison Keillor writes of a Lake Woebegone boy who grew up hating the Bunsens, a family in his parents’ church, only the boy never knew why, exactly: it was just how his parents felt, a part of the air his family breathed, and he was expected to follow suit.
How many children have been misshapen by their father’s stuff? How many have been kept perpetually miserable and small by their parents self-serving expectations? How many children have been dwarfed in their development by their parents’ demanding of them something other than what God may intend? That, when the goal of parenting, of faithful parenting at least, is to bless and release and grow our children beyond us.

III

My friend John Simmons says that he thinks the best definition of faithful parenthood is this: “faithful parents work to release the gifts of their children, whatever the gifts God has given them; and faithful parents allow their children to exceed them—allow their children to exceed them—in whatever areas God and the child may choose.”

Faithful parents learn to see their children, I guess you could say—to see their children the same way Jesus asked the Pharisee to see the woman who was washing Jesus’ feet in our lesson for the morning. Jesus did not want Simon to see the woman just objectively: a thing, a woman of the city, a sinner; but as a real, live person: a loving child of God made in God’s loving image, no matter how much that image was marred or smeared, misused or corrupted; one for whom God desired the fullness of life, the best expression of all the good gifts God had given her; one to whom God had given gifts for that very person; one in whom was God’s very breath, God’s very life and spirit, and from her first breath one blessed with a sense, an hint, an echo of God’s purposes for her.

Is that what Jesus wanted Simon to see? Something like that?

What does God want you to see? Fathers? Mothers? Which is to say, Parents, how does God want you to see your child? Not just as yours, I think, but as God’s…that at least. One who is made in God’s image and graced with God’s gifts and, with your help, sensing God’s call.

Faithful parents (and grandparents, too) will work to see their children as God has made them and gifted them, will work to release their children’s unique gifts, will work to help their children realize God’s dream for them, will work to let their children exceed them and their own expectations.

That is hard work, God knows, putting them on the bike and holding on only till they find their own balance and then letting go, letting them ride—into joy and danger. It is hard work, to be sure, harder to let go than hold on, but if we are to be faithful parents, we have to keep trying, to do just that. Put them on the bike, hold on for a while, then let go. Let go and trust. Let God and let God. Let go and, of course, pray.

III

All across America today preachers are preaching sermons on Christian Fatherhood, something like that, and maybe with titles like: The Bible’s Guide to Being a Good Father. I have to say that strikes me as a bit ironic, because there just aren’t that many good fathers in the bible. I have a list, but you can check it out for yourself.

Ironic, too, when Jesus—who loved children, of course—said in Luke 14:26, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” Those are not our traditional family values, I guess. And surely some parents hate their kids, and some kids hate their parents, but not because they are disciples of Jesus.

Another place Jesus says, “Call no man ‘father,’ for you have one Father and that is God.” And still we do—we call some men father, daddy, dad. Our Father—that is God. Your father, my father…we have someone in mind today, so how shall we proceed?

All I can say is that on a day when my children intend, don’t I know, to celebrate me—to give me cards and gifts—I know full well that what I need most from them is their compassion. Their mercy. For them to see me as I am and am trying to be: to find in my file the word “hero” or even “monster,” and replace it with “human,” to find “”best ever” and replace it with “good enough,” adequate, faithful.

I recall a line from Shakespeare, King Lear, scene V, act III. The insane king and his beloved daughter Cordelia are in a British prison. He speaks to her of the future, his hope for their life together wherever it might be lived out, even in prison—he says to her, “we two alone will sing like birds in the cage…” that even incarceration is joyful if they can share it, but of a sudden his tortured mind recalls his guilt, his many kingly offences and not least to her, and he confesses: “when thou dost ask of me blessing, I will kneel and ask of the forgiveness…”

“When thou dost ask of me blessing…”which I guess is what this day is, really, every father’s child asking for their old man’s love and blessing, saying what ought to be true of us but also seeing us for who we are…

“I will kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness…”and that is what this day should be, every child’s father kneeling and asking forgiveness, repenting of what we have done and haven’t, pledging with God’s help to do better: “Next year, with God’s help, the cards will be truer than they are today,” as we dads and granddads and great granddads… kneeling to ask our kids forgiveness, to ask God for God’s help.

Isn’t that what today should be about?

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A Day at the Chur-- uh, Zoo

A little background: the day before Mother’s Day about thirty-five of us got up and got going and a couple of hours later arrived at the Riverbank Zoo in Columbia. The parking lot was already filling-up as we pulled-in and by the time we reassembled and headed for the ticket window there were, oh, I don’t know, a million people there. Maybe not quite that many, but there were lots of people, I mean to tell you, and lots of different kinds of people. There were little nuclear families of every shape and color and tonnage, teachers with their classes all in white tee shirts and hoping for some extra credit, now that the school year is winding down. There were singletons and couples and leather-clad bikers not a few. Some were dressed more for the beach than the zoo and others looked like they were on their way to a sit-down dinner. Some of whom we saw should have been in cages while some of the animals—and especially the sea lions and the elephants—looked kind and hospitable enough to join us for lunch. The gorillas were unimpressed. The snakes barely moved, and I never did see the lions and tigers, but the bears—oh, my! I never knew Grizzly Bears were both so skinny and had such long legs.

If we started our journey sleepy—at least that is how I saw it through my own puffy eyes—we were pretty excited when we first got there. But somewhere just before lunch the air began to go out of the balloon. “When do we get there?” turned into “When can we leave?” Hypnotically, the sleep we abandoned a few hours before so as to get on the road began calling to us again. As birds both exotic and common chirped and cawed and filled the air with song, some of our number seriously considered taking a nap right there under a shade tree. We kept moving, though, most of us, until we came to the aquarium.

I came alive standing before the various tanks of water: fresh, salt water, brackish. There was such incredible variety before me—and what the zoo boasts is a mere fraction of all there is. There were fish flat as cardboard and others fat as a tire. Some of them you could color with Crayola’s basic box but a few would require a much and subtler larger palette. There were beautiful ones and ugly ones, dangerous ones and docile ones, a couple as long and thin as a rope and one with a mouth the size of Ohio. There were piranhas and lion fish, eels and sea horses, catfish and sharks. I was transfixed, wowed, looked over to find another in our group with which to share the moment, only to see a little girl (not one of ours) leaning against the wall yawning, completely bored. So much wonder all around her and she was shaking her head as if to say, Let’s get out of here!

Now, she may have liked the birds or quadrupeds better. Or maybe it is a tendency we all of us share, to disregard the beauty and variety of creation, the wonder and texture of God’s world and will, in favor of our own tiredness or distraction or agenda. And many there are, too, who see the Bible in gray or monotonous tones, never imagining the wildness and weirdness and variety that is God’s Word and gift to us.

In our church we too boast such variety! Let us never yawn at it. We are witnesses to the energy and scope of God’s will for the world. So let us keep our eyes open. We are given the opportunity to examine and study the Word of God. Let us not hasten past it for other reasons to other things, but rejoice share this moment together. Let us rejoice together.

Midrash for Mother's Day

I

Today is the Sixth Sunday of Easter, the next to last Sunday of the Easter season, the Great Fifty Days. Thursday upcoming is Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter Sunday, when we remember how Christ, after “showing himself alive to his disciples by many proofs,” led them out to the Mount of Olives and, after giving them some last instructions, “was taken up into heaven.” You remember. His disciples stood there, looking up, till an angel fussed at them: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand there looking up toward heaven? This same Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come the same way as you saw him go…”

Since most Christians do not, won’t come back to church on Thursday to read those Ascension scriptures and mark that Ascension day, some preachers, today, will preach those texts, will acknowledge that Christ is indeed exalted, ascended, at the right hand of the Father in heaven, but they will also perhaps bark at their people the way the angels barked: we cannot long stand looking up into heaven; we must look down and around us, see here on earth the work we have to do, the gospel we have to preach, the disciples we have to make till Jesus comes again, however it is and whenever it is that he does come back.

II

Today is also Mother’s Day—as it is the second Sunday in May every year.

A daughter of Methodism, Anna Jarvis, started this tradition in 1907 at the small Methodist Episcopal Church she attended in Grafton, WV. She wanted to memorialize her mother, who had died two years before on May 9, 1905—May 9 being the Tuesday after the second Sunday in May that year.

Already there was a tradition in England called Mothering Sunday, celebrated in the middle of Lent—when churches called to all children to come home during that season and honor their mothers.

And in 1872, soon after the Civil War, a Boston woman named Julia Ward Howe began the Mothers’ Day for Peace, a national day of prayer if you will, when mothers were summoned to pray, for the sake of their sons, especially, for peace at home and abroad.

But what Anna Jarvis did was different, and by 1912, the Methodist Episcopal Church itself had officially adopted the day as a tribute to all mothers. Leaders of the church began to call for a national observance, and President Woodrow Wilson answered their call by proclaiming May 9, 1914—the ninth anniversary of the elder Ms. Jarvis’ death—as the first nationally recognized Mother’s Day.

And so, today, all over the nation, as has been the case for not quite a hundred years now, sons and daughters, grandchildren and others, will take time to look down—away from the scoreboards or TV screens—to look back or look around, to acknowledge, to remember or see, to pay compliment or tribute to the women who gave us birth, who also gave of themselves, many of them, selflessly and lovingly.

“Every good and perfect gift comes from God,” the brother of our Lord writes, and if for many mothers a child is the surest proof of that scripture, for some children it is the other way round: their mothers who are the proof. “God could not be everywhere so he gave us mothers”—Jo cross-stitched that for her own saintly and sainted mother years ago, and for some children, indeed, the love of a mother is the surest sign, the abiding presence, the almost incarnated reality of God’s love.

When these blessed mothers’ blessed children read the famous text in I Corinthians 13—“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not jealous or self-absorbed or abusive. Love does not insist on its own way, is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice when things go wrong—if only to say I told you so—but rejoices always in the good things, the truth”; when they read, “Loves bears every burden and never piles on another ounce. Love believes, even when all the evidence seems stacked the other way. Loves hopes. Loves endures. Love never ends—does not, even when by any other standard but God’s it might should”—they read those verses and remember, they hear those texts and they see the face of their own mother.

And so today, here, there are some of us who are so thankful, so appreciative and happy to be able to do a little something for their mothers by way of small tokens—cards, flowers, candy, dinner. At our house tonight (don’t tell Jo I told you!) we are going to cook out and play cards. It was the kids’ idea, and it may not sound like much to you, but ask Jo. She will tell you. That is her favorite thing for us to do—all of us there in the family circle, face to face, smiling and laughing and each one doing their best to beat the living tar out of the others.

For some children, today is the best day of all, truly celebrating the women who gave us life.

III

It is not so for everyone, however. For some, in fact, today is the worst—maybe because they lost their own mother too early. Maybe because they have no children of their own to celebrate them, to buy them dinner or send a card or candy.

Or maybe because their experience of their own mother is so radically different from the ones I have described. Perhaps because their mother one way or the other was like the ones we mentioned in our prayers: unable to be a source of strength to their children or anyone else much either; unresponsive to their children’s needs, which made the children all the more afraid to ask; not sustaining their families in any way. They were nothing at all like the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31. Their love, if you could even call it that, was not patient or kind; they were selfish and abusive; they believed in nothing and in their children least of all. They hoped less than they believed. Their devotion ended almost before it started. They may have been mothers, but only biologically.

Every Mother’s Day I think of the young woman who came to my office, long ago now, to tell me that she dreaded this day most of all days, because for her it was all of it a lie: an empty ritual: sending a card (“To the best Mom in all the world!”) buying flowers, bluffing her way through conversation about the good old days when there was nothing good about those days, or about any of the days since. “There are no cards at the Hallmark store,” she said, “that say what I really want to say, something like, ‘Thanks for the emotional baggage to carry the rest of my life, the great weight of guilt and the feeling I could never quite measure up to what you expected of me, for never knowing, really, what you expected of me. For making me feel like I was the cause of all your problems and grief…’”

“Know where I can find a card like that?” she asked rather sarcastically.

I shook my head.

“Then what am I supposed to do?” She asked. “Besides therapy?”

“Why don’t you start your own company,” I said, “making cards that say what you think they really ought to say. But get a lawyer,” I said. “Print a disclaimer on each one. Tell people to buy them and sign them but for the love of God don’t send them.”

When the laughter died she said, “No, really. What am I supposed to do?”

“Keep at your therapy,” I said. And then I said this: “For the love of God, keep saying what ought to be true. Keep thinking of love in the ways it ought to be given and received. Keep giving it that way, if you can, even if you have not received it that way, if you can.

“Make love your aim,” I said. “Make love your aim.”

IV

When we read I Corinthians 13, we often stop right there at the end of the chapter: “Now faith, hope, love abide, these three. But the greatest of these is love.” How well we know those verses. The verse we do not know so well is the next verse, the first verse of I Corinthians 14, where Paul says to all of us just what I said to that young woman in my office, quoting him—it was not original with me—“Make love your aim.”

One of the things I love most about the Bible is how realistic and true to life it is. It is not overly sentimental; it is not hard-hearted, either. When Paul says, “Make love your aim,” I think he is acknowledging that we any of us do not always, some of us do not often experience love—maybe do not often either give or receive love—in all those wonderful ways he has just described. We are not always patient and kind. We do sometimes, and some of us all the time, insist on our own way. We are sometimes very jealous and very selfish. We put up with very little and give up far too easily.

Love as we experience it is rarely how Paul described it. Love as we receive it, as we give it likewise. That is the truth beyond a Hallmark card’s ability to tell it.

And so what do we do with that? Throw up our hands, shut down our hearts, close ourselves off from one another? Repeat the cycle?

Or do we keep aiming? Keep trying? Keep at it?

V

Today is Mother’s Day, when we look around us and see…many things. And for those of us who rejoice this day, give thanks this day, who think this is the best day of the year: make your mother’s love your aim. Look down, look around, see the work that needs doing, the people that need loving. Remember and acknowledge the way your mother loved you and take aim to be like her: patient, kind, selfless, trusting. Do the same work for others you have seen her do for you. Give love the way you have received it. Make her love your aim.

But for those of you for whom this day is hard, I remind you again of the Ascension, and in spite of the angel’s advice I encourage you to look up: to remember that what Paul describes in I Corinthians, really, is the love of God. Make his love your aim.

Remember, acknowledge the way God has loved you—how patiently, how kindly, how gently. Remember the way Jesus has given himself to you—how selflessly, not insisting on his own way even at the end—pouring himself out in forgiveness and love. Remember how the Spirit has stayed with you every day of your life.

Remember how God’s love for you has never ended and never will—God has never stopped loving you even when, really, he had every right to. If you look around you today or any day and see…well, nothing of the kind of love Paul is describing, keep looking up, to the One who loves as love ought to be and whose Spirit will help you to make love your aim, to love, really love, even those who for whatever reason cannot love you the same.

Make God’s love your aim. Patient. Kind. Selfless. Forgiving. This day and every day.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Requiem

Mr. Lovett died last week.

That is sad enough. Sadder is that I did not hear about it till this afternoon.

It was time. He was 87. He had Parkinson's. His brain was calcifying and his memory was all but gone, along with most of his other means of engaging the world. His death is a mercy. He had been so alive, so vibrant, so much a child of God and utterly without guile. A friend once said of him--and he meant it as an insult, I think, but I took it as blessing and benediction--"He is like a little boy with a checkbook." Yes, in many ways. He had plenty of money. He was preternaturally inclined to share. And he did. With many.

I dedicated Praying for Dear Life to him. He showed me incredible kindness and an almost unspeakable support when he had reason to do neither. He paid for my therapy when I nearly lost my mind. He loved me in spite of myself. I owe him a debt I can never repay.

I was going to say all that at his funeral. He told me many times he wanted me to do the funeral, or part of it anyway. Alas. His dear wife forgot to call me or write. I only heard a week after the fact. He had it all written down, she said when at last I got her email. I had seen a copy of his funeral plans and my name was on them--at least last time I saw them. Just as well.

He always wanted me to call him Bill, or even, he said, Daddy Bill. He was in fact the same age as my dad. But I could not bring myself to call him either thing. The latter because it seemed too close in a way and the former because it also seemed too close, too familiar, if in another way. So I always called him Mr. Lovett.

Always will, and with almost hushed humility and gratitude. And great love.

Mr. Lovett.

Silent as the Grave

A couple of nights before my father died I was sitting with him in his hospital room. I had trimmed his beard and hair—I had never done either before, but we both knew that soon he would need to look his best. There was nothing more, therapeutically, to be done for him. The cancer had done its grim work. A cold compress on his forehead was the last palliative offered him against the fever. He felt awful. His eyes were closed. He was very still.

The Browns and the Dolphins were playing a Monday Night game but neither of us were watching. Still, football had been the most of what Dad and I had in common so I tried to strike up a bit of conversation about the game, tried to hold onto him and us for as long as I could. Dad never opened his eyes, just raised his hand slightly and said, “Shhh. Let’s don’t talk.” Except for “I love you” next morning as I took my leave, never to see him alive again, those were the last words he ever said to me.

I am not sure why I am telling you this story. There are other things I might say. It is just that for one reason or the other my thoughts have been with Dad the last couple of days. And it is Holy Week, too, when the message—the reality and memory and expectation—of death is almost palpable. Death is coming. For all of us it is just a matter of time. That is our lot, the human predicament.

But there is promise, too, of course. We believe in the resurrection of the body: Jesus,’ our loved ones,’ and our own. But those promises are so tangled up with the predicament that sometimes, like now, it is hard to know where to start or how to talk about it. Maybe that is not so unusual.

As I read the narratives again and again of the crucifixion and the empty tomb, I notice how much silence there is. Everything seems muffled and muted. If at Jesus’ birth there were choirs of angels and royal visitors and even the wailing of infants, as he dies the mob falls silent and so do his disciples. Saturday is quiet as the grave. Even Sunday morning there are less words than gasps, at least at first—as if no words are sufficient, right, appropriate, equal to the miracle.

There will come words, of course, joyful and celebrative testimony and proclamation, words of praise and thanksgiving, wonder and amazement. But even days later, on that morning when the disciples found Jesus on the beach making them breakfast on a charcoal fire there was…silence (John 21).

Perhaps when we are faced with the truest and deepest mysteries silence is the most authentic response. When our eyes come to focus on either the tragedy of suffering and sickness, brutality or death, or when they see the hope which answers all that, the light that shines in darkness, our tongues rightly go still as voices choke on swallowed words.

“Shhh. Let’s don’t talk.” Let’s just be here, together, in life for as long as we can, in death whenever it comes, in resurrection. Let’s look. Let’s listen. But, “Shhh.” Maybe Dad was teaching me something very important that night, one last lesson, a lesson I have as yet to learn.

Me, Food and Lent

I

I always fast during Lent. We have to do it for the doctors now and then, so why not for the Great Physician? I have to admit that it rankles a bit, however, that to the extent we most of us know about fasting at all, what it is--giving up food for a specified period of time in view of a "test" of some sort--we know it for medical and not spiritual reasons. Be that as it may, I fast during these forty days of preparation for Good Friday and Easter.

The fast itself varies—sometimes I give up a specific food or beverage, sometimes a specific meal or two. And maybe it is not good for me--my mother thinks as much, fussed at me only last week about it. She may be right. I remember that Martin Luther had perennial digestive difficulties because he fasted so rigorously and so often.

My fasts are in no wise comparable, but still it begs the question. Why? Year by year, I set myself the task, but to what end? Not to lose weight, though I do like being able to button my pants without holding my breath. Not so Jesus will love me more. Jesus already does that and there is no righteousness in "works." So why?

I think because I realized, some years ago, how much I think about food, how much time and energy I give to eating. "Man does not live by bread alone," Jesus says, quoting Deuteronomy, but you could not prove it by me. Not the Hours but mealtimes order and shape my life, give my days shape and definition—even as they remove definition from my body and makes me pretty shapeless. Clock strikes nine, or noon or six and, hungry or not, her I come to the table.

Recently I had lunch with a friend, at a Chinese restaurant in Charlotte, and he commented as I sat down with my third plate that he had never seen anyone eat as much as I do. I was embarrassed and proud at the same time! What is it about me and food?

Mom says that she tried to nurse me the first few weeks of my life but there was something wrong with her milk, something essential that was missing. In sum, I spent all those weeks hungry, crying for food, starving, really, she said. Maybe that’s it: deep down, somewhere below my consciousness I think I still am starving and so I eat.

Just knowing that piece of my psychological encoding does not curb my appetite, however--information is not transformation--and so I just keep eating. And there may be more to it, too, than just that.

II

Last year, near this time I was a part of a writing seminar in Washington. I have had occasion of late to reread the diary I kept while I was there. What surprised me was how much I wrote about food and eating. Just a sampling:

Monday, March 27:
Lunch was cream of broccoli soup, pasta salad, fruit. This morning I ate raisin bran, fruit and part of a muffin. I am trying to remember I do not have to eat everything every time.

Tuesday, March 28:
Did not sleep again last night. I think maybe I ate too much or something. There was a wonderful pinto bean soup, salad, roast beef, carrots, asparagus and yellow peppers, rice with a shitake mushroom sauce, raspberry something in a pastry (I did not eat that, but did have seconds on the beef and rice). I am trying to remember that it is Lent, that I do not have to eat everything, Fought the covers during the night, or maybe that was the mushrooms fighting.

Wednesday, March 29:
Tonight Michael Lindvall, Lauren Winner and and a couple of others of us sat together (among yet others) at dinner. I cannot hear what is being said and so I just smile and nod and eat. A lot. We had salmon tonight—it may have been red snapper—but it was quite good (and I do not really like fish), with sautéed vegetables (heavy on the peppers) and little, well, footballs of spaghetti. I have never seen that before, the servings pre-spooled and parsleyed and ready to pick up with tongs.

Thursday, March 30:
The food has been wonderful. I am eating Raisin Bran every morning (please, God!), and soup for every lunch (today with fruit and a part of a large sub sandwich). Tonight the Louisville Institute hosted us at a Mexican place a couple of blocks away.The restaurant was loud and the table long: I was unable to hear much of any conversation at all. Finally a fellow in the group, a pastoral counselor of all things, asked if I could hear. I told him no, but that I was used to it. I pick up words here and there. I realized something important—I think I eat as a coping mechanism in such circumstances: I cannot experience my sense of hearing, so I compensate by over-stimulating my sense of taste. Perhaps. I did eat A LOT. And am pretty miserable right now.

III

I fast, in part, because I know how much I eat. If in the deafness of my ears and the base of my psyche there are physiological reasons for my gluttony, in my heart there is a desire to dethrone food from its central place in my life. I try NOT to live by bread alone. My life revolves around eating (and I suspect I am not alone in that regard, whatever its sources in others’ lives) and I am trying to put it into a new orbit.

Nor is that the only thing Paul means in Philippians 3:18-19, when he says that there are many who live as "enemies of the cross of Christ." "Their god is the belly," he says —and if for some people like me the gluttony is obvious and culinary--going to the refrigerator for food to try to fill an old psychological or current spiritual emptiness (ala Buechner), for others their hunger is different. It may be for money or stuff, clothes or gadgets, lovers or victims. Sports, scandal, power, politics: our hungers are many and vast and in any case there can come with it enmity with the cross of Christ.

The cross means self-denial: and what a concept that is in our acquisitive culture, our go-ahead-and-get-it mind-set, our pay-ourselves- and feed-ourselves- and pamper-ourselves-first society. I speak not in judgment but in confession. Reading this text again this week I realized that many days, in many ways, I live as an enemy of the cross of Christ.

I don’t want to. Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart, and with my stomach and with my checkbook, my calendar and energies. I want to desire nothing but Christ but day by day I desire so many other things. Food, not least.

IV

Join in imitating me, Paul says. Imitate others of us in whom you have an example. Imitation, in this case, is less a matter of flattery than faithfulness. We learn to live our lives by trying to live as they do, at least for a season.

In I Corinthians Pauil says, I punish my body and enslave it, and the idea seems to be so that nothing material controls us. I am not so rigorous, but I am fasting, trying to look to the provision of God to nourish me more than to the bounty of the earth. I look to Jesus, who fasted for forty days in the wilderness that he might serve us faithfully. I want to imitate him, not in the extreme, but in some way that honors his sacrifice with a bit of my own.

One way to look at it is that my hunger began with my mother's inability to feed me. Or maybe we are all of us prewired in such a way that no one of this earth--not mother or father, spouse or child, not portfolio or team can satisfy us entirely. As John Baillie prayed,

"I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou has so set eternity within my heart that no earthly thing can ever satisfy me wholly. I thank Thee that every present joy is so mixed with sadness and unrest as to lead my mind upwards to the comtemplation of a more perfect blessedness."

Or, as Augustine might have said, "O Lord, thou has made us for the Feast and our hearts, our souls, our stomachs are hungry till we shall feast there with Thee."

Thankful for Enough

I sit in my den, at my faux clawfoot desk with leatherette inlays, banging away on an old dell lap-top--which is lighter but does not seem to be holding up as well as the old Royal my dad said got him through the war and the first twenty years of his career--thankful for the day, the family, the work, the blessings which are mine but only by grace.

I do not have much money, but I have a beautiful home--a "benefit" of serving this particular congregation. My wife and I are getting older and gaining weight, and my knee is still gimpy after summer surgery, but we travel along, singing a song, side by side. My kids are not in Harvard or MIT, but they are doing well and finding their way. They have faith, and hope, and oh, so much love. My book is not a classic or a best-seller, but I am as proud of it as I can be. I have finished the rough draft of my rough draft of the book that will come out September next, and I am WAY thankful for that!

Every once in a while I get a piece of good news or a little attention about my writing; yesterday I heard that an article I wrote, originally, as a presentation for a group of my peers, is being published in our official UM journal next March, and an e-interview I did for Dabbling Mum is on line: http://thedabblingmum.blogspot.com/2006/11/interview-with-thomas-steagald.html
I fire off emails to friends and family to share the news and I am always convinced, a few hours later, that I should not have, that they wiill take it for bragging or hubris, especially when I title the email, as I often do, "A bit of Hubris," but it really is thanksgiving. Humble thanks for these little and to me HUGE blessings associated with what I have long worked to do: which is, of course, write.

Tuesday at our community Thanksgiving service--and I love those kinds of events because you get to be for an hour what you are not normally, and in this case, a Pentecostal, as our preacher for the evening capered about and danced and sang his sermon up and down the aisles, mopping his brow and trying to provoke us (in the best sense of that word, "to call forth") into a less constipated praise than is usual for Presbyterians and Methodists, Lutherans and Baptists. He finally stopped when it was clear we had come about as far toward him as we could, and that was not that close... but he preached on the text in II Timothy 3, about how in the last days people would be all the things we are in these last days, but especially this, he said: unthankful. And it is the truth that we are so unthankful. We are so entitled, we feel, instead, imagining that we deserve what we have and deserve even more. We lack graciousness and grace, we lack humility and deference, we do not love or hear the cry of the needy...instead we want, we demand, we expect, and then we want demand expect more.

I have long thought and often said that we need to develop a theology of enough. As when Esau said to Jacob, "I have enough, my brother. Keep this gift for yourself." But in addition to that theology of enough we need also I think to develop a sense of gratitude that is in keeping with the rabbis' counsel, that we pray to God to want what we have instead of praying to have what we want. If God is the giver and not the Wal-Mart, or the military, or even our own ability to provide, then we can enjoy the bounty that is already ours and not hanker after, or covet, the bounty of another. Enough, together with thankfulness, is shield against envy, greed, gluttony, lust, anger, and even despair--and pride, too, I guess. So ALL the seven deadly sins are silenced in us when we are thankful for our enough.

I have enough, my brothers and sisters. Which is not to say that I would not be thankful for more, but I want what I have, am thankful. Today and always.

Their Faults Forgiven--An All Saints Meditation

On June 2, 1935, at eight-thirty in the evening, and I assume the service started so late because of the heat, or the lack of air conditioning, or both, Lynn Harold Hough, then Dean of Drew University, offered the first sermon ever preached in the newly constructed Duke Chapel—the dedicatory sermon. “The Cathedral and the Campus,” it was entitled, and it was full of the kind of public optimism that existed in those uneasy days between the world wars. Public opinion: things are getting better, a little better all the time.

The nation was still in the throes of the Great Depression, the great Duke Chapel—itself built and paid for in those lean years—seemed to be the very symbol of the abiding American conviction that education and hard work (and a little help from the Almighty) can solve any problem, economic or otherwise. Yes, there were rumors of storm clouds gathering on an axis between Berlin, Rome an Tokyo, but the granite sanctuary stood as testimony to the classic and liberal Christian sentiment of a universal brotherhood, as it were, an enlightened good will between persons and nations beyond all class consciousness and ethnic hatred. Soon, education and hard work, thriftiness and democracy, would put a forever end to racism and poverty, hatred and war. Had not Christian thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century foreseen that the twentieth would be the “Christian Century”?

But on that same June evening in 1935, half-a-world away, Josef Mengele was in medical school, preparing to perform grotesque experiments on the powerless in Germany—thereby proving that education is not salvation; Dachau had already been in operation for two years, not as a killing place, not yet, at least not as it would become, but as a prison for German communists. Other camps were planned and would soon be under construction—Treblinka, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson—thereby proving that hard work is no savior. The same nation that produced Brahms and Beethoven was about to unleash Goering and Goebbels on the world.

Dean Hough’s sermon was optimistic, like we are sometimes optimistic, but the reality of our world is sometimes quite different. We need more than education and hard work, more than business sense and sound-byte bromides. And Dean Hough was wise enough to realize all of that, though he did not say it just that way. What he did, though, was end his dedicatory sermon with a story—a story that speaks to a need beyond what we ourselves can attain, a reality beyond what we can build and learn in this world.

He said this: “The other day I heard an address by a Christian leader of great eminence. I walked away from the building with a man whose name you would recognize. ‘It was a notable address, was it not?’ I said to my friend. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘it was a great speech.’ He was silent for a moment. Then he added: ‘I am over 80 years of age. He told me nothing about what I can hope for when I make my great adventure.’”

Death: the great adventure. And what that wise old unnamed man in Dean Hough’s story was saying is this: I need to hear a word from the leaders of the church to help me die well. Education, hard work—money, maybe—they may, may, help me live well, or not, but what will let me die well? What will give me strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow? That is the message the church needs to proclaim: nothing less, and maybe not even a lot more.
But what is that message? Dean Hough concluded his story this way: he said, “One of the great French proverbs tells us that to understand earth you must have known heaven.”
To understand earth, you must have known heaven.

That, my friends, is why we gather Sunday by Sunday and come to the Table of the Lord month by month: to know heaven. That is why we celebrate a day like today, the Feasts of All Saints, to let us know that there is hope beyond the ordeals of our world, and to know it so well that we can understand: that if this is a world where in the name of science and medicine crazy men experiment on the helpless; if this is a world where political leaders in the name of life still send thousands and millions to their deaths; if this is a world where for all our education and hard work were are still not saved—then there is coming another world, another day, a Savior and salvation which will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. That is no opiate, my friends, to anesthetize us to the world’s ill; it is instead a promise, and a command, a hope and a summons to live now as we will live then, to understand earth, and our place in it, by knowing heaven.

John saw a multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages. The Elder said, “These are those who have come through the Ordeal, the horror, the death; these are those whose rags, dirtied by the world and its ways, are now glistening white because of the blood of the lamb. Because of the blood of the Lamb—because of that and no other thing.

Because of grace, in other words. Grace greater than the struggle, greater than the sadness; grace greater than the sin.

Several years ago, I was at our Annual Conference of ministers and laity at Lake Junaluska, NC. I was standing to pray in Stuart Auditorium during what is, for me, the high point of every Annual Conference: The Memorial Service. We take time each year to remember the ministers and spouses of ministers, who have died that year, and we thank God for them.

Pictures flash across the screen as the liturgist reads the names—I would like to do that in here—and there, all at once, was a minister I knew. I will not mention his name, but he was a difficult and troubled man. A man who had, in some obvious ways, betrayed his vows of ordination, and maybe in some other ways, too. And yet there he was with all the rest, his picture among the others, his name read as one of the faithful departed… I was still trying to puzzle all of that out when the liturgist had us read a prayer, and part of the prayer said this:

Eternal God, we praise you for the great company of all those who have finished their course
in faith and now rest from their labors. We praise you for all those dear to us, our loved ones
who are no more. Days, months, and even years may have passed, and still we feel near to
them. Our hearts yearn for them… (and then this) We see then now with the eye of memory,
their faults forgiven, their virtue grown larger. So does goodness live and weakness fade from
sight. We remember them with gratitude and bless their names…

Their faults forgiven, their virtue grown larger. And I guess to the cynical mind that is an opiate, a kind of denial, like the kind of we experience now and then in funerals when the preacher says, “He was a good man,” and everyone in the house knows he was a louse.

But to the faithful mind it is not opiate at all, but an echo of God’s grace, and the very thing we need to know of heaven—that in heaven, dirty robes are washed clean and faults are forgiven and virtue grows large. In heaven goodness lives and weakness fades from sight, and with gratitude we bless our God who forgives, and we bless our loved ones who are departed and forgiven, and even our enemies—Can God forgive their faults, make their virtue grow large? Of course God can. That is what we need to know of heaven.

And if we know that, then we can understand that if this earth is an dark evil place, sometimes, full of dark evil people, some of them, we need not fear. Though tribulation overcome us, that is not the last word. Though we have all of us sinned, fallen short of God’s glory and our own expectation, there is grace—our faults will be forgiven, our virtue grown larger. By grace. Thought we are all of us different, different languages, tribes, tongues, God will have us together at the Last, and that will be a day of rejoicing.

When we ALL get to heaven, that to say, and not just our closest friends and neighbors, but multitudes which cannot be named or counted, and all so precious to God he felt them worth the life of the Son…

When we ALL get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be. We will see there those we love and have lost, and there we will regain them again. But even more than that… we will rejoice to see Jesus.

Does that give you hope for your great adventure? Whether you are eight or eighty, does that give you hope? Is that what you need to hear? Not by wealth, or education, or work, but by grace our faults will be forgiven, by grace our virtue grown larger, when we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the answer is...

“So what is your book about?”

I have gotten that question more than once in recent days, people checking the menu and the price before sitting down to order. So, let me give you the recipe--in a couple of different versions.

Here is the “formal answer.” My book is a spiritual memoir, a slice of my life set in the context of a single “day” of my ministry. It begins before first light as I wake, dreaming of Jesus standing at the shore of my dreams and calling me back to land. I go on then to narrate and ponder the various dimensions of my life and work. Framed and intersected by three of the traditional services of daily prayer (morning, noon and night), I tell stories about my family and friends. I baptize babies and sit bedside church members as they die. I recount a few of my more obvious failures (and confess some that are not so obvious). And I bless God for the little rays of light that have come to me and, I pray, through me. In sum, I look at the movements of a day: the goings and comings, the separations and reunions, the chance encounters and happenings which, as John Baillie put it, are part of God’s “gracious plan for the education of my soul.” There are chapters on time with the family, study, counseling, teaching, visits, choir, returning home and making ready for bed. I pull back the curtain on my life in hopes that others can see themselves there (my friend Frederick Buechner says that we each of us look to find our own faces in others’ picture albums, that being the reason memoirs are the least bit interesting).

The informal, and in some ways truer answer is this: ten years before I came to Stanley I went through a profound crisis of faith and life. I had lost or was losing almost everything precious to me and found myself in a terrible wilderness of exile and despair. The weekly grace of a Christian gentleman named Bill Lovett, the monthly support of my long-suffering mother, the abiding hospitality of my saintly sister helped me keep body and soul together till I could heal, or begin to (the process continues). During that time I had to learn to pray, not as a public part of my job but in the deepest and most private parts of my soul. The book I have written is a chronicle of that process—of learning to pray, learning to examine all of my life and work by the sometimes scorching, sometimes soothing light of God’s presence. Hard to imagine, I guess, that a preacher had to learn to pray, but I did (or am beginning to: the process continues), and while this book is not a “how to,” it is a kind of “how I”: how I live and move and have my being in the One who ever calls me from my dreams and illusions to ever greater wakefulness, ever greater faithfulness, ever more (God, I pray) selfless service.

It is not always an easy read, this book of mine, though a friend wrote even today to tell me it was much more of a page-turner than she would have expected. My daughter said that reading it, she felt I was in the room with her. Another friend said to my wife, “It is so Tom.” Yes, for better or worse that really is me there, warts and all. And so I guess that is the best answer to the question. "What is the book about?" The book is about me. And God. Him, too.

The Smile of a Pharisee

I see them all the time, those knowing, Gnostic grins, condescending and self-serving, and I guess the reason I notice and react, badly, is that more times than I would like to admit I sport the same, think the same, communicate the same: if only you knew as well as I, if only you believed as I believe, if only you had the kind of relationship with Jesus that I have (when I, at least, know far better than any of that; which admission is in its own way Pharisaical; is there no escaping the trap?). And we Pharisees have our proof, God knows: texts and tracts, diplomas and credentials, statistics and long-range plans.

Nouwen says that Prodigals cannot help becoming Elder Brothers, and perhaps disciples cannot help becoming Inquisitors, or at least "experts." The fundamentalists on the right and the fundamentalists on the left are all of them Fundamentalists. Pharisees, all.

And so the Will Graham crusade is coming to town. Will is the son of Franklin, the son of Billy. And though our UM churches have as a stated goal (as if it needs to be said), "Intentionally relating unchurched persons to Jesus Christ," we look down our collective noses at this form of evangelism, content ourselves that we are not emotional or manipulative or whatever--as if all crusades are created equally--and meanwhile we languish. We are adrift between prosperity and damnation, not wanting to preach either, not sure what to preach to invite others into the fold. The Baptists and Wesleyans are on board and the Methodists are not, all of us looking at each other and all of us smiling the smiles of Pharisees...

For Presence's Sake

I have a friend, a crusty old bishop, who snorts that in many of today’s congregations the de facto job description for “pastor”—that is, what people seem to expect and therefore what pastors, anxiously, try to provide—is “presence.” Mere presence, he says. Pastors are to “be there,” in other words, wherever there is and for whatever the reason. Today’s pastor, he says shaking his head, is “a quivering mass of availability.” But, he concludes, “the pastor who is always available brings nothing with her when she comes.”

A pastor’s days are filled with important things, the bishop says, and in truth there are plenty of important things pastors are expected to do: there are meetings to attend, visits and calls to make, favor to curry and fires to put out. But, says the bishop, if pastors are always available (quivering or otherwise), and always do only the important things, they will never have time for, nor will they do, the crucial things. The crucial things are prayer and study—those first, of course—and only after that visits and counsel; only after that sermon and Bible Study preparation. The important things come only after the crucial things. Why?

To have anything worth a Sunday morning saying or hearing, pastors themselves have to take time to listen. They have to ask, “What is God saying to me?” before they ask “What am I going to say to my people.” That kind of listening is hard and time-consuming work. Moreover, to be “present” to a situation, really present and not merely present to people and circumstances—bringing something more than clichés and quivering—requires time apart with Jesus. As precedent, remember how often Jesus himself went away alone in order to pray.

In sum, to shepherd the faithful, the faithful pastor must spend time with the Shepherd, must tend to his or her own faith. And so next week, if God allows, I will be in the mountains praying, studying and writing. We have friends who are gracious enough to leave a key under the mat of their beautiful vacation home and every year (with the approval and blessing of our Staff-Parish Relations committee), I go away alone for a week or so—not for vacation, though the setting is pristine enough for one—but to slow down, to focus, to do the hard and intentional work of listening to God. I read God’s Word and I ponder what I read. I write down what I think I may hear and reflect on pastoral moments and circumstances. It is a spiritual exercise and absolutely necessary for me if I am going to be an effective pastor (or at least as effective as I can be).

It is hard to leave home—and it is sometimes harder to come back—for there is lots of important stuff I could be doing here every day. But crucial work awaits me there—the work that by grace will allow me to come back with ears more keen to hear, a heart more ready to serve, with a word that, I hope, is worth the saying.

sales

yesterday I was 477, 481st in sales at Amazon...today I am 512, 979th. OH NO!!

At Long Last...

I mean that.

It has been a long time coming, what arrived recently at my house: a package from the warehouse where my freshly printed and bound books are stacked neatly on shelves, awaiting the orders sure to come. The label on the box said NavPress and I knew the treasure in side, thirty copies of Praying for Dear Life: A Reason to Rise, Strength for the Day, Courage to Face the Night.

As I have mentioned in other posts, it has been thirty years since I knew I wanted to write and had some reason to believe I could. It has been twenty-eight years since I first read Buechner and knew that spiritual memoir, especially as refracted through the Bible (or vice versa) was the kind of writing I wanted to do. It has been 26 years since my first little book was released, a pretty feeble collaborative with a couple of friends of mine from seminary (and while Lauren Winner says we cannot refer to our books as little, this one was little, as was the second booklet, a worship resource written solo, a few years later). It has been six years since the idea for this book came to me in a Bojangle's in Monroe, NC, the day after Christmas and the day before I was rushed to the hospital with something called labrynthitis (chronicled briefly in chapter 1). It has been two and one-half years since I took an armload of proposals and partial manuscripts to Calvin College for the Festival of Faith and Writing, where the first person I saw was an editor named Rachelle Gardner who read it and asked to see a bit more. I was crazy nervous, and even more so when I saw her left eye-brow arch-up and she invited me to sit down (see her take on this scene at http://thewordstudio.blogspot.com/2006/08/divine-appointment.html.

It has been nineteen months since I started doing serious rewrites and fourteen months since the final manuscript was finally handed in...and why it has taken so long, I do not know, but now I have a box of books on my kitchen table and great thanksgiving in my heart that this part of the journey is behind me. Though, truth to tell, like the Israelites when they finally reach the promised land, I sometimes look back fondly toward the wilderness. It was such harrowing fun working with Liz Heaney. Harrowing, and fun. It was so frustrating waiting for Rachelle to answer my emails, tell me the latest, but there was always good conversation to be had. It was a struggle, but I have learned so much.

Will I do it again? Well, I have a manuscript that NavPress will publish next year at this time and then, who knows. Terry said it would depend on sales, whether NavPress would want me to do more. For me, the question is more internal than that. Have I said all I have to say? Maybe. maybe not. Wherever the road before me leads, the road behind has led me here, and at long last there are books on my table with my name on them and Buechner's below mine and I know of twenty that have sold and of a few I will give away...like seeds cast from the hand of a patient sower, or I could hope as much, hoping some of them find fertile soils, that the reviewers (if there are any) do not gobble them up like crows, that other books do not choke them off too soon and that other more luminous works do not scorch them to death.

I am thankful to have come this far.

PS It was on September 11, the anniversary of the attacks which will remain a part of our national identity--allowing us, sadly, to imagine ourselves evermore as innocent victims and undaunted overcomers, American Adams all over again, as the author said--that I received the package from NavPress. I wonder what that confluence means?

I Come to the (Olive) Garden Alone...

I have gotten rather hooked on that “all you can eat” soup and salad deal at the Olive Garden (breadsticks are included, too!). How they make a profit off us guys who order every soup every time is a mystery but I don’t worry about it. Instead I stick a napkin in my collar and go to work. Now and then I carry a book to pass time between the servings; usually, discreetly, I observe my neighbors.

The other day I had a fresh bowl of minestrone in front of me when something made me glance over a couple of tables. There was a family of, oh, about twelve, just beginning to celebrate a birthday it appeared. What I noticed next, though, was that each of the four kids was playing with a hand-held computer. I had almost no time to get indignant (we told our kids to put theirs away so we could have conversation!) before I looked again to see that of the eight adults at the table, five of them were talking on cell phones.

Maybe you have seen this kind of thing yourself—a family, even a group of friends, but everyone at the table is talking to someone else or living in another world. They are “together,” if you look at it one way, but at the same time separated as they can be. If we are honest we might all of us confess that we felt this kind of thing, too—that even among friends and family, sometimes geography is the only thing we have in common.

On the one hand I can understand and in some ways even bless the hunger for something more than we might be experiencing at any given moment. Though this desire is without doubt the root of more than one of the Deadly Sins, at the same time we all of us have the disquieting sense that there is a Conversation yet to be had which is more crucial than the ones we’re in. There is an Adventure awaiting us that deserves our immediate Attentions. We long for Friendship deeper and more life-giving than the often codependent ones we have now. And so we take the call, play the game, turn away from the ones who are with us—in the often unspoken and mostly unconscious hope of the Other. Augustine meets Verizon, if you please: this generation’s wireless version of our wired-in restlessness.

Still, the Incarnation demands that we see this moment and this people as the place where Jesus is present—when two or three or twelve gather together—and therefore it is a call, a spiritual obligation as much as it is a challenge, to put down the games (electronic and otherwise) and to switch off our phones. We turn back—repentance in this case is also reconciliation—to listen, to watch, to pay attention to this word, this conversation, this very moment.

While the Bible tells us that strangers may be angels and far away lands the precincts of promise, the corollary is that if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, members of our own family, folks in our circle of friends, even people in our classes and congregation may be the flesh of God’s abiding word, and this very place a tabernacle of the Holy Spirit. If so, whether at Olive Garden, old First Church or the dinner table, we hearken to other siren voices (or eat only alone) at our spiritual peril.

Post-Partum Depression

These are the good times, as our good friends at the Catchup (sic) Advisory Board would say, but I can't help this nagging sense of sadness around the edges--and maybe more nearly in the heart--of things.

My counselor friend, Todd, says I have dysthemia, a recently named emotional condition, a kind of neurosis, actually. The difference between a psychosis and a neurosis is this: whereas psychosis says "two plus two equals Raleigh, NC," neurosis says, "two plus two equals four,but I am not happy about it." Dysthemia, then, manifests itself basically this way: there is no day so bright that I cannot find a dark cloud somewhere on the horizon or over my head.

If I have 150 in worhship, for example, I wonder why it is not 160 or 200 or why the Joneses are not in their usual spot. It all feels personal, too--an intentional slight or insult that God, the universe, my church members are perpetrating on me.

And so I have this article which came out in Christian Century. I am thrilled, right? Except I am worried I will never be published there again, that the people I most want to see that I had an article published in Christian Century did not see it (and why is it considered poor form to send out an announcement?), that there is no link to the article (though there are links to other articles in the issue, dated August 22)...see how it goes?

It is pretty maddening, actually, and not only to me. My wife gets pretty tired of it, all in all. One of my two best friends in ministry (and why do I have only TWO good friends in ministry, his dysthemia asked) is a district superintendent in Georgia, and he gets annoyed too: "If you are not happy NOW, with a book and an article and endorsements by Buechner, Winner, and Long, you will NEVER be happy." I guess he is right, but my publisher misspelled one of the endorsers' names on the inside flyleaf and left off Tom Long's altogether. "I did not really know who he was," the girl at the publisher said, so WHY NOT ASK ME I replied, but only to myself.

Perhaps this is what the Fathers meant by sloth--distraction. Or maybe it is related to despair. Or lust. Or envy. I cannot sort out or untangle all the ways sin is active in my dysthemia and dysfunction, or whether I am guilty or sick, but the effect is the same.

And so now at least five members of the editorial and marketing team of my publisher have jumped ship in the last couple of weeks. I am afraid that my little book with float away with the rest of the flotsam. I need to go to the home office to meet some people, as I now know NO ONE who works there.

My book is coming out! Yeah!!

But there is a depression that comes with it, no extra charge.

Buechner and Me

I was thinking today of the first time I "met" Frederick Buechner. I was in seminary, unhappily married, an emotional wreck--and not suicidal, I do not think, but so deep in a hole that I could not see light.

At our campus bookstore, by Chance, I had picked up The Alphabet of Grace, a book Buechner had published some seven years before, and one night I got in the bathtub--where I do all my most serious reading--and devoured it.

I still have the slim volume on my desk and if you open it you will see two things: massive amounts of red ink with which I underlined almost everything, and little blotches, water stains, but whether of tub water or tears is now a guess. I suspect mostly the latter.

It was as if someone--Buechner himself or Someone--had thrown a rope down into the hole to gather me back up. I was better, though I did not know how or why. I sat down the next morning and wrote him a letter, "Frederick Buechner, c/o Seabury Press," unsure as to whether he would even receive the thing, but needing anyway to tell him what he had done for me, long years after setting his pen to that particular paper, how even through time his words had somehow spoken to me and for me and how much I loved him without even knowing him and how much he had blessed me, without knowing me from Adam's cat.

A few weeks later I received in the mail a letter from Pawlet, VT, addressed in Buechner's almost illegible scrawl, my name written by his hand and inside two pages of blessings and peace. It took me over an hour to decipher and translate--things that good are worth working for--and at the end I felt a glow, as if I had been standing barefoot near a bush that burned and was not consumed. Not to overstate the case, but it may have been the turning point of my life.

After that I began hoping that I, too, could write. I read all Buechner had written and shamelessly imitated him for long years, cribbing his style but never approaching his genius or spirit, nor his insight. I would write to him now and then, he would always respond--not as voluminously as that first time, but always with generosity. I sent him the articles and reviews I wrote of his work for this journal or that, most recently a review of his Secrets in the Dark (http://www.umph.org/resources/publications/review.asp?review_id=162), and again he was always most kind. At Grand Rapids a couple of years ago, during the Festival of Faith and Writing, I had the good fortune to introduce him to Barbara Brown Taylor, her to him, and there I stood in the between two legends--glowing again, I am sure.

Since that night in the tub Buechner has been more to me than a writer, more than an hero, more than an occasional correspondent--more like an icon, written large on my mind and soul, a channel of grace. He is indeed larger than life in my life, and I speak his name with only reverent familiarity.

I tell you all this because on yesterday the first copy of my new book arrived at my house: Praying For Dear Life: A Reason to Rise, Strength for the Day, Courage to Face the Night
(NavPress, 2006; http://www.amazon.com/Praying-Dear-Life-/dp/1576838161/sr=8-1/qid=1156952927/ref=sr_1_1/103-2223670-6996610?ie=UTF8), and right there under my name on the front cover is this: "...a treasure from start to finish...Frederick Buechner"

I cannot tell you what that means to me, not just that he seemed to like it (the rest of the blurb is on the back cover) but that HE is there with ME on this book, a book over which I labored so long and as I typed away he was always somewhere in my consciousness as inspiration and example. For twenty-five years now I have wanted to be a "real" writer, with a "real" book to my credit, and if Buechner first awakened in me the notion that I might be a writer, that writing could be a part of my ministry, he is there with me also at the end, to bless with his name and his words my work.

Long ago, before he knew me, he set pen to paper to help me. Not only me, of course, but me among the rest. And now he has done it once again, set his pen to paper, written his name next to mine, to claim me and bless me and send my book, my heart's work, on its way.

Grace upon Grace. The Peace of Christ. Memory and Hope.

Thanks, Fred. For everything.

Thoughts taken from an email to a friend...

Frederick Buechner says that "nothing human is ever uncomplicated." I do so agree, and therefore am loathe to speak further about the situation in the Middle East. I will defer, instead, to David Grossman.

On Bill Moyers "Faith and Reason," David Grossman--an Israeli novelist who has done a recent work on Samson, wherein he compares Samson with Israel itself, suggests (as I heard it) that Israel is in danger of becoming what it has long fought and tried to protect itself against. If you go to Moyers' Faith and Reason website, and click on David Grossman, you can listen to/see the entire interview.

Relatedly, I am wondering is if, in today's political climate, it is possible to be critical of Israel, it's policies and its warring, without being labeled an anti-Semite. So many people are so quick to play the racism card. And WHY is Mel Gibson's DUI, and his drunken chatter, more interesting than the rest of the world's news--at least according to CNN's website banner.

Relatedly, is it possible to criticize our own government, its policies and its warrings, without being labeled with some culture-wars adjective? As William Sloane Coffin said, "A patriot, always; a nationalist, never." Where are the voices from the middle? Drowned out by the ones coming from either side, as always.

Joining some of my friends, I do wish Jesus would come back...NOW! But I am persuaded that that much of many people's hope in that theological perspective is misplaced. A new book on the millenarian theologies of which the Left Behind series (preeminently) as well as Jack Van Impe and Hal Lindsay and the rest are a part suggests that that particular view of God's action in the world is exactly backwards, that "God's purpose is not to remove Christians from the world in order to destroy it, but that like Christ they are to enter the world to redeem it" (Barbara Rossing. The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation. Boulder: Westview, 2004. ISBN: 0-8133-9156-3). God always sends his people into the struggle for justice, rather than exempting them--Jesus' Incarnation is the ultimate proof. I suspect that my desire for escape from the fray is just that...and while I feel it more most every day I confess it is mostly based in fear for myself and, especially, my kids.

I hope you, dear reader, have seen Second Hand Lions. I saw it again the other night, having forgotten how wonderful it is, and especially Robert Duvall's line about the most important things in life having to do with matters that cannot conclusively be proved right or wrong. GREAT movie.

A Lament for Lebanon

Pray for the children of Abraham.

I, as you, have watched in horror this week as pictures emerged from the latest fighting in Lebanon. The heirs of Abraham are once again at war. The sons of Ishmael (the Muslims) and the sons of Isaac (the Jews), each with their own logic and fierce rhetoric, are hard at work trying to destroy the other. Would to God—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, yes, and the God of Ishmael, too (see Genesis 21:12-21)—that it were not so.

I am no student of modern geopolitics. When it comes to “the ways of the world,” I guess I am about as naïve as they come. But I am a student of scripture and I know a least a little concerning the ways and purposes of God—and I am persuaded that no matter how often or passionately these or any of the worlds’ various combatants invoke the blessing or “will of God,” God neither intends nor honors the killing of children. Of that, at least, I am sure. And if the killing of any one nation’s children is a horror never to be forgotten, we must remember with anguish and repentance the deaths of all children.

I keep wishing that the heirs of Abraham would be quick to follow his example. Do you remember that time when Abraham (or Abram as he was called then) and his nephew lot were coming up from Egypt into the Negeb (to the south of Judah). Both men were rich, having herds and servants and much gold. It soon became apparent that they were richer than the land—that is, the land was not able to support the both of them. And there were others peoples in the area as well, the Canaanites and the Perizzites. All told, there were too many sheep and not enough grass, too many mouths and not enough water. And so it was that there was “strife” between the servants of Abram and the servants of Lot (not to mention the Canaanites and Perizzites).

Abram, bless his heart, surveyed the situation and uttered immortal words: “Let there be no strife between you and me, between your headsmen and my herdsmen: for we are kin.” To Abram, family and peace were more to be fought for than any land, even if that meant surrender, and so he said to his nephew, “Take what you want and I will make do with the rest.” That is just the way it happened: Lot, his family and servants, journeyed to the fertile area near the Jordan River, in the precincts of Sodom, while Abram took the dryer and more inhospitable land called Canaan.

Abram ceded land for the sake of peace. It may be an oversimplified and naïve hope that his heirs on both sides of the family tree might find a way to do the same. But as I look at the pictures of the dead—children, women, old men—I have wondered this: what price “security”? Tell me: who made “survival” the greatest good? And I have wondered why none of the children of Abram are willing to invoke the old man now and say, “Let there be no strife between us, for we are kin.”

Why we are so quick to forget how Jesus—another child of Abraham so that we who follow him are likewise—said that his disciples are those who love their enemies, who willingly lay down their lives for others? But how very different that looks from so many of the pictures we’ve seen.

Save on Trinity Sunday

I can still remember coming in from school, walking home from Crieve Hall Elementary, stepping through the back door to see that a remarkable transformation had occurred since that morning. In our back den, the hub and hive of all things in our family, all the furniture had been moved out, and replaced by a great wooden frame—a couple of saw horses and long side beams that must have been five or six feet long. White fabric ws stretched across the frame, a sandwich, really—one layer of linen, and another, separated by a padding of cotton—it was a quilting rack, of course.

I can still remember the way my pulse would quicken because if there was a quilting rack set up in the den, that meant my grandmother’s sisters were there too. Memie, that was my grandmother, she lived to be 104 and a week; her older sister was Nanny, my favorite, elegant and funny; and Cokie, the youngest, who looked and acted the oldest, sour expression, grunting with her every step. Cokie—we sometimes called her Pokey because she moved so slowly—she made the best jam cakes in the history of the world.

You ever had a jam cake? Blackberry jam. And it would come out of the oven and she would put some kind of sugary icing on it and there was nothing pokey about the way we went for our forks and dug in, sometimes without even slicing it first. Just ate it whole right off the cake plate. Nanny and Memie tried to duplicate the recipe. Mom tried to duplicate the recipe. Cokie gave them the recipe—she said—but it was never the same. The sisters and nieces think Cokie held out on them, for some reason, did not include a crucial ingredient or something, took the secret to her grave.

Whatever intrigue characterized the kitchen, there was none of that at the quilting rack. And I loved to watch them, all three of them, sitting here or there, stitching a while, intricate and delicate and amazing hand work, sometimes talking amongst themselves, sometimes silent except for Cokie’s grunting, and then one of them, or two of them, or all three as if on cue would move their chairs to start working somewhere else. I could never tell exactly what they were doing, of course, and sometimes it looked like they were stitching in the same places over and over again. Day after day I would come in from school to find them at their work, check their progress, and for the longest time it looked like random stuff, haphazard patterns.

But there came a day, there always came a day, when I would come in after school and see that it all made sense, that it all worked, that the random and the haphazard were not that at all but were part of a plan and design that my elementary-age eyes simply could not recognize.

Theirs was a craft beyond me. They knew what they were doing. I was only watching. They crafted a quilt that would keep me warm on a cold winter’s night, and into that quilt they poured their years of experience and skill and love… sometimes when they were working they would poke themselves with a needle, and on one or two of those quilts, if you know where to look, you can still see the tiniest trace of blood, evidence of their love and work. And then, the work would be finished and the quilt rack put away till next time—if there was one. They worked on each quilt as if it were their last one, and then they went home and I would miss them till the next time when I would see the quilt rack and smell the jam cake and know that something wondrous was going on.

Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, is when we Christians proclaim the fullness of God, the inner life, the inner relationship of God, as it has gradually been revealed to us: Father, Son, Holy Spirit: eternally one and eternally distinct, one God in three persons, three ways of knowing and experiencing the One eternal God.
It is a mystery, this doctrine of ours: and a mystery, as Augustine said it, a true mystery, is something that one cannot know unless it is revealed to you, and even after you know it, after it is revealed to you, you cannot explain it.

The Trinity—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—is a mystery to us in just that way, but it is revealed to us through Creation, through Salvation, through abiding presence.
In the beginning, when there was nothing but darkness and chaos and void, God spoke, said “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Only later did we realize that the Word by which God created the world was the eternal Word, the Word that would become flesh and dwell among us. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God; all things were created by that Word and apart from that Word nothing was made that has been made. That Word came among us, full of grace and truth, took on our flesh, lived our life, died our death, sanctified all our beginnings and endings. Before every birth: God. After every death: God. In every life and moment: God(Credo, William Sloane Coffin).

Only later did we realize that in creation, as the Word was being spoken, God’s Spirit was moving on the face of the deep, that God’s Spirit came upon the prophets that they might proclaim God’s will, that God’s spirit came upon a virgin who conceived and bore a Son who was the Word made flesh.

Our elementary eyes have only gradually come to see what God has been doing all along, Only gradually have our eyes come to see WHO God has been all along.

I can’t explain it, I can only point to it. I can tell you the story of my grandmother and her two sisters, and it is not a perfect analogy by any means, but it pleases me—it pleases me--to think of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, each of them and all of them together fussing over our world, working here and there, sewing, stitching, unstitching, hurting themselves now and then so that if we know where to look we see the blood stains that prove their once and future love.

There is a cake in the oven, too, and no ingredients are missing and soon enough all of us will dig in and wolf-down that delicious eternal confection, but until then we get up and we go to work and we go to school and we come home again to see that there seems to be something going on but we cannot quite yet tell what it is… just a random pattern, it seems, a haphazard attention, but One Day we will see that they knew what they were doing all along.

I cannot explain it; all the explanations are inadequate and even idolatrous: water, ice, steam; apple, peel, core; father, husband, brother. None of that is helpful, not very. But we know it. We can feel it—which is to say that when it is explained to us it rings eternally true: there is more going on in the world than we can domesticate; there is more to God than we can ever imagine or manage; there is more to God’s way in the world than we can see or understand or recognize right now, our eyes being as young and inexperienced as they are. Day by day we see just little parts of it.

But day by day they keep working. Here, there. Sometimes silently, sometimes not. And soon, one day soon, there will be a world that will keep us all warm and fed and blessed and at peace. They know what they are doing; I believe that. They are crafting something wondrous, pouring their years of experience and skill and love into the world, for us.

Leslie Newbigin tells of visiting the Fountain Abbey, ruined home to the Cistercian or White Monks, and how there was this placque in the chancel noting that the Monks offered silent praise and adoration, instead of sermons, on Trinity Sunday, “owing to the difficulty of the topic.”

And yes, in one way, it is difficult. Very difficult. A mystery.
I
n another way, though, as Eugene Peterson says, it is the most practical doctrine of all, and the simplest: the doctrine of the Trinity, this gradually revealed awareness of the fullness of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, tell us that there is always more of God than we know, always more of God than we can explain, always more of God than we can show. Trinity says God is not in a box, is bigger than we imagine, is more powerful than we sometimes want to believe or remember.

Do you remember the text from Isaiah 6? How, in the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw God high and lifted up, and the hem of God's robe filling the Temple? Do you remember Isaiah's reaction?

The German philosopher Goethe said that when we humans are overmatched—as Isaiah was in the Temple—when we are faced with and experience a reality that is clearly superior to us, our only defense is love. Love of God is worship.

The truth of the Trinity leaves us with one option: to worship. To look and celebrate. To smell the cake and sing. To know we are in over our heads, and that is a good thing.

The Trinity reminds us that God is not at our disposal, we are at God's. That “God” is not a word we tack onto the end of our speeches, but rather the Word who grafts us into God's purposes. That God is moving even now on the face of the chaos and war, the hunger and homelessness, the confusion and hatred—even now stitching and restitching sense and light and purpose into the fabric of our world.

I hope that there are times you have known you were in over your head. That this God we worship is no trifling reality, but Lord of the Universe, blessed be he. I hope that you have been worried about God's anger, amazed by God's grace, befuddled by God's abiding presence (and seeming absence), humbled by God's might. If you have, you know something of the Trinity.
Before every birth: God. After every death: God. In every life and moment: God. You can’t explain it, it is a mystery; but you can look around, point to it: even now the furniture is being rearranged and there is a smell of feasting in the air.

God’s making something wonderful, something lasting, just for us.