Living word by word

The messy work of love

I have a special affection for this month because my birthday falls in February. So does Valentine’s Day. And Presidents’ Day.  And Groundhog Day.  And usually in the midst of that, Ash Wednesday floats in and paints an ashy cross somewhere in the calendar.

There’s something about the mobility of Ash Wednesday around all these other strange little days that feels profound to me each year, and each year in a different way. There are times when we get to have hearts and chocolate as part of Mardi Gras, and that is lovely. But there are years, like this one, when our declarations of love happened the day after we’ve walked around with signs of our mortality on our foreheads – and I can’t think of anything that makes me feel more tender toward my loved ones than being reminded that they, like I, will die some day.

I don’t have a great affection for Hallmark holidays in general, but my kids are now at an age when Valentine’s Day has meant that our house has been littered with scraps of red and pink construction paper all week. Of course the kids are making Valentines for every child in their overcrowded classrooms, because that is what they must do – give one to everyone, or to no one. On the one hand, this means that most of these cards will be ignored, unless they have candy attached; on the other hand, it means that my children will have to write the names of every single child in their class, even the ones they would never hang out with if given a choice.

The making and giving  of these school-age Valentines themselves seems something like a trial – a test of my tolerance for glitter glue and paper scraps, for last minute bustle and the inevitable sugar crash that will come at the end of the day when the candy that comes with all these greetings has been consumed. I have to work constantly to reframe what is happening here – that we are not just going through the motions or being slaves to Hallmark, but in fact are celebrating the fact that we have the leisure to celebrate all kinds of love, even the generic love of one classmate for another and the fact that these kdis  daily have a chance to learn and grow together.  

Every year as I put ashes on foreheads I’m reminded that some of those foreheads might not be present next year. It wouldn’t hurt to understand the giving of Valentines in the same way: I cannot know what life will bring these 38 fifth graders in the next year. They could use all the love – even construction paper love – they can get. And if my children learn that the giving of love is not just sentiment but intentional work as well, all the better.

 

 

Lent by another way

            This year, feeling a bit burnt out on the Gospel of John, and really excited about the opportunities this late Easter provides for preparation for the Three Days, we decided to depart from the lectionary on lenten Sundays. The jury is still out, and I’m sure we’ll have a lot to learn from our actual execution of the idea, but it has been enormously energizing to use this time to focus on the “big stories” of Easter Vigil in our Sunday morning worship. How often do you get to preach on Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego? (Answer, if you never stray from the RCL: never.)

           There are four elements to the plan:

1.      On Sundays, we read or tell the “big story” – always a Hebrew Bible story – as part of the children’s sermon. This gives us license to use a children’s Bible, or give people speaking parts on the fly, or add motions, all as means of preventing the zone-out that so often happens with long readings.

2.      We’ve been intentional about trying to have the Sunday School kids also prepare in this season for Vigil. They are learning songs that will be used during Vigil for each story, and one week we had an guest speaker (the incomparable Earl Schwartz) talk to older youth  and adults about the Passover during education hour.

3.      In sermons, we try to give adults some elements to grab onto that go beyond the knowledge of the story itself.  So many people get hung up on the historicity of the Bible these days, and miss the richness of the literature itself. These stories of deliverance are so full of human nature they almost have their own scent – and that’s a great place to start preaching deliverance with adults.

4.      Each week on Monday we publish (on the website, and link in our e-newsletter) a “page-turner” devotion designed to get people thinking about the text ahead of time.

Liturgically we’ve made a few other adjustments. We read a psalm instead of a New Testament lesson as the 2^nd reading. We rewrote the Eucharistic prayer so that these stories are reflected as part of salvation history. Some weeks, due to the length of the service, we have shortened up hymns or other elements in the interest of time. (But seriously, those John lessons were LONG anyway!)

So here it is folks, in all its complicated and messy glory. Though I miss the connection to what other congregations are doing with the common lectionary, I think the opportunity for drawing the paschal season together as a whole, especially in this year when most families will not be on spring break over Holy Week, is too good to pass up. As Vigil gets closer I'll post again about our thoughts for making that event truly the liturgical highlight of the year.

(Note: we switched around the chronological order of Noah and the Exodus because we had a guest speaker who could only come on Lent 1. This also worked great for still reading the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness – but you could easily switch Lent 1 and 2 and work in biblical order).

Lent 1:  The crossing of the Red Sea  (I used the Spark picture Bible from Augsburg Fortress, which has a nice recitation of the plagues with a refrain that kids can join in).

            Psalm 103

            Matthew 4:1-11

Lent 2: Noah  (Genesis 6, 7, 8)

   Psalm 25

    John 9:1-7

 

Lent 3: Daniel 3; the Three Men and the Fiery Furnace

(This story is remarkably absent from many Children’s Bibles, including Spark. However it makes a great participatory reading, if you hand out “instruments” and have people join in each time you say “Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego”. Try reading it with a tone of Dr. Seuss.)

Song of the Three (Benedicite Omnia Opera)

Matthew 7:21-27

 

Lent 4: Jonah

Psalm 145:1-8

Matthew 20:1-16

 

Lent 5: Ezekiel 37:1-14 (which happens to also be the RCL assigned first lesson)

Psalm 130

John 12:30-33

 

 

Other  resources

• songs from Justin Roberts’ Why Not Sea Monsters? CD of Songs from the Hebrew Bible. Justin has great theological instincts and kid-friendly melodies.
• Paul Andress (one of ECLC’s musicians) has a lovely rendition of Isaiah 43:  “Fear Not for I have Redeemed You”) Contact ECLC for permissions information.
• David’s Lose’s offered Confession from www.workingpreacher.org for Lent 1 works very well with all of these texts, as we seek to move from fear to freedom.

reasons we don't fast

    In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus enjoins his disciples, "when you fast, do not do as the hypocrites do. . . "  So I guess it's possible that many people take this so seriously that I just do not know what they are fasting from. Perhaps many people's piety does not allow them to talk about what they have given up for Lent. Maybe we ARE fasting, intensely and quietly.

    But I kinda doubt it.

    I suspect that G. Jeffrey MacDonald is right when we wrote this week that mos American Christians just don't take Lent seriously anymore -- certainly not the fasting part.  Yes, there are exceptions, but compared to our Muslim counterparts, who are very clear about what they are to do during Ramadan, our "have-it-your-own-way" faith consists of very little self-sacrifice at all.

   MacDonald lays the blame at the feet of the consumer economy, which relies on keeping our desires stoked in all seasons, every day. We are so used to being pleased, being the customer who is always right, that we really can't imagine living another way for forty days. "The church," he argues, has become "the handmaiden of desire," giving people what they want rather than holding up a higher vision of what God knows we need.

   But there's another reason MacDonald has overlooked which is very much connected to our consumer culture, but a little less evil-looking than self-indulgence: we are afraid to stop.  For the flip side of constant consumerism is the need to "be your best" at every moment. As a recreational runner, I've learned that food is fuel; pick up any women's magazine, and you'll read about foods that provide energy; our health plans urge us to eat "right" and exercise every single day.

   The message is clear: in this economy, you have to perform, and if you don't -- because you have low blood-sugar from fasting, or your prayer life is making you question the very premise of your business-- you are "less."

    I suspect that this temptation -- not self-indulgence but the myth that I can please everyone at all times -- is especially hard for successful middle-class Christians to face. We know about sacrfice, whether it's for our jobs our our families. We know about missing meals and hours of sleep -- but we do so "accidentally," in the service of chasing the approval of everyone around us. it seems more benign than mere gluttony, but it is just as dangerous to the soul.

    Truth be told, if we take Lent seriously, more than rich foods  will be given up: we will "lose" some time which might otherwise be spent being efficient producers of "added value." We might spend some time assisting others that would otherwise be helping our children win the rat race. We might be distracted from the best business strategy by our hollow stomachs. We might have to contend with our bodies in a way that no one rewards like they do a successful 10K or a few pounds lost.

   It's been my experience that Lent can be freeing, but it can also bring me face-to-face with the least pleasant parts of my personality. Quite honestly, I don't want to inflict them on others if I can avoid it. I'd rather be my "best self." Jesus was right.  In the short term, fasting can cause a kind of self-obsession that can be the very definition of hypocrisy.

   But my worst self shows up regularly when I'm not fasting too. I can be distracted even when I'm not trying to pray, irritable when I'm not hungry, and stingy even when there is no practice to remind me of the poor.  Perhaps the intentional disciplines of these forty days -- especially when they are shared with others -- give me an opportunity to take that worst self out and turn her over to God.

 

Better than your own funeral

 
"It's too bad we can't attend our own funerals."  I hear this wish voiced from time to time, usually when a particularly well-attended and well-organized memorial service has taken place. I think what they mean is that they wish the living could hear the affirmation of their lives that a memorial service often devises. They wish all the loved ones from near and far could gather while the person is still living and well enough to appreciate the love that is witnessed there.

Of course, people who make these wishes are often not the people who, like pastors, see the underside of end-of-life planning. They haven't witnessed the ways that long-buried family dynamics can suddenly rear their heads when people are grieving and have no energy for best behavior. They may have forgotten about the relative who must be in control of matters at all times, and who was only held in check by  -- guess who -- the one who is now deceased.

And, I suspect, what they might really want is all the "celebration of life" that can happen as a life ends, without the reality that death ends that life. Better observers than I -- Thomas Lynch and Thomas Long in particular -- have voiced the concern that we seem too eager to have funerals without death, without bodies, without sorrow.

But every year, on Ash Wednesday, an astonishing number of people -- and not only the ones I would expect -- turn up to have a cross of ashes placed on their foreheads, and to hear the words, "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

It's a moving ritual in and of itself, this reminder of mortality, but it is especially moving to me each year, because I know a lot of stories behind every forehead. Since I am a pastor,  I know who buried a sibling or a spouse this past year and who had a medical scare last week. I know who buried  a parent in the columbarium behind us, and who has come to terms with an addiction this year.  I know which marriages are particularly troubled, and who might actually be glad to hear that the troubles of this world won't go on forever.

It is, in an odd way, sort of like attending your own funeral, except that elevating the individual is completely antithetical to the day's message. In fact, Matthew's Gospel explicitly enjoins us to avoid visible signs of our piety, to hide the things that others might call holy in us. Instead, we all receive exactly the same visible signs-- a cross of ashes, mixed with oil, and a bit of bread and wine.  Whatever our triumphs or failings in life, they are marked with the same sign of temporality, and the same signs of God's redemption.

Like a funeral, Ash Wednesday produces in us a kind of compassion for one another that we don't always muster every Sunday, without the individualistic  "pressure" of the "only funeral you will ever get." We walk away reminded that this community, as it is gathered on this day, is captive to time and aging and death. No matter what our differences with one another, they stand underneath these signs of the ultimate truths: we will (all of us!) die; and Christ is risen.

I'm glad I don't have to attend my own funeral, and really grateful I get to attend this collective reminder of mortality  and redemption every year.

 

Lent = lengthen

When days are longer but still rather wintry, we live in the in-between time. Spring is coming, yes it is, but we cannot see it yet.

How often do lenten disciples feel like this? You can imagine praying more, or being more generous, or giving up that thing you know isn't adding life to your days, and yet somehow the living-into-it proves pretty hard.

So don't be thinking about your lenten disciplines as a sort of renewed January resolutions. This is about coming to terms with your limits, finding where they are, and handing the rest over to God.

Passion Sunday: Luke 24

 
We're (and by that I mean I am) preaching for Palm Sunday this year -- not usually our pattern at ECLC.

I wish I could just get up and preach the message of my former landlord, David Cunningham, in his wonderful piece in Christian Century  this month about the fate of "the other" thief.  Definitely worth a read.

For those of you who don't know Cunningham's work, his lovely book Friday, Saturday Sunday is worthy Holy Week reading too.

Lectionary blog Lent 5C: all about timing

When a group of us met recently and looked at John 12, we had to stop for a moment and figure out where  we were (or when), because one of the guests at the table is Lazarus. So, we wanted to know, is this the pre-resurrected Lazarus, or the raised from the dead one? Does he still stink from the tomb? Or does he not know yet, as we do, that he’s a marked man?

It turns out that it was the post-resurrection Lazarus, which makes it all the more interesting that Mary is pouring out her life savings on Jesus’ feet. Yes, she’s probably that much more grateful, since Jesus raised her brother from the dead. But if Jesus is right that she’s anointing him for burial, she sure picked a strange occasion to remind everyone that Jesus is headed for the grave next.

          

 “She has saved this for my burial,” Jesus says.

But why is she doing it NOW?

 

Why NOW?

 

That’s a question that comes up more than once in John. With a different Mary, his mother, Jesus has an argument in Cana, at the very beginning of the gospel. She suggests that he could help make the wedding feast last a bit longer. He responds that it is not yet his "hour." But then moments later, as everyone is enjoying this remarkable vintage that’s suddenly coming from the water jars, people say to the host, why did you save up all this good wine for the end?? “Why now?”

 

Mary and Martha weren’t too happy with Jesus’ timing just a few days ago, when he  lollygagged on his way to Bethany, arriving only after Lazarus had died. We tend to think that Martha is just a grieving sister she says, “Jesus, if only you had been here!” But of course, she’s right. His timing sucked.

 

 Jesus is always messing with people’s sense of the appropriate time for things.  In fact, many people say that’s what made him so offensive to his peers. He was getting ahead of himself, you could say. Or getting ahead of reality, anyway.

Pharisees said, yes the Kingdom of God is coming, but it’s not here yet, and it won’t come until we all start obeying Moses’ law better. First righteousness, then celebration.  Others, like the zealots, wanted justice NOW, and they were willing to take up arms to do it. First we plot the revolution and rid ourselves of these Roman pagans, then we establish God’s kingdom here as it was meant to be.

But Jesus shows up and says the kingdom of God is at hand. He turns water into wine, forgives people who have  sinned but  haven’t evidently changed their ways yet. He feasts with tax collectors and zealots and Pharisees together and acts as if God has already accomplished the great reconciliation that the prophets promise. He’s getting way ahead of himself. Way ahead, of GOD, people argue.

 

So maybe it’s no wonder that he responds to Mary the way he does. She’s supposed to have this stuff saved for his burial and she can’t even wait a week. Everyone else is upset that she’s making a resurrection party smell a bit like a tomb! Not to mention the fact that any logical person would say first we have to feed the poor, then we worry about – well really what is Mary doing here?

 

I think Mary has been listening. She’s noticed that he turns weeping into dancing. She’s noticed that he has been talking about Jerusalem as the place he would be “lifted up” and “glorified,” and maybe she’s starting to realize that what those things mean to everyone else is not what Jesus has in mind.

 

Why break open the nard now? Maybe because she knows that Jesus never schedules  extravagant love as if it has to be on a calendar. And he never checks his accounting books before he starts feeding people. And maybe, just maybe, she knows that if she waits until  the "appropriate" time to cover his broken body in burial ointment, she’ll never get her chance at all.

 

Yes, he will die at the “appropriate” time—Passover. But already Mary knows that Jesus can turn even a burial into a resurrection feast.

Lectionary blog Lent 5C: Against usefulness

        John 12:1-8

    My son is enamored of the Thomas the Tank Engine stories, which center around a mythical yet very British island where various steam engines and a few newfangled diesels each work out their place in the railyard. The highest praise for any train is that they are “really useful” – which might help explain why Thomas has a tremendous following this side of the Pond.   

    We’d all like to be useful, wouldn’t we?

Now, I am not one of those pastors who will wax poetic about how wonderful it is that the clergy are paid to have coffee. Personally, I like doing things. I like projects, I like goals, I like having some sense of where my ministry begins and when I can just be a Mom for the day.  And in a time when so many people are unemployed and others work at jobs which seem devoid of meaning to them, I relish what Gail Godwin calls the “grace of daily obligation” that being a woman of the cloth provides. I know where I belong – on Sunday mornings, in a crisis, and most days  when the needs of the community stretch out before me. It's good work, if you can get it.

But the need to be useful can really trip a person up. After all, as clergy, we are the ones who urge people to show up on Sunday mornings for worship but cannot claim that God is basing the heavenly rewards on our attendance records.   We are the people most of the population calls only after the doctor says there is nothing else he can do.

There is an extravagance to this whole affair of Christ's incarnation – evident in John’s gospel from the opening wedding feast to the surreal breakfast on the beach. The accounting books just can’t make sense of it. God’s very son doesn’t just show up and set people straight about The Truth, maintain his dignity and return home. He pours himself into mortal life, and pours it all out in the most undignified way possible.

This story is positioned in Lent just as we might be too eager to account for how much good our Lenten disciplines are doing us. In the daily lectionary, it appears on Holy Monday, that day of best intentions and long to-do lists, as if to warn us that what is about to come won’t fit on a balance sheet, even a really righteous one about feeding the poor (or even writing a really good sermon).  

           

    Instead of doing some math, we’re invited to take a deep whiff of nard, the smell of death, beauty, and love.

Lectionary blog Lent 4C

A commenter asked whether the criticism of Mary Gordon’s Reading Jesus -- that she is either unaware or unmindful of most biblical scholarship --  is justified. I haven’t read enough to form a full opinion, but what I find helpful is simply her perspective, namely that of a writer who knows "story" inside and out,  but is re-discovering these particular stories as an adult.

 

It’s hard to “re-discover” the parable of the Prodigal Son, since it is so familiar to us. But it is also one of those stories that simply doesn’t ever lose its emotional power. Unless you are an only child who has never had children of your own (and perhaps even then), its hard to imagine that you wouldn’t resonate with some relational dynamic of this story.  Who doesn’t know the shame, at some level, of “coming to yourself” after wandering away? Who doesn’t know the grief of seeing a loved one wander off? Who doesn’t know the resentment of the elder brother, feeling overlooked though he’s strived for so long to keep his nose clean?

 

In our own house we spend a lot of time thinking about sibling rivalry, and a lot of energy as parents trying to blunt its power. But wow, it is a force! The need the children profess to have everything be “fair” is insatiable, a game you cannot ever really win. Because they are not the same. To treat everyone “the same” is in fact to treat someone unfairly, because their needs differ.

 

One of the “bibles” of parenting through this minefield is Siblings without Rivalry, which provides parents with tools for stepping out of the tit-for-tat scorekeeping kids so readily engage in. But its most powerful moment is when the authors recount a seminar in which they acknowledged that, no matter what we say, most parents secretly do have a child that speaks to their heart more than the others. Amazingly, when the authors say this aloud among parents who have begun to trust each other, no one contradicts them. Most of us try mightily to not let our children know this truth, but in our own hearts we can't deny it.  We strive to treat children equally as a sort of compensation for the reality that they truly are very different people.

 

In fact, one confidential survey some years ago of adult children and their parents revealed that all family members identified a “favorite” among siblings. But here’s the odd thing: the children often identified a different favorite than the parents did. The beloved child doesn’t always look that way. (Case in point: Jesus).

 

This parable is one of the most powerful arguments for the assertion that “God is not just. God is merciful.”  No wonder we prefer to focus on the love shown to the wayward son as opposed to the elder son’s bitterness. We might know exactly how angry he is, and yet the story cannot truly end as long as he's just sitting out there, outside the party.

God is merciful. Maybe God made "him to be sin who knew no sin" so that we would stop trying to figure out who the favorite is after all. If the beloved child is the wayward one, dying cursed on a tree, then the party thrown as he comes to life again really belongs to all of us.

Lectionary Blog Lent 3C

Luke 13:1-9

In the wake of the earthquake in Chile and amidst the tsunami warnings, USA Today had a headline this weekend asking, "Is nature out of control?"

Say what? In whose control?  And has it ever been "under control?"

Next Sunday's Gospel reveals that these questions are as old as the hills. Terrible stuff happens, like earthquakes and towers falling on people, and we grasp for a reason.  When the world literally shifts under your feet (sailing on land, anyone?), more than just your footing gets unsteady. Talk to anyone who has been through a disaster or tragedy-- either natural or manmade -- and it's clear that part of the suffering they experience is the loss of steady worldview, the sense of control we get from believing that our right actions or right beliefs make us safe.

Jesus is clear, though: the victims are not at fault.This is not about who deserves to die and who does not. Stuff (or manure. . .) happens. Life can be brutal. It's not our job to control it or come up with the reasons why things happen. Our only work is to be fruitful with whatever patch of ground we're planted in, for as long as we get to be there.