The Practice Of Paying Attention

May 12, 2024 - Matthew 17: 14-21

On Saturday morning at 9am, I gathered with about ten other members of the board of PADS, the Elgin-based organization that seeks “To respectfully and compassionately empower persons and families who are in need of housing to become self-sustaining by providing shelter, needed services, and professional guidance.” It’s unglamorous work, sitting in a boardroom on a beautiful morning that I could have spent on a long bike ride or working in my garden. I’m not trying to impress you with my level of self-sacrifice. I’m, honestly, pretty suspicious of self-sacrifice these days. I’m becoming less and less convinced it takes us all to the healthy places we want to go. No, I’m telling you how I spent the bulk of my Saturday this week to share with you how I think change happens.  

I can understand how someone would read today’s scripture passage and conclude that if we want to see healing and positive change in the world, in ourselves, or in people we love then we just have to believe hard enough. Why couldn’t the disciples cast out the demon in the boy? Because of your little faith, the Matthean Jesus tells them. I wish I could tell you the Greek clears everything up nicely and doesn’t make Jesus sound quite so mean. But unfortunately that’s not the case as far as I can tell.

In this passage, Jesus is downright frustrated with the disciples and their lack of faith. There’s no getting around that. But I have lived long enough to notice that just because I make a wish list of things that I want to change, it doesn’t mean they will. Even our most fervent prayers are not always answered with the solutions we’d prefer or on the time table we’re wanting either.

So, you won’t be able to convince me that the reason we can’t end the housing epidemic or the violence in the Middle East or abuses of power in our own country is because we just don’t believe or care hard enough. That’s not an interpretation of this text I can personally swallow. In fact, I think that interpretation likely leads to a paralyzing frustration with ourselves or a profound resentment of the people around us who don’t express the same opinions as us with the same fervor.

There are demons in today’s story after all. We don’t talk a lot about demons in the broader culture unless it’s in a horror movie. But we do practice a lot of demonizing of each other. That can lead to violence pretty quickly – either emotional or physical harm. But it’s also a pretty ineffective technique to solve the problems that plague us. The trouble is when you demonize a person or a whole group of persons, you don’t actually address the problem. You actually let the problem off the hook, assuming the way things are is all the better we can ever expect. Instead of blaming people in need of housing for their problems, we can address the issues - both individual and system-wide - that leave a person without adequate housing.  

Now, my experience with folks in this church is that we’re less likely to demonize unhoused folks than some people. But we might be more tempted to demonize government officials, non-profit leaders, or folks across the political aisle for their inability to solve this complex problem or even see it the same way we do.

In the scripture though, Jesus is usually pretty upset with people who have hurt, neglected, or discriminated those who are experiencing something harmful or challenging to them. He goes around casting out demons. I have never met a demon. And while I am certain that there is real harm, suffering, and evil in the world, I’m not certain that I’m completely separate from it. So, I’m pretty grateful when someone helps me see how I’m part of causing the harm. I may not always agree. But sometimes I do, and I’m glad then to try to make helpful change.

My point is, Jesus doesn’t cast out people. He casts out the things that are harming them. Can we do that, too? Can we love people but not accept the violence, hatred, and harm they bring? Can we do this for ourselves? Who does this for us? How do we surround ourselves with folks who love us but who also help us see when we’re the ones causing harm, too? Because we can try demanding that everything and everyone be perfect – or become perfect in one sudden moment. But that’s not usually the way healing or change actually works. Those things take place on the quantum level - infinitesimally small increments at a time.

I once had a teacher who warned that “real change is more like erosion” than anything else. The same way the cells of these human bodies slowly regenerate themselves, that’s the pace often of the changes we want to see in the world. We’re lucky if they happen one inch by one inch at a time.

In this passage Jesus declares to the disciples that if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they would be able to say to this mountain, “Move from here to there”, and it would move. That’s a nice sentiment. I’ve never seen it happen all at once. But I do think it’s true. I think we can move mountains one spoonful of dirt at a time.

For me, the housing crisis is a pretty big mountain. In Elgin the rental market is so tight that there is a less than one percent vacancy rate. So landlords can ask for a security deposit that is three times the monthly rent and even consider moving an applicant to the head of the line if they can provide twice that security deposit. That’s a practice some social service agencies are implementing just to get their people into a safe, secure housing situation. And getting folks into even that situation can be made more difficult by their inability to hold down a job or otherwise overcome the challenges of their own mental health condition, substance abuse, or other disability. We are not living in a county or a country that has figured out how to care for all of us, yet.

It’s an overwhelming problem that will take many different people working at many different solutions to address. It can be stressful to understand the gap between housing conditions as they are and a world in which there are much better housing conditions for many more of us. It can be tempting to say there is nothing I can do so why try. It can be tempting to want to look for someone to blame and make them the reason it’s not worth trying, too. But that is not a theory of change I can subscribe to or that I find supported in this passage. No. I prefer the idea of a faith the size of a mustard seed being enough to sustain our actions one day at a time over the course of a long period of time until we see more of the change we seek and toward which God calls.

So, I will keep showing up in the ways I am able and with the time and energy that I can joyfully share, believing that with the help of God, my showing up day after day makes almost nothing impossible. All along the way I want to celebrate the progress made, too. Even if it’s not the final product I hope to see, celebrating every inch of progress made helps me keep faith and see how far we’ve come, even if we still have a ways to go.

I think it’s a kind of spiritual practice to do this – to approach change like this – with patience and persistence. Another spiritual practice of mine is reading poetry to anyone who will listen or just aloud to myself. I love poetry read aloud. So, today I gave you a well-known excerpt from Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes as the call to worship.

Let me read it to you again: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”  

May you go forth, with a patient, persistent, mustard seed size faith.

May you trust that it is enough to move mountains, one spoonful at a time.

May you pay attention to all the little things there are to celebrate

that make for healing and good, wholeness-bringing change in the world

and may that cause you to be so astonished,

you can’t help but share it with someone else, too.

May it be so. Amen.

One Lily At A Time

May 5, 2024 - Matthew 6: 25-34

I don’t know about you but sometimes opening my email inbox feels like drinking from a fire hose. There are some emails in there that are personal and written just to me. There are some emails in there that are written to a whole group of people but are about something pretty particular. Then there’s the advertisements and the spam and the too many things I’ve subscribed to ever read them all.

But sometimes the title or the preview of one of those too many things will catch my eye. One day, it was my subscription to the blog of Carrie Newcomer, the singer-songwriter, that caught my attention. Her words are always carefully crafted and often carry moving spiritual insights. But what most captured my attention on that particular day was her practice of taking photos that measure one inch by one inch. She includes these still every week with her words. They’re one of her ways of going slow. These photos of minute, square inch details of the world are her way of practicing living life aware of its holy preciousness.

Jesus teaches his disciples, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”

You are precious to God, I hear Jesus teaching in this passage. You are precious and so is all life. Just like those lilies in the field, you, too, are beautiful, loved, and cared for, if by no one else than most certainly by God.

How often do we live like that is true? Life can come at us fast, hard, and overwhelming. It can be easy to forget – to stop – to slow down – to come alive and to consider the lilies of the field and the holy way they grow.

I don’t know about you but I am a Grade A worrier from a long line of worriers. I have spent so many of my adult years trying to convince myself down to my bones that worrying about something will not actually stop it from happening. If it did, oh, what a superpower I would have.

So, when Jesus teaches his disciples, “‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear,” well, I have to tell you I feel as convicted as I do reassured.

I’d like to worry less and I probably worry less now than I used to. But it’s not just a matter of turning it off because I read this passage – at least not for me, I’m glad if that does it for you. No, for me, it takes practice to live with more trust than worry. For me, quite honestly, it takes a therapist. It takes a whole circle of friends. It takes figuring out what my body needs in terms of food, drink, and sleep. It takes what some of us call spiritual practices.

There’s a whole raft of ways of praying that I really dig but this week what seems to work for me is listening to as much music as possible.  I thought maybe I’d try on Carrie Newcomer’s one inch photo trick in preparation for this week’s sermon. But I never got around to it. You know who did? My husband, Parker. These are his photos you’re seeing today. It’s something that comes naturally to him, catching little details that hold a whole universe inside.

So, when I told him about this week’s sermon, he started coming back to me with these. These are the little details of his life,

–things that could be overlooked in the hustle and the bustle

–things that may otherwise be considered mundane.

But under his attention they reveal a world of beauty. Or maybe that’s just my biased eye, enamored with the view through his camera.

How many of you have heard the advice though that when we’re worried one of the best things we can do is come back to our physical senses and take in the details? What’s one thing you can see? What’s one thing you can hear? What’s one thing you can touch? What’s one thing you can smell? What’s one thing you can taste? If we ask ourselves these questions, sometimes they help us become more powerfully present to what’s really here in front of us now rather than all the worries that would carry us away.

The world is full of marvels like the lilies. We’ve just passed the annual point now where Elgin comes alive with miles of daffodils and whole terrains of tulips. They’re hard not to consider but there have been years when I’ve almost missed them completely. I just get caught up in the next thing and next thing and next thing. If I’m lucky, there’s usually a day when they catch my attention. But do you know what really works the best for me? If I can zero in on one single daffodil or tulip and just stare at it for a while. I probably look like I’ve lost my mind standing there but I don’t really care. That one flower focus changes everything for me. Then I can see them all more clearly. Then the whole world seems to shine more fully.

It’s a trick I use not just for beauty but for hard times, too. I can do this hard thing sometimes if it’s not a whole season of hard things at a time but one day, one moment, one breath at a time as we go. At the Creation Care Event here last week, Camp Emmaus Director Randall Westfall led a session and referenced the four stages of creation connection that he developed a decade ago. He recounted them to me over lunch on Sunday. He connects them to the eco-wheel or the four compass directions. 

The stages are:

East = Inspiration

South = Connection

West = Attunement

North = Communion

I connect them to the time I met a mouse in the woods. I had been sitting in the woods for hours, as a young hunter, waiting for my dad to come back from a drive, when I first noticed the little brown grey mouse scurrying through the leaves near me. I was inspired - I noticed its presence. Then I followed it with my eyes, watching wherever it went. I made a connection. Next, I waited to see what it would do. I kept as still as I possibly could. I became attuned. Finally, the most magical thing happened. The mouse began to circle me, getting closer and closer until it came right up and nibbled my big heavy boot with a scritch-scritch of its teeth and then ran away. I gasped. It was surely a moment of communion.

You might say to me, Pastor Katie, that’s a nice story, but where’s God in it? And I would turn to you and ask, my dear, where isn’t God in it? God is all around us. There is nowhere far away that we can be. But sometimes we forget that God is as close as our very breath. God is in the tulips and the daffodils and the lilies. God is in the mouse and the river and even in the people honking on the highway in their cars. If we like, we can practice remembering this, and when we do, I believe we will live with more trust and far less worry.

If we like, and Jesus suggests we will, we can practice living out his teaching to his disciples, “‘So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

Instead of trying to solve all our problems or even experience all the beauty at once or getting caught up only in the have-tos and the mundanes, I hear Jesus inviting us to practice taking things one day at a time. Maybe when we need to – practicing taking life one inch at a time, too.

We may find that God is in those little details just waiting to be found. We may find that going one day at a time - one inch at a time slow helps us move at what one of my mentor’s memorably called “the pace of what is real.”

Or as Carrie Newcomer sings,

“Come back come home

[come] gather the crumbs and the stones

Been traveling faster than my soul can go.”

Today, may you move only as fast as your soul can go.

And may you meet God in every inch.

May it be so. Amen.

No Waste Faith

April 21, 2024 - Psalm 24: 1-2 & Genesis 1: 1-9

I want to begin today with a poem by Danusha Lameris:

“Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds

All over the delicate pink strings of their bodies,

I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine

The dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples

Permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley,

Avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,

Almost vulgar–though now it seems, they bear a pleasure

so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,

Forgetting, a moment my place on the menu.”

On this Earth Day Sunday, the waste we humans make is causing a crisis on a planetary level. That very thought can paralyze a lot of us– leave us feeling like we are the earthworms stuck under a heaping pile of garbage. What can our menial lives do to process all this waste? So, I like this poem to remind me that even something as humble as an earthworm has an important job to do in the scheme of processing and of recreating a healthy world.  

I like this poem because its images help me conjure up both the grossness of compost and the sweetness of tasting an apple through all our pores. Doesn’t life carry both those extremes all too often?

I like this poem because when I imagine myself in the place of the earthworm I feel soft, squishy, and vulnerable, and I think those are the qualities we need to face the challenges before us more than we need invincibility, hardness, and meanness. 

The Creation myth we read in Genesis is such a big story of God’s awesome power to call this world into being. Our spiritual ancestors were looking for ways to explain how we got here and what we do now. While today, we also have the benefit of thousands of years of scientific advancement, we can still continue to use these stories to debate those same questions. What do we do now with this awesome resource?

Next to the power to bring the world into being, our power individually is miniscule. What then are we to do? Will all our efforts also go to waste? After all, aren’t we very nearly as fragile as the earthworms?

“Everywhere we look in our culture you will find plastic,” shares Creation Justice Ministries in their resources for Earth Day 2024.

“[Plastic] surrounds our food, it makes up our technology and it is a standard element in our household items. Unfortunately, it is also overflowing from our landfills, floating in our waters and polluting our soil. More and more, you can even find it in our own bodies and those of other living creatures. There have even been traces of plastic found in breast milk. Despite the fact that we have learned the harms of plastics, we are steadily increasing our production of the material and integrating it into more and more items. Plastic is everywhere!”[1]

One place plastic isn’t though is in the Bible. Although plastic breaks down at such a slow pace it could be said to be with us basically forever, it has not always been with us. They didn’t have plastic in Bible times.  

I find that kind of interesting to consider. It helps me envision a time in the future when we figure out how to live without plastic again or at least how to mitigate its harm.

I struggle with how to fit plastic into its place in Creation. It’s not listed here in the Creation myth found in Genesis, no. There’s no day eight when God created plastic. But plastic is not not part of the world. It comes from oil in the ground. Oil is naturally occurring. So, part of Creation, right? But it’s reached the point that we’re being choked with the stuff. It’s poisoning us. We can’t dispose of it safely enough with enough consistency. So, it’s poisoning the planet.

What do we do with this part of Creation?

My hunch is that the majority of us here are already cutting down on plastic use – especially the single-use plastics that proliferate and create waste that could be avoided by carrying reusable water bottles, coffee cups, shopping bags, take out containers, or utensils.  

I know I’m not alone among you to be delighted by the growing accessibility of products that help us avoid certain single-use plastics like these cool strips of laundry detergent we can get ahold of now. They work great, and they come in paper instead of a big heavy water filled plastic bottle that not only has to be disposed of but costs more carbon in the shipping process. There are a lot of individuals and companies, too, trying to come up with solutions for personal single-use plastic.  

I’m under no delusions though that my individual actions will alone save the planet. That’s why I also appreciate collective efforts to find ways to reduce plastic use across our communities or to lessen the power and impact plastic-producing fossil fuel companies have. Did you know there are whole denominations, like the United Church of Christ, that have agreed to resolutions to find ways to reduce their plastic use wherever they can. There are also congregations who call themselves “no waste churches” and are intent on reducing or eliminating waste that goes to the landfill from their churches and homes.

The snippet of Psalm 24 we read today proclaims that “the earth is God’s and everything in it.” One thing I love about psalms is the way they try to capture the awe of this Creation. And I think even this small line of Psalm 24 gets at the awe-inspiring scope of the natural world that is so far beyond us and cannot belong to any one of us alone – not even to all of us as a human species. It belongs to God, the Source of All Being.

How then should we treat this natural world and each other?

What if we treated our bodies and our planet as if we were all as fragile as the earthworms–soaking up everything and walking around with all our taste buds exposed? It’s not really so different from the truth, like it or not, or so that nasty detail about how plastic seeps into breast milk has me rather convinced. If this planet isn’t so much ours as it is God’s then maybe that, too, helps us treat this borrowed resource that we only steward for the short span of our lives like the precious, fragile thing that it is.

That seems like a way of embodying our faith to me. I don’t know what that manner of embodying faith would change for you, but what it does for me is invite me to move at the pace of what is real. The pace of what is real, reminds me that I can’t solve all these problems myself but I can do something about them.  

And I can learn to trust that other people are doing something about them, too, as is the God who called this precious Creation good. That helps me to trust that our faith-filled actions to reduce our harm to the planet and to each other will not be wasted. One way or another, God will use us, the earthworms, and more to work a resurrection story, yet.                                                          

May it be so. Amen.

[1] https://www.creationjustice.org/plasticjesus.html

For All Who Doubt

April 14, 2024 - John 20: 19-31

In 1978, Church of the Brethren leaders Bob and Rachel Gross conceived of the idea of the Death Row Support Project, “as a way to answer Jesus’ call to visit those in prison, as well as [a way to help] those outside prison walls to see past the sensational headlines that often accompany a murder conviction.”

“Additionally,” Rachel wrote in the June 2019 issue of Messenger magazine, “[Bob], based on his own time in prison (due to having returned his draft card in 1970), … observed that people who received mail were treated better by prison staff.”

Their project began with a list of the then four hundred inmates on death row, obtained with the support of the Washington DC Office of the Church of the Brethren and a notice in Messenger inviting readers to become pen pals.

By the year 2000, more than 2,500 people had been assigned a pen pal on death row, the majority of them from beyond the Church of the Brethren. Rachel Gross, who retired from this volunteer ministry at the turn of 2024, spent 45 years as the assigner of pen pals and writes in multiple venues of the peace-bringing relationships and renewed hope for life that she has witnessed transcend prison walls.

Somehow Jesus got through the locked doors of the house where the disciples cowered in fear after his crucifixion and still not quite believed resurrection. In that room, “he came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”

They had every reason to doubt and to fear a similar violent fate as Jesus had met. His presence with them, his Holy Spirit-loosing breath, and his words, “Peace be with you” were meant as a powerful balm and a witness to the love of God that will not be bound by locked doors, by any of our shortcomings, or even by death.

It must have been healing because the other disciples told Thomas who hadn’t been there, “‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’”

I have never been able to blame Thomas for doubting. It’s pretty unbelievable, the bodily resurrection of Christ.

In fact, if I’m honest, it's less important to me that Jesus stood before them in a physical presence as though this were a newspaper report and it's more important to me the deep truth this story shares of the unbound, new life bringing love of God.

Bodily resurrection for me could be real in the sense that we are all made of the same atoms. There are only 118 different kinds. Whatever makes up our bodies now doesn’t go away either. It is one way or another matter that will be taken up and reused somehow some way for new life. There’s no getting away from each other totally just as there’s no getting away from the unbound love of God. Whether we’re talking faith or science, for me, we’re all inescapably connected.

You may doubt that. And that’s okay.

I have come to have profound respect for doubt.

Doubt tells us something. Doubt tells us we have more to learn. Maybe doubt even tells us what we want next.

Thomas wanted proof. He wanted the impossible proof of Jesus’ physical crucifixion and resurrection altered body.

What is it we want proof of? And how do we go about getting it?

I don’t hear about it so much today. Maybe it’s the circles I run in or maybe the conversation is changing but I’m aware that there are plenty of people who doubt that humans are causing the climate change and environmental degradation we’re experiencing. I have witnessed conversations in which proof is offered to change that doubt but to no avail.

Even proof can be doubted.

On this topic of climate change, I’m more likely to run into a different kind of doubter and to sometimes even be this kind of doubter if I’m honest. That’s the kind who doubts we can overcome the incredible challenge that is the in-progress cascade of environmental crises before us.

Over the past few years, I have coached myself to look for proof that we are capable of forging a new, hopeful future. While the projected outcomes remain all too grim, I have found reason to hope in new science and in the growing work of folks of all ages to rally together to meet this challenge.

This proof though is not indisputable. It takes some faith to hold onto the hope that with the right scientific break-throughs, policy changes, and shifts in public practice we can avoid the worst wages of all we have done to neglect this Creation God so loves.

 John 20 tells us, “a week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’”

That last bit is often interpreted as the writer of the Gospel of John either talking directly to or about the audience of his story – about hearers closer to the time of Jesus and us – hearers today. We are those who have not seen the bodily resurrected Christ.

We have to make a leap of faith to believe that God’s unbound love is really real and that new life can come out of the direst of circumstances.

Our proof is often slim.

But sometimes if we’re lucky we catch a little glimpse.

Every time I pick up the phone and press 5 to accept a call from Daniel Cummings an inmate at Central Prison in North Carolina I get a little glimpse of that unbound, new life bringing love of God.

Daniel is 68 years old and he has been in prison since 1997 following his double murder conviction in 1994. That’s about 30 years for those of you doing the math – a horrifically long time to be imprisoned. It’s made worse for those of us who care about him knowing that in neither of those convictions were the prosecutors able to produce eye witnesses or any physical evidence placing him at the scenes. Rather, he confessed to the murders, likely under duress.

So, Daniel has been in prison for 30 years. He has very little in the way of comforts in his cell. It sounds to me as if he is under near constant threat of violence. His one “window” is a thin slot that lets in light and if he gets up on his bed he can vaguely see the opposite wall that is his view of the outside.

But when he gets on the phone his voice carries this shining, upbeat light of hope and care for those of us on the outside who he has never even met in person. He always asks how I’m doing. He wants to know what it’s like outside. He remembers and cares about any trouble in the lives of his friends mentioned to him. He prays about it and follows up on the next call like I try to do when I am administering pastoral care. It just seems natural to him.

And he is blown away by the love of this congregation. That love has been spearheaded by John Lengle and by the Tuesday Men’s Breakfast Group. In 2019, John, after reading about the Death Row Support Project in the June Messenger announced one Tuesday that he planned to become a pen pal and invited the other breakfast goers to join him. And they did. They started writing. They started putting money in his commissary account so that he could buy basic things like snacks, hygiene items, over-the-counter medicines, dental supplies, clothing items, and stationery to write these letters back and forth. Then at some point, Daniel got access to a phone. And now he can make 15 minute phone calls like the one you heard him on today. I have been so blessed by those phone calls in the lead up to this day of welcoming him into membership.

As John wrote in Friday’s Weekly Update, “those of us who have spoken with him by phone are moved by his faith, his cheerfulness, and his positive attitude. Although the lone picture we have of Daniel does not convey the bright spirit we encounter in him, we often come away feeling we are the ones who are blessed to be a part of his life.” 

I don’t know what kind of proof you’re looking for but for me the connection with Daniel across state lines and through prison walls, that has been a gift to all of us involved, is a powerful glimpse of the unbound love of God that brings new life somehow even in the places we least expect it.

I sometimes wish having faith meant being rewarded by being able to see and control the future or get everything we want or see that no one we love suffers harm. But I just don’t believe that’s how faith works.

I believe that faith is tied up with doubt. I believe faith is meeting our doubts and our fears as directly as we’re able, trusting that in those bound up places, God is still to be found, working a freedom bringing, resurrection story yet.                                                                          

May it be so. Amen.

God’s Will, You Say?

April 7, 2024 - Matt 6: 9-1 0; Ephesians 1: 3-10

God’s will, you say?  I still remember the conversation, over four years ago.  Carol and I were in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, attending an event called NOAC, the Church of the Brethren National Older Adult Conference.  We had just come through the buffet line for the evening meal, and spotted two acquaintances from back east sitting at one of the tables.  They invited us to join them, and so we did.  Both of our table companions were retired pastors, who will remain anonymous, but whom I will call Ron and Frank.

          Our table conversation began with the usual small talk, catching up on what was happening in our lives, then moved on to a weightier matter.  Ron already knew that we had recently lost our grandson Tyler to melanoma.  A couple of years earlier, Ron had undergone his own loss, the death of his wife to another fatal form of cancer.  And in an effort to help us, he shared the way he had coped with his own loss and grief.  He had been sure that God would cure his wife, but it was not to be.  “For awhile I was angry with God,” he said, “because I know God had the power to save her.  But I finally came to accept her death as God’s will.”

          God’s will?  Well, it wasn’t the time to argue with Ron.  We all wrestle with life’s tragedies in our own way, seeking to understand what befalls us.  Ron had made peace with his loss, and I needed to honor that.  I also know there are many others who share Ron’s perspective.  When our world is falling apart, when loss overwhelms us, there is a kind of comfort and stability in believing that God is still in control, that everything that happens is part of a divine plan, even if we don’t understand it.  I get that.

          But this theology just doesn’t work for me.  Can it really be God’s will for a thriving 14-year old to develop melanoma, suffer the ravaging effects of the disease and its treatment, and eventually succumb to death?  Or when a natural disaster strikes like a hurricane or earthquake, destroying life and property, and an insurance company calls it an “act of God,” did God really will that destruction to happen?  Or when six million Jews perished in the Holocaust, who among us believes that this happened with God’s permission, as part of some divine plan?

           No, God’s intent for our lives is never harm or evil.  We need a different way of understanding the will of God.  In the Bible, God’s sovereignty does not mean that everything that occurs does so at God’s behest or with God’s sanction.  Rather, it means that God is powerfully at work in the midst of all that life throws at us to seek our good and the good of all creation.  The will of God is exhibited in God’s purposeful activity to heal, to redeem, to build up, to reconcile.

          The author of Ephesians provides an example of God’s will in action in the scripture read this morning.  According to Ephesians, God’s will is revealed in the way all things are being gathered up or brought together in Christ.  That may sound a bit vague or abstract, but a little later the author makes his point more concrete.  In the ancient world, the cultural divide between Jews and Gentiles was marked by mutual hostility.  Gentiles harbored anti-Semitic attitudes toward Jews, and Jews viewed Gentiles as godless and immoral.  But lo and behold, that dividing wall of hostility has been broken down by God’s grace, and the two groups have become one in the church, the body of Christ.  That’s what God’s will looks like.

          Another text that helps us think biblically about the will of God is the hymn that we will sing at the end of worship this morning, “My Life Flows On.”  The hymn names the lamentations, tumult, and strife that befall us in life.  It acknowledges those times when darkness gathers round, when joys and comforts die.  But whatever comes our way, we know that “Love is Lord of heaven and earth,” and that keeps us singing.  According to this hymn, the sovereignty of God is the sovereignty of Love, Love that always wills the good and seeks our good.

          But that raises another question:  If Love is Lord of heaven and earth, why do we still encounter so much trauma and tragedy?  Each Sunday at Highland Avenue, we share with God and one another our joys and concerns.  And it is definitely a mix.  On any given Sunday, one of us may be sharing the glad news of healing, of life achievements, of a forthcoming marriage, or the birth of a baby.  But another of us may be sharing the difficult news of a life-threatening disease, of violence in our world, or the loss of a loved one.  So if Love is Lord of heaven and earth, why isn’t the news always good?  Why does the bad stuff keep happening?

          That is a question with which believers are still wrestling.  And it is a question for which there is no easy answer.  But I have found help in approaching the question from a very familiar scripture, the Lord’s Prayer, from which Josh read this morning.  Hear the words again: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.  And now ponder the question: Why do we need to pray such a prayer?  We pray for God’s kingdom to come, because God’s sovereignty is not yet a done deal in our world.  We pray for God’s will to be done, because God’s will and purposes are not yet fully accomplished in our lives.  To put it another way, God’s reign of love where God’s will is fulfilled is still a work in progress.  God’s reign of love where God’s will is fulfilled is still a work in progress.

          If this is the case, it provides a new perspective on the suffering and loss that we experience in life.  It is not that God wills and inflicts such suffering.  It is not that God is nowhere to be found.  It is not that God is unaware of what we are going through.  It is not that God isn’t paying attention.  It is not that God listens to some prayers but not to others.  No, God is always listening, and God is always doing all that God can, to heal our wounded lives and transform our wounded world.  As the very ground of our being, God is powerfully at work in our midst and in and through us to make life whole.

          But it is a work in progress.  We are not yet fully there.  Sometimes there is good news to celebrate: Bodies are healed, disasters are averted, and violent conflicts are resolved.  At other times, however, what is broken proves resistant to all that God is doing.  A disease resists treatment; violence keeps erupting; an angry climate fuels stronger storms.  And so we keep praying, “your kingdom come, your will be done.”

          It is not a coincidence that I chose to preach on this topic on this Sunday.  It was seven years ago today that our grandson Tyler lost his battle with melanoma.  Not because it was God’s will, but because his body was not able to tolerate the immunotherapy that would have saved him.  As Carol and I remember our family’s loss afresh this day, it seemed the right time to testify to the faith with which we hold those memories.  Put simply, it is a faith that God was right there in the thick of the battle to save Tyler, and to uphold us as well:

* God was there in the care Tyler received from doctors and other medical staff who attended him,

* God was there in the work of the scientists who continue to labor diligently in the field of cancer research,

* God was there in the amazing courage with which Tyler was able to face the bad hand that life had dealt him,

* God was there in the unwavering support of the circle of Tyler’s high school friends who called themselves “the squad,”

* God was there in the love and care that our family received from friends near and far, and from this congregation,

* And at the end, God was there grieving with us, and with all those who gathered to remember Tyler at his memorial service.

          That was the will of a loving God at work. That’s what the reign of God is all about.  And with that faith we continue to pray that what is still a work in progress will one day be fully realized, that every life and all of life will be made whole.

          May it be so.  Amen.

~Rick Gardner

A Good Enough Faith

March 31, 2024 - John 20: 1-18

In their book, Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection, Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie describe “a proud British gardener named Steve Owen [who] specializes in prizewinning breeds of snowdrops.” 

Many of you gardeners and landscapers among us will know that snowdrops are one of the very first flowers to blossom in a season. In fact, they come up more in late winter even than early spring. Their dangles of white petals hang on delicate green stalks and herald the coming of a new season. In my experience, they can provide hope and also hasten some of our impatience for warmer weather. 

This Steve Owen, who Bowler and Richie describe in their book, seems to be the most patient breed of gardener though. On a visit, he once, beaming, pulled out a specimen of this cultivar for them and announced that these white petals were the first blooms this particular plant had ever produced after fourteen years of his tending it. Most of that time it had been a fight just to keep it alive. “Look at it now,” he declared joyously to the women, “Alleluia!”  

Writes Bowler, “Gardening requires a certain kind of hope, envisioning new life in the midst of despair and death. Gardeners toil and trowel, pluck and prune, all [sometimes] for a single bloom. The very act of gardening is one of hope. And it’s the exact kind of hope that a woman was hunting for that first Easter morning (226).”  

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb.” 

She had waited out a grief-filled sabbath day before she could return to the body of her beloved friend and teacher to anoint his shrouded corpse with the customary fragrances and oils that were part of her religious and cultural practice of mourning the dead.

But when she arrived she found the stone moved.   

How could this be? Who could be so cruel as to steal this beloved body from its grave and rob would-be mourners of carrying out their traditional grieving practices? 

Peter and John come to the tomb, too, and confirm what Mary has seen. Undone by their grief they return home. 

This cold, empty tomb was not what any of them had wanted. Whatever they imagined when Jesus described the coming kingdom or commonwealth of God, despite his warnings, they never seem to have imagined it with him tortured to death first and now his body desecrated. 

Some of Jesus’ followers even hoped that he was talking about overthrowing the powers that be with violence and bloodshed if necessary. Their ideas of success and the path they wanted to follow him on did not end in an empty tomb. Yet, that is where they found themselves. 

Where do we think following Jesus will take us? 

Do we suppose that following Jesus will make us successful in life? 

And how do we define that success?

There is a very popular ideology running rampant in this country that teaches us that we know we are loved and blessed by God if our bank accounts are full, our social media connections are beyond count, we are paragons of health, and nothing bad ever happens to us.

But if that is the case, then how do we reckon with the empty tomb? 

If bad things never happen to good people, how then do we reckon with bad things happening to Jesus, God made flesh?       

Can we instead, begin to admit to ourselves and to each other, that despite all our trying, striving, and ladder climbing, we will not be able to keep ourselves from all harm no matter what we do or how we believe?

Suffering, evil, bad luck, mistakes, injustices, and imperfections are all part of this life no matter how good we try to be. 

Instead of kicking ourselves and each other when we’re down, or bemoaning the rung of some ladder of success that has just ruptured beneath us, we can apply the kind of grace, compassion, and tender garden keeping care that Jesus, the Good Gardener, longs for us to experience.

After Peter and John are gone, Mary stays to keep watch. She ducks her head back into the tomb as if something would be changed. And lo and behold, something is. Two angels in white ask her why she’s crying. She doesn’t linger long with them and their seemingly cruel question. She turns and finds some stranger standing there. He, too, asks why she’s crying. As if life doesn’t give us more than enough opportunities for our hearts to leak out of our eyes. This man she supposes to be the gardener. 

Why do you think that was? Does he have dirt under his nails? Has he borrowed the gardener’s clothes after his were stripped from him and gambled over? Does he look like a laborer of some kind? “Maybe,” writes Bowler, “he looks ready to cultivate new life, to pull us toward resurrection with his fingers digging in among the worms.” 

Maybe he carries himself with the kind of hope gardeners know about - the kind of hope that can plant a seed in cold ground, cover it with manure, and trust that with the right amount of water, sun, and time, new life will mysteriously grow.

What seeds are planted in your life now? Is it hard to believe anything will spring up from this cold ground? What will it take to renew your hope that God makes beautiful things even out of dust and even out of us?

In her confusion and her grief, it’s her name in a familiar voice that reaches her. When the risen Christ uses her name, Mary, she gets grounded somehow and can finally see the person miraculously standing before her. 

“Teacher,” she answers. And later, she declares to the rest of the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”       

Easter is tricky when it comes to faith. We come for the happy ending–the “and then they lived happily ever after.” The resurrection story proclaims hope over despair and life over death. Yet, we know that life continued for them, and continues for us, as a story of spiking heartbreak moments and too often endings that come too soon. But perhaps a good enough faith is one that moves through the chronic nature of being incurably human with an eye for resurrection moments that assure us that this good enough life is worthy of our amazement. 

How will the new life and enduring love that God mysteriously brings amaze you this season? Will you look to the blossoming bulbs that lay sleeping all winter? Will you listen to the bird song that heralds the eternal cycle of seasons and days – of all the little deaths and resurrections? Will you try on a little hope and a little good enough healing? 

Whatever you do, may you know that you do not need to be perfect or have some kind of perfect faith to be loved. You are good enough just as you are. You are blessed not because you are successful but because God goes with you through all life’s triumphs and trials, leading you not to perfection but to good enough experiences of transformation and that is miraculously good enough, too. 

I want to leave you with a last word from Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie. It’s “A Blessing for You Who are Being Planted (232).”

Blessed are you who are buried. You who feel stuck in the depths of grief and despair or who sit in the pit of unknowing. You who are learning to trust the timing of a tender Gardener. 

Blessed are you who are growing, you who burst with new life, fresh creativity. Who understand the pain that sometimes comes with stretching and changing, pruning and being cut back. 

And blessed are you in your season of fruitfulness. You who are learning to abide in the vine, and who taste the sweetness of God’s loving-kindness. The God who was there all along–planting, waiting, watering, pruning, delighting. The God who pays careful attention to God’s hope-filled garden. 

Alleluia, indeed.

May it be so. Amen.

You Are A Group Project

March 24, 2024 - Luke 19: 28-40

I sometimes hesitate to speak of suffering.

So many of you have been through so much worse than me.

I don’t actually think we can rank suffering or that we shouldn’t be kind to ourselves when we suffer because we think the only people who deserve kindness

are some imaginary people who have the dubious honor of suffering most.

But from what I can tell, I still think it might be true that the world doles out meanness that I have only faced in part.

Maybe my experience is good enough though to say I know something of meanness, grief, and even the violence of life.

I know enough to know that the places where we hurt can be very lonely places. Sometimes that’s inescapable, and sometimes that’s because we refuse to let other people in.

I don’t know if I have ever felt more alone than when they wheeled me into the OR for surgery. It was years ago now. It was technically a minor surgery but I had never been rolled into the OR before. And you know what some people say the difference is between a minor and a major surgery? Whether or not it’s happening to you.

In that OR moment I was caught up short by the idea that life is so very unlike watching a movie or being part of a video game. At the end of the book, I can close it, walk away, and pick up a new one. I can experience a thousand lifetimes in all these patterns of storytelling that I love. But being rolled into the OR, I was overcome with the harsh reality that there is no getting out of this body. There is no do-over button if things go wrong.

It was hard to trust in that moment that I was still connected to my husband waiting nearby and connected to the one big heartbeat that I call God. But I do remember deciding to try to trust that I was still connected and that that meant one way or another things would be okay.

Even dying, as unlikely as that was and as grief-inducing as it would be for my family, would be okay in the sense that I would still be part of this great fabric of love and being somehow.

Jesus experienced the breadth and depth of all that it means to be human. In that palm parade in Luke 19 we read about today, he was surrounded by crowds singing his praises.

But in just a short time, by Luke 23, the crowds would want him dead. They would demand the release of Barabbas instead. After they take Jesus to the cross, Luke tells us, even Jesus’ bravest, most stalwart friends could only look on from afar while he was tortured to death. 

We don’t all go through everything Jesus did, and Jesus didn’t go through everything exactly like we will either. But the extreme ups and downs of mortality, Jesus did experience. Christians talk about how God in Jesus experienced the fullness of being human. In the church, we call this the incarnation.

At Christmastime, imagining God made flesh often comforts me. Imagining God made flesh in Holy Week is more disturbing. But that’s incarnation, too. That’s life, too. And God is here with us in the thick of all its messy, imperfect, flawed wonder from our brilliant babyhood to our last breath.

I’m trying to get at this idea of atonement and what it means to me.

Rick Gardner did a nice job of explaining two different takes on atonement to the Passion of Jesus Sunday School class last week.

There are more than two options of course. And the beautiful and messy thing about the Church of the Brethren is that we don’t demand everyone believe the same things the same way.

But the idea of atonement in short is that there is a brokenness or a disconnect in existence and there is something to be done to fix it, to heal it, to overcome it, to endure it, to accept it, and to put things back together.

Some people use the word salvation, and while we may all define that differently, I think most of us would agree there are times in our lives when we could use a healing salve. 

I know that some of us really appreciate the idea that Jesus died for our sins and that now we don’t need to fear God’s retribution and punishment. For some of us, there is profound freedom in that belief. I can respect that.

For me though, I need to take a different road to understanding the boundless grace and appreciating the infinite being of God. What works for me is understanding atonement as the act of making things one, literally breaking the word atonement down to at-one-ment.

I get the at-one-ment when I read about the fullness of the incarnation in the Gospels from Jesus’ birth to his remarkable life to his horrific death and his mysterious resurrection. In the fullness of his love and life and death and mysterious ongoing life, I see the fabric of how the universe is made and how we can participate in experiencing and knitting more closely together that eternal connection. Because I see my life in Jesus’ life. I see your life in Jesus’ life. No, it’s not the same. But there is a universality in the details. There is a solid and sacred connection to the love that moves the universe. His life and death and life teach me how to lean into that one big holy heartbeat in healing and transcendental wholeness making ways.

 When I feel that at-one-ment - that connection - I can understand a little better the sentiment of the crowd crying out, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” That deep contentment doesn’t solve all my problems but it gives me a lot of fuel to face my problems. And it spurs me to want to walk alongside others going through life’s ups and downs, too.

I often visit people in the hospital or otherwise when something hard has happened. That’s part of my job. And while I wish nothing bad would ever happen to you, the truth is sometime something will. So, I hold it as a sacred honor to be invited to stand with you in the breach when the awful things come. Some of you do this for each other, too, whether it’s visiting, or bringing soup, or otherwise serving others and standing up to be part of the solutions our community needs.

I often forget about the power of it though, until it’s me who needs it. In preparing for that years ago surgery day, I cracked. At the time, I was even more enamored than I am now with thinking myself invincible and able to evade suffering with my intelligence, creativity, charm, and hard work. Realizing that nasty things happen anyway wasn’t fun. I was worried. I felt alone. I had just had a second baby. We were living hundreds of miles from family. Parker was there like a rock but I didn’t want him to feel alone either. So, I cracked my armor and let someone in. I called one of the only friends I had in the whole state even though she lived over an hour away. I told her what was happening, and I asked, will you please visit me when it’s done?

So, she did. She was there with Parker when I woke up. Some dear church person was watching our tiny kids. I’m not sure what it changed to have her there. But I know it was a big deal to me. I felt more solid. I felt connected. It mattered.

Listen, if you don’t want me to come to the hospital every time, I’m not offended. You can be as private as you want about whatever you want.

But I think every time we do things like this for each other, we participate in the one-ness making that God is about. We declare in a good enough way that each one of us in our own way comes in the name of God and no matter the suffering we go through, we are blessed and beloved.

The last thing I want to do before I stop today is to tend to the stones. What a great line that ends today’s reading: “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ [Jesus] answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’”

I do believe we are a group project - each of us individually. We are interconnected to so many others who have touched us along the way. But I also know that we fail each other profoundly all the time.

So, I love that while we can be part of the sacred work of connecting and wholeness making, that work also does not entirely depend on us. Even when we fail to love each other or ourselves as we wish we could, even when we face life’s harshest disappointments, even when we learn that all our trying and striving and strategizing will not save us from all hardship, there is still a force of love that moves the universe far beyond our human efforts. Even though I think using words to describe that eternal fount of life and love fails to do it any justice, I call that fount God, and to me it is good enough knowing that God is in humans and also far beyond them in the trees and stars and stones.

It is good enough for me to know that because we are connected to all of that and to each other, we are all a group project. Even when it feels that way and it will sometimes, we are never really alone. God goes with us through the palm parades and the passion days and that is good enough for me today.              

May it be so. Amen.

We so often believe we are the problem

March 10, 2024 - Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32 (NRSV)

The Worcester Public Library in Worcester, MA is running a program this month they’re calling March Meowness.

Got fees for lost or damaged Worcester Public Library items?

Show them a picture of a cat (any cat)* and they will forgive your fees.

Their website declares: “We want you back at the library, so we are offering one month of fee forgiveness for lost or damaged items. Show us a picture of your cat, a famous cat, a picture you drew of a cat, a shelter cat - any cat, and we will forgive WPL fees on your library account.

We understand accidents can happen, and sometimes fees might hold you back from fully using your public library. We hope that you will join us as we celebrate March Meowness at all of our Worcester Public Library locations.”

Maybe you know that Gail Borden Public Library no longer charges late fees at all - only lost book fees if you let it go too long - I do know that from experience.

Is this kind of amnesty fair? What about all the people who are bringing their books back in on time? Are cat pictures really enough to make up for breaking the rules?

This is not the first time we have read the story of the Prodigal Son together since I have been your pastor, and over the years what I have heard from a number of you is how much you identify with the rule following older son.

Truth be told, I do, too. Like many of you, my identity was formed early as a rule follower, a good student, and a compliant member of my community.

I have been guilty, like the Pharisees, of expecting that all my good rule following would make me favored by God and get all the good things I deserve. I have been guilty of thinking if I never made mistakes, kept everyone happy, and met expectations that I would not be hurt.

Like the older son and the Pharisees who are grumbling at the beginning of this chapter because Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, I, too, have been disappointed and even angry when I have learned that God and life don’t work the way I sometimes expect.

In the story, the older brother refuses to join the feast. He’s too angry.

We don’t know if the father’s explanation moves him or not. We don’t know for sure if he ever goes in. Perhaps it’s up to the original hearers, the Pharisees, and today’s hearers, us, to decide what we will do.

All I know, is that when I sit with the older son, refusing to go in, I realize that my refusal to soften my heart locks me out of the party and puts me in the position of the lost.

Like the Pharisees, if I set up a dichotomy in my mind of myself as all good and my brother over there as all bad, I lose sight of our shared humanity and I lock myself out of the party and into a world of hurt.

It’s only when I allow myself to hear the heart of the parent who rejoices in the returned sibling, that I can accept that it’s okay for me to be my own flawed and forgiven self, and it’s okay for others to be their own flawed and forgiven selves, too.

It’s a hard lesson for me and for the older brother to hear: that it’s not my striving for perfection that saves me from that locked out fate. Rather, it’s my acceptance of the healing power of grace for us all that allows me to come to the party.

After all, if we’re honest, I think we all have parts of us that are the younger son, too. We have made mistakes. We have hurt others. Although there are times when we humans can’t even see or refuse to acknowledge our shortcomings, we are also often harder on ourselves than on anyone else.

Destitute and humiliated, the younger son remembers that the nature of his father is to take good care of even the lowliest members of the household. So, he decides to return home and finds himself more than welcome.

This lesson is the one the tax collectors, mistake makers, and social outcasts learn, too, I imagine, when we are welcomed to the table alongside Jesus.

We learn that persistent grace, joy, and festivity are characteristics of the nature of God.

Like the father who sees the younger son coming from far away,

God, too, runs to meet us and gathers us up in warm and welcome embrace, no matter what we have done or where we have been.

I have a friend who tells a story of what God’s grace is like.

She was a young woman then, driving her dad’s car home late one night.

She was out past curfew.

Although she had sometimes been given permission to take the car, this night she had swiped the keys without asking, knowing that her strict father would never approve of her driving to the places she wanted to go.

She planned to have the car home before he ever noticed, and to slip into her room without incurring his harsh wrath.

But something went wrong. The weather was bad.

She was driving too fast for the conditions.

Her mind was filled with the stress and adrenaline of breaking the rules.

She put the car in a ditch. Totaled it.

Before the days of cell phones, a kind stranger came by and a tow truck showed up.

Someone found her dad.

Standing by the side of the road in the rain, she watched him get out of a neighbor’s vehicle.

Her whole body shook and tears sprang to her eyes.

She had surely disappointed him terribly.

Would he punish her?

Could she ever replace the car with her meager part-time job?

How would her dad even get to work in the morning?

Just how angry would he be?

She walked toward him trying to choke out an apology.

But before she could say much of anything at all, he scooped her into his bear hug arms and declared, “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

That was the end of it.

She later shared that her relief that night, and for the rest of her life whenever she thought about that night, felt like a rain shower falling down on parched earth.

This grace was not something she had earned with some kind of perfection. It was life changing for her to know without a shadow of a doubt that she was still loved and cherished no matter what she had or hadn’t done.

So, too, are we loved, celebrated, and offered grace.

We can all strive to transform ourselves and to grow.

We can apologize and ask for forgiveness when we mess up.

What we don’t need to do is punish ourselves for not reaching an unattainable level of perfection.

What we don’t need to do is deceive ourselves into believing that striving for perfection will keep us from harm.

Instead, we can accept that we are loved and that love is entirely good enough.                                                    

                                                                                                       May it be so. Amen.

Lots of things can be medicine

March 3, 2024 - Luke 13: 1-9 (NRSV)

It can be pretty satisfying to condemn other people or to condemn big impersonal systems for getting things wrong and causing great harm. 

It’s not only satisfying, it’s also necessary to offer needed critique when getting in the way of injustices and violence. 

In the verses directly before the ones we read aloud today. That’s what the people seem to want Jesus to do. They want him to condemn the acts of violence carried out by Pilate and the Roman empire. 

But he doesn’t give the people that satisfaction. Instead, Jesus doles out medicine the people aren’t in the market for. 

He starts talking about repentance and bearing fruits lest they perish.  It’s stunning and disturbing in that way Jesus is so good at being.  I figure there was more than one person who heard him that day and wondered what was wrong with him.  Why wouldn’t he just denounce the evil over there that those other people were carrying out?

I’m guessing not all of you here are avid fans of Nickelodeon’s animated Avatar: The Last Airbender series like my family. But if you are, you likely know that Netflix has just produced a first season of a live action re-make. 

The series is set in a world at war in which different nations harbor folks with different supernatural elemental powers and from which one person rises in each generation who can control all four elements. That person is the Avatar. 

Like the animated original, the live action remake explores big themes related to war, peace, nationalism, and social justice that only continue to feel timely. It also brings back most of the same characters as vehicles to do so. 

One such character is an Earth kingdom mercenary named Jett. This young man is bent on revenge against the Fire Nation and all its citizens to the point where he is willing to kill anyone who stands in the way of that revenge. It’s not hard to understand how that kind of hate can grow in a story in which his kingdom has been at war with the Fire Nation for 100 years and in which Fire Nation soldiers murdered his family. Unlike the main characters of the story, however, who have also lost loved ones to the war-mongering empire, Jett is unconcerned with inflicting the same harm on others that has been inflicted upon him. In both versions of the story, his group sets explosives that are intended to harm those they see as wrongdoers without regard to the collateral damage of innocent civilians who will also lose their lives along the way. 

Main character Katara tells him, “You’ve become so focused on what you’re fighting against, you’ve forgotten what you’re fighting for.”

How do we keep from becoming that which we hate?  In the gospels, Jesus so often offers the foul tasting counter-intuitive medicine that the way to stop that to which we object is to stop it first in ourselves. If we want to end greed, hatred, abuse, and violence, it may be tempting to find the biggest loudest examples around us and call them out.  Maybe that’s part of the work. But for followers of Jesus, it seems part of the work is also examining ourselves for those shortcomings and working on our own transformation, too. We’re the people we are most likely to have the most success changing anyway. 

Then there’s this weird story about the fig tree. It’s another metaphor. The fig tree could be a stand in for the people of Jesus’ own country and culture as a whole. It could also be a stand in for individuals. It could also be a stand in for us. Are we bearing any fruit? 

The story gets pretty dramatic if you put yourself in the place of the fig tree. The vineyard owner wants to cut the tree down. It hasn’t produced in three years after all. But the gardener wants to give it more time. He wants to nurture it. Leave it alone and fertilize it. If it isn’t producing next year then cut it down. 

I’m no fig tree farmer but a quick search on the internet tells me fig trees take 3-5 years to bear fruit. I hope this one got a little more time. 

But I understand the impatience.  Heaven forbid I get sick or hurt or heartbroken.  The healing takes so much longer than I would like.  I hate when grief and suffering and human imperfection slow me down from doing all I’d like to do or feel I need to do. 

I can understand an interpretation of this scripture that concludes that we ought to repent our wrongdoing and produce worthy fruit or else.

But what if the wrongdoing we need to stop and turn around from is the idolization of productivity to begin with? 

In their book, Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection, Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie explain how the treadmill was an 18th century invention by the civil engineer William Cubitt who sought to ensure that prisoners were kept busy and isolated from each other by these solitary devices often meant to require meaningless activity. 

The women like the metaphor for describing too many of our lives today. “When we say we want to ‘get off the treadmill, we are saying we want lives that are meaningful.” But we so often get distracted from that which will actually bring meaning, chasing productivity and perfectionism instead. “We might feel we are climbing an ‘endless staircase’ of achievement, for high grades or success. Like an MC Escher drawing, we might feel caught in an endless staircase of caregiving, work, or social pressure.” 

“Most of us,” they write, “are turning the wheel of obligation in our lives. People depend on us. Nothing ever stops. Regardless, we need a sober look at reality to stop pretending that there is unlimited energy or endless time to do what is meaningful. To attend to the values we cherish most. And stop the mindless pressures that we have placed on ourselves (pgs 98-100).”

I have the feeling that is the kind of counterintuitive medicine Jesus would have many of us hear in this passage. I have that feeling because I don’t like it. I don’t like stopping. If something is wrong, I’d prefer to keep running at it headlong until it is fixed.  

But did you hear the gardener’s plan in the story? He doesn’t plan to stand and scream at the tree to be more productive, brandishing his ax at it. No, he prescribes leaving the tree alone, giving it time and fertilizer until it starts bearing fruit. 

The story reminds me of a friend in seminary who took Parker and I to our first protest for worker’s rights. We didn’t achieve everything we set out to accomplish that day. But that same week he invited us over to his house for a party because as he said a world without parties is not a world worth working for. 

I love that some of the medicine in this story is actual manure. That’s what the fig tree is going to get. Manure gets a bad rap. It doesn’t smell great. That doesn’t help. It’s a waste product for another thing. But plants love it because it's chock full of good nutrients for them. 

Going about the world as if we’re tending a garden, it’s sometimes tempting to want to climb across the fence and cut down a neighbor’s offending weed before tending to our own overgrowth. 

It’s also tempting to think the only thing the gardens of our souls or the gardens of our communities need is just hard work and high standards. 

I’m not against those. But sometimes we also need time, less pressure, and frivolous but fun and nutrient packed medicinal manure. 

We’ll all have our own version. I joined a table-top role-playing group which serves absolutely no purpose but to amuse me. Maybe you go for walks in the middle of the day. Maybe you watch TV. Maybe you go out to lunch with a friend. Reformation church father Martin Luther reportedly liked to go fishing with Philip Melancthon. That’s more than allowed. And it’s more than good enough distraction for a more than good enough life. Maybe it’s even the counterintuitive medicine you need to be able to fuel the work of holy transformation you feel called to be about in the world.

I want to leave you with this blessing from Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie. 

It’s a Blessing for Slowing Down (pg 101): 

May it be so. Amen.

So much is out of our control

February 25, 2024 - Luke 13: 31-35 (NRSV)

Kate Bowler was 35 and living the life of her dreams.  She had married her high school sweetheart. After years of infertility, she had finally gotten pregnant and was raising a one year old. She had just been hired at the first job she applied for in academia.

But she had terrible pains in her stomach that no one could explain until a physician’s assistant called her at work to share she had stage 4 cancer and that she needed to come to the hospital right away. She remembers helplessly telling the physician’s assistant on the phone, “But I have a son.”
So much is out of our control. Wars rage. Children go hungry. The planet is in peril. And even now new parents are not spared from devastating diagnoses. How are we to live with that reality?

Terrible things happened in Jesus’ time, too.  Terrible things, in fact, happened to Jesus. By some people he was loved and revered.  By some people he was feared and reviled. In the end, he was torturously executed.  

Then and now bad things happen to good people. How can any of us stand it? 

One strategy it seems is to wager that “everything happens for a reason.” Maybe that gives some of us a sense of comfort and control to believe that every hardship brings a grand lesson or a great chance for improvement or an opportunity to prove ourselves worthy. But if I’m honest, I just don’t think that’s true. 

I think it’s much more likely that this Creation is full of billions of self-interested entities bumping up against each other. Volcanoes and viruses and vultures are not necessarily out to get each other or to teach us a lesson. But their well-being can and does often conflict with our well-being without much rhyme or reason that we humans can comprehend at least on the plane of morality. 

Neither do I think that has to mean there is no God or that God doesn’t love us.  I think it does mean that God is not orchestrating all the events of our lives to either reward us for good behavior or punish us for bad. I think it means that life can be difficult no matter how good we think we are. Rationalizing how we deserve or don’t deserve such difficulty is so much less than helpful.

Jesus wasn’t really into that. He wasn’t into sweeping aside difficulties with pleasantries. He didn’t pretend that bad things hadn’t happened, weren’t happening, or weren’t going to happen in the future. No, he talked about his own imminent death a lot. He discussed his own beloved culture’s propensity to murder their prophets. Rather than cast them out, he blessed and cared for those who experienced hardship in life. He never promised we would be able to control everything if we just tried hard enough. 

As Kate Bowler was walking into the hospital on the day she received her diagnosis, even amidst her grief she was struck by the irony that just weeks before she had published a book on the prosperity gospel titled “Blessed.” Bowler believes the prosperity gospel to be today’s great civil religion. “Rather than worshiping the founding of America itself,” she explains, “the prosperity gospel worships Americans. It deifies and ritualizes their hungers, their hard work, and their moral fiber. Americans believe in a gospel of optimism and they are their own proof.”

Despite telling herself she was nothing like the evangelical Christians she had interviewed across the country, she realized on that fateful first day approaching the hospital that she was already asking herself what she had done wrong. How had she not been enough? What had she messed up to receive this diagnosis? She realized then that “if you live within the influence of dominant American culture, it is extremely difficult to avoid falling into the trap of believing that virtue and success go hand and hand. The more I stared down my diagnosis,” she shares in her Ted Talk,  “the more I recognized I had my own quiet version of the belief that good things happen to good people.”  

Now, the upside of the gospel of success is that it does allow us to achieve, to dream big, and to forge ahead. It serves us well until we find ourselves in the middle of something we can’t manage our way out of. 

Bowler writes, “everything that I thought would save me – my hard work, my success, my personality, my sense of humor – would not save me. My life,” she realized “is built with paper walls and so is everyone else’s.”

So, she wrote an Op Ed that got published in the New York Times asking: “How do you live without quite so many reasons for the bad things that happen?”

Thousands of readers wrote back to convince her that there is a reason for what happened to her. Some even confronted her husband while she was still in the hospital to declare to him “everything happens for a reason.” But they stammered awkwardly when he replied, “I’d love to hear it. I’d love to hear the reason my wife is dying.”

It’s human to look for patterns, to learn, to want our world to be a safe, just, wonderful place. But there is no concrete correlation between how hard we try and the length or ease of our lives. 

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to make the world a better place.  I’m not saying there aren’t people who are committing horrific violence and abuse. 

I’m just saying if it were up to me, there wouldn’t be book bans, or devastating health struggles, or a climate crisis, or war upon war, or non-binary children fearing for their lives at a normal day of school.  And I will do what I can to work for a more just and hopeful world.  But I know so much is out of my control. 

As much as I find that to be disturbing and even at times rage inducing, I have decided I will do my best not to let the fear of that lack of control win the day. 

I am still in love with the teaching of the late preacher Frederick Buechner who once declared in a sermon: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.” 

The Pharisees tried to tell Jesus to be afraid. They warned him that Herod was out to kill him. He answered back, Go tell that fox about the work I’m doing. Tell him I have more to do before I meet the end he has in mind.

Then he declared to the symbol of his whole world, oh my beloved city, you have problems. But oh, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” 

Sometimes when hardship comes our way, we can feel far from God. That is a real experience many have. But sometimes, we get to experience the peace that passes understanding and the shelter Jesus speaks of longing to provide us – to gather us in as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings. 

Kate Bowler wrote that in those early days of her treatment that’s what she felt. In the depths of her despair she did not feel alone. She felt deeply loved. It wasn’t the medical healing she was looking for. But it was a kind of healing all the same. That love overwhelmed her and held her up for a time. Its intensity came and went. But even when the strength of that feeling of eternal love sheltering her “receded like the tides, it left an imprint” for her to draw on, too.

“I am learning to live without reasons and assurances,” Bowler declares. “Life will break your heart and it will take everything you have. But I am learning to believe in a different kind of “prosperity gospel:” “I believe that in the darkness, even there, there will be beauty and there will be love. And every now and then it will feel like more than enough.”

May it be so. Amen.

Ordinary Lives Can Be Holy

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – February 18, 2024

Ordinary Lives Can Be Holy – Luke 4:1-14

In today’s scripture story the devil tempts Jesus with glory, fame, and a quick fix. Those of us who have read this story many times know that Jesus doesn’t go for any of it. He responds with pithy one-liners and sends satan slinking away until an opportune time. But the temptations would mean nothing if they weren’t actually obviously tempting in Jesus’ place and time.

What are the temptations that catch our ears today, singing out promises that our lives should be better, more special, or less hard than they are?

In their book, Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection, Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie write “If you check your social media feed, the debate has been settled. Yes, you can be perfect. Other people are living beautiful, joyful, effortless lives. In fact, it’s embarrassing that you haven’t joined their ranks already (vii).”

Social media didn’t invent the practice of projecting a perfectly polished image to our neighbors, of course. That existed long, long before. But it did take it to a particularly portable, persistent new level for a large swath of the population. Studies now show its rise has been a major contributor to the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young people.

Many of us, regardless of our age or our social media use, can fall victim to the temptation of judging our insides by other people’s outsides. We know our own struggles. We know the stories we keep hidden. What we see of others can so often be only the polished best. It can be easy to imagine we’re the only ones struggling or to begin to become paranoid about what everyone else is hiding.

If we think it was easy for Jesus to turn down those temptations, maybe we would-be Jesus followers start to think we can and should be just as perfect and we turn the message of Christianity into an injunction to live a flawless life. In that way of thinking, those who struggle are no longer welcome in our midst, lest we catch their infection. In that thinking, our own flaws become things we must hide and defend at all costs lest we lose our own position. We may even begin to moralize and judge things that have no inherent moral weight, scouring ourselves and others with an acid wash of shame. 

In February of 2020, therapist KC Davis gave birth to her second child. She had an extensive support plan in place. Various relatives, friends, and paid caregivers were scheduled to help KC’s family care for themselves and their newborn. Then, abruptly, in March of 2020 everything shut down. No one came into their home, leaving the growing family completely isolated. KC developed postpartum depression. Never an immaculate house keeper, KC struggled to simply feed herself, her working from home husband, her toddler, and her infant, let alone clean their home. She took to social media to share self-deprecating footage of her living space, hoping to make light of the harsh situation and find some solidarity on the internet. Instead, judgmental comments came flying back. The one that struck her most? One word: lazy. How lazy of this completely isolated mother with postpartum depression not to be able to keep everyone in her home alive and keep her house spotless at the same time, during a global pandemic.

She was hurt by the comments but as a therapist she also already knew the shame, judgment, and morality that in the US often surrounds deceptively complex care tasks like cooking, cleaning, and personal hygiene.

In the best selling book that she went on to write, How to Keep House While Drowning, she shares, “I have seen hundreds of clients who struggle with these issues, and I am convinced now more than ever of one simple truth: they are not lazy. In fact, I do not think laziness exists (5).”

What does exist, according to KC Davis? “Executive dysfunction, procrastination, feeling overwhelmed, perfectionism, trauma, motivation, chronic pain, energy fatigue, depression, lack of skills, lack of support, and differing priorities (5).” Any one of those things could lead to a difficulty in caring for oneself. But none of them are moral failings. 

When the wilderness times come for us, as they eventually do for us all, I cannot think of anything less helpful than an extra heaping of shame upon an already hard situation. Why has this bad thing happened? Why is this so hard? Is it something I have done or not done? It can be terribly difficult to accept that the wilderness just is itself. Terrible things happen with or without our permission and no matter how good or special we try to be.

Jesus himself walked through his own actual wilderness in which he met the personification of evil. Keep in mind he hadn’t even eaten for 40 days. If I don’t eat for 4 hours, I can’t handle much. No, life was hard sometimes even for Jesus, God in the flesh. And life is just hard for us sometimes, too. Judging ourselves for our suffering isn’t going to make it any easier.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I think we don’t get things wrong and that there aren’t ways that we contribute to our suffering that we might like to stop. As Bowler and Richie write, “Perfection is impossible but transformation isn’t…There are some things we can do to inch toward a deeper, richer, truer kind of faith (ix-xiii).”

Neither is it that I don’t believe in evil. For me, I see evil in the dehumanization it takes to murder thousands of Palestinians and internally displace millions more.

It’s just that I think God will someday, somehow ultimately heal all evil and reconcile the world to wholeness and that God is doing that even now.

It’s just that I think there’s a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt tells us we’ve done something wrong and helps us change. Shame tells us that we’re wrong just for being and in that there’s no hope of change.

So we can continue to bully ourselves with shame for all the things that aren’t the way we’d like them to be in ourselves and in our world. Or, we  can apply self-compassion and forgiveness to all the places where we experience guilt, suffering, and shame.

Throughout How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis shares the encouragement to allow ourselves to be human. She quotes Brene Brown in proclaiming “humans are born with the birthright of worthiness,” but she goes on to argue “they are also messy, fallible, imperfect creatures who cannot and will not ever get everything right all the time. And this messy, fallible imperfection never detracts from our inherent worthiness.”

According to Davis, the good enough care routines she encourages to keep folks functioning with more ease and more joy are not settling. She declares, “Good enough is perfect.” I, for one, believe that goes well beyond our attitudes toward laundry.

Our lives may never be as easy as we would like. We will never escape all the calamity and suffering while we draw breath. Our world will not be set to rights in our lifetimes. We will get things wrong. We will harm others. We will fall short of our own expectations and others will do that, too.

The good news is that does not make us unworthy of love. It does not separate us from the possibility of transformation. It does not separate us from the eternally healing presence of God. Some translations of today’s text read that the Spirit led Jesus to the wilderness, but I like the NRSV’s translation better at least for the theology. Because it tells us Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, sounding to me as if the Spirit never left Jesus’ side. Even though he was hungry, tempted, and visited by the devil himself, the Spirit was with Jesus through this hard time.

I believe the Spirit of God is with us through every wilderness, too, whether naturally occurring or self-inflicted. The Spirit of God is with us – not saving us from all suffering, not making sure we never mess up or lose face, and not even keeping us far from the presence of evil. But with us, reminding us that no matter how ordinary and imperfect we may be, we are still loved. We are still loved, and that is more than good enough.

Thanks be to God that it is so. Amen.

A Stir in the Water

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – January 14, 2024

A Stir in the Water – Mark 1: 4-11

Today’s scripture story takes place in the wilderness and begins with a description of the ministry of John the Baptist, who wore camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey.

That is not the description of a typical resident of Judea in that place and time. The setting and this description of John would have tipped off the original hearers of the likely read aloud Gospel of Mark that something out of the ordinary was happening.

In fact, they may have heard those wild descriptors and understood that the storyteller was likening John the Baptist to ancient Israelite prophets of old, who were not always popular with the people but who were often in touch with the message of God to their place and time.

In her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May writes about the way she responded to a series of crises in her life. Rather than keeping the “stiff upper lip” so ingrained in her British culture, she chose to let herself fall apart. She took a leave from her stressful position as a college professor and started homeschooling her young son.

She made cookies and took long walks on the coast. She screamed and cried and argued with members of her family. She slept and ate and wrote whenever she wanted to. She came to think of this time as a kind of winter and a retreat from the press of expectations she had held up for so long.

Writes Katherine, “Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again…We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower…They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.”

In my experience, the dominant culture doesn’t usually applaud stories like Katherine’s. It seems to me it’s more likely that the stories that get passed around on social media or published in the paper or highlighted on TV news are ones where, in the face of overwhelming odds, someone persevered and performed a superhuman feat. I love those stories. I love hearing about the resilience and capacity of the human spirit.

But what I don’t love about the dominant culture’s preference for those stories is how easy it becomes then to see productivity, prosperity, perseverance, and popularity as the only good goals. Is there any space for the naturally occurring cycles of internal winter times in a culture like that? Or do we have to lie and pretend we’re always in a high emotional summer all the time?

What happens to rest, grief, and the uncomfortable business of accepting our sadness and anger in a culture like that? How does a culture like that cut people of faith off from hearing the word of God as it whispers or wails out from our places of supposed failure? 

Mark tells us that John the Baptist offered a ritual cleansing of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. What kind of sins do you think those folks imagined themselves to be carrying to the River Jordan? What kind of sins did John have in mind? And were those understandings of sin all in line with the nudging of that eternal Spirit of Life and Love we call God?

Would God really see our inability to conquer all odds or please all people or make all the money or always be happy or fit in with our neighbors as sins? That’s not an image of God that resonates with me despite the pressure I often feel to atone for those supposed failures.

Rather, I think the shortcomings that the Spirit of all Life and Love would call us to turn away from would include making idols of productivity, prosperity, perseverance, and popularity. 

It’s pretty easy to get wrapped up in an orientation toward those things. But if you find, like me, that you are still at least sometimes oriented toward those things to the point where you are unkind to yourself or others, I invite you to imagine slipping into the warm waters of forgiveness and letting yourself return home to that place where you know you are made for love and so is everyone else.

You don’t have to be more than you are.

You don’t have to be ashamed of needing a break.

You don’t have to be afraid to say you’re sorry or to simply say “no.”

You don’t have to push away uncomfortable feelings forever.

The winter time can be a great time to welcome in all those things you’ve pushed away the rest of the year. Indeed, you may find these longer nights bring all those uncomfortable feelings and realities rushing in without your welcome or permission. What if instead of the cultural prevalence to push through and push down discomfort, we got a little more comfortable with being present to the things that make us uncomfortable?

If we let ourselves spend time in that wilderness, might we too find ourselves better in touch with the message of God for our place and time?

I know a lot of you know this Rumi poem “The Guest House”, but even if it’s well-worn to you, I want to offer it to you again today in case it has some new insight for you this season:

 “This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

For who knows if they may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.”

I can’t even begin to guess what the human part of Jesus brought to the wilderness waters of baptism in the Jordan. But Mark tells us there was a clear message from God:

“And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”

Whatever meets you on these long winter nights, may you trust that the soft light of a winter dawn is coming and may you hear the clear message that you, too, are a beloved child of God.

                                                                                           May it be so. Amen.

Reflecting the Sacred: Sacred Knowing

I’ve never been one to believe that God arranges for a perfect parking spot or stops the rain when I walk outside or cares if the Bears win or lose. Their record this season is maybe proof of that. But that’s not to say that I don’t believe God conveys things to us

– sometimes in subtle nudges and sometimes in hard to miss bright and blaring billboard signs. Messages from God, I believe though, are more likely to be about how we can draw near to the holy heartbeat and endure life’s chaos, hardship, and inconvenience than they are about granting unfailing escape from those things.

In today’s story God sends a very clear messenger in the form of the angel Gabriel whose presence was apparently perplexingly overwhelming. I have never seen an angel in quite the manner the Bible describes. But I have had times when I have perceived very clear signs about the right next step in my life.

When Parker and I decided to go to seminary, I felt a warm hum from the top of my head to the bottom of my soles as though my bones were vibrating like a struck tuning fork. When we sat on the porch of our Iowa home wondering if it was time to move, the pair of neighboring Barred owls we had heard but never seen swooped down and roosted mere yards in front of us on a tree limb. Long before I ever got pregnant, I remember leaving the home of a friend with two young girls with a smile in my heart and a tear in my eye that told me for the first time that being a mother was a thing I wanted. While I believe the message Mary received that day was holy and unique, I also believe that we, too, can receive messages today from the Sacred Source of all knowing, wisdom, and wonder.

In the scripture story, Gabriel tells Mary that she will bear God into the world by giving birth to a child who will be named Jesus and who will bring forth God’s reign in new fullness. She will do this even though she has not yet conceived for with God nothing is impossible. Mary responds like the prophets and heroes of her people before her, “Here I am…Let it be.”

How do we respond when we receive signs and nudges from the holy? Are we even ready to perceive them? Do certain places, people, or practices help?

Different things work for different people. Some of us read the Bible in community. Some of us take long walks in the woods. Some of us sit in prayerful silence. Some of us sing or play music until our hearts are spent.

I once knew an ordained minister who got in touch with a God-filled place of peace in his heart by listening to loud classic rock music on his headphones. I once had a friend who liked to write messages to God on a white board and often felt moved to come back to read them later in an entirely different frame of mind as if something had been revealed. Some of us just seem to be particularly good at paying attention like the woman who told me that she decided all at once that it was time to give up her car keys and change living situations after a close call one day. However we get in touch with our sense of deep knowing, I hope we don’t get too busy or too downhearted to seek out those practices, people, and places that help us pay attention to the signs the Sacred still sends.

In the scripture story, the angel has already spoken to Mary the words, “Do not be afraid,” but she embodies those words by boldly accepting her call to be the one to give birth to God in the flesh. What gives us the courage to respond “Here I am?” And how do we know when it's time?

Although I had watched the movie countless times in my childhood, I hadn’t seen the Chicago-set Home Alone for many years. The four stars on the supposed police officer’s uniform, the jokes about the Midwest, and the scenes of the Winnetka neighborhood hit me differently than before.

This time I also appreciated one scene in the movie that I remember finding so boring as a child I wanted to fast forward through it. It was the scene in the nearby church in which 8 year-old Kevin McCallister, left behind at home while his family flies to Paris for a holiday trip, wanders down the aisle and into a pew during the choir’s Christmas Eve rehearsal of “O Holy Night”.

An elderly neighbor, Mr. Marley, sits down next to Kevin and engages him in conversation. He asks if Kevin has been a good boy this year. Kevin responds, “No.” Marley nods and shares, “Well, the church is a good place to be if you’re feeling bad about yourself.” “Are you feeling bad about yourself?” The young boy asks the older man. “No,” he responds.

But then Kevin confesses that he hasn’t been too kind to his family this year. He doesn’t share that he thinks he made his large nuclear and extended family disappear by wishing them gone. But the audience who has followed the action since Kevin woke up in an empty house is well aware of that aspect of the story.  Kevin feels bad because he admits he kind of likes his family even when they are a pain to him.

“Do you get what I mean?” he asks. And Marley responds, “Yes, I think so.” “How you feel about your family is a complicated thing.” He goes on, “Deep down you always love them. But you can forget that you love them. You can hurt them, and they can hurt you. That’s not just because you’re young.”

Then the truth spills out. Marley is only there at Christmas Eve rehearsal watching his granddaughter sing in the choir because he is not welcome to attend events with his family any more. He and his son have said hurtful things to each other, and they haven’t spoken in years. “If you miss him, why don’t you call him?” Kevin asks. Marley explains he is afraid that if he calls, his son won’t pick up. “No offense,” Kevin ventures, “but aren’t you a little old to be afraid?”

The two close up their conversation with a handshake and a Merry Christmas before the ringing bells remind Kevin it is time to run home and prepare for the slapstick comedy-filled climax of the movie. Later, in the very last scene of this Christmas classic, Kevin, now reunited with his lost family, stands at the window watching Marley greet his estranged son and family on the sidewalk. John Williams’ Somewhere in My Memory plays while Marley hugs his son and daughter-in-law and then picks up his granddaughter in an overjoyed embrace.

McCauley Culkin’s Kevin is not quite an innocent or angelic character, but he is the one through whom Marley receives the nudge he needs to make amends to his son, an act that requires courage, grace, and humility. Not all relationships between family members, friends, or nation states are so easily mended. There is often real hurt or even violence that needs to be interrupted and addressed, if there is to be peace and reconciliation in which all are made well and held safe. Sometimes space and separation are the right choices, at least for a time.

But I believe every time we engage in that kind of courageous, grace-filled, humble peacemaking, we, too, participate in bearing the presence of God in the world. We too become mirrors, reflecting the sacred.

This Advent and Christmas season, we are invited to be in touch with a sense of sacred knowing from which we can find our courage to reflect the ever-present and ever-renewing hope, love, joy, and peace of Christ.

                                                                                      May we do so. Amen

Reflecting the Sacred: Sacred Space

When I was being trained as a writer, teachers would make clear to us that if you want readers to be transported from where they sit reading your book to the plane of imagination where your book is set, it’s the details that are the vehicle you need. You can write that a woman entered her cousin’s home. Or you can write that the woman unwrapped her worn shawl from around her face, revealing a relieved smile as she pushed open the sturdy wooden door of her cousin’s home.

I think it’s the same way with our spiritual lives. We can sit in church. We can walk in the woods. We can watch our favorite movies. But pay attention to what happens when you let yourself slow down and take in the details of a place – whether that place is real or fictional. You may find, as I do, that the details better connect, orient, and move you.

It’s just a little detail but at the end of today’s passage the writer of the Gospel of Luke tells us, “And Mary remained with her, Elizabeth, about three months and then returned to her home.” The details give us a context, in this case a setting, for all the words we have heard.

This beautiful, revolutionary song Mary sings in today’s scripture passage takes place in a setting that could be considered inconsequential. She is singing after all not in a palace but in her cousin’s home. 

While those of us who hold Jesus and John the Baptist to have been history changers might consider the meeting of these two pregnant women to be sparkling with sacred importance, it could also be said that in terms of earthly power, these women, this moment, and this place were of little importance at all.

I have lived in six different states and nearly every place I have ever lived has been considered nowhere - that is a place considered unimportant in terms of global politics or economic power. Rural Pennsylvania, small town Indiana, and even suburban Chicago could all be seen this way. And yet, they are sacred places to me. The land, the history, and the people of all these places have gotten under my skin. Through DNA and food and friendship they are both literally and metaphorically part of who I am.

I know God dwells in all these places because I have seen the glory of God reverberating off wooded mountain valleys, vast expanses of grass, thickly clustered buildings designed with eclectic architectural styles, and even off long passes of pavement for my bike to travel along in relative safety.

I know we humans tend to have places where we find it easier to encounter the Holy One who is in and beyond all things, people, and time. And I can’t say that forest preserves, churches, libraries, museums, weight rooms, and coffee shops haven’t provided special territory where I can consistently travel  to encounter again the eternal foundation of all existence. But, at least for me, the truth is that all existence and every place is sacred. Even if we have certain places it is easy to call sacred, there is no place God does not dwell. God is on the battlefield. God is in the prison cell. God is in the OR. God is in the flyover states and every place in between.

If we let them, I believe those places we name as sacred can remind us of the sacredness of every place. They can help us bear the details and reality even of the most hard to dwell in and full of suffering places of our world.

Journalists, too, know the power of details to transport us from passive readers or listeners to people who can empathize with someone halfway around the world. It was the description of babies being pulled out of incubation to evacuate hospitals in Gaza that got me while driving one day. I had to turn off the radio and pull over to the side of the road; I was so upset. I think what got me was not only that detail but the way that detail helped me feel the weight of all the other deaths and violence in the region that I feel all but powerless to stop.

It’s hard for me to really fully comprehend that in a part of the world where the Christmas story took place and that three religions call “holy” unspeakable violence has been roiling in fresh and horrific ways since October.  The three religions that call that land holy all trace their spiritual if not ethnic and cultural roots back to the Abraham Mary speaks of in her song of praise and joy. It is God’s remembrance of and mercy toward Abraham’s descendants that Mary praises.

We could certainly use that mercy today. Mercy is what seems to be in short supply among Abraham’s descendants on whatever shores they stand. There seems to be little room for nuance or disagreement certainly in the midst of the violence itself but also here at home where friends and neighbors scream at each other or are even moved to murder as in the case of the young boy killed by his anti-Palestinian hate-motivated landlord.

Is there mercy in the space where we are right? Or does our righteousness intoxicate us into echoing the very behaviors we claim to abhor?

What Mary says in her Magnifcat has been transposed into various beautiful music pieces throughout time. It is held sacred. But do we look and listen close enough to the details? I think if we do we notice just how troublesome her words really are. She is praising God after all for bringing “down the powerful from their thrones and lift[ing] up the lowly; … “for filling the hungry with good things and sen[ding] the rich away empty.”

Her words are troublesome in the sense of what the late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis called “good trouble,” for they spell trouble for the unjust world order. These words ought to afflict our comfortable places and comfort our afflicted places. Brethren biblical scholars Christina Bucher and Robert W. Neff found this reversal to be so central to their understanding of this gospel that they subtitled their recently published Luke and Acts commentary book “Turning the World Upside Down.”

What would a world turned upside down mean in our time? Would it mean simply violence perpetrated by different people? Or would it mean that we start to see the details of each other’s lives in ways that lead us to merciful co-existence and conflict resolution? Would it mean that we learn to share space with people unlike us?

Maybe then we would recognize that the spaces we share are truly sacred. Maybe then like Mary our souls would magnify the Lord, reflect the sacred, and truly rejoice in God who connects us to each other no matter where we are.

                                                                                           May it be so. Amen.

Reflecting the Sacred: Sacred People

My grandmother was a sacred person to me. When asked to imagine a person who has made me feel loved, her face is always in the mix. Long before Mariah Carey, she was the Queen of Christmas. Her house was incredible. Her food was incredible. Her hugs were incredible.

Her memory brings me immeasurable joy. But sometimes, if I’m honest, her memory is also a crushing weight to the women in our family. Because we feel the pressure to replicate the magic she made at the holidays. And we fear that if we don’t provide the Norman Rockwell Christmas, then maybe we won’t be remembered as sacred people by those who come after us.

So, since I am tempted to feel that way, I have started practicing remembering all the warmth my grandmother shared with us. And then asking myself what will bring me that warmth this season? What will help me share that warmth with others? How can I best keep my focus on the presence of the sacred in creating and sharing that warmth this season?

Sometimes that has meant trying to recreate dozens upon dozens of her amazing raisin filled cookies with more and less success. Sometimes that has meant sending a Christmas card to over a hundred households. Sometimes that has meant volunteering my time or giving away my money to someone who needs it. Sometimes it has meant choosing not to do everything I could try to do this year because I would rather spend that time paying attention to the sacred people in my life.

Maybe you didn’t have a grandmother like mine. But maybe you carry your own weight of worry, expectation, or a list of things you think you should do or be this season or all year round.

What do we think it takes to make us sacred, safe, or saved?

I think it can be really hard in our world not to be drawn into thinking that there is some amount of money, power, status, consumption, or achievement that can prove us worthy of love and safety. But that’s not the message of the Christmas story, especially not as we find it in the Gospel of Luke.

In the Gospel of Luke the angels proclaim “good news of great joy” that a baby has been born who is full of the sacred presence of God in a way that will set us all free. That baby is not born in Caesar’s palace or even a carefully curated Christmas chateau worthy of a Hallmark movie but rather in a straw-filled stable and placed in a hastily cleaned animal feeding trough.

This child is sacred not because this child is wealthy or a member of an earthly ruling class or because he has not yet spit up all over his cute Christmas outfit before his photo op with Santa. No, this child is born to a rather ordinary, even somewhat scandalous couple while squeezed into an overflow space at a relative’s house while trying to respond to a Caesar-sponsored census for tax purposes.

This child is sacred because this child is bearing the presence of God.

The fact that such a lowly, vulnerable creature born to such a scandalous, relatively impoverished but faith-filled couple is God in the flesh is as the angels proclaim “good news of great joy to all the people.” It’s a sign that God does not dwell only in the holy of holies and does not favor only the most wealthy and ritually pure. God dwells among us. The sacred is here with us, a part of us, whenever, wherever, and whoever we are.

“In 1992, Jeff Balch's mom died of cancer, at the age of 60.” She died on a weekend and trash day at her house was Monday. That Monday Jeff was outside when the trash collector came to wheel the barrel away from his mom’s house. The stranger called out to Jeff, “Hey, how’s Mrs. Balch doing?” Jeff took a deep breath and explained that she had been very sick and died very recently.

The other man was visibly stricken as he walked away. But a moment later he came back with two other men. One was the crew chief who looked Jeff in the eye and asked, “Are you Mrs. Balch’s son? We just wanted you to know your mom was the nicest person on our route.” Jeff, now older than his mom when she died, still remembers those men, and that moment that meant so much to him, when unexpected strangers humanized his grief and mirrored back to him the kindness of his mother.

My sons used to idolize our trash collectors when they were toddlers, waiting excitedly for their big, impressive trucks to come around the corner on Tuesdays mornings. But plenty of people would dismiss those workers as unimportant or unclean.

Shepherds at the time of Jesus' birth were looked down on, too. They were the lowlest of the low on the social ladder, working a thankless job that required long hours and sometimes put them in harm’s way. For their efforts they were considered ritually unclean by the religious establishment. Their testimony was not even admissible in the court of their day.

Yet, who was issued an angelic invitation to the birth of the sacred Christ child? Not King Herod, not wealthy merchants, not even a religious leader, but unclean shepherds were the ones to whom angels sang of the babe lying in the manger. To the shepherds the heavenly host proclaimed the child’s birth, declaring, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors!”

Other translations of the Bible sometimes choose to render this line “and on earth peace, goodwill among people.” Those words may be a little easier to swallow for those of us who believe that God longs for all people to live at peace and through Jesus God’s favor extends to all of us.

Aren’t we all beloved? Aren’t all of us precious to God? How then can we say there are “those whom God favors?”

What I have come to believe is that both things can be true at the same time. We are all precious, sacred to God and because of that God favors the last, the lost, the least.

Rather than the prevailing cultural belief then and now that God’s favor is proven by good fortune and an easy life, the story of the birth of the Christ child in the Gospel of Luke proclaims that God has a special concern for all who suffer. This line from the angels and indeed the entire story of this birth proclaim that God attends to all the suffering places of our hearts and of the world with gentle care and concern as a caring adult tends to a sick child. 

In 2003, a woman named Jennifer Reinhart sleepwalked out of her lofted bedroom and fell 10 feet into her living room. She was put in a medically-induced coma and underwent three surgeries before she even woke up. But once she was conscious she was in incredible pain. The medical staff kept her heavily drugged but the painkillers gave her nightmares and made her sweat through her sheets. One such horrific night she called for the nursing staff who when they found her in such a state explained they would need to move her from the bed. Already wracked with pain her panic went through the roof, unsure if she could endure the additional pain that she expected would come with being moved.

But then a nurse came in who Jennifer remembers as three times her size. He tenderly scooped her out of bed, she told interviewers, “Like a little baby.” “He held me very still and quiet," she remembers. While other nurses changed her sheets, he held Jennifer close to his chest and began to quietly hum. His tenderness and care soothed her body and mind. After that she reports, "I felt sure that I was going to live through this. And that I'd get back home to my children. I wish he could have known just how much he helped me."

That’s how I think God holds all of us. God wraps us up with tenderness and care, especially when we are hurt or discounted, holding all our flesh sacred.

How might it change how we behave if we believed and acted like all people, whether crossing borders, enduring war, facing gun violence, being abused, experiencing homelessness, or even perpetrating crimes, were sacred to God–even imbued with the presence of God? 

I’m not suggesting that we believe and act like everyone is God or that we are all doing everything right. But I do believe that God is the “ground of our being” as the scholar Paul Tillich once said and that we are all connected to God and to each other.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton described a moment of thunderous realization of this truth, “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district,” he writes. “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world…” Merton continues, “If only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

We are all loved by God. And we all have the opportunity to recognize the sacred presence of God in each other and to consciously reflect that sacred presence of eternal love to others. That's an important part of what I think the Christmas story is about–learning to love each other and hold each other with the kind of precious tenderness Mary held the Christ child and pondered the miracle of him in her heart. I think the Christmas story ought to move us to go forth like the shepherds making known this amazing love through our words and our actions.

I think when we look for Christ in other people, it changes how we treat each other and even how we treat ourselves. I think when we look for Christ in other people, we practice holding all people as sacred, precious, and beloved just as God does, mirroring God’s love in the world.

So, whenever I catch myself being tempted to think that this season or this life is about checking boxes and proving my sacredness, I try to remind myself I am already held sacred by God and so is everyone else. When I remember that it does help me live differently not just in this season but in every season. I find myself more loving to others and even to myself. I find myself catching moments of love shining all around me.

Like yesterday, when two grandparents of another student came into the crowded space where my son’s piano recital was being held. They hardly had to look around before a younger family jumped up and offered their seats. Maybe that seems like nothing to you. Maybe it’s just a micro-kindness but I see so much micro and macro meanness that it moved me.

It reminded me that we can still hold sacred the Christ light in each other this Advent and every season.

                                                                                             May it be so. Amen.

Count on Me: Community

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – November 12, 2023

Count on Me: Community – 1 John: 4: 7-12

Nathan Pyle’s comic series, Strange Planet, follows a planet of blue beings without gender or race who have human traditions and behaviors but discuss them in highly technical terminology, such as saying "I crave star damage" instead of "I want to get a sun tan."

One of Pyle’s strips describes well my feelings about the original version of the board game Monopoly. Two aliens are shown with the game between them. One asks, “But how does the game end?” The other replies, “In sadness.”

I have played some fun rounds of original Monopoly, but in my experience it does so often end “in sadness,” and I think that’s probably because it encourages hoarding for some and starving for others. It’s like real life can be but doesn’t have to be.

On more than one occasion, I have played Monopoly with children and adults who couldn’t handle it. Some cry. Some get angry. Some throw pieces or toss the board and storm away.

On more than one occasion though, I’ve played with children who decided the game would be fun if they just agreed to break the rules together by sharing paper money and buildings and avenues, sometimes giving up the rounds entirely just to create a whole new story and imagined life for the little pieces on the board. 

Early Christian communities were breaking the rules, too. They were imagining a whole new way of living and being together. Their renewed way of living was based less on the practices of honor and shame surrounding their blood family or the strict confines of cultural and religious law, and was founded more on the expansive love of God that they knew in Christ.

In letters like the one we read today and descriptions of the earliest communities in the book of Acts, we find that they shared what they had and became a close-knit, family-like network of support for each other. These communities came to include folks of diverse wealth statuses and cultural backgrounds. Those who offered leadership in these communities included young people, older people, women, men, and folks described as eunuchs who existed outside binary gender understandings.

Many were estranged from their blood families either because they had left home to find work or because they were ostracized for their Christ-following beliefs or behaviors. That was the first century community to whom the writer of today’s scripture wrote. Those were the ones he called “Beloved” and encouraged to “love one another.”

Like many of you, I know intimately what it means to have very few or no people in my geographic area who are committed to me by blood ties. In every place I’ve moved I have had to knit myself a new network and while I have a lot of advantages that make it easier I still can’t say it’s easy to do.

I think one of the things that makes it harder is the common myth, to which I am not immune, that each one of us should be sufficient on our own. Or that each marriage should provide all the emotional and social needs either partner ever has. Or that each nuclear family ought to be able to handle all the pressures and responsibilities that they have on their own. According to this myth, friendships are frivolous and intergenerational or communal living is a sign of someone’s failure. But those aren’t things I read in the Bible. Neither are they rules that seem to make us very happy.

No one is an island. Friends are important, and it takes a village to care for anyone. After all, Jesus himself highly valued his friends, those named twelve and others too. He also often set off the miracle of sharing, turning a few loaves and fishes into enough to feed thousands.

In her book, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, Mia Birdsong quotes David Hackett Fisher when she explains that “the word free is derived from the Indo-European friya which means “beloved.” Friend also shares this common root with freedom.”

In this country that so highly values individual freedom, what if we understood freedom to mean a network of friendship, belovedness, and well-being? What if we understood freedom to mean that together we can ensure that we all have the things we need–love, food, shelter, safety? I think that’s the kind of Christ-like belovedness the writer of today’s scripture is encouraging their audience toward.

I think it would be lovely to see how that could be acted out on a nation-wide or global stage. But in the meantime, I take a lot of comforting hope from the practices of this kind of community building that I see in churches and beyond churches, too.

I talked to you last week about how much I love trick-or-treating because of its potential as a love-filled community-building practice, but I also see the community-building potential in so many practices that so many of us engage in on a weekly, monthly, annual, or occasional basis. I see it in our church’s weekly Men’s Breakfast and Sacred Stories groups. I see it in baptisms, in potlucks, in Sunday Schools, in Soup Kettle, in fellowship times, and in baby dedications. I see it in Thanksgiving gatherings, in book clubs, in supper co-ops, in monthly full moon bike rides, in the annual Gail Borden Public Library Dia De Los Muertos ofrenda, in LGBTQ Pride Parades, and in neighborhood block parties.

There are plenty of pundits who will tell you to be afraid, very afraid of your neighbors. I’m not saying don’t lock your doors or don’t take proper security measures. I’m saying we’re living in an epidemic of loneliness and the only way out is by actions that build community.

Whether we name Christ’s presence or not, I believe we find that holy love anywhere we are knitting together networks of kindness, neighborliness, and care. 

Today’s scripture talks about the costs of Christ’s sacrifice. Among us we have different understandings of how that works and what it means. Today’s scripture uses the word atone however. It could be literally understood to mean at-one. Across the spectrum of Christian understanding of what Christ’s saving work is and means for us, there is strong agreement that God’s love as known in Christ makes us at-one with each other and at-one with God.

While I’m not sure this scripture, likely written well after the time of Jesus as an interpretation of a community of followers, names entirely my understanding of or experience of Christ, I do know that love and community building often cost something. Sometimes it’s actual money that helps give you enough bandwidth to build community. But I’m thinking more of other costs. I’m thinking about the costs of vulnerability and the costs of time to put yourself out there to give or receive someone’s help or attention.

Those networks of community are not always easy to build. They will cost us something. But I believe the potential love and freedom we can experience and share is worth it and is from God.

Before moving here eight years ago, I pastored a Church of the Brethren in rural central Iowa. Both my parents and extended family and Parker’s too lived hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania. And we moved there pregnant with our first child. We didn’t really understand at the time exactly how hard it would be to start new careers and become parents so far from any established network.

A saving grace was the patterns that church had for building community even with the pastor’s family. They held weekly potlucks and invited us to all their age-based small group gatherings. But there were also one or two families in particular who took us in and gave us childcare breaks when we didn’t know how we would handle it all.

One family, whose children were older, was particularly adept at being community for us in worship. While we tried to juggle parenting and pastoring, they would slide into the pew behind us with a bagful of age-appropriate toys, they would make encouraging or silly faces at our curious toddler driving a toy truck along a pew back, and they would even take a screaming baby off our hands to bounce in the back until the service was over. They built this relationship with us over time. We learned to trust each other. It was never lost on me though that they paid a price for supporting our children and us in that they could have sat there in the pew and enjoyed their worship experience encumbered perhaps only by grimacing at a struggling family. But they never seemed to hesitate to scoop us up, and they always seemed to enjoy the relationship they built with our growing children.

Parker and I were supposed to be the pastors, but it was this family who showed us God. For, as this scripture proclaims, God is love. God is love far beyond the connections of community. But for many of us community is where we meet God whenever we encounter the warm glow of love in the laughter of a friend, in the bowl of soup shared, in voices raised in harmony, or in feet washed.

Are our eyes and hearts open to perceive that holy love in our lives?

Are we ready to identify, value, or start new community-building acts?

It’s not always easy but I believe there’s a lot of healing that can happen when we practice building and rebuilding communities in which we can share that holy love. It’s the only antidote to hoarding, loneliness, and violence that I know of. I think it’s how we become the kind of people who can say with integrity, you can count on me.

I give thanks to God that I can count on so many of you.

May we all learn to count on God, too.

                                                                                            May it be so. Amen.

Count on Me: Connection

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – November 5, 2023

Count on Me: Connection – Matthew 22: 34-40

It’s pretty easy to see meanness in the world today. It seems like its own pandemic. There’s the horrific violence wrought in Israel and Gaza. There are the mass shootings in the US, most recently in Maine. There are instances of domestic violence throughout the Fox Valley and all too close to home. Then there’s just the meanness that’s all too common among folks who used to be friends, all over social media, or even at the checkout counter. I think it’s understandable that many of us would often feel overwhelmed and discouraged, maybe even to the point of despair.

Things weren’t all sunshine and roses in Jesus’s day either. Rome violently occupied his country. And the religious leaders could be downright mean to each other, to the people, and to him - as we see, violently mean, too. 

Today’s passage from Matthew begins with infighting:

“When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.”

Given the vast array of religious law and its history of interpretation, it was basically an impossible question. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus quotes Deuteronomy and Leviticus but then he turns the question on its head, declaring:

“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The commandments? Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

The Greek here for love is the big one. It’s agape love that is big enough even for enemies. It’s the kind of love we can practice even when we don’t agree. It’s the kind of love we can practice even when we don’t much like each other right now. It’s the kind of love we can practice cultivating even in a world of violence and meanness. Because agape isn’t about returning an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth. That big love is not about being kind and gracious to people who are already kind and gracious to us. No, that agape love is next level love. It’s the kind of love that changes the math. It refuses to return meanness for meanness. Instead, it returns meanness with a focus on what we really mean to each other.

I don’t know about you but I love Halloween. I love Halloween because it begins the season I like to call the Season of Great American Folk Art when so many of us trick out our houses, our vehicles, our workplaces, and ourselves with festive decorations or costumes. I love Halloween because we get to pretend to be someone else if we want. It’s a playfulness even adults can join in on. But most of all I love Halloween because it’s the one night a year that neighbors open their doors to strangers with a wide, wide welcome. It doesn’t matter if you’re wearing weird clothes, too much make-up, or if you are actually a little scary, the idea is you will be welcomed to the door and given good things.

Growing up, I lived in a close-knit rural community, where it was common for my sister, my Dad, and me as a merry band of trick-or-treaters, to go all the way into the house of the person whose door we knocked on. Then the adult with the candy was supposed to guess who was under the costumes. We were related to a lot of them. Others we saw at church or on a softball field or at school. So, they were pretty good at guessing. But if they didn’t know our names, it was an opportunity to reintroduce ourselves to our neighbors. Too often and for too long to my candy-focused brain, my Dad would then sit and visit before we could move on to the next house. I have never experienced trick-or-treating like this in any other place I have lived. But I think it’s just a more intense and deliberate version of what Halloween can be: a night of community-building and connection-making, especially for the kids. It can be an opportunity for children to learn their community is a place where they are known and cared for. It can be a night of abundant neighborliness.

Jesus has a pretty broad definition of neighbor in the gospels. In Luke, a similar interaction with a “lawyer” leads to the story of the Good Samaritan and the understanding that neighborly actions can come from unexpected people. In the Sermon on the Mount in this Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. I feel fairly confident that Jesus would welcome all the ghouls, goblins, and fairy tale princesses at the door with whatever delicious things and the warmest neighborliness he could afford.

What if we could greet each other with that expectation of good things and with that wide, wide welcome all year round? What kind of neighborly, agape love-connections would we make? How might we affect the meanness of the world?

That’s the hope I know I have to carry. It’s the hope that loving big will do some big good – maybe not in all the ways I’d like or on the timetable I’d prefer, but in ways that could not possibly be estimated to be insignificant. That big neighbor love to which Christians are called gives me hope in this too often too mean world.

What Jesus teaches though is to “love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s a teaching predicated on the assumption that we love ourselves. Some of us clearly do. Others of us struggle for many different reasons.

There’s a strand of folks in the movement we call the Church of the Brethren and beyond who were taught to always put others before ourselves. For some of us, this meant we always put ourselves last, we learned to ignore our own needs, and we maybe even feel that talk of “loving ourselves” is self-serving drivel rather than something Jesus assumed we were already doing. Many of us who feel this way would be appalled to realize we were treating our neighbors in this fashion. But I don’t know how we get good at genuinely loving other people when we are so very unkind to ourselves. I can’t believe that’s what Jesus meant in this passage. I can’t believe that does much to undo the meanness in the world. My experience is that it only adds to it.

Extending neighborly, loving connection to ourselves can be hard though when we don’t have a lot of practice. It takes baby steps, and it can feel very vulnerable. For me, this year I’ve been practicing loving myself by allowing myself to make more friends and spend time with them. That can be pretty vulnerable, just being with someone for fun instead of for pastoral, therapeutic, or business reasons. Maybe some of you can relate, but I have found that cultivating a loving connection with myself has helped me tremendously to cultivate loving connections with others, too.

It’s weird how all these avenues of love seem connected. It’s like it’s all one big river, soup, or super highway. Because my experience of trying to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength has led me to be able to better experience love and to love others, too. And the reverse has also been true, at least for me. Maybe it’s more like electricity. Maybe it’s like God is the ultimate source of love, and we can plug into that love and share it with others – sometimes, yes, in shockingly unexpected ways. Because when we live out our call as followers of Christ to practice loving connection to God, to self, and to neighbor, we may just be surprised at what may happen.

This weekend at the IL/WI district conference I ate lunch with people who didn’t look like me and didn’t believe like me. I sang other people’s songs and some of my favorites, too. I heard about church clothing closets and dinners for teachers and food pantries and after-school ministries. I didn’t really want to go, to be honest. In the past it’s felt more like an all-day infomercial than anything spiritually uplifting. But this year I was touched by moving tributes to churches that had closed, generous purchases of homemade pie, and connections made across difference and distance. When the most controversial question of the day rose to the floor, the discussion ended quickly, and the paper ballot was decisive. That doesn’t always happen. I was surprised. But I wondered did connection have something to do with it? Have we learned something about how to be with each other just as we are? Maybe so. Maybe not. Maybe time will tell.

But I believe there’s a lot of healing that can happen when we practice agape love-connection with others, ourselves, and God. It’s the only antidote to violence and meanness that I know of. I think it’s how we build the kind of beloved communities God wants to see. I think it’s how we become the kind of people who can say with integrity, you can count on me.

I give thanks to God that I can count on so many of you.

May we all learn to count on God, too.

                                                                                            May it be so. Amen.

Emerge: Letting Go

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 29, 2023

Emerge: Letting Go – Exodus 16: 9-12

I had never rock-climbed before this past weekend. I was the only person in my family who hadn’t. My 11 and 9 year-olds scurried up the artificial rock face at the indoor gym and expertly belayed back down before I had even figured out how to clip in my harness. I was relieved to find that going up, while a workout for my under-used arms, wasn’t too bad on the beginner climbs I was trying. For me, it was the auto-belaying back down that was the problem.

If you’ve never rock-climbed before like me, let me explain. There’s a harness that goes around your waist and around each leg that you have to tighten securely around you. Then there’s a sturdy loop that clips into what’s called a belay line. In our case that Friday it went up the 10-30 foot wall to attach to a sort of mechanical pulley system called an auto-belay. Its job is not to hold you in place on the wall but rather to slow your fall to something safe and supposedly controlled. But the control part, it turns out, does depend somewhat on your keeping your body oriented to the wall and landing, if possible, on your feet.

Maybe you’re already imagining the movie montage some producers could have made of me landing haphazardly on my butt over and over again and then scraping the side of my body pathetically down the wall a few times, too. In fact I didn’t land successfully on my feet without falling down until the very last attempt of the day when I was so gassed I was barely making it up ten feet. But that one successful landing felt incredible after all I’d been through.

What didn’t feel incredible was the first time I realized I was 30 feet in the air and now, somehow, I needed to get back down. I started cheating, down-climbing, which you’re not supposed to do. The kids, watching of course, called me out. So, I stopped, and I froze. I clung to the holds in front of me, and I felt the sweat start to eke out. My heartbeat thumped through my whole body like someone had turned the bass up to 11 on my internal stereo.

I knew what I needed to do next. I needed to take both hands off the wall holds and let the belay slow my plummet to the ground. But I couldn’t. I didn’t trust it. Suddenly, in the air, that wall was my only means of salvation. I started wondering how long my arms would hold out, and if someone would bring me a snack, if I just stayed up there the rest of the time.

I don’t know that I was up there a long time but it felt like a long time. I heard my kids call up from the ground, “You can do it, Mom! Let go! Just let go!” I don’t know if it was my love for them or my spite at not wanting to be shown up by my preteens but those were the words that did it for me. “You can do it, Mom. Just. Let go.” 

It wasn’t pretty how I got down from there. But I did then. And of course, being my overly analytic self, I saw the metaphor pretty clearly. Because there are a lot of other things in my life that I’m clinging to that aren’t actually helping me. Sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s less obvious that what I’m depending on to save me is actually my very undoing.

Maybe you’ve got your own walls you’re clinging to. Whether it’s overwork, over worry, perfectionism, people pleasing, judgmental attitudes, hoarding of any kind, control over a certain situation, or the last illusion of your independence, so many of us have so many things we’d rather trust than God. 

The ancient Hebrew people in today’s story were not in a well-lit gym with remixed 90s music cheerfully playing from the speakers, their worst concern losing face in front of their children. They were in the wilderness, and their worst concern was starvation. They had fled Egyptian slavery, but they were starting to reconsider the wisdom of all that, given their situation of being far from civilization and any obvious source of food or water.  

They complained to their human leaders, Aaron and Moses, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

They were understandably afraid, upset, and unsure if they were safe. What kind of God would put them in such a situation? What kind of God indeed?

In Exodus God is a very interesting character with wide-ranging human emotions, including jealousy and wrath. In Exodus, God hardens Pharaoh's heart and either plans or allows for the deaths of many Egyptian babies. In Exodus 15, God is even described as a warrior. That was a common motif at the time with the variation that this God was a warrior for the impoverished rather than the powerful. It’s an important distinction but still this God is the one who makes things happen for good or for ill. In this understanding of God there’s a pretty strong correlation between things going well for you and God taking a shine to you, as well as the reverse. If life is hard for you then you can be sure you’ve done something wrong by God. It’s an ancient idea of a higher power, and it’s one that’s still very prevalent today among various religious traditions.

I understand why humans would write about such a God. It’s a way to give life meaning, to explain the unexplainable, and maybe a way even to control each other if you can be convinced that I have lots of power because God loves me more than you. But I don’t believe in that God. Or at the very least I can’t trust that God. If that God is my belay line, no thank you. I will find another way off this wall.

But there are other understandings of God in Exodus and throughout the Bible. God describes Godself to Moses as the Great I AM who always has been and always will be. God is very concerned about the enslaved Hebrew people. God longs for their freedom. God hears the complaints of the people in this story and provides them with the food and water they need.

One common interpretation of this story is that God is one on whom we can depend. God is the one we can trust no matter what. I wonder how true that is for you, and what kind of God it is you’re depending on.

Personally, I no longer depend on a God who will make everything go my way. I’ve let go of that. That kind of God certainly hasn’t earned my trust. Because the world, while not too terribly unkind to me, is not nearly kind enough to too many people I love. No, the only God I can practice trusting in would be the ineffable heartbeat of this incredibly blessed and broken creation. That heartbeat always has been and always will be. That God is more a force of nature than something humanoid, but it looks like us in that we bear the unbearable image of its inexhaustible, overwhelming love.

What else is there really to trust in? Nothing else remains. Even these bones that bear us up will rot in the ground before that well of love that ties the universe together will ever run dry. That’s what there will always be enough of. Even when the well dries up and the bread runs out, the universe will be made of love, and despite the reality of all that troubles us, we can trust in the rhythm of that eternal heartbeat.

About the mysterious manna in the wilderness, Moses told them what to gather: only enough for each day. Some of the people, being people, of course tried to gather more than they needed. Because what’s safer than having enough for today but having enough for tomorrow, too? I can’t fault the logic. But guess what? It got wormy and moldy like the rice and beans I thought I so smartly hoarded in 2020. 

They had to learn the hard way how to trust that tomorrow there would be enough and the day after and the day after and the day after there would be enough. What does that mean to us in a country where affluence and lack live side-by-side? What if tomorrow there’s not enough regardless of how much I have today?

At least if that’s our question we’re starting to talk about the things that really matter. Who has enough to eat and how can we make it so that more people are included in that? Who is it that knows they are loved and how can we make it so that more of us know that, too? What keeps us from having enough and sharing enough and loving enough? Maybe that’s what we can let go of. Maybe that holds us back from what we don’t really need any more. Maybe that’s what we can set down. Maybe that’s what we can ask forgiveness for. Maybe that’s what we can let go of and find ourselves free to trust in what really matters and in the one who will really keep us safe in the end. 

Like a hermit crab putting down a too tight old shell

like a craftsperson turning old t-shirts into a new quilt,

like a butterfly breaking free of its bonds,

or like a rock climber safely falling to the ground,

maybe we too can practice trusting

that letting go of all we do not need

and opening up instead to the sweet grace and love of God

is what will really set us free now and evermore.           

May it be so. Amen.

Unwrap: Waking Up

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 15, 2023

Unwrap: Waking Up – John 11: 38-44

I don’t know about you but I learned to dehumanize people pretty early in life. I remember my first grade teacher made a big deal about this one boy, we’ll call him Dale, and how Dale’s fingernails always had dirt under them. Dale lived on a farm. He got free lunch. His clothes didn’t fit. He had holes in his shoes. He stunk. No one would sit near him.

Where we all could hear, the teacher would check Dale’s fingernails every day to see if they had dirt under them. When they did, she would tsk, tsk, tsk and send him to the sink to wash while berating him for his lack of hygiene skills. We all heard. We all saw. We all learned.

We didn’t learn good hygiene. We learned that Dale was less than the rest of us. He was less than the rest of us all through elementary school and middle school and high school. He was mocked and bullied and ostracized like every other kid whose poverty was visible at school.

The term at my school for those kids was “scruff.” It was the bottom of the bottom rung. It was, socially, worse than death. It was as if those students were invisible to the rest of us.

If I had to give you a definition of sin, I would tell you it was what the students and some of the teachers both did to the Dales of our school. It was what we did to each other. It was a little taste of hell on earth, and though I think picturing God with human characteristics is just what our mortal minds like to do to wrap our heads around a concept that our words can never fully explain, I imagine that kind of sin does “reek in the nostrils of the almighty God.”

That’s how Martin Luther King Jr. once described “peace” that meant a quiet acquiescence to violently enforced racial segregation. He said that kind of peace “reeks in the nostrils of the almighty God.”

“Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’” 

There are a lot of places in our world that plainly have a stench. We could, I suppose, point to actual landfills and their toll on the earth. But I’m thinking more about the stench that’s coming off our human hearts.

I’m not talking about people who are poor or who have to go to school still with the manure smell of their family farm on their clothes. I’m talking about all the little ways we make each other less than.

We like to make poor people less than. It makes the rest of us feel a little insulated from the dangers of poverty. But there are a hundred other ways we decide all the someone elses or even our own selves are less than good for anything.

We set up hierarchies and call some people good and other people bad. Then we spend the rest of our time making sure we look good and no one ever confuses us for those less than human bad people or finds out that we are anything less than “good” all of the time.   

The bad news is we’re all the same in the sense that we all live, we all die, we all make mistakes, we all hurt, we all love, we’re all healing from something whether or not we care to admit it. No amount of posturing or hierarchy or money is going to change that, although a minimum amount of money in this life, it turns out, makes it a lot easier to bear a lot of things.

I don’t always see it these days though. I see a lot more hate and a lot more rage. I see people driving like their own lives don’t mean very much to them–let alone the lives of other people walking, biking, or driving nearby.

I have pretty much quit social media because that seems like a place people go just to hate each other.

The news is full of states passing laws to remove healthcare from women and trans people who need it. The news is full of wars and the necessary dehumanization it takes to launch one.

Do you know I actually had someone tell me this week they prayed to God that Israel would kill as many people as possible on the Palestinian side. People of all ages. As many as possible because they are, this person said, “the wrong kind of people.” This person told me those are all people God wants dead.

Meanwhile, I led an online workshop not a month ago with one of the smartest, funniest, most-committed-to-other-people’s-welfare young women I ever met who lives in Palestine. I don’t know how she’s doing. But I pray for her every day.

So, I’ll tell you, I find it very easy to sympathize with Martha in this story. Her brother is dead. There’s not a lot of hope here. If Jesus had come earlier that would be one story. But now it’s too little too late. Why crack open the tomb? Whether it’s a tomb or our hardened hearts, we know what’s inside has a stench.

But Jesus does it anyway.

“Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”

I wish I could say there was a time when I stopped dehumanizing other people. But I’m still guilty of it all the time. Judgment is a hard habit to break. And the thing is it does a lot of breaking to the person doing the judgment, too.

But I can tell you about one of the times I started to learn that even I was doing it. I was working at a church in San Francisco. I was the Christian Ed Director. The person who was running the church’s meal assistance and homeless outreach program was named Megan Rohrer, who would go on to be the first openly transgender minister and bishop in the Lutheran tradition and be profiled by national and international media outlets.

At the time, the people benefitting from this program became famous to me for schooling me in my ignorance. I would maybe stop by and say hi at meals with the Welcome ministry. But I would never sit down, and I would especially never eat. I didn’t want anyone to think I needed the meals. One day they stopped me and invited me in. When I wouldn’t eat and Megan asked why, that’s what I told them, I didn’t need the food as much as everyone else there. One man actually dropped his plate. Megan sighed a deep sigh then looked up at me and said, “You obviously don’t know what we’re doing here.”

What they were doing there wasn’t just dishing up food. It was dishing up dignity. It was breaking bread and sharing a little humanity. I was embarrassed. But I got it. Eventually. Well, I’m still working on it anyway.  

“So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said [to our shared Holy Parent], I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”

As people living in this current stage of scientific advancement, I think you would be well within your rights to ask me, “Pastor, do you believe this actually happened this way? Did Jesus really raise his friend from the dead?”

And I would have to tell you I don’t know.

I know the world is a lot bigger and more ancient and more mysterious than I know. Any really good scientist will agree. And it’s hard to rule out something that happened so long ago that anyone who saw it has been dead for two millennia.

What I do know is that whether or not it happened just like this would have been of much less consequence to the people who first wrote it down. What mattered most to them was not journalistic veracity but the deeper meaning they were trying to impart with any given story.

You can take your own meaning from Lazarus rising from the dead. You can believe what you will. Today, the meaning that rises to the surface for me is the extraordinary power of one person paying attention to another person. I have witnessed that extraordinary power turn lives around. I would say it has brought many from a dark, stinking tomb. I would call it the love of God and I know that sometimes, inexplicably, we discover it outside of human actions, but very often we need other humans for us to realize that the universe is actually made up of this extraordinarily powerful love.

I have come to believe in the power of that love to meet us and change us in every hurt and stinking place in our lives. I have come to believe that love unbinds us from all the messed up things we’ve done and the messed up things that have been done to us, allowing us to heal and to trust that we can experience wholeness and holiness anyway. I have come to believe that love is big. It is bigger than big.

My mother’s name is Robin. R-O-B-I-N like the bird. They say a baby learns to recognize their mother’s voice in the womb. I would recognize hers anywhere. It used to make me jump when I heard her call me by my middle name. In a crowd at church I could pick out her strong soprano no matter where she sat. If I want to get goosebumps all over, I can still close my eyes and hear her sing, “You are my sunshine.”    

Her father sang her the same song when she was small. Once, I protested when she sang it for my sister. I thought the song was for me alone. (Her only sunshine!) That day she told me that her love was big. She said her love was more than big enough for both my sister and I.

God’s love too, I believe, is big.  Her love is more than big enough for the lot of us--for all her creation.

For Israel and Palestine. For Democrats and Republicans.

For rich and poor. For you and for me.

For the parts of you that you hope no one ever sees.

God’s big love still calls into those tomb places, unbind him, unbind her, unbind them, let us all go.

Let us be together. Loved.

And like those freshly emerged, unbound butterflies, flying free.

May it be so. Amen. 

Coming Out: Leaving Comfortable Places

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 1, 2023

Coming Out: Leaving Comfortable Places – Hebrews 11: 1-3

I think it might be fair to say there were as many different experiences of the pandemic lockdowns as there were humans. Some of us never completely locked ourselves away whether by choice or due to being deemed an essential worker. Some of us welcomed the break from doing and peopling, at least initially. Some of us descended into close quarters chaos because we were working from home and supervising children doing school at home all at the same time. Some of us were stuck at home in an abusive situation. Some of us didn’t have much of a home to be stuck in and found resources growing scarcer. Some of us experienced profound loneliness, isolation, anxiety, and depression that wreaked havoc on our health in myriad ways.

So, maybe it should be no surprise that ending or transitioning those lockdown protocols happened differently for different people, too. What many of us shared though was an awkwardness to transitioning those protocols. Late night shows joked about the too true reality of Americans struggling to remember how to talk to each other in person.

I know there were some people who I knew for months if not years before I saw the bottom half of their face or the rest of their body not confined by a Zoom screen. I just would never have imagined that experience pre-2020.

And there were awkward parts to picking things up in a different way. I wonder if we’d gotten comfortable with our pandemic cocoons even if we didn’t particularly like why we were stuck in them. I wonder, too, how much we’re still in a place of transition as individuals, as families, and as a faith community, navigating the awkwardness of living into this new reality together.

There are likely many other reasons among us today, too, for finding ourselves in a time of transition and for feeling maybe not unlike a cautious caterpillar turned butterfly starting to pry open our cocoons. Emerging into new realities and new identities is difficult work often filled with anxiety and unknowing.

The writer of this book of the Bible we call Hebrews seemed to understand that predicament, imparting this lovely, encouraging bit of poetry that the NRSV renders: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith is what it takes to face the anxiety and unknowing of any change.

The audience of this book of the Bible were in a time of enormous change. They were at the forefront of a diverging faith movement that saw them persecuted by Rome and at odds with their own cultural and religious hierarchies. It seems to me they wondered: is it even worth it? As much as we believe in the truth and good news of Christ, is it worth all the effort and struggle we’re undergoing to live out this new reality and new identity?

Into that question the writer speaks of the conviction of things not yet seen and encourages them to believe in and to live out the good news of God’s love in Christ as they have come to know it. “Indeed, by faith,” the writer goes on, “our ancestors received approval.” Nearly the rest of the chapter continues to cover the story of Abraham and Moses and other ancient Israelite ancestors who put their faith in God to live into a new reality and a new identity.

It even turns out the Greek for approval could also be translated as testimony, bear record, or report. Maybe the writer means to convey that the faith of the ancestors was rewarded.

Looking back, we can see how those who have come before us took risks that bore tremendous outcomes. We don’t always know when we’re living through it what risks and ventures of faith that we take now will one day lead to the world we want to see. But neither did our forebears know. Yet, we are the recipients of so much risk taking that has come before.

Standing in this pulpit before you today, I am the recipient of so many women preachers and their allies who broke open the way when others would have kept it closed to men only.

These days, I am moved by the Pacific Northwest District’s intention to ordain my friend and colleague Elizabeth Ullery Swenson this month despite her identity as an openly queer woman and the denomination’s lack of official support for her full inclusion as a church member and as a gifted, faith leader.

My prayer is that young people in our congregation and everywhere would have the opportunity to be part of a larger community of faith that welcomes them with open arms in the fullness of who God has made them to be.

I am willing to keep faith in that yet coming wider church reality even though it is too often not the one I currently see before me.

What is the reality and the identity God has put on your heart to imagine into being? What is it you pray for faith in even when it is not yet what you can see?

I believe every step we take toward that new reality is a way of our bearing testimony to all that God is yet bringing to be in our world and in our hearts. We may not live to see all that our efforts will bring to bear but we can trust that like those who have come before us, God will use the risks we take and the effort we put forth to help something new and wonderful emerge.

“By faith,” the writer of Hebrews claims, “we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”

So many of us already believe in so much that we cannot see –at least not with our naked eyes. We wash our hands to free ourselves from germs. We take medicines and vaccines to fight off invisible viruses. We trust that the sun will come up in the morning and the spring will come after the winter even when the hour is still cold and dark.

So many of us here believe in this invisible thing called love.

So many of us here believe in the invisible presence of God.

Maybe we have seen love in action.

Maybe we have felt God in those loving actions and beyond them, too.

However we have practiced faith in what we cannot see has prepared us for the next step in continuing to grow that muscle of faith.

However we have practiced faith has prepared us a little more to support each other when our faith wanes or to have the humility to ask for support when we need it, too.

However we have practiced faith has been an inoculation, preparing us so that whatever we go through, we can have a better chance of trusting that whatever the future holds the God of love will meet us there, too.

A caterpillar turning into a butterfly is one of the most amazing processes of the natural world. But if you’ve ever watched it happen up close. You may know that it doesn’t happen all at once. There has to be a hungry little caterpillar. Then the long cocoon or chrysalis stage. Then even when it’s time to start emerging, that doesn’t happen fast. It’s slow and awkward.

As a child, I remember a few times my mom adopted Monarchs for us to protect indoors through their growing stages. We would walk along the railroad near my grandparents’ house, looking for the teeny-tiny eggs on the undersides of the broad Milkweed leaves. We must have harvested plenty of Milkweed to feed those voracious growing yellow, black, and white wormy things because I remember vividly the green chrysalises they eventually formed. As a child it seemed an interminable wait for that butterfly to come out. Do you think it will be today, Mom? What about today? I must have asked her a million times. I don’t know, it looks a little a different today. Don’t you think? And it happened. Eventually it happened.

But there was a lot of waiting involved. For a young, growing me, it took a lot of faith to believe everything my mom said would happen was true. And there was no guarantee every little one would make it either. I think that made the waiting even worse. But it was good practice because I have found there is so much awkward, uncomfortable, anxious waiting in life.

Change is guaranteed, and it’s not guaranteed to be comfortable nor to come with clear instructions.

Whether we are growing up or growing old,

Whether we are starting something new or ending something else,

Whether we are hopeful or discouraged, change is with us.

One way or another we will have to leave our comfortable places.

The good news is that even when we cannot be sure what the future holds and however we are being called to emerge into something new, the God who calls forth the butterfly and who called Christ forth from the tomb, will meet us on the other side of our emergence, too.  

For as the writer of Hebrews proclaims, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.”

May you go forth trusting in yet invisible things, too.

May it be so. Amen.