Category: The Comma

She’s moving clear across the country to a city where she has never lived and doesn’t know a soul.  But something is calling her away from this familiar place to something that is new.  She’s clearing out clutter and packing her bags to make room for change.

“How do you feel?” I asked her.

“Excited and terrified.”

I laughed.  I know those feelings well, just a couple of weeks away at that time from a wedding.  There were so many beginnings in my life – I was walking into a new marriage the next weekend and the week after that taking on new responsibilities as moderator of our Conference Board of Directors.

In both cases, I was afraid that I might fail and crash the boat. But something was calling me too. I knew if I didn’t say yes to these opportunities in my personal and professional life, I would step away from something that wanted to grow and bloom in me.  To say no, I would have to step away from myself.  But I was scared too, apprehensive.

“What enables you to step through the fear and go anyway?” I asked her.

“My faith”, she responded.

“I don’t believe in a God who makes things happen but I do believe God is present in all things.  If I go and things don’t work out, I know God will be there in that as well.”

That’s just the kind of faith I need – the kind of faith that might enable me to step into the unknown in hope and trust.  It’s the kind of faith I long for.

The theme of our Conference Annual Meeting in Wenatchee was “Out on a Limb.”  Folks shared stories like Kathryn and Hillary about how they stepped out of their familiar into a new thing – giving a year of their lives to live work for the United Church of Christ Justice Leadership Program.  They lived in community, did work they had never done before, and lived on a small stipend.  While other friends were stepping into jobs and further education, they were stepping out to make a difference in the world as they felt called to do.

And folks shared stories like Bill who heard Jesus’ calls to go be with those on the margins and learn with them.

Their stories give me the courage to step forward into new life, a new marriage, new work, new beginnings.

May the witness of those who step into the fear and go anyway be inspiration to all of us today to do the same.

Kathryn Murdock: You can’t go much more out on a limb than taking a year of your young adult life to do justice while living on a $400/month stipend, in intentional community and in a very tiny apartment.

Going out on a limb through the Justice Leadership Program wasn’t always easy. In fact, going out on a limb is not supposed to be easy – it should stretch you and enable you to grow. While going out on a live can be hard, it can also be profound and life-changing.

In the Justice Leadership Program, I learned how to live out my passions and how to be a leader in ways I would have never learned if I had not been a part of this program. It also helped me to find my place, both in leadership and community, as a young adult in the church.

Hillary Coleman: For me, the Justice Leadership Program enabled me to live out my passion through working at the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness. Of course the program was challenging but it also helped me grow and it has been exciting to see the advocacy work I’m working on, on a daily basis reflected in churches work around the conference.

The other way I went out on a limb through this program was being part of a new church community at All Pilgrims Christian Church which was a big change for me since I had grown up and attended University Congregational UCC my whole life. Through this experience, I learned new ways of worship and different ways of how to be in community together.

The Pacific Northwest Conference has done a gone out on a limb to support the Justice Leadership Program by supporting young leaders and encouraging churches to not just talk the talk but walk the walk by doing justice and advocacy work. It’s now time to take the next step with the Justice Leadership Jubilee Program by supporting older members of our congregation to lead in advocacy work as well.

To learn more about the Justice Leadership Program check out http://justiceleadership.org .  And for more info about the program and/or how to apply contact Elizabeth Dickinson jlp.elizabeth@gmail.com and Rev. Rich Gamble rich.gamble@keystoneseattle.org

Bill Kirlin-Hackett:  At University Congregational, as we celebrate 125 years, not as old as some and older than many, we look at our mission in various ways, to include around housing and homelessness. It is truly timely. A tent city resides in one of our parking lots. In the past two weeks, regional conversations on homelessness met in our space and focused on evictions. Here is a description of an eviction from Matthew Drummond’s new book, “Evicted.” The movers hired by the landlord have started moving all the belongings of this tenant onto a truck to be put into storage at the tenant’s expense.

“As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene; the speed and violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink, poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call?  Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.”

This happens hundreds of times every week across the country. To change this harm, we at University, and others, will need to go out onto the limb. For some of us, shock will come; for others, at minimum, significant trauma. We can dull our senses in response, go into retreat, or open ourselves to greater awareness and action. The truth is that our being out on the limb isn’t about us. The limb onto which we go is not empty. It is already occupied. A few look like us perhaps, but most are less easily recognized. We call them the least, the lost, the lonely, and the left behind. More often than not, when we arrive on that limb, when we see faces that have that look, we hear from them, “no matter who you are, no matter where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”  Amazingly, outside our sanctuaries, on the limb, we are welcomed by unexpected if imperiled hosts. Leaving our palaces, as happened in Exodus, to go out in humility onto a limb where others barely survive. God accompanies us. Yes, God is already there before us.

To learn more about Bill’s ministry in the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, see http://itfhomelessness.org

 

 

 

“Our texts are fine.  It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together, that’s the problem.”  Cameron, College Junior

How are your conversations going?  Have you sparked any conversations to life by adding a good dose of curiosity, humor and impudence to the table – some good conversational nerve to talk about what might be hard or scary to talk about?  Have you found some conversations veering in directions you never could have imagined?  How’s that been?

But perhaps before blogging a few weeks ago about how to spark a conversation to life, I should have started by talking about how to put out a good conversational fire.  Before we teach our kids how to light a match, we better teach them what to do when the match drops to the floor and starts smoldering on the rug.

So you want to put out a conversational fire?  Try putting a cell phone on the table.

Studies show that the mere presence of a phone of the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about.  If we think we might be interrupted, we keep the conversations light and focused on topics of little controversy or consequence.

And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection as well.   Empathy is the ability to feel another’s pain, to show com-passion, “suffering with” another in their struggle.   For the past ten years there’s been a sharp decline in the markers for empathy among college students.  The relationship between empathy and the new presence of digital communications is the subject of a new book by renowned media scholar Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation:  The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.

Why do we spend so much time messaging each other if we end up feeling less connected to each other?  Turkle’s interviews show that in the short term online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation.  If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control.  And texting and emailing and posting let us present the self we want to be.  We can edit and retouch.

Turkle calls it the Goldilocks effect:

 “We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance – not too close, not too far, just right.”

The downside of mere online connections however, is that human relationships are rich, messy and demanding.  When we clean up our relationships with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection.  The fire goes out.

Don’t worry Turkle’s not a Luddite and she doesn’t want us to give up our beloved smart phones but she does want us to understand their effects on us so we use them with greater intention and live differently with them.

Texts, tweets and emails all can effectively generate a lot of fire of connection and have an incredible ability to make stuff happen.  But there is something else that is necessary for building a life of connection as well – connecting to yourself.

“You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something.  That’s what the phones are taking away.  The ability to just sit there.  That’s just being a person.”  (Louis C.K., Actor and Comedian)

So, slow down, Turkle advises.  Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself.  To have them, you have to learn to listen to your own voice.  A first step is to slow down sufficiently to make this possible.  Today, a quarter of American teenagers will be connected to a device within five minutes of waking up.  Most teenagers send one hundred texts a day.  Eighty percent sleep with their phones.  Forty-four percent do not “unplug” – ever.  When is there time in your day to hear your own voice?

Obey the seven-minute rule.  It takes at least seven minutes to see how a conversation is going to unfold.  Don’t go to your phone before those seven minutes pass.  If there is a lull in the conversation, let it be.  Learn to see boredom as an opportunity to find something interesting within yourself.  Conversation, like life, has silences and boring bits.

Finally, choose the right tool for the job.  There is nothing wrong with texting or emailing or videoconferencing.  And there is everything right with making them technically better, more intuitive, easier to use.  But no matter how good they get, they have an intrinsic limitation:  People require eye contact for building connection.  If a tool gets in the way of looking at each other, we should use it only when necessary.  Otherwise, we might well put out the fire before we can even start one.

A phone is not just an accessory.  It’s a psychologically potent device that changes not just what you do but who you are.  To clear a path for conversation, try setting aside the laptops and tablets.  Put away your phone and risk lighting a fire.

 

 

 

 

It seemed like one of those conversations that was just going nowhere.  One of those conversations spinning in memory and woe, pain and hurt, going over one more time the details   as if telling it again might wear a way to clarity.

There is a time for self-pity.  A time for the processing of grief and change.  There is a time for telling the stories over and over again to all who will hear us.  Times like these are essential for finding our way through pain to compassion, to healing and hope.  It was the kind of self-pity they felt walking the lonely road down to Emmaus after Jesus had been killed and grieving that what they had hoped for never happened.  (Luke 24:13-35)

Yes, there is a time for self-pity.

And there is, as well, a time to put it down.  The endless spinning of our stories of woe has no chance of lighting a spark and making a fire of vision, clarity, and newness.

Boy Scouts learn that you need three things to start a fire – oxygen, fuel and heat.

The problem with the familiar conversations we spin of pain and woe, abandonment and hurt is that they don’t make room for any air.  We wind ourselves so tight there’s no room for anything new to get in.  For some air to get in, you need to bring in the possibility of opening up to another story.

Daniel Menaker, author of A Good Talk:  The Story and Skill of Conversation, notes that good conversations depend on three things:  curiosity, humor and impudence.  By impudence he means a little conversational nerve to speak about what we might otherwise not say.

It’s exactly what we see happening in the story.  A dead-end conversation becomes a good conversation.  The stranger interrupts the two friends spinning their tale of woe with a question, “What are you talking about?”  Which leads to the two stopping in their tracks wide mouthed and laughing, “Are you kidding?  Are you the only one who hasn’t heard?”  As they tell their well worn tale one more time, the stranger interrupts them with an audacious, “O how foolish!” and the conversation sparks to a new level as the stranger offers a different interpretation of the same events.

The day has drawn to a close and they come to the village of Emmaus.  The two friends stop at the door of their home.  The stranger walks on.

There is a moment.

This moment.

What do you do?

You know the familiarity of going back and winding around yourself your familiar stories of pain, regret, shame and woe.  You now the familiarity of rubbing over and over the sharp stones of your own broken past.

You know as well that voice that you hear sometimes as a whisper, “It’s not too late.  Change your life.”

There is a moment.  This moment.  What do you do?

Do you go in and shut the door?  Return to spinning in your familiar old story?

Or despite everything in you that is full of fear of where it might lead do you shout down the road and invite the storyteller in, “Hey, come back!  Join us for supper!”

As children we learned that when there is danger of a fire, you put your hand on a door first and don’t open it if it is hot.

If it is God’s spirit, God’s fire beckoning you to new life on the other side of that door, you need to risk opening the door even though you don’t know where it will take you or how it will change you.

If you open the door what may well come forth is an avalanche of verbs like came that day – blessing, breaking, sharing, burning, recognizing, telling.  Changed lives.  A new story.

What will you do?

Today, will you open the door to a new conversation and the possibility of hearing a different story?

I’ve been thinking about writing a blog about anger the past couple of weeks ever since I read a Wall Street Journal analysis suggesting that this may be the election year of the angry white male.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are speaking to an angry people, and especially angry men –   men who are angry about income inequality, loss of jobs and an economy that has left them behind.   And while they stand on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they connect with a deep nerve in America today.

And then last week, Brussels.  After months of speculation that it would happen, another suicide bombing in a European capital.   And then a suicide bombing in Lahore.  And then…

Anger is a powerful emotion.  Anger can spew fearful and hateful rhetoric.  Anger can make us see what we would rather not see.  Anger can push us forward towards creative action or push us away from each other in fear.  Anger can lead to bombing of innocents.  Anger spreads.

Last week the UCC Conference Ministers endorsed a statement by the Episcopal Bishops on angry rhetoric in the Presidential election.  We read it in church on Palm Sunday as did other churches throughout our country.   It was a call to remember what we so often can forget when we are angry – the dignity of every person, the common good, our true selves.

Holy Week was a week of anger and a week of pain.

This Easter week might be a good week to live a different way.

**************************************************************

The leadership of the United Church of Christ, concerned with the political rhetoric aimed at the marginalized people of society in this election cycle, spoke out in support for and solidarity with a Holy Week statement released by The Episcopal Church. The UCC national officers and  Council of Conference Ministers, in testimony to the ecumenical relationship between the two churches, expressed gratitude to The Episcopal Church  for “the courage to speak, and for granting us the kindness of joining them in this statement.”

Here is the text of “A Word to the Church” from The Episcopal Church House of Bishops for Holy Week 2016.

“We reject the idolatrous notion that we can ensure the safety of some by sacrificing the hopes of others.”

On Good Friday the ruling political forces of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. They sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power. On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead, revealing not only their injustice but also unmasking the lie that might makes right.

In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we are troubled by the violent forces being released by this season’s political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbors, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us.

In this moment, we resemble God’s children wandering in the wilderness. We, like they, are struggling to find our way. They turned from following God and worshiped a golden calf constructed from their own wealth. The current rhetoric is leading us to construct a modern false idol out of power and privilege. We reject the idolatrous notion that we can ensure the safety of some by sacrificing the hopes of others. No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else.

We call for prayer for our country that a spirit of reconciliation will prevail and we will not betray our true selves.

“To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose.”  (Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, p.60)

Tidying guro, Marie Kondo says start with your bookshelf.

Don’t just scan through the books on your shelves, she counsels, but take each book out and make a big pile of them on the floor and one by one pick each book up and ask,”Does this bring me joy?”

Books are memory.  I love the books on my shelf that reminded me of what I once loved and read.

Books are possiblity.  I love the books that contain the possibility that one day I may actually read them.

Books are status.  I love the books on my shelf that say, “This is a fine bookcase because you have me on your shelf.”

Books are treasure.  Those books that I would take with me to a desert isle because they are part of me.

Marie Kondo helps me rethink my relationship to books:

“If you missed your chance to read a particular book, even if it was recommended to you or is one you have been intending to read for ages, this is your chance to let it go.  You may have wanted to read it when you bought it, but if you haven’t read it by now, the book’s purpose was to teach you that you didn’t need it.”  (Marie Kondo, p. 91)

Can it really be that I bought this book to teach me that I don’t need it?

I pick it up, I let it go.

“There’s no need to finish reading books that you only got halfway through.  Their purpose was to be read halfway.  So get rid of all those unread books.  It will be far better for you to read the book that really grabs you right now than one that you left to gather dust for years.”  (Marie Kondo, p. 91)

I pick it up, I let it go.

Wow, this is hard.  So simple and so hard.  In filling the boxes with what I no longer need, I realize how I struggle to let go of so much in my life.

I live so often in the place of someday…I might…I could…. My life is full of a clutter of possibilities.

The moment is now she says:  “The moment you first encounter a particular book is the right time to read it.”  (Marie Kondo, p.95)

“When you come across something that you cannot part with, think carefully about its true purpose in your life.  You’ll be surprised at how many of the things you possess have already fulfilled their role…..By acknowledging their contribution and letting them go with gratitude, you will be able to truly put the things you own, and your life, in order.  In the end, all that will remain are the things that you really treasure…” (Marie Kondo, p. 60)

Who will I be with an empty bookshelf, full of nothing but joy?  What will come in to fill the empty space?  Will it be enough?  Do I have enough faith to believe, to trust in the emptying will be room for all filling, for what I really need today?

I’m a work in process,

I’m letting go

making room for the treasure

I otherwise

might have missed.

 

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know.

– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “East Coker,” III, 142-144

The season of Lent is the oldest season in Christianity.  It’s much older than other seasons and holidays like Christmas and goes back to 300 and something when we first find evidence of early Christians marking a season of 40 days in preparation for Easter.

The 40 day season has its roots in the story of the 40 days Jesus spent out in the wilderness after his baptism.  It’s rather an amazing story that after his baptism when Jesus hears shouts from heaven proclaiming that he is in fact God’s beloved, that he high tails it out not to the local disco tech to celebrate but into the desert where he fasts for 40 days and 40 nights.  The reasons for his fasting are never made clear, but perhaps the desire was simply to empty himself fully out so God could fill him fully up – every ounce and breath and sinew of him with God.

After those 40 days, when he’s at his worst – tired out, worn out, hot, sweaty and stinky, Satan shows up as a frightening mirage or a depressingly insistent interior voice and tries to get him to sell himself out for something less than what these past 40 days have been all about.

There’s lots of interesting takes on the meaning of the three temptations of Jesus in the desert but my favorite is Walter Wink’s insight that it all has to do with the greatest satanic temptation of all – the temptation to be someone other than ourselves.

What Satan offers to Jesus are not bad things.  In fact, they are temptingly good things.  Just the kind of things that everyone thought a good Messiah should have – power, might, the rule of empires.   The Messiah who would free his people from oppression, restore God’s nation and reinstate God’s good honor.  All these good Messiah-Savior kind of things, Satan offers to Jesus.

They were good ideas – except for one small problem.  They weren’t Jesus’ idea of what he was about.  They didn’t fit him.  They were yesterday’s hopes, not God’s present desire for his life.

So, Jesus answers Satan, “No, no”… and finally fed up with the whole charade, with a good Jesus loses his temper moment, “Get behind me Satan!”

And so, Jesus walks out of the desert, not so much knowing who he is and what he will do as who he is not and what he will not do.

Jesus will do a new, unprecedented thing.  He will be a different kind of Messiah for whom no models exist.

I have spent so much of the first half of my life building up a strong sense of who I am and what I am supposed to do.  I have treasured certain aspects of my identity.  I’ve woven them tight around me quite comfortably.

Now, in the second half of life, I’ve discovered that some of the pieces of my identity were not in fact mine but what I took on as someone else’s ideas of who they thought I ought to be and how I should behave.  Some ways that I have walked through life before just don’t fit me anymore.  It takes time, attention and a good share of grief I have learned to shed these pieces of my so-called identity, and clear a little room for God to work in me in the here and now.

Maybe none of our beloved identities are in fact so impermanent.  Maybe, wherever we are in the journey of life, we too need to shed a bit of the “oh, that’s just the way I am!” notions that we cling to so we can move and mature our way more deeply into the wonder and unfolding surprise that is our life.

Many years ago I quit my job.  In fact, it was the same job I happen to have now.  I walked into my colleague Don’s office and announced I was going to move on.  I had done what I could do, I was ready for something new, a fresh start.  Don heard me out, and supported my decision.  The next day, I came to work and had the best day I’d had in ages.  I learned that I indeed had to leave something but it wasn’t my work.  It was how I did my work, the identity I had taken on for how I was supposed to do it.  When I let go of my old baggage of who I thought I was supposed to be, I could make room for a new way to be that fit me and my life.

I wonder, what surprising new thing does God want to bring to life in you?

Perhaps it’s some strength you never knew you had.  Perhaps it’s some gifts that you never considered manifesting.  Perhaps today is the day to put down what you just don’t need to be and cling to anymore and open yourself to the unfolding wonder of who you are created to be.

 

trump (tr?mp)

1. 1. Games a.A suit in card games that outranks all other suits for the duration of a hand. v. trumped, trump·ing, trumps

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian…I say only that this man is not Christian if he says things like that.”  

(Pope Francis in response to a question about Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to build a wall along the Mexican/U.S. border to keep illegal immigrants out.)

Donald Trump fired back that when ISIS attacks the Vatican, the Pope will have wished Donald Trump had been President.

Today Donald Trump will be firing back at Mitt Romney and the Republican establishments historical and unprecedented last ditch effort to undermine their front runner candidate.

But today, I want to turn back to a few weeks ago and the war of words between Donald Trump and Pope Francis and what it might reveal about the future of Christianity.

Beyond the war of words between Pope Francis and Donald Trump is an important theological question.  What does it mean to be a Christian?  Who gets to decide?  Previous Popes and other Christian leaders have often defined being a Christian in terms of what you say you believe.  Things like, “Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God”, “The Bible is the Word of God”, “Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior.”

Pope Francis moved the conversation in a different direction – from what Christians say they believe to Christians thinking and acting in certain ways. For Pope Francis one of these ways is building bridges.

UCC President and General Secretary John Dorhauer writes in Beyond Resistance: The Institutional Church Meets the Postmodern World that now is the time for a rapidly changing church to wrestle with our “non-negotiables.”  That is, what are those things that we cannot give up or else we lose our identity as Christians?  What might they be for you?  The Cross?  Communion?  The Lord’s Prayer?  The Bible as the Word of God?  Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior?  Building bridges?

Pope Francis staked his claim on bridge building as one of those non-negotiables.  He’s moved the conversation from a history full of too many examples of Christians walling out strangers and outcasts, the culture and people of different faiths or no faith.

He’s opened the conversation to building bridges as part of our core identity as Christians.  In the same flight home from the Mexican border he opened the conversation on the role of conscience in deciding on issues like contraception and support for same-sex marriage.  Last month, he embraced the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Last spring, he addressed a Papal Encyclical, “On Care for Our Common Home” on our environmental and economic responsibilities to not only good practicing Roman Catholics but to every human being on earth. Bridge builder?  It’s a defining characteristic of this Christian leader and I am watching with wonder and hope about where it all might lead.

It makes me wonder about my own ministry and stumbling walk as a Christian.  When have I been a wall builder or a bridge builder?  When is the time for each?

Donald Trump has brought the question of walls and bridges to the center of our national conversation.  Weird to say, but perhaps I’m thankful for that – to make me and perhaps you as well deal with questions we might have stepped around.

UCC Pastor and Writer, Donna Schaper believes that bridge builder Pope Francis will usher in the next Reformation.  When she shared that last month, I laughed.  When I heard the Pope last week, I wondered.  More so, I hope she might well be right.

 

 

Sound·ing (noun) plural noun: soundings

1. the action or process of measuring the depth of the sea or other body of water.
2. information or evidence ascertained as a preliminary step before deciding on a course of action. “He’s been taking soundings about the possibility of moving his offices.”

Our time with Alastair McIntosh was an amazing gift for many.  Thank you to Betty Spieth, Lecture Series Coordinator and our Lecture Committee for an amazing week of engagement and challenge, laughter and learning with him.

He left questions in the air…

What are you seeking?

What are the questions you are afraid to ask?

What are the answers that you don’t want to hear?

Where are the green, growing parts of your life?

Is this a space where it is safe for the soul to show up?

 

He drew us to wonder…..

“Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is to express gratitude and to allow another to be visible.”

“The most important activism is the everyday connections we make with each other.”

“We though our work in Eigg had only a 5% chance of success.  It turns out 5% was enough.”

“Don’t overestimate your power.  Don’t underestimate it as well.”

What do you need to own about who you are?

“You are forgiven.  Whatever you’ve done or seen.  Now get up and get on with you life.”

“We handed out teaspoons to remind each other that even this little bit can be the beginning of turning the soil in a new direction.”

“Religion is like a trellis, upon which the vine of spirituality can grown.  It should support the vine of life, point it upwards towards the sun.”

“I am from the Outer Hebrides.  I always take the scenic route.”

“We don’t set out to fail, but also try to avoid the narcissism that we are going to succeed.”

“Every artist knows that if we are really doing creative, spiritual work we will feel at times like we are transgressing.”

“We are tied together by a holy knot and we must live for each other.”

“Alastair is an intellectual.  You must let him find his own way.”  (Words of Alastair’s conservative pastor encouraging his parents to let Alastair go away to university.)

“God, come to my heart.”

 

He challenged us with words from the company of other prophets and poets…

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.  (Adrienne Rich)

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm… (Alice Walker, Everyday Use)

“This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

He concluded his sermon on Sunday, February 7 with a resounding recitation of the poem “Beyond the Headlines” by Patrick Kavanagh.

BEYOND THE HEADLINES

Then I saw the wild geese flying
In fair formation to their bases in Inchicore,
And I knew that these wings would outwear the wings of war,
And a man’s simple thoughts outlive the day’s loud lying.

Don’t fear, don’t fear, I said to my soul:
The Bedlam of Time is an empty bucket rattled,
‘Tis you who will say in the end who best battled.
Only they who fly home to God have flown at all.

– Patrick Kavanagh

Our sanctuary echoes with: “Don’t fear, don’t fear….” and the wonder of “Only they who fly home to God have flown at all.”

As one member said after the service,

“I have the rest of my life before me to try to live into that.”

Thank you Alastair, for words and calls that you have leave resounding in the air….

It’s Lent and I’m thinking about emptying.  In certain Eastern traditions and in Zen Buddhism there is a traditional fifth element of creation besides earth, air, water, fire – the element of emptiness or “sunyata” in Zen Buddhism.  It’s hard to put words to what is “nothingness” but I have heard others describe it as “the void which is the creative energy of the world.”  I’ve heard it described as the calm deep down in the ocean, below the waves and wind that are always doing what waves and wind do – rolling and blowing.

I have trouble putting words to it myself, but maybe like you, I know emptiness when I experience it.  It’s that something that can feel like presence, opening, releasing and resting that has been attracting Westerners to meditation and yoga.  That something we feel when we are absorbed in a simple activity and everything else recedes a bit and we are just in the here and now.

I’ve been practicing emptiness this Lent by cleaning out my closets.  In a just a couple of months is our church’s annual giant rummage sale called Superfluity.  Every year we are invited to clean out our closets and bring those items that we no longer have use for, those beloved things that we at last need to let go of, and to let them be transformed in the magic of Superfluity where they will be put into the hands of those who will delight in them again and something like $30,000 will be raised for all sorts of good work around our community.  It’s a huge effort.  Some 200 volunteers are already at work helping to get ready for the sale.

I’m doing my small part by cleaning out my closets and reading Marie Kondo.  Kondo is the bestselling author of The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and has become an international phenomenon with her techniques for cleaning things out and making room for more joy.

What’s surprised me about the book is that it’s a lot more than a guide to how to sort through your belongings and organize your drawers.  Instead, she uses the practice of tidying to talk about making room not only for the stuff we treasure, but more importantly, for our souls.  Working through our physical spaces creates soul space.  It truly is one of the best “spiritual” guides I’ve read in a long time as she leads us through processing the past, letting go of what needs to be, and making room to live in the here and now.

Kondo believes that making room doesn’t begin with attacking a closet and getting rid of things. Instead, she counsels that you need to begin with a vision of the kind of space you want and be clear about why you want it.  Maybe you would like a space that feels more restful, peaceful.  Whatever it is, it’s making room for something that you want more of in your life.

Last week, Margaret Irribarra Swanson, our Youth Ministries Director, sent out a letter to our youth and their families about the season of Lent.  She wrote, “The popular practice of giving up something for Lent really has nothing to do with exercising self-control.  Rather, it is a way to make space in our regular routines to allow God to do something new in our lives.”

Sometimes, I am desperate for that newness to come.  Sometimes, I’d rather not have anything change.

But this Lent I’m trying to practice risking opening my heart, cleaning out my closets and making room for the newness that is God.

I don’t know what that newness might be or where it might lead.  I hear the stories of a God who empties tombs and gives new life in unexpected, unforeseen ways.  So, I’m cleaning closets and soul space as well.  I look forward to gifting Superfluity with lots of treasures.  And to risk clearing some space in my life and soul – with a little fear and trembling, a little wonder and hope – for the newness of God to bloom.

It’s not a very popular service.

And why would it be?  I mean, who would really want to come at an inconvenient hour in the middle of a busy week to have the pastor make the sign of the cross on your forehead in black soot and bless you with the words, “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.”  

Maybe?  Maybe not.

Years ago, I almost lost my job over Ash Wednesday.

I was fresh out of seminary and swept up in the excitement of the liturgical revival that was introducing low-church Protestants, like me, into the wonder of all things ancient and traditional. (The very things that my ancestors had emptied the church of for fear that they were remotely “Catholic” or having the scent of “mystery”.) Things like Ash Wednesday.

Roman Catholics and High Church Episcopalians marked Ash Wednesday. In my New England church world in the United Church of Christ, we did not.

So when the Senior Pastor was away on vacation I took it upon myself to revive Ash Wednesday. I held a service complete with ashes that I gathered from my fireplace and marked on the foreheads of the tiny congregation that gathered at midday.  “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.”  The senior pastor was none too pleased at his upstart associate when he returned.

But this year, it’s not me using Ash Wednesday to convert the church to an ancient ritual and way, it’s Ash Wednesday that is converting me.

It wasn’t reading about some new Ash Wednesday service or trying to decipher, once again, what T.S. Eliot is actually talking about in his poem “Ash Wednesday”.  But it was going back to a novel I read last month that planted a question in me,

“What if Ash Wednesday were an invitation to see what we don’t want to see?”

Simon, rector at All Saints Parish, in K.D. Miller’s novel, All Saints, officiates at his tiny Anglican parish’s Ash Wednesday service.  He reminds his congregation that we can begin Lent by receiving ashes and those stark words, “Remember you are dust…” as a reminder that our lifespan is limited.   And he goes on,

“But we shouldn’t stop there.  We need to go on and acknowledge the thing that most frightens us, most pains us.  The thing we are must reluctant to face. It doesn’t have to be death, though it can be.  It can be the need to confront someone and say, “You hurt me”.  Which is the first step on the road to forgiveness.  Or it can be the need to tell someone we love them.  Whatever it is, I suggest you enter this season of Lent with the intention of saying, in effect, Ecce cor meum.  Behold my heart.”  

There are things in all of our hearts we don’t want to face.  There certainly have been in mine.  Our own Jerusalem’s.  Our own coming to terms with what we need to pay attention to. The things we might want to cling to desperately, but in fact need to release, to “die” to, in order to risk the possibility of something more.  Call it “resurrection”. Call it something on the other side of “this”. Some new life that we can’t, right here today, imagine finding our way to.

Years ago, I didn’t want to see, I didn’t want to know, what I knew.  I didn’t want to face that in order to continue to grow, to mature, I needed to leave my relationship with Dave. A man I dearly loved.   I needed to step out on my own and do some of the growing up work I had waited a long time to do.  I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want anything to change in a life that was full together of such goodness.  I didn’t know what might happen.  Where it all might lead.  I was frightened.  Indecisive.  Full of trying to bury, to push away, what I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to face.  To control what was beyond my controlling.  Something was happening in me and I needed to pay attention to it.  The hurt, I came to realize, was not so much in the leaving, but in the hurt that came from not paying attention to what I needed to see.

I needed Jesus.  Yes, that one that is the story, and the one who makes this journey time and again with all of us on the way through death to the possibility of resurrection.  Yes, Jesus, in the specific incarnate form of those who stood by my side, put their arm around me and said, “Together we can stand here.  Together, I will hear you out, wait with you, until you are ready.”

A sailor’s job is to leave the dock.  To untie the bow line and push the boat out into the channel and step aboard.  To set a direction – that place you want to be – call it Hope, Joy, Peace, Justice, Life.  A huge thing to kick off from what we have known. A huge thing to look out and set a Hope on where you are going – and not have a clue how you are going to get there.

But how we are going to exactly get there is not the sailor’s job.  For what the sailor knows is that it takes this third thing – beside the sailor and the boat.  Call it the Wind. Call it the Spirit. Call it the Breath of God.  Only by tracking the Wind, playing with the Wind, using the Wind, trusting the wind, can the sailor tack and jibe the boat on its way toward that distant horizon.

This Ash Wednesday, I wonder what might happen if today were a day for us to stand on the dock we have made of our lives.

To listen to our hearts. To face the thing we don’t want to face.  Admit what we didn’t want to admit. To say the thing we don’t want to say.  And then to reach down and untie the bow line.  Give the boat a firm kick out into the channel and step aboard.

To set our faces to that far destination we might not even be able to give words to, but know from the feeling we have when we imagine we are there.

To put our hand lightly on the tiller. Find the direction of the wind.  And then, using the wind, and letting the wind take us – back and forth, quickly and quietly, in still waters and sudden gusts as such a journey always is – but forward, ever forward, toward that place beyond our knowing where new life awaits.

It may take a long time. It may take detours and twists and turns we never could have envisioned. It might take more courage than we have ever risked taking before. And it might be more joyous as well. It might be the beginning of something new. The way to new life.

Perhaps, this is Ash Wednesday.  Perhaps, this is Lent.