The Wesley Foundation at UVA

Sunday Night Worship - 20 April 2008

director — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:15:56 +0000

Trust

Acts 7: 55-60

Have you thought much about the pace at which you live? I don’t mean just how busy and fast-paced a certain day or week or exam period might be. I mean that but more…the way you structure your days and weeks and exams periods, the people and things and places that get priority, what you choose to make life easier and where you purposely choose the harder, longer, slower path. Is this something you think about?

I don’t know many people who think they have loads of time and space to fit in everything that is important to them. It seems most people complain about the workload or the family responsibilities or how to do two majors and a minor and that internship that will look so good on the resume. Most people seem to recognize that their plates are heavy. But most of us seem to want bigger plates…36 hours in a day, more days in a week, more hands, more money, the ability to function better on less sleep….Do you recall hearing anyone willingly ask for a smaller plate?

There is a computer science professor and dean at Harvard, Harry Lewis (no relation), who sat down to pen a letter to incoming freshmen about 6 or 7 years ago and it has proven so popular that it’s been passed along to each subsequent incoming class (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~lewis/SlowDown2004.pdf). In the letter he encourages students not to graduate early even if they are able to. He encourages studying abroad and says there is no shame in taking a year away from school if you’re struggling. He advises students not to choose their academic majors for professional preparedness, to pick only one major extracurricular activity, and to “leave something for after you graduate.”

To use the plate metaphor again, Lewis implores Harvard students to fill a modestly sized plate, not to heap it on, and to leave the table satisfied but still a little hungry for what comes next.

I know his letter is popular and somewhat counter-cultural but I don’t know any students at Harvard so I don’t know how much they take it to heart. Do they read it and feel a moment of relief before digging back into over-full lives or do they take it to heart and choose non-Harvard-seeming academic lives with room for daydreaming and changing their minds? Do they think, “Well, that’s easy for him to say, he’s already finished his degrees and got tenure!”? I don’t know but I find it fascinating. How would you take a letter like this, fresh from the desk of Mr. Casteen or the head of your department? Would the encouragement and permission make a difference in how you live while you’re here?

I discovered Lewis’ letter while reading a book called In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré (pp. 246-7). One by one, he examines realms of life where people are attempting to slow down – work, family, food, etc. In reading the book and contemplating its ideas I’ve been struck with how much trust this kind of living requires. Slowness takes trust.

There is something about slowing down and choosing the smaller plate that requires deep and abiding trust. Slowness is one way of saying It’s not all up to me. It doesn’t all need to happen today or this year or this class or this degree. I have a role to play but this story is larger than just my perspective or my life.

In his book Honoré tells the story of a musical piece called As Slow as Possible, composed in 1992 by John Cage and currently being played on an organ in a small German town (p. 244). They are projecting the concert will last 639 years.

The piece is being played on a custom built organ with weights attached to the keyboard in order to “hold down notes long after the organist has left” (p. 244). The concert began in September 2001 and one pause between notes lasted 17 months. During that time the only sound in the room was the intake of air as the bellows were inflating.

Can you imagine this? What would it be like to live in that German town and to stop into the concert every few weeks? During that 17 month pause how would the bellows have sounded when you stepped in on a lunch break? Would it have been different late at night? Would you have noticed anything different in month 16 than in month 3?

And what must it be like for the composer, Cage, to intentionally create music that will not only be played after he is dead but that will still be playing – after his grandchildren are gone?

Trust. To begin something meaningful and to entrust it into others’ hands because it is so much bigger than your own life. Cage started something he will never even hear all the way through.

It strikes me on this Sunday closest to Earth Day, as we worship in this cathedral of trees, that there are similarities with the Green movement. The 639 year concert and the ethos of slowing down are not a way of saying, “Let someone else deal with it.” Just as we can not, as faithful people and stewards of creation, continue to create an environmental mess and vaguely hope that the next generations will set it right, the composer doesn’t say, “I play for my own enjoyment and my own ears. It begins and ends with me.” Even those who aren’t creating centuries-long pieces tend to hope that their music will outlast them.

But with each of us there is a starting point. Our gifts, our abilities, our place in time. And within those contexts what we offer can be miserly and finite or it can be expansive and trusting. We can live only within the moment, hoarding and piling up grain in our barns that will outlast our needs but rot in the process. Or we can live within our moments with the knowledge and trust that our own stories are all part of the larger story God is creating.

With the environment, with life, it’s not “Let someone else deal with it” but rather Here is the best I have to give with my talents in my time and I trust what comes next. I trust that the end of the story is in God’s hands.

Stephen’s story from Acts is like this. Stephen is one of those back in chapter six who were chosen to make sure the daily food distribution was shared among all the disciples. He not only solved the dispute at hand but helped to further the spread of the gospel (Acts 6: 1-7). He is described as doing “great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). When authorities within the synagogue challenge Stephen, he speaks with such conviction and is so infused with the Holy Spirit that his accusers are threatened and falsely accuse him of blaspheming Moses and God (Acts 6: 8-15).

When he’s given his turn to speak in self-defense he launches into the longest speech in the book of Acts and basically gives the entire history of God and God’s people, with a prophetic tongue (Acts 7: 1-53). This is the gospel. This is what makes all of the rest of life make sense. This is what he is living for: to have a place in God’s grand story.

So he tells it with relish and in response his accusers stone him.

He becomes the first Christian martyr and by that very word, “first,” you know that there have been others. But Stephen doesn’t know this will happen or that this will give him a certain prominence. All he knows is the truth. All he knows is that his plate is filled with the blessings of God and that partaking in that feast has brought him this far. He trusts what comes next.

He doesn’t know what that will be but he trusts the Giver. He trusts the resurrection and proclaims it with the whole of his life. And I want to tell you that that is enough. That calling alone is enough, no matter what happens next. No matter what happens once it’s out of your hands. No matter who picks up a stone.

I also want to tell you that what seems like the end of the story never is, with God.

Over to the side watching the whole thing is a young tax collector, watching the coats (Acts 7:58 – 8:1). What an odd detail, but Acts reads like this: “…and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul” (v. 58). Like the bed at a party, Saul is the site of a pile of coats. Other than that we don’t learn anything else about him except that he “approved of their killing him” (Acts 8:1).

I’ll remind you again that what seems like the end of the story never is, with God. This coat-pile moment of Stephen’s witness proves to be a seed in Saul’s conversion to his life as Paul. And we know his story didn’t end with him either.

With each of us there is a starting point. Our gifts, our abilities, our place in time. And within those contexts what we offer can be miserly and finite or it can be expansive and trusting. We can live only within the moment, hoarding and piling up grain in our barns that will outlast our needs but rot in the process. Or we can live within our moments with the knowledge and trust that our own stories are all part of the larger story God is creating.

Trust the resurrection of this Easter season! Trust that all of our endings can be places to begin again in God’s story. Trust that it is not all up to you but that God wants what you have to offer the world. That calling alone is enough, no matter what happens next.

Thanks be to God!

Sunday Night Worship - 3/30/08

director — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:46:08 +0000

“Inviting Doubt”

John 20: 19-31

Seeing as how you are college students, you probably know this already, but it is hard to make a college student squirm uncomfortably. Y’all are used to graphic images and harsh language. You’re at home on the internet. The world you’ve grown up in and are maturing in is saturated with images, words, and social situations many people of my generation didn’t face until we were well into our 20s and 30s.

So I have to say I took a small amount of pride when I succeeded in making some of you squirm last year during our forum on doubt. If you were here you may remember that I had found several paintings on the internet depicting the so-called Doubting Thomas story and I printed them out to pass around during part of our forum discussion. Well, I could tell without looking where the Caravaggio was as it went around the room. All I had to do was listen for the “oooughs” and the “Oh! Disgustings!”

Caravaggio is the Italian painter from around 1600 who was known for his striking use of light and dark. His painting, “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” is his most copied painting and it’s this one that made some of us squirm.

In the painting, the risen Jesus has pulled aside his gown to reveal the gash in his side. Thomas is bent over at the waist with his finger inserted into Jesus’ side up to the first knuckle. Thomas’ forehead is wrinkled up, a look of curiosity and concentration on his face, and his eyes about 6 inches from Jesus’ wound. Two other disciples are standing behind him, leaning in over Thomas’ bent frame, trying to get a better look.

It’s a startling picture. Detailed and almost gruesome. We hear in the scripture that Thomas wanted to put his fingers in Jesus’ wounds, but somehow most people don’t picture it this way. He’s got his hand shoved into Jesus’ body and he’s poking and pulling the skin aside!

The way Caravaggio paints it, there is no place to hide. All the light in the picture rests on Jesus’ white torso, so that your eyes are pulled to that hole and that finger, against your will, like gravity. You want to get a better look at those other disciples – Who is that there? Is it Peter in the back?—but you are helpless in the face of this masterpiece. The finger, the wound, and that moment draw your eye to them over and over.

To be honest, Caravaggio gets it wrong. At least so far as that very real finger-in-the-side part. In John’s gospel Thomas never actually touches Jesus. We forget that.

When Jesus comes back to the house a week after Easter, a week after appearing to the other disciples gathered there on Easter night, he comes right in, stands in their midst, and says, “Peace be with you.” And even though he wasn’t there when Thomas was talking with the others that week…even though Jesus wasn’t there when Thomas laid out his demands for belief in the risen Christ…Jesus turns immediately to Thomas and says Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. And, just like Mary Magdalene at the tomb last week when someone she thought was the gardener suddenly speaks her name, Thomas hears Jesus’ invitation and –without touching him — Thomas knows and believes who Jesus is. He proclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

Just like that. Is that the way you remember it?

I didn’t. I have to confess that I was surprised when I re-read this story recently. I was surprised to read that Thomas never touches Jesus after all. I was surprised to see that Jesus simply meets unbelief and mistrust and skepticism with peace and a holy invitation – an offering of himself, of his body. But why should this be surprising? Isn’t this what Jesus always does?

So Caravaggio gets the touch wrong. As gripping as the scene is on canvas, it’s not exactly what transpired. In the gospel, as soon as he hears Jesus’ invitation, Thomas erupts in his brief and potent confession of faith: “My Lord and my God!” What he thought he needed in order to believe is not what it took, after all.

But here’s where Caravaggio gets it right. I haven’t really described to you what Jesus looks like in the painting. Bathed in light, he stands at the edge of the scene, right hand pulling his clothes aside to expose his wounded side. His head is cocked a little to the side and his gaze is downcast and gentle. You know the look a proud and affectionate parent has when watching a beloved child try something new? You know how such a parent looks pleased and protective and awed all at once? Caravaggio’s Jesus looks a little like this. His head is bent down above Thomas’ and he’s watching over Thomas lovingly. And here’s the best part: Jesus’ left hand is lightly gripping Thomas’ wrist, as if he’s encouraging and guiding Thomas in his exploration of the wound. As if Jesus has said Come on and touch all that you need to in order to see and believe, and then on top of it, takes Thomas’ hand and guides him to the sweet spot.

This, Caravaggio gets right. Brilliantly right. Jesus is not a begrudging participant in his interactions with Thomas. There is no exasperated sighing or rolling of the eyes. Jesus never calls him a Doubting Thomas. Jesus does not imply that if Thomas were a better apostle he would not need “hands on” proof. Jesus doesn’t come back a week after Easter, offering greetings of peace to everyone except Thomas. And he doesn’t put any conditions on what Thomas has said he needs in order to believe. Jesus does not even wait for Thomas to ask. Jesus simply offers Thomas what he is looking for, what he needs.

Even though the touch never happens in John’s gospel, we can believe Caravaggio’s moment because he shows us what John shows us: what kind of God this is – One who graciously offers himself up to our feeble misunderstanding and reckless fumbling. A God who doesn’t just stand in our midst while we struggle, but who takes our hands and guides us.

“Doubting Thomas” gets a bad rap for wanting exactly what the other disciples already received: an encounter with the risen Christ. Thomas unfairly gets the bad rap, but this we can say for him: he knows enough about Jesus to accept nothing less. What are you willing to accept? Knock and it will be answered; ask and you will receive.

Why in the world wouldn’t you ask for what you want from the Risen One on whose lips even the sounds of our very names sound like invitations?

The Risen Christ comes into the locked and shut off places, granting peace, breathing into us the breath of new life, attentive to what we need, and – if Caravaggio is to be believed – graciously guiding our trembling and searching hands. We believe; help our unbelief! Can you hear the invitation? Can you feel his hand on yours? There is no doubt about it.

Thanks be to God!

Sunday Night Worship - Easter 2008

director — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:39:43 +0000

“What Do You Do with an Empty Tomb?”

John 20: 1-18

My friend Mike has very strong beliefs. He’s a lawyer who often works pro bono cases; he became a vegetarian even when he still wanted to eat meat, because he decided it was the right thing to do; he is active in his church, organizing Christmas plays and music and children’s Sunday school. In short, he is a person of conviction.

One of Mike’s most passionately-held convictions is this: At the movie theater, after the film, people should not be allowed to talk until they get to their cars.

This one may be right up there with vegetarianism. He absolutely abhors being subjected to the ill-considered, hasty comments of fellow moviegoers who begin jabbering before the credits roll and who prattle on all the way to the lobby. He feels that the only proper response to art – to cinematic revelation – is silence.

Today is a day for silence. It may be hard to hear it, to notice it, to observe it. But it’s true. Easter is all about the grand silence of the empty tomb, the life-transforming and life-giving emptiness of the tomb.

You may not have noticed this in church this morning. We tend to have “issues” with emptiness and with silence. We’d rather rush to restore the altar – swipe down the Good Friday black and swoop in with a truckload of lilies. No time or space for emptiness today!

I got an Easter card in the mail from a friend of mine one recent Easter, and it was sweet and thoughtful and cheery – and completely overdone. It was actually hard to pick out the cross in the picture on the front, festooned as it was in blooms and vines. If I were from another culture or another religion, I might gather from this card that Easter is a celebration of blooms. I might not have even noticed the cross.

Maybe there is something about silence, about that glorious emptiness, that feels too close to death for us. Maybe that’s especially so on Easter, when we celebrate the fact that death has lost its sting. We know it but we’re still trying to believe it – and lilies can seem so much more lively than an empty and silent tomb.

A former student once confided in me that he doesn’t particularly like being in church on Easter morning, that it feels too much like the tomb to him. He pointed out that when the resurrected Jesus starts appearing to people, it is outside – in the garden, fishing on the beach, walking on the road. Because of this, he craves worshipping outside. Outside feels more like Easter. (And there are 20 early rising Humpback hikers and campers who might agree with this.)

Maybe we’re onto something. After all, when the women arrived there that morning, Jesus was not sitting in the tomb, waiting to yell “surprise.” Why do you look for the living among the dead? The resurrected Jesus meets people not in the tomb but out in the world, in their lives – just as Jesus did before the crucifixion. And yet, Mary, the women, and several disciples have to go to the tomb before they can meet Christ anywhere else.

And here we are Easter morning (and night), standing at the gaping, silent mouth of the empty tomb. Faithful, fearful, and with a serious addiction to lilies.

One biblical commentary wonders, if there had been a surveillance camera in the tomb, what would it have recorded? Would it have shown Jesus getting up, neatly folding his burial garments, miraculously moving the stone, and going on his way? Would there have been a sudden burst of light and smoke which, when it subsided, showed a suddenly empty tomb and a missing stone? And do we really think it matters how it happened, rather than why? Do we really think the stone had to be rolled away in order for Jesus to escape death? ( ) What if the stone were moved aside not to let Jesus out, but to let the women in? ( )

Maybe, just maybe, we need that empty tomb more than we know. Maybe we need it more than we need the comfort of the lilies and the joyful noise of our triumphant singing. Maybe the stone was rolled away to invite us in to the awed silence that follows the defeat of death.

Mary Magdalene stands at precisely this spot – the threshold of the tomb – talking to someone she thinks is the gardener. Until she hears her name called. In the echo of the empty tomb, this man makes sudden sense and she hears her name on God’s lips.

I am not saying we should get rid of lilies or magnificent hymns (OK, maybe a few of the lilies). What I am saying is that perhaps the most fitting response to the glory of the empty tomb is silence. Perhaps we ought to wait until we get to the lobby, at least, before we start critiquing this passion film. Perhaps we ought to stand silently in the garden before we cover over the majesty and miracle of that emptiness with lilies and lutes.

If the stone has been pushed aside to let us in, then there is something in the emptiness and the silence that we need. If the stone’s been rolled away to let us in, shouldn’t we stand there quietly for a minute or two and wait to hear our names called?

Come now, to the edge of the garden and listen for what God is saying, echoed in the depths of that tomb. Love is stronger than death, passion fierce as the grave. God is stronger than death.

Look deeply into the place of death – and see that there is nothing there for us any longer. Don’t be afraid of the silence – it will not deafen you. Or the emptiness – it will not envelope you. The tomb cannot suck you in!

This emptiness of which we are so often afraid is a call home. A call back from the edge of death. The call of a mother gathering her children in for supper. Jesus isn’t in the tomb but we need to see it and experience it to believe it.

My friend Mike may have a point about movie theatres, but I am convinced his dictate is true for Easter. The only proper response to the empty tomb – to divine revelation in the resurrection – is silence and thankfulness and reverence. ( ) And maybe, eventually, a little verbal praise.

Thanks be to God!

Easter Sunrise at Humpback Rocks - 23 March 2008

director — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:36:04 +0000

“Hark, the Herald”

John 20: 1- 18

I was studying a painting by Giovanni Savoldo this week, called Mary Magdalene. She’s wearing a light, shimmery, almost silvery “hoodie.” You know how female Biblical characters are always represented, with long flowing robes, parts of which seems to drape over their heads? Well, she’s wearing one of those and sort of has one knee drawn up under her chin and she’s hugging that leg to herself, with her head balanced on her knee.

Her face is turned toward the viewer, her gaze unwavering, her expression serene and satisfied. She looks like she knows something and she makes me want to find out what it is.

Behind her in the close background of the painting is a gaping, black archway – a doorway into nothingness. Next to her there is a small pitcher, also shimmery in the light.

Behind her in the far background is the sunrise, just barely beginning to happen. Clouds are scattering on the horizon and the new light is reflecting on water, clouds, and sky. You can’t quite see the sun but this is the moment just before it emerges fully. It’s still a collection of bright light peeking out from the earth, about to startle us with its brilliance when it inches up past the horizon.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about this painting is that the shimmering light on her “hoodie,” the shimmery light on the pitcher, the light that illumines her face – none of it comes from the direction of the sunrise. In fact, the light cast on Mary comes from the opposite direction. It would be as if, sitting here on the top of Humpback Rocks, you were to turn your back to the sun but still your face would somehow be illuminated from a light source in the west.

Fascinating.

The verse that stayed with me as I was preparing for Easter this year was verse 18 from John’s Easter story: “Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her” (John 20: 18). It’s the very last verse we heard this morning and it’s the word “announced” that did it for me. I could almost picture Mary blowing a trumpet before announcing to the other disciples what she had seen. “Hear ye, hear ye…”

She announced it. Announcing connotes proclamation, declaration, and publicity. This is something she has no doubt about and she is not seeking any approval or corroboration. She is simply telling it like it is. She is announcing it to the rest of the disciples – and they will be wise to listen.

As this verse played over in my mind the word “herald” came to me. Maybe that’s where I got the trumpet image. Here’s Mary, the herald. Hark!

Here’s Mary, who moments before was so scared and distraught with crying that she wouldn’t follow Peter and the other disciple into the tomb, but just stood crying outside in the garden. Here’s Mary, who through teary eyes fresh from hearing her name called, recognized Jesus where an instant before she had seen a gardener. Here’s Mary, fresh from a tomb which somehow gave birth to new life, ready to tell everyone that everything Jesus promised is already coming true. Here she is, the herald about to bring good news to the entire world.

Hark, the herald!

Charles Wesley wrote that well-loved Christmas hymn, “Hark! The herald angels sing.” If I could start us off on the right key, you could probably all sing along, at least through the first verse. But listen to the words of the final verse:

Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings
Ris’n with healing in His wings
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark! The herald angels sing
“Glory to the newborn King!”

Fitting for Christmas and Easter… Light and life to all He brings, Risen with healing in His wings.

I go back to the painting I spent time with this week. There is still the matter of that unexpected light, shining from a direction opposite the rising sun. Where is the light on Mary’s face coming from?

For all of us, who camped out and got up exceedingly early to be here on this spot to see the sunrise, what an odd notion that on Easter morning the brightest light comes from another direction. Or is it?

Easter morning changes the world as we know it. The last will be first and the first will be last. Death has no authority anymore. The sting is gone. The old rules don’t apply. Christ is risen and lives! Risen with healing in his wings!

No matter where we were last night, this is a new day! No matter that you were just crying in the garden, you are about to be the ambassador herald to the world.

Savoldo’s Mary – and John’s – looks like she knows something and she makes me want to find out what it is. Her face is lit up with it.

Like Mary, like Moses coming down from Sinai, will your face shine coming down from this mountain today? Will you announce with your face and the whole of your life that a new day has dawned?

Hark, the herald. Listen! Everything Jesus promised is already coming true.

Thanks be to God!

Sunday Night Worship - 3/16/08 - Palm Sunday

director — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:13:58 +0000

Pause
Matthew 21: 1-11 (Mark 11: 1-11)

When I was in junior high school – we called it that then, rather than “middle school” – when I was in junior high, way back in the early eighties, I think it was the oh-so-hot movie, Flashdance that inspired us to wear leg warmers. We donned the fuzzy colored knitted things, pushing them into wrinkled rings around our lower calves and ankles. In case you haven’t seen pictures, we actually wore these over our jeans. It didn’t matter whether you were a dancer or not – this was a fashion statement. Joining the ridiculous looking crowd marked you as hip and cool.

Of course, if you have seen the pictures, you’ll notice that we looked neither hip nor cool. We didn’t even look particularly cold enough – not enough to need extra warmth for our lower extremities, anyway.

Like all good and bad fashion trends, leg warmers came back around a couple years back and, no surprise, they still look rather silly. But somehow or another they were updated and styled for consumption in the 2000s and then, thankfully, they disappeared again. Maybe some other outdated fashion will be updated and re-sold soon. Let’s just hope it won’t be big shoulder pads and the mullet hairstyle.

The church is not immune to this sort of thing. As with fashion and cultural statements, the church’s liturgy goes through what we might call, for lack of a better word, trends.

When the church was young Christians worshipped together more than just on Sundays. Many Roman Catholic congregations still offer at least one daily worship service, in addition to several on Saturday nights and Sundays. When we were on spring break we closed each day with Compline, the traditional bedtime prayer in the liturgy of the hours. The liturgy of the hours, or daily office, are the times set aside for prayer throughout the day in monastic communities. Though monasteries continue in this tradition and it can be enlightening and formative to dip into the practice for a time, most Protestants are content with our once-a-week Sunday worship.

It hasn’t always been this way. In my grandparents’ youth they expected to gather at church at least two days a week. In addition to Sundays, Wednesday nights were reserved for Bible studies and worship. This is still practiced in many rural Southern churches today; when I lived in Appalachia, we never scheduled board meetings on Wednesday nights because we knew folks already had some place to be.

When I was growing up we called this day “Palm Sunday.” If you were in church this morning, you likely noticed the way our triumphant Palm Sunday marching and singing gave way to the passion narrative; by the end of the worship hour we were clearly in Maundy Thursday territory. That’s “Palm/Passion Sunday.” This is one of those trends I was talking about. In the last 30 years or so, Protestants have experienced a liturgical renewal. And it’s truly been renewing, bringing us into greater communion with each other and with the Catholic side of our family through such “trends” as the lectionary, which sets out a 3-year cycle of texts to be read in worship that cover almost the entire Bible. Liturgical renewal has reached back to our earliest Christian roots to uncover and recover some of the powerful language and action in our celebration of the Eucharist. If you want to call all this a trend, it’s been a good one.

But when you update and renew your commitment to something, it usually entails doing so in a specific context. As I said, the more traditional name for this day is Palm Sunday. But in looking at the church’s communal life liturgical reformers noticed that the majority of worshippers only come to church on Sundays, even during the special times of year like Holy Week. So if folks are here on Palm Sunday, when we celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and then folks don’t show up again until Easter Sunday, when we celebrate the risen Christ, they kind of miss out.

So the reformers encouraged churches to include a bit more on this Sunday. If folks don’t show up for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services, we’ll bring the Passion of Christ to them! So we front-loaded Holy Week, giving more gravitas to Palm Sunday. Today at Wesley Memorial we began with Palms and moved all the way through the readings for the week, ending up by the end of the service, with Christ crucified.

I suppose this is an OK thing to do on Palm/Passion Sunday. I suppose that sometimes we have to accommodate the rest of Life and cram more into a Sunday. I certainly agree that going straight from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday is too easy and skips some of the most important parts of the journey we are called to walk together in the company of Christ.

But I want to make a case, here, in this community, for Palm Sunday without the Passion. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for reading and meditating on the Passion story this week. But I want to take my time. I want to set out the door each day and be in that day. I want to listen to my Jesus Christ, Superstar soundtrack throughout the week, traveling with the song-story through the events this week commemorates.

This is one of those rare times in contemporary Protestant life when we have the opportunity to come together for worship on several occasions in the same week. Towards the end of this Holy Week, it becomes almost a daily commitment. Here in the Wesley Community we will worship together on Maundy Thursday and on Good Friday (both nights at 7pm). We have all day Friday set aside for private prayer and reflection on the block, encouraging one another to participate in the Stations of the Cross meditation. Then we will walk those last steps of our journey together up Humpback Rock to an Easter Sunrise service and another one later than morning back down here in the valley. Why would I want to collapse all that into Palm/Passion/Maundy/Good/ Holy Week Sunday?

The gospel reading today is from Matthew but I was struck when I read Mark’s version this week. The thing that struck me about the Palm Sunday reading from Mark is that Jesus pauses. After the palms and riding on the colt, here is what Mark describes: “Then [Jesus] entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve” (Mark: 11:11). And when he had looked around at everything… Why is that in this story? What was Jesus looking for? At? What was the “everything” in question? Was this one of those calm-before-the-storm moments or did he go there hoping to find something? Did he find it or did he go away empty-handed? Was he remembering all those other times he’d been to the temple? Did he go, planning to pray, and then change his mind?

I’ve always had a sort of dread about Palm Sunday. It’s like the tipping point on a roller coaster, that moment when you are as high as you are going to get and, just when you realize that, you head downhill at an alarming speed and your stomach catches in your throat. It’s hard to wave Palms enthusiastically on a day like today, knowing what we know, knowing that Thursday and Friday and that long, long Saturday lie before us. But I want to keep them before us, not cram them into today – at least here in this community where we see each other throughout the week and have the opportunity to be together in worship again on those hard and dreadful days that lead us, against all reason, to Easter.

The roller coaster tipping point is that moment of elation mixed with foreboding, the last moment when you see things “from the top.” The last moment before you start screaming and hoping your flip-flops and glasses don’t fly off.

Maybe Jesus felt it. Maybe that subtle tug at the pit of his stomach alerted him. Maybe he took a few minutes to look things over from the very top at the temple that day. Maybe he knew the scenery was about to change at a breakneck pace. Maybe.

Thanks be to God!

Sunday Night Worship - 2/24/08 (Fluvanna Prison)

director — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:04:57 +0000

“Leave Your Jars Behind”

John 4: 5-42

I really have only one thing to tell you tonight so I’m going to say it now: When you believe that God is the One giving you what you need to survive, you can leave behind your inadequate attempts to save yourself.

Do you know what I mean?

And do you know what it’s like to walk miles in the desert at noon, by yourself, carrying a water jug to fill up and quench your thirst with? Do you know what it’s like when you realize after all that walking and sweating that there is not a well on earth deep enough for your thirst? Do you know what it’s like to be met in such a lonely place by Jesus, offering to fill you up so you are never thirsty again?

This unnamed Samaritan woman does. Early morning was normal time for drawing water from the well. Women went together in the cool of the dawn to get water for their families, socializing and talking along the way. No one went to the well at noon. It was way too hot.

So long before Jesus starts asking her questions, we understand that she is something of an outcast, forced to make that daily journey on her own in the hottest part of the day. A daily reminder that she is not welcome in the social circles of her town. Do you know what that’s like?

And out of nowhere there is this man. A Jewish man and a rabbi at that! And he’s talking to her! This simply wasn’t done – men and women talking alone or Jews and Samaritans socializing. On top of that, no one ever talks to her – that’s why she’s there at noon in the first place. And on top of all that he is brazen enough to ask her for a drink.

What do you mean by this, you a Jew asking me a Samaritan woman for a drink?

And Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (v. 10).

Maybe you already know this, but there is a big difference between finding water to live and receiving living water. ( ) You can go to the well every day — early morning, noon, or night — to draw enough water for the next day. You can walk all that way and back, careful not to slosh it all out onto the dry ground. You can love the cool, fresh taste of it and you can long for it when you don’t have it. But that’s just water to live.

Then there’s living water.

The woman is confused and curious when Jesus mentions it. Where do you get this living water? You don’t even have a bucket and this well’s really deep. How do you plan to get it?

He doesn’t answer the question directly. This water here will leave you thirsty again eventually. But if you drink the living water I give you’ll never be thirsty again. The water I give you will gush up like a spring to eternal life.

I find this part amazing, because if I had been at that well with Jesus I don’t know if I would have been that brave. There in the crazy heat of the day, talking with someone she isn’t supposed to be talking with, the woman receives what must have been the strangest invitation of her whole life.

She’s used to fending for herself. If she doesn’t walk out here in the middle of the day there will be no water. She doesn’t have friends to bring some back for her and she can’t make the load lighter by going with the other women at dawn. She came here to draw her own water and now this complete stranger with no bucket is offering her some water she’s never heard of.

And what does she do? Does she tell him to go take a flying leap? Does she think he’s being cruel and taunting like the rest of the people she meets? Does she even think he may have spent too long in the mid-day heat himself?

Without hesitation she says, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water” (v. 15). Whatever it is, I know I need it. Please give me this water! Is that what you would say to Jesus? Are you that brave?

Then it gets scarier because Jesus knows more than he has let on. He says back to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back” (v. 16).

She tells him she doesn’t have a husband and he says You’re right. You’ve had five husbands and the man you have now is not your husband. What you’ve said is true.

That is all he says about that.

We don’t know why she’s had so many husbands. We don’t know if they’ve died or run off or what. We don’t know anything except how Jesus responds to her. When she confesses the truth of her life all he says is “you’re right.” He recognizes the truth.

A lot of folks like to focus on this part of the story. They want to talk about her five husbands a whole lot more than Jesus did. They want to decide things about her and her life based on this one fact. They want to condemn her and her past.

This is not what Jesus does. I’m here to tell you that there is a big difference between condemnation and the hard healing truth. Do you know what I mean? The truth about who we are can be hard to see, hard to say, and hard to deal with. But at least it’s the truth. Saying it and seeing it is at least honest. It is a starting place. It is the only place to start.

The woman must know this somewhere deep inside because after she has been brave enough to ask for some of that living water, she’s honest enough to tell Jesus the whole story about her life.

None of this changes anything about Jesus’ invitation to the living water. He asks her for the truth and he listens to it all. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t change his mind about the offer. He doesn’t decide to get up and walk on to another well. He doesn’t tell her to stop talking to him. He still wants her to have living water gushing up inside her to eternal life.

The story tells us they talk a little while longer and then the disciples come up. And when they get there they are so shocked to see Jesus talking alone with a Samaritan woman that they are speechless. They just stand there gawking and wondering what is going on.

And in that silence “the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people [there], ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!’” (vv. 28-29).

I told you that I had only one thing to tell you tonight and it depends on this: the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. It is such a small-seeming thing that it would be easy to overlook. Of course when she gets to the city she tells everyone she runs into about this amazing man she’s met. She’s a great evangelist even though we never find out her name.

But the big news – the biggest statement she makes — is when she leaves that water jar. That water jar was her one friend on her daily trips to the well. It represented life to her because she had to have the water it held for her every day. This was how she took care of herself, how she kept herself alive.

And she left it behind!

Do you think maybe that water jar represents even more? What else was she ready to leave behind? Where else in her life was she protecting herself and trying to save herself? Where else in her life did she think it was all up to her?

Maybe it was that long line of husbands, there to give her a name or a home, or some kind of security. Maybe it was being able to take care of herself. But she gets up and runs back to town to tell all those people who wouldn’t even allow her at the well with them. She leaves behind all those ways she thought she was taking care of business. She leaves what she thought she had to have in order to make it through the day – she leaves that water jar, sitting there empty by the well.

When Jesus offers her living water she says Whatever it is I know I need it. What do you say?

I’ll say it again: When you believe that God is the One giving you what you need to survive, you can leave behind your inadequate attempts to save yourself.

If you have a water jar with you tonight, know that God makes the same offer to you. There is living water for you. There is eternal life for you. There is living water that is so abundant it overflows all our water jars and it quenches the deepest thirsts of our lives. If you have a water jar with you, know that you can leave it behind.

You may have come here to draw your own water. But God’s got a better offer.

What do you say?

Thanks be to God!

24 February 2008

Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Center

Sunday Night Worship - 2/17/08

director — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:27:53 +0000

“At the Well”
John 4: 5-42

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Jesus could have taken another route. He didn’t have to travel through Samaria. The first few verses of this chapter (which we didn’t read) set this story up with a description of Jesus traveling from Judea back to Galilee and claim that “he had to go through Samaria” (John 4: 4). I don’t buy it.

I mean, this is the gospel that begins with that great echo from Genesis, declaring Jesus to be the very Word of God, with God from the beginning of all that is. This is the gospel where Jesus’ first miracle – at Cana – is turning water into wine. This is the gospel in which Mary of Bethany not only anoints Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume, but then wipes them with her hair. This is a gospel with some inherent tensions: Jesus is Word (capital W) and yet he is sensually human, someone who enjoys Mary’s elaborate foot treatment and someone who sits down by the well because he was “tired out by his journey” (v.6). So, when Jesus takes a notion to go through Samaria, when a thirsty Jesus decides to sit by a well in the desert at noon and wait until a Samaritan woman approaches before he does anything about getting some water – we should pay attention. There wasn’t any other road for him to travel, was there? Well.

This is a gospel where Jesus’ seemingly random conversation with an unnamed woman of an enemy people gets 38 verses – one of the longest conversations he has with anyone. It’s tempting to contrast this story with the one we read about Nicodemus visiting Jesus in the night. It is interesting to consider the curious contrasts: a named male Jewish leader seeks out Jesus in the night; an unnamed female Samaritan is minding her own business when Jesus seeks her out. Most biblical commentaries contrast the woman at the well with Nicodemus, using her as an example of someone who accepts Jesus’ message and casting Nicodemus in less favorable light as one who couldn’t get past his silly questions to grasp what Jesus was trying to tell him. There may be something to these comparisons but that’s not where we are going today.

She may not have earned a name in the biblical account, but this Samaritan woman is the first person in John’s gospel to hear Jesus reveal himself as the Christ. And this after a strange ramble of a conversation, touched off when Jesus presents his simple request for a drink (v.7). He’s a foreigner in her land, thirsty from the travel, and in need of her hospitality. The woman’s initial reaction is to question him right back, wondering at his flouting of Jewish purity laws. By this point it would seem Jesus should be very thirsty and intently focused on getting a drink to his lips, but he answers her back: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (v.10).

What begins as a relationship of hospitality continues as one, but it becomes less clear as the conversation continues who is giving and who is receiving. Jesus seems to be both asking for a drink and offering to quench the woman’s thirst. The woman moves from considering his request to imploring him to give her the strange water he calls living water. Who is asking whom for what?

This scene reminds me of a letter one of our past Wesley Foundation student presidents sent out to area churches one summer, inviting them to help provide meals for our Thursday night dinners. A week or so after the letters went out I ran into a pastor who mentioned the letter, chuckling a little and saying, “David invited us to partake in the opportunity to cook for the Foundation students.” To which I said, “Well, isn’t it an opportunity, to serve?”

Hospitality is a wily endeavor. There have to be two sides, two roles, to the relationship. But without some fluidity of roles, you end up with handouts or mooching or self-aggrandizement or any number of other distortions. If you enter into a situation of hospitality convinced that you know all the rules, chances are you don’t. If you like to have a script in advance and follow it without wavering, then hospitality isn’t the thing for you.

Jesus and the woman know a little something about hospitality. Each has something to offer and to receive and it seems that only in this dance of an encounter at the well, where the roles of giver and receiver flow like water, are they each affected by the other person. By the times she pleads with Jesus for some of this crazy living water “[the woman] has moved from seeing Jesus as a thirsty Jew who knowingly violates social convention to seeing him as someone whose gifts she needs” (NIB, p. 567).

How does this happen? How does the skeptical woman end up trusting the strange man with her life?

I think the trust begins with him.

I told you Jesus could have traveled by another route. Sure, he could have stayed safely out of Samaritan territory, clean away from that estranged part of the Jewish family tree. He could have set up just at the edge of Samaria and called to them across the border, offering living water from a safe distance, in a more respectable manner. He could have.

But what does he do instead? He walks right into enemy territory and plops himself down at the well. And when the least likely candidate for divine revelation shows up….he asks her for something she can give. Then he asks her about her life, her family situation. He recognizes the truth when she speaks it. He lets her know he hears it, sees her, and wants to get familiar with the details of her life.

Some folks want to focus on the woman’s marital status and history. Jesus doesn’t do this. It’s of little importance. The focal point of this whole story isn’t a list of husbands. It’s the jar.

That water jar she left behind, her one response to Jesus’ self-revelation. Like other disciples who leave behind boats and tax offices to follow Jesus, she leaves behind her water jar and runs back to town to give everyone she meets her testimony: “He told me everything I have ever done” (Storyteller’s New Testament Women, p. 128; v.39)

Just think how little Jesus had to say in order for her to feel that he had a grasp on her whole life. When’s the last time someone listened to you like that? When’s the last time you went out of your way to pay attention to the details of someone else’s life?

On several occasions I have heard my seminary professor Don Saliers mention somewhat wistfully that his singer-songwriter daughter Emily, of the Indigo Girls, can get 9000 people to sing along with every word of her songs, while he can’t get a congregation of 30 Methodists to sing a hymn. ( ) Our culture is thirsty for the living water that can quench our deepest thirsts, but too often too many people experience the church as just another parched patch of desert. Don’t get me wrong. I am one of the 9000 singing along at the Indigo Girls concerts and I am thankful for the ways God speaks to me inside and outside of these walls. What disturbs me is that too often we choose which side of the wall to live on.

I was flipping through The Christian Century magazine a while back and saw a seminary advertisement featuring a young man wearing a bandana on his head, an earring in his ear, and a wary scowl on his face. The copy was: “The last thing he wants is a sermon. How will you communicate God’s love to him?”

Indeed. You know, Jesus spends an extra two days in Samaria because of this woman. When she runs back to town she just keeps telling everyone she sees about this man who has spoken her whole life to her. “Come and see [the one] who told me everything I have ever done!” (v.29). And they come. Based on her testimony of this life-giving encounter, the people come in droves. Because she believed, they came to believe.

When’s the last time we ran from church on a Sunday afternoon, eager to proclaim all the good God has worked in our lives? When’s the last time we turned to each other in the pews to testify to our experience of the living God? When the last thing much of the world outside these walls wants is a sermon, how will we communicate God’s love, if not with the proof of our lives?

This is a week when the outside has come inside here on the Wesley block. Last night began our 2 weeks of hosting the PACEM homeless shelter here in our buildings. It’s a simple and life-giving idea: a moving shelter for homeless men in the coldest months of the year. Each church takes a week or two to offer beds, showers, hot meals, and companionship in the evenings.

We could take another route. It’s easier for us not to learn each other’s names, to stick to the rules, to go straight through on our journeys without stopping at foreign wells. We are hosting a group of unnamed men these 2 weeks. People who our society likes to blame for their circumstances. People who might need someone who can tell them everything they have ever done. Or who may be able to see you clearly enough to tell you about the things you’ve done.

It’s easier to let them remain unnamed. But we have the opportunity to tarry. We can stop by the well this week and next. Take a load off. We can offer hospitality – and receive it – with thirsty, nameless, strangers passing through.

Maybe we think we are the ones who can offer a cold draw of water from the well. Maybe we can. But sometimes the rules and the roles of hospitality get confused and the one who comes asking is the one who bestows the gifts.

What if the living water Christ promises is to be found among the community in the church basement every night? What if we miss out on it because we think we’re not thirsty or because it’s been so long since we relied on someone else for a cup of cold water?

Leave your jars, your boats, your tax offices….your tax returns, your load of laundry, that pile of reading and study problems…Try it this week…Come by the well and drink deeply. Leave your jars behind and receive the water, like a stream that catches your whole life up in its course.

Thanks be to God!

Sunday Night Worship - 2/10/08

director — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:52:54 +0000

“By Every Word”

Matthew 4: 1-11

Ash Wednesday is a weird and wonderful way to begin Lent. The way it shows up in the middle of the week, on a different date each year, almost hidden between Sundays. Today may be the first Sunday in Lent, but Ash Wednesday always kicks the whole season off.

It’s a strange ritual, to gather in order to have ashes smudged on our foreheads – and then to walk around for the rest of the day like that. Weirder, perhaps, to be told when we gather like that: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

You started as nothing but the dust of the earth and one day you will die and be returned back to the dust. Remember that.

I’ve been reading Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss. He’s a reporter and a self-described grump who decides to set off around the world to find the happiest countries. He finds several unexpected trends, things like Denmark and Iceland turning up happier than warm island paradises. But one of the most interesting trends is how often the topic of death comes up with happy people and in happy cultures.

Places like the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. One of the local men Weiner meets is actually named Karma and it’s Karma who offers this as a prescription for a healthy and happy life: “You need to think about death for five minutes every day. It will cure you, sanitize you.” The typical middle-class American, Weiner responds by saying how depressing that sounds. Karma says, “Rich people in the west, they have not touched dead bodies, fresh wounds, rotten things. This is a problem. This is the human condition. We have to be ready for the moment we cease to exist” (The Geography of Bliss, p. 65).

Sounds happy, doesn’t it?

Advertisers and marketers and sometimes our own well-meaning family and friends can go to great lengths to “keep us happy” by avoiding all such topics, by keeping life sanitized and easy and comfortable, by encouraging us to forget or at least ignore for a while the cold hard facts of being human beings on the planet.

I remember being with my grandfather when he was dying. Along with my mom and my aunt and my step-grandmother, I was there for 2 days at his bedside. And it wasn’t like it is in the movies. Granddaddy, who had been suffering with Alzheimer’s for several years, had to struggle to die. His raspy breathing turned rattling and his lips dried out until they cracked and bled. His skin turned yellowish as his liver failed. He would seem restful for small bits of time and then vigorously struggle to get the covers off, to sit up, to do anything except the task at hand – dying.

At the time, it struck me how like birth the whole thing was. Like a woman in labor going through waves of pain and pushing, Granddaddy needed to work his way through that threshold into the next life. He was laboring and getting closer with each wave. It wasn’t like it is in the movies. He didn’t just shut his eyes and leave. And, though he seemed to be letting go, it was not a peaceful, quiet, interior process.

In the weeks after my grandfather’s death, I wrote letters to my mom and my aunt and my step-grandmother, telling them what a privilege it was to be with them in those holy moments. Don’t get me wrong, it was uncomfortable and sad and scary and gritty-real, but it was also so obviously the kind of thing we are put here for that I felt grateful for the experience. I felt thankful that I was able to be part of that labor and that we did not leave it all up to hired professionals.

There is an awful lot in our culture that would say it is better to remember “the good times” and to remember my grandfather in the days before he was diseased. There is an awful lot that would want to sanitize my experience. Even in the church, we sometimes move too quickly from the deathbed to the service of death and resurrection. Karma would tell us to linger a little and get a feel for death while we are yet living.

There is something of this in the conversation we begin on Ash Wednesday. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. In part we are reminding ourselves of how simple it is. No matter the bystanders, we each enter and leave the world on our own, crossing the thresholds alone. Are we living now so that we are ready for the next one when it comes? What are all these suitcases and storage boxes and where do I fit the plasma screen TV? Who is this friend and where is this relationship going? Why do I never find the time to tend it? Why do I never seem to have time for the most important things and people?

Jesus goes out alone into the wilderness for 40 days. Into the arid, lifeless, unforgiving desert, carrying nothing and accompanied by no one. And then the devil shows up.

And he’s like a traveling snake oil salesman, with a coat full of dangling watches and a trunk with extra compartments and something hidden under his hat. He’s determined to make his sale.

Step right up, young man. You look like you could use something to eat, perhaps a nice sourdough. Would you believe it if I told you any of these stones could be turned into bread? Go ahead and try it.

But the young man from Nazareth leaves the stones in the dust on the ground. No thanks, I live by every word that comes from God.

OK, a tough sell. That’s alright. The devil’s seen worse in the dust bowl days in Oklahoma. No one wanted to buy anything back then. He pulls out a dusty photograph of St. Peter’s. See this here dome? 446 feet high she is! Want to know how to jump off without a scratch?

It doesn’t interest me, Jesus says.

He removes his straw hat and wipes the sweat from his brow. You must be interested in knowing what I know about the mountain yonder? he says, pointing in the distance. You can see all the world from there and, I tell you, whatever you seen you can have, if you’ll come with me.

Jesus glances into the distance and back again at the pitiful sweating man in the plaid polyester suit. I won’t come with you. And I’m not interested in anything you’re selling. Can’t you see I came out here with nothing? It’s God I’m after. Now leave me!

That’s a rough translation.

It’s the rough, treacherous, deadly places that can reorient us towards life. Jesus doesn’t bring a picture of his mom or an iPod to pass the long hours. He faces the desert wilderness with nothing but a desire to seek God – even there. He goes hungry with only a taste for God’s Word.

Some of us feel like we are facing death when we give up chocolate or internet access or any of the myriad ways we distract ourselves from real life. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with most of them, but occasionally it seems we become a bit overloaded and need to clear out the excess, head into the wilderness and see how we do on our own again, with just God. With only the hunger for every word God sends our way. Word-itarians, you might say.

I quoted Jan Richardson in this morning’s sermon and here’s another one from her Painted Prayerbook blog. Jan’s a United Methodist elder, writer, and artist, and wrote this on her Lenten blog this week (www.paintedprayerbook.com): “The season of Lent beckons us to see what we are clinging to. The imagery of this season, therefore, is frequently stark. These days draw us into a wilderness in which we can more readily see what we have shaped our daily lives around: habits, practices, possessions, commitments, conflicts, relationships—all the stuff that we give ourselves to in a way that sometimes becomes more instinctual than intentional. Much as Jesus went into the desert to pray and fast for forty days, Lent offers us a landscape that calls us to look at our lives from a different perspective, to perceive what is essential and what is extraneous.”

Am I shaping my life around chocolate and television and Facebook? What is the shape of my life? Does it look sanitized and store-bought or does it look homemade and include messy things like relationship and death? When I return to the dust, will I be upset at all the crap I have to leave behind at last? Or will I recognize the threshold where I’ve visited, the place I’ve practiced for?

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

Most yoga classes end with a restorative pose called savasana, “corpse pose.” It’s pretty much like it sounds: you lie on the floor on your back, palms up, eyes closed, and try to stay still for several minutes. Most teachers talk about it as restful and balancing after a hard and vigorous practice, and it is. But I had a teacher once who said something different. She said that the pose is what it sounds like: we are practicing for our own deaths.

The thing about any yoga pose is that all of your regular personality traits come to the surface as you practice. If you are impatient, you will want to come out of poses before the rest of the class. If you are uncomfortable with stretching yourself, you will pull back when it would help you more to lean into the stretch. If you are serious about your practice, you make note of these responses. They, too, are part of the practice.

That’s what the Lenten wilderness is like. That’s what Lenten disciplines can be to us. Places where we practice in order to live more intentional lives. Places where we rid ourselves of the extraneous and develop our Word-itarian tendencies. Maybe even a place we allow ourselves to remember that we are dust and that we shall return to dust one day.

Thanks be to God!

Sunday Morning Worship - 10 February 2008 - 1st Sunday in Lent

director — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 18:04:14 +0000

“Making Loincloths for Ourselves”

Genesis 2:15-17; 3: 1-7

We’ve been full of revelation recently. A month ago we moved from Christmas into the feast of Epiphany, when Christ is revealed to the Magi. The Christmas intimacy of Jesus’ birth refocuses to include Gentiles, as the Magi arrive and the story enlarges. Our eyes adjust to the ongoing revelation.

Last Sunday, the fourth and final Sunday after Epiphany, was Transfiguration Sunday. We went to the top of that mountain with Peter, James, and John and stood amazed as Jesus was transformed into someone almost unrecognizable in his glory. Once again we squinted, along with the disciples, trying to make out just what God was doing. What is it we will see the next time the light changes?

Revelation is a strange sort of experience. An unveiling. Often, something which has appeared quite normal, something we never questioned at all, is unveiled to reveal another layer, another perspective, another motive or purpose, a deeper beauty or truth. When God is involved, you never know what you are going to get. You mean you were in there all along? Why are you showing up like that right now? This is the season – the season of revelation – that we’ve lingered in until this week, the first week of Lent.

When Bishop Will Willimon was here for our McDonald Lecture last year he spoke about revelation in a way that I had never conceived of it. Fitting, huh? He talked about learning as revelation. What else is learning but an unveiling? You read and ponder and write essays and solve for “x” and reflect on the lecture and in time you are given to understand something you didn’t see before. Revelation!

I love this way of thinking about the academic pursuit. But, see, I give myself away here by calling it the academic “pursuit.” I may love Willimon’s novel description and recognize the truth in it, but a big part of me is stuck back where I was before I heard him say that. This is how we are raised in this country. Sure, you may have some natural gifts of intelligence and perseverance which make school a good fit for you. But really it’s because you work hard, right? Revelation?! Come on, I earned that grade. I busted my butt studying for that exam. No one handed it to me!

Maybe you have a similar gut reaction?

I think it’s an interesting one, as if the only choices are between full out, hi-def, surround sound, God-given revelation or do-it-ourselves Protestant wok ethic pride. Either God gives it or we make it ourselves.

Does that seem right?

Last week Elizabeth said in her sermon that a lot of the time we come to church looking for just enough of God’s help to make it through the week, but not enough to have our lives turned upside down.

This goes beyond academics. We want to be in charge! In recent years I’ve heard several biblical scholars describe various stories – Job, Jonah, Adam & Eve – as all boiling down to this central point: I’m God and you’re not.

Apparently there is a steep learning curve on this lesson. Our people have been working on this one a long time, beginning with our story from Genesis today.

God puts the man and the woman in the Garden, telling them to “till and keep it,” offering them abundant food from every tree in the Garden except one. Avoid that one and we’re OK, God says (Genesis 2:15-17).

But along comes one of God’s other “good” creatures (Genesis 1:25) who puts a new idea in their heads. What if God’s not really providing for you but keeping the best from you? Doesn’t that one lone untouched tree over there look tasty? What if God just wants to keep you from being like God (Gen. 3: 6)?

Well what if God is trying to do just that?

Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar and professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, says it this way, “The destiny of the human creature is to live in God’s world, not a world of his or her own making” (Interpretation: Genesis, p. 40). Here’s Elizabeth’s comment again, about wanting only enough of God to help us do what it is we want to do in the first place, ourselves. We want to come along like thieves and snatch the low-hanging fruit. We want the food without the tilling. We want the food that we want, not the feast we are offered.

And we end up suddenly naked. Vulnerable. Ashamed. Not sure how we got here. Something unexpected has been revealed – and it is not a beautiful sight. It is a clear vision of our grasping after what we were not offered. There it is in plain sight. It is painful and humbling. And we have got to cover this unbearable exposed nakedness!

It’s interesting to me that Adam and Eve don’t run straight to God when their eyes are opened. If nothing else, it is firm testament to what God was saying all along. Why not throw themselves at God’s mercy? Why not run to catch up with God taking an evening walk in the breeze and ask for forgiveness?

It’s interesting what they do. They make loincloths for themselves (Gen. 3:7). Seeing how completely wrong-headed they were, seeing their own nakedness, catching a whiff of their own vulnerability, they don’t run back to the God who has given them every good blessing they have received in life. No. Instead they decide to fix it themselves. Thinking, for the first time in human history, that two wrongs will make a right, they sew together some fig leaves (Gen. 3:7). Making bad worse, they try to cover up their mistake, which, of course, only brings loud attention to it.

This is the perfect text for the first Sunday of Lent! The story from Matthew is good too, with the wilderness and the 40 days (and we’ll tackle that one at the Wesley Foundation tonight), but this oldest of stories seems truly perfect. How long will it take us to get this life with God right? How long until we learn to turn back and rely on God when we find ourselves grasping for what’s not ours? Or when we end up naked, unmasked and deceived?

This is where spiritual practice comes in. And, believe me, it does take practice.

Artists and writers speak about priming the pump. All those days rising at 5am or staying up until 3am, scribbling away or covering the canvas…All those days, many of them resulting in work that isn’t yet art. Nothing to sell or even to show to another person. But the artist trudges up there one more time the next day. In our production-consumption society those days, those activities, don’t make sense.

But those are the priming the pump days. The days when the artist submits herself to the practice itself, not knowing where it will lead nor what will emerge from the time. Those are the days when she agrees to put herself in the way of revelation, in case one of those days is the day when it shows up and art is born. That’s the crazy way it works. Most writers will say that their best writing seems to come from somewhere deep within and, at the same time, seems to move through them from some place else. A revelation.

Spiritual practice can be like this, too. Sure, there are days when it all coalesces and we are in the groove and the scenery changes to splendor and the choir rocks and we deeply feel the presence of God as we pray and it’s so easy to see Christ in the people around us and we overflow with generosity.

Then there are the other days. The toaster catches fire while we’re trying to have 5 minutes of morning prayer time and when the smoke clears we still can’t feel God in the room and no one anywhere looks remotely like Christ.

But we are called back to the quiet corner, the walk in the woods, the devotional booklet, the kneeler. We choose to put ourselves in the way of God, trusting that when we do this often enough our eyes adjust and we can see what it is God reveals. We choose practice, not because it makes us perfect, but because it’s all we can do. It is our vocation, how God calls us to participate with God in reconciling all of creation to God. It’s part of the tilling.

Jan Richardson, a United Methodist elder, writer, and artist, wrote this on her Lenten blog this week:

“These days challenge us to take on a practice, or give one up, so that we can look at our lives in a different way. As Jesus knew, going into the barren and uncomfortable places isn’t about proving how holy we are, or how tough, or how brave. It’s about letting God draw us into the place where we don’t know everything, don’t have to know everything, indeed may be emptied of nearly everything we think we know. And thereby we become free to receive the word, the wisdom, the clarity about who we are and what God is calling us to do” (www.paintedprayerbook.com).

During this season of Lent, don’t be surprised if God is still in the revelation business. Don’t have your eyes so focused on Easter that you forget to look around. Remember that what you give up or take on is one way in, one path to God – but not God Godself. Your practice does not need to be perfect. Take a break from the loincloth-making and let God give you what you need. Feel startled or uprooted or relieved or at loose ends or eager. Feel whatever this dependence feels like to you. Let God speak to you in your vulnerability. Let God be with you in your anxiety. Let God show you what you’ve been dying to see.

Thanks be to God!

Sunday Night Worship - 1/20/08

director — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:55:40 +0000

Come and See
John 1: 29-42

Several years ago I took a seminar class at Wesley Seminary in Washington, DC. It was an evangelism class that I was required to take in order to be ordained. Though I’d graduated from seminary seven years previously, evangelism had not been a required class at that time and, as I was fond of saying, “Why would I take that if it weren’t required?”

I wasn’t the only one with this opinion in the class. There were several people (whom I immediately befriended) who were also taking the class solely as a requirement and with not a little trepidation. As I later found out, that single class contained the campus’s absolute most radical students in either direction. In terms of evangelism, it contained people who had come to know Christ and turned their lives around due to someone else’s witness and it also contained those who had been driven to the very edges of the church by others who “witnessed” that Jesus didn’t want them – at least not as they were.

As you may surmise, this was a class ready to blow. Thank God we had one of the best professors of my entire seminary career leading this class. He was brand spanking new, from Iowa, teaching a class that had gone unmanned and which many would have love to see remain that way. If memory serves, his background was in Wesleyan studies. Certainly related to evangelism, but not always cobbled into one professorial job description. So I’m not sure if he was even teaching what he initially came there to teach – but he had passion!

Through serendipity or studiousness or silly chance, Scott Kisker was passionate about evangelism. Most of the people I’ve met with a real burning passion for evangelism tend to speak a certain language that can sound like code to the rest of us. Before that class, most of what I’d heard described as evangelism seemed forced, formulaic, and even archaic (especially when it came to relations between different cultures around the world). But Scott Kisker didn’t come off this way to me and he walked the talk. Starting with our class assignments.

On the very first day he informed us – a group mostly intending to be ordained pastors – that each class we would spend 20 minutes at the start listening to two students give their testimonies. Immediately, half of the class was elated, knowing just what they’d say and just where the high points were, and eager to get to the sign up sheet.

Then there was my half of the class. We weren’t personally familiar with this practice and had given up on that word, “testimony.” In fact, I wasn’t even sure I knew what to include in a testimony. Because the only kind I’d ever heard always involved drug abuse and other “rock bottom” moments, I wasn’t sure I had a suitable one to give. There we were, perfectly respectable seminarians and soon-to-be-pastors who would rather be any place else than standing up in front of a group of people – even other pastors – giving our testimonies. And yes, we could see the irony in the situation.

This is where I think Scott Kisker was particularly brilliant. He absolutely insisted on this assignment and he absolutely insisted that everyone had something to say when asked to give reason for the hope within us (I Peter 3: 15). He also insisted that we were not to give our call stories. This exercise wasn’t about why we were called to be ordained but simply about why we were called in the first place.

I thought of that class again this week reading John. This is the gospel with that great opening evocative of Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). And though this is the gospel where we are told in chapter one, verse one, that Christ has been with God since the beginning of all beginnings, still Jesus does not actually show up until verse 29, the first verse we read today. And even then, Jesus stays on the sidelines and doesn’t say anything until verse 38 (New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Vol. IX, p. 528). It’s as if Jesus knows how important testimony is. John’s witness is important enough for Jesus to wait 29 verses to appear and then 9 more before he says anything. He wants John to have his say first.

There are a lot of pithy sayings meant to demonstrate the importance of evangelism, testimony, witness. “Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary” is attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. A more recent one says, “You may be the only Bible some people ever read.” Pithy, but they do hit on something central to the truth of Christianity: it takes a witness.

In this week’s Christian Century magazine writer Kathleen Norris tells the story of an Islamic scholar who, while she was studying in Paris, found the lives of Islamic Africans (her fellow students) to be so fascinating that she was drawn to her conversion. Though she was raised Christian, “what she witnessed” as the Africans endured daily assaults “astonished” her. They endured it all with grace and “without bitterness [and] attributed their perseverance under pressure to their Muslim faith, and that caused her to take a closer look” (The Christian Century, 1/15/08, p. 22).

Norris also describes a Benedictine monk’s exchange experience with a Japanese Buddhist: “[The Benedictine] said that after the Buddhist had been in the monastery for about a month, he had only one question. It seemed to him that the monks did not live very well. They worked hard, their food was neither good nor plentiful, and they did not get enough sleep. ‘Yet they are joyful,’ he said, ‘and I want to know: from where does this joy come?’” (Christian Century, 1/15/08, p. 22).

From where does this joy come? What is the reason for the hope within them?

Can I get a witness?

There is something mighty and powerful about seeing someone’s convictions shine through the sometimes dull moments of daily life.

That’s what I love about Jesus’ words here: “Come and see” (John 1: 39). They are not didactic or preachy or even much of an explanation. Jesus wouldn’t be picked for the debate team with these words – not enough of an argument. But aren’t they more persuasive than a treatise or a theorem or legal argument? “Come and see.”

Wouldn’t you rather receive an invitation than a critique? Aren’t you curious what you’ll see if you just come on and follow? “Come and see.” They are playful words. Hopeful words. Imaginative words.

My friend Scott McReynolds directs the Housing Development Alliance where we are volunteering during spring break. We were emailing last week about the “war on poverty” begun in Appalachia in the 1960s and how we haven’t fought that war well. Scott commented that he has come to see lack of hope as one of the biggest obstacles to conquer in this fight. He listened to a speaker recently who said that imagination and art use the same part of our brains. Scott wondered to me, “So, by cutting art education funding are we limiting our children’s ability to imagine a better future?”

Jesus was right at home in the world of imagination and hope. Maybe that’s why he spoke so often in parable. When John’s disciples ask Jesus where he’s staying he doesn’t answer the question. He says, “Come and see.” He lets the disciples explore his life with him. Rather than answering all their questions for them, he invites them on a journey where they can discover the answers (NIB, p. 531). Maybe he knew that we just listen better – with our whole lives – to an imaginative invitation.

What is the future to which Christ beckons us? How will our lives be different in 5 years because we want to live like Christians? Come and see.

What is the reason for the hope within you? Why do you live like you do? Why do you believe what you believe? Why do you make those commitments? What peace do you know? Come and see.

And when others ask you about your life…When a Scott Kisker comes in and forces you to give your testimony…Or when you face the every day choices between living in or out of synch with your beliefs…What will you do? Will you struggle to cross every “t” and dot every “i” with explanative detail? Will you draw a diagram about your faith? Or will you welcome your brother or sister with a warm invitation: Come and see.

Thanks be to God!