Story

A preview of my upcoming column in the Baltimore-Washington Connection

You need to know, I tell a lot of stories in my preaching. Mostly they are stories from my life or the church’s life. The stories that you find when you Google or, God forbid, from sermon anecdote books, make my flesh crawl. My actual life is way more interesting than those stale Saltines.  Stories have always been important to me. They are the way I learned lessons, from the time I was a wee tyke.  Family stories, mostly, that all start with “The Time…”  like The Time Mama Rowe Wanted to Learn to Drive, The Time Uncle Roscoe Shot the Rope, and The Time Daddy Left Me in the Tree.  Stories, to be good ones, had to have recognizable, fallible, flawed, hopeful, characters, somehow kin to me, and moments of great conflict , and satisfying resolutions. From those stories, I learned who I was, where I came from, and what was important in life.

So much of the gospel is told in story form.  Scripture is, at base, a story of God and people, a story of covenant and consummation and the life and work of Jesus Christ. In that larger story, we see ourselves, and when preaching works, we come to see that the story of faith is our story. We see ourselves in Israelites and Egyptians, in  Peter the Doubter and Peter the Rock.  The best part of the preaching moment is when we come to see how the Jesus we hear about in Scripture is the Jesus who woos us and works in and on us today. It’s a wide-eyed recognition  that, in the blink of an eye, we are the women, running from the tomb, running from the sanctuary, saying “He’s not here. He has risen.”

In every church, we must tell the story of the gospel and we must tell how the gospel is being lived out in our midst. What are some of your church’s stories of God at work?  The Time Our Church Fed our Neighbors in the Park, The Time John Went into Rehab and We Prayed for Him, The Time We Marched for Justice? The Time the Power Went Out and We Worshipped Anyway? I promise, you have a story to tell, about God’s love and mercy, about faults and failures and God’s redemption.  You have a story because God had a story first…that  “old, old story of Jesus and his love.”

Independence.

As I write this, I’m watching the sun rise over the ocean while my vacationing family sleeps.  We are at the beach celebrating our 20^th wedding anniversary.  As July approaches, and I’m asked to reflect on independence, my first thought, after 20 years of marriage is, it’s overrated.  Relationships are very quickly about interdependence, in my experience, or they don’t last very long.  I remember counseling a newly married person, and being asked, “Do you mean I have to just give up being RIGHT?” Her quarrel with her husband was about something tiny, like when he put the dishes away, he didn’t stack the bowls in the manner that she wanted. “Oh, baby girl,” I wanted to say, “this good man here loves you and wants God’s best for you, and you are screaming at him over bowls?”  Of course you have to give up “being right” all the time if you want to have a happy marriage.  There are more important things than being “independent.”

Our life with God is certainly about freedom from bondage. Our God is the God of the Exodus, and the God of Christian freedom.  God certainly has strong opinions about worshipping stuff that isn’t God.  In our baptisms, we promise to use the freedom and power God gives us to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.  But all of the freedom we have is a gift that is designed to help us choose God.  We raise up our kids in the church so that when they become independent, and can make their own choice, they may be led to “accept God’s grace for themselves, profess their faith openly and lead a Christian life.” (Baptismal Covenant).

Independence exists so that we can have the chance to choose be dependent on the right things, and so that we can choose to love God and each other.  What if we shot off fireworks at baptisms?  OK, too scary for the babies.  What if we played the 1812 Overture at clergy retirement parties?  There should be sparklers at every church meeting where folks choose Jesus over being right, where they listen and disagree and love one another anyway.  Let’s have a parade down Main Street because people who are hungry are being fed and the oppressed are being set free.  

May God bless us all so that we love Jesus and each other, and all our neighbors, more than just “independence."

Hope

When a Christian talks about hope, what do they mean? Is it a wish? Is it like holding your breath as a “Hail Mary” pass flies to the hands of a wide receiver?

To Emily Dickinson, hope is “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” For the apostle Paul, Christian hope is rooted in God’s action in Christ. God has saved us and our response to that salvation is something rising up in us called “hope.”   In Romans 8 we read, “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

When a Christian talks about hope, it’s not just an ethereal wish. It’s grounded in God’s saving action in Christ.  Christian hope is a lot like the Christian notion of mystery. My systematics professor told us that Christian mystery is not just a throwing up of hands. He reminded us that the mystery of faith is not “I don’t know, I don’t  know, I don’t know.” It’s “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”  

Christian hope is wild and untamed and audacious hope, like Dickinson’s wild bird of the soul. It stands in the gap of government shutdowns and a collective lack of options to whisper words about angels and Easter and a love that is stronger than death.  It allows for mustard seeds turning into great shrubs. However, it’s not a cotton candy hope.  It’s a hope that’s firmly grounded in God’s promises in Christ. It is invisible and mysterious, and at the same time, strong enough to risk everything for. That’s why we can stand at a graveside and proclaim the “sure and certain hope” of the resurrection.   It is a wild leap of faith into God’s often unseen, but still sure and certain, embrace.

“My hope (all wild and audacious, all unruly and unlikely) is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness…On Christ the solid rock I stand (sometimes my legs quiver, but I stand), all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.”

Clouds of Dust and Clouds of Glory

I'm thinking this morning, still, of dust and ashes.  I don't dust all that much around the house, which I'm sure is a glaring fault. I am sure that other people dust regularly, even the parts of the house that are hidden, like behind the curios and knickknacks or along the baseboards. I read somewhere that the dust of our home contains our skin cells, which makes me look at Pigpen, the Charlie Brown character, more sympathetically.

Last night at the Ash Wednesday service, we spoke of being dust and returning to dust. I suppose in light of the skin cell business we might say that is literally true.  But I can't shake the fact that stars are made from dust, and more importantly, if humanity is dust, we are surely some beloved dust. Precious enough to be animated by the Divine breath. Important enough for God to die for. 

Wordsworth wrote:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:

 As this bit of dust reaches skyward in Lenten disciplines, may we all remember that we are children of dust, and also, children of God. If we are in fact trailing clouds of dust, for all who are born have started the clock to that dusty mortal return, perhaps, too, we are trailing clouds of glory, from God, who knew us and loved us from before we were born, and who knows and loves and carries us through this and every season. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Ashes

My first experience of Ash Wednesday came when I was in middle school, and we had just moved to Rhode Island from Florida.  One day, folks came to school with a funny-looking smudge on their foreheads. I was embarrassed for them until my Social Studies teacher took me aside and said, "It's Ash Wednesday."  Oh, good, well that makes sense. My theory of Completely Unbelievable Coincidence involving #2 Pencils and Charcoal was a lot harder to believe.

As we prepare to gather again to contemplate repentance and bear the cross on our forheads, I'm grateful for this ancient practice, which reminds me that I am mortal, and that I am in need of a savior, and that salvation was wrought on the cross, and unleashed on Easter morning.

I wear many hats in life, and at times, many "masks" too.  It's good to be able to shed those masks in favor of a mark of who I really am, and who we really are.  We are children of the King, marked in baptism as Christ's own, forever.  From newborn babies to elderly saints of the church, let us all put on ashes, and remember that we are dust (beloved and breath-animated dust). Let us repent and believe the gospel, that Jesus tells us who we are and what we inhabit these dust bunny bodies for:  "To bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Saturday Morning

Reconnecting with this blog I have let lay fallow for TOO long....and inspired by a poem I read yesterday, I offer the following:

Saturday mornings are for not making up the bed, and for drinking hot black coffee as slowly as I want. Saturday mornings are for carving out a sand fort to keep out the ocean called "I have to give a sermon tomorrow." Saturday mornings are for children with their hair standing up and sleep still in their eyes.  They are for having the news on in the background but not listening to the words they are saying. Saturday mornings are for riding a bike in the cold because the sun is out, and for warming bare feet in the sunny spot on the carpet. Saturday mornings are for washing and drying but not for ironing. Saturday mornings are for cinnamon rolls and flannel, but not the tailored flannel suit. Saturday mornings go by too quickly, pushed with a momentum that comes from Somewhere Else, somewhere Not My Idea, leaving me wistful for it before the sun even sets, leaving me curled up on a hidden sofa, scraping the bowl of Saturday Morning like Mama's chocolate cake batter, and holding on to the taste as long as I can.

The Generosity of Numbers: Why I love and hate math

When I was a kid, I loved words--give me metaphors and similes, give me alliteration, give me the "snap, crackle, pop" of onomatopoeia! Math was...well, not the same. Once I got into Algebra and all the surprises that followed it (Algebra II, Trig/Analyt), I could no longer count on my magnificent brain to figure out the answer with any degree of reliable accuracy.  Sometimes the right answer felt like winning the lottery--and by that I mean, rare and random and disconnected to any pattern I could figure out.


I appreciated the beauty of math, how it had hidden rules and patterns and how it solved so many of the world's problems..."If a train leaves Chicago at 12:45 and another train leaves South Bend at 2:17, and then if there's a cow on the tracks..." I did not understand math, totally, but I respected it. I stared wide-eyed at it, like a Neanderthal's first encounter with fire. It gave off lovely sparks, but had a heat and power that I knew were beyond my grasp. Math was to be approached with caution once we had variables and equations and parabolas and hyperbolas. Math was to be approached with something akin to awe, barefoot and kneeling before a burning bush full of mystery and beauty and sometimes, as my GPA swiftly showed me, full of pain.

I love this poem by Mary Cornish about the generosity of numbers. I dedicate it to my favorite high school teacher, who taught, of all things, mathematics. John B. Walters, III, this one is for you.

Numbers
by Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.