Grace and peace to you on this Christmas Eve.
Throughout the season, I have occasionally tuned in to the 24/7 Christmas music on the local Christian radio station here in Atlanta. Between renditions of the "12 Days of Christmas" by the Muppets and "O Holy Night" by Amy Grant, the announcer's voice breaks in -- "104.7 - The Fish -- helping your family keep Christ in Christmas."
Besides the irony of the fact that immediately after that announcement, completely secular Christmas tunes like "Deck the Halls" often start to play, hearing that announcement over and over has gotten me thinking -- what exactly does it mean to "keep Christ in Christmas"?
We hear this catch-phrase often this time of year, often by disgruntled Christians who feel that Christmas has been too "secularized" in the mainstream, and are upset about Christmas pageants no longer being a part of public school celebrations. But I would argue that "keeping Christ in Christmas" is not a matter of forcing our particular religious symbols into the public square that we share with our Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh brothers and sisters (and those of others or no faith). Rather, we keep Christ in Christmas by how we LIVE, regardless of whether there is a crèche on the town hall lawn or not.
"Keeping Christ in Christmas" is a personal spiritual discipline, not something that can be mandated by the outside culture. And for those of us who recognize in Jesus of Nazareth the Christ and the incarnation of God, this most holy night when we celebrate his birth as an infant child in a manger is an occasion to reflect on what this teaches us about the nature of God.
Centuries of Christian theology have covered and buried the infant Jesus amidst a slew of heavy accolades -- Prince of Peace, King of Kings, Lord of Lords. "Glory to the newborn King!" we sing triumphantly on Christmas Eve. But the birth of Jesus was anything BUT stately and powerful. It bears repeating year after year because human beings have such a need for pomp and circumstance that over the years Christians have ascribed to Jesus the image and role of an earthly ruler. But in actuality, Jesus was born a helpless baby, to a poor peasant family, in a dirty animal stable. This was certainly not in keeping with first-century Jewish expectations of a Messiah who would come to liberate the Israelite people from their political bondage to the imperialist Roman powers of the day. And, two thousand years later, it is still not in keeping with how we human beings like to think of God -- as mighty and powerful. Jesus in the manger is not "crowned with many crowns;" he lies helpless, utterly dependent on the care of his all-too-human parents.
"So what are you saying?" someone might ask. "That God in Jesus was NOT all-mighty and all-powerful?" Most certainly not... but herein lies the paradox of the Christian faith. Yes, the God of the Universe most definitely reigns supreme over the universe. But the birth of Christ shows us that the WAYS that this God of the Universe exercises power is NOT in mighty armies, NOT in the upper eschelons of wealth and power in society. Rather, God's power is made manifest in a child -- a poor, infant child -- the single most vulnerable state of humanity that we know.
What does it mean to "keep Christ in Christmas"? What does Christmas -- God as a baby -- teach us about the nature of God? Perhaps it shows us that the places that need the most care, the most attention, the most love - the places that are the most helpless and the most vulnerable... there we find God. The God we know in Christ is Emmanuel - "God with us." Not God "over" us or God "of" us, but God WITH us -- in all the celebration and joy, and in all the pain and sorrow, of the human experience.
Our secular Christmas frenzy tells us that those with more have the better Christmases; those with the most expensive material gifts, with the best family situations, and with the best-decorated homes have the most blessed Christmases, the ones that look most like the syrupy-sweet Christmas specials playing incessantly on T.V. But the Christmas of the Bible is anything BUT these things. It is full of the fear, pain, and need that so many of us find our lives filled with during this holiday season. And although Paul tells us in the book of Acts that the adult Jesus once said that "it is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35), William Willimon, Methodist bishop of Alabama, writes that it is actually more difficult this time of year for us to own our identity as RECEIVERS:
"I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story -- the one according to Luke not [Charles] Dickens - is not about how blessed it is to be givers but how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers... The first word of the church, a people born out of so odd a nativity, is that we are receivers before we are givers. Discipleship teaches us the art of seeing our lives as gifts. That's tough, because I would rather see myself as a giver. I want power -- to stand on my own, take charge, set things to rights, perhaps to help those who have nothing. I don't like picturing myself as dependent, needy, empty-handed."**
And yet, it is true -- and it is actually comforting to me to realize -- that we are, ALL of us -- from the neediest man standing in line at a soup kitchen tonight in search of a hot meal, to the most wealthy among us who will mark Christmas Eve with a five-course catered meal in a multi-million dollar home -- utterly dependent on God for our very life and breath. The Christmas story brings this out in full force to us. We all find it difficult to give gifts to that relative who seems to have everything - how much less do we have anything to give to the very Creator of the Universe! The English carol "In the bleak midwinter" says it best in its final verse:
What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give him —
Give him my heart.
Acknowledging that all we have is a gift from God, we can only humbly give thanks and try, however brokenly, to model God's generosity towards us in how we live our lives in relationship with others. I am reminded of the General Thanksgiving, used in the Episcopal liturgies of morning and evening prayer. After giving thanks to God for our creation and preservation in this life, the prayer goes on to say,
"...And, give us such an awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts, we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to your service..."
What does it mean to keep Christ in Christmas? I can't think of a better definition than that.
I would like to leave you with a poem by Oscar Romero that reminds the broken and hurting among us -- which is ALL of us, in some way -- that Christmas comes for US.
No one can celebrate
a genuine Christmas
without being truly poor.
The self-sufficient, the proud,
those who, because they have
everything, look down on others,
those who have no need
even of God -- for them there
will be no Christmas.
Only the poor, the hungry,
those who need someone
to come on their behalf,
will have that someone.
That someone is God.
Emmanuel. God-with-us.
Without poverty of spirit
there can be no abundance of God.
It is my prayer that we might all know the power of Emmanuel, "God-with-us," this Christmas. Peace be to you and yours this most blessed night.
** William Willimon, "The God We Hardly Knew," in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001).
Monday, December 24, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Spiritual Autobiography for DYVE
I have entered the discernment process for the priesthood in the Diocese of Atlanta, through a program called Discerning Young Vocations Experience (DYVE), designed specifically for young adults (twentysomethings). This is the spiritual autobiography I wrote for my first meeting with that group on Nov. 17. (It could only be three pages, double-spaced, so that really forced me to edit and create something more structured and precise than I otherwise would have!)
When I think back on the wrestling match that has been my Christian journey over the past ten years, the overarching theme could be summed up in one brilliantly concise line from a book called Encountering God, by Harvard religion professor Diana Eck. She writes, "Theological questions are not merely theoretical; they are the life and death questions of real people attempting to live with intellectual and personal honesty in a world too complex for simplistic answers." As I have walked the path of faith, I have always asked tough theological questions; in the early years of my journey, they took the form of philosophical and intellectual speculation and turmoil, while more recently I have asked more practical questions about ways "to live with intellectual and personal honesty" in how I embody my faith.
In college, my journey was characterized by intense intellectual questions as I tried to make sense of my newfound faith in Christ. Though I had been raised Lutheran, I had never been very "into" church until I had a "conversion experience" through a retreat at a friend's church in my senior year of high school, which propelled me into several years of time in nondenominational, evangelical churches. My mindset in relation to my faith at this time was intellectual and rational; the communities of which I was a part thought of faith primarily as belief, as assent to a particular doctrine. I was drawn to these communities for their passion for Christ and spiritual certitude, but soon realized that I personally still had searing questions about God, my faith, and the scriptures. I became a religion major in an attempt to work through some of those questions, but initially the religion courses seemed to raise more questions than they answered. My first response was reactionary – I was determined to "prove" that Christianity was "right." However, after reading many apologetics, I came to the conclusion that there can be no objective proof in matters of faith. And after delving into the study of world religions in my later college years and encountering for the first time people with active faith commitments to religions other than Christianity, I found that my sense of "intellectual and personal honesty" made it impossible for me to continue to hold an exclusivist belief – the idea that Christianity held all the answers and all other faiths were wrong. This was not an easy conclusion to reach when I was involved in communities who believed there are fiery consequences for anyone who does not believe that Christianity has an exclusive hold on truth and salvation. These questions truly were "life and death," in the most literal sense, for me.
After I graduated from college and moved to Boston for graduate school, my faith began to shift, from a struggle with speculative theology about the afterlife to a sense of calling to address the immediacy of human need in the here and now. One of the things that had always compelled me most about Jesus, from the very first time I really cracked open a Bible in my senior year of high school, was his way of breaking down the social boundaries of the day and reaching out to call all people blessed and beloved of God – including those that society and the religious establishment were quick to dismiss or even condemn. Once I had exhausted myself with intellectual and philosophical questions, realizing that they were likely not ever going to be solved and answered entirely to my satisfaction, I focused instead on the practical – on what I could see and hear and feel and know on this planet. And one of the first things I noticed was that people were hungry. And I remembered that Jesus had said something about feeding them.
So began my struggle "to live with intellectual and personal (and I might add, spiritual) honesty" in the world, to live out my values in following Jesus's example, to answer what I began to increasingly understand as a calling from God to reach out to those in need, to assuage suffering, and to promote healing. After running from this call for nearly two years, I finally stepped out in faith and began to volunteer every week with a homeless ministry program that slowly but surely transformed my life. One particular Sunday, after giving lunch to a woman on the street, I offered to give her one of the crosses we wore as a symbol of our ministry with this group. She eagerly accepted, and asked me to place it around her neck for her. Many months later, I realized that this was my first true sacramental act. And in that moment, something stirred deep within me, something that let loose a chain of events that has brought me, two years later, to be entering the discernment process for the priesthood.
I went immediately home and rode a wave of inspiration as words flowed out of my fingertips into my computer, recording my circuitous path to homeless ministry. I shared that writing with friends and mentors, and some of them began to encourage me to think about ordained ministry. The next year, I wound up serving as an intern in an Episcopal church in Omaha, Nebraska, through a discernment program for young adults. I came out of that program with an increased sense of calling to ministry, and at the end of the program felt a strong call to return to my home region of the country, which precipitated my move to Atlanta this summer.
Through all my struggles with my faith, I have stared complexity in the face and refused to acquiesce to simplistic, pat answers in matters of faith. I am always and constantly "working out my salvation with fear and trembling," as Paul writes in Philippians 2:12; constantly wrestling with God, praising and thanking God, arguing with God, and listening for God. I have moved from a faith that was concerned primarily with belief and right answers to a faith that is rooted in compassionate action and is comfortable sitting with the places of uncertainty and complexity in the human experience, fully confident that the incarnate Lord will always show up in those places with us.
When I think back on the wrestling match that has been my Christian journey over the past ten years, the overarching theme could be summed up in one brilliantly concise line from a book called Encountering God, by Harvard religion professor Diana Eck. She writes, "Theological questions are not merely theoretical; they are the life and death questions of real people attempting to live with intellectual and personal honesty in a world too complex for simplistic answers." As I have walked the path of faith, I have always asked tough theological questions; in the early years of my journey, they took the form of philosophical and intellectual speculation and turmoil, while more recently I have asked more practical questions about ways "to live with intellectual and personal honesty" in how I embody my faith.
In college, my journey was characterized by intense intellectual questions as I tried to make sense of my newfound faith in Christ. Though I had been raised Lutheran, I had never been very "into" church until I had a "conversion experience" through a retreat at a friend's church in my senior year of high school, which propelled me into several years of time in nondenominational, evangelical churches. My mindset in relation to my faith at this time was intellectual and rational; the communities of which I was a part thought of faith primarily as belief, as assent to a particular doctrine. I was drawn to these communities for their passion for Christ and spiritual certitude, but soon realized that I personally still had searing questions about God, my faith, and the scriptures. I became a religion major in an attempt to work through some of those questions, but initially the religion courses seemed to raise more questions than they answered. My first response was reactionary – I was determined to "prove" that Christianity was "right." However, after reading many apologetics, I came to the conclusion that there can be no objective proof in matters of faith. And after delving into the study of world religions in my later college years and encountering for the first time people with active faith commitments to religions other than Christianity, I found that my sense of "intellectual and personal honesty" made it impossible for me to continue to hold an exclusivist belief – the idea that Christianity held all the answers and all other faiths were wrong. This was not an easy conclusion to reach when I was involved in communities who believed there are fiery consequences for anyone who does not believe that Christianity has an exclusive hold on truth and salvation. These questions truly were "life and death," in the most literal sense, for me.
After I graduated from college and moved to Boston for graduate school, my faith began to shift, from a struggle with speculative theology about the afterlife to a sense of calling to address the immediacy of human need in the here and now. One of the things that had always compelled me most about Jesus, from the very first time I really cracked open a Bible in my senior year of high school, was his way of breaking down the social boundaries of the day and reaching out to call all people blessed and beloved of God – including those that society and the religious establishment were quick to dismiss or even condemn. Once I had exhausted myself with intellectual and philosophical questions, realizing that they were likely not ever going to be solved and answered entirely to my satisfaction, I focused instead on the practical – on what I could see and hear and feel and know on this planet. And one of the first things I noticed was that people were hungry. And I remembered that Jesus had said something about feeding them.
So began my struggle "to live with intellectual and personal (and I might add, spiritual) honesty" in the world, to live out my values in following Jesus's example, to answer what I began to increasingly understand as a calling from God to reach out to those in need, to assuage suffering, and to promote healing. After running from this call for nearly two years, I finally stepped out in faith and began to volunteer every week with a homeless ministry program that slowly but surely transformed my life. One particular Sunday, after giving lunch to a woman on the street, I offered to give her one of the crosses we wore as a symbol of our ministry with this group. She eagerly accepted, and asked me to place it around her neck for her. Many months later, I realized that this was my first true sacramental act. And in that moment, something stirred deep within me, something that let loose a chain of events that has brought me, two years later, to be entering the discernment process for the priesthood.
I went immediately home and rode a wave of inspiration as words flowed out of my fingertips into my computer, recording my circuitous path to homeless ministry. I shared that writing with friends and mentors, and some of them began to encourage me to think about ordained ministry. The next year, I wound up serving as an intern in an Episcopal church in Omaha, Nebraska, through a discernment program for young adults. I came out of that program with an increased sense of calling to ministry, and at the end of the program felt a strong call to return to my home region of the country, which precipitated my move to Atlanta this summer.
Through all my struggles with my faith, I have stared complexity in the face and refused to acquiesce to simplistic, pat answers in matters of faith. I am always and constantly "working out my salvation with fear and trembling," as Paul writes in Philippians 2:12; constantly wrestling with God, praising and thanking God, arguing with God, and listening for God. I have moved from a faith that was concerned primarily with belief and right answers to a faith that is rooted in compassionate action and is comfortable sitting with the places of uncertainty and complexity in the human experience, fully confident that the incarnate Lord will always show up in those places with us.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Sermon - Calling (no connection to Lectionary readings)
This sermon was delivered at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Bellevue, Nebraska as my 'farewell' sermon to them after serving for nine months as an intern in their parish through the Resurrection House program in Omaha.
A friend asked me the other day, "What does it feel like to have a calling?"
As I come to the end of nine months spent reflecting on that very question, I wanted to share with you my own understanding of calling and how I have experienced that in my life.
Frederick Beuchener, an American Presbyterian minister and one of the most prominent theologians of our day, has written that one's calling is found "where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." The wisdom in this statement is that finding one's calling is not just a personal quest, not just a matter of making ourselves happy. It is a matter of finding where our gifts and talents might best be put to use in the world to benefit others. God does not call us to sit at home on the sofa watching television -- even if we find "deep gladness" in that. God calls us to address the "world's deep needs," and Buechener says we have found our vocation when we find that the thing that brings us great gladness and joy is also addressing one of those deep needs of the world.
Now, this is a nice thought, and perhaps for some people it might ring true. But my own experience of calling has not always been so pleasant. Oftentimes what I perceive to be a call from God comes to me quite apart from any sense of "deep gladness" in doing something, and instead comes as a mandate, a sense that I MUST do something, often accompanied by a sense of urgency.
For two years now, I have been involved in work with people who are homeless, first through an outdoor church community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for the past 9 months, through Siena Francis House, which many of you know is a shelter and residential drug and alcohol recovery program in downtown Omaha. This is work to which I have felt deeply called, but it was not a nice, warm fuzzy call, a call in which "my deep gladness met the world's deep need." I didn't reach out to care for the homeless because I WANTED to or because I felt JOY in doing so, I did so because I felt that I HAD to, that I MUST.
My experience of calling has been less about Beuchner's idea of finding my "deep gladness" in doing work that also happens to address the world's needs and more about a discomforting, unsettling encounter with God that shakes up my world and prods me to step out of my comfort zone. Singer/songwriter Susan Werner gives voice to this experience perfectly in a song called "Did Trouble Me," from her recent album, The Gospel Truth. Just a sampling of the lyrics: "When I closed my eyes so I would not see, my Lord did trouble me. When I let things stand that should not be, my Lord did trouble me. When I held myself away and apart, my Lord did trouble me. And the tears of my brother did move my heart, my Lord did trouble me." The chorus of the song describes how exactly God does this troubling: "Did trouble me, with a word or a sign, with the ringing of the bell in the back of my mind. Did trouble me, did stir my soul, for to make me human, to make me whole."
This perfectly illustrates "what it feels like to have a calling" to me -- it feels like God "troubling me" to become a more whole and human person through recognizing the humanity in others, rather than allowing me to "close my eyes" or "hold myself away and apart" from my fellow human being and their joys and sufferings. This call has not always been about feeling any "deep gladness," but about a struggle -- a struggle "to make me human, to make me whole," a struggle against my own selfishness to live out the radical love of God for all people as exemplified by Jesus in the Gospel texts.
For me, knowing WHAT the call is is not difficult. In fact, the basis of our calling as Christians is actually quite similar no matter who we are. The source of our call is the life and example of Jesus as set forth in scripture. As I read and study about the way Jesus lived his life -- reaching out with compassion precisely to those people that the wider society said were sinful, unworthy or unclean -- I know how I should be living my life. That inner nagging is loud and clear, and often takes the form of various scripture passages ringing in the back of my mind -- "If you love me, feed my sheep." "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Whatever you did to one of the least of these, you did it to me." Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian, put it well when he wrote, "The matter is simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly."
The difficult part is NOT in knowing what God requires of us, what God expects of us. The difficult part is deciding whether or not I am going to say "yes" to God's call or ignore it and continue along my own path. And the question, then, becomes not "what is God calling me to do?" but "where and how is God calling me to live out that call?"
In my own life, this has meant a question about whether or not my response to God's call necessarily involves ordained ministry. Over the past nine months, I have made a point of talking one-on-one with as many ordained people as possible, to hear their own stories of how they figured out that they were called to this ministry. I sat down with them and asked them, essentially the same question my friend asked me a few weeks ago: "What does it feel like to have a calling?" And on some level they all gave me the same answer -- they spoke of this sense of necessity, of feeling that they HAD to do this. In fact, the advice they all gave me was fairly similar as well -- don't go into this line of work unless you really feel that you HAVE to do it. This advice was far from a denigration of the ministry, but an acknowledgment that the ministry is not something to be rushed into, not something to do for the power or the status or even the pretty vestments.
When I first set off on this journey, as I left Boston to spend a year thinking about the possibility of ordination, the minister at the outdoor church where I volunteered, who was a dear mentor to me, sat me down and told me that the process of discernment for the ministry was tricky. "We are ALL called to ministry," he told me, "the trick is to figure out whether you primarily see yourself as a minister or you primarily see yourself as something else."
At the time, I wasn't quite sure what he meant, but as I reflect back on it a year later, I now understand. And interestingly enough, it was my volunteer work at Siena Francis House that really brought this home to me. Because of my strong sense of calling to work with the homeless, I had thought that perhaps this was an indication that I was called to a career working in this arena, potentially in social service work. But this year, I found that volunteering in a largely secular shelter context did not feel as deeply fulfilling and meaningful to me as my work with the Outdoor Church had been. I realized that I feel called not just to help others, not just to reach out to those on the margins, but to do so in an explicitly ministerial context, to call people into the kind of relationship and community with one another that I feel is possible only through the bonds of faith, in God's name, appealing to a higher standard than human potential can ever reach on its own. I realized that I DO see myself as a minister. Not as a volunteer, not as a social services worker, but as a minister.
I am not yet sure whether I feel that I HAVE to be ordained, but I do know that this is the first vocation that I have explored where I feel truly at home. I have explored several other possible careers -- journalism, teaching, research or non-profit work -- and while I enjoyed doing all of those things and was generally happy with my work, it seemed there was something missing, that something wasn't quite right. And after spending nine months immersed in the life and work of a parish, it just seems to fit. It feels like I've finally found a round hole for my round peg after trying to make it fit into a bunch of square holes.
If I am called to ordination, I am not yet sure to which form of ministry I am called -- does my sense of urgency about reaching out to the world outside the walls of the church lead me to the diaconate, or does that urgency coupled with my deep reverence for the Eucharist and for the sacramental elements and rituals in the church, as well as a strong desire to sustain and deepen the bonds of the community inside the walls of the church lead me to the priesthood? I would appreciate your continued prayers for my ongoing process of discernment as I leave Omaha for Atlanta, Georgia in a few weeks, where I will continue doing work for the documentary film I've been working with and do some part-time work for my dad's website company. I hope to find a church community there that will eventually sponsor me for the formal discernment process for ordination in the diocese of Atlanta.
Although a number of things are not yet clear to me in my future path, I am confident that God will continue to guide and direct me as I journey. I am reminded of the famous prayer by Thomas Merton: "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does indeed please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right path although I may know nothing about it."
Thank you, beyond words, for all you have done for me this year to support me in the discernment process and in realizing and affirming my fledgling sense of calling to the ministry. I pray that the Spirit would continue to be your guide as you journey with the future interns in this parish to help them answer their own calls, however "troubling" or full of "deep gladness" they may be.
In the name of the One whose Spirit is at work within us "to make us human, to make us whole," Amen.
A friend asked me the other day, "What does it feel like to have a calling?"
As I come to the end of nine months spent reflecting on that very question, I wanted to share with you my own understanding of calling and how I have experienced that in my life.
Frederick Beuchener, an American Presbyterian minister and one of the most prominent theologians of our day, has written that one's calling is found "where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." The wisdom in this statement is that finding one's calling is not just a personal quest, not just a matter of making ourselves happy. It is a matter of finding where our gifts and talents might best be put to use in the world to benefit others. God does not call us to sit at home on the sofa watching television -- even if we find "deep gladness" in that. God calls us to address the "world's deep needs," and Buechener says we have found our vocation when we find that the thing that brings us great gladness and joy is also addressing one of those deep needs of the world.
Now, this is a nice thought, and perhaps for some people it might ring true. But my own experience of calling has not always been so pleasant. Oftentimes what I perceive to be a call from God comes to me quite apart from any sense of "deep gladness" in doing something, and instead comes as a mandate, a sense that I MUST do something, often accompanied by a sense of urgency.
For two years now, I have been involved in work with people who are homeless, first through an outdoor church community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for the past 9 months, through Siena Francis House, which many of you know is a shelter and residential drug and alcohol recovery program in downtown Omaha. This is work to which I have felt deeply called, but it was not a nice, warm fuzzy call, a call in which "my deep gladness met the world's deep need." I didn't reach out to care for the homeless because I WANTED to or because I felt JOY in doing so, I did so because I felt that I HAD to, that I MUST.
My experience of calling has been less about Beuchner's idea of finding my "deep gladness" in doing work that also happens to address the world's needs and more about a discomforting, unsettling encounter with God that shakes up my world and prods me to step out of my comfort zone. Singer/songwriter Susan Werner gives voice to this experience perfectly in a song called "Did Trouble Me," from her recent album, The Gospel Truth. Just a sampling of the lyrics: "When I closed my eyes so I would not see, my Lord did trouble me. When I let things stand that should not be, my Lord did trouble me. When I held myself away and apart, my Lord did trouble me. And the tears of my brother did move my heart, my Lord did trouble me." The chorus of the song describes how exactly God does this troubling: "Did trouble me, with a word or a sign, with the ringing of the bell in the back of my mind. Did trouble me, did stir my soul, for to make me human, to make me whole."
This perfectly illustrates "what it feels like to have a calling" to me -- it feels like God "troubling me" to become a more whole and human person through recognizing the humanity in others, rather than allowing me to "close my eyes" or "hold myself away and apart" from my fellow human being and their joys and sufferings. This call has not always been about feeling any "deep gladness," but about a struggle -- a struggle "to make me human, to make me whole," a struggle against my own selfishness to live out the radical love of God for all people as exemplified by Jesus in the Gospel texts.
For me, knowing WHAT the call is is not difficult. In fact, the basis of our calling as Christians is actually quite similar no matter who we are. The source of our call is the life and example of Jesus as set forth in scripture. As I read and study about the way Jesus lived his life -- reaching out with compassion precisely to those people that the wider society said were sinful, unworthy or unclean -- I know how I should be living my life. That inner nagging is loud and clear, and often takes the form of various scripture passages ringing in the back of my mind -- "If you love me, feed my sheep." "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Whatever you did to one of the least of these, you did it to me." Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian, put it well when he wrote, "The matter is simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly."
The difficult part is NOT in knowing what God requires of us, what God expects of us. The difficult part is deciding whether or not I am going to say "yes" to God's call or ignore it and continue along my own path. And the question, then, becomes not "what is God calling me to do?" but "where and how is God calling me to live out that call?"
In my own life, this has meant a question about whether or not my response to God's call necessarily involves ordained ministry. Over the past nine months, I have made a point of talking one-on-one with as many ordained people as possible, to hear their own stories of how they figured out that they were called to this ministry. I sat down with them and asked them, essentially the same question my friend asked me a few weeks ago: "What does it feel like to have a calling?" And on some level they all gave me the same answer -- they spoke of this sense of necessity, of feeling that they HAD to do this. In fact, the advice they all gave me was fairly similar as well -- don't go into this line of work unless you really feel that you HAVE to do it. This advice was far from a denigration of the ministry, but an acknowledgment that the ministry is not something to be rushed into, not something to do for the power or the status or even the pretty vestments.
When I first set off on this journey, as I left Boston to spend a year thinking about the possibility of ordination, the minister at the outdoor church where I volunteered, who was a dear mentor to me, sat me down and told me that the process of discernment for the ministry was tricky. "We are ALL called to ministry," he told me, "the trick is to figure out whether you primarily see yourself as a minister or you primarily see yourself as something else."
At the time, I wasn't quite sure what he meant, but as I reflect back on it a year later, I now understand. And interestingly enough, it was my volunteer work at Siena Francis House that really brought this home to me. Because of my strong sense of calling to work with the homeless, I had thought that perhaps this was an indication that I was called to a career working in this arena, potentially in social service work. But this year, I found that volunteering in a largely secular shelter context did not feel as deeply fulfilling and meaningful to me as my work with the Outdoor Church had been. I realized that I feel called not just to help others, not just to reach out to those on the margins, but to do so in an explicitly ministerial context, to call people into the kind of relationship and community with one another that I feel is possible only through the bonds of faith, in God's name, appealing to a higher standard than human potential can ever reach on its own. I realized that I DO see myself as a minister. Not as a volunteer, not as a social services worker, but as a minister.
I am not yet sure whether I feel that I HAVE to be ordained, but I do know that this is the first vocation that I have explored where I feel truly at home. I have explored several other possible careers -- journalism, teaching, research or non-profit work -- and while I enjoyed doing all of those things and was generally happy with my work, it seemed there was something missing, that something wasn't quite right. And after spending nine months immersed in the life and work of a parish, it just seems to fit. It feels like I've finally found a round hole for my round peg after trying to make it fit into a bunch of square holes.
If I am called to ordination, I am not yet sure to which form of ministry I am called -- does my sense of urgency about reaching out to the world outside the walls of the church lead me to the diaconate, or does that urgency coupled with my deep reverence for the Eucharist and for the sacramental elements and rituals in the church, as well as a strong desire to sustain and deepen the bonds of the community inside the walls of the church lead me to the priesthood? I would appreciate your continued prayers for my ongoing process of discernment as I leave Omaha for Atlanta, Georgia in a few weeks, where I will continue doing work for the documentary film I've been working with and do some part-time work for my dad's website company. I hope to find a church community there that will eventually sponsor me for the formal discernment process for ordination in the diocese of Atlanta.
Although a number of things are not yet clear to me in my future path, I am confident that God will continue to guide and direct me as I journey. I am reminded of the famous prayer by Thomas Merton: "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does indeed please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right path although I may know nothing about it."
Thank you, beyond words, for all you have done for me this year to support me in the discernment process and in realizing and affirming my fledgling sense of calling to the ministry. I pray that the Spirit would continue to be your guide as you journey with the future interns in this parish to help them answer their own calls, however "troubling" or full of "deep gladness" they may be.
In the name of the One whose Spirit is at work within us "to make us human, to make us whole," Amen.
Friday, April 6, 2007
Sermon - Good Friday 2007
Good Friday is the most somber and dark day of the church year. Tonight we gather to remember the cruel and gruesome death that Jesus suffered on the cross.
The cross has become such a ubiquitous and over-used symbol that we Christians often become desensitized to the brutality and terror it represented to people in the first-century Roman Empire. For many of us, a cross is something comforting, even beautiful, something we cast in gold or silver and wear around our necks as a fashion accessory. It denotes our Christian identity to others, and perhaps reminds us of Christ's love and sacrifice for us. In the cross, we see a message of love and forgiveness, informed by Christian theology about the meaning of the cross. But to others, it may carry a different message.
Many of you remember Valarie Kaur, the creator/writer/producer of Divided We Fall, the documentary I'm working with that many of you saw at the Omaha Film Festival back in February. Valarie spoke at our first Wednesday night Lenten series and at the 10:30 service the following Sunday. She shared with us a bit of her experience growing up as a Sikh girl in California in a town full of many Christians, Christians who tried very hard to convert her to Christianity. She spoke of family friends performing exorcisms on her, telling her that every time she was confused or distraught over her religious identity, it was the devil speaking to her. By the end of her childhood, the image of the cross struck fear in Valarie's heart. To her, the cross meant judgment, hate, condemnation.
In early versions of Divided We Fall, Valarie included some of this discussion about her views of the cross in the narration of the film. I remember vividly a conversation we had one day last fall, sitting outside a café in Cambridge, when I told her how incredibly sad and painful it was to me to think that the cross, a symbol that meant so much to me spiritually, had been for her an object of fear and judgment. I was in tears as I spoke to her of what the cross meant to me, a symbol of God's love for us, of God's willingness to die for us. She assured me that she had made her peace with Christianity by now, that through other Christian friends she had made in her college years, she no longer saw the cross only as a symbol to be feared. We left it at that.
Several months later, I was sitting in the pews at St. James Episcopal Church for the Good Friday services, and as the enormous stark wooden cross was brought forward, I suddenly had a moment of revelation. The cross was for Jesus the same thing that it had been to Valarie in her childhood -- an object of judgment, of hate, of condemnation -- an object that struck fear in his heart and the hearts of all who were dear to him. After all, the cross was an object of execution! The modern equivalent would be if we all went around wearing miniature electric chairs around our necks! I think we lose sight of that in all the sentimentalizing we do to the cross. Ironically, my Christian faith and experience had actually blinded me from fully understanding the gravity, the horror and fear, of what Jesus experienced that dark Friday in Jerusalem. On some level, those who have experienced the cross as condemning or hateful are actually closer to understanding Jesus's own experience of the cross than are we Christians who see the cross as comforting or beautiful. It was only through my relationship with a Sikh woman and through seeing my faith through HER experiences that I was able to reach a new level of depth in my own Christian spirituality.
On that Good Friday at St. James, as I knelt at the foot of the life-sized wooden cross, as I pressed my hand against the bare, rough wood, I thought about not only the rejection, hatred, and violence that Jesus experienced that day, but the rejection, hatred, and violence that Valarie and so many others have experienced and are still experiencing today. In a single moment, I felt the weight of both the historical event of Jesus's crucifixion and the ways in which we continue to crucify Christ today, whenever we preach a gospel of condemnation, of hate, and of judgment, rather than a gospel of reconciliation, forgiveness, and redemption. My dear Sikh friend, perhaps unknowingly, had given me one of the most profound Christian spiritual insights I had ever experienced.
It was something along these lines that I was hoping for when I planned the Wednesday night Lenten series this year. By asking people of other faiths to reflect on the traditional Christian stations of the cross, I was hoping that all of you, too, might gain new insight into your own faith through seeing it through the eyes of others. That through others' experiences, you might come to feel a deeper sense of connection with God and with others, that you might come to feel a profoundly sacred human solidarity with others in the experience of suffering.
The interfaith stations project was deeply moving for some of our contributors as well. Valarie herself reflected on the experience, "I discovered that the themes of suffering, sacrifice, and service defined not only the Christian story but the human story - and the way I understand my own life experience. Here I remember the central tenet of the Sikh faith - beneath all husks and labels, humanity is one. Even across the sheer range of human experience, we are bound together by a shared humanity."
What allowed us to connect with the contributors who wrote meditations for the stations out of their non-Christian faith experiences was our shared humanity. As we read their reflections on the universal human themes of the crucifixion -- deep-seated patterns of suffering, cruelty, injustice, and death -- we were able to connect to them on a human level, even when our theologies or beliefs may not agree.
But the connections, at least for me, were not merely human or secular, but profoundly spiritual. The mystery of the incarnation that we proclaim as Christians is that it is precisely in the human that we find the divine. Thus, connecting with someone on a human level IS connecting with them on a spiritual level! I have a quote by Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th century Dutch poet and Christian mystic, tacked on the wall in my bedroom that says, "We must love the humanity in order to reach the divinity." This, to me, is one of the central messages of Christianity. In Jesus, the human and the divine are no longer separate. Humanity is fused with the very nature of divinity.
Jesus was indeed human, a particular historical figure who lived at a particular time in history, and his death was an historical event that happened under the Roman Empire around the year 33 AD. But for Christians, Jesus is also the cosmic Christ, the eternally begotten son, one aspect of our Trinitarian God, a God whose very nature is to be found in and with the human. Christ did not just live and die in the first-century AD; he lives and dies continually in our world today. As Christians, we are called by our baptismal vows to "seek and serve Christ in all persons." Every time we fail to see Christ in another person, we crucify Jesus again. Every time our eyes are opened to the Christ in those around us, we feel the power of Jesus's resurrection again.
In our interfaith stations, we confronted hate crimes, poverty, religious persecution, loneliness, abuse of power, suffering and the forces of destruction. Valarie wrote in her depiction of the first station that those who killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man in Arizona murdered 4 days after 9/11, were afraid of him because they did not understand him, because "they could not see the divine in him." Every time we cannot see the divine in someone, every time we are complicit in the suffering of others, even by our inaction -- by those "things we have left undone" -- we crucify Jesus. Our hardness of heart continues to nail Jesus to the cross. "Crucify him!" we all yell together with the crowds of the Passion narrative on Palm Sunday and again during our liturgy tonight.
On Good Friday, we must own our complicity in the violence and suffering of the world. But we do so confident in the mercy and forgiveness of God, for despite the horrors of the cross, despite the human capacities for cruelty, inhumanity, and violence, the message of the cross is ultimately a message of forgiveness. Even as he hangs gasping for breath on a cross, Jesus prays for his executioners -- "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." I can only imagine that Jesus continues to pray this same prayer on our behalf, as we muddle through the world often unaware of how our own actions implicate us in the literal and metaphorical executions of our time, both as a society and as individuals.
The cruelties of this world are difficult to face head-on; it is human nature to close our eyes to situations that seem beyond our control to change, to refuse to see what seems beyond hope. But through his suffering on the cross, Jesus brought the divine into the most gruesome and unbearable aspects of the human experience. Through his Passion, we know that even in the darkest of pain and suffering, even in rejection, betrayal, and violent death, there is the possibility of redemption. And through his resurrection, we know that for the Christian, nothing is beyond hope.
Gracious Lord, may we live our lives in the full knowledge of the forgiveness, hope and redemption of the cross, in the name of the One who forgives even his executioners and reaches through his wounds to transform suffering, Amen.
The cross has become such a ubiquitous and over-used symbol that we Christians often become desensitized to the brutality and terror it represented to people in the first-century Roman Empire. For many of us, a cross is something comforting, even beautiful, something we cast in gold or silver and wear around our necks as a fashion accessory. It denotes our Christian identity to others, and perhaps reminds us of Christ's love and sacrifice for us. In the cross, we see a message of love and forgiveness, informed by Christian theology about the meaning of the cross. But to others, it may carry a different message.
Many of you remember Valarie Kaur, the creator/writer/producer of Divided We Fall, the documentary I'm working with that many of you saw at the Omaha Film Festival back in February. Valarie spoke at our first Wednesday night Lenten series and at the 10:30 service the following Sunday. She shared with us a bit of her experience growing up as a Sikh girl in California in a town full of many Christians, Christians who tried very hard to convert her to Christianity. She spoke of family friends performing exorcisms on her, telling her that every time she was confused or distraught over her religious identity, it was the devil speaking to her. By the end of her childhood, the image of the cross struck fear in Valarie's heart. To her, the cross meant judgment, hate, condemnation.
In early versions of Divided We Fall, Valarie included some of this discussion about her views of the cross in the narration of the film. I remember vividly a conversation we had one day last fall, sitting outside a café in Cambridge, when I told her how incredibly sad and painful it was to me to think that the cross, a symbol that meant so much to me spiritually, had been for her an object of fear and judgment. I was in tears as I spoke to her of what the cross meant to me, a symbol of God's love for us, of God's willingness to die for us. She assured me that she had made her peace with Christianity by now, that through other Christian friends she had made in her college years, she no longer saw the cross only as a symbol to be feared. We left it at that.
Several months later, I was sitting in the pews at St. James Episcopal Church for the Good Friday services, and as the enormous stark wooden cross was brought forward, I suddenly had a moment of revelation. The cross was for Jesus the same thing that it had been to Valarie in her childhood -- an object of judgment, of hate, of condemnation -- an object that struck fear in his heart and the hearts of all who were dear to him. After all, the cross was an object of execution! The modern equivalent would be if we all went around wearing miniature electric chairs around our necks! I think we lose sight of that in all the sentimentalizing we do to the cross. Ironically, my Christian faith and experience had actually blinded me from fully understanding the gravity, the horror and fear, of what Jesus experienced that dark Friday in Jerusalem. On some level, those who have experienced the cross as condemning or hateful are actually closer to understanding Jesus's own experience of the cross than are we Christians who see the cross as comforting or beautiful. It was only through my relationship with a Sikh woman and through seeing my faith through HER experiences that I was able to reach a new level of depth in my own Christian spirituality.
On that Good Friday at St. James, as I knelt at the foot of the life-sized wooden cross, as I pressed my hand against the bare, rough wood, I thought about not only the rejection, hatred, and violence that Jesus experienced that day, but the rejection, hatred, and violence that Valarie and so many others have experienced and are still experiencing today. In a single moment, I felt the weight of both the historical event of Jesus's crucifixion and the ways in which we continue to crucify Christ today, whenever we preach a gospel of condemnation, of hate, and of judgment, rather than a gospel of reconciliation, forgiveness, and redemption. My dear Sikh friend, perhaps unknowingly, had given me one of the most profound Christian spiritual insights I had ever experienced.
It was something along these lines that I was hoping for when I planned the Wednesday night Lenten series this year. By asking people of other faiths to reflect on the traditional Christian stations of the cross, I was hoping that all of you, too, might gain new insight into your own faith through seeing it through the eyes of others. That through others' experiences, you might come to feel a deeper sense of connection with God and with others, that you might come to feel a profoundly sacred human solidarity with others in the experience of suffering.
The interfaith stations project was deeply moving for some of our contributors as well. Valarie herself reflected on the experience, "I discovered that the themes of suffering, sacrifice, and service defined not only the Christian story but the human story - and the way I understand my own life experience. Here I remember the central tenet of the Sikh faith - beneath all husks and labels, humanity is one. Even across the sheer range of human experience, we are bound together by a shared humanity."
What allowed us to connect with the contributors who wrote meditations for the stations out of their non-Christian faith experiences was our shared humanity. As we read their reflections on the universal human themes of the crucifixion -- deep-seated patterns of suffering, cruelty, injustice, and death -- we were able to connect to them on a human level, even when our theologies or beliefs may not agree.
But the connections, at least for me, were not merely human or secular, but profoundly spiritual. The mystery of the incarnation that we proclaim as Christians is that it is precisely in the human that we find the divine. Thus, connecting with someone on a human level IS connecting with them on a spiritual level! I have a quote by Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th century Dutch poet and Christian mystic, tacked on the wall in my bedroom that says, "We must love the humanity in order to reach the divinity." This, to me, is one of the central messages of Christianity. In Jesus, the human and the divine are no longer separate. Humanity is fused with the very nature of divinity.
Jesus was indeed human, a particular historical figure who lived at a particular time in history, and his death was an historical event that happened under the Roman Empire around the year 33 AD. But for Christians, Jesus is also the cosmic Christ, the eternally begotten son, one aspect of our Trinitarian God, a God whose very nature is to be found in and with the human. Christ did not just live and die in the first-century AD; he lives and dies continually in our world today. As Christians, we are called by our baptismal vows to "seek and serve Christ in all persons." Every time we fail to see Christ in another person, we crucify Jesus again. Every time our eyes are opened to the Christ in those around us, we feel the power of Jesus's resurrection again.
In our interfaith stations, we confronted hate crimes, poverty, religious persecution, loneliness, abuse of power, suffering and the forces of destruction. Valarie wrote in her depiction of the first station that those who killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man in Arizona murdered 4 days after 9/11, were afraid of him because they did not understand him, because "they could not see the divine in him." Every time we cannot see the divine in someone, every time we are complicit in the suffering of others, even by our inaction -- by those "things we have left undone" -- we crucify Jesus. Our hardness of heart continues to nail Jesus to the cross. "Crucify him!" we all yell together with the crowds of the Passion narrative on Palm Sunday and again during our liturgy tonight.
On Good Friday, we must own our complicity in the violence and suffering of the world. But we do so confident in the mercy and forgiveness of God, for despite the horrors of the cross, despite the human capacities for cruelty, inhumanity, and violence, the message of the cross is ultimately a message of forgiveness. Even as he hangs gasping for breath on a cross, Jesus prays for his executioners -- "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." I can only imagine that Jesus continues to pray this same prayer on our behalf, as we muddle through the world often unaware of how our own actions implicate us in the literal and metaphorical executions of our time, both as a society and as individuals.
The cruelties of this world are difficult to face head-on; it is human nature to close our eyes to situations that seem beyond our control to change, to refuse to see what seems beyond hope. But through his suffering on the cross, Jesus brought the divine into the most gruesome and unbearable aspects of the human experience. Through his Passion, we know that even in the darkest of pain and suffering, even in rejection, betrayal, and violent death, there is the possibility of redemption. And through his resurrection, we know that for the Christian, nothing is beyond hope.
Gracious Lord, may we live our lives in the full knowledge of the forgiveness, hope and redemption of the cross, in the name of the One who forgives even his executioners and reaches through his wounds to transform suffering, Amen.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Sermon - Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C (BCP)
Isaiah 43:16-21 link to NRSV text
Psalm 126 link to NRSV text
Luke 20:9-19 link to NRSV text
Wilderness.
It is a somewhat scary word. We think of "the wilderness" as the opposite of the comforts offered by "civilization." For centuries, human beings have lived in dense, concentrated towns or cities not only for convenience, but as a protection against the dangers of uninhibited nature. The wilderness is a place where things are wild and unpredictable, a place where we are not in control. In the wilderness, things are uncertain. We never know what unseen threats may await us, what animal may be lurking around the next tree. It is a place many of us want to avoid, not to seek out.
But during Lent, we are called to go INTO the wilderness. The 40 days of Lent symbolically recall both the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt and the 40 days that Jesus spent in prayer and fasting in the desert before the start of his public ministry. In both of these stories, the wilderness is a place of danger, of fear, of uncertainty -- but also a place of encounter with God.
The idea of "the wilderness" usually conjures up an image of a place void of God's presence, a place where we are distant from God. To be in the wilderness, to be wandering in the desert, is to be lost, to be out of touch with God, to be in a "dry spell" spiritually, if you will. But the scriptures for this morning remind us that God is present, and even active, in the wilderness.
In Isaiah 43, God declares that God is "about to do a new thing" in the wilderness. "Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:18-19). In this passage, God promises to deliver the Israelites from captivity under the Babylonians, just as God delivered them from the Egyptians centuries before. Using imagery that echoes the story of the exodus, already a central sacred story for the Israelites at this point in their history, the writer of Isaiah ties the Israelites' present liberation to the salvation history that traces back to the exodus from Egypt. Just as God delivered the Israelites from the hands of the Egyptians, so will God deliver them from the hands of the Babylonians. Isaiah promises us that God will "make a way in the wilderness;" that is, God will bring deliverance from oppression.
The psalm for today also gives us an image of God active in the wilderness, active in nature. God has "restored the fortunes of Zion," the psalmist writes, restoring the land to the people, bringing forth a harvest from a land formerly barren, and simultaneously turning the Israelite's tears into "songs of joy." The metaphors of sowing and reaping, so prevalent in the biblical texts, show the extent to which God's activity was perceived and felt in the land, in nature, even in the wilderness, in the land that is least life-giving. The psalmist promises us that God will "restore the fortunes of Zion;" that is, God will bring new life after a period of lifeless and despair.
The gospel reading for today also shows God doing a new thing in the land -- this time with regards to the vineyard in the parable. God, represented in the story by the vineyard owner, destroys the corrupt tenants who abuse, reject and kill God's messengers and gives the vineyard to "others," presumably those who will respect those who come on behalf of God. Jesus promises us that God will make "the stone that the builders rejected to be the cornerstone;" that is, God will vindicate those the world has mistreated and deemed worthless.
Whether literally or metaphorically, these readings show us that God is doing a new thing -- IN THE WILDERNESS. God is doing a new thing precisely in those places that seem the most threatening, the most hopeless, the most fearful. God is doing a new thing precisely in those places where we may doubt God is even present.
"Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old," God commands the people in the reading from Isaiah (Isaiah 43:18). Even if the "former things" that have happened to us give us reason to doubt God's goodness or God's love for us, as the Israelites surely must have during the periods of slavery and exile, the scriptures tell us that we have the promise of God's deliverance, that God is active even in those periods of despair, that we can look forward to the new things that God has in store for us in our lives.
"I am about to do a new thing," God says, "now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:19) Just as with the ancient Israelites, God is about to do a new thing in OUR midst, in our community and in our lives! Do we perceive it? If we dwell too much on the past, God tells us, we will miss the new thing that God is doing in the present. Unless we take the time to look for it, we may indeed NOT perceive it. We must go to the wilderness, to take the time to look and listen for that "new thing" that God is doing -- so we can give thanks and rejoice in God's goodness in our lives and in the life of our community.
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest in Georgia and the author of many books, including Leaving Church, writes that "faith in God has both a center and an edge, and that each is necessary for the soul's health." The "center" is the liturgical life of the church within the buildings and hierarchical structures, and the "edge" is that wilderness on the outskirts of the community. The center is where the stories of encounter with God get preserved and passed on to future generations, she writes, but the edge, or the wilderness, is the place where most of those encounters have happened.
The wilderness can be scary, "a place where things are wild and unpredictable, a place where we are not in control" -- but is this not the very definition of what it means to be in God's presence? When we step boldly into the wilderness, we open ourselves to encounter God. When was the last time you went there, literally or metaphorically, willingly or unwillingly, and opened yourself to the voice of God?
Two weeks ago, I went on a mostly silent Lenten retreat through the Resurrection House program. In the weeks before the retreat, my life was incredibly busy and my mind was constantly going a million miles an hour... and I had completely lost touch with God's presence. For a while, I had been feeling like I was wandering in a mental wilderness -- a somewhat scary and uncertain place of not knowing what the future holds for me after this internship, of feeling restless, without a sense of direction.
But during that retreat, during the silent time I spent walking in the wilderness -- well, if you can call the 22 acres of woods on the property of Knowles Mercy Retreat Center "wilderness!" -- I reconnected with God. I was reminded of God's love for me, I saw God's active presence in nature, and one day as I walked, I suddenly received a strong sense of direction and peace -- a sense that "it's time to go home," that the next step of my life will lead me back to that land to which I am deeply connected on a visceral level -- that is, the South. I didn't receive any kind of insights just yet as to what the extended future will hold, but I do believe I received guidance for the next step. This is the "new thing" that God is doing in my life.
I would encourage you all to also spend some time, some REAL time, in the wilderness with God in these last weeks before Easter. Find some patch of nature somewhere where you can walk or sit, empty your mind of distracting thoughts, and listen for what God is trying to communicate to YOU this Lent. What things is God making new in your own life?
May we be always open to the wild and unpredictable ways of our God, may we always be willing to relinquish our control and to listen and wait for the ways in which God is calling to us in the wilderness. Amen.
Psalm 126 link to NRSV text
Luke 20:9-19 link to NRSV text
Wilderness.
It is a somewhat scary word. We think of "the wilderness" as the opposite of the comforts offered by "civilization." For centuries, human beings have lived in dense, concentrated towns or cities not only for convenience, but as a protection against the dangers of uninhibited nature. The wilderness is a place where things are wild and unpredictable, a place where we are not in control. In the wilderness, things are uncertain. We never know what unseen threats may await us, what animal may be lurking around the next tree. It is a place many of us want to avoid, not to seek out.
But during Lent, we are called to go INTO the wilderness. The 40 days of Lent symbolically recall both the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt and the 40 days that Jesus spent in prayer and fasting in the desert before the start of his public ministry. In both of these stories, the wilderness is a place of danger, of fear, of uncertainty -- but also a place of encounter with God.
The idea of "the wilderness" usually conjures up an image of a place void of God's presence, a place where we are distant from God. To be in the wilderness, to be wandering in the desert, is to be lost, to be out of touch with God, to be in a "dry spell" spiritually, if you will. But the scriptures for this morning remind us that God is present, and even active, in the wilderness.
In Isaiah 43, God declares that God is "about to do a new thing" in the wilderness. "Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:18-19). In this passage, God promises to deliver the Israelites from captivity under the Babylonians, just as God delivered them from the Egyptians centuries before. Using imagery that echoes the story of the exodus, already a central sacred story for the Israelites at this point in their history, the writer of Isaiah ties the Israelites' present liberation to the salvation history that traces back to the exodus from Egypt. Just as God delivered the Israelites from the hands of the Egyptians, so will God deliver them from the hands of the Babylonians. Isaiah promises us that God will "make a way in the wilderness;" that is, God will bring deliverance from oppression.
The psalm for today also gives us an image of God active in the wilderness, active in nature. God has "restored the fortunes of Zion," the psalmist writes, restoring the land to the people, bringing forth a harvest from a land formerly barren, and simultaneously turning the Israelite's tears into "songs of joy." The metaphors of sowing and reaping, so prevalent in the biblical texts, show the extent to which God's activity was perceived and felt in the land, in nature, even in the wilderness, in the land that is least life-giving. The psalmist promises us that God will "restore the fortunes of Zion;" that is, God will bring new life after a period of lifeless and despair.
The gospel reading for today also shows God doing a new thing in the land -- this time with regards to the vineyard in the parable. God, represented in the story by the vineyard owner, destroys the corrupt tenants who abuse, reject and kill God's messengers and gives the vineyard to "others," presumably those who will respect those who come on behalf of God. Jesus promises us that God will make "the stone that the builders rejected to be the cornerstone;" that is, God will vindicate those the world has mistreated and deemed worthless.
Whether literally or metaphorically, these readings show us that God is doing a new thing -- IN THE WILDERNESS. God is doing a new thing precisely in those places that seem the most threatening, the most hopeless, the most fearful. God is doing a new thing precisely in those places where we may doubt God is even present.
"Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old," God commands the people in the reading from Isaiah (Isaiah 43:18). Even if the "former things" that have happened to us give us reason to doubt God's goodness or God's love for us, as the Israelites surely must have during the periods of slavery and exile, the scriptures tell us that we have the promise of God's deliverance, that God is active even in those periods of despair, that we can look forward to the new things that God has in store for us in our lives.
"I am about to do a new thing," God says, "now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43:19) Just as with the ancient Israelites, God is about to do a new thing in OUR midst, in our community and in our lives! Do we perceive it? If we dwell too much on the past, God tells us, we will miss the new thing that God is doing in the present. Unless we take the time to look for it, we may indeed NOT perceive it. We must go to the wilderness, to take the time to look and listen for that "new thing" that God is doing -- so we can give thanks and rejoice in God's goodness in our lives and in the life of our community.
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest in Georgia and the author of many books, including Leaving Church, writes that "faith in God has both a center and an edge, and that each is necessary for the soul's health." The "center" is the liturgical life of the church within the buildings and hierarchical structures, and the "edge" is that wilderness on the outskirts of the community. The center is where the stories of encounter with God get preserved and passed on to future generations, she writes, but the edge, or the wilderness, is the place where most of those encounters have happened.
The wilderness can be scary, "a place where things are wild and unpredictable, a place where we are not in control" -- but is this not the very definition of what it means to be in God's presence? When we step boldly into the wilderness, we open ourselves to encounter God. When was the last time you went there, literally or metaphorically, willingly or unwillingly, and opened yourself to the voice of God?
Two weeks ago, I went on a mostly silent Lenten retreat through the Resurrection House program. In the weeks before the retreat, my life was incredibly busy and my mind was constantly going a million miles an hour... and I had completely lost touch with God's presence. For a while, I had been feeling like I was wandering in a mental wilderness -- a somewhat scary and uncertain place of not knowing what the future holds for me after this internship, of feeling restless, without a sense of direction.
But during that retreat, during the silent time I spent walking in the wilderness -- well, if you can call the 22 acres of woods on the property of Knowles Mercy Retreat Center "wilderness!" -- I reconnected with God. I was reminded of God's love for me, I saw God's active presence in nature, and one day as I walked, I suddenly received a strong sense of direction and peace -- a sense that "it's time to go home," that the next step of my life will lead me back to that land to which I am deeply connected on a visceral level -- that is, the South. I didn't receive any kind of insights just yet as to what the extended future will hold, but I do believe I received guidance for the next step. This is the "new thing" that God is doing in my life.
I would encourage you all to also spend some time, some REAL time, in the wilderness with God in these last weeks before Easter. Find some patch of nature somewhere where you can walk or sit, empty your mind of distracting thoughts, and listen for what God is trying to communicate to YOU this Lent. What things is God making new in your own life?
May we be always open to the wild and unpredictable ways of our God, may we always be willing to relinquish our control and to listen and wait for the ways in which God is calling to us in the wilderness. Amen.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
"It's Time to Go Home."
It is amazing to me how easy it is to lose sight of God's presence -- or, perhaps I should say, how easy it is to forget to stop and listen for God.
On the wall in my bedroom above my bed is tacked a small blue notecard with a quote scrawled on it that I read in some book somewhere (perhaps it was Madeline L'Engle, but I can't remember) that says, simply, "Listen to the silence. Stay open to the voice of the Spirit."
When I first arrived in Omaha for the Resurrection House internship program back in late August, the first thing they did was take us on a retreat out at a Benedictine retreat center in Schulyer, NE. One of the days on that three-day retreat was a silent day. When I first heard this, it horrified me (how could I possibly be SILENT for an ENTIRE DAY? I, who have a reputation for being able to talk to a brick wall if it would listen?), but by the end of the retreat, I was sold on silence. Being forced into silence, not allowed any of the usual distractions of chatting it up with anyone and everyone, and even forcing myself to silence my INTERNAL chatter, I found a deep sense of communion with God that is often missing from my daily life.
In fact, I was so sold on silence that I even suggested to my roommate, as we formulated our "Rule of Life" for the year that would guide our community living in the Resurrection House program, that we keep one hour of silence in our house every evening after our evening prayers. Soon after returning from the retreat, I posted that blue index card on my wall. "Listen to the silence. Stay open to the voice of the Spirit."
Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes. As the luxury of retreat faded and the daily grind of life began to close in, the silence also faded. My roommate and I did not keep that hour of silence beyond perhaps the first several days of our living together. I intended to keep silence at least on my own in my room, before bed each night, setting up a small altar space in my room where I would sit and meditate, complete with candles. I think I have only lit those candles about four times in the past six months. I have not been particularly good about listening to the silence, nor staying open to the voice of the Spirit.
The past several weeks have been particularly bad. With more than the usual amount of activities peppering my calendar, I had driven myself into an active frenzy, running around non-stop with no time to simply sit and be. And not only was my calendar full, but so was my mind -- full of questions and concerns about the uncertainties lying ahead in my future. As the end of this internship program approaches in late May, I began to fret and worry over what my next step should be.
Should I stay in Omaha? There are some amazing things going on here in interfaith work, with the Tri-Faith Initiative that the Episcopal Church has entered into with the Reform Jewish congregation here in town and a Muslim organization, the goal being to build a "tri-faith campus" in West Omaha with a church, a mosque and a synagogue. I am on one of the committees for this initiative and am excited about working with this unprecedented interfaith venture. Could this be perhaps where I am called to be?
Or should I go back to Boston? I visited there in early February and found that I felt that I was home, in a very deep sense. Staying in my old apartment, it felt so comfortable and comforting to be back in such familiar surroundings. And returning to St. James, my church in Cambridge, was like a rejuvenation for my soul, realizing all the more how much I miss that community and how much it means to me after having been away from it for six months. Would it be crazy to move someplace simply for a church? But where else will I ever be able to find a community like St. James?
Or should I go back to the South somewhere? I keep saying that eventually I want to go back to the South, but I wasn't even quite sure what my relationship with the South is anymore. At times when I go home I feel somewhat out of place -- everyone's accents seem a WHOLE lot thicker than I remember them, and I am constantly afraid of rejection and judgment from the dominant Evangelical culture, perhaps due to some baggage I still carry around from my late high school and early college years.
And what about this ordination thing? I am still in discernment about what exactly my call is, and if it is to ordained ministry or not, but if it is, where should I go through that process? Here in Nebraska, where I have a great connection with the diocese here? Back in Boston, where I have an established parish that could sponsor me for ordination? I have no connections with the Episcopal Church in the South, since I didn't attend an Episcopal Church until I moved to Boston, so if I went back there, I'd have to start all over again in terms of building relationships with a parish and a diocese for a few years before I could even START the formal discernment process. And are there any dioceses in the South that would welcome a progressive woman candidate for the priesthood who is an adamant supporter of gay rights and gay ordination? I keep hearing horror stories about how the Diocese of South Carolina is one of the dioceses threatening to split from the Episcopal Church... do I really want to get into that mess?
All these questions and thoughts were pounding in my mind as I left last Monday for the Resurrection House spring/Lenten retreat. This retreat was to be nearly entirely silent, at the nearby Knowles Mercy Spirituality Center. I was nearly desperate for silence at this point, to get away and to return to a focus on God. I wanted to use this time to try to discern where God is calling me for the next step of my life, to try to listen to the silence and be open to the voice of the Spirit. My mind was exhausted from over-analyzing my situation, which I had been doing in my own mind and with Father Bob and other friends for the past several months... but I had never really taken any serious time to stop and listen, to be still, to pray. I was crying out for direction, but not taking the time to stop and listen for it. I hoped I'd be able to do that at Knowles Mercy.
First item on the agenda for the retreat was a meeting with one of the Catholic nuns who runs the retreat center, for a spiritual direction session. Immediately it was clear that Sister Jean was a pro at this spiritual direction thing, having been at it for over 20 years - we had a 45 minute session scheduled, but she had me out of there in 30 minutes! And that's really saying something, given how much I can ramble on and on and on if given the license to do so! She was able to ask me pointed questions that got right to the heart of the matter.
On the wall in my bedroom above my bed is tacked a small blue notecard with a quote scrawled on it that I read in some book somewhere (perhaps it was Madeline L'Engle, but I can't remember) that says, simply, "Listen to the silence. Stay open to the voice of the Spirit."
When I first arrived in Omaha for the Resurrection House internship program back in late August, the first thing they did was take us on a retreat out at a Benedictine retreat center in Schulyer, NE. One of the days on that three-day retreat was a silent day. When I first heard this, it horrified me (how could I possibly be SILENT for an ENTIRE DAY? I, who have a reputation for being able to talk to a brick wall if it would listen?), but by the end of the retreat, I was sold on silence. Being forced into silence, not allowed any of the usual distractions of chatting it up with anyone and everyone, and even forcing myself to silence my INTERNAL chatter, I found a deep sense of communion with God that is often missing from my daily life.
In fact, I was so sold on silence that I even suggested to my roommate, as we formulated our "Rule of Life" for the year that would guide our community living in the Resurrection House program, that we keep one hour of silence in our house every evening after our evening prayers. Soon after returning from the retreat, I posted that blue index card on my wall. "Listen to the silence. Stay open to the voice of the Spirit."
Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes. As the luxury of retreat faded and the daily grind of life began to close in, the silence also faded. My roommate and I did not keep that hour of silence beyond perhaps the first several days of our living together. I intended to keep silence at least on my own in my room, before bed each night, setting up a small altar space in my room where I would sit and meditate, complete with candles. I think I have only lit those candles about four times in the past six months. I have not been particularly good about listening to the silence, nor staying open to the voice of the Spirit.
The past several weeks have been particularly bad. With more than the usual amount of activities peppering my calendar, I had driven myself into an active frenzy, running around non-stop with no time to simply sit and be. And not only was my calendar full, but so was my mind -- full of questions and concerns about the uncertainties lying ahead in my future. As the end of this internship program approaches in late May, I began to fret and worry over what my next step should be.
Should I stay in Omaha? There are some amazing things going on here in interfaith work, with the Tri-Faith Initiative that the Episcopal Church has entered into with the Reform Jewish congregation here in town and a Muslim organization, the goal being to build a "tri-faith campus" in West Omaha with a church, a mosque and a synagogue. I am on one of the committees for this initiative and am excited about working with this unprecedented interfaith venture. Could this be perhaps where I am called to be?
Or should I go back to Boston? I visited there in early February and found that I felt that I was home, in a very deep sense. Staying in my old apartment, it felt so comfortable and comforting to be back in such familiar surroundings. And returning to St. James, my church in Cambridge, was like a rejuvenation for my soul, realizing all the more how much I miss that community and how much it means to me after having been away from it for six months. Would it be crazy to move someplace simply for a church? But where else will I ever be able to find a community like St. James?
Or should I go back to the South somewhere? I keep saying that eventually I want to go back to the South, but I wasn't even quite sure what my relationship with the South is anymore. At times when I go home I feel somewhat out of place -- everyone's accents seem a WHOLE lot thicker than I remember them, and I am constantly afraid of rejection and judgment from the dominant Evangelical culture, perhaps due to some baggage I still carry around from my late high school and early college years.
And what about this ordination thing? I am still in discernment about what exactly my call is, and if it is to ordained ministry or not, but if it is, where should I go through that process? Here in Nebraska, where I have a great connection with the diocese here? Back in Boston, where I have an established parish that could sponsor me for ordination? I have no connections with the Episcopal Church in the South, since I didn't attend an Episcopal Church until I moved to Boston, so if I went back there, I'd have to start all over again in terms of building relationships with a parish and a diocese for a few years before I could even START the formal discernment process. And are there any dioceses in the South that would welcome a progressive woman candidate for the priesthood who is an adamant supporter of gay rights and gay ordination? I keep hearing horror stories about how the Diocese of South Carolina is one of the dioceses threatening to split from the Episcopal Church... do I really want to get into that mess?
All these questions and thoughts were pounding in my mind as I left last Monday for the Resurrection House spring/Lenten retreat. This retreat was to be nearly entirely silent, at the nearby Knowles Mercy Spirituality Center. I was nearly desperate for silence at this point, to get away and to return to a focus on God. I wanted to use this time to try to discern where God is calling me for the next step of my life, to try to listen to the silence and be open to the voice of the Spirit. My mind was exhausted from over-analyzing my situation, which I had been doing in my own mind and with Father Bob and other friends for the past several months... but I had never really taken any serious time to stop and listen, to be still, to pray. I was crying out for direction, but not taking the time to stop and listen for it. I hoped I'd be able to do that at Knowles Mercy.
First item on the agenda for the retreat was a meeting with one of the Catholic nuns who runs the retreat center, for a spiritual direction session. Immediately it was clear that Sister Jean was a pro at this spiritual direction thing, having been at it for over 20 years - we had a 45 minute session scheduled, but she had me out of there in 30 minutes! And that's really saying something, given how much I can ramble on and on and on if given the license to do so! She was able to ask me pointed questions that got right to the heart of the matter.
She immediately noticed how "in my head" I was with all these questions and encouraged me to get "in my heart" about it. She cautioned me against expecting to get any clear-cut answers as to where exactly I should be going next year, instead encouraging me to just remember that God loves me and to spend the next few days "falling in love again with this God of ours."
She encouraged me to try a method of journaling in which I would imagine a sort of "conversation with God," writing down things I wanted to say to God and then imagining what God's response to me would be. This was somewhat of a breakthrough for me, because recently I had been struggling with my age-old demons of low self-confidence and self-esteem, and as she told me to imagine what kinds of things God would say to me, I realized that the negative self-critical inner voice that haunts me is NOT the voice of God, that God would never say the kinds of things to me that I say to myself.
I left there feeling like I had had something of a spiritual revelation, and it was as simple as this: God loves me!!!! My self-critical inner voice, which Anne Lamott, one of my favorite writers, calls "Bad Mind," is not the voice of God!!!! This sounds rather basic and simple, but in that moment I understood it with a clarity that was startling.
I had been reading online about low self-confidence and whatnot, and all these articles were saying things like, "every time you find yourself thinking negative thoughts, correct yourself with positive affirmations or focus on the good things you've done." Somehow this seemed very hollow advice to me. How the heck can I make myself think positively about myself when the very problem is that I think negatively about myself?! But when I thought of it as thinking about what GOD would say to me, it was entirely different. Of COURSE God wouldn't say things things to me; God would say how much she loves me and cares for me and accepts me for who I am. This felt like a huge breakthrough for me in beginning to think more healthily about myself and reminding myself of God's care for me.
As I came to realize all these things, I was yet again amazed at how easy it is to forget to listen for God, even to forget that God loves us -- and how this is just as true for people working daily in the church as it is for people in corporate America. Let no one think that clergy or those training to be clergy are in any way more spiritually advanced or superior to everyone else -- they are just as in danger of losing the message as anyone. And while I don't necessarily believe in Satan or a devil, I think the ease with which we lose sight of God and God's presence are indicators of the world's fallen nature. It does not come naturally to us, at least not to many of us, to abide in that place where we constantly remember God's presence, and sometimes even those tools which are meant to bring us into closer communion with God -- liturgy, prayer, and so forth -- can actually become distractions from the real Presence out there and accessible to all of us.
For the first full day of the retreat, I merely basked in the wonder of these revelations. I read over and over again Psalm 27, which sort of came to me (I think it had been in the lectionary readings sometime recently in the days leading up to the retreat) and grabbed my attention. I meditated on its celebratory message of God's support and protection of us -- "The LORD is my light and my salvation," it begins, "whom shall I fear?" (Psalm 27:1)
I left there feeling like I had had something of a spiritual revelation, and it was as simple as this: God loves me!!!! My self-critical inner voice, which Anne Lamott, one of my favorite writers, calls "Bad Mind," is not the voice of God!!!! This sounds rather basic and simple, but in that moment I understood it with a clarity that was startling.
I had been reading online about low self-confidence and whatnot, and all these articles were saying things like, "every time you find yourself thinking negative thoughts, correct yourself with positive affirmations or focus on the good things you've done." Somehow this seemed very hollow advice to me. How the heck can I make myself think positively about myself when the very problem is that I think negatively about myself?! But when I thought of it as thinking about what GOD would say to me, it was entirely different. Of COURSE God wouldn't say things things to me; God would say how much she loves me and cares for me and accepts me for who I am. This felt like a huge breakthrough for me in beginning to think more healthily about myself and reminding myself of God's care for me.
As I came to realize all these things, I was yet again amazed at how easy it is to forget to listen for God, even to forget that God loves us -- and how this is just as true for people working daily in the church as it is for people in corporate America. Let no one think that clergy or those training to be clergy are in any way more spiritually advanced or superior to everyone else -- they are just as in danger of losing the message as anyone. And while I don't necessarily believe in Satan or a devil, I think the ease with which we lose sight of God and God's presence are indicators of the world's fallen nature. It does not come naturally to us, at least not to many of us, to abide in that place where we constantly remember God's presence, and sometimes even those tools which are meant to bring us into closer communion with God -- liturgy, prayer, and so forth -- can actually become distractions from the real Presence out there and accessible to all of us.
For the first full day of the retreat, I merely basked in the wonder of these revelations. I read over and over again Psalm 27, which sort of came to me (I think it had been in the lectionary readings sometime recently in the days leading up to the retreat) and grabbed my attention. I meditated on its celebratory message of God's support and protection of us -- "The LORD is my light and my salvation," it begins, "whom shall I fear?" (Psalm 27:1)
I began to rest more confidently in God's control of my life, to actually FEEL in my bones that God would provide for the next step of my journey, instead of just saying those words, knowing them intellectually but not really trusting in that promise. "Wait for the LORD," the psalm closes, "Be strong, and let your heart take courage, and wait for the LORD." (Psalm 27:14) I realized that God was abundantly present with me here and now, in Nebraksa, and that whatever my next step was, whether it be staying here or moving on, God would continue to be present with me.
I put aside my analytical mind, I left the questions about the future on the shelf, and I simply soaked up the divine Presence in the landscape around me, as I wandered through the woods and by the lake of the outdoor grounds of the retreat center.
The next morning, after Morning Prayer and breakfast, I headed outdoors to walk through the woods again, simply to be with God in nature and to be open to God's presence, just to listen to what the Spirit was saying -- about anything that happened to come up. I wasn't focusing on any specific questions, I was just open -- more open than I had been in a long time -- to whatever might come to me.
I wandered down through the woods, watching rabbits jump out of the way and seeing deer gallop off in the distance through the still-bare trees, breathing the clear air and basking in the warmth of the sun and the breeze through my hair and on my face. And as I rounded a corner and came upon the banks of the Platte River, suddenly an overwhelming sense of clarity came upon me. A voice inside my head said, loud and clearly, "Yep. It's time to go home." And by "home," I knew that meant the South.
I can't even quite describe what this feeling was like, but it was a moment of clarity in direction such as I had not experienced in quite a while. It wasn't even a feeling of desire, as in "I WANT to go home" -- in fact, in terms of my feelings, the week prior to the retreat I had been deeply missing Boston and really WANTING to go back to the Northeast. But suddenly I just knew that it was TIME. Entirely apart from my wants, feelings or desires, it was time. It was like when I was a little kid playing at a friend's house and my mother walked in and said, simply, "It's time to go home." There was no question about whether I wanted to or not, or whether I thought it would be best to stay at my friend's house or go home, or if perhaps I should stay at my friend's house for just one more hour, it was simply time to go home. Period.
As I stood on the banks of the Platte and looked out over the somewhat marshy river, I was reminded of the marshlands of the coasts of South Carolina, and of all the aspects of the land, the physical location, that are home to me in the deepest sense. And as I thought about going back there, back to that familiar landscape, I felt a deep sense of peace, a sense of coming home, a sense of putting an end to my restless journeying. I felt exhausted, like I had been chasing after something, restlessly looking for something, and suddenly I realized that I knew exactly where it was -- it was home, in the South. I felt a bit like St. Augustine when he writes of God, "Our souls are restless until they find their rest in You" -- only in regard to a place rather than in regards to God, necessarily. I have been saying for years that eventually I want move back to the South, but always holding it at arm's length, always feeling like I wasn't ready to go back, or that I wanted to experience other things and places first, but suddenly I realized it was time. I was ready.
It was fascinating, because suddenly I also knew that if I was to pursue ordination, it would be in the South. I had previously not really been considering this as an option, mostly because I had no connections with the Episcopal Church in the South, thinking it would make more practical sense to go through the process here or in Massachusetts, where I have networks and connections. But something always felt uneasy about that to me, and as I thought of going through the process in the South, it just felt right. The discernment process for ordination is a considerable commitment -- the process takes many years. I felt uneasy about making that kind of a commitment to either Nebraska or Massachusetts, but I knew in that instant that I would have no problem making that kind of commitment to any place in the South (and not necessarily just South Carolina, but anywhere in the region), and I would be ready to root myself in a community right away and begin this process, if ordination is indeed what I am called to.
The next day, as I sat with Mother Judi during a one-on-one session with her and talked to her about my thoughts and my future, she shrugged off the questions of location and instead asked me, "What do you think Tracy will be doing in five years?" I told her I wasn't sure, but that I didn't see myself back in any kind of office job, that I really enjoyed working in the church and that whatever I was doing, I would want it to be intensely involved with being there for people in their lives. I spoke of the power in the very human connections that can be made with one another at the moments in our lives where we are the happiest and also the most vulnerable, and my desire to be in those moments. Mother Judi just looked at me. "You realize that what you're describing is a priest, don't you?" she asked, with her quiet chuckle and knowing smile. "I mean, you ARE aware of this fact, right?"
I laughed, somewhat flattered and somewhat scared, and sort of shrugged, saying, "Well, I don't know about that...!!" And made some comment about having thought that I was led more toward the diaconate (becoming a deacon) rather than a priest.
"I don't hear the deacon thing," she said. "Maybe it's in there, but I'm not hearing that from you. But I am hearing the priest thing."
On some level, I felt she was right. But it's still not entirely clear to me... just earlier this year I was all but sure that the diaconate was my calling. But various comments from several other people and sources over the past several months have made me stop and think about reconsidering the priesthood. Mother Judi recommended that I go out and walk the labyrinth at the retreat center with the intention of focusing only on the very next step, of not looking ahead to see where the path was leading me, but just to follow along with only focusing on one step at a time, trying to be present in the moment.
After we finished talking, I went out and did just that, and as I walked, suddenly the words of Thomas Merton came to me, the very same words that were printed on a bulletin insert at the graduation worship service at Furman University four years ago and which made me break down into tears the moment I read them on that day I graduated from college.
"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does indeed please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right path although I may know nothing about it."
This prayer is just as poignant for me today as it was on the day of my graduation from college. And even though I think I may have discerned the next step, even while I may think I have received direction, guidance, that the road is leading me to the South, in all honesty, "I cannot know for certain where it will end." All I can do is put one foot in front of the other and trust. Trust that God is leading me, God is with me, and God will guide me, even those days when I am completely unaware of God's presence.
Thanks be to God!
The next morning, after Morning Prayer and breakfast, I headed outdoors to walk through the woods again, simply to be with God in nature and to be open to God's presence, just to listen to what the Spirit was saying -- about anything that happened to come up. I wasn't focusing on any specific questions, I was just open -- more open than I had been in a long time -- to whatever might come to me.
I wandered down through the woods, watching rabbits jump out of the way and seeing deer gallop off in the distance through the still-bare trees, breathing the clear air and basking in the warmth of the sun and the breeze through my hair and on my face. And as I rounded a corner and came upon the banks of the Platte River, suddenly an overwhelming sense of clarity came upon me. A voice inside my head said, loud and clearly, "Yep. It's time to go home." And by "home," I knew that meant the South.
I can't even quite describe what this feeling was like, but it was a moment of clarity in direction such as I had not experienced in quite a while. It wasn't even a feeling of desire, as in "I WANT to go home" -- in fact, in terms of my feelings, the week prior to the retreat I had been deeply missing Boston and really WANTING to go back to the Northeast. But suddenly I just knew that it was TIME. Entirely apart from my wants, feelings or desires, it was time. It was like when I was a little kid playing at a friend's house and my mother walked in and said, simply, "It's time to go home." There was no question about whether I wanted to or not, or whether I thought it would be best to stay at my friend's house or go home, or if perhaps I should stay at my friend's house for just one more hour, it was simply time to go home. Period.
As I stood on the banks of the Platte and looked out over the somewhat marshy river, I was reminded of the marshlands of the coasts of South Carolina, and of all the aspects of the land, the physical location, that are home to me in the deepest sense. And as I thought about going back there, back to that familiar landscape, I felt a deep sense of peace, a sense of coming home, a sense of putting an end to my restless journeying. I felt exhausted, like I had been chasing after something, restlessly looking for something, and suddenly I realized that I knew exactly where it was -- it was home, in the South. I felt a bit like St. Augustine when he writes of God, "Our souls are restless until they find their rest in You" -- only in regard to a place rather than in regards to God, necessarily. I have been saying for years that eventually I want move back to the South, but always holding it at arm's length, always feeling like I wasn't ready to go back, or that I wanted to experience other things and places first, but suddenly I realized it was time. I was ready.
It was fascinating, because suddenly I also knew that if I was to pursue ordination, it would be in the South. I had previously not really been considering this as an option, mostly because I had no connections with the Episcopal Church in the South, thinking it would make more practical sense to go through the process here or in Massachusetts, where I have networks and connections. But something always felt uneasy about that to me, and as I thought of going through the process in the South, it just felt right. The discernment process for ordination is a considerable commitment -- the process takes many years. I felt uneasy about making that kind of a commitment to either Nebraska or Massachusetts, but I knew in that instant that I would have no problem making that kind of commitment to any place in the South (and not necessarily just South Carolina, but anywhere in the region), and I would be ready to root myself in a community right away and begin this process, if ordination is indeed what I am called to.
The next day, as I sat with Mother Judi during a one-on-one session with her and talked to her about my thoughts and my future, she shrugged off the questions of location and instead asked me, "What do you think Tracy will be doing in five years?" I told her I wasn't sure, but that I didn't see myself back in any kind of office job, that I really enjoyed working in the church and that whatever I was doing, I would want it to be intensely involved with being there for people in their lives. I spoke of the power in the very human connections that can be made with one another at the moments in our lives where we are the happiest and also the most vulnerable, and my desire to be in those moments. Mother Judi just looked at me. "You realize that what you're describing is a priest, don't you?" she asked, with her quiet chuckle and knowing smile. "I mean, you ARE aware of this fact, right?"
I laughed, somewhat flattered and somewhat scared, and sort of shrugged, saying, "Well, I don't know about that...!!" And made some comment about having thought that I was led more toward the diaconate (becoming a deacon) rather than a priest.
"I don't hear the deacon thing," she said. "Maybe it's in there, but I'm not hearing that from you. But I am hearing the priest thing."
On some level, I felt she was right. But it's still not entirely clear to me... just earlier this year I was all but sure that the diaconate was my calling. But various comments from several other people and sources over the past several months have made me stop and think about reconsidering the priesthood. Mother Judi recommended that I go out and walk the labyrinth at the retreat center with the intention of focusing only on the very next step, of not looking ahead to see where the path was leading me, but just to follow along with only focusing on one step at a time, trying to be present in the moment.
After we finished talking, I went out and did just that, and as I walked, suddenly the words of Thomas Merton came to me, the very same words that were printed on a bulletin insert at the graduation worship service at Furman University four years ago and which made me break down into tears the moment I read them on that day I graduated from college.
"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does indeed please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right path although I may know nothing about it."
This prayer is just as poignant for me today as it was on the day of my graduation from college. And even though I think I may have discerned the next step, even while I may think I have received direction, guidance, that the road is leading me to the South, in all honesty, "I cannot know for certain where it will end." All I can do is put one foot in front of the other and trust. Trust that God is leading me, God is with me, and God will guide me, even those days when I am completely unaware of God's presence.
Thanks be to God!
Monday, February 19, 2007
A brief reflection on liturgical worship
Note (1/22/10): I'm actually not sure when I wrote this particular paragraph, but found it saved in a draft post that I never published in 2006 during my year in Nebraska. I just picked an arbitrary date in February (since there were no posts for February) and posted it, retroactively.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Sermon - Third Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C
Brief note of explanation: If you're not a member of my church.... obviously the "you"s in this sermon are addressed to the people of my congregation... this is written pretty much exactly as I wanted to speak it to them as I was standing in front of them.
1 Corinthians 12:12-27 (click here to read the passage (NRSV version))
Luke 4:14-21 (click here to read the passage (NRSV version))
Last Sunday during the announcements and in the weekly email that went out to the parish on Friday, I gave you a little "homework" in preparation for this Sunday's sermon. In our New Testament reading for this morning, Paul uses the metaphor of the members of the church being "one body in Christ." I asked you to think about your answers to three questions about that metaphor:
1. When you hear someone say, "we are one body in Christ," what does that mean to you? What are your first associations/connotations with that phrase?
2. Who is included in that body?
3. How does who you consider to be included in the body of Christ change how you relate to or are in relationship with them?
I hope you found this to be an interesting and thought-provoking exercise. I used these questions to guide my reflections about this passage, and will share with you my own thoughts in response to them.
First, "When you hear someone say, "we are one body in Christ," what does that mean to you? What are your first associations/connotations with that phrase?
For me, the phrase "we are one body in Christ" connotes first and foremost a sense of community, a community that is bound together by something larger than ourselves. As I reflected on this, I also realized that the phrase connotes to me a sense of being similar in some sense, of having something in common.
The second question was, "Who is included in that body?"
When you hear someone talk about the "body of Christ," who do you think of as being included in that body? Members of Holy Spirit? Fellow Episcopalians? Christians of other denominations?
I found that when I think about who is included in the "body of Christ," my first thought is of my particular worshipping community -- that is, all of you. Upon further reflection, I think about the other churches with which I have formed meaningful connections, in Boston and South Carolina. I also think about the wider "body" of Christians throughout the world who I may have never met or have any connection with and yet to whom I am still connected, through the "mystical body of Christ," as our Eucharistic liturgy says.
And finally, begrudgingly and with great confusion at times, I think of those who call themselves Christians with whom I disagree on various aspects of theology, politics, or ethics, or who see the world entirely differently than I do. It is sometimes hard for me to make sense of the idea that they and I are "one body in Christ" -- especially if, as I mentioned earlier, the notion of being "one in Christ" connotes to me some sense of oneness, of similarity.
I think this is probably a common line of thinking -- that as Christians, we should be similar in some way. And, on some level, this is true -- but the problem comes when we look for this commonality in our opinions, or our worship preferences, or our tastes in music, or even our interpretations of scripture, rather than in our common love of God and desire to follow Christ.
I am currently reading a book with my spiritual director called The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. In the most recent chapter we read, the author, Ronald Rolheiser, writes about the misperceptions people hold about what "church" is supposed to be. One of those misperceptions, he says, is the idea that church is made up of "like-minded individuals, gathering on the basis of mutual compatibility." He says it better than I could, so I quote from him:
"To be in apostolic community, church, is not necessarily to be with others with whom we are emotionally, ideologically, and otherwise compatible. Rather it is to stand, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, precisely with people who are very different from ourselves and, with them, hear a common word, say a common creed, share a common bread, and offer a mutual forgiveness so as, in that way, to bridge our differences and become a common heart. Church is not about a few like-minded persons getting together for mutual support; it is about millions and millions of different kinds of persons transcending their differences so as to become a community beyond temperament, race, ideology, gender, language, and background" (Rolheiser 115).
After explaining a number of other things that church is NOT, Rolheiser finally gets to his main point, his definition of what church IS -- people "gathering around the person of Christ and sharing his Spirit" (Rolheiser 118). And the Gospel passage for today gives us a nice summary of who exactly we are gathering around in the person of Christ - the one who brings good news to the poor, gives sight to the blind, and frees the oppressed.
So, the phrase "one body in Christ" DOES connote similarity -- but our similarity as Christians lies in our turning to Christ as our Savior, not in sharing similar political opinions, similar cultures, similar backgrounds or even similar interpretations of scripture. If we struggle to think about those who are different from us as included in the body of Christ, perhaps it is because we have focused so much on the "oneness" part of the metaphor that it overshadows the centrality of the "Christ" part of the metaphor.
Paul gives us some powerful imagery to illustrate this concept in this morning's New Testament reading: "Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- Jews or Greeks, slave or free -- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Corin. 12:12-13). Christ is what unites us; the Spirit is what binds us together. Through our baptism, we are inextricably linked to one another, even when we may not FEEL like we are a part of the body.
One of the most powerful aspects of Paul's metaphor of the "body of Christ" is his affirmation that we are still included in the body even when we feel excluded because we are different from the other members of the body. He writes, "If the foot would say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body" (1 Corin. 12:15).
Over what things have we found ourselves feeling excluded from the body of Christ? What would you fill in to that statement -- "Because I am not _______, I do not belong to the body"? Because I am not "spiritual" enough? Because I am not good at talking with others about my faith? Because I don't live up to my ideals? Because I don't agree with this or that action of the national church? Despite any of our differences that might make us feel that we do not belong, Paul says that our feeling this way does not make us any less a part of the body! If we have been baptized into the body, we ARE a part of the body, in spite of any attempts by ourselves or others to exclude us.
Next, Paul goes on to affirm that the differences within the body of Christ are a part of God's plan: "God arranged the members in the body, each one as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?" (1 Corin. 12:18-19).
In fact, Paul argues that this diversity is ESSENTIAL to the Christian community. By its very DEFINITION, the "body" consists of different "parts." Instead of saying that we are one body in Christ DESPITE our differences (a way of thinking I know I often hold), in this passage Paul argues beautifully that we NEED our differences to truly live out what it means to be the body of Christ.
He writes, "the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you" (1 Corin. 12:21). I cannot say to those Christians who are different from me, "I have no need of you." Their presence is critical to maintaining the integrity of the body of Christ. Otherwise, we are just a community of ears, with no eyes. Or of feet, with no hands. When I am able to have considerate and respectful conversations with people who are different from me, it is often those people who can help me to see and understand things I could never have seen through talking only with people who look, talk, and think like me. As Paul writes, "If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?" (1 Corin. 12:17) Without engaging with differences, we miss out on experiencing the fullness of God in Christ.
I am a strong advocate of building intentionally diverse Christian communities for precisely this reason. We need all the different parts in order to be a HEALTHY body. Just as a body without an eye is not completely whole and healthy, so too is a Christian community not healthy if it is too homogenous -- in terms of race, class, culture, or ideology. Over the years I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the way churches in our country are segregated along racial, socioeconomic, and ideological lines. While I understand many of the historical and sociological reasons behind this phenomenon, I do not see how there can be any scripturally justifiable reasons for this. We have "white churches" and "black churches" and "conservative churches" and "liberal churches" and "rich churches" and "poor churches," and in all these churches, we read the same scriptures that tell us we are "one body in Christ." To modernize the metaphor, "In the Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- black or white, conservative or liberal" -- so why do we so often live as if this were not so? I feel that we as Christians are not really living the Gospel unless we are living it together, in community.
As you may know, this week is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. Praying for "Christian unity" does not necessarily mean that we are praying for all Christians to become part of ONE denomination or ONE church, or that certain groups should give up their particular styles of worship and methods of scriptural interpretation and adopt those of another group. "Christian unity," as informed by Paul's metaphor of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians, does not mean erasing differences or assuming consensus among all Christians. Rather, it means caring enough to ENGAGE WITH the differences and to learn from one another. Ecumenical dialogue continually reminds us that God is not contained within our particular church, and as we engage with our sisters and brothers of other denominations, we are also strengthened in knowing that we are connected to a wider community of support in the larger body of Christ as we strive to live out the Gospel in our daily lives.
And finally -- I bet you thought I was never going to get to the third question -- how does who you consider to be included in the body of Christ change how you relate to them?
For me, I know there are people with whom I would never be friends or really have much to do with if it weren't for our shared Christian commitment. If I think of someone as being a part of the body of Christ, it makes me think twice before simply dismissing them or not listening carefully to what they have to say, even if we don't always agree. A common identity as Christians in the body of Christ may at times bind people together when nothing else will.
This metaphor also gives us a powerful theological basis for reaching across differences and building community, in some of the ways that I discussed earlier. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it in terms of "building the beloved community" -- that is precisely the type of community we should be about building as the body of Christ.
Above all, considering someone as included in the body of Christ gives us a powerful sense of solidarity with them. Paul puts it beautifully in 1 Corinthians: "If one members suffers, all suffer together with it, if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it" (1 Corin. 12:26). We are one body in Christ with our brothers and sisters who are fleeing genocide in the Sudan. We are one body in Christ with our brothers and sisters who are entangled in the war in Iraq (on either side of the conflict). We are one body in Christ with our brothers and sisters who are rebuilding after the devastating effects of Katrina in on the Gulf Coast. When any member of the body of Christ suffers anywhere in the world, it affects us all.
But our solidarity does not end with the Christian community. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to "seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves." We are called to be in solidarity with ALL people, not just Christians. Though we may feel a special connection and solidarity with our fellow Christians throughout the world, may we also be open to finding the presence of Christ even outside of our fold, in places where we least expect it.
In the name of the One who comes to bring good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to free the oppressed, and to bind us all together in the One Body, Amen.
1 Corinthians 12:12-27 (click here to read the passage (NRSV version))
Luke 4:14-21 (click here to read the passage (NRSV version))
Last Sunday during the announcements and in the weekly email that went out to the parish on Friday, I gave you a little "homework" in preparation for this Sunday's sermon. In our New Testament reading for this morning, Paul uses the metaphor of the members of the church being "one body in Christ." I asked you to think about your answers to three questions about that metaphor:
1. When you hear someone say, "we are one body in Christ," what does that mean to you? What are your first associations/connotations with that phrase?
2. Who is included in that body?
3. How does who you consider to be included in the body of Christ change how you relate to or are in relationship with them?
I hope you found this to be an interesting and thought-provoking exercise. I used these questions to guide my reflections about this passage, and will share with you my own thoughts in response to them.
First, "When you hear someone say, "we are one body in Christ," what does that mean to you? What are your first associations/connotations with that phrase?
For me, the phrase "we are one body in Christ" connotes first and foremost a sense of community, a community that is bound together by something larger than ourselves. As I reflected on this, I also realized that the phrase connotes to me a sense of being similar in some sense, of having something in common.
The second question was, "Who is included in that body?"
When you hear someone talk about the "body of Christ," who do you think of as being included in that body? Members of Holy Spirit? Fellow Episcopalians? Christians of other denominations?
I found that when I think about who is included in the "body of Christ," my first thought is of my particular worshipping community -- that is, all of you. Upon further reflection, I think about the other churches with which I have formed meaningful connections, in Boston and South Carolina. I also think about the wider "body" of Christians throughout the world who I may have never met or have any connection with and yet to whom I am still connected, through the "mystical body of Christ," as our Eucharistic liturgy says.
And finally, begrudgingly and with great confusion at times, I think of those who call themselves Christians with whom I disagree on various aspects of theology, politics, or ethics, or who see the world entirely differently than I do. It is sometimes hard for me to make sense of the idea that they and I are "one body in Christ" -- especially if, as I mentioned earlier, the notion of being "one in Christ" connotes to me some sense of oneness, of similarity.
I think this is probably a common line of thinking -- that as Christians, we should be similar in some way. And, on some level, this is true -- but the problem comes when we look for this commonality in our opinions, or our worship preferences, or our tastes in music, or even our interpretations of scripture, rather than in our common love of God and desire to follow Christ.
I am currently reading a book with my spiritual director called The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. In the most recent chapter we read, the author, Ronald Rolheiser, writes about the misperceptions people hold about what "church" is supposed to be. One of those misperceptions, he says, is the idea that church is made up of "like-minded individuals, gathering on the basis of mutual compatibility." He says it better than I could, so I quote from him:
"To be in apostolic community, church, is not necessarily to be with others with whom we are emotionally, ideologically, and otherwise compatible. Rather it is to stand, shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, precisely with people who are very different from ourselves and, with them, hear a common word, say a common creed, share a common bread, and offer a mutual forgiveness so as, in that way, to bridge our differences and become a common heart. Church is not about a few like-minded persons getting together for mutual support; it is about millions and millions of different kinds of persons transcending their differences so as to become a community beyond temperament, race, ideology, gender, language, and background" (Rolheiser 115).
After explaining a number of other things that church is NOT, Rolheiser finally gets to his main point, his definition of what church IS -- people "gathering around the person of Christ and sharing his Spirit" (Rolheiser 118). And the Gospel passage for today gives us a nice summary of who exactly we are gathering around in the person of Christ - the one who brings good news to the poor, gives sight to the blind, and frees the oppressed.
So, the phrase "one body in Christ" DOES connote similarity -- but our similarity as Christians lies in our turning to Christ as our Savior, not in sharing similar political opinions, similar cultures, similar backgrounds or even similar interpretations of scripture. If we struggle to think about those who are different from us as included in the body of Christ, perhaps it is because we have focused so much on the "oneness" part of the metaphor that it overshadows the centrality of the "Christ" part of the metaphor.
Paul gives us some powerful imagery to illustrate this concept in this morning's New Testament reading: "Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- Jews or Greeks, slave or free -- and we were all made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Corin. 12:12-13). Christ is what unites us; the Spirit is what binds us together. Through our baptism, we are inextricably linked to one another, even when we may not FEEL like we are a part of the body.
One of the most powerful aspects of Paul's metaphor of the "body of Christ" is his affirmation that we are still included in the body even when we feel excluded because we are different from the other members of the body. He writes, "If the foot would say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body" (1 Corin. 12:15).
Over what things have we found ourselves feeling excluded from the body of Christ? What would you fill in to that statement -- "Because I am not _______, I do not belong to the body"? Because I am not "spiritual" enough? Because I am not good at talking with others about my faith? Because I don't live up to my ideals? Because I don't agree with this or that action of the national church? Despite any of our differences that might make us feel that we do not belong, Paul says that our feeling this way does not make us any less a part of the body! If we have been baptized into the body, we ARE a part of the body, in spite of any attempts by ourselves or others to exclude us.
Next, Paul goes on to affirm that the differences within the body of Christ are a part of God's plan: "God arranged the members in the body, each one as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?" (1 Corin. 12:18-19).
In fact, Paul argues that this diversity is ESSENTIAL to the Christian community. By its very DEFINITION, the "body" consists of different "parts." Instead of saying that we are one body in Christ DESPITE our differences (a way of thinking I know I often hold), in this passage Paul argues beautifully that we NEED our differences to truly live out what it means to be the body of Christ.
He writes, "the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you" (1 Corin. 12:21). I cannot say to those Christians who are different from me, "I have no need of you." Their presence is critical to maintaining the integrity of the body of Christ. Otherwise, we are just a community of ears, with no eyes. Or of feet, with no hands. When I am able to have considerate and respectful conversations with people who are different from me, it is often those people who can help me to see and understand things I could never have seen through talking only with people who look, talk, and think like me. As Paul writes, "If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?" (1 Corin. 12:17) Without engaging with differences, we miss out on experiencing the fullness of God in Christ.
I am a strong advocate of building intentionally diverse Christian communities for precisely this reason. We need all the different parts in order to be a HEALTHY body. Just as a body without an eye is not completely whole and healthy, so too is a Christian community not healthy if it is too homogenous -- in terms of race, class, culture, or ideology. Over the years I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the way churches in our country are segregated along racial, socioeconomic, and ideological lines. While I understand many of the historical and sociological reasons behind this phenomenon, I do not see how there can be any scripturally justifiable reasons for this. We have "white churches" and "black churches" and "conservative churches" and "liberal churches" and "rich churches" and "poor churches," and in all these churches, we read the same scriptures that tell us we are "one body in Christ." To modernize the metaphor, "In the Spirit we were all baptized into one body -- black or white, conservative or liberal" -- so why do we so often live as if this were not so? I feel that we as Christians are not really living the Gospel unless we are living it together, in community.
As you may know, this week is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. Praying for "Christian unity" does not necessarily mean that we are praying for all Christians to become part of ONE denomination or ONE church, or that certain groups should give up their particular styles of worship and methods of scriptural interpretation and adopt those of another group. "Christian unity," as informed by Paul's metaphor of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians, does not mean erasing differences or assuming consensus among all Christians. Rather, it means caring enough to ENGAGE WITH the differences and to learn from one another. Ecumenical dialogue continually reminds us that God is not contained within our particular church, and as we engage with our sisters and brothers of other denominations, we are also strengthened in knowing that we are connected to a wider community of support in the larger body of Christ as we strive to live out the Gospel in our daily lives.
And finally -- I bet you thought I was never going to get to the third question -- how does who you consider to be included in the body of Christ change how you relate to them?
For me, I know there are people with whom I would never be friends or really have much to do with if it weren't for our shared Christian commitment. If I think of someone as being a part of the body of Christ, it makes me think twice before simply dismissing them or not listening carefully to what they have to say, even if we don't always agree. A common identity as Christians in the body of Christ may at times bind people together when nothing else will.
This metaphor also gives us a powerful theological basis for reaching across differences and building community, in some of the ways that I discussed earlier. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it in terms of "building the beloved community" -- that is precisely the type of community we should be about building as the body of Christ.
Above all, considering someone as included in the body of Christ gives us a powerful sense of solidarity with them. Paul puts it beautifully in 1 Corinthians: "If one members suffers, all suffer together with it, if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it" (1 Corin. 12:26). We are one body in Christ with our brothers and sisters who are fleeing genocide in the Sudan. We are one body in Christ with our brothers and sisters who are entangled in the war in Iraq (on either side of the conflict). We are one body in Christ with our brothers and sisters who are rebuilding after the devastating effects of Katrina in on the Gulf Coast. When any member of the body of Christ suffers anywhere in the world, it affects us all.
But our solidarity does not end with the Christian community. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to "seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves." We are called to be in solidarity with ALL people, not just Christians. Though we may feel a special connection and solidarity with our fellow Christians throughout the world, may we also be open to finding the presence of Christ even outside of our fold, in places where we least expect it.
In the name of the One who comes to bring good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to free the oppressed, and to bind us all together in the One Body, Amen.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
A recap of my spiritual journey to this point...
I wrote this spiritual autobiography for the discernment commitee at my church in Nebraska... they are trying to help me discern whether I have a calling to any form of ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church.
My spiritual journey began in earnest when I was a senior in high school, back in South Carolina. I had been raised in the Lutheran Church, but faith was not something real and personal to me until an experience I had at a retreat at a friend's church my senior year of high school. Some may call such an experience a "conversion" experience or a "born-again" experience. Although I tend to shy away from those words, I essentially had an encounter with God where I realized that God could be a very real presence in my life, and after that retreat I began to read the Bible in earnest, which I had never done before. I was enthralled with what I found -- the beauty in the Scriptures, particularly in the parables of the Gospels and the songs of praise in the psalms.
For about a year and a half, I became wrapped up in an Evangelical community, during my late high school years and early college years. I was certain that I had "found Jesus," that I now knew "the Truth," and that my mission was to convert everyone in the world to Christianity. I often felt a huge burden over the fact that I did not "evangelize" others like I should, and I and a friend who was my "accountability partner" in faith would sometimes sob at our meetings over the fact that people were dying and going to hell because we personally hadn't told them about Jesus. I felt an intense burden, like the salvation of the world rested on my shoulders. I would talk about being "on fire for God" and go to praise and worship meetings where we would raise our hands in a darkened room and deeply and passionately sing praises to God, tears running down our faces, eternally grateful for God's salvation of us, such unworthy sinners. Since early childhood, I had struggled with low self-esteem and often felt I was a horrible person or unworthy of love, so this message of God's unconditional love, which I had never heard proclaimed so strongly or emotionally in the Lutheran church I grew up in, pierced through to my very insecure heart and touched me deeply. I was hooked.
Somewhere along the line, though, my neat little black-and-white world began to fall apart. My sister's best friend's father died unexpectedly when I was a sophomore in college, and my faith simply did not provide a sense of comfort to me during this time. When challenged, my all-too-happy façade broke. At the same time, we were studying about the Holocaust in a European history course I was taking, and the horrors of the world began to bear down on me. Where was God in all this? I struggled with the age-old question of theodicy: how could an all-loving, good God allow such horrific suffering? I simply couldn’t get past this for many years. I became a religion major in an attempt to learn more about my faith and to strengthen it, but courses in systematic theology and analytical approaches to the scriptures only shook my foundation in what I thought was absolute fact. Somehow it all stopped making sense.
Wanting clear-cut answers, I became desperate to PROVE that Jesus was the only way, that my faith was the "right" one, and I went on a rampage, reading all that I could, searching for answers, for proof, for reassurance that Christianity was indeed FACT, and not faith. Eventually, I could find no objective proof that satisfied me, so I felt I had no other choice but to reject exclusivist theology - the idea that only Christians can connect with God or will be saved by God.
My spiritual journey began in earnest when I was a senior in high school, back in South Carolina. I had been raised in the Lutheran Church, but faith was not something real and personal to me until an experience I had at a retreat at a friend's church my senior year of high school. Some may call such an experience a "conversion" experience or a "born-again" experience. Although I tend to shy away from those words, I essentially had an encounter with God where I realized that God could be a very real presence in my life, and after that retreat I began to read the Bible in earnest, which I had never done before. I was enthralled with what I found -- the beauty in the Scriptures, particularly in the parables of the Gospels and the songs of praise in the psalms.
For about a year and a half, I became wrapped up in an Evangelical community, during my late high school years and early college years. I was certain that I had "found Jesus," that I now knew "the Truth," and that my mission was to convert everyone in the world to Christianity. I often felt a huge burden over the fact that I did not "evangelize" others like I should, and I and a friend who was my "accountability partner" in faith would sometimes sob at our meetings over the fact that people were dying and going to hell because we personally hadn't told them about Jesus. I felt an intense burden, like the salvation of the world rested on my shoulders. I would talk about being "on fire for God" and go to praise and worship meetings where we would raise our hands in a darkened room and deeply and passionately sing praises to God, tears running down our faces, eternally grateful for God's salvation of us, such unworthy sinners. Since early childhood, I had struggled with low self-esteem and often felt I was a horrible person or unworthy of love, so this message of God's unconditional love, which I had never heard proclaimed so strongly or emotionally in the Lutheran church I grew up in, pierced through to my very insecure heart and touched me deeply. I was hooked.
Somewhere along the line, though, my neat little black-and-white world began to fall apart. My sister's best friend's father died unexpectedly when I was a sophomore in college, and my faith simply did not provide a sense of comfort to me during this time. When challenged, my all-too-happy façade broke. At the same time, we were studying about the Holocaust in a European history course I was taking, and the horrors of the world began to bear down on me. Where was God in all this? I struggled with the age-old question of theodicy: how could an all-loving, good God allow such horrific suffering? I simply couldn’t get past this for many years. I became a religion major in an attempt to learn more about my faith and to strengthen it, but courses in systematic theology and analytical approaches to the scriptures only shook my foundation in what I thought was absolute fact. Somehow it all stopped making sense.
Wanting clear-cut answers, I became desperate to PROVE that Jesus was the only way, that my faith was the "right" one, and I went on a rampage, reading all that I could, searching for answers, for proof, for reassurance that Christianity was indeed FACT, and not faith. Eventually, I could find no objective proof that satisfied me, so I felt I had no other choice but to reject exclusivist theology - the idea that only Christians can connect with God or will be saved by God.
This rejection was extremely painful and traumatizing to me. I constantly wondered if maybe I really WAS being led astray by the devil -- how could I tell what was from God and what was from the devil??? -- and involved painful readjustments of my views of God and Scripture. But, my rejection of exclusivism was only confirmed when I had my first real interfaith encounter a year later, with a Muslim student in an introduction to Islam course I was taking. Outside of class, we talked and shared our faith journeys, and discussed how we related to God and how our faith had sustained us (or in my case, failed me) during times of crisis. I simply could not deny that this young man was also in touch with God, with the divine presence, and no amount of "official, orthodox Christian doctrine" about non-Christians going to hell could convince me otherwise.
Also, I began to develop a sense of calling to reach out to the outcast of society. As I began to come into my own understanding of faith rather than a parroted version of someone else's, I began to feel more and more convinced that standing in a darkened room singing praise songs accompanied by guitar and drums was probably not as pleasing to God as reaching out to love and serve those most in need would be. As I read the Gospel texts, I saw a Jesus who lived among the outcast in society, who did not cavort with the powerful and the wealthy, but with those most despised in the society of his time - the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and - heaven-forbid - even Samaritans. I saw a Jesus who said things like, "It will be easier for a camel to go through the needle of an eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:23). Who asked his followers to sell all that they owned - not 10 percent of their annual income, not five dollars in the collection plate each Sunday - but all that they owned, give to the poor, and come follow him. This, to me, seemed to be the heart of Jesus's message about the kingdom of God - the kingdom of God is at hand, and it will be realized as people come to follow him, serve the poor, love their enemies, and reach out to the stranger, the disenfranchised, the abandoned, the socially stigmatized, and the deserted.
The incongruence between Jesus's calling as I understood it from Scripture and the experience of seeing students wearing ridiculously-priced clothing from Abercrombie & Fitch driving to Sunday worship in their $40,000 SUVs that Daddy bought for them, never encountering or speaking with someone who didn't have tons of money and privilege, began to drive me nuts. (And I should be clear that this incongruence wasn't limited exclusively to the Evangelical communities of which I was a part; it was something I found in pretty much any Christian community I had encountered. Maybe the displays of wealth were more excessive in some churches than others, but nowhere did I see a truly radically inclusive community being lived out, a community like what I envisioned the followers of Jesus and the early Christian community to have been.)
My Evangelical friends surely sensed these changes in me, even if I didn't talk about them openly very much for fear of rejection and criticism from them. I began to feel increasingly out of place in the Evangelical community and eventually left it and found a home in a more liberal Baptist church (which was part of a movement in the South called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an alliance of more moderate Baptists who reject the conservative views of the Southern Baptist Convention). By the time I graduated from college, I had become fairly involved in that Baptist church, but I was still a bit unsettled in my faith. The summer after I graduated from college, I lived at home in Columbia, S.C., and didn't really attend church much for that summer.
Part of the reason that I didn't get to attend church much was that I was doing some research for the Pluralism Project at Harvard (www.pluralism.org) about religious diversity in Columbia, and this research entailed visiting ceremonies of the various religious groups in the area. Since many of them had adapted their religious schedules to fit the American workweek, they often had meetings on Sundays (since that's when all the Christians were doing their religious thing). Thus, I often had a Sikh service or a Hindu ceremony to go to on Sunday morning instead of church. This was perhaps also a good experience for me personally, to sort of "take a break" from involvement in church and immerse myself in other faiths and cultures.
I was very open to seeing the presence of the Divine in these faiths, and I did find it there. I sensed God's presence when I was sitting and listening to hymns from the Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh holy scriptures) recited in the local gurdwara, or when I watched Muslims bow in reverent prayer, in unison, to the call to prayer in Arabic proclaiming "God is great!" I delighted in the many forms and representations of God in the Hindu tradition, especially enjoying a late-night vigil on the eve of Vishnu (one of the deities)'s birth as the baby Krishna, watching the crowd break into jubilant applause, singing and dancing at the hour of Krishna's birth.
From Muslims, I learned to think about disciplined prayer. From Baha'is, I learned to think about racial reconciliation and unity as a part of the divine mandate. From Buddhists, I learned to think about stillness and centeredness in meditation. From Hindus, I learned to think about what it meant to worship God not just as creator and preserver, but also as destroyer, to own the suffering and dark side of life as part of God's very presence in the world. My questions of theodicy that had tripped me up for so long in struggling with Western Christian theology were simply irrelevant for a worldview that did not posit as its starting point that only good things come from God -- and on some level I found this extremely liberating.
I was particularly drawn to one middle-aged Hindu woman, who I thought simply oozed the presence of the Divine. She spoke of the presence of the Divine Mother in all of us and told stories about visiting prisoners at the local prison, of reaching out to the outcast of society, of living out a sense of calling very similar to what I had discovered in the Christian scriptures but which I still at this point was not living out myself.
Also, I began to develop a sense of calling to reach out to the outcast of society. As I began to come into my own understanding of faith rather than a parroted version of someone else's, I began to feel more and more convinced that standing in a darkened room singing praise songs accompanied by guitar and drums was probably not as pleasing to God as reaching out to love and serve those most in need would be. As I read the Gospel texts, I saw a Jesus who lived among the outcast in society, who did not cavort with the powerful and the wealthy, but with those most despised in the society of his time - the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and - heaven-forbid - even Samaritans. I saw a Jesus who said things like, "It will be easier for a camel to go through the needle of an eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:23). Who asked his followers to sell all that they owned - not 10 percent of their annual income, not five dollars in the collection plate each Sunday - but all that they owned, give to the poor, and come follow him. This, to me, seemed to be the heart of Jesus's message about the kingdom of God - the kingdom of God is at hand, and it will be realized as people come to follow him, serve the poor, love their enemies, and reach out to the stranger, the disenfranchised, the abandoned, the socially stigmatized, and the deserted.
The incongruence between Jesus's calling as I understood it from Scripture and the experience of seeing students wearing ridiculously-priced clothing from Abercrombie & Fitch driving to Sunday worship in their $40,000 SUVs that Daddy bought for them, never encountering or speaking with someone who didn't have tons of money and privilege, began to drive me nuts. (And I should be clear that this incongruence wasn't limited exclusively to the Evangelical communities of which I was a part; it was something I found in pretty much any Christian community I had encountered. Maybe the displays of wealth were more excessive in some churches than others, but nowhere did I see a truly radically inclusive community being lived out, a community like what I envisioned the followers of Jesus and the early Christian community to have been.)
My Evangelical friends surely sensed these changes in me, even if I didn't talk about them openly very much for fear of rejection and criticism from them. I began to feel increasingly out of place in the Evangelical community and eventually left it and found a home in a more liberal Baptist church (which was part of a movement in the South called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an alliance of more moderate Baptists who reject the conservative views of the Southern Baptist Convention). By the time I graduated from college, I had become fairly involved in that Baptist church, but I was still a bit unsettled in my faith. The summer after I graduated from college, I lived at home in Columbia, S.C., and didn't really attend church much for that summer.
Part of the reason that I didn't get to attend church much was that I was doing some research for the Pluralism Project at Harvard (www.pluralism.org) about religious diversity in Columbia, and this research entailed visiting ceremonies of the various religious groups in the area. Since many of them had adapted their religious schedules to fit the American workweek, they often had meetings on Sundays (since that's when all the Christians were doing their religious thing). Thus, I often had a Sikh service or a Hindu ceremony to go to on Sunday morning instead of church. This was perhaps also a good experience for me personally, to sort of "take a break" from involvement in church and immerse myself in other faiths and cultures.
I was very open to seeing the presence of the Divine in these faiths, and I did find it there. I sensed God's presence when I was sitting and listening to hymns from the Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh holy scriptures) recited in the local gurdwara, or when I watched Muslims bow in reverent prayer, in unison, to the call to prayer in Arabic proclaiming "God is great!" I delighted in the many forms and representations of God in the Hindu tradition, especially enjoying a late-night vigil on the eve of Vishnu (one of the deities)'s birth as the baby Krishna, watching the crowd break into jubilant applause, singing and dancing at the hour of Krishna's birth.
From Muslims, I learned to think about disciplined prayer. From Baha'is, I learned to think about racial reconciliation and unity as a part of the divine mandate. From Buddhists, I learned to think about stillness and centeredness in meditation. From Hindus, I learned to think about what it meant to worship God not just as creator and preserver, but also as destroyer, to own the suffering and dark side of life as part of God's very presence in the world. My questions of theodicy that had tripped me up for so long in struggling with Western Christian theology were simply irrelevant for a worldview that did not posit as its starting point that only good things come from God -- and on some level I found this extremely liberating.
I was particularly drawn to one middle-aged Hindu woman, who I thought simply oozed the presence of the Divine. She spoke of the presence of the Divine Mother in all of us and told stories about visiting prisoners at the local prison, of reaching out to the outcast of society, of living out a sense of calling very similar to what I had discovered in the Christian scriptures but which I still at this point was not living out myself.
She was my contact at the Hindu temple and always welcomed me warmly to their various festivals and events throughout the summer. By the end of August, when I showed up for yet another religious festival (this time for Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of new beginnings and remover of obstacles), she welcomed me with a hug, smiled, and said with a laugh, "Is this your church now?" She was half-joking, but it really made me stop and think. Was the Hindu temple my "church" now? Was the gurdwara? The mosque? The Buddhist meditation hall? I didn't even have a church anymore. What was my church? Sensing my hesitancy to respond, she nodded knowingly and revised her statement: "ONE of the churches," she said. I nodded vigorously. One of the churches. Yes. That was more like it.
By the end of the summer, despite everything I learned about God from these various faiths, I knew that I wanted to actively seek out a church and try to find my place within Christianity when I moved to Boston to start graduate school. Despite all my "interfaith" sensibilities and my ability to see the presence of God in other faiths, there was something there that kept me hanging on to my Christian faith.
I struggled a lot in college with traditional doctrines about Jesus -- was he really "God" in the flesh? Was he really born of a virgin? What if I don't think Jesus was God, but an inspired human teacher? At times my roommate (a fellow religion major) and I would joke that if we were honest with ourselves, we probably should just be Jewish, since we were fine with most everything in Christianity except the claims it made about Jesus... and, well, if you take Jesus out of the equation, it's not really Christianity anymore, now is it?
But ultimately, I came to realize that yes, Jesus was important to me. Despite my inability to "prove" the "factual" nature of any of the truths that the church holds about Jesus, I knew that the story of Jesus, the very simple basic story of his life, death and resurrection, had deeply touched me and moved me in a way that nothing else had in my life, and in a way that no other religion had (from my limited knowledge of them). Although I had rejected just about everything that I used to believe or hold dear during my Evangelical days, I realized that I couldn't reject Jesus.
That realization was a very deep and profound one for me. I realized that I had let my frustrations with and anger towards the Evangelical community I had once been a part of obscure the fact that in those communities I had actually found a very powerful and meaningful encounter with God. I loved those communities for their passion for Christ and for the Gospel, for their contagious sense that they really knew the power of the love of God expressed through Christ Jesus, and yet I disagreed with many of their social and political opinions. My problem was that although I agreed more with the theology of the more moderate "mainline" churches, in many of those types of churches I had visited, people seemed to be simply lackluster in their approach to worship, reciting words and turning pages, but not truly WORSHIPPING God. I felt like slapping everyone upside the head and screaming, "PEOPLE!! Do you know what you're singing about?? Christ is RISEN!!! My GOD, act like you understand what you're saying!!" I was not optimistic about my options as I moved to Boston for graduate school and began my church-hunting process.
But, thanks be to God, within three weeks of arriving in Boston, I found the church that I wound up attending for the three years that I lived in Boston -- St. James's Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
St. James became my first true church home, in a way that no other community had ever been. It was everything I was looking for in a church -- racially diverse (I had become increasingly impatient with racially homogenous churches after seeing the racial diversity of the Muslim and Baha'i communities in Columbia during my Pluralism Project research and was determined to find a church that was also racially diverse -- I could write you a book about that particular issue but I'll spare you, for now), social justice-minded (doing a number of outreach ministries to the poor and marginalized), and joyful in worship without being "rock band evangelical."
By the end of the summer, despite everything I learned about God from these various faiths, I knew that I wanted to actively seek out a church and try to find my place within Christianity when I moved to Boston to start graduate school. Despite all my "interfaith" sensibilities and my ability to see the presence of God in other faiths, there was something there that kept me hanging on to my Christian faith.
I struggled a lot in college with traditional doctrines about Jesus -- was he really "God" in the flesh? Was he really born of a virgin? What if I don't think Jesus was God, but an inspired human teacher? At times my roommate (a fellow religion major) and I would joke that if we were honest with ourselves, we probably should just be Jewish, since we were fine with most everything in Christianity except the claims it made about Jesus... and, well, if you take Jesus out of the equation, it's not really Christianity anymore, now is it?
But ultimately, I came to realize that yes, Jesus was important to me. Despite my inability to "prove" the "factual" nature of any of the truths that the church holds about Jesus, I knew that the story of Jesus, the very simple basic story of his life, death and resurrection, had deeply touched me and moved me in a way that nothing else had in my life, and in a way that no other religion had (from my limited knowledge of them). Although I had rejected just about everything that I used to believe or hold dear during my Evangelical days, I realized that I couldn't reject Jesus.
That realization was a very deep and profound one for me. I realized that I had let my frustrations with and anger towards the Evangelical community I had once been a part of obscure the fact that in those communities I had actually found a very powerful and meaningful encounter with God. I loved those communities for their passion for Christ and for the Gospel, for their contagious sense that they really knew the power of the love of God expressed through Christ Jesus, and yet I disagreed with many of their social and political opinions. My problem was that although I agreed more with the theology of the more moderate "mainline" churches, in many of those types of churches I had visited, people seemed to be simply lackluster in their approach to worship, reciting words and turning pages, but not truly WORSHIPPING God. I felt like slapping everyone upside the head and screaming, "PEOPLE!! Do you know what you're singing about?? Christ is RISEN!!! My GOD, act like you understand what you're saying!!" I was not optimistic about my options as I moved to Boston for graduate school and began my church-hunting process.
But, thanks be to God, within three weeks of arriving in Boston, I found the church that I wound up attending for the three years that I lived in Boston -- St. James's Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
St. James became my first true church home, in a way that no other community had ever been. It was everything I was looking for in a church -- racially diverse (I had become increasingly impatient with racially homogenous churches after seeing the racial diversity of the Muslim and Baha'i communities in Columbia during my Pluralism Project research and was determined to find a church that was also racially diverse -- I could write you a book about that particular issue but I'll spare you, for now), social justice-minded (doing a number of outreach ministries to the poor and marginalized), and joyful in worship without being "rock band evangelical."
In contrast to the churches in the South, where church was largely a social outing to see and be seen, to keep up with the Joneses (and all their relatives), in "godless," liberal New England, people didn't go to church unless it really MEANT something to them. In the South, people in the churches were mainstream, whereas in the Northeast, people in the churches were a bit countercultural – they were those people on the margins where I felt Jesus himself would have been. I felt that finally, after so many years of drifting and being unsure in my faith, unsure of where I "fit" within Christianity or if there was even a place for me in the faith, I had finally found a community that was the perfect balance between tradition and innovation, between ritual and feeling, and between definitive Christian identity and open-minded and accepting love.
The community at St. James, particularly a young women's small group of which I was a part, challenged me and supported me as I began to finally step out and act on my faith in ways I'd felt called to do for some time but never had the courage to act on. In this stage of my faith, I began to evaluate what really mattered to me and to what kinds of things I wanted to devote my life. I began to take steps to practice what I preached, inspired largely by many people who served as examples to me of living lives of conviction and integrity. I finally acted on my sense of calling to reach out to the poor and marginalized and began to volunteer with an outdoor church ministry to the homeless in Cambridge, an ecumenical ministry of which St. James was a part. My time in Boston was also when I became a vegetarian -- acting on my belief in non-violence and non-cruelty to animals. Interestingly, I found that in beginning to live out the values I held most dear, I found myself less critical and judgmental of others for not living out those same values.
Despite the real ways in which I was challenged and grew spiritually at St. James, by the time I left St. James, I still had a somewhat naïve and limited view both of church and of God. I saw the community of St. James through rose-colored glasses. Everything at St. James was wonderful, everything at St. James was inspiring, everything at St. James was perfect. If at any time I had a problem or issue with something that happened at St. James (which did happen a few times), I felt very comfortable approaching the rector to talk about it and he was always very willing to sit down and talk with me about whatever my concern was. Somehow I managed to stay away from all the arenas of church politics -- the vestry, etc -- and generally avoided hearing any of the unpleasant things that I'm sure did go on there from time to time. Whenever I got some glimmer of the fact that St. James wasn't perfect, like hearing one of my friends at church complain about not liking another church member, I was just entirely horrified ("but EVERYONE at St. James LOVES each other, right?!?!?!?!").
I was thrilled to be a part of that congregation, which I felt exemplified in every way possible what living out the Gospel of Jesus Christ should look like in this human life. I loved that congregation so much that I practically elevated it to a position of idolatry, and a certain arrogance began to creep into my outlook, without my even realizing it -- a self-inflated assurance that only churches like ours were authentically living out the Gospel -- only liberal, gay-rights supporting, pacifist, progressive political activists were truly showing Christ's radically inclusive love for all. In my mind, I began to confuse Jesus with a New England liberal.
I guess that's why God didn't let me stay in Boston to do my discernment internship, as was my original plan. Instead, God brought me to Bellevue, Nebraska, to serve in a church made up almost entirely of military folks!
Church of the Holy Spirit couldn't be more opposite to St. James in a number of ways -- it's much less racially diverse (I had convinced myself that I could never worship in an entirely or mostly white congregation again!), more traditional music and worship than I was used to, ... and this military thing!! During my time in Boston, I had subconsciously received the message that "military" was a bad word. According to the prevailing attitude there, the Iraq war was horrible, the military was horrible, and pretty much everything the American government did was horrible (obviously I'm exaggerating for effect, but this truly was the subconscious message I received). I never heard anyone talking about personally knowing people who were serving in the war. One of the first things I noticed upon arriving at Holy Spirit was the sobering list of "the deployed" that we pray for every week... and at the same time, little to no explicit attention in the prayers for people or countries outside of the United States. This is just one example of how different Holy Spirit seemed to be from St. James. I could almost hear God laughing at me. "You were so sure about the only kinds of places you could find My presence, weren't you?" God seemed to say. "Well, honey, you've got a lot to learn."
And indeed, I did. The first thing I learned is that a warm, inclusive, welcoming spirit is not the exclusive property of New England liberals. I found the same kind of warm and welcoming community at Holy Spirit as I did at St. James. I learned that "military" is not a bad word, and was humbled to realize how much service military people have given our country, with a sense of quiet duty, dignity and honor that I had not seen amongst the pacifist, protester crowd in Boston. I learned that, as always, God is in the business of breaking down my prejudices and stereotypes and showing up in places where I least expect it. I learned that yes, church is not always pretty and nice and happy all the time, but that living with an unrealistic view of church as always happy and wonderful is less spiritually edifying and spiritually healthy than confronting the realities of our brokenness as human beings and continuing to worship together in spite of that fact.
It is hard for me to add a section about my four months in the Resurrection House program to this "autobiography," I guess because it's all still in process; I don't have the benefit of time, distance and perspective on my current state to be able to describe it like I have the other periods in my life. I'm still working through a number of things. I was excited and joyful to feel that I had finally discerned how to listen for God's call, which I believe I did in coming to Nebraska, but I am learning that answering that call will not always bring entirely pleasant experiences, and that some of the most beneficial and important lessons we can learn in life are often the hardest ones. I think I already knew that before I came, but even so, I still have the tendency to want to avoid dealing with more difficult things in life.
The community at St. James, particularly a young women's small group of which I was a part, challenged me and supported me as I began to finally step out and act on my faith in ways I'd felt called to do for some time but never had the courage to act on. In this stage of my faith, I began to evaluate what really mattered to me and to what kinds of things I wanted to devote my life. I began to take steps to practice what I preached, inspired largely by many people who served as examples to me of living lives of conviction and integrity. I finally acted on my sense of calling to reach out to the poor and marginalized and began to volunteer with an outdoor church ministry to the homeless in Cambridge, an ecumenical ministry of which St. James was a part. My time in Boston was also when I became a vegetarian -- acting on my belief in non-violence and non-cruelty to animals. Interestingly, I found that in beginning to live out the values I held most dear, I found myself less critical and judgmental of others for not living out those same values.
Despite the real ways in which I was challenged and grew spiritually at St. James, by the time I left St. James, I still had a somewhat naïve and limited view both of church and of God. I saw the community of St. James through rose-colored glasses. Everything at St. James was wonderful, everything at St. James was inspiring, everything at St. James was perfect. If at any time I had a problem or issue with something that happened at St. James (which did happen a few times), I felt very comfortable approaching the rector to talk about it and he was always very willing to sit down and talk with me about whatever my concern was. Somehow I managed to stay away from all the arenas of church politics -- the vestry, etc -- and generally avoided hearing any of the unpleasant things that I'm sure did go on there from time to time. Whenever I got some glimmer of the fact that St. James wasn't perfect, like hearing one of my friends at church complain about not liking another church member, I was just entirely horrified ("but EVERYONE at St. James LOVES each other, right?!?!?!?!").
I was thrilled to be a part of that congregation, which I felt exemplified in every way possible what living out the Gospel of Jesus Christ should look like in this human life. I loved that congregation so much that I practically elevated it to a position of idolatry, and a certain arrogance began to creep into my outlook, without my even realizing it -- a self-inflated assurance that only churches like ours were authentically living out the Gospel -- only liberal, gay-rights supporting, pacifist, progressive political activists were truly showing Christ's radically inclusive love for all. In my mind, I began to confuse Jesus with a New England liberal.
I guess that's why God didn't let me stay in Boston to do my discernment internship, as was my original plan. Instead, God brought me to Bellevue, Nebraska, to serve in a church made up almost entirely of military folks!
Church of the Holy Spirit couldn't be more opposite to St. James in a number of ways -- it's much less racially diverse (I had convinced myself that I could never worship in an entirely or mostly white congregation again!), more traditional music and worship than I was used to, ... and this military thing!! During my time in Boston, I had subconsciously received the message that "military" was a bad word. According to the prevailing attitude there, the Iraq war was horrible, the military was horrible, and pretty much everything the American government did was horrible (obviously I'm exaggerating for effect, but this truly was the subconscious message I received). I never heard anyone talking about personally knowing people who were serving in the war. One of the first things I noticed upon arriving at Holy Spirit was the sobering list of "the deployed" that we pray for every week... and at the same time, little to no explicit attention in the prayers for people or countries outside of the United States. This is just one example of how different Holy Spirit seemed to be from St. James. I could almost hear God laughing at me. "You were so sure about the only kinds of places you could find My presence, weren't you?" God seemed to say. "Well, honey, you've got a lot to learn."
And indeed, I did. The first thing I learned is that a warm, inclusive, welcoming spirit is not the exclusive property of New England liberals. I found the same kind of warm and welcoming community at Holy Spirit as I did at St. James. I learned that "military" is not a bad word, and was humbled to realize how much service military people have given our country, with a sense of quiet duty, dignity and honor that I had not seen amongst the pacifist, protester crowd in Boston. I learned that, as always, God is in the business of breaking down my prejudices and stereotypes and showing up in places where I least expect it. I learned that yes, church is not always pretty and nice and happy all the time, but that living with an unrealistic view of church as always happy and wonderful is less spiritually edifying and spiritually healthy than confronting the realities of our brokenness as human beings and continuing to worship together in spite of that fact.
It is hard for me to add a section about my four months in the Resurrection House program to this "autobiography," I guess because it's all still in process; I don't have the benefit of time, distance and perspective on my current state to be able to describe it like I have the other periods in my life. I'm still working through a number of things. I was excited and joyful to feel that I had finally discerned how to listen for God's call, which I believe I did in coming to Nebraska, but I am learning that answering that call will not always bring entirely pleasant experiences, and that some of the most beneficial and important lessons we can learn in life are often the hardest ones. I think I already knew that before I came, but even so, I still have the tendency to want to avoid dealing with more difficult things in life.
Sometimes I have felt that life would be a whole lot easier if I just forgot all about this "church" thing and stopped trying to hold myself to such high standards; I could just go sit around and veg out and watch television with the rest of the majority of the American population. "I don't have to do this," I've thought a number of times. "I don't even want to do this! Why am I even here?" But I am thankful for the structure and discipline of being a part of a program to which I have committed -- that commitment keeps me here on those days when I feel most like running away from all the difficult things that I am being forced to deal with in really spending a year in intentional discernment and coming to know myself perhaps better than I would have ever chosen to, if it were entirely up to me! But I keep all this in perspective by knowing that I will be a better person for having struggled with these issues, and by continually being reminded that God's grace is with me through it all.
Since starting this program, I have been wrestling with confronting some of my own attitudes and behaviors -- namely, my propensity to only interact with people I like or to show favoritism in relating more positively to some people than others and to implicitly or explicitly judge those who don't meet my criteria for approval, whatever that means. I am struggling with wondering how much I could really express my most true, most authentic thoughts and beliefs if I pursued ordination, or if I would have to "tow the party line" to be acceptable to the church. On some level I have always felt like a bit of an outsider, a bit of a "fringe" person to the church... someone standing on the edges, still loving the institution but always critical of it, and I wonder if I would lose the ability to do that or be that in being ordained, or if that attitude/role/position would prevent me from being considered seriously as a candidate for ordination in the first place.
I am learning about the gravity of ministry -- that being a minister means not just celebrating in worship on Sunday mornings, but about being present for people at some of life's most difficult and serious moments. I also am learning a great deal about prayer, silence, and listening -- and about the importance of humility and recognizing with thanksgiving that whatever ability we have to minister to others comes through God's grace -- and continually remembering to turn to God in prayer to ask for that grace to enable us to do the work we have been called to do.
Since starting this program, I have been wrestling with confronting some of my own attitudes and behaviors -- namely, my propensity to only interact with people I like or to show favoritism in relating more positively to some people than others and to implicitly or explicitly judge those who don't meet my criteria for approval, whatever that means. I am struggling with wondering how much I could really express my most true, most authentic thoughts and beliefs if I pursued ordination, or if I would have to "tow the party line" to be acceptable to the church. On some level I have always felt like a bit of an outsider, a bit of a "fringe" person to the church... someone standing on the edges, still loving the institution but always critical of it, and I wonder if I would lose the ability to do that or be that in being ordained, or if that attitude/role/position would prevent me from being considered seriously as a candidate for ordination in the first place.
I am learning about the gravity of ministry -- that being a minister means not just celebrating in worship on Sunday mornings, but about being present for people at some of life's most difficult and serious moments. I also am learning a great deal about prayer, silence, and listening -- and about the importance of humility and recognizing with thanksgiving that whatever ability we have to minister to others comes through God's grace -- and continually remembering to turn to God in prayer to ask for that grace to enable us to do the work we have been called to do.
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