What Defines Us?

     I mentioned in an earlier post that David's car bit the dust a couple months back.  Unexpected, but there it was.  Since we were traveling a lot this summer, I thought we could probably get by with just the two cars.  David works from home, after all, and Youngest and Middle would go back to school in the fall.  But as we unloaded everything out of the car, I found myself shaking my head and wondering how long it would be before one of the other two would also reach that point where it no longer made sense to try to fix it.  That point came last week.  The Toyota Camry (a 1995!!) has gone a long way, but when it started having issues and we took it to the shop, our mechanic said it was probably the transmission and so, car number two is now gone as well.  While I was certain we could hobble along with two cars, the five of us trying to share one car felt like a stretch.  Even considering that most of the year it will be only three of us at home, one car still felt like it would really be a great inconvenience, to say the least.  Finally, since we have become accustomed to using the electric car for most of our driving, this last week's need to fill the lone car's gas tank twice also convinced us that it was in our best interest to try to find another electric car.  We had heard that many rental car companies were getting rid of their electric fleets fairly cheaply, so that is the route we went and we now have a new (used) Kia.  Putting aside the financial concerns, it is fun to have a new car to get to know.  

    But all of that is an introduction to say that we spent about 3 hours at the Enterprise sales office this weekend.  The young man who helped us was really nice, and with David and Youngest along, there was a great deal of laughter and joking that we shared.  At one point we had to fill out the financing forms and David and I needed to tell him what we did for a living and who employed us. Because we'd been laughing and kidding each other so much, I felt comfortable asking him, "Guess what I do?"  He smiled, looked at me for a long time and said, "Oh, I think it could be just about anything."  (That is not a direct quote... if you want to know what he really said, you'll have to ask me...)  When I told him I was a pastor though, he nearly choked.  He was like, "Oh wow.  I did NOT see that coming!"  Hm.  I found myself wondering what I convey that made that so surprising.

    While we were on our UK tour, I had a conversation about music with someone who asked if I played an instrument and I told her that yes, I played several, but piano primarily. I wasn't telling her that it was my job, but somehow that was the message that got conveyed and there never seemed to be a time or a place to correct the impression that working as a pianist was my primary career.  That misunderstanding ended up being passed along to others on the tour, and it was only a couple people who, on asking directly, knew that I was a pastor.  Interestingly, the wife of this couple is a professional church organist, working at a United Methodist Church so we had some good conversations about church.  Still, it was a different experience for me to be in a group of people, most of whom did not know what I do.  

    I have assumed I would be a pastor since I was in first grade.  It has been my career focus, but also my identity then for 50 years.  That is a long time to be known for this role, for this focus, for this faith.  And to be in a position where, for 12 days people did not know what I did was interesting and unique for me.  But I also learned some things.

    First, people talk differently around me when they don't know what I do.  There was a lot more foul language, more raunchy jokes, a lot less apologizing for both, and more invitations to join in on the laughter than when I'm in groups who know what I do.  I guess that's not a surprise, though I don't see myself as judgmental about how people talk or play.  In some ways, that was freeing.  There weren't the assumptions about what would offend or upset me.  There wasn't the caution or carefulness around me about what could or should be said.  

    I also did not have the experience, as I've shared that I often have on airplanes, of my job scaring away conversations.  The most common reaction I've received in telling people on airplanes what I do for a living is for them to no longer want to talk to me.  And since only this very nice couple knew what I did on the tour, I didn't have that experience of people disengaging because of assumptions and fears around what it means that I'm a pastor. 

    But the other side of the coin is that I've found that many people open up a great deal when they know what I do.  Conversations can go deep and beyond small talk  when people know you are a person who engages with faith and people's life transitions on a regular basis.  I've had people share with me (second most common airplane reaction) stories of their lives that have both stunned but also gifted me to hear.  Many people trust that pastors will keep confidences and know how to listen.  The only people on the UK tour with whom I did share real conversation was the couple who knew what I did. My role opens doors that I missed by not sharing what I do.  

    All of this also caused me to step back and wonder what is core to my identity.  Is it being a pastor?  Is it being a mom?  A wife?  A friend?  A child of God?  Or is it just being a person, being me?  I think that the core of my identity has changed through time.  Being a mom has been and continues to be important for me.  But being a pastor has also always been foundational for me as both one of the core markings of my identity, but also as just a marker to say that my relationship with God has been foundational to my being.  

    There are times when I regret all the assumptions that are made about me when people know what I do for work.  I don't like it when people stifle who they are, or apologize for their language or their jokes because of what I do.  As I've shared before, I dislike the assumptions some around me have made about what I believe and what kind of person I therefore am.  But hating the assumptions does not change the fact that being a pastor is who I am, who I believe I am called to be, what I love and what I want to do with my time, with my life.  I am a person who feels a strong call to live a life of faith, and of teaching, and of support to others also walking a faith journey.  I am a person who chooses to check in with God, with Love, with the Divine in all that I do and I love that this can be central in my work.  This is who I am.

        So the question remains, if I were to go on another trip like this, would I be more forthcoming about what I do?  I think I would.  I think the desire to be invisible for a while proved to me that I am a pastor at core, and I don't want to hide from that. Good experience though... interesting and different for me.

Are We Our Stories?

         About a month ago I was able to attend a conference for pastors and church leaders.  The theme of the retreat was story-telling: the importance of hearing and sharing the stories that make us who we are.  I found myself troubled by some of what was said, but I tried to stay in the positive of what we learned concerning the importance of telling our stories and hearing other people's stories.  The conference ended with lunch, and as I sat with a new friend I had made at the conference, she turned to me and asked what my biggest take-away had been.  I told her that I needed time to think on that, but that obviously she had been thinking about it already, so I wondered what her biggest take-away was.  She said it was a negative take-away.  She is the pastor of an older congregation, many of whom have Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.  She said, "If our stories define who we are, what happens when we can no longer remember those stories? If we are our stories, when those stories are lost, are we lost too?"  And in her words, I realized exactly what had been troubling me throughout the conference.  

          My mother has Alzheimer's.  In her case, it is not so much that she has lost her stories, as that her stories have changed, dramatically.  She is at the place in her illness where she tells outrageous stories of mistreatment (in particular), some that she claims happened years ago, some that she believes to be happening in the moment.  None of them are accurate.  For example, when my father went outside to get something from the car, she informed me that "that man has left me and I don't know what I did!"  I explained that Dad had just gone to the car to get something and she insisted that "No.  He's left me.  He's not coming back."  When he came back in and I said, "See, here he is!" she gave me that look of an abandoned, mistreated child and turned away.  That same afternoon as I made her a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, she told us that when she was a kid she was not allowed to have sandwiches.  Again, I have enough stories of her childhood, shared with me both by herself and her siblings, to know that this is not in fact true.  Still, in that moment these stories were true for her.  

          The stories that might once have defined her, that might once have made her into the person she is are gone.  Nonetheless in so many ways, my mother is still the person she has always been. Her personality is the same in many ways.  There is consistency in who she has become, even with the Alzheimer's.  And while that, too, may change (after all Alzheimer's does take us away from ourselves  and our loved ones, one painful step at a time), she is more than all of that.  She is more than her face and her body (which are changing for all of us all the time).  She is more than her memories, or her lack of memories.  She is more, even, than her personality.  She is more than what she has done and what she has left undone.  The conference answer to the question of who we ultimately are seemed to center completely on stories. And while the conference solution to the fading of memories was that "We therefore need to be intentional about sharing our own and each other's stories" and "In the end, God will remember our stories even when we cannot," I have to say that I found both these answers unsatisfactory in many ways.  

         I agree with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin when he says, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."  As humans, we are given the experiences of this life: all of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and stories are a part of that.  What our brain does, with its gifts and its limitations, and yes, its stories, is a part of that experience.  Frankly, the experience of Alzheimer's and other dementia is often also a part of our human experience, a part of living.  It is not an easy part, but it is still a part, still an experience that we have here on this human journey.  And as a person grounded in the deep belief that we are more than our experiences here, more than this human journey, I have to believe that our identity, our meaning, our grounding goes beyond our stories.  

        For me, then, ultimately who each of us is, is a deeply loved, seen, understood and valued child of God.  And, big picture, each of us is part of a whole: deeply, intricately connected to every other part of creation. When we lose our stories, when we lose our memories, when we lose our abilities, and our functionality, and even our personalities, we are still valued, loved, deeply important pieces of a bigger picture that is a wondrous creation.  Each of us are a unique and beautiful drop in the ocean of life.  We are still children of God.  And we are still spiritual beings experiencing that painful and difficult part of the human journey as well.  Again, it is not an easy part of the journey.  But with every breath we take, the Spirit remains with us, accompanying us in our human journey, and being present with us even when that journey ends.  Ultimately, then, we return to being simply the spiritual beings that have had a human experience.  That is who we are, even when the stories are gone.

What Is Truth?

John 18:28-40

Psalm 145:10-13

3/27/22

 

Truth.  What is truth?  Today we are swamped with extreme stories in our news on both ends of the spectrum.  The tales become more and more wild, and what is real becomes harder and harder to determine.  As a result, people don’t know what to believe anymore.  We don’t know what is true, we don’t know what is TRUTH.  And it feels important, desperately important to know what is real, what is FACTUAL, what is historical, what is TRUE. 

As people try to navigate what is real, what is true, we are impacted by many who are actively trying to hide truth, thinking that truth will be damaging.  I think about what happened in our own Presbytery at Cameron house in San Francisco.  When the stories started to come out that the pastor who had led Cameron house for forty years had been molesting the boys he worked with the entire time he was there, the first response of the Presbytery was to hide it, to shut it down, believing that the truth would create more damage, would divide the church, would effectively stop important programs.  Of course, the opposite was true.  In trying to hide the truth, instead, they did much greater damage to those who had been harmed.  And this led to greater damage to the church because the stories did come out, despite the attempts at hiding them. The appearance of duplicity, the attempts to hide the stories are what made the church look bad and what drove people from it.  Truth matters, and the facts matter.  Telling the truth matters. 

But still, in a world where everyone sees things differently, what is truth?  What is it really? 

The “truths” that we are told, and our determinations of what is real, what is not, who to believe, who not to believe: these are tearing us apart as a country, as a people, as a nation.  And I would say that this is because under all the historical truths, under the facts, under the histories, we have forgotten the deeper meaning of what is really TRUE.  We have gotten so caught up in what is factual, what is historical, that we have forgotten what is true with a capital T. 

I realize that may sound complicated and confusing.  We come to know our world by what we believe to be true.  It determines our actions, it determines our friendships, it determines our lives.  But we also know that there is always more than one way to see any and every event.  Depending on where you stand, what preconceived understandings you already come with, and your core beliefs, you will see each event differently.  There are very few “facts” when it comes down to it.  Let me give you an example.  In front of you right now you see me, a solid.  You see me standing here as a solid person.  But when you dig a little deeper you find that we are all made of atoms and atoms are mostly space.  What you are seeing is not a solid, but mostly space at a core molecular level. 

Let me give you another example.  We see color all around us, but what is color?  To quote scientific Britannica: “color is simply the range of visible light that humans can see. Different colors, such as red and orange, and other invisible spectrums such as infrared light, move around in waves of electromagnetic energy. The human eye is capable of seeing only light with wavelengths between 380 and 750 nanometers. For example, the visible spectrum begins with the wavelengths that we call violet, between 380 and 450 nm, then moves on to blue, green, yellow, and orange, and ends with what we call red, between 590 and 750 nm. When you look at someone’s red shirt, for instance, that shirt will be absorbing or scattering wavelengths of light lower than 590 nm, so those waves will not reach your eyes. But a red shirt will be reflecting some wavelength between 590 and 750 nm, which your eyes process as red.” 

These two examples are just scientific examples.  But I could easily give you human examples too.  When we see other people’s behavior, we ascribe to each person motivations, “agendas” and feelings.  But if you ever think about why someone does something and then ask them why they did it, you will find that our ideas about people’s behaviors and their ideas about their own behaviors do not match.  And to be fair, people don’t see everything about themselves, let alone about other people.  Our motivations for every behavior are complex and are made up of our histories, our perceptions, and our values.  Each action builds on past actions, and our motivations for any one behavior will never be completely determined.

Even at a more basic level, interpreting what we hear and see others DO can be difficult.  I shared in a blog about a church where I had worked as organist/choir director during seminary.  After I graduated, the church hired another young woman to take my place.  One week that new young woman called me extremely upset and said that the pastor’s wife (who sang in the choir) was mean to her and didn’t like her at all.  I found this very hard to believe since the woman had been so kind and sweet to me.  But I listened and tried to encourage her to talk directly to the pastor’s wife.  A week later the pastor’s wife called me, explaining that she didn’t know what to do about the new choir director who misinterpreted everything she said.  She tried to joke with her and the director heard it as attacking.  She tried to offer care and the choir director heard it as telling her what to do.  Neither of them heard each other.  And neither of them could understand very well what was going on.

I remember watching a TV episode on sight.  They ran a bunch of tests on people on their sight, but it was also on their understandings.  One of the tests they ran was to have a group of 100 people watch a small video clip and then each of them wrote about what they saw.  None of what they wrote matched.  After sharing with the group each person’s memory of what had happened, they then had the same group rewatch the video.  And then had them once again write down what they saw.  And while each person’s vision of what had happened had changed a bit, each person had, at some level, incorporated what they heard the others had also seen into their descriptions, none the less, the descriptions still did not match.  What was fact here?  What was historical?  If all of this added up into what was “truth”, “truth” itself was more confusing and unclear than ever. 

In faith matters this becomes even more complex.  I can guarantee that if we were to spell out each one of our beliefs in this room, no two of us would agree 100%.  We are all worshiping in the same church, in the same denomination, in the same town and same building.  And yet even here, no two of us would be 100% in agreement in terms of faith beliefs.   If we define “truth” then in this way, we will find that no two of us can agree on what is true, what is real, or even what is factual. 

Bishop Michael Curry said it in his book, Love is the Way: page 221: “If you are only getting stories from people who look like you, you aren’t getting the truth.” And since Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week, our reach for “truth” needs some help.  When I talk to my brothers, sisters and siblings of color, for example, most of them have a depth of faith, an experience of God, that we can only imagine, that we can only hope to attain, hope to reach for.  And that should tell us something.  We, with our intellectualism and our cynicism and our skepticism are missing out on some very deep truths about God’s presence, God’s actions, and God’s movements.

Paul Kalanithi in his book, When Breath Becomes Air, said it this way, “In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture.  The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth.  Human knowledge is never contained in one person.  It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.  And Truth comes somewhere above all of them…”

But still, what is Truth?  One of my favorite movies is Second Hand Lions.  And there is a wonderful scene towards the end of the movie that I want to share with you.  The main character is a kid who has come to stay with his uncles over the summer.  His mother is horrible and has basically abandoned him to two old men she really doesn’t even know.  But these men tell the boy these huge, fantastic tales of their time as young men.  Truly the tales are outrageous, but at the same time, possibly true.  And at one point, the boy confronts one of the men with these words, “Those stories about Africa, about you, they are true aren’t they?”  The old uncle responds, “It doesn’t matter.” 

The boy continues, “It does too!  Around my mom all I hear is lies.  I don’t know what to believe.”

The man responds, “Son, if you want to believe in something, believe in it.  Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it.  …  Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a [person] needs to believe in the most.  That people are basically good.  That honor, courage and virtue are everything, that money and power are nothing.  That good always triumphs over evil and that love, and I want you to remember this, that true love never dies.  I want you to remember that, boy.  Remember that.  It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.  You see, a [person] should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.”  C.S. Lewis in his Narnia series similarly said that it is better to believe in a lie that is wonderful than a “real” world that is hell.

William Faulkner has been quoted as saying, “Facts and Truth really don’t have much to do with each other.”

So what am I saying?  That “facts” don’t matter?  No.  What I’m saying is that we are part of creating what is real, and what is true.  And part of that start with our beliefs, with our visions and with our understandings of the world.  What is true is impacted by our faith.  A belief, for example, in love means that you will behave in ways that are loving, that you will trust your love and that will make a difference to all those you encounter.

Today we come to the story of Jesus’ trial before Pilate.  I wonder, when you think about Jesus, what you think his primary purpose here was?  We can think of many purposes.  A mirror into God, a model for how to live as faithful people, an example of what Love really looks like.  Many of our fundamentalist, evangelical, and even mainstream brothers and sisters would say Jesus’ purpose is death, or resurrection, or salvation from sins.  But this is not what Jesus himself says.  He doesn’t tell us his purpose is any of the theological reasons we might suppose.  No, instead, in this discussion with Pilate, he states very clearly and very simply that his purpose in coming is to testify to the truth.   Pilate then ends today’s readings with the simple question, “What is truth?”

And as we know, this “simple” question is anything but simple.

Frederick Buechner says this about Truth in his book Wishful Thinking: a theological ABC: “When Jesus says that he has come to bear witness to the truth, Pilate asks, ‘What is truth?’  Contrary to the traditional view that his question is cynical, it is possible that he asks it with a lump in his throat.  Instead of Truth, Pilate has only expedience.  His decision to throw Jesus to the wolves is expedient.  Pilate views [humanity] as alone in the universe with nothing but [our] own courage and ingenuity to see [us] through.  It is enough to choke up anybody.  Pilate asks What is truth?  And for years there have been politicians, scientists, theologians, philosophers, poets, and so on to tell him.  The sound they make is like the sound of empty pails falling down the cellar stairs.  Jesus doesn’t answer Pilate’s question.  He just stands there.  Stands, and stands there.”

Jesus stands there.  The one who has declared over and over “I am” stands there.  “I am” stands there.  And that is the truth that he presents.  His truth is that he is.  The truth to which he testifies is that God IS.

God is present in the heavens, and God is present in this person.  God is present in the very air we breathe, and, dare I say, God is present in YOU.  That is the truth that stands there.  That is the truth that Jesus presents by his very body, by his very being.  That is Truth.  And it is on that that we can base our faith, our determination, our lives.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Psalms: Salvation History

Psalm 105

            This lent we will be focusing on the psalms and what they have to say to us, what they have to teach us, their piece in our faith lives.  As part of that, today I want to give a brief overview and then we will focus on psalms of history, psalm 105 being one of those. 
            The psalms are a collection of prayers, poems and songs that express to God and to God’s people a wide spectrum of human experience and emotion.  As such they express praise, thanksgiving, wonder, doubt, faith, lament, grief, trust, hope, joy, sorrow.  The psalms reflect all of these feelings, as well as all sorts of human experiences, and they do so as a way of connecting with, honoring and reaching out to the Holy Spirit.  As theologian Eugene Peterson says it, “When we pray the psalms, we enter into the centuries-long experience of being a people of God.”  Many of the psalms are attributed to King David, but not all of them.  Scholars have identified different types of psalms, and while many of the psalms fit into more than one category, generally, for our understanding and study, they are divided into the following different types:
Hymns of praise,
Enthronement hymns which recognize God as King over all the world,
Songs of Zion which recognize and lift up Jerusalem as God’s holy city,
Songs of lament,
Songs of trust,
Sacred History psalms which look at the history of God’s people,
Royal psalms which focus on ways in which God is actively involved in the politics, battles and national work of Israel,
Songs of thanksgiving,
Wisdom psalms which contain short memorable wise sayings,
And liturgies that were used in festivals and other worship experiences in the temple.
          If any of you would like a list of these different kinds of psalms with the psalm numbers that tell you which psalm fits into which category, I would be happy to provide those for you.
          As I said before, the psalms are prayers, they are hymns, they are poetry.  As hymns, they were sung, many as part of worship services.  As poetry, they tap deep into human experience, touching mind, soul, heart, and spirit.  No matter what you are feeling or thinking, a psalm can be found that mirrors where you are, that speaks for you, reassures you that you are not alone in that experience, and in those feelings as they connect to the Divine One.  The psalms call you into a deeper connection with yourself as well as with God.  In this way, psalms are very personal, and invite us into the second half of the second commandment to love neighbor AS self (or, in this case, to love yourself even as you love your neighbor!).  The psalms invite us to take the time to focus on our own spiritual journeys and to offer up prayers, thoughts, and songs as a way of caring for ourselves, since a deeper connection to God IS a way to care for yourself as well.  As prayers, they give us words when our own words do not feel complete or do not feel enough.  They give us words that have been said over the centuries, and prayers that therefore connect us not only to our own experiences but to our tradition and to those throughout the centuries who have prayed these same words before us.
         The psalms are also teachers, not only of how to pray, but of who God is, and of who we are as God’s people.  The psalms of history contribute in a special way to teaching and connecting us.  Today’s psalm is one of the psalms that recounts the history of the Jewish people and casts that history in a light that gives special focus to God’s role in that history.  In telling history through the psalm, we express care for our faith community and for ourselves as individuals.  We know ourselves and are known by others according to the stories we hear, remember, and retell about who we are.  We are shaped by the traditions with which we identify and we reshape those same traditions as we pass them onto others.  There is, therefore, great purpose and great meaning in retelling the stories, in inviting them to remind us who we are, WHOSE we are and why we are. 
        I read a recent study on the well-being of children.  And one of the strongest and most surprising finds was that when children know their history, and by that I mean their extended history, the history of their parents and grandparents, they fare much better, make better choices, tend to be more successful as adults, are happier, healthier, feel more grounded, more connected, and more confident in life than when they don’t.  Think about the truth of this: no matter what kind of support and grounding we give to kids who are adopted, I’ve supported many of these kids as young adults who often have felt a sense of being lost, a strong desire to connect to their biological history, and a stronger sense of connection and continuance when they do know BOTH their biological family’s history as well as the history of the family into which they’ve been adopted.  When we know where we are from, when we have a connection to the past as well as to the present and the future, we feel grounded.  We know ourselves better.  We see the long arc of history that can allow us to remember that whatever we are experiencing in this moment is tiny in the scope of time.  We have a stronger sense of long-term connection to everything when we know where we are from and what has created us in this time and in this place to be exactly who we are today. 
         These history psalms invite us into that time of remembrance, of re-centering in the story, or recommitting to being the people of God with a history, with a faith tradition and faith community, with a purpose and a meaning.  They invite us to step back and to see the bigger picture of God’s movement through time.  No matter what is going on today or how we are feeling in the moment, when we look at history, when we reflect on not only our own personal lives and history, but on the history of all of God’s people, we see God active and present, interacting with us, never leaving us alone, calling us ever deeper into our faith and into relationship with God. 
        Bernard Anderson describes the psalms as “the songs that accompany the people of God on their journey through history.”  When we engage the psalms, and today as we engage the sacred history psalms, we invite the story to be our guide as we continue on our journeys with God.
             Even when the psalms of history reflect on hard times, on tragic times, naming those times and singing them reminds us that we walk even the hard times together – together with one another and together with God as God’s people.  Psalm 137, which also tells part of the story of God’s people, reflects this. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.  On the willows there we hung up our harps.  For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’  How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?  If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!  Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mount, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”   This psalm reflects the time when in 586 B.C. Jerusalem was captured and burned, the Temple destroyed by the king of Babylon, and thousands of people from Judah were taken into exile in Babylon.  This psalm recalls the pain and anguish of a displaced people in grief for their capital, for their temple, for their home for God.  I would like us to take a moment to sing this psalm together. And as we do, I invite you to feel the pain of the exiled Israelites, but also to see if singing their pain allows you to express grief, too, for things that you have lost as well – for those times when there is nothing to do except sit down and weep for what has passed…. #784
            What was that like for you to sing this psalm?
            In contrast to the reflection of history that shows pain and grief, today’s scripture reading was psalm 105 and after the sermon we will sing another history psalm, psalm 136.  Both of these reflect the beauty of God’s saving action through history.   Psalm 136 interjects the phrase, “God’s love endures forever” after every line.  We will sing, “for your love is never ending” as the alternate line each time reminding us that God does act, is acting, continues to act with love every day and in every place, even when we sit by the waters of Babylon and weep.
            Whether we are telling a story of sorrow or telling a story of God’s acts of salvation, it is the telling of those stories that grounds us, gives us continuity in our own stories, helps us understand who we are, and helps us to see God in history.
            I think about the movie, “Secondhand Lions”.  For those who have not seen it, a neglected boy is left with great uncles whom he has never even met for a summer by a mother who is more interested in meeting men than in caring for her boy.  Walter quickly engages his uncles in telling him stories of their adventures in Africa.  Until the very end of the movie, we don’t know if these stories are true or not.  But what becomes very apparent throughout the movie is that the telling of these stories, these histories, is life-giving to Walter, regardless of the veracity of the stories themselves.  The stories teach him what it is to be brave, what it is to be a man, what it is to be loving and faithful and strong and courageous.  They ground him and connect him to a sense of family that is more than just the here and now.  They transform him from being a boy who feels nothing but rejection, who is scared of his own shadow, who cannot stand up for himself into a boy who does stand up for himself and for those he loves, who claims his own rights and claims his own life.  The stories gave him the strength to be a person with hopes, dreams and a future. 
          Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote many wonderful Christian children’s stories, including A Wrinkle in Time, says that stories are incredibly important because they tell us who we are, and who God is in relation to us.  She says they do this more deeply than almost anything else because the stories get into our psyches, and transform us into God’s people.  The sacred history psalms are an important part of that story telling, combining the poetry that speaks to our hearts with the stories that speak to our imaginations about who we are.
            Psalm 78, another history psalm, begins with details about the way in which we are to hear the stories of God’s amazing work in history.  You can read the psalm yourself, but it is very long, so I will just sum up the call for us.  We are expected:
1.      To listen to the teachings.
2.     To tell others what God has done
3.     To teach our children
4.     To set our hope in God
5.     To not forget the works of God
6.     To keep God’s commandments
7.     And finally, to NOT be like our ancestors – in other words, to learn from history, and to choose a different path forward. 
           Each sacred history psalm, even when it tells stories of sorrow, also presents the same vision of God – the one who has done wondrous deeds, who has acted with justice, who brings salvation, who loves, forgives and rescues.  That is the story we are called to tell again and again with these psalms, with our songs, with our prayers, and with our readings. 
         I want to finish today by having us pray together a piece of Psalm 77.  Please join me in prayer:
           I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord;
           I will remember your wonders of old.
           I will meditate on all your work,
           And muse on your mighty deeds.
          Your way, O God, is holy.
            What god is so great as our God?
          You are the God who works wonders;
            You have displayed your might among the people.
         With your strong arm you redeemed your people,
            The descendants of Jacob and Joseph.  Amen.

Boundaries and Identity

          Last week I was working on my sermon on the Transfiguration.  A large part of that sermon focused on identity.  Who are we?  Who are you at your deepest core?  Under all the veils of social acceptability and under calls to various things, our faith, our relationships, our jobs, our personalities  - under all of that, who are we? And as I wrote the questions, I found myself considering them, as I often do, for myself, and to reflect in a slightly different way on who I really am, when I am most truly myself, and who I am called to be at my core.
         The week before, we had had our clergy boundary training.  This is a required event for all Presbyterian pastors.  We go and are reminded of all the important ways in which we keep boundaries within our congregations and communities.  We talk about the obvious ones (sexual boundaries), but also boundaries that may not be as obvious: money, gifts, time, energy.  We discussed the differences in relationships with parishioners as opposed to people we might friend outside of our congregations, the boundaries that must exist in our sharing and in our behaviors, the rules around what happens when a pastor leaves a congregation and what they can and can't do for and with that congregation or its members once they are gone, etc.  All of it is very important stuff.  There is a power or authority differential between pastors and congregants that needs to be recognized by pastors so that they do not use that authority in inappropriate ways.  It is extremely important that we remember that vulnerable people who come and share with us are exactly that: vulnerable, and we have a responsibility to have appropriate boundaries with them so that they can work through whatever it is they are experiencing without the fear of being taken advantage of or further damaged by their time with us.  I agree with everything we were taught at the training.  And I promise to continue to uphold appropriate boundaries.
       But I'll tell you the truth, which has nothing to do with the training.  And that truth is that I left feeling like a big fake.
         What I mean is that as I sat with all of these other very powerful, very authoritative and professional clergy members, I felt that I didn't belong to them.  I had a hard time seeing myself in the stories that were told of people with power.  I had a hard time imaging myself in the stories of people with authority using that authority for good or bad.  My self-image is not of a powerful, authoritative individual.  My self-image is of a person like everyone else I encounter who has struggles and issues and times of sadness and anxiety, and times of crabbiness and times of confusion about everything, including my faith.  I understand, from a practical place, that the role of "pastor" innately has within it a certain power and authority, which then must be used with great respect, caution and awareness.  I understand that and I am careful because of that understanding.
       But I'm also aware of how that role ends up isolating us as the real, human, broken people that we deeply and truly, at our core, are. This, too, was discussed at the boundary training.  Clergy are usually, are often, are inevitably lonely.  We spend a great deal of time with people, but we are limited in how much of ourselves we can share in those situations.  We are therefore encouraged, strongly, to make friends outside of our congregations, the same as other professionals who also must maintain certain boundaries and who do that in part by forming relationships with colleagues at their same level of authority.  But for clergy, who spend 90% of our time not only working but socializing with parishioners, finding the time to work on, build and nurture those outside friendships is often difficult.
       It is also confusing because there are two very different images of pastors.  In the first image, the pastor is distant, and authoritative because he/she does not show any vulnerability or personal pain.  The second image is one of the "wounded healer".  This model shows a pastor who does share their personal experiences of wounding and healing.  And yet, even within that model there are boundaries: usually you don't share until after a crisis has ended, or after you have a handle on how to deal with it, for example.  If you share while you are in crisis, you need to do so in a way that does not leave parishioners feeling they must take care of you.  But again, that often can mean walking the path, the hard path, alone.  And there are times when the personal crises are big enough that this isolation from our real struggles and real lives is an impossibility.
       It's a strange place to be, this place of being a pastor.  It is a weird calling: trying to be prophetic and pastoral at the same time: speaking truth but in a way that doesn't alienate or isolate our parishioners.  We have to wear many hats: that of counselor, that of friend, that of prophetic leader, administrator, speaker, teacher.  Sometimes it feels very artificial.  After all, we believe, those of us Presbyterians at least, that all people are ministers, one to another; that our role as pastor is only different in that it is a different job from what someone else might have, but not a less valued, less "called" or less holy one.  We cannot put ourselves on a pedestal that says we are important or holy where others are not.  And yet, we also have a public role and that role has to be treated, at least by those of us who hold it, with the respect it deserves.  After all, we are told, "If anyone causes one of these little ones--those who believe in me--to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." 
      I love my work, but I also struggle at times feeling that I don't quite fit into the role, or the image or the personality of what it is to be a pastor.  I struggle as I recognize some of my own faults that pop up and at times make my work challenging for me.  I see the ways in which I am not an ideal pastor.  I see areas of my ministry that are lacking.  And all of it causes me at times to doubt this part of my identity, especially when I am with other pastors who don't have the same areas of challenge or inadequacy.
     Add to it that there are other parts of my identity as well, and some of those are in conflict with my role as pastor.  Parenting as a pastor, for example, is not easy at several levels.  My kids live in a fish bowl.  At my current church my eldest two have dealt with it by maintaining a bit of distance: they have not been as open with who they are in the same way they did in previous churches.  I had a counselor of one of my kids tell me straight out, when I was at my last church, that the best thing I could do for my child would be to change careers.  Pastors who are moms, especially, are constant targets of parenting critique: critique that would not be given to other parishioners.  And that constant watching of how one lives one's life is a challenge, not only for the pastor, but for the entire family (spouse included).  The role of pastor also puts limitations on the spouses of those pastors.  For example, it would be hard for a pastors' spouse to join a support group that assumed open conversation about the personal lives of the pastor and their family.
      I love being a writer, but in that, too, I feel some boundaries and limits with what I can say, or how I can say it, because of my role as pastor.  And that, too, presents challenges for me.
      People are complicated.  And the question I asked of my congregation, "when are you most truly yourself?" is not always met with a simple answer.  I am most truly myself as a pastor in some ways.  But in other ways, I am most truly myself when I am a hundred miles away, anonymous and being a total goofball mom with my kids.  So for me, I think the question is changing a bit.  How can I be a more integrated person and still live up to the codes of my profession?  And if that is not a possibility, what does that mean for me and where do I go from here?  Perhaps this question, too, put forward in a public format, is a crossing of boundaries.  But I share it in the hopes that when other struggle with these questions, they will know that they are not alone.  All of us share questions of identity.  And all of us struggle with the answers at times.
        Go in peace.  Be the most "you" you can be.  Find God where God is calling you to be.  And invite God into that process of becoming more wholly and fully yourself.

Coming into our True Natures

Exodus 34:29-35,

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Luke 9:28-36

I’d like to invite you to take a moment to think of a situation in which you weren’t seen for who you really are: a situation in which someone completely mis-understood you, didn’t get what you were saying or refused to see you as you really are and made assumptions about your motivation, or your personhood that were just plain wrong.  I think for most of us these situations have been painful or unpleasant, though it can also happen that someone thinks of you as better than you are, misunderstanding you in a way that puts you higher in someone’s esteem than you might deserve.  Can you think of a situation where you were judged or misunderstood?

When the kids were young, we read together a series by Noel Streatfield that begins with a book called Dancing Shoes.  And in the book, the little girl, Rachel, whose mother has just died, is seen as a sulky, cold, jealous little girl because she is adamant that her adopted sister, Hillary, not be part of the Wintle’s Little Wonders dance troupe.  The reader in the story is let in on to the fact that Rachel does not wish this for Hillary because she loves Hillary deeply, feels responsible for Hillary’s well being after the death of their mother, and believes that Hillary is capable of being a real ballet dancer with a professional ballet company.  But the adult characters in the book universally mis-understand Rachel and believe that she is an awful, unfeeling, jealous child.  This creates the tension or drama in the story which is only resolved at the end when she is finally seen and heard for who she is and finally treated as the loving child she is.  I found this story very difficult to read because of the pain central to this mis-understanding, and the pain of Rachel at being mis-treated because she was so terribly mis-understood.

But this theme, of mis-seeing someone, mis- understanding someone’s true character is a very, very common theme in our literature, in our television, in our movies.  In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s misunderstanding of Darcy (and visa versa), Jane’s misunderstanding of Bingley’s sisters, and everyone’s misunderstanding of Wickham make up the drama of the story line: all of which, again, are only resolved at the end.  In the movie Run Away Bride, the Julia Robert’s character is misunderstood by everyone, herself included.  Many of our stories involve someone being lifted up as a hero who really isn’t. Others involve judgement and condemnation on someone who doesn’t deserve it.  It is everywhere.  I’m sure you can think of many stories in which people are simply misunderstood, their motives and their actions read wrongly.  Their personhood or identity is read as something other than what it is.  And I believe that this is so central in our books because it is a very common experience that all of us have.  I am certain that everyone here could tell of at least one time in your life when your actions were completely misunderstood or misinterpreted, and undoubtedly this had results for you, many of which were probably unpleasant.

We experience the damage of these misunderstandings in our own lives, and yet I think we still tend to act on our own mis-interpretations of others at a smaller level on a daily basis.  We determine that the person next to us who made a mistake driving in the car is a jerk or an idiot.  We decide the sales person on the phone who can’t give us a lower price is greedy.  We see a person with their shirt half untucked and we decide they are a slob.  We assume a pregnant teenager is loose.  On a daily basis we all make snap judgments of others that do not allow us to really see who people are. 

I think this is common for two reasons.  First, we try to understand people by putting people into categories, setting up images of each person in our minds about who they are and what they are like in an effort to understand our world and to relate to it in a way that makes sense.  We all do this.  From a scientific perspective, we can’t make sense of the many images and bits of information that come at us all the time unless we somehow categorize and sort through the information, and we do this with the characters of the people we meet as well.  That person is a care-taker or that person is a cynic or that person is a little off their rocker.  These are ways in which we make sense of our world, try to gain a handle on who the people around us are, and determine how we want to interact with them, respond to them, engage them.

Second, despite our efforts to understand and box people, the reality is that people are very complex.  So, it is easy to get our judgments about people’s motivations for certain behaviors wrong because people rarely do anything for only one reason, or for a simple reason that can be easily understood and summed up.

Putting together that we are quick to make judgments about why people do what they do alongside with the fact that there are usually multiple reasons why a person does what they do, and we end up, in many instances with a false understanding of the people around us.

We’ve all been a victim of this at one time or another.  And chances are, we’ve all been mistaken in our understanding of others at one time or another.

This is about identity.  And so now I’d like to ask you to think about your own identity again for a moment.  Who are you at your basic core?  Who is it that God has called you to be?  When are you most fully yourself? 

Can you think of a moment or a time when you were most fully yourself: when you were the most whole, most God-following person, most you at your deepest core?  What did that feel like?  As you journey through your life do those moments come more or less often for you?  Are there certain situations that bring this out of you? 

One of my favorite movies is the Edward Norton film, Keeping the faith.  I shared with you last month a scene from this movie between the young priest and his mentor in which he was struggling with his call and whether or not he should stay a priest.  But there is another part that precedes that scene that takes place between the young priest and the woman friend he fell in love with.  She does not return his affections, but he still struggles with what it means for who he is at his core to love her.  He said to her, “I don’t know which feels worse: having my heart-broken, or starting to doubt myself because of what that means for me.”

She responded, “Don’t you dare doubt yourself because of me.  You have a gift and you know it.  If you start to doubt that because of me, I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”

And then Brian answered, “I don’t doubt myself because of you.  I feel like the best version of myself around you and that makes me doubt everything else.”

Where are we the best versions of ourselves?  When are we the best versions of ourselves? What does it mean to be the best version of your?  Who is it you, at your core, feel called to be?  This is different from the question of what you are called to DO.  This is about identity.  This is about who God has made you to be in your core, in your private moments, in your thoughts and your feelings as well as your actions.  Where do you feel most centered, most whole, most true to yourself and to God?  Do you pay attention to where and when and with whom you feel most yourself?  Most whole?  Most real?

Of course, part of our identity does involve what we do.  Our choices in thoughts, words and actions, who we choose as friends, how we treat those who have less power and resources: all of that says a great deal about who we are.  And what we do for a living, as well as in our daily life are an important part of that.  If our jobs are a real vocation for us then that is a prime part of our identity.  If our relationships are central to who we are, then that is central to our identity.  If our words and what we produce come from a place of call, then that is central to our identity.  For many of us we are defined by our roles as workers of whatever kind, also as parents, as a spouse, as a Christian - whatever it is that tugs at your heart and calls from you all of your being.  But then, what happens when something changes?  What happens to someone whose primary identity is as a parent when a child dies, or someone who is first and foremost a husband or wife when a divorce happens, or to someone whose identity is so connected to their work when they have to change a career or even when they retire?  These things can be devastating not only because they are stressful, but because they challenge our very identity.

All of today’s scriptural passages talk about identity, though it may be hard to see.  In the story of Moses talking to God, Moses’ face is changed by the conversation he has with God.  It becomes shiny, we are told, in a way that scares the people around him enough that he finds it necessary to hide his face behind a veil.  To me, this is a story that emphasizes that when we are closest to God (and I believe that the closer we are to God, the closer we are to our true selves, to our true identity) people around us see that.  It changes how we look, changes how others see us, changes how we present ourselves and how others perceive us.  I think about how many women glow during pregnancy: the joy of carrying another life can change how we move in the world.  Also when someone is passionate about something, it is not uncommon to see them glowing with that excitement, or radiating enthusiasm while they talk about it or while they live it. 

The passage from Corinthians talks about the veils we put on our own hearts, the ways in which we hide.  And to me, this is a hiding not only from others, but from ourselves as well.  We are called to work on removing those veils so that we can be most genuinely ourselves.  Those veils are sometimes easier to see in other people.  The ways people put on speech patterns for particular jobs, for example, is often a way of “veiling” who they are.  Without any real words at all, I am certain if I were to mock the speech patters of newscasters for example, or flight attendants giving the safety speech, you would know what profession I was acting out.  My daughter wrote a scene for her school musical theater performance in which she substituted colors for real words and gave an entire dialogue in which there was no question what she was saying because of the way she said it, the way she used her words, the tone of her speech.  In that case it was just a conversation.  But we have affected speech patterns in many of our professions.  Many pastors, for example, have very specific preaching or speech patterns.  Some have particular phrasings or words that put a person in a specific category.  You can tell where a pastor stands theologically, for example, when their prayer beings, “Father, we just want to thank you, Lord…”  You can assume a whole mess of stuff about the person when they begin that way.  But is any of it true to the base identity of who someone is?  These recognized speech patterns or phrases: these are veils: They are things we put them on.  They are not who we are.

And finally we have the scriptural story of Jesus’ transfiguration: a moment, a time, when Jesus was completely seen as he was, like Moses, with the glory of God shining from him and on him.  For just a moment, he is seen in his greatness by his closest friends.  They are given the gift of seeing who and how Jesus truly is.  And their reaction is to be afraid.  Why?  Partly because when a person is seen as they really are, they can’t be completely boxed, which means they can’t be completely understood.  The disciples don’t understand what they are seeing, and that is scary for them, and would be scary for any of us.  Of course, the other part of this is that Jesus’ identity was so far beyond what they expected, that it was scary in this way as well. 

But real identity is scary.  The core of who we are, I would say, not just for Jesus, but for us too, is something difficult to present, something difficult to claim, difficult to comprehend, something we are constantly working towards, journeying into.  More than that, our true identities, below all the social niceties and roles, are powerful.  They are close to God, they lack fear, they can speak truth, and do what is necessary to make changes in the world.  God calls us to make that journey into being our genuine selves.  God wants us to be the most “us” that we can be; the most true to ourselves, the most real.  God wants us to be the us that God intends us to be.

But for today, as we think about Jesus and as we think about who we are called to be, my challenge for you is not just to intentionally walk that journey, but also to remember that when you talk to someone, when you drive next to someone, when you interact with anyone, strive to remember that you are not seeing all of who they are, you are not getting the full picture, and that helping someone else to walk towards wholeness involves looking deeper, for who they really are, while knowing you won’t see it all, looking for the best in them.

I think coming into our true natures is something like recognizing that our real natures can move mountains.  Our real beings, through love, kindness, grace and compassion can make a difference.  We don’t have to fight to change the world when we are whole.  Just being the people we are intended to be can and will change the world.  Amen.

Sermon from 5/1/16 - Do You Want to be Made Well?

John 5:1-9
Luke 17:11-19
5/1/16

In today’s lesson from John, Jesus asks a man who has been ill for 38 years if he wants to be made well.  What is interesting is that the man doesn’t say “yes.”  Instead, he makes excuses for why he is not yet well.  “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.”  He has been sick for 38 years, and yet he has not been able during that whole time to get himself into the waters that he believes will heal him?  Hmm.
Do we do this?  Sometimes it is hard to take the steps towards healing that we need to take.  Sometimes we become used to the way things are, even if they are painful and difficult, and choosing to step forward into new life, into something different is so frightening that we simply cannot do it.  Change is hard for all of us, even if we know it would be better for us in the long run.  It is so hard that sometimes we are even willing to die with the way things are rather than changing things to what they might be.
I’ve mentioned to some of you before that I volunteered for a while on a crisis line for battered and abused spouses.  And what I heard again and again was that despite the threat, not only to their bodies, but to their very lives, these women could not leave their spouses.  They just couldn’t.  Help was there – we had a secure and hidden shelter that led into retraining programs, job counseling, help finding places to live, therapy for the children and women, and legal help in getting divorces and restraining orders.  But still, most of the women we counseled could not or would not leave their spouses.  Even when their children were being threatened or harmed it was extremely difficult.  And it wasn’t that they couldn’t leave because they were afraid of being hunted down.  It also wasn’t so much that they loved their spouses, though sometimes this is the reason they would give.  In my experience listening to these women it was more that the idea of change was so hard, the idea of trying something new was so daunting, they had gotten used to the life they had and just could not envision something different.  Changing was too hard, too scary.  But I think it was even more than that.
We hear about this in church communities as well.  People say they want things to be different: they want more children and more young adults in the church, for example.  But often times they aren’t actually willing to do anything that will change what they know even if it would successfully bring in those people.  We say we want change, we want things to be different, but it is hard to be willing to make the changes that will make things different.  One of my good friends is currently pastor of a congregation that is facing what many congregations are facing – his congregation is experiencing a slow atrophying death due to lack of growth and loss of financial support.  They have explored the possibility of being a church without walls because it is their building that is costing them so much strain and difficulty.  But again, they can’t do it.  They would rather become what is becoming more and more known as a “chaplaincy church”, a church that has made the decision to stay the same and to simply die out rather than trying something different.  Another friend was pastor of a church that was in the process of joining with another congregation and made the decision to close instead.  It was easier to close than to envision being church with other Christians, other Presbyterians, other...  And again, we ask, what is that really about?
In the passage from Luke we have a story in which 10 lepers are begging for Jesus’ help, but when he heals them all, only one returns to give thanks.  Our first tendency on hearing this story is probably a bit of righteous outrage.  Why wouldn’t they thank Jesus for turning their lives around?  For saving them?  For healing them?  We can imagine these people today, as modern day lepers – those whose lives have been consumed by their “illness” or situation.  Today those “lepers” might be drug addicts, prostitutes, people from the middle East, homeless persons, people with a mental illness like schizophrenia, gang members, ex-convicts, immigrants, Muslims – in other words, anyone who might make us feel uncomfortable or who we might fail to see as anything other than their condition, situation or other quality, or fail to include because of one of these aspects: those would be today’s lepers.  We can imagine what it would be like if Jesus came to them today and offered them healing.  He would be offering to them a place back in society, he would be offering them acceptance once again into their communities.  Why would anyone not want that?  Why would anyone not be grateful for that?  The ten lepers in today’s passage were healed.  Shouldn’t they be grateful?
The question is, what makes these changes, even these really positive changes, so hard to embrace, to accept, and to be grateful for?  I think at the deepest level, at the deepest level, we come to accept what is into our beings in a way that not only becomes familiar, but actually comes to define who we are.  Our very identity becomes mixed up with those things that are part of our lives, or that are part of our daily living.  We do this to other people and we do it to ourselves. Whenever we refer to a person by a label we are doing this.  I saw a sign in a women’s restroom recently that said, “be aware of purse snatchers”.  And it struck me that by calling them “purse snatchers” we claim that as the whole of their identity.  It wasn’t “be aware of people who snatch purses.”  It was “be aware of ‘purse snatchers’.”  That, then, is who they become for us.  They aren’t mothers or fathers who are potentially in need.  They aren’t people who are struggling like us, to find their way.  They aren’t people who have lives outside of snatching purses. They aren’t children of God.  Instead they are “purse snatchers.”  We can do this with anyone with whom we are uncomfortable.  People without homes become “bums”.  People who struggle with addictions become “addicts”.  People who join gangs become “gang members” or “juvenile delinquents” or “thugs”.  It becomes their identities.  For us, and even for them.
In both of today’s gospel lessons, it wasn’t just that others had applied these labels to the “lepers” or those who were sick.  The people in today’s stories applied those labels to themselves.  Jesus actually didn’t.  He refers to them as “people with leprosy”, “people with disease”. My guess is that their identity, though, became tied in to their illnesses, to their struggles, to their societal labels.  Is it any wonder, then, that these things that defined them would be hard for them to give up?  Who are we when things change?  For the battered and abused spouse, who is she once she leaves her home?  She is no longer the married woman, she is no longer living in the same house with the same friends or company.  Often an abusive spouse separates his or her partner or spouse from his/her support system, so often the person who finally has the courage to leave is left with no other support people to ground them, to care for them.  Who, then, do they become?  Sometimes there is no choice about this change in identity, but that doesn’t mean the change in identity is any easier.  A spouse dies and we are no longer “the wife” or “the husband” of so and so.  Instead we get a new identity “widow” or “widower”.  We get divorced and for the rest of our lives on the forms we fill out, we are not “married” or even “single” anymore, but “divorced.”  We get a new identity, one that is not so very attractive.
In the movie, Pleasantville, the characters are stuck in sameness, in black and white, in a life that is calm, expected, “pleasant”, but in a life that is also uninteresting and not lived to fullness.  They are “languishing” or failing to live life deeply, to live a life that has any excitement or real meaning in it.  But things begin to change in Pleasantville and some people begin to live with passion, with intensity.  With it, though, their identities change.  And that change in identity is shown as they become “colored” – or rather, they go from being black and white to having the normal colors that we associate with life, with living.  This becomes extremely threatening to many of the people to whom the old identity is so important that they cannot face the possibility of change, even when it means adding passion and interest, real LIFE to their living.  They cannot do it.
This is what happens in both of today’s stories.  Jesus comes and offers healing to the one man in John.  And that man has all kinds of reasons why he has been unable to accept healing.  But my guess is that it is a deeper issue for him.  He has been sick for 38 years.  Who will he be without his illness?  Who will he be if he is really cured?  It is easier to come up with reasons to not step down into the water, to find reasons why he hasn’t been able to do it than it is to take the step that means his life will be completely changed.  His life would be changed for the better, we know, but he may not be so sure.  Who will he be?  And the same for the lepers who were cleansed.  Why did they not return to give thanks?  Well, my guess is that for some of them, they weren’t thankful.  Maybe the gifts they thought they sought came to them and they realized they no longer knew who they were or how they would be after the healing.
Still, Jesus doesn’t leave us there.  We are challenged to grow, we are challenged to heal, we are challenged to find new ways of being in the world.  The man in John never said to Jesus that he wanted healing, but Jesus gave it to him anyway.  The lepers said “Have mercy on us” which was the phrase used to ask for alms.  They, too, were not actually asking for healing.  The gifts of healing, the gifts of challenge and change may change our identities, or rather our sense of who we are.  But God loves us too much to leave us with identities that are less than wholly who we are called to be.  God loves us too much to leave us without opportunities to work towards healing.  God loves us too much even to leave us “comfortable” when God can bring transformation, shalom, and wholeness.  Will it be hard?  Of course.  But it will be healing.  And it will bring us closer to the whole people God calls us to be.  Amen.

Wearing our Scars like Medals

I had a doctor's appointment last week.  It wasn't for any medical issue.  I was just setting up "care" under a doctor out here so that if I do get sick, I can get in to see someone.  We did the usual "intake" interview where I list past issues (not many) and current concerns (also not many).  But as I left I realized that it was the first time in the last 4 1/2 years that during a "care" conversation I didn't share anything about what my family has experienced in these last few years.  And I will admit, it felt ... different.

I found myself thinking about some of the conversations I've had with the male people in my life lately who have shown me with great pride the physical scars they carry, some from surgeries, some from injuries, some from great adventures, ALL of them marks of having endured, having survived, having gone through something and come out the other side.  My son, but others I know as well, wear their physical scars like medals.  Those scars show the person to have really lived, to have really suffered life in some way, and to have sustained some kind of hardship intact.  The scar is a sign of strength as well as a sign of being a person who has met life head on, participated in it, and become better because of it.  At some level those scars have become, not just part of their history, but part of their identity.  "Sam" is the person who survived that injury. "George" is the person who experienced this physical trauma.  Both are the persons of strength (again) and character, who made it through.

I realized that at some level, I have carried my scars, my emotional traumas and experiences in the same way.  I am the person who lived through hell.  I am the person who carried my family while going through my own personal nightmare.  I am the person who continued to pastor a church and work a job and a half and raise my kids as a solo mom while enduring the unthinkable in terms of public scandal, shame, shock, disappointment, judgment, rejection, loss and trauma.  I've worn these scars tentatively because I am all too aware that, first of all, everyone experiences hardships of one kind or another, and second, what I've gone through is still nothing compared to what some survive - war, hunger, chronic pain, torture, assault, etc.  I've worn my scars tentatively, but I have worn them. They, too, have marked me in a way that I've not only worn, but which have helped define me over these last few years.

To have left that doctor interview without sharing these stories marked a change for me.  And as I walked away, I realized that this was momentous in many ways.  To not only have declined to tell my story, but frankly, to not even have thought about it until I was leaving marked a significant change. It put that story squarely in the past, no longer as something that defines me now, no longer as a part of my current experience.  Are there still scars?  No doubt.  But they are smaller now, and they have moved to less obvious places.  They no longer take up a large part of my exposed visage, of my front, of my being.  I am much more than my past, and even than my experiences, both then and now. The kids and I have survived, but more than that, we've chosen to live as people who are today free from the restraints of a past that might have defined us a few years ago.
It no longer does.
And for that I am grateful.

Thoughts on Art and Artists

I saw a quote on facebook today: "When you buy something from an artist you're buying more than an object. You're buying hundreds of hours of error and experimentation.  You're buying years of frustration and moments of pure joy. You're not buying just one thing, you are buying a piece of a heart, a piece of a soul...a small piece of someone else's life."

This is a beautiful sentiment and I believe there is truth in it.  All of us who engage in any kind of art work hard to put ourselves into that art. When it is not honored, it feels like it is we, ourselves, who are not being honored. When it is not treated with reverence or value, it feels like we, ourselves, are being discarded, not valued. We fail to be seen in those moments and the hurt of that can be deep and lasting.

So, yes, I agree with the quote above.

And yet, I also believe that this thinking can be abused.  For example, Taylor Swift made a comment this last week that she is taking her music off of Spotify because artists should be paid for their work. Her millions aren't enough for her? And if so, why is that? Because a person's "art" makes them somehow a better human being and therefore more deserving of an indecent amount of luxury and wealth while others are starving in the world and unable to access art at all? I agree that true art lets us into a person's soul - whether that be visual arts, music, poetry, stories, sermons or other. It must be respected and honored. I also think it should be shared, and accessible to ALL people, but not because of the greed or personal self-interest of the artist. True art reflects not only the one who created it, but the Creator behind it all. It is a gift to all of humanity to witness, experience and have access to real and deep art. Should artists be able to earn enough to live on with their art? Of course. We all should be able to earn enough to live on with whatever talents (or even lack of talents) we use in our work.  But art is a gift given to us. Our talents and the opportunities we are given to share them, to use them, to make a living from them are not things we have somehow earned because we are better humans and therefore more deserving of wealth than the rest of the world. God loves us all the same.  God values us all the same. And those gifts of talent, art, ability - those are given to us by God for the service of God and God's people. They are not given to us so that we can declare ourselves innately better or more deserving than others.  They are not given to us so we can hoard the world's resources and leave others to suffer. They are not given to us to use selfishly for our own gain.

Most of our best artists never received the accolades or support of their art during their life times and that is a tragedy. Too many genius artists die poor and unrecognized. That is tragic because the gifts they gave have long lasting benefits for those who eventually have gotten to witness their arts. But I also wonder if that suffering didn't deepen their art at times. I'm not saying that is a justification or even a good thing. Tragedy is not a good thing. But it does deepen all of us. And while I would not wish awful things to happen to anyone, I find myself grateful for the events in my life that have deepened my soul, though they were hard to live through at the time. As a result, when I read about Taylor Swift's comment, I found myself feeling a sadness and compassion for any of those "artists" who never have the opportunities to deepen because their biggest challenge is whether they will earn only a million, as opposed to 20 or 100 or more, in profits this year. Will they ever have the chance to see themselves as children who are loved no more and no less than the homeless man they pass on the street? Will they ever have the opportunity to see that the money they make could change the world if used in the right way? Will they ever be given the experience of feeling genuine compassion for someone radically different from themselves? To look in the eyes of someone they normally wouldn't see at all and to see in that other person a brother, a sister, a person on the journey as they are?  Will they ever find that the art of those who remain undiscovered is sometimes just as amazing and incredible as their own?

Our artistic talents are gifts given to us out of grace for no other reason than because we are loved. What we do with them, how we share them, whom we allow access to that art and how we honor all of those others with their arts as well - that is a gift that we can give back.