Days 14 & 15 - And the question: Human Being Vs. Human Doing

Tuesday we went to Filoli and the Pulgas Water Temple.  Pics:

Wednesday we visited the Sonoma Botanical Gardens.  More pics:

    In the last few days, though, the inevitable has finally descended for me: after two weeks of my three month sabbatical, I am deeply struggling with the whole idea of sabbatical. The guilt I feel at not working during this time has become overwhelming.  I hear in my head the words, "We are human beings, not human doings," but I find myself wondering if this is not a western ideal that I honestly don't subscribe to. 

    What is our point of being?  From a faith perspective I have usually argued that the point is love. It's all love.  That takes many forms: love of our neighbors means doing what we can to ensure that they have lives worth living, lives full of the same things that bring us joy.  Love of God is the same: serving the beauty of the creation that God has made by taking care of it, not exploiting it for our own uses, but being good stewards of everything we have been lent during our lives here to use for the good of all.  Love of self?  That's harder.  And what I mean by that is that we justify a lot of "self-care" that I think is exploitive of the larger world.  We say "you deserve it" and "aren't we meant to enjoy the beautiful life God has given us?"  The first of those statements is just plain problematic. The second can be twisted into justifying all kinds of things. There is value in learning to enjoy simply living in each day, without the extravagance that we seem to believe we are owed.  And we know that our cars and the airplanes we fly are doing great damage to the earth.  But we still use them to drive and to fly to other places so we can enjoy seeing and experiencing those places.  Are they better than the places at home?  I think they are just different. We value seeing and experiencing new things and I do think that other places, people and cultures can give us insight and a deeper understanding of our own.  But I've often wondered if the surface dives we do when we go other places aren't a way of skimming the top.  The deep dive into understanding requires a lot more than just a tour or visit of a place, and more than just meeting people and cultures that are "other."  It truly requires spending time and getting to know those others.  Frankly, we could do that here. We are surrounded by people of different socio-economic differences and different cultures and ethnicities.  Taking the time to get to know, for example, our unhoused neighbors, might bring us into deeper understanding and appreciation of the world we have than we know.  But that may also feel scarier as we face the fragility of our own situations.  

    So back to the question of being vs doing, or really, the question is about working vs doing things that are simply self-satisfying.  Is there room for both?  Is there room to take time to walk gardens, to see new places, to write, to pray, away from working, away from serving others?  Jesus took time away to pray.  He took 40 days or "a long time" in the wilderness.  And I guess that's what a sabbatical really is: taking that time away to refocus, to remember that we have value just because we ARE, aside from what we do.  

    But I continue to struggle with it.  As I run around visiting beautiful gardens, and soon will leave on longer trips away, I struggle with what worth my life has during those times when it is solely focused on the service of myself and my family, even if it is only for a three month period.  That is the deep challenge of this time for me.  While the other day I wrote about the challenge of doing too much each day, I am aware that for me the "busy busy" of rushing around is a way to avoid the deeper issues. It is a physical running away from the deeper questions of purpose and meaning. Today is a slower day before the pace picks back up again tomorrow.  And in that space, the loudness of the deep concern about worth rears its head.  Today I am sitting in the questions. I have no answers and will need to be okay with that today.

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.

Expectations of Clergy And Other People of Faith

            I've heard several people lately say something to the affect that they left the church at some point in their lives because of the way other people in the church behaved.  They left because of a pastor, or because of the way members of the congregation behaved towards the pastor, or they left simply because members of the congregation were unkind towards other members of the congregation.  And the conclusion of each of these folk was something along the lines of "people in the church shouldn't behave that way."  After all, if we strive to follow God, shouldn't that make us better?

            I've been sitting with this question for years, actually.  It's common that people leave because of the hypocrisy they see in the church: so after a pastor messes up, or after mean people in the church do something unkind, or because of the judgmental stance of some churches or congregations.  Shouldn't we who profess to follow a loving, compassionate, gracious God work harder to do right?  To avoid hurting people?  To build people up and care about those who need our care?  Shouldn't our weekly time remembering what we are called to do and who we are called to be make some difference in our lives?

          My answer has changed over the years, some, but here it is as I think now:  Yes, our time in the church should make us better.  But it should not make us better than other people.  It should just make us better than we ourselves might have been had we not been in that place of remembrance and support for being the best we can be.  None of us will ever be perfect.  And I don't think we can ever compare ourselves to other people.  The best we can do is compare ourselves to ourselves.  Have we grown to be more loving, more forgiving, more gracious than we were before?  Or than we might otherwise have become?    

        I think about what Jesus himself said on this subject, (Luke 5:31-32): "Jesus answered, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do.  I didn’t come to call righteous people but sinners to change their hearts and lives.”  

        People come to church for many reasons.  But for many of us, it is because we are striving to be the people God calls us to be and we know we need the help and support of the community, of the time of worship and joint commitment to serve the poor and oppressed.  We need the time together to both reflect and work together to bring justice and peace to the world.  We can't do it on our own, or certainly we can't do it as well on our own.  For those who can, more power to them.  For the rest of us, our time in community and in church is essential for us to be the best we can be, for us to continue on the journey to be more whole, more caring and more loving.  That's all we can do.  We will never reach that goal, we will never be perfect.  But church allows us to grow towards it, to remember to self-reflect and work harder to be better.

        Some of what angers people is how big the mistakes are that some people within churches make.  I understand that.  But I have two responses to this.  First, I don't think God ranks "mistakes" or "sins" (to use a churchier word) in the same way that we do.  In the ten commandments, for example, murder is not listed as a worse sin than forgetting to take a day of rest.  I want you to think about that for a minute.  Murder is not ranked higher in the ten commandments than forgetting to honor the Sabbath.  There's no "ranking" of sins in scripture.  WE do that.  WE rank things and sometimes we really get those rankings off in some very strange ways.  Some Christians think that loving someone they have decided is inappropriate is worse than murder, for example.  We know this because they will KILL LGBTQ folk and feel justified in doing so.  But God wants wholeness for us and that means working for good in every aspect, working towards love and care, compassion and understanding in every way.  When we fail, we fail.  God forgives and we move on, hopefully having learned from the mistake.  

         The second thing I want to say about that is that again, we cannot be comparing people against other people: only against themselves.  And since we do not know what they would have been like had they NOT been in church, who are we to say that church has made no difference for them?  We can't know this.  

        Churches are human creations.  And as such they will be imperfect just as humans are imperfect.  They are there to build up, to honor God, to create community, to encourage us to be the church in the world, lifting up the oppressed, empowering the poor.  We who are in the church are part of that.  But because we are part of it, church will reflect our gifts, and our weaknesses.  We continually strive to do better, to make church better.  But it will never be perfect just as we as individuals will never be perfect.  

         I say again, church will make no person perfect.  It just won't.  But it can help.  At least it can help some of us.  And that's enough for me.    

The Church as Fertilizer

         This is the second Sunday in lent and I would like to invite you to think for a few minutes about what that means for you.  What is lent about as you understand it?  What are we to do during lent?  We talk about it every lent - lent is a time of repentance - or, to put it in less “churchy” words, to look at our lives, to reflect, to try to make some changes, to turn from one direction and go in a new direction, to grow, to try to be more worthy and more whole and just plain more Godly.    

 And so, how do most people do this?  What is the most common Lenten practice that we know of?  Giving something up, of course.  And what kinds of things do people give up?  There can be something good and healthy about giving something up: if we are really looking at our lives and we find something that is getting in the way of our wholeness, of our serving God and others.  Then we can decide to make a practice of limiting, for a set period of time, but perhaps with the idea that if we can do it for a short time, we might be able to do it for longer, whatever it is that is interfering in our growth, wholeness and service to God. 

But I found myself thinking, as I do every year, about the falseness, so many times, of these deprivations or sacrifices.  These sacrifices on many occasions are almost like a game we play - “let’s see if I can give this up,” or they are a way of feeling “righteous” or religious.  We feel like we’re really doing something in the name of our faith.  But they represent a choice that a privileged or wealthy person (and we are all wealthy here by the world’s standards) makes for a short and specific period of time: a choice that can be “cheated” and even changed at any moment. 

What do these deprivations actually mean in the bigger scheme of our faith?  What does it mean in terms of our dual call to love God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor as ourselves?  What does it mean to the people God really calls us to care for - the oppressed and the poor?

To put it in more concrete terms, what does it mean to those who can’t afford and therefore don’t own a television that you give up watching TV for a month?  What can it possibly mean to the poor person who eats what they can find, often very unhealthy foods such as junk food, that you give up chocolate or coffee for a month?  What does it mean to God that you “give up” something but aren’t giving to someone who might need it?  The intent of these sacrifices is to focus on God.  But often the Lenten practice of sacrifice gets warped and trivialized.  And do we then use those deprivations to focus more on God, or do we end up focusing on something else - like on our own “religiousness” or even more, on that thing that we have given up?  Are we taking the time that we would otherwise use watching TV or whatever else it is we have given up to volunteer with the poor, to meditate on the direction God wants for our lives or even very simply to pray? 

Thinking about how this particular ritual sometimes ends up being false brought up for me the even bigger issue behind it.  I went from wondering what the purpose of this particular ritual has become to the larger question of what is the purpose of our weekly church rituals?  What is the purpose of our religion?  What is our church about for us?  What SHOULD it be about?  How does our participation in church serve us? But more, how does it serve God and serve the world?  Are our rituals, like the practice of giving up something for lent, and indeed involvement in church itself, instead a way to escape the realities of this world, and the call of God to action?

Most of you are probably familiar with the musical, the Sound of Music and in particular, the Julie Andrews’ movie version.  At one point in the story, the Julie Andrews character, Maria, became confused about her feelings for the father of the house where she served as a governess.  And so what did she do?  She ran away back to the convent.  She went to the convent to escape her feelings.  She felt that she was turning to God: she felt that she was making the choice for God over the choice of being a wife or being a mother.  But in reality, she was turning to God, turning to the church, for escape.

We find a similar image of the church as a place of escape in the movie, “Sister Act.”  In Sister Act, the main character, Delores, literally hid in the convent as a “nun” while she waited to be a witness against her murdering boyfriend.  In that convent she found that all the nuns there were really “hiding” out.  The Mother Superior described the convent using the words, “These walls are the only protection they (the nuns) have.  The streets are no longer safe for them.  These robes no longer protect our sisters.  The walls do.”  The purpose of the convent in the Mother Superior’s eyes was to protect them: it was an escape for them, a place to stay safely away from the realities of the dangerous and scary world outside.

I would like to suggest that perhaps the same is true, many times, in our local churches.  People enter the church with the idea of “leaving their burdens behind them” or “laying their burdens at the feet of Jesus”.  And while it is right and good to ask God for the strength to carry our burdens, for the courage to face the trials, for the wisdom to navigate the torrential waters of our lives, many times the church becomes itself almost like a drug - a way to escape this life: a place to hide, a place to run away, an addiction even.  We know churches like this.  The music literally creates a “high” in people, the walls become a safe place, people hide in their theology of a future heaven where everything will be okay.  And in the midst of this, the people of the church don’t do the work they are called to do.  They forget the call to serve each other, feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, comfort the sick, and do the work of being in this world.

I would like to offer another image of the church for us today.  “The church as fertilizer.”  This brings us back to today’s scripture reading.  The verses for today are not “nice” passages: in the first half of today’s lesson, Jesus first says that bad things don’t happen to people because they sin, but then he goes on to say “I tell you unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”  And then we get the story of the fig tree. The fig tree doesn’t produce fruit and so the owner wants to tear it out.  The gardener persuades the owner to give the fig tree another year to produce, but even then, the owner still says that if it doesn’t produce good fruit in another year, it will be ripped out.  Not a really reassuring story, is it?

But the good news in this story is that the fig tree is not left to its own devices.  The gardener promises to dig around it and put manure on it: to amend the soil in which the tree is planted.  It is a recognition, for example, that when things are bad with people in a place, that it often has much more to do with the place than with those individuals.  We know that when an entire school of children are not doing well in school, we don’t throw the kids out.  We work on changing the systems surrounding the children; adjusting the school system, the teaching methods and platforms in order to help the children learn more effectively; making sure the kids have proper nutrition and safer home lives, adjusting the availability of resources, supplies for the kids.  When a society is not doing well, I would encourage you to look at the bigger systems for what needs to change.  Why is our society rife with racism?  Why is there a hugely growing discrepancy between the rich and the poor?  Why is gun violence on the rise?  Why do we have the highest percentage of any developed country of people in prison?  Do we just “have bad people” here?  Is it just that we have a huge number of racists, and violent people, and people with mental illness?  No.  This has to do with the soil we have planted, the systems we have in place, the institutionalized greed, prejudice, rage, revenge thinking, violent thinking.  Our history, a history of slavery, of greed, of some having while others don’t, of sanctioned thievery, sanctioned destruction of families at the border, and an acceptance of political lies has determined who we currently are.  And the only way we can address these huge issues is through different fertilizer, different manure that we use to enrich all of our lives and to help all of us grow more fully.  This has to start with our places of gathering.  From a faith perspective, this has to start with a fertilizer of our churches that encourages seeing deeply, being willing to change, being willing to learn and grow, looking for God, learning to love, remembering that we are all God’s children, brothers and sisters to one another.

As New Testament professor Mitzi Smith said it, “Jesus’ framing, use, and interpretation of the parable of the barren fig tree is harsh. He is calling Jerusalem to repent, but a people or a nation must admit and be conscious of its wrongdoing in order to change its commitments, policies, and practices. Just because Jerusalem (its leaders) has not experienced the state sanctioned violence to which Pilate subjected the Galileans does not mean the Galileans or those killed when the tower of Siloam fell are sinners. Revolutionaries are murdered. Innocent persons have been and continue to be crucified, murdered, or die because the state fails to maintain its infrastructure or slum lords make money. Many persons and leaders commit evil with impunity under unjust judicial systems and corrupt authorities; the avoidance of justice is not a sign of innocence, goodness, or divine approval.”

So, my image for the church then is of a place where you are dug around, where the hard places are pointed out, sometimes rooted out, but more often softened with some digging, some aeration, and a place where you are “manured” or fertilized.  A place where you are nourished and fed, replenished, and given the best nutrition possible in order to grow so that you, too may produce fruit.

In both of the movies that I mentioned, the churches stopped being places of escape.  In Sister Act, the nuns in the convent broke out of their imprisoning walls, with a little encouragement and nurturing, and began reaching out to the community, serving the people, serving the children, making a difference in the community rather than hiding from it.  So, too in the Sound of Music.  My favorite speech in the musical happens after Maria says to the Mother Superior upon her “escape” back to the Abbey, “I knew I had to come back here.  That here I would be safe,” and Mother Superior sharply replies to Maria, “Maria, our Abbey is not meant to be used as an escape...you must find out how God wants you to use your love...You must go back....These walls were not meant to shut out problems.  You have to face them and live the life you were born to live” And then she sings “Climb Every Mountain,” the poetry of which I really love -

Climb every mountain

Search high and low

Follow every by‑way

Every path you know

 

Climb every mountain

Ford every stream

Follow every rainbow

'Till you find your dream

 

A dream that will need

All the love you can give

Everyday of your life

For as long as you live

God does indeed call us to be the people of love, finding, searching, seeking and serving with that love...not escaping.

Repentance means “turning around”.  Often it is used to mean that we are called to turn around to go a different direction.  But this week I heard it differently.  Perhaps we are called to turn our vision around and look within ourselves and within our systems at the areas in our own hearts and our own lives, our own church and our own country that need to be changed, that need to be fertilized, that need to be aerated, dug around.  We are called to look at those areas that need pruning, that need the loving hand of a caring gardener.  This won’t be painless.  And that means we do not come to this place for comfort, for ease, for a pat on the back.  We come to learn, to see, to dig deeper.  Every single person can benefit from growth.  Not one of us has “made it”, not one of us is there yet.  We need different things: the hurting need comfort and reassurance of God’s love for them.  The comfortable need to look at the ways in which they contribute to the suffering of others and the ways in which they can overcome that.  But we all have needs.  I’m reminded of the story in Numbers 21:9; “So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.”  All of us get bitten by temptations: greed, or anger, or hatred, or judgment; prejudice or pride, ego, or fear.  We all have these parts of ourselves.  And we have to face them: to look at the snakes within ourselves and within our society, naming them for what they are, in order to be healed.

God’s intention for us is to be fruitful, to bear the good fruits of love, compassion, grace, kindness, peace, hope and joy.  But that takes work: tending, working, talking with one another, facing truth with one another.  And like corn, we should be planted together.  Apart we also cannot produce fruit.  Also, we have to remember that even when soil is amended, it takes three years after planting a fruit tree for good fruit to grow.  It’s not comfortable. And it takes time. But the whole point of a fruit tree is to produce fruit, so we are called to make that happen, to work the soil, to do the planting, the pruning, the fertilizing until it can produce fruit.  God in the parable is the gardener, always asking for more time to work the soil, to tend to the plants.

I think back on my own life.  There have been voices that have confronted me with truths about my own behaviors or own personality that I did not like.  I don’t enjoy those times, and I sometimes react defensively.  But even when I become defensive at first, I always have taken them away to ponder, to learn, to try to grow.  Those have been opportunities to learn, to deepen both in my faith and in becoming the person I want to be.

 I have hope.  I actually take it as a good sign that we sometimes speak truth to each other in ways that can be a bit cranky - that is a sign that this is a real place, a place where people are not “escaping” into the high of non-reality.  This is a place where people still are in the world, and still are seeking to do God’s work.  It would be better still if we could talk about the things that bother us before they pop out in crankiness, but God is not finished with any of us yet.  We still need some more aeration and a little more manure to become the whole, fruit-bearing people God calls us to be.  Maybe this lent we can focus on how to be more present in this place, more real in our relationships, more open to bearing fruit, and more focused on God and God’s love for us all in the midst of whatever lenten disciplines we employ.  Amen.

God's Call for Our Lives

 Isaiah 6:1-8

Luke 5:1-11

            Today we have two scriptures that both show a strong call from God to follow.  Unlike many of our other call stories, in both of these stories, those called also easily take on the call they’ve been given.  Isaiah, we are told, readily jumps up and proclaims, “here I am, Lord!  Send me!”  And in the Luke passage, we are told, “As soon as they brought the boats to the shore, they left everything and followed Jesus.”  Unlike with most of our prophets, like Jonah and Jeremiah, for example, in neither of these stories is there hesitation or even a moment in which those called think twice. And perhaps that is because the calls in both are so clear, so forceful, so undeniable.  In the Isaiah passage, he is given a vision of deep, complete and life-changing forgiveness.  And in the story in Luke, the fishermen have this amazing example of the abundance and life-giving fulfillment of fishing with complete success, after a long time of failed fishing, when they choose to follow what Jesus has asked them to do.  So both most of felt like pretty safe calls to accept.  One chooses to follow someone who can completely erase one’s past.  The others choose to follow someone who provides abundance for them.

            Have any of you ever had an experience like that?  Where the call was so clear, so undeniable and so compelling that you simply could not refuse?  These are not times when prayers were answered.  This isn’t about asking for something and having it show up.  In neither of these situations did it appear that the people approached were the initiators.  They weren’t asking someone to show them the way, they weren’t asking for Jesus or God to throw their lives upside down and bring them into a new calling, a new situation.  But in both cases, they were called in amazing and undeniable ways.  For Isaiah, his choice to say “yes” meant a life time of confronting injustices and declaring that God cares what people do to and for those who are poorer, have less power and fewer resources, those being treated unfairly or oppressively.  For Peter, James and John, we are told that they left everything they had: family, work, their homes – everything to follow Jesus. 

            Has there been a time when you have felt so moved, so called that you left everything in order to start something new?  There probably has for a few of you.  And for many more of us there have been smaller versions of this, perhaps.  For example, moving to a new country or across the country in order to start something new, not completely leaving behind family, maybe, but still taking a big risk in order to start something different.  It is still the case that immigrants often struggle unbelievable hardships in order to come here, risking everything in order to do so.

            It is much easier to take those risks, and to jump into something new when there has been a deep sign, and when there has been a promise of abundance (especially in a time of scarcity or deep struggles and pain), like Jesus gave to the disciples or like God gave to Isaiah with his abundant forgiveness.  But those just don’t come as clearly or as often for most of us, do they? 

            The call of most people we would consider to be heroes in some ways does happen like this.  A job shows up, a situation presents itself, and our heroes are those who step up to meet the challenges set before them, who may feel they have no choice but to respond in those situations, when they show.  I realize this is just a story, but when I think about people responding to a call that shows up in front of them, the Dr. Seuss story, “Horton hears a Who” often comes to mind for me first.  Horton was just minding his own business when he heard the cry of distress from a tiny person on a clover flower.  He could have ignored it, but he chose not to.  As he says, “because a person’s a person, no matter how small.”  He protects the people who are so small they can’t be seen by him, but only heard, from the elements, from other animals, from unkindness again and again.  He, himself, suffers pain and humiliation but he isn’t willing to give up caring for the Whos because he knows that to do so would mean their destruction.  He is the hero in the story not because that’s who he has always been, and not because he sought out being a hero, but because he wasn’t willing to allow the destruction or harm of these very small people that couldn’t even be seen.  That’s what heroes do: when they stand up for injustices, they often are standing up for those whom we would see as “small” or unimportant or not valuable.  That stepping up and standing up when there is an opportunity to do so: that is the difference between a hero and someone who isn’t.

            But while our calls may not look heroic, still, every single person has a call.  I’m sure you are all probably familiar with Frederick Buechner’s comment that call is where a person’s deepest passion and the world’s deepest need meet.  I always add into this that our deepest gifts need to be part of that too.  And the example I most often give is of the people on American Idol who have the passion for singing and see that the world is fed deeply by art, but who can’t carry a tune in a bucket.  Our gifts must be part of any true calling.  And a true call does not usually leave us alone.  Most of the time God gives us more than one chance to say yes to those calls.

            As I was thinking about call, I was reminded of this page in Mitch Album’s book, Have a little faith (p234. New York: Hyperion, 2009):

It is summer and we are sitting in his office.  I ask him why he thinks he became a rabbi. 

He counts on his finders.

“Number one, I always like people.

“Number two, I love gentleness.

“Number three, I have patience.

“Number four, I love teaching.

“Number five, I am determined in my faith.

“Number six, it connects me to my past.

“Number seven – and lastly – it allows me to fulfill the message of our tradition: to live good, to do good, and to be blessed.”

I didn’t hear God in there.

He smiles.

“God was there before number one.”

I believe that is true for all of us, whether we are aware of it or not.  When we are really, truly, deeply fulfilling the call of our hearts, the call that God placed there before we were born, before we were made, before we knew ourselves that we had a passion or even a purpose, then it shows.  It shows in the passion with which we work.  It shows in the love with which we tackle any calling.  It shows in our joy and in the time we commit to our work.  It shows in all that we are and all that we do. 

I think about certain people I’ve met who are absolutely doing the work of a calling.  It doesn’t actually matter what the work is.  You can see it in a person.  My kids had a preschool teacher who was so incredibly gifted at her work.  She loved the kids, the kids loved her, and that love and care shone from her on a daily basis.  A real estate person I knew years ago absolutely loved helping people find homes that would work for them. She did her work with passion and joy.

How do you tell the difference between something you just simply love to do and a real call?  I think it comes down to whether or not the particular task you are doing does, indeed, meet a need of the world.  Does the task you are doing just serve you?  Or does it really help people, feed people, care for people, provide for them?  Even the real estate agent I mentioned: she took her work as a call: she worked hard to make sure that people found houses that they could afford but that also would serve them long term.  She didn’t hesitate to tell people, even if it meant loss of a sale for her, when she thought the neighborhood was questionable or the house wouldn’t grow with a growing family.  She didn’t hesitate to give realtor discounts if she thought it would help a family get into a house that would work for them.  She really saw her work as a call and she lived that out fully.

That doesn’t mean that when we are following a call, we are happy all the time.  It doesn’t mean that our work is easy all the time.  In the movie, Keeping the Faith, there is a wonderful conversation between a young priest and an older priest.  The young priest doubts his call into the priesthood after falling in love with a woman who is his friend.  Nothing happened between the two, but he found that the very fact of falling in love made him doubt a call that included celibacy.  He said to his older priest mentor, “If she had kissed me back, I would have given it all up.  She didn’t, but I keep thinking about what you said in the seminary that the life of a priest is hard and if you can see yourself doing anything else you should do that.”

The older priest responded, “Well that’s my recruitment speech which is good when you are starting out because it makes you feel like a marine!  But the truth is you can never tell yourself there is only one that you could be.  If you’re a priest or if you marry a woman, it is the same challenge.  You cannot make a real commitment unless you accept that it is a choice that you make again and again and again.  I’ve been a priest over 40 years, and I fall in love at least once every decade.”

That is part of call too – those doubts, those times of struggle.  The older priest in the movie went on to say that God would give the younger priest his answer.  And I think that in times of doubt, God ultimately does give us answers: but often the answer comes in the form of a deeper question: what do I do, what can I do, that serves God and God’s people the most?  Where do we find God the most in our work, our tasks, our lives? Where is our passion and gifts that meet the world’s deepest needs?  And how do we do that work to the best of our ability?

Josie Jones was a very rich woman who felt and answered God’s call to serve the homeless population in Oakland.  She felt certain that God was calling her to do so out of her own resources.  So, she gave everything that she had and opened a transitional house for homeless women trying to move out and beyond their situation.  She got them into job training programs, enrolled in school, she helped them to take control of their lives and to move permanently from homelessness into full and productive living.  When Josie heard this call, she had everything.  She had a huge mansion and very nice cars.  She had a good job as a lawyer, but she was also independently wealthy and very, very comfortable.  Still, she heard God’s call.  And so she began by taking out her savings to being this program.  But as she served and worked with these women, she ended up giving more and more to fund it.  She did not want to take funds from government grants because she found that most grants came with a great deal of caveats, demanding a list of specifics that would not have given Josie the freedom she needed to really serve, empower and change these women’s lives.  Josie became materially poorer and poorer, personally, giving up her cars, her large house, her beautiful clothing, everything, until she lived truly as poorly and simply as the women she was serving with her care.  But in becoming like them, she was able to serve them and relate to them and care for them in a way that truly

transformed lives.  Josie died just a few years ago, and until the very end she described herself as one of the richest women alive.  God had not filled her life with popularity, with fame, or, in the end, with wealth.  God had instead filled her life, daily, with visions of the resurrection as she saw new life beginning and transforming around her and within her: bringing her life meaning, love, life.

As I think about people like Josie Jones, I am reminded of an Amy Grant/Gary Chapman song that I have always loved entitled, “All I ever have to be”:  “

When the weight of all my dreams is resting heavy on my head,

and the thoughtful words of help and hope have all been nicely said. 

But I'm still hurting, wondering if I'll ever be the one I think I am…

Then you gently re-remind me that you've made me from the first,

And the more I try to be the best the more I get the worst.

And I realize the good in me, is only there because of who you are. Who you are...

And all I ever have to be is what you've made me.

Any more or less would be a step out of your plan.

As you daily recreate me, help me always keep in mind

That I only have to do what I can find.

And all I ever have to be:

 All I have to be:

 All I ever have to be Is what you've made me.” 

Beautiful words about a life lesson to let go and let God so that God’s purpose can be made manifest in your life.

Sometimes we look too hard for the right call when if we were to relax a little and see what comes before us, we would know what it is we are being called to do in any one moment.  I think about this with my own life.  I would hope that being a pastor is a call: I’ve always wanted to be a pastor, I love my work, I enjoy almost all aspects of it.  But there is another part of my work that I also think is a call and that’s the one I want to talk with you about today.  The one job that I have never sought but that keeps coming to ME, is that of playing the piano (and organ), or, in particular, accompanying church choirs.  Even when I think, again and again, that that part of my work is done, it pops up for me again.  When I was serving my church in Ohio as pastor, our organist graduated and moved on to another state for graduate school.  My congregation asked if I would fill in until they found someone else.  Months later, they finally admitted to me that they didn’t want someone else and hoped that I would continue to play.  Then, as many of you know, I was asked this last fall by one of the choir directors at St. Bonaventure if I would be willing to accompany their resurrection choir that primarily plays for memorial services.  I struggled with this decision.  Even after I had asked session approval and had played for them for a few weeks, I struggled with this.  I’m already so busy after all… But it is an ecumenical choir and a few of our members sing with that choir.  One Monday morning when I was just on the verge of deciding that this was not something I could continue to do, one of our members who sings in that choir approached me and told me that the work we were doing, of giving music and meaning to people who were grieving, was deeply important, was a true calling from God.  In particular, he said, my using my piano playing in this way was what God was asking me to do.  I am sure he has no idea how much those words hit me, or that it has kept me playing for this choir.  Playing music is not the job I think I should have.  It’s not the work I want to say that I am “called” to do, and yet it keeps presenting itself: showing up before me in ways I don’t ask for or expect.

What are you called to do?  Whatever your gifts, your purposes, your life lessons, God calls you to use them, to see them, to grow with them and to work with them for the common good.  So my challenge for all of us is to look this next week, is to reflect on the callings God has for you specifically.  Thanks be to God for the prophets, the teachers, the nurturers, the servers, for all God’s people, since we are all called.  God help us to fulfill Your purposes for us.  Amen.

For My Eyes Have Seen Your Salvation

For My Eyes Have Seen Your Salvation

Isaiah 61:10 - 62:3, Luke 2:22-40

12/30/18

            Simeon was a normal person who, after a long life, was able to see salvation, salvation given, as we are told in Luke, to ALL people.  And that salvation, holding that baby in his arms, finding the peace of knowing that salvation has come to the world and for the world, he now feels he has finished his tasks here on earth, completed what he came to do, and he asks God to then let him go, “you may now dismiss your servant in peace.”   

            As we approach New Year’s eve, I often think about what tasks we have yet to do, what we have yet to see, to learn, or to accomplish here in this life time that will then allow us to go, when it is our time, in peace, work completed, job done, accomplished, finished, a whole life, bookended with a call and a response, created in love and allowed to move forward in peace.  New Years is often a time of reflection.  We reflect on our past year, but we can also use it as a time to reflect on the whole of our lives.  What have been your life lessons?  What has been your life calling?  I think these are often different: some things we are called to accomplish, some things we are called to learn. It usually is not just one thing, but I think God does call each of us to certain tasks in our lives.  I also think there are specific tasks for each life - they are not always the same for every person.  They are not always obvious, not always clear, but each of us has a call, sometimes multiple calls, throughout our lives, reasons to be here. I think we have things we are supposed to learn and things we are supposed to do. Sometimes those reasons are things that carry us through a long life, sometimes it is something that we have to learn over and over again.  And sometimes we may learn and do things early on.

            Do you know what you are being called to do and called to learn in your life?  To help you think through this, let me give you some examples.  I think I’ve had several life lessons, or things that I have found myself called to do and learn.  One of my life lessons, or something that I feel I’ve been called throughout my life to learn has been what I would describe as the call to be an adult.  While others appear called to learn to surrender to God, to let go of their egos and allow God to be the driver, I find that every time I pray for God to tell me what to do, every time I ask God to make the decisions, I hear God calling me in turn in multiple ways and through many different forms, to take some risks and chances and make my own decisions, some of which will be good and others which won’t, which I will just have to learn from.  I hear God telling me to trust that God will be with me in those choices, but that God will not make them for me.  

I’ve had other life lessons as well.  Such as facing my judgments.  Every time I have judged someone, it comes back at me, and I find I have to deal with that, face that, in my own life.   

What are your life lessons?  They usually are not things that come easily, but they are deep calls to us to be the best and most whole we can be, for God, for others and for ourselves.

            As people reach the end of their lives, I am often asked the question, “Why am I still here?  Why haven’t I been able to die?  Has God forgotten me? I feel done here, so why hasn’t God taken me?” My answer is always the same.  “Perhaps there is something still left here for you to do.  Our job then is, with your time left, to figure out what that is.”  Often a person is not able to completely name what that is, what is left undone, what needs still to be done.  But I have walked now with many people at the end of their lives and I find it is very often an amazing time of coming to terms with their lives, of reconciling relationships, of making peace with what has been and with what is. 

            As I reflected on this, I thought of Thornton Wilder’s book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2014. New York: Harper Perennial).  The book begins with these words, “On Friday noon, July the 20^th, 1714 the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.”  This collapse began an intense search into the “why” of that strange tragedy.  In particular, a monk was convinced that if we were to look at the five lives of those who died, we would see that each life was at a place where something had been concluded, that each life was “done” in some profound way, that God’s hand was in the bigger picture of the collapse because their callings, their purposes, their “jobs” here on earth were concluded and so it was simply time for God to call them home.  It is a question that many ponder.  Does everything happen for a reason?  Or at least, do we die at an appointed time?  Is there a bigger pattern and bigger picture that determines the very hour and even minute at which we will die?  Or does God call us home when our jobs here are done?  When we have finished our “tests” or our tasks and done what we are called to do, learned what we have been asked to learn?  In many ways, the story doesn’t actually answer the question about providence, destiny and fate.  In describing these lives and where they were at their final moment of death, the story causes the readers to explore more fully their own beliefs.  But it does so while leaving more questions than answers.  Towards the beginning of the book, Wilder says this about whether or not their fates, their lives and their deaths are determined, “Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

But more to the point of this sermon, the book ends with these words, “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.  But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them.  Even memory is not necessary for love.  There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Under all of our calls, under all of our life lessons, there is a bigger call, a deeper call.  It is to listen and follow God.  It is to follow Love, since that is what God is.  It is to bridge and reconcile and heal all of life with that Love. It is to learn to embody and be and act and live that love out. Thomas Merton put it this way, “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 that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone." 

Sometimes the distinction between loving God for our own happiness and loving God for God is a subtle difference. “God, help me to find what will make my life whole,” is really a question about me.  It is a question that invokes God, but it still is about me.  “God, how can I serve you?  Where would it be most helpful to you for me to be and what would serve you and your people and your world the most for me to do in that place?” is slightly, but profoundly different.  That difference, between turning to God to make our lives whole, and turning to God so that we might serve God and help God make the world whole, that is the difference between asking God to be with us, following us in our journeys, and following God. 

Simeon had seen love incarnate.  He had seen it, recognized it, allowed it into his heart. He followed God in his call.  He had been given a task, and that task was seeing, recognizing and proclaiming who Jesus was.  Anna, too, had that task.  Their proclamations were about love, were about Jesus.  And having finished their work, they were ready to depart.  They came for the one thing that would make each whole and they did it.  And as Simeon declared, he was then made ready to cross that bridge of love and to be dismissed in peace. 

How are you called to follow the way of Love?  How are you called to serve God with eyes of love rather than fear?  As we enter the New Year, my hope for us all would be to move more fully into a commitment to loving God and serving God with our whole beings.  It is the call, the meaning, the resolution that matters most.  Amen.