an oblique sense of gratitude...

This year's journey into and through Lent has simultaneously been simple and complex: simple in that I haven't given much time or attention to the rituals and practices I once favored in the past; and complex in that I keep finding new ways that my time-tested demons keep morphing into new irritants and manifestations. It was genuinely sobering to realize that the ancient words of the old preacher, Qoheleth, in Ecclesiastes can still shed new light on my life: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; for there is nothing new under the sun. Traditionally, I've interpreted this insight historically, but in these later days of the second half of my life I find it is equally true ethically, morally, spiritually, and personally as well as politically.

Perhaps that's why this year I shied away from what had been long practiced personal Lenten disciplines. Once upon a time, I constructed a series of fasts to mark this sacred season. Like Jesus in the desert, I yearned for the Spirit to help me heal my inner wounds, questions, and confusion. This year, however, it felt like most of those efforts at piety were more self-righteous distractions than true balms of healing. Clearly, a spirituality of sacrifice used to resonate within when I was an earnest young believer. But today, as an elder who must pick and choose how and where I share my attention, the assertive and judgmental zeal of days gone by no longer works. Indeed, this year my solitary Lenten commitment consisted of making simple soups for supper. Not only was that sufficient for the day, but it felt like it was enough for the One who is Holy, too. And here's why:  

+ First, St. Paul really was right when he wrote that living into the way of Jesus is NOT about being squeezed into someone else's mode; but rather simply entering everyday as a servant of grace.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him. (Romans 12: 1-4, The Message)

+ Second, small is holy and less is more. As an earnest urban intern in NYC, I learned that when a person came to the church in need, more often than not the more complicated their story the greater the bullshit. Over time this axiom hit me as true for my soul as well: the harder I make trusting grace every day, the more I am able to avoid living and loving in simplicity. How did Jesus put it in the sermon on the mount?

Don’t say anything you don’t mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ and never doing it, or saying, ‘God be with you,’ and not meaning it. You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong. You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the supple moves of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you. (St. Matthew 5: 33-48, The Message)

+ And third, hubris can be a portal into trust rather than just one of the seven deadly sins IF I'm willing to own it and then let it go. Being full of myself can be a paradoxical blessing when I let it take me down a few pegs. Again, the sermon on the mount is instructive:

You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought. (St. Matthew 5: 2-3, The Message)

Most days I don't need MORE to do - or think - or pray. There are troubles enough in every day. No, I don't need MORE, I need less so that I can attend to the love right in front of me. Or reign in my inclination towards self-pity when I am weary and just deal with it (whatever IT may be.) I suspect this is what the emptiness of the Lenten desert is all about: letting go of inward distractions so that I might be genuinely connected in grace. Of course, my old devotional practices gave me the words to explore spiritualities of descent, but true relinquishment doesn't start with sound. it needs silence to mature. It needs time to go deep. How did Psalm 51 put it: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

This Lent my fast from fasting showed me just how much I need silence. And space. And time to rest. Without these small expressions of grace, I am unable to discern the presence of the sacred in the ordinary. I become impatient and surly. I want more when the Spirit is offering me less. Frederick Buechner puts it like this:

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly... If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Fr. Rohr recently reminded me that is in the quotidian that Christ's shows up:

I’ve noticed in the Gospels that even after two appearances of the Risen Christ, the apostles return to their old job of fishing (John 21:3). They don’t join the priesthood, try to get a job at the Temple, go on more retreats, take vows, leave their wives, or get special titles. Nor is there any mention of them baptizing each other or wearing special clothing beyond that of a wayfarer or “workman” (Matthew 10:9–10). When the inner is utterly transformed, we don’t need symbolic outer validations, special hats, or flashy insignia. We can also note that the Risen Christ is never apparent as a supernatural figure, but is mistaken in one case for a gardener, another time for a fellow traveler on the road, and then for a fisherman offering advice. He seems to look just like everybody else after the Resurrection (John 20:15; Luke 24:13–35; John 21:4–6), even with his wounds on full display! In the Gospels it appears we can all go back to “fishing” after any authentic God encounter, consciously carrying our humiliating wounds, only now more humbly. That is our only badge of honor. In fact, it is exactly our woundedness that gives us any interest in healing itself, and the very power to heal others. As Henri Nouwen rightly said, the only authentic healers are always wounded healers. Good therapists will often say the same.

It is with oblique gratitude that i return thanks form my inner anxiety this Lent. It has become an earthy portal to reconnect with simple grace. Onward to Maundy Thursday tonight... 

getting into the holy week groove...

We FINALLY got our seed and wildflower order in! By now we've usually had seedlings started but... my new gig at church, Di's health, playing a TON of music AND the fact that you can't plant anything here until after Memorial Day slowed everything down. For about seven years we've been learning what the land wants us to know about how to help it: how to add nourishment and water, what grows better where, and what doesn't work at all. We've given up on tomatoes except those we can grow up on the deck. Too little sun for too little time even in our wide open and fenced in plot. This year, in addition to my 15th attempt at raising more than one puny pumpkin, we're going with LOTS of wildflowers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cukes, peas, spinach and a variety of peppers. I am so ready for Mother Nature to lure spring back into these parts.

The past two weeks have been full to overflowing with music: band practices, open mics at Methuselah, private house party, two St. Patrick's Day gigs and our preparation for the Sideline Saloon next Tuesday. Each and every event was fun and more often than not pretty damn rockin' too. Dave and I are into a bit of Tom Petty and Gov't Mule right now as well as dusting off our earlier Beatles song as well. And then there's the joy and challenge of getting ready for Holy Week 2024.

+ This Sunday is Palm Sunday: in addition to the blessing of the palms at the start of worship, we'll be welcoming in a new class of members from every walk of life. It will be a celebration of grace trumping karma for sure. Worship closes with an extended reading of the Passion Narrative - this year from St. Mark's gospel - with precious little commentary. As those wiser than I have noted: this story speaks to us in different ways; it holds a multiplicity of insights that are best embraced personally while in community. So, like Christmas Eve, why try to do better that a reading that's time-tested and mostly free of dross?

+ Next comes Maundy Thursday on March 28: This liturgy, conceived in a Roman Catholic monastery in the 9th century CE, is beloved in much of the Protestant West. It, too, requires little oral commentary leaving each pilgrim to her/him self with Scripture, candle light, songs, and silence. 

+ Good Friday on the 29th: the Sanctuary will be open for silent prayer between 12 noon and 3 pm: the hours traditionally observed for the crucifixion of Jesus. A collection of Scripture and prayers are available to guide each person's journey into the darkness.

+ Easter Sunday: March 31st: the Palmer congregation hosts a lay led Sunrise Service this year followed by a pancake breakfast. At 10 am the whole community gathers for Holy Communion, hymns of joy, and an informal reflection for children using music to retell the Easter story.

lent five: bracing versus releasing as an embodied prayer

There are tons of reasons and excuses why people choose NOT to attend worship, right? You’ve used them, I’ve used them, we’ve ALL used them. One of my favorite worship stories involves a mother who has to wake up her son on Sunday morning. “Time to get ready for church,” she chirped full of sweetness and light only to be told by her son, “I can’t go anymore, momma, I’m just going to stay in bed.” Like any good momma would, she asked, “Why in the world would you say that honey?” Pulling the blankets up over his head, he moaned: “I’ll give you two good reasons, ok? One, they don’t like me; and two, I don’t like them. Please, just let me go back to sleep.” Undaunted, his mother replied: “Look, I know sometimes you just want a break but I’ll give YOU two good reasons why you SHOULD go. One, you’re 54 years old and two you’re the PASTOR! So, get your butt out of bed buster and get moving.”

· I share that golden oldie with you because there have been a few times when I didn’t want to go to church: sometimes I was burned out, other times I was being selfish or contrary. And early in my life, when I was a young boy growing up in Connecticut, I had a theological disagreement with my grandmother about worship that had lifelong implications.

· For about a year I went with my grandma Deanne to the Unitarian Universalist church of Stamford. My paternal grandfather had been pastor, so she felt very much at home there. When we started, I LOVED to enter the darkened old stone Sanctuary with its stunning stained glass and scent of centuries gone by still lingering in the air. Hearing the massive pipe organ took my breath away. And I was often enraptured sitting silently in that huge nave as the candles flickered and the gathered faithful raised prayers unto the Lord.

What I didn’t like so much was… Sunday School. Not the IDEA of Sunday School – I’ve always loved to learn – no, it was the content of our classes. Back in my grandfather’s day, this was a Unitarian Christian congregation; by the time I was attending with my grandma, however, the emphasis had shifted to the Universalist side of the merger. And, like the early days of so many mergers, both sac-red and secular, it’s easiest to gather the low hanging fruit first. So, with the best of intentions, our Sunday School celebrated what I came to call the lowest common spiritual denominator – we were learning to be nice liberals with good manners who knew how to share with one another – but who rarely spoke of God and NEVER spoke of Jesus.

Now, this is a viable spiritual path that clearly speaks to some, so let me be clear that far be it from me to denigrate this or any spiritual tradition, ok? I simply knew from a tender age that it just didn’t speak to me: it didn’t help me sort out a code of conduct for living nor did it teach me anything about prayer. Don’t ask me why or how I became so interested in contemplative Christian spirituality at such a young age because it was not in the air of our home nor the zeitgeist of our culture. But by 1st grade I knew that I wanted to follow Jesus. I didn’t really know what that meant at age seven, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find out in that Sunday School. I just knew that I couldn’t take another Sunday talking about dinosaurs and evolution. NOT that I denied science, then or now: I just wanted to know about Jesus. So, that summer, sitting on the porch of our rustic cabin on Lake Webster – and yes I know how to say Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaug – I told my grandmother that I wanted to learn how to pray and live like Jesus.

· As best I recall, she gave me a concerned look, started to say something to me about Thomas Jefferson and the Deists, at which point I just silently got up and went to sit by the water as I realized my days at the Unitarian Universalist Sunday School were over. Then and now, I still find that the wisdom of God’s first created word in nature is often my ally when words no longer cut it.

· In time, I discovered that Jesus often retreated into the solitude of Mother Nature, too when he needed a place to listen deeply for guidance from his Heavenly Father. Our first reading to-day expresses the heart of a contemplative spirituality with great care:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Is-rael and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with your ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke – ev-en as I loved them. So, this is the covenant… will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, says the Lord; and I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.

This oracle was first articulated to our ancestors in Judaism while they were in captivity to Babylon during the last 70 years of the 7th century before the Common Era. It was a mystical message of hope and healing then; and some one thousand years later was adopted by our Congregational founders. Notice that this text doesn’t abrogate the first covenant made on Mt. Sinai after the Exodus – Judaism is still viable and holy – for the new covenant is inward and honors a sacred love that never demands a one size fits all spirituality.

Some 500 years AFTER Jeremiah, Jesus told his followers that in my father’s house there are MANY mansions, right? The new covenant recognizes that there are a variety of spiritual paths that all have integrity – an insight worthy of respect as our Muslim neighbors enter the month holy month of Ramadan, ok? We need not all agree on how to love the Lord our God and our neighbors as ourselves in order to trust that salvation is still fundamentally God’s work not ours. Perhaps that’s why the new covenant implies that silence and trust are how the Lord puts God’s law within us. I will write my law upon their hearts and minds (not a stone tab-let). No longer shall they have to teach one another or say out loud: “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me within, from the least to the greatest. As Jesus said: the kingdom is where… within, right?

Now that last phrase in the Hebrew text literally says: every person will realize that their neighbor is a brother (or sister) because they will all KNOW me as I take away their sin and iniquity. That word, KNOW, in Hebrew is yada– a wonderfully paradoxical verb that COULD mean realized or acknowledged; OR it could mean, as it most often does in the Bible, sexual intimacy as in “Adam KNEW his wife.” Adam experienced Eve (and we hope to God that Eve experienced Adam) with profound pleasure, vulnerability, and trust. To KNOW is to trust God’s grace so thoroughly from the inside out that spirit and flesh embrace with joy. THIS knowledge, you see, is NOT abstract or aloof but boldly experiential, transformative, and incarnational. And THAT, dear friends, is what I was looking for – but never found – as a child while attending Sunday School with my grandma. Like the Psalmist of ancient Israel, I wanted to TASTE and see. I wanted to encounter something of the Lord with all my heart, soul, flesh, and mind – something mystical and vibrant – and intuitively I knew that Jesus was the key for me.

His spirituality is unique: it insists that there is NO delineation between the sacred and the secular for by faith heaven and earth are one just as the Lord’s Prayer tells us: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it’s already being done in heaven. Jesus teaches us to live as embodied prayers believing that contemplation is more than just resting in God’s grace – although it is that, too. The sixth century wisdom keeper, St. John Chrysostom, used to say that contemplation is “luminous seeing or knowledge impregnated by love.” What a brilliant description: wisdom impregnated by love. But not an emotional love, “but a quiet, clairvoyant intimacy with the holy that is physically grounded in the human heart.” Jesus puts it like this in today’s text appointed for the fifth Sunday of Lent:

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it while those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servants be also – and who-ever serves me, the Father will honor.

This is simultaneously a de/scription of Christ’s passion – his betrayal, trial, suffering, death, and resurrection – and a pre/scription for practicing the prayer of relinquishment. Or, as they say in AA, learning to let go and let God. That’s the first insight of this text: the time was ripe for the Son of Man to be glorified – that is, to show the world the purpose and meaning of his ministry – by accepting and enduring the Cross. The Rev. Stephanie Sellers writes:

Jesus entered as he did, where he did, doing what he did, because God needed us to finally comprehend the truth: God is not a sky king who heads an empire; God is the love that gives itself away for the sake of more love. Jesus could only communicate that point by standing outside the power structures and inviting disciples to join him and discover new life with him on the margins. In Jesus, God shows us what it looks like to be this vulnerable, humble, and self-giving. In him, we see one who did not run from the things that broke his heart, nor did he first calculate what he could gain from a situation. Jesus sought instead to give away his life, so he and others might flourish as God intends. . . .

The Cross, you see, unites agape love – radical compassion – with disciplined surrender of self. The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault put it like this: the Cross shows a mystical alchemy at work when the raw primal force of eros is subjected to the sacramental act of surrender in what contemplatives call kenosis. Borrowing an early baptismal prayer, St. Paul sings this hymn in Philippians 2:

Beloved, be of the same mind as Christ, having the same love, being in full accord. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. And in this humble act of self-emptying love, God exalted Jesus even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

· First, the Cross shows us what the marriage of love and humble sacrifice means: we SEE and KNOW what God looks like through the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus for Scripture says that on the Cross Jesus took on the shape or form of God. His hidden birth at Christmas tells us that God can and does show up any and everywhere – often in the most unexpected places like a cold stable in Nazareth – but his birth doesn’t show us what God looks like.

· Same for his table fellowship: Eucharist shows us a feast where no one need be shut out of the bounty of grace. But as much as I love that feast IT shows us what the kingdom looks and feels like in practice but the feast doesn’t show us what God looks like either.

No, in our tradition, only the Cross exposes the glory of God: humbly and intentionally love takes the form of a sacrifice and TOGETHER they show us what God looks like in Jesus Christ. That’s foundational, ok? We tend to forget in Western Christianity that the Cross is both Christ’s embodied prayer but also our own as well. You see, the same love that empowered Jesus to face the Cross in his time can ripen within us bringing blessings both to OUR souls and those we love the more we practice letting go and letting God. When love’s passionate energy is harnessed with humility, a sacramental sacrifice takes place that gives shape and form to God in Jesus Christ, AND, tutors us in the practice of Christ’s love.

God invites us into a new covenant, where by the power of the Spirit we can choose to allow our hearts to break, and then take the pieces— our lives, our goods, our love, and our privileges —and share them all like a broken loaf of communion bread. By consciously and tenderly letting go of ego – letting it die within – grace begins to thrive and bear more fruit and before you know it, we are praying the wisdom of the Cross.

· Does that make sense? Are you still with me? Please understand I’m not asking does this make linear or even cultural sense because… it doesn’t. It’s not only paradoxical, ok? It calls into question a culture obsessed with an individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Letting go is NOT about acquiring; it’s about emptying; taking something you possess—your bread and power, your abilities and identities, your comfort and control, your treasured structures and even life itself—and releasing our attachment to them so that they can be useful to God’s love.

· It’s no wonder that St. Paul wrote that those who follow Jesus to the Cross have become fools for Christ. We are advocates of the upside-down kingdom. The way of the counter-cultural Spirit. Jesus opens his Sermon on the Mount by telling us: You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed, too, when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.

Our Western minds have been shaped by the blessings and disciplines of science – the pursuit of empirical evidence – or as Joe Friday said on Dragnet: Just the facts, ma’am. Consequently, the culture we have constructed is LONG on certainty but increasingly SHORT on nuance; a way of being where the bottom line has become the whole story. Back in 1934, T.S. Eliot warned us that this ob-session with the bottom line has consequences – and often they’re unintended. In “The Rock” he wrote:

The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death, but nearness to death but not nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries have brought us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

So, every year Lent comes back around the circle of life with Jesus insisting that the grain of wheat must die before it can bear fruit. It must relinquish its essence in order to spread its wealth. That’s what he’s saying to those who grasp and clutch: trying to hold on to everything will ultimately cause us to lose it all. A mystical wisdom-keeper of the Western realm, Cynthia Bourgeault, gets it right when she tells us: It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven. Over and over, Jesus lays this path before us: there is nothing to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced, but the catch is to cling to nothing.

· Now I may have said this out loud to some of you before, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but I am a slow learner when it comes to spiritual things. Often I’m late to the party. I eventually get there, but it takes me a LONG time. About seven years ago, I started to volunteer as a spiritual advisor to a small community of people with and without intellectual disabilities in Canada called L’Arche – that’s French for the ark. I would drive 6 hours one way to spend a few days in community sharing prayer, playing music for worship, and learning how to slow down and live from the heart of tenderness.

· One evening after playing some songs and sharing supper, I stepped into the living room to put away my guitar and found Geoffrey rummaging through my guitar case. Now, NO musician likes her or his instrument to be fondled without permission, and my first reaction upon finding my guitar in Geoff’s hands was… fury. I didn’t really KNOW Geoffrey yet – and he was a big, strong guy. To be blunt: I was angry that he’d violated my space by scarping up my VERY expensive guitar AND I was a little afraid for my well-being seeing that Geoff could probably flatten me with one blow. Somehow or another I jollied him into giving it back, packed up my precious guitar, and headed back to the states – taking the whole next six hours to fret and fumble over what to do next.

I wasn’t scheduled back in Ottawa for a few weeks so that gave me TONS of time to worry before I was to lead music for the community retreat. I know Psalm 37 urges believers NOT to fret and fuss, but… well, I’m a slow learner and I fretted the entire six hours back up to Canada without ANY clear strategy about what to do with Geoff. The retreat began, I lead some songs in English and French, and then sat with my guitar tightly in my grasp until lunch was served. I hadn’t seen Geoff, but I heard him as he sometimes shouted out words or thoughts that caught his fancy.

· I was still perplexed upon returning from the restroom when I saw him hovering over my guitar case and another wave of fear washed over me. Deep within I knew that trying to hold on to control was not going to work but I didn’t know what else to do. And then, thanks be to God, it hit me: I could sit down with Geoff before the next session, keep a hold of my guitar, and show him how to strum it while I played the chords. I didn’t know if that would really WORK but it struck me as a way to let go and try to let God… so I did.

· At first Geoff just looked at me. I gave him a guitar pick and he started to strum and before I knew it we were singing and dancing to La Bamba!Para bailar La Bamba para bailar La Bamba se necesita una poca de Gracia - Una poca de gracia pa' mí, pa' ti, ay arriba, ay arriba, Y arriba, y arriba Por ti seré, por ti seré, por ti sere Bamba, bamba, Bamba, bamba, Bamba, bamba

It was both an answer to prayer AND an embodied prayer: I hadn’t remembered that the translation of La Bamba is: to dance la bamba you need a little grace – se necesita una poca de Gracia. And there it was: a vision of the Cross as the marriage of love and sacrifice. It showed me again what God looks like and how we are made whole. So, let me close with this practice that NEVER fails. It comes from the wisdom tradition that Cynthia Bourgeault celebrates in the brave little book: The Wisdom Way of Knowledge.

In any situation in life, if you are confronted with an outer threat or opportunity, take time to notice how your body feels. Inwardly are you bracing, hardening and resisting; or are you softening, opening, or yielding. If you go with the former – bracing – you will be catapulted immediately into your smaller and more selfish self with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the later – letting go -regardless of the outer conditions you will remain in alignment with the sacred.

This is spiritual practice and maturity at its no frills simplest: a moment by moment learning NOT to do anything is a state of internal brace. Do you know what bracing feels like? (try it with your fists with me: 1-2-3 BRACE) How about letting go? (Try that, too: 1-2-3 release!) This, dear friends, is the good news for today. Let those with ears to hear, hear!

lent four: god so loved the kosmos...

Text: John 3: 14-21: And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.

My heart always beats a bit faster whenever today’s texts show up in the appointed readings both because St. John’s gospel is so rich with complex spiritual insights, AND, because this was the text my mentor, the late Rev. Dr. Ray Swartzback, chose when he preached my ordination service back in June 1982. Swartzy was a pulpit master: part Old Testament prophet and contemporary social critic, part skilled wordsmith and Bible scholar, and part devotee of Jesus committed to vigorous pastoral care and compassion. He earned his propers fighting in the Battle of the Bulge during WWII; when he returned stateside, he sensed the need to give whatever time he had left to nourishing life after encountering the rigors, trauma, and destruction of war. He served four different urban congerga-tions in the rustbelt before I interned with him in Jamaica, Queens, NY. His ordination sermon was entitled: Trapped in the Trappings and it’s been one of my guides for decades.

· Ray issued a prophetic warning to me in that sermon: do NOT try to be holier than Jesus. Rather, give yourself fully to loving the folk – and that means ALL the folk – those who fit in and those from the periphery, those who love God as well as those who are either ambivalent or even hateful. Remember: Jesus didn’t come to condemn the cosmos, but to love, nourish, and bring a measure of healing. Like the old song says: he’s got the WHOLE world in his hands

· So, in the spirit of both St. John the Evangelist and Ray Swartzback the urban preacher, let me risk unpacking some of the problematic and even uncomfortable parts of today’s readings for you because they not only strike contemporary people as troubling, but evoke a sense of God that no longer holds water. A creator who sends poisonous snakes to kill the community’s complainers? The source of creative and wild diversity throughout the cosmos who condemns those with doubts or existential questions about the meaning and purpose of life?

That, my friends, is BAD theology, a truth some intuitively embrace and vote with their feet, while others resist – especially if they choose to interpret the Bible literally. We would do well to recall that our spiritual cousins in Judaism long ago concluded that nuance, patience, and creativity are essential for making sense of the Bible. In fact, they crafted a four-tiered approach to Bible study using the acronym, PaRDeS, to keep things fresh. Pardes, in Hebrew, means orchard or garden, a reference to the paradise of Eden God created in the beginning.

P stands for p’shat meaning plain – a medieval exploration of a text’s literary, linguistic, and historical context – that strives to articulate what the words of Scripturehtml meant when they were first written, spoken, and/or collected. R represents remez meaning hint - a teasing out the allegorical possibilities of a passage – D is for drash from the Hebrew word midrash – the preferred, practical, and playful application of Scripture for everyday life – and S is for sod, meaning secret, or the creative consideration of the mystical and sacramental meaning of God’s word. The rabbis concluded – and we would do well to emulate – that the Bible is open to a host of interpretations – some are more useful than others – but all carry a piece of the truth. John Robinson, pastor to the Pilgrims who came to this continent in 1620, told us that: “God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from the Holy Word,” than we now grasp.

· Such a perspective is essential if we’re to make ANY sense of passages like Psalm 61: I long to dwell in your tent, O Lord, forever, and take refuge in the shelter of your wings? Oh really? God has wings…?

· Same holds for a rigid interpretation of some of the purity codes like not ever touching pork: does that mean Christians and Jews can’t play football? Let’s not even open the door on some of the sexual references that today strike us as bizarre except to note that once upon a time women’s hair made into braids or a top knot was considered an offense to the Lord. No wonder Jesus quoted the prophet Hosea to the scribes and Pharisees saying: “There is something greater taking place than even the Temple so go and learn what this means: I, the Lord your God, desire mercy not sacrifice.” Compassion always trumps rigid rule keeping for Jesus.

So, with these qualifications, I think Bible scholar and pastor, Bruce Epperly, is right to ask: Is God for us or against us in these readings? Is God primarily punitive or graceful in nature?

Can we trust God’s love or is there a “hidden” violent side to God, inspiring fear and not companionship? The texts for today describe an ambiguity in divinity. Though they speak of divine rescue and global love, they also suggest a dark side to divinity. In the Numbers passage, God causes suffering and seems to be the source of punishment that far exceeds our misdeeds… (while) the gospel of St. John asks us to wonder: Is God the source of condemnation or does condemnation occur in the natural course of events in response to our actions? Can our love of darkness thwart God’s grace? What is the nature of this condemnation – is it a matter of inability to experience the fullness of God’s love or is it eternal in impact? Is there a limit to divine love and, if so, does it come from our side or our ability to say “no” to God? Is it possible to have moral responsibility without condemnation or accountability without destruction? These passages invite us to ponder the relationship between grace, punishment, and personal responsibility.

· We know many of our neighbors no longer find solace or hope in the institutional church now at least partly because of such passages. They intuitively sense what depth psychologist, Carl Jung, once said about the story of Job: with a God like THAT, who needs Satan?

· Declining numbers for the past four or five generations have given rise to a culture with NO experience with church. Episcopal lay theologian, Tricia Gates Brown, writes that we are “on the cusp of a change… where almost every aspect of our country is in upheaval — cultural, technological, political, environmental, and spiritual. We are well past the time when we thought we could reverse the tide…for this cultural shift is much larger than us.” And while there are clues that the tide is beginning to turn in this vast and epochal cultural shift that may result in a yearning for communities of compassion like the church, so much remains beyond our control. My hunch, Dr. Brown, writes:

Is that in time, the shared faith expression people get from religious services is something they will, again, long for. But only in the way we appreciate something so long absent that the reper-cussions of the absence become evident and undeniable… and it’s not likely to occur in my life time.

· So rather than lament and fret over this – or give-in to nostalgia or worse to fear – why not become allies of the Holy Spirit as St. Paul encouraged in Philippians 4 and give attention to whatever is “honorable, just, pure, pleasing, true and commendable: if there is any excellence or anything worthy of praise, give your attention to these things.”

· From my perspective this includes rigorously sorting out what is true and salvific, good and noble, even in our holy scripture, ok? And today’s texts are a GREAT place to start given the ambiguity and contradictions they describe about the nature of the Lord we’ve chosen to wor-ship.

I take my lead from a wise and wonderful Bible scholar, the late Rev. Dr. Walter Wink, who taught at my alma mater, Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and later went on to do truly remarkable re-search at the Presbyterian Auburn Theological Seminary. Walter used to say that there are at least three perspectives concerning Biblical interpretation and each is thoroughly grounded in Scripture.

· One is a literal reading of Torah – the Law in Hebrew – that’s shaped by Leviticus and Deut-eronomy. There are liberating passages within Torah but also severe restrictions concerning who is in and who is out – who is acceptable and forbidden – who belongs and who must be banished from community. Can you think of a Biblical story or character that speaks to this restrictive perspective?

· A second interpretative lens comes from the prophets: rather than celebrate an austere and fixed sense of who is acceptable to the Lord and who is not, the prophets ground themselves in the story of Exodus and urge us to incarnate acts that emancipate and heal people, the land, and all that lives and thrives in creation. Tradition suggests that the essence of the pro-phetic expression was synthesized in Micah 6:8: What does the Lord require but that we do justice, love mercy, and walk with God and neighbor in humility. Do you sense the differ-ence between the path of the prophets and those favoring a more simplistic sense of Torah?

· And then there’s the path of Jesus who is every bit as devout as the Pharisees but without their penchant for segregation: Jesus rarely offers an unyielding set of rules, preferring, in-stead, parables, stories, and testimonies of faith rather than inflexible tests of faith. That’s the school OUR tradition favors – testimonies not tests of faith – and while we haven’t always gotten this right – think of the genocide our founders enacted upon first nations people or our acceptance of slavery for way too long – one of the great poets and hymn writers of the Congregational Way, James Russell Lowell of Cambridge, MA, put it like this in Once to Every Man and Nation: New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; they must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth. Contemporary commentators insist that the readings for today are so curious and problematic that we MUST wrestle with them in worship, so here’s a few concerns:

As the story goes, when the wilderness people (of the Exodus) continue to grumble and misbehave, God gets impatient and angry and sends poisonous snakes among the people, whose bites cause several fatalities. The people confess their sin and ask Moses to intercede on their behalf. God relents and has Moses fashion a bronze serpent as an antidote. So, while God has offered a remedy, the snakes are still running loose, and people are still getting bitten… This story shows us a God who hurts and heals; a deity somewhat arbitrary and unpredictable whose moral ambiguity borders on abuse and should be called into question because the path of Jesus abhors even a hint of divine torment and terrorism.

The spirit, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus thoroughly rejects any portrayal of the holy as arbitrary and vindictive. As the Reverend Dr. Bruce Epperly put it writing in the on- line website Patheos: “If there is any redemption in this passage, it comes in recognizing that an orderly universe can involve pain as well as joy and that acts have consequences… any-thing more must be denounced as unworthy of Jesus and his love.” I would add that as St. John notes: the bronze serpent that Moses raises symbolically prefigures the Cross of Christ. Scholars at the SALT Project write: 

While God could have saved the Israelites by having them look upon any object at all, the chosen remedy is to look upon a bronze serpent, a vivid reminder — even in the midst of healing and restoration — of two things: first, the deadly, self-destructive nature of sin; and second, God's gracious transformation of even our worst into part of our redemption. The Christian cross can play this dual role, too reminding us of the many ways we turn against each other in violence and betray-al, and at the same time, of God’s graceful, transformative forgiveness and deliverance Like St. Paul wrote: we KNOW that in everything God works for good with those who are commit-ted to love. Not that everything IS good, but that God’s love is greater than even evil.

In the 21st century, connecting church with the cultural shift that engulfs us must include calling out bad theology even as we highlight the awesome accounts of sacred love that are beautiful, true, noble, and salvific. I like the way Pastor Dan Sadlier of Mosaic Church in NYC put it when he said that while formal theology can be confusing, the way of Jesus is pretty clear:

We move toward the poor, empower women, create space at the table for everyone who wants to eat, throw parties, widen the boundaries of family, poke holes in oppressive systems, don’t retaliate with violence, forgive the enemy, don’t horde, and be present with one another. Heal, share, and trust God as you push back the darkness because the kingdom is within and among us all.

So what do we do with the ambiguities and contradictions of today’s gospel? As you might expect, to make sense of this in OUR generation involves a choice. Some, like the Pharisees before us, are inclined limit and segregate God’s grace saying: ONLY those who confess Jesus as Lord the way I do are entitled to experience eternal life after life on earth is done. Others, and I place myself in this group, perceive at least three reasons to trust that salvation is way more inclusive.

First, throughout John’s Gospel, “the world” (kosmos in NT Greek) is a term used as shorthand for sin or estrangement from God — be in the world but not OF the world – which makes it all the more striking that Jesus says, “God so loved the world” (the kosmos) not, “God hated the world but loved the remnant of those who believe.” Second, in Torah, when God provides the remedy of the bronze serpent, the strategy is not to save just a few well-deserving Israelites, but rather to save “everyone” who had turned against God and then (for arguably less-than-noble reasons) sought deliverance (Num 21:8). And third, as if to clarify this very question, in the next verse Jesus underlines that God sends the Son not “to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). (SALT Project)

I think this causes us to make a choice: do we trust that God loves ALL of creation and is doing all that is possible to heal rather than hurt? Or, is God’s love eclipsed by divine violence so that we worship not a God of mercy but one of retribution and suffering?

· To save, you see, is NOT to offer a pass to get into heaven at the END of this life – although that’s not excluded – rather the New Testament word we translate as salvation – soteria from the root sozo – means… to heal. To rescue from danger, pain, as well as the consequences of sin, confusion, and brokenness.

· So, what I hear in our new context is that those who choose to trust the way of Jesus – the path of forgiveness and compassion – are made whole. Healed. Empowered to pass on God’s love to others. Fr. Richard Rohr likes to say: if our wounds and sins are NOT transformed with-in, they are transmitted outwardly to others – most often to those we love the most. To be a part of the charism of this era, therefore, calls us to greet one another with open hands and arms rather than closed fists, hearts, and minds.

Reality is calling our community to incarnate an alternative to the chaos both by being creative and faithful to the gospel that Jesus makes flesh; and, by wrestling with the hard, troubling, and often unacceptable bad theology found in the good book. Symbolically, these challenging parts of Scripture are a lot like you and me: they’re real – they have to be dealt with – and by grace we need not be afraid to engage and be changed by them. Bad theology, like aspects of our own inner brokenness, you see, can point us in new and better directions IF we’re paying attention.

And that’s where sacred humor becomes part of God’s salvation plan: over the years I’ve discerned that most of us do NOT respond well to criticism, challenge, or what some overly pious people call speaking the truth in love. Most of the time, we just walk away from such insights and never find out the real issue. But bring a bit of self-deprecating humor to the table and suddenly hard truths within can be owned, named, accepted, and addressed. And you know who tells a GREAT story sat-urated in spiritual humility and humor? The mystics of Islam: the Sufis. One of my favorites involves the Holy Fool known as Mullah Nasruddin.

One day, the Mullah was sitting in a tea shop when a friend excitedly came in. ‘I’m so happy, my old friend,’ he gushed, ‘I’m about to get married and wanted to know if you had ever thought of marriage?’ “Oh many times,” smiled the old man. “When I was young, I very much wanted to and set out in search of the perfect woman. I travelled far and wide to find her. I went first to Damas-cus where I met a beautiful woman: she was gracious, kind, and deeply spiritual, but had no worl-dly knowledge, so I decided she was not the perfect wife. Later I travelled further and went to Bagdad and met a woman who was both spiritual and wise in the ways of the world. She was beautiful in many ways but we did not communicate well. Finally, after much searching, in Cairo I found her: she was spiritually deep, graceful, compassionate, savvy, and beautiful in every way. She was at home in the world and at home in the realms beyond it. In her I knew I had finally found the perfect woman.’ At which point his friend blurted out: ‘Why then why did you not marry her, Mullah?’ “Alas,” sighed Nasruddin as he put down his tea cup while shaking his head, “Alas, it seems that she was searching for the perfect man.’

We need not be trapped by bad theology: its existence in our Bible gives us a chance to name it, call it out, make it good and get it right just as we do in prayer and contemplation. And I submit to you that the more we do – and do it playfully and tenderly, with humble humor – the more God’s truth will shine within and among us to lead us from the darkness into the light.

For this is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And here’s why: so that no one need be destroyed; by trusting him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.

And THIS is the good news for today for those with ears to hear.

what a LONG strange trip its been...

One of the BEST rock lyrics ever penned is found in the Grateful Dead's anthem: Truckin'! It showed up on the American Beauty album in 1970 and became an instant winner. Written by Garcia, Weir, Lesh, and Hunter (three instrumentalists and their erstwhile lyricist) about "life on the road," Truckin' is a mid-tempo shuffle that joyfully proclaims: "What a LONG strange trip its been!" Truer words have rarely been shared in all of rock and roll.

The first time I heard this I had just entered the first year class at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, WI. I was already a Deadhead and LOVED Working Man's Dead. Taking in the groove of that era with other music geeks and progressive intellectuals was like a smorgasbord: new songs were happening every week and that fall was all about After the Gold Rush and Dr. John the Night Tripper PLUS the new Dead  and Lennon's solo album. What a trip that some 50+ years later, my precious 10 year old grandson is playing tunes from American Beauty. And, of course, the best of both Revolver and Rubber Soul.

relearning how to say yes and say no...

One of the challenges of my current incarnation is accepting limitations: it is a counter-cultural commitment to sometimes say no, right? Especially for clergy. Stanley Hauerwas once described clergy burnout as the result of living like a quivering mass of availability. Twenty-five years ago I began to learn about this commitment through the spiritual practice of "saying yes, saying no." (for more information see:

https://practicingourfaith.org/practices/saying-yes-and-saying-no/) Martin Copenhaver, retired President of Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, tells the story of his mother's strict NO when it came to sabbath keeping. He wrote:

At first, saying No usually looks like a form of self-denial. And often it is only later that we can see that the No is really the key to freedom. For instance, when my mother was a girl her family kept the Sabbath quite strictly. In accordance with the biblical mandate, they would observe Sunday as a day of rest. My grandmother would bake bread on Saturday to be served with warm milk the next day—their traditional Sunday meal—so that she would not have to cook on the Sabbath. When Sunday arrived, the children would not do their normal chores. The Sunday newspaper was kept on the top shelf of the China cabinet until Monday morning. They couldn’t talk on the telephone and they weren’t allowed to play any games, either. As a boy, I remember thinking that it sounded awful. My mother would say, “Well, actually, that was my favorite day of the week. After church in the morning, we would spend the day together. It was a busy family, so it was nice to have a day when you could eat dinner together without being so rushed, take walks and catch up with each other. Or we could spend time with friends.”

My aversion to Blue Laws notwithstanding, something was lost when Sunday became just another day of doing business. Not that I favor returning to a watered down theocracy, mind you. Not at all. Simultaneously, however, I know that actually articulating a commitment to Sabbath - and living into it - is baffling to most contemporary Americans. We may lament that our children and grandchildren have sports events when they might be in worship - or that families struggling to make ends meet now regularly work on both Saturday and Sunday - but our behavior tells a different story. The art and discipline of keeping the Sabbath holy has been ceded to devout Jews and Muslims as Christians rush about with more and more important tasks to complete. 

Back in our early days of Sabbath keeping I was scolded by a Cleveland matriarch for my selfishness in not answering the phone on my Sabbath day off.  The very notion that I would opt out of engaging was an affront to her - especially, she said pointedly: because our pledge pays your salary! In addition to the loss of Sabbath consciousness her fury was fueled by an understanding that a pastor is just like any other employee in the so-called helping professions. And as much as I protested and challenged such narrowness: it's in the cultural air we breathe and not easily eradicated. Copenhaver adds:

It is not insignificant that the Sabbath was established when the Jews were in exile. Their Babylonian captors wanted to get as much as possible from the Hebrew slaves. So they tried to make them work every day. But the Jews rebelled and insisted that one day a week they would refrain from working so that they could worship their God. In short, they said, “No. We are good for more than labor. We are made in the image of God. This is the God who rules over us all, Jew and Babylonian. Call us slaves if you will, but one day a week we will remind ourselves that we are precious in the sight of the one true God.” Somehow the 4 Babylonians knew that this was a form of rebellion that could not be crushed. And so they relented. One day a week they did not expect the Jews to work and allowed them to worship. (NOTE: you can read his entire reflection @

https://practicingourfaith.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Learn-to-Say-No.pdf)

The mystical wisdom-keeper of Western contemplation, the Rev. Dr. Cynthia
Bourgeault, notes that challenges to our commitments (be they Sabbatarian or not) are necessary in helping us strengthen, deepen, and modify them as needed. Questions and controversy, you see, reflect the healthy tension of natural new life where outdated truths are discarded and eternal insights fortified. How did the poet Rilke put it in Letter to a Young Poet?

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

But let's be clear: saying NO is still counter-cultural. It remains a discipline to be practiced. And requires patience along with a willingness to fail in order to sustain its life giving qualities. As a dear friend from L'Arche Ottawa wrote me: you can't keep adding commitments to your day without relinquishing others if you want a balanced life, ok? Upon accepting a call to serve as an Interim Minister during a time when my musical options were starting to flourish showed me just how much I needed a "saying yes/saying no" refresher course. Reality was squeezing some commitments out even as new ones were being revealed. Some, like needing to stay local during key holidays rather than traveling to loved ones, broke my heart. AND this reality is calling us all to become more creative and inventive in finding ways to stay connected. We haven't cracked that nut yet but the possibilities are beginning to strike me as wonderful even as I grieve what is being lost. Talk about paradox, yes?

The cultural/political/spiritual/emotional need to revive a healthy commitment to saying NO is all too obvious in 2024. But NOT in a theocratic/return to blue laws way. No, our rebellion must be a playful and tender rebellion that helps us affirm the best of this era while relinquishing habits that no longer celebrate life. Today, as part of MY Sabbath, I'm off to the library. There isn't a better place to practice saying yes and no for they are both part of the dance of life. I like how Copenhaver's essay concludes:

Here as elsewhere, it is not simply that we must learn how to say No to some things and Yes to other things. The two are more closely related than that. It is like they are two steps of the same dance. The No is implied by the Yes. The No frees us to say Yes. We say No as a form of Christian practice so that, finally, in the end, our lives might sing a word of affirmation: Yes, yes, yes!

recognizing that reality is the will of god...

Since before February, I've been wrestling with HOW do I keep connecting with those beyond my immediate faith community who are important to me now that I have taken on the assignment of being an Interim Pastor for a few years? I put my weekly spirituality reflections, Small is Holy, on hold in the hope that I would be able to find another day or time for them. To be candid, today I had to admit that while I still don't have the answer to this I wanted, two inter-related truths have bubbled to the surface that speak volumes:

+ First, given my new commitment to nourishing the faith community of Palmer, including worship leadership and pastoral care, after linking the music we're making locally with the church it's become clear that most of my time, energy, and focus has been consumed. 

+ And second, as Meister Eckhardt might suggest: this IS my answer. Somewhere along the way I read Matthew Fox quoting Eckhardt as saying: Reality is the will of God; it can always be better but we must start with what is real. The Serenity Prayer affirms much the same truth: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. What I must figure out is how to share our music work beyond the confines of each gig as music is where I currently connect to those beyond my faith community. 

Initially, this wasn't clear. I wanted to find a way to keep doing what I had been doing even while adding a bold new commitment. Truth be told, however, I have neither the wisdom nor the energy to do more outwardly than give myself to the church and music along with an essential commitment to family and caring for Di. It's humbling - and rather sad - to realize and accept that along with the new blessings are some unexpected consequences causing my to relinquish a discipline that I've savored for four years. What I sense now, however, is that Small is Holy needs to morph into a music /poetry connection - I don't yet know how - but that seems to be where my journey has taken me thus far. Stay tuned for future developments.

celebrating grace outside the box...

Today was a blessing - and my hope is that the blessing ripens as we move from Sunday morning worship to Sunday afternoon music party. Two simple thoughts about each gathering:

+ This week I wound up crafting three very different drafts of my reflection. The first was too heady - the second spent too much time on the bad theology of the Numbers reading - while the third discerned a playful and new take on Nicodemus. What I keep discovering in the process is that my preaching is NOT just about sharing Bible facts and insights. Rather, it is opening up the blessings of grace, challenging the parts that are punitive and/or simply wrong, all while reiterating the joy of living into God's love. The story of Nicodemus in St. John 3 invites us to move beyond the baggage of being "born again" to the more inclusive invitation of recognizing when we are "sired from above." Not that born again is bad, it is not; it is just too limited. Yes, some among us have a Damascus Road event - those stunning, awesome inward/outward encounters with forgiveness that change our lives forever - while most of us are awakened and renewed by grace incrementally. One way is NOT better than another for it ALL comes from the holy. Our response to grace is what matters. Born again rhetoric has only been around for about 100 years and offers only a one size fits all description of inner transformation. If today's reaction has legs, a lot of folk are hungry to know that their experiences are holy, too.

+ That's part of why doing this afternoon's music party is so important: it, too, is a way to share beauty, depth, and solidarity as an integral albeit non-traditional path to inner renewal. Like Richard Rohr says: "If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.”  We're doing a LOT of quiet and reflective tunes - Fast Cars, Breathe, Times Like These, Lucky Now, Landslide, One Voice, and Find the Cost of Freedom - both because we've created some stunning 3-4 part harmonies and to showcase the band's depth. People KNOW we can rock and roll - now it is time to show the poetry and nuance. This means making music with and for a very mixed gathering is every bit as prayerful as this morning's worship for me - and I hope for those who attend. 

My hope is that I'll be able to video some of the music and share it as yet one more way to "rejoice in the Lord always (and all ways, too!)  

the sacrament of music in mud season...

This weekend, Lent IV in the Christian tradition, is also the unofficial start of Mud Season in the Berkshires. There's certain to be a "surprise" snow storm still to come in April - there always is - and locals always say: this is such a shock! Nevertheless, spring is starting all around us - and that means MUD before much else. That's a rather culturally appropriate symbol on the way to Easter, don't you think? There's muck and mire to wade through before the beauty and bounty of new life.

Further, if you are truly sacramental in your spirituality, you'll rejoice in the mayhem as much as the miracle because you can't have one without the other. Many of us are unable to trust grace till it heals our hearts. We're anxious and even angry about how little we can actually change, fix, or control till we experience the deep rest and renewal that occurs when we relinquish our illusions of control and rest into the unforced rhythms of God's love. Same for serenity: it comes NOT by taking on more busyness or effort; but by trusting God to be God and accepting just what is ours to contend with. How did Jesus put it? There's already enough worry in each day without adding to it!

So, to celebrate - and incarnate - the sacred nature of mud season: we're hosting a music party at the home of one of 3D's musicians. There will be beer and wine, finger foods, and whatever else guests choose to bring. It is a "by invitation only" affair (but if you want to come, just shoot me a note, ok?) For the past month or so, the band has been working on a variety of reflective songs in addition to some kick ass rockers. I am particularly moved by our take on Leslie Duncan's "Love Song," Anna Nalick's "Breathe," Stevie Nicks' "Landslide," the Wailin; Jenny's "One Voice," and the Doobie Brothers' romp through "Jesus Is Just Alright." It should be a grand little party - and part of the reason is that our commitment is to sharing love through music. There is precious little ego in this band. Tons of willingness to experiment, too as well as an abiding respect and affection for one another - and our guests.

We also believe that the more our culture and politics become brittle, the more we are called to make alternatives flesh. Visible. Audible. Tangible. If you are in need of a pick me up, I hope you'll send me a note and I'll make sure you get the logistics to join us.

lent three: living as embodied prayers...

TEXT: John 2: 13-23: The Passover of the Jewish community was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves where the money changers were seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, with the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” Those who had gathered for prayer then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” And Jesus answered: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” They Jews said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

+

This morning, I want us to consider how our bodies are an integral part of our Lenten discipline – specifically our flesh as embodied prayers. We all HAVE one, you know? They may be young or old, tall or short, healthy or hurting. Karoline Lewis of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN wrote: “We all have bodies and all too often we don’t really know what to DO with them.” Sometimes:

We desperately want to change them, improve them, shrink them, hide them. We want to tighten them, shape them, mold them. We compare ours to others. We describe them with odd category-ies, like fruit. We analyze them, take them apart, and we like some parts more than others. We take them for granted. We look at them in the mirror with disgust or with modest admiration. We keep the lights off so that they cannot be seen; or, we expose them in ways that leave little to the imagination.

St. John’s gospel gives us a lot to chew on today – and not JUST about the unity of flesh, blood, and spirit. For the next few weeks, the appointed gospel texts come from St. John’s writing so sometime before Easter:

· We’ll need to clarify the tragic historical mistake made by the early Christian community that conflated a once time specific internecine squabble between Jews – some who followed Jesus and others who did not – into the sanctification of antisemitism for two millennia.

· We’ll also try to put the anger of Jesus and his furious civil disobedience against the money-changers and merchants of sacrificial animals in the courtyard of the Temple into context, con-sider how his assertion that his body was every bit as holy as the Temple itself – a critique of all spiritualities of sacrifice – and ponder what Mary Magdalene’s anointing of Jesus means in anticipation of his Passion.

And that’s not even opening the door to the spiritual and political parallels these ancient words have with some of the challenges we’re facing today. That could warrant a rich conversation and analysis of what happens when religious leaders get into bed with political authorities. But today the Spirit has led me in a very different direction: I’d like to contemplate what an embodied Lent might mean for you and me – or how our flesh and blood can become living prayers, ok?

You may recall that St. John’s gospel starts by telling us that at just the right time in the history of creation, God’s essence – the Word – became flesh and dwelt among us. The text says that since the beginning of time, the Word – the essence of the Lord – was waiting to become incarnate. So, at the right time, the time of God’s choosing, this holy essence took on flesh and blood, literally pitching his tent right next to ours to sojourn with us – that is, walk with us – so that we might see a one-of-a-kind glory saturated in generosity both inside and out. Tradition rightly insists that generosity shapes God’s grace as made visible to us in Jesus. It only stands to reason, therefore, that we’re encouraged to respond with a comparable largesse.

You may also recall that when St. Paul was asked to define how we are to respond to God’s generous love, he crafted Romans 12: Here’s what I want you to do with the help of God: pre-sent your bodies to the world as a living sacrifice. Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t be-come so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. In-stead, fix your attention on the Lord and you’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to the lowest level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. To express our gratitude to the Lord, we’re to practice living as embodied prayers for the world.

That’s what the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus shows us: love is greater than death – and love wins. But most of us aren’t used to seeing sacramentally – that is, recognizing reality as well as its deeper insights and truths – so we must train our eyes to see the holy amidst our human-ity. We need to SEE God’s truth in a tangible way, an incarnation we can trust, a manner of seeing the BIG picture in faith. Did you know that the word belief or faith – pistis in New Testament Greek and emuhan in the Old Testament’s Hebrew – is NOT about dogma, doctrine, catechisms, creeds or ideas? Faith is about trust – embodied trust – and I’d like to show you what I mean if I can have a volunteer, please?

Oh, you want to know WHAT you’ll be asked to do BEFORE you volunteer? Nothing dangerous, I assure you, something simple: I want to see who among us TRUSTS this stool to be a stool that will hold you up when you sit on it, ok? Anyone willing to help me with this demonstration? You see, you can say out loud that you trust this stool, you can hold a host of ideas about this stool in your mind, but you aren’t actually trusting it till you put buns on the seat. Anyone? (NOTE: Today a young tween volunteered - she first said I trust it because it looks sturdy - so I said: that's an observation but only verbal. I won't know you trust this stool till you sit on it and... she did. To the congregation's applause and delight.)

Trust – faith – is embodied not abstract, ok? St. John’s gospel asks us to practice trusting that the One who is holy not only brought the essence of the sacred to birth in the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth, but that the more Jesus practiced trusting God’s truth to be his guide, the more he GREW in wisdom and blessings.

· Does anyone recall what Jesus heard from the heavens – and his heart – when he came up from the baptismal waters in the River Jordan? YOU ARE MY BELOVED. Those words – YOU ARE MY BELOVED – were NOT for Jesus alone. By faith – by trust – YOU – and you and you and you and me – are God’s beloved, too.

· Incrementally, we mature into this blessing the more we practice living by trust. St. Paul was clear: we see by faith not just by sight alone? Practicing trust is how we embody God’s love and grace. It seems to me that’s what God was telling us when the Word became flesh in Jesus. And if it’s true for Jesus, then by association and faith it’s true for us too: trusting God’s grace in our flesh is the foundation of a living and salvific faith.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that poets are much better at affirming this truth than many theologians. I’m not going to unpack today WHY the church so often contributes to our confusion – and even sometimes hatred – of our bodies. I’ll save that for another sermon. And I do not want to go into the way culture and fashion warps our perspective except to say: they do. No, just give an ear to what old Walt Whitman told us about our bodies: I sing the body electric…

A man's body is sacred, and a woman's body is sacred, too. No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers' gang? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you, each has his or her place in the procession of creation.

ONE of the reasons we sing in worship is to practice trusting ourselves to become embodied prayers by expressing praise and gratitude with our WHOLE being – from the inside out. Not long ago I found out that scientists have discovered that when a group is singing something they love together that our hearts start beating more or less together in unison? The music, our voices, and our flesh and blood tenderly become ONE body guided by the Spirit. And in our case, that means the body of Christ as well as a community of compassion. 

Same for our celebration of Eucharist. In this sacrament we physically take IN to our bodies the mystical essence of Jesus so that Christ may nourish our bodies to pass on the generous blessings of God once worship is over. One of my favorite poets writing about the body, the bard of Provincetown, Mary Oliver of blessed memory, put it like this:

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Your body matters: it matters to God as the Lord’s beloved; it matters to Jesus who has NO body now but yours (as St. Teresa of Avila told us adding: Yours are the eyes with which he looks com-passionately on this world and yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.) Your body mat-ters to this community, to this church, and even to strangers. Your body matters because by faith, hope, and love, you are becoming an embodied prayer who makes Jesus visible to the world. That’s what Jesus did wherever he showed up: he made God’s grace visible more often than not by shar-ing peace, blessing, and healing to troubled flesh and blood.

· Think of the parable of the prodigal son who recognized his brokenness only when he woke up physically hungry and surrounded by ritually unclean pigs in a foreign land. When he repented – that is, when he changed direction in his life – he was embraced by his father and welcomed to a feast.

· What about the healing of the young man possessed by demons who lived in a graveyard? After banishing the abusive spirits, Jesus made certain that he fed and clothed this young man in need. And just to drive the point home, where do you think he GOT clothes for that broken body? From his disciples! He asked his followers to ante-up so that the one who was naked and alone could be clothed. In other words, he asked Peter, James, John, Magdalene and all the rest to practice sharing grace in a tangible and essential way.

· Same for the woman who had been hemorrhaging for seven years: she was made physically well in her body so that she might return to community life and spread the blessings. Over and again, the heart and soul of Jesus brings new life to worn out bodies. During Lent we now cast our eyes upon the body of Jesus: a body washed in the waters of baptism, a body that was anointed, then beaten, nailed to a Cross, and placed in a tomb. Lent tells and re-tells this story of Christ’s body so that we might listen to what OUR bodies are telling us about the sac-red, the desecrated, the ordinary, the extraordinary, and everything in-between.

When Jesus told his opponents that HIS body would be raised again in three days, he not only link-ed HIS flesh and blood with the presence and location of our living God, but yours and mine, too. He was telling us that by faith and trust in God’s grace we no longer need be confined to the Temple – or zendo – a mosque or church. Grace and God are now portable in our bodies. The historical incarnation made flesh in Jesus ended on the Cross – now, by faith, sharing this as God’s beloved has been passed on to you and me to make flesh every day. My prayer today is: Lord, may this be true among us. Amen.