time and rivers

Posted on March 2, 2013 by emacaulay

Of time and rivers flowing
The seasons make a song
And we who live beside her
Still try to sing along
Of rivers, fish, and men
And the season still a-coming
When she’ll run clear again.

So many homeless sailors,
So many winds that blow
I asked the half blind scholars
Which way the currents flow
So cast your nets below
And the gods of moving waters
Will tell us all they know.

The circles of the planets
The circles of the moon
The circles of the atoms
All play a marching tune
And we who would join in
Can stand aside no longer
Now let us all begin.
Pete Seeger

How is it we are given this gift of life?

Having returned from vacation a scant 24 hours ago, I officiated this morning at the funeral of a woman who blessed. She blessed through laughter and quick humor. She blessed through a willingness to “join in” as Seeger sings in the lyrics above.

She lived a singular life; unrepeatable and precious.

And so it is for each who join in.

I don’t know what tomorrow holds. My prayers for my loves and the real clamor of my longings sound relentlessly in my soul.

Sometimes the “I want” is a gong noisy and clanging and that gong has the power to create such cacophony within that the still small assurances of the Holy are near overwhelmed.

And then I remember.

Mine is to cast my nets below; deep into the moving waters of grace that will tell me all I need to know.

Still. Small. Powerful. Deep.

Let us all begin.

dust

Posted on February 14, 2013 by emacaulay

It is so elemental:

A thumb-full of ash traced on forehead. Eyes that meet as words are spoken about inevitable death. The deep knowing and willingness to name the beauty and vulnerability of living and the sometimes elusiveness of surety. The breath of the Holy inspiring being.

We gather each Ash Wednesday and share such intimacy.

And we are changed.

steadfast

Posted on January 17, 2013 by emacaulay

Today we celebrated the life of a woman who lived 101 years.

Gathered for worship were her children and grandchildren and friends and folk who knew themselves to have spent time and life with a graceful powerhouse.

We do that at church. We hold the space for celebrations and life markings. We welcome people we may never see again and for a time we share voices in song and stories through hearts.

There are times when the beleaguer of “doing church” can make the heart heavy. The tending of relationships and buildings and protocols and brusings can near obscure the reason for our being.

And then there are services that remind us that community in Christ matters. It matters deeply.

For 101 years the woman we celebrated today held space in her being for the power of God in her life. The fruit of her faith was palpable in her people and in the air and prayer we shared.

I’m grateful. I’m grateful for the steadfast devotion that has prompted people to support a church that has held funerals for nearly 160 years. I’m grateful for the privilege of weaving worship that names resurrection and wonder. I’m grateful for the hands that bake bars and pour coffee.

I’m grateful for the reminder that “doing church” matters. It matters a lot.

Advent 20

Posted on December 21, 2012 by emacaulay

Bulletins are printed, folded, and stuffed.

Candles are put into holders – new ones this year!!! – and set.

Sugar has taken up a seemingly permanent place on our staff table.

All is in readiness for worship on Sunday and Christmas Eve worship (4:00 PM and 11:00 PM) on Monday.

And now we wait.

For preachers, this is a time of fervent mulching and prayer. Yes, we pray for the perfect sermon on Christmas Eve, but really, that isn’t the point.

The point for this preacher is that there is an almost physical desire that hope would be named as more important than fear in this world. My hope is that those who come in out of the cold might find welcome in this house. My hope is that the power of Christ Jesus might take up the places of empty and despair that sound such clang in the souls of the walking wounded who include our very selves.

Oh, I have such hopes.

And those hopes are perhaps made more strong by the wash of violence and snarl that seem to be dominating our collective consciousness.

We cannot afford to be a people of hate. We cannot afford to allow it any purchase in our being. We cannot afford to be cavalier about our faith and our witness because it takes enormous and conscious effort to be a voice crying out in the wilderness of this time: Prepare the way of our God. The wounded will be made whole. All flesh shall see it together. For the mouth and the heart of our God have spoken it.

We are ready. We are ready we are ready we are ready.

We are ready for peace to speak and soak into the rough places.

We are ready.

Advent 19

Posted on December 20, 2012 by emacaulay

“Salvation” does not

Mean liberation from tasks

We alone can do

Haiku by Vic Hummert

Worship on Sunday centers on the song of Mary. Upon being told that she is to bear the hope of the world, that even then the pulse of promise resided within her, Mary says “yes” to magnifying God.

She says yes, she sets out on a journey in order to share the news and ponder what it might mean for her. She sits in the company of an older kinswoman, Elizabeth, and it is then that her soul sings revolution song: the mighty will be brought down, the poor lifted up, and the world forever changed by the child in her womb.

Mary agreed to magnify holiness.

So too might we. We might open ourselves to holy invitation to nurture within and through us the healings and witness that we are uniquely called to share. The tasks we alone can do are as wildly and wonderfully different as we are.

Day by day the invitation to be magnifiers is delivered.

Through our “yes” we participate in the deliverance of “those who walk in darkness and the shadow of death” (Isaiah 9:2).

We offer light to those struggling with heart aches and despair.

We work for justice in order that the hungry might be fed.

We pay attention to the ways we are kin to all of creation.

We begin to act from the place of love.

We trust the life and love growing within us and we agree to consider what it might mean to apprehend ourselves as pregnant with promise.

“Yes” changes everything.

It did.

It does.

Advent 18

Posted on December 19, 2012 by emacaulay

My mom is coming for Christmas.

It’s a seemingly simple sentence dense in power.

We are, we two, not unlike lots of moms and daughters. We have spent the 55 years of my life clashing wills and life views.

My mother is a woman who knows with certainty what is seemly and what is not and her surety has extended to the needful state of cupboards (pristine!) and planned menus for each meal.

Her daughter? Not so much. For some reason my mother was presented with a girl-child who resisted blacks and whites and rebelled against imposed order.

We have lived, we two, a challenge.

I don’t know what it is about mothers and daughters. The desire to protect, the temptation to create in our own image or the image of what we wish we had been able to able to call our own; so many things swirl beneath the surface of this elemental heart dance.

What I know is that my relationship with my mother affects my daughters and will affect their daughters. If there is work to do, running from it robs not only me and my mom but the generations that follow.

So we have worked. When it might have made sense to let it go and play it safe, we have engaged with each other and risked the hurt and vulnerability of letting each other know that it matters. Our honest hearts won’t let go of each other.

My mom is coming for Christmas. She will be in the midst of the feasting and the laughter and I know full well that she will bite back comments about how things might be better organized and I know full well that sometimes those comments will slip their way out of her mouth and into my ear.

But they don’t have to take up space in my heart.

What takes up space in my heart is profound admiration for the mighty mite that is my mom. She has endured much, lived much, and loved much. She has not let go of me.

Gathering for Christmas means readying our hearts. We will mourn those absent, mark in our hearts the shifts and losses and remember years gone past when things were different.

But oh, the chance to be present to the wonder of the Word Made Flesh in our midst is stunning gift. We get to learn what it is to love.

My mom is coming for Christmas.

Thanks be to God.

Advent 16

Posted on December 17, 2012 by emacaulay

A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse. The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11: 1a, 6

Children were our ministers.

We arrived at church yesterday morning heavy of heart, raw, and peeled back. After hearing the news of bullets unleashed in an elementary school and after seeing the faces of snuffed lives, there was an almost physical need to gather together. We needed the Word. We needed to see each other and remember the larger story that this recent violence could not dim.

We needed to be church.

On the docket for the morning was precisely what our hearts longed for: our children up front, in a place where we could sing their beauty with our eyes. They were sharing the annual pageant; the telling of the time when a holy – as all children are – child was born into astounding vulnerability.

There were singing angels and wrestling shepherds and sheep with pink tights and a Mary and baby Jesus with matching red hair and a proudly sentinel Joseph and there were in the sanctuary people with their hearts bruised, open, and hungry for hope.

The children were our ministers.

There is unfathomable pain in this world, this we know. The quiet desperation lived by too many erupts in innocence-crushing ways. We wonder at such times if there is any Balm in Gilead powerful enough to be antidote. Because we are willing to summon the courage to be open to all that life has to offer us, we are bound, one to the other, in the ache provoked by unspeakable violence.

As a people who seek to follow the teachings of a babe born in a manger who dared to call us to love, we were reminded by the children that there is more to the story than executions.

There is resurrection; resurrection practiced in hugs and tears and gathering and remembering and choosing to live in such a way that maybe, just maybe, we will practice love in the living of our days.

On Sunday we were reminded that angels sing yet. In the swirl of pain, angels sing yet.

Led by our children, we could remember.

Advent Day 12

Posted on December 13, 2012 by emacaulay

Rejoice in Christ always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. Jesus is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4: 4 – 7

Here is what I see: I see gentleness being lived in community.

Every Wednesday at 8:00 AM I meet with men from the church for bible study. They have been at this for years. They are seasoned souls who have lived a lot of life and they are beautiful.

And, they are getting on in years. We check in with each other weekly and the list of bodily challenges is as varied as the men around the table. There is a constancy in the sharing: Growing older involves the deeply spiritual discipline of letting go.

Some of the men around the table have “had the talk” with their children. In a poigniant and circular playing out of love, their children have asked to share with them a fact of life: they are worried about their parents driving. They believe that getting behind the wheel of a car is not safe any longer. They love their dads enough to share their concerns.

It is hard to go from being the co-maker of family law to the recepient of same.

The beauty that I see is their willingness to reflect upon the changes they are experiencing. There is laughter thrown in and there is a lot of grace.

What moved me in the “let your gentleness be known to everyone” department happened as I was leaving for a meeting directly following bible study. Out in the parking lot, the men who drive were loading up their cars with the bible study members who no longer drive.

They ushered each other into the waiting chariots with a sense of reverence and care.

The promise of “Jesus is near” was made flesh in the parking lot of our church. Ninety-three year olds drive the snowy streets of South Minneapolis in order that their brothers might sit at table and unpack scripture.

Jesus lives.

Advent 11

Posted on December 12, 2012 by emacaulay

Tonight at 6:00 PM we gather for worship. The service is one of the most powerful we offer at Richfield UMC.

We call it an Advent Service of Hope and Healing.

While around us the culture seems intent upon denying and sidestepping places of loneliness and loss in this season, we pause as faith community and mark the wisdom of our heart aches.

There is something about the Advent season of purposeful waiting for the light of hope that stirs in us awareness of loss. We miss the physical presence of people in our lives who have blessed and vexed us. We miss the ways we used to encounter life in a way that felt simpler and less tentacled. We miss our children’s footie-jammied presence in our daily life. We miss, we mark, we name, and we are present to all of the major and minor losses that make for honest living.

Tonight during worship we bow before those losses and ask for them to lead us into wholeness and wisdom.

We will savor scripture and silence. We will allow the singing of Silent Night to move us. We will light candles to mark our questions and we will know the power of giving over to God the burdens and beauty of our souls.

I hope you will join us. If you cannot, I hope you will pause at some point on this day and listen to the wisdom of your heart.

Folded into the power of community or sitting in a moment of mindfulness, may we each name the power of stumble and question, healing and hope.

The Healing Time

                                                Finally on my way to yes
                                                I bump into
                                                all the places
                                                where I said no
                                                to my life
                                                all the untended wounds
                                                the red and purple scars
                                                those hieroglyphs of pain
                                                carved into my skin, my bones,
                                                those coded messages
                                                that send me down
                                                the wrong street
                                                again and again
                                                where I find them
                                                the old wounds
                                                the old misdirections
                                                and I lift them
                                                one by one
                                                close to my heart
                                                and I say    holy
                                                holy.

Advent 5

Posted on December 6, 2012 by emacaulay

Come, thou long expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art;
dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart.

Born thy people to deliver,
born a child and yet a King,
born to reign in us forever,
now thy gracious kingdom bring.
By thine own eternal spirit
rule in all our hearts alone;
by thine all sufficient merit,
raise us to thy glorious throne.

Charles Wesley

On Sunday our church is offering a Service of Lessons and Carols.

Through sumptuous scripture and song, the salvation song of faith and love will be spun out during our 9:00 AM worship service.

Last night during rehearsal for Sunday’s service I was moved by the beauty of it all.

In the sanctuary were some forty people who gave their voices and instruments to the intensely personal thing that is expressing faith publicly.

The organ held us, the oboe wrapped us, the strings danced us and the voices wove a witness that rolled through the sanctuary and into my heart.

Come, thou long expected Jesus. Come, set us free!

Set us free from our so-small sense of what is possible.

Set us free to move into the huge of grace and the life-shift of fully throwing in our lot with you.

Take up the spaces in our heart colonized by cynicism and shine instead the light of hope.

As we spend this fifth day of Advent intentionally breathing Holy Presence, may we each honor the prayer of our hearts:

From what do we long to be set free?
How can our freedom spark a movement of healing in this, God’s world?
What keeps us from saying “yes” to freedom and why would we waste a minute more in bondage?

Light a candle, sing a song, breathe ten intentional breaths, take a walk and smell the air. Do whatever it is that will remind you that you move and have your being in the company of a God who calls you to freedom.

Pray with heart: Come thou long expected Jesus.

Living Waters

Celebrating the Sacred

Category Archives: community in Christ