Category Archives: community in Christ

Advent Day Three

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O Come, O Come Emmanuel,

and ransom captive Israel,

that mourns in lowly exile here

until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice!  Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee,

O Israel.

 Somehow my soul has always leaned into the mournful power of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”.  Even as a child growing up, I felt the shiver of mystery whenever the above song of longing was sung.

The hymn begins with a prayer so deep we seldom name its power:  O Come, hope.  O Come, deliverance.  O Come, Dayspring from on high.

To begin the season of Advent, we name our soul longings.  Surrounded by the many stuffs of our lives, we name the places of echo and want.

We name the longings for peace in our world.

We name the loneliness that sounds in our soul.

We name the hunger we feel for compassion made food for the hungry.

We name the near desperate sense we have that the antidote for all the brokenness in creation seems so long in the coming.

O Come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer

our spirits by thy justice here;

disperse the gloomy clouds of night,

and death’s dark shadows put to flight.

Rejoice, Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee

O Israel.

 In the midst of the bustle of this holiday preparation marathon there is melancholy.

There ought be melancholy.

The promise and the gifting that is Christ Jesus is light and witness to answered prayers and gut sung entreaties.

And we know him not; not really.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

On this day give to God these questions:

 

For what does my soul long?

 

Who will I pray for during this Advent season?

 

How will I know my own call to live the vision of Jesus?

 

 

Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay

Advent Day Two

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Primary Wonder
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes:  the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void:  and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
                          Denise Levertov

Tonight our children will be at our house for a time of hall decking. 

We will put on the must-haves:  Julie Andrews and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  Boxes will be hauled from the basement, ornaments created in kindergarten will be unwrapped, the unspeakably ugly elf will be placed on the top of the tree, and we will make the house ready for Christmas.
 
Rituals matter.  
 
Truth be told, we have all been tempted to ditch the hassle, haven’t we?  Some years it feels almost impossible to summon the energy to adorn anything.  We can sometimes feel tired or overwhelmed and summoning the energy to festoon our homes feels like too much heart work to be borne.  Fold in grief over losses and shifts in our hearts over the years, and inertia is understandable.
 
But sometimes going through the motions brings healing.  We discover that while much in our lives has changed, some things remain constant: the wonder of Emmanuel, God With Us.
 
Jesus, born to make us free. Jesus, hope made flesh.
 
As you consider how it is you ready the home of your heart for this season, hold these questions:
 
What essential rituals help you to remember the power of the hope given in Jesus?
 
How will you deck the halls of your heart in order that hope and wonder might shine?
 
How will you remember the “Primary Wonder” of Emmanuel?
 
 

waves

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I thought I was done, except in a bittersweet way.

Preparing for a sermon this past Sunday, I was thinking a lot about heritage and the presence of the unseen guests at all of our Thanks Giving tables.  The text had to do with a faith forewoman so it gave great opportunity to consider witness and how it sounds through the ages.

I had my sermon set to go and had the perfect ending for it.  Some thirty years ago, my dad was interviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  It was a column about Thanksgiving and in it he reflected upon being a pastor and the gratitude he felt about being able to love and be loved wrapped in community.

The long ago article ended with a Thanksgiving prayer.  It hangs on my refrigerator at the cabin.  I knew that Leah was there and could relay it to me.  Except that she didn’t have her phone on.  As the night dwindled and there was no word, I knew that I was not going to be able to speak words written by a heart I so miss.

And then the grief swooped.  The ache in my heart over my dad’s death was so raw.  It has been sixteen years ago but I so wanted to “hear” his voice and share it with a people I get to be in ministry with.

And the empty place of his friendship and his not knowing of my beloved and and and all those things fell into my heart and I missed my dad and mourned the huge space left by his death.  All the little and large sharing of life we don’t get to share; it hurts.

It hurts.  And, it humbles.  I barrel along my days and sometimes I am brought up short and reminded that life and love are tender precious fierce things and I am blessed to live them, I am.

So may I share his prayer with you?

Dear God it’s me.  Remember?

And it is Thanksgiving time and turkeys and football games and family gatherings and all sorts of special things are here and so am I and so are you.

I know that we must be an abomination to you.  Our existence is a continuing, helpless pollution of your world.  

We are terribly concerned with messy affluence, the insane rains of our bombs keep falling.  It’s easy to mask who we are.

We clatter with heavy shoes over the lives, the sensitivities, the joys and heartaches, the realness of our brothers and sisters.

Appearances, of color, of dress, even of hair have a strange importance to us.

We talk of love and forget to do it.

But it is Thanksgiving time.

And I would like to thank you for everything I have and everyone I know.

For family and home in now and past, for friends.  For those who touch my life with love.

For letting me love others,

For a world of maybes,

For smells and touches and eyes that meet.

For my job, my car, the little things I take for granted.

And they are all from you, and thank you God.

Can I ask a little favor?

My thanks are so special, so big, so real –

Will you arrange it so I won’t have to say a table grace right out loud?

That would be so predictable, so polite.

I would far rather babble and shout.

Rev. George Macaulay

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

naming

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It seems to be vexatious to use feminine pronouns for the Holy.

A church volunteer remarked on an intriguing church bulletin.  Since we reuse our music inserts, Monday brings a day of sorting and recycling.

The Monday bulletin sorter noted that one of our church bulletins had been painstakingly edited (I surely hope not during the sermon!).  Throughout the Parker Palmer version of the Prayer of Jesus, in which God is addressed as Mother and Father, any reference to the feminine in the Holy had been deliberately crossed out.  It seems the notion of God as both male and female (and more) was too much to be borne on a given Sabbath.

I understand that language for God is a powerful thing.  Surely there is no intention of “taking away” each believer’s preferred name for God.

And, at Richfield UMC there is a deliberate choice made to include the feminine when imaging God.

For centuries, nearly the only language used for the Holy was male, even though scripture tells us from the get-go that In God’s image God made them; male and female God made them” and there are a myriad of non-male images of God used throughout scripture.  Even so, church culture through the ages reflected the seemingly sure sense that combing in the feminine would sully the power of the Holy.

Our Women and the Sacred group at church is reading “Half the Sky” by Kristof and WuDunn.  It is a really hard read, since it details the ongoing subjugation of women through sex trafficking, substandard maternal care and the use of rape as a weapon of war, among other things.

Statistics in the beginning of the book take the breath away:  “It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battle of the twentieth century.  More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.”  (“Half the Sky”, pg. xvii)

There is a life-denying denigration of women rampant in the world today.

Naming matters.

I am saddened that the use of feminine language for the Holy would cause church-goers to methodically excise such offending words from their worship bulletin.

But more than that, I am heart sickened by the deaths; day by day, minute by minute, of God’s createds born into woman form.

Perhaps when we can speak the sacred feminine, we will end the devastation that is woman kill.

May it be so.

salute

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I caught up with a woman via email this morning.

She was connecting around the recent election.  In her note was news of her mother.  It seems her mom is very ill.

Her mother is around the same age as my own mom.  We got to know each other in the course of living life and I love this woman.  We have scrapped and we have enjoyed each other’s minds and differences.  She is a theologian as sharp as any I have met and my books still bear post-it notes in her hand, through which she shared her questions and challenges in conversation with the author.

She has struggled openly and frankly with decisions I have made along the way of my life.

And, I love her.

What is it about people we encounter?  Sometimes the most unlikely folk become our life’s companions in ways precious and rare.  Surely a more unlikely friendship couldn’t much be imagined.

But we have shared life and mutual admiration and a mutual recognition of a slew of differences and that sharing on this day I know as gift.

As it will be; always.

teachers

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Tomorrow during worship we will name the saints of our church who have died in the year gone by.

We will name them and see their faces and feel their continued presence in our midst and we will know for our own selves the reality of our own naming someday.  We too (we pray) will be remembered by a community that acknowledges the witness we bore through the gift of our life.

I am mindful of the power of teachers.  This morning I met a beloved teacher for coffee.  We had not seen each other for nearly a decade.  Life happened and while we stayed connected the chance to savor each other’s presence in the flesh has been long in coming.

Mary is a few years older than I.  When I began college I auditioned for the choir there.  I had always been a band geek but was encouraged to see myself as a singer.  Wonder of wonders, I made the top choir and was terrified and amazed at the full-body miracle that is singing in the midst of talented and soulful singers.  I remember yet the first rehearsal I went to.  I was born again.

Mary was the queen of the sopranos; not in the Pit-Bull with jewelry on sort of way, but in such a way that the grace of her being sang through her body.  Her voice was (and is) sublime.  I wanted to be like her.  I wanted to sing that freely and laugh that fully and practice grace that deftly so I apprenticed myself to learn this way of voicing soul.

She taught me well.

She still does.  Encountering a kindred with whom beers and tears and so much life have been shared is like entering sanctuary.

Did she know she was my teacher?  Probably not, and therein lies the power.

St Francis enjoined fellow disciples to “Preach the gospel always, and if necessary, use words”.

We are preachers, each one of us.  My prayer is that our lives are witness to the power of the gospel.  As we sing and scrap and love and bumble, may we preach grace.

Some day our name will be read and our spirit will echo with the sound of a bell rung to mark our passing.

May we also be a place in hearts we have touched and taught.  For surely, as a gospel preaching people, we know the power of resurrection.

 

 

 

varied and dense

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The Holy Spirit finds ready kindling in the bellies of pastors.

My partner is a pastor. I am one too.

Last night Cooper offered a mini retreat at his church.  Twenty some people came out for an evening of faith sharing.  He got home after ten, set the alarm to get up at six and now he is unloading food from a truck for their church’s monthly food distribution.

On this day I will meet with a couple to plan their wedding and talk about their hearts.  I’ll follow that with a hospital visit and phone calling, come home and write a sermon and then attend a dinner for our confirmation students and their parents and mentors.

Tomorrow we at RUMC will be in the presence of five amazing youth as they speak for themselves their intention to live in the grace of God in the way of Jesus.  At our second service we will all savor the power of our discipleship, and then it is off to a party and then and then and then we will motor off to our place of regrouping:  the cabin.

It is a varied and dense thing, this art called ministry.  It fascinates and calls me yet.

I’m preparing to spend time with new clergy in a retreat setting next month.  The stated topic is “margins”.  How do we as clergy maintain margins in this thing that is living our vocation?  How do we give and give and give knowing that we must also receive receive receive?  How do we balance the exquisite juggle that is parish ministry with the needful time spent apart from it?

Sometimes the belly fire falters.  Like all others whose work is woven into their bones, clergy wonder if we can muster the energy and hope that keeps us setting alarms and dreaming programs.  We wonder if the world is just too busy to sit open before the immensity of possibility and grace.

And then we encounter eyes that light up and puddle, hearts that hunger, and transformation that invites and the spark that felt falterish gets lit anew.

Mostly I thank God for seeking my partnership in the stirring of hope.

In a world tangled and seemingly bent upon savaging, I am part of a movement that proclaims the power of holy and human love.

For today, that is enough.

 

forgiveness

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I’m still digesting the feast laid out by poet David Whyte yesterday at a gathering held at Hennepin Ave UMC.

In talking about the wild learning project that is living and loving, he spoke of the power of forgiveness.

Whyte said that if a friendship has lasted over the years, each individual has had opportunity to forgive and be forgiven through the years.

In order for relationship to be, forgiveness is a crucial ingredient.

What gift it is to greet and name forgiveness as necessary in relationship rather than trying to dodge the reality that there will be bumps and hurting through any companionship that is real.

The acknowledgement of the sometimes heartbreak and disappointment that is living in relationship is a unique gift given by the teachings of Jesus.

According to an insight shared by some wise person I encountered in my reading, while all religious traditions teach a version of the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), Christianity is unique in that Jesus was specific about how it is we are to practice the soul art of forgiveness.

I’m grateful for that.

This morning I sat over coffee with two women I have known as friends for over twenty years.  As I took in the gift of their being I was aware of gratitude for forgiveness given and received.  I can’t remember that we’ve gotten into major scrapes through the years, but I know that hurts and challenges have accompanied our relationships.

Yet there we were, the forgiving and the forgiven, reveling in the miracle of years lived in each other’s company.

Being human is no solitary pursuit.

Soul gifts come in the stretch and song of loving.

Forgiveness frees, teaches, and waters the tender bungle that we are.

Thanks be.

 

 

 

 

we’re ok

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I spent part of last night in the company of our future.

I was at Minnesotans United for All Families for a phone bank training.  There were some fifty of us in a big room.  There were many places we could have been.  We were there.

We were there on National Coming Out Day in order to make phone calls to voters.  With a scant few days before the election and air waves being inundated with increasingly fear-provoking ads, the need for heart touching is great.

What I saw as I took part in it all was that I was easily one of the oldest people there.  I sat with my two daughters.  Around me were couples, singles, and a wonderful assortment of the kind of young people I would LOVE to have in the pews of the church I serve.  They were there because they do not want the constitution of their state to be contorted by discrimination.

I am hopeful.  With all the anxieties of this election season, what I saw last night gives me a great sense that there is a generation coming up behind us that knows the power of civic engagement and knows how vital it is to be attentive and engaged.

It’s about love.  It’s about love for country and love for the gift that is living democracy and it is about the living of love in families and last night that love walked into the room in the hearts of those who care enough to take action.

Join them.  Join those who were surprised a minister would be present.  Join those who speak up and have conversations via phone or in person.  Find a phone bank or invite a friend out for coffee or write letters to the editor and pray pray pray that love might live in a Minnesota that values justice for all people.

Maybe, just maybe, if the church of Christ Jesus speaks for love, those present last night might see their way into faith community.

We need them.  They have much to teach us.

soul song

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I am newly home from a ten day pilgrimage to Ireland.

The trip sought to stimulate questions provoked by land.  How is it place shapes soul?  Do  rocks and stones indeed cry out story?

Indeed they do.  The group visited sites where intrepid souls carved out space in which to worship and learn.  Centuries ago, the building blocks of shelter from the wind and cold were heaved out of the land and placed one upon the other and within that stone womb life stirred.

Those on pilgrimage stood in shell after shell of worship space.  Many of them no longer had roofs, since conquerers throughout time have had a keen sense that spiritual questing often leads to resistance of civic power used to oppress.  Worship site after worship site had been sacked by powers seeking to silence the sound that can not be stilled: the keen and croon of soul.

We who journeyed joined with that song; the song of soul seeking voice, witness, community and healing.

We listened to the wind and the song of the stones.

We sing on.