One of the gifts of ministry is that I get to experience the same worship service many times.

I get to experience it as the scripture text leads me in the crafting of a service that will move it into hearts.  I get to experience it as I work with our communications person to create visuals that will move the message.  I get to experience it as I write sermons and then, I get to experience it in community as we worship together.

So, that being the case, I can tell you that Good Friday and Easter worship (my colleague is writing Maundy Thursday) has already run through my being and I am glad for their touch on my soul.  Utter devastation followed by blasting new life is a rhythm as old as our souls.  Lived through the being of Jesus it is beat-of-heart intimate and real, this proclamation of messy and tenacious love.

There is much to make ready for Holy Week.  My house is coated in the fur of cat and dog, my table cloths needful of ironing (but, my mom is coming and I will put that precise woman to goodly works!), and the list of things to do at church to make ready is endless.

But worship?  It is amazing, trust me.  Or don’t trust me.  Come and feel for yourselves!

Tonight was amazing.

Unfolded in our sanctuary were sounds never before heard in that space.  The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth was in need of a concert venue.  Because the chair of the music department is soul kin from a past pastorate, she called to ask if Richfield would host their music department’s spring tour.

Host we did.  In the house were moms and dads and sisters and brothers and grandparents and church members.  Sharing music with us were vocal ensembles, a steel drum band, a hand drum ensemble and a drum line.

Amazing.  The director of the percussion ensembles made a comment about not being all too sure that a church sanctuary was the place for such reverberations.  It surely is.

The psalmists spoke often of how it is we are blessed to praise God with harp and timbrel and cymbal and praise God we did through the blessing of music spooled out by amazing young things.

I figure the echoes of this night will live in our sanctuary always.

Praise God, indeed.

If we want to have all our bases covered before we act, nothing exciting will happen. But if we dare to take a few crazy risks because God asks us to do so, many doors, which we didn’t even know existed, will be opened for us. Henri Nouwen

Crazy feels beguiling.  Maybe because it is spring, maybe because there is this sense around us that the budget woes of our nation are so big and the necessary communal heart to solve them so wanting.  Maybe it is because there has been a dash of crazy in my being always.

Crazy feels beguiling because being immobilized by a conviction that unless we have all things perfectly aligned we cannot act; that conviction is dead making.

I went to an international conference yesterday.  Through the wonders of video feed, I sat with a group of leaders of the UMC and together we wrestled with what it is that will create a sense of holy movement among us.  Like all other mainline denominations, we are stuck.  We are stuck in our wonderings about how it is a wildly good news movement of healing and hope has been stuck too long in buildings and protocols.  We were asked weigh in on what we believe will open the doors.

My hope is that we’ll get a little crazy.  My hope is that we will know the goodness of what we seek to share and get crazy in our willingness to share it in ways that will connect and my hope is that we’ll loose ourselves through the joy of living something alive.

I’m part of a church that is stirring with crazy.  We’re trying new things.  There are Vietnamese language classes going on every week, there are Al-Anon meetings and varieties of worship and honest connecting and pancake feastings and carnivals and what we are seeking to do is share the good news of a place dedicated to giving itself away.

Crazy is good.  God asks it of us.  I want more.

Today in worship we will share Living Water, one with the other.

The text is the story of how it was Jesus found himself in conversation with a woman outcast in her society.  He asks her to share what she has:  a cup of cold water.  She does, and because of that elemental sharing, she becomes a part of the movement of freshening we’re trying to remember is our own.

Rob Bell has written a book asking why it is the “church” writ monolithic has become so enamored of the notion of hell fire and damnation.  It’s a book that is causing a ruckus in circles theological.  It’s a book I like very much.

I’m in the first chapter, but already I know I have met a compatriot who mourns, as do I, the ways that the Christian church has become more about barbed wire and less about living water.  The message of love gets lost, both within our churches and in the ways the church is perceived in the arid world around it.  Who would want to be a Christian, he asks (and we know this question oh so well) when the church and the Living Water it seeks to share seems almost gleefully judgmental and the withholding of juicy good seems to be driving motivation?

The story we will encounter this morning has to do with seeing the holy in each; in outcasts, in the lonely, in the society-assures-us-is-damned and in our very selves.  It shares with us, does this encounter between the Samaritan woman at the well and Jesus, the ways that grace is elemental and human encounter conduit and the cellular cry for holy communion real.

So we will offer it, one to the other.  And we’ll seek to live it, this way of sharing the Living Water of Jesus.  The burble of life is meant to be taken into our bodies and sung through our souls.

We’re tired of living parched.

Otherwise – Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed on two strong legs.

It might have been otherwise.

I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach.

It might have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill to the birch wood.

All morning I did the work I love.

At noon I lay down with my mate.

It might have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks.

It might have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day.

But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.

from Otherwise, 1996 Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.

It is snowing in Minneapolis.  Dumps of fat flakes follow the rain and sleet of last night. 

I am at work, interfacing with the world via computer and the crafting of worship.  Outside my window are grave stones in a cemetery that holds the body husks of church members and a cloud of witnesses engaged in living in ways beyond my ken.

There is this day.  This day to savor coffee and pancakes bursting with blueberries prepared by my favorite in-home chef.  There is this day to  laugh at the primal scream bubbling in me provoked by this March snowstorm.  There is this day to put my heart to thinking about the living water we are offered every day we are given to live and thirsty we are and slake our thirst so often we do not.

Some day it will be otherwise.  Some day we will not have the great gift of being vexed by snowflakes.

But this day, this day the call to presence sounds louder than the call to whine.

It certainly has been otherwise.

Yesterday I got an email that held my day.

It was from one of my spiritual sisters.  She is a Benedictine nun living in community at Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Indianapolis.  What she told me was this:  she was praying for me all day.

Sr. Mary Luke is a visionary.  Knowing that clergy women are an often desperately lonely and challenged people, she worked with others to create a program called “Women Touched by Grace”.  Through the program, she brought to the monastery for a span of three years a group of clergy women from throughout the United States and Canada.  While in the lap of community, our lives were changed.  We came to know that we were enfolded in that thing we name often and long to experience more:  grace.

One of her Lenten practices is to hold each of the women she has enlivened.  That number is now fifty, since after watching thirty of us open to the light of love, she offered the experience to another group of clergy women.  Applications are now being taken for the third unfurling of good.

Yesterday was “my” day.  All day, I was aware that in the chapel of Our Lady of Grace, my name was offered.  Even more powerfully, I was aware all day that in the heart of a woman who is light to me, I was bathed and blessed by the intentions of a sister.

Life feels so often a place of shards.  Headlines would have us know that the steady shatter of God’s vision for creation is relentless.

Not so.  Yesterday, Sister Mary Luke prayed for me.  Today, I arise filled with awareness that the Word became flesh and dwells among us that we might know knitting of soul and hope.  We are not alone.  We hold the world in the imaginations of our hearts and in the care of the Holy.

We participate in healing each time we reach into each other with tidings of great joy:  you are not alone.  I am praying for you.

Watching my children unfold is like opening the best present ever imagined.

They zig and they zag and sometimes it feels like there isn’t room enough in me to hold worry and love.  The stretch that is parenting is excruciating beauty. And, it has grown me more fully than any other adventure.

What I am loving on this day is our children’s humor and tenderness.  We have gotten to that stage in life together where parents and their foibles are fair game for the art of the roast.  Our children pick up the pieces of goofy and fine that their parents are and have at with gusto.  This is a good thing.

It’s a good thing because in the house I grew up in, it was fully against the unwritten rule of family to move into the honesty that goes with good roasting.  We had a family joke (or was it a joke?) that if our mother told us to jump in front of a car then by golly we ought jump.

I’m seeing a different dynamic with my children.  While sometimes I WISH I could command and jumping (not in front of cars but in the directions I think are best) would happen without question, I seem to have participated in parenting children who are willing to check in with their parents on questions of direction but are not driven by parental commands.

This is good.

And, I think that the more mature their parents are becoming (please God I hope this is so) and the more we as parents are able to take ourselves less darn seriously, the more room there is for flat-out great fun at our expense.

I really like our children.  They are, each one of them, seeking to use the good that they are to build good around them.  They have a network of good people who hold and challenge them, and best of all, they are appreciative of the gift that is good loving.

I don’t get my mother mitts on them near often enough, but I watch their exploits via Facebook and texts and phone conversations and they make me laugh and they make me know that miracles are real.

God knows what they will come up with next in the living of their days.  What I know is that they are solidly fine, funny, and unique creatures who somehow came my way.

Amazing, that.

A parishioner sent me an email today.  She encouraged me to hold fast to one of the many stones I brought home from the island of Iona.  During the turmoil of these days, while the earth is rumbling, waves decimating, and social fabric rending, she suggested that I carry with me always the hum of that holy place.

Icons are gift.  They are visual and physical reminders that every place and time in which we find ourselves is holy.  We travel no road unaccompanied.  There is in all things the breath of the Holy.

I know that she speaks strong and gentle good.  In this morning’s Star Tribune is an article speaking earth shake of sorts for the United Methodist church.  In the crumble that was once one of our most vibrant churches, one of our pastors is insisting that new life can and will be born through willful disobedience.  Serving as he does in a movement that specifically prohibits clergy from blessing same gender relationships based on the denomination’s statement that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching”, the Rev. Greg Renstrom has stated that blessing “responsible, mutually respectful and reverent relationship” is a natural expression of pastoral care for all of God’s children.  Serving as he does a congregation intentionally seeking to reach out to GLBT folk, pastoral care naturally includes the support and nurture of loving same-gender relationships.

It is a provocative proclamation.  It is a calling out in a movement founded on the inclusive teachings of Jesus.

We are a global connection, we United Methodists.  Our polity is crafted at quadrennial meetings.  We are a representational body; meaning there are persons sent to General Conference based upon the numbers of United Methodists in their region.  Larger numbers in more conservative regions – in the Southern United States and in Africa – means more votes.  Based upon numbers, some Annual Conferences send many representatives.

Some send precious few.  Minnesota will send three lay and three clergy representatives in 2012.

How to impact global policy for inclusion when the task feels Herculean?  How to shape a fully inclusive church when it feels crazy-making that it would be anything but?

The Rev. Greg Renstrom has said he will wait no longer, even though it means he may lose his standing in a denomination he has served for decades.

I am washed with compassion for him, for the too many who have been told that in the name of the church, blessing is withheld.  I am washed with compassion for our Bishop, who is charged with overseeing the living of UM polity in Minnesota regardless of her personal and pastoral convictions, and I am washed with compassion for the ache of the Holy that in the swirl and need that is living in these days, so much energy gets funnelled into policing bestowal of blessing.

So the presence of Iona will bless me in these days.  The wind of the Spirit is blowing.

We are held.  We are believed in.  We are movement.

Organized labor’s catastrophic decline has paralleled – and, to a disputed but indisputably substantial degree, precipitated – an equally dramatic rise in economic inequality.  In 1980, the best-off tenth of American families collected about a third of the nation’s income.  Now they’re getting close to a half.  The top one per cent is getting a full fifth, double what it got in 1980.  The super-rich – the top one-tenth of the top one per cent, which is to say the top one-thousandth – have been the biggest winners of all.  What is always called their “compensation” (wage workers lucky enough to have a job simply get paid) has quadrupled.” Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, March 7, 2011

While on vacation last year I read a book entitled “The Spirit Level”.  The book painstakingly assesses data from around the world and what was found was that in all cultures the greatest marker for misery for all people was the level of economic disparity found in the culture. Violence levels, health issues, quality of life, and general well-being was compromised when the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened.  Even those supposedly protected from angst by gated communities feel the pain.

The conclusion was clear and biblical.  Whatever is done to the least (or not done) is done to the soul of the whole.

Political commentators and each of us have been roiled by the unfolding of civic engagement in Wisconsin.  There is much at stake in this.

It seems there has been a willing sort of going-along with whomever it was who pushed the most effective fear buttons come election time.

But we are waking, each of us.  We are waking to an awareness that class skirmishes are real and chasms between haves and do not haves are becoming wider and we are whistling in the dark if we are not willing to acknowledge that we cannot go on this way.

As the gap noted by Hertzberg above widens, we are all of us made more fragile.

Collective advocacy – through voting, unions, churches, and all who are willing to voice conviction that the dignity and want of one is the dignity and want of all – cannot be quashed.

Jesus preached plenty about caring for all, insisting that the Hebrew Bible teachings were meant to be lived in community; teachings about living justice and kindness and mercy and humility and while we are playing at legislative smoke-and-mirrors tricks to triumph over “those people” whoever they might be, we are shredding the soul of our faith mandates.

“Whatever you do to the least of them you do to me”.

The number of the economic “least” is growing.

How will the movement of Jesus respond?

I read a great Facebook post the other day.  The man who spoke announced that his Lenten discipline was to fast from political wrangling on Facebook.  He seemed a bit anxious about it and made some rumblings about loopholes; when and what and if happened he allowed that he might have to break the fast. But overall, he seemed pretty interested in what he would discover about himself.

Fasting is like that.  So often we hear the word and feel the clutch of wants gone unsoothed and we flinch and run.  Fasting is actually a more spacious thing than that.

When we fast, we make more space for the Holy to sound.  Each of us has things that we fill ourselves with in order to dodge.  We do or distract in order to distance ourselves from the gnaw of anxiety that feels like constant companion.

The Holy calls us to “be still and know” that God is God and we are not.

Our world calls us to zoom around stuffing our lives full of busy.  Distractions make other people rich.

So this Lenten season, what is it you might fast from?  For the Facebook wise man, it is the hurling of muck via electronic community.  For others, it might be refraining from buying anything new.

The first step is to still ourselves long enough to ask the question:  what is it that I take up as my dodge of choice?  How can I let go of that behavior in order to be more available to God?

What sorts of learnings are in store?

It’s a journey, this spiritual season called “Lent”.  We journey in sacred company.  Perhaps it is time to be sure that we are present and open to the learnings along the way.