Is it just me, or does Spring springing early make it more intense?

Outside my office window the crab apple trees are ready to pop – in mid April!  Scootering down the road my nose encounters blooming trees and back yard barbeques.  The sun feels like blessing, sinking into those light-starved places in my soul that have learned to hibernate during the winter.

All things are possible!

The church is stirring with new life.  My eldest daughter just organized her first (of many, I am sure) major fundraising event in Denver.  My middle daughter is coordinating an eco learning event in the metro due to roll out this Saturday.  My son is playing tennis and zooming through the whee of these days, my guy is shorts wearing and deep breathing and I am almost jangled to confusion by gratitude.

Life is sweet, and good and pregnant with promise. 

All things are possible.

It is possible to be woven into a quilt of the finest and warmest of stuffs.

This I know.  It happened to me last night.

I was back in the midst of a people with whom I had made life for years.  I was invited back to celebrate a ten-year anniversary of a justice event given birth through the hearts and energies and convictions of some of God’s finest souls.  The event was held at the church I had been member of for four years, left, and returned to pastor for five.

There were people there with whom I raised my babies.  People who taught me leadership and life.  People who shared in the symphony that is ministry.  People close to my heart and woven into my life and how can thanks of that magnitude be lived?

I am proud that ten years ago the risk was taken to speak and witness on behalf of glbt folk.  I am proud that we joined with others to advocate for healing the wounds of historic exclusion of same from communities of faith.  I’m proud that a new way was proclaimed and lived.  The church bumped through conflict;  churches often do when they follow the Way.  Grace led us through.

We gathered to celebrate the then and the now stitched together by love holy and fine; compatriots in the making of music, worship, witness, celebration, and life.

The Body alive.

Amazing; truly and wildly amazing.

The sanctuary of the church was literally packed to the rafters on Easter Sunday.  We had two services lush with brass and organ, children’s song and good news and we rolled in hope like joy crazed dogs.

If you have ever wondered if it really matters that you show up at church, stop wondering.  It matters.  It matters that hundreds of people rolled out of bed on Sunday morning and listened to the need of their souls to be in community where hope spoke:  Children in their Easter finery, elders willing to brave chaos to be present in their church, college students and youth group grads reconnecting with their church kin, pastor moms (that would be me) almost levitating with the joy of having their babies present to lend their brass-playing beauty to the mix.  It was a lot to take in.  I’m still digesting!

What I am left with is such gratitude.  The church showed up, witnessed, imagined, and made claim on gospel promises. 

With the Christ, we are risen. 

We are risen indeed!

My mother had a system (of course she did, it is her way!) whose rhythm my sisters and I breathed in.

Saturday mornings were ironing days.  Set up in front of the tv (it lived in the only seemly place; the basement) we girls would steam and fold and press our way through the morning.  The wrinkled became straight.  All was well with the world.

Most of the ironing was my father’s accoutrements:  handkerchiefs (iron flat, fold once and iron, fold again into quarters and iron again), shirts (collars, then sleeves, then side back side) and pants (hold them by the cuffs, let them fall, follow the inside seam line to press).

When parties had occured of the special variety, the pile included table linens.  They were to be found in the refrigerator.  They had been dampened and placed in a bag, thus preparing themselves for the straightening to come.  Proper preparation was a part of the rhythm.

Tomorrow is Easter.  Following two worship services for me and three for Cooper, we will gather at table with the family we share.

I am readying the table.  It is ironing time.  I plug in the iron and settle into the rhythm taught decades ago and I am suddenly moved by the ritual of home making.  My mother is with me:  it is her wedding table-cloth I am smoothing.  My father’s mother is with me:  some of the napkins came to me by way of her trousseau.

As I stand at the ironing board, celebrations of years past flood my heart.  Faces and laughter and feasts thrum in me and while I try to practice short cuts by not preparing the table-cloth as my mother taught me (I have not sprinkled and refrigerated!), I laugh at life and learning and being.

Of course my mother’s methods were right.  Try as I might to shorten or dance from them, I give up trying to get the table cloth to behave according to my schedule.   I go downstairs, wet it, bundle it in a plastic bag and close the refrigerator door with a smile.  My mom was right.  There is a seemly way to things.  Preparation matters.  Sometimes it is ok to acknowledge that.

Rhythm, ritual and savor. 

Holy, holy, holy.

There is a deepness about this week called “holy”; a deepness of breath, a stilling of pace, a pause.

It is as though the whole swirl of the Christ-among-us is concentrated in these seven days.  The wild unfurling of hope, the stillness and grief of last meals, the betrayals and the turncoat fear and the utter silence after the last is breathed.

We are asked to take these things into our bodies and hold them awhile.  We take them in as witness to the then pain and to the ongoing of the now sorts of crucifixions.  We choose for a time not to look away.

Of course, we know that Easter is coming.  The trumpets and the lilies will declare an end to death and we will know the real of resurrection hope.

But for this week, we becoming willing to bear witness, summoning the courage to know that this deepness is reminder.  For all weeks we are called to see.  To choose not to look away from the instruments of torture – relational, societal, and visceral – that exist yet. 

And we are better for it, this week called “holy”.

Here is how crazy making our world has become due to the constant stoking of fear.

I preached a sermon on Sunday using the highly subversive words “social justice”.  I made mention of Glenn Beck’s (Fox News) warning to good people of faith that if their church is using the term “social justice” they really are fronting for Nazis and Communists.  I took exception to the advice he had for followers in such churches to run for the doors and never come back.  It seemed to me, particularly on Palm Sunday when Jesus was clearly saying “no” to justice as practiced by Rome, that we ought celebrate the work of weaving justice in the way of Jesus.  Such justice is social in its very core.

What I am aware of is that the word “social” in our culture instantly morphs for some into the word “socialist”, the new cuss word du jour.  Instantly, some pew folk are whisked from a contemplation of the gospel into an internal defense against same.

In men’s Bible study this morning, we read together the text for Holy Thursday in which Jesus kneels at the feet of his disciples, takes their tired and dusty flesh into his hands, and offers grace and compassion.  The text ends with the reminder that our call as disciples is to love one another.

To love means to listen deeply to one another.  To love means to know our connection with the well-being of one another.  To love means to let go of the cudgels that fear would have us wield.

To love means doing the astoundingly hard work of living as disciples, one with the other, lest crucifixions continue.  It was fear that eventuated in the mangle of the cross.

Please God, let us live love.

There are those who say with all kinds of conviction that the teachings of Jesus have been so contorted that they can’t be named as relevant.

Not so.  It seems that everywhere I look in these days I see grace of the Holy kind.  The church is stirring.

We are stirring into our midst compassion, laughter, hope and courage.  The result is a community willing to be far from perfect, very human, and open to transformation.  We come together with the power of the Christ as our hub, and we trust that the wobbly of community living will not overtake us.

Given that headlines in these days are full of hate speak born of fear-incitement politicking, I breathe deep thanks for a community that seeks to live in a different way.  As the people of Jesus, we intentionally sniff for the Holy in each other, knowing it resides in us each, as well.  Hurled epitaphs break the Body.  We seek another way.

So, having a community where the Way is practiced is salvation for the hope-clingers in these days of rage-speak.  Mayhap we will take to the streets and share the power of another way.  It is time.

It’s scooter weather!  I rolled out my pink scooter yesterday and sniffed the wind like a dog as I zipped down the street.  There is life, and sound, and smell and the wind reached for me like a long-lost friend.

I’m visiting my daughter and her partner today.  The plane will deposit me in Denver where I will have three days of wandering streets and reading while Leah works, followed by adventures in the company of dearly beloveds.  Will I ever get over the wonder of being a mother crazy for her babies?  I hope not.

Retreat with 19 women from church is shimmering gift.  To make house together, to sing and to laugh and to open and to be in the company of sisters in faith who share the wild hope of being people of Jesus.  It is sometimes too much to take in, this beauty, but I did.  And I do.

And oh, I am full of hope that this issue of providing health care for all might be moving toward the practice of grace.  I read of the growing rancor between people so convinced that there is not enough to go around and so convinced that someone is trying to take from them what has been gained and I wonder how it is that the gospels can be reconciled with allowing the poor to fend for their (please keep them invisible) selves?

Until all are fed and known as kin, we will be a people bent-over by fear.  That is not one of my favorite things.

But it is spring, and love is, and celebrations await, and we are a people of hope, are we.