I was at a training recently for United Methodist pastors.

A statement made really got my attention.  The issue was how it is that sometimes, when we seek to build community based on shared values and corporate buy-in, people who exist on the edges of the community seek to dictate course.  In other words, they show up only rarely, “invest” themselves minimally or not at all, and then lob their comments into the “boat” of the community and expect that they will be able to chart the course of the communal boat.

The comment made was that these folks are “on the dock” and have not earned the right to pilot the boat.

I loved it!  Church is so often a messy and confusing place.  We are somehow under the impression that as dutiful followers of Jesus, we cannot practice clean and clear boundaries around process.  We’re too nice to say to someone “Hey, get in the boat and we have something to talk about.  As long as you remain on the dock, your voice just isn’t going to be pilot”.

What happens when people forget that living in healthy ways together is a foundational value of Christian community is that members wield power in the ways practiced in secular culture.  They withdraw their monetary support.  They boycott worship for various and sundry reasons.  They mutter and mutter via emails and spoken word their denigration of the course of the boat called church.  They refuse to practice the Jesus teachings of face to face conversations and communal problem solving.  And they somehow believe that if they shout loudly from the dock and enjoin others to join their campaign of discontent,  they can pilot the boat from the dock.

I had a clergy colleague, a former District Superintendent, who asked a question that lives with me yet:  “Do you want to be Christian, or do you want to be nice?”

I think that in charting the boat called church in these days of necessary honesty and new shore seeking, we need to be Christian.  We need to celebrate those who are in the boat. 

And we need to leave the dock party in the hands of God as we set out on the thing called being community in Christ in the 21st century.

The seas await!

We’re blending families at church.  Two congregations that have collectively spent three hundred people and ministry years are coming together to become something new.  The process has been amazing grace.

We talk about being the One Body of Christ all of the time in the church.  It’s one of those phrases that get tossed off as an “of course”.  Of course we are one.  BUT, we like the way we do things and we like the way we know each other and we like the way our sanctuary looks and we like the treats we serve at coffee and changing these things that give us a sense of ground in a shifting day and age seems too much to risk.

But risk we will.  Edgewater Emmauel will hold its last service of worship in its sanctuary on September 13th of this year.  Richfield UMC will hold its last service of worship in its sanctuary on September 13th of this year.  And then, on the 20th of September, we will join together as a new Body: Richfield UMC, composed of folk from EEUMC and RUMC and anywhere else God sees fit to garner partners in ministry.  Some of us will be in a sanctuary that may look and feel familiar, but we have to know this:  we are a new creation.  We’ll learn from each other and we will change and grow and explore and blunder and wonder about how it is that we have been so blessed.

We’re blessed by a Spirit that leads us into new celebrations and expressions of what it is to be community in Christ.  Blending families (this I know) is a work that is challenging.  But done mindfully and prayerfully and with a willingness to just plain laugh at the foibles of being human, it is Spirit work of immense power.

We gather at the common table of grace. We trust that God is in our midst.  We are blessed.

Words have great power.  Sometimes that power scares us, because words peel back layers we have wrapped around the quiver that is our hearts.

I run into this a lot as a clergy woman, this word aversion.  At a former church I served, the word “struggle” sent a shiver of distaste up the spines of some of our leaders.  We wanted to use the word in our mission statement.  It seemed important that our church claim our participation in the struggle against the death-dealing amnesia that can be our cultural reality.  The amnesia would have us to believe that poverty and isms and injustices of the endless stripes that exist are somehow beyond the notice of nice Christian folk.  To acknowledge that living the teachings of Jesus is struggle in our world means that we might have to engage, get dirty and roughed up in the living of the gospel message.   Well, of course.

The lament goes up often:  why is it that the church seems to be increasingly sidelined in our civic life?  Why is it that our young-ins seem to scorn an institution that is built upon the teachings of a man who was radically inclusive and insistently justice seeking?  How is it that in a time when loneliness and a sense of powerlessness grip our communal being the movement of Jesus is deemed somehow irrelevant?

It’s about words.  The words we are afraid will somehow offend or challenge or confront.   Words that would stake our claim upon the challenging and cosmos healing vision of Jesus.  Words that would call us to claim that systems of oppression, even when they facilitate our middle class comfort, those systems of oppression must be named and claimed as foe.

Why?  Because of a word that we hold to: gospel.  The good news.  The good news to the poor and the outcast and the addicted and the lonely and the frightened and the hopefilled and the beaten and the powerful.  The message of relief to those burdened and awakening to those whose hearts have been too long wrapped.

Our hearts need to quiver.

It is awful.

I love the graciousness of my house.  It has stained glass windows and rooms meant for entertaining and woodwork and it has… no central air conditioning.

It is 95 out in Minneapolis.  Humidity is at about a bizzillion.  Yesterday was the same.  On such a day it is hard to summon the energy to think a coherent thought, let alone stir bodies that simply want to sleep through the agony of it all except sleeping in such heat is impossible so what is a person to do?

I walked a three mile path around Lake Harriet yesterday during the worst of it.  My man was swimming the buoys at said lake and I knew that if I didn’t move I would be scraped off the walls or floors so I set out.  There were other crazy people out, too.  And really, about half way around as I was finding how truly effective the body’s coolant system is (read there was sweat streaming EVERYWHERE) I started to laugh.  What else was there?  I waded into the lake after my walk and laughed again.  The cool water I sought to refresh my hot toes?  Not there.  Even the water of a MN lake in early summer had given up semblance of cool.

Driving around in cars is respite.  Going to movies works.  Libraries are our friend.  Coffee shops work too. 

I’m so happy to be at work.  It is cool here.  The space under my desk seems near large enough to stretch out and sleep.  It is feeling tempting…..

We are what we think.  Is this so?

What difference does our thought process make?  What does being a person of faith have to do with it?  What about free will and what about right thinking and what about shoulds and shame and what about choices and intentions?  And what about the Holy in the midst of it all?

Here’s what I think.  I’m echoing the teachings of the desert mothers and fathers and I’m echoing the teachings of contemporary and long gone teachers of all faiths and I’m echoing the wisdom of many who share community with me at church.

What we choose to think matters.  We are the pilot of our thoughts.  We assent to the negative ones: We can follow them down the same grooved paths that lead to worry or bitterness or despair or any of the other obsessions that can cramp our souls.

Or we can choose to redirect the well-worn paths that lead us to nowhere.  We can choose to gently reroute our negative grooves by paying attention to them when we start down that path.  Noticing them and following them to greater knowing of ourselves and then; choosing a different course.  A course that leads us to a gentler, grace filled place where there is room for sunlight.

We see it all the time in others, don’t we?  Some people seem obsessed with the ways the world has wronged or cheated them.  They pounce on the offenses and pick at them and get energy from rehearsing them over and over and over again and spilling them out into their interactions with the world and while that rehearsal is going on the performance that is life right now is playing out without their whole presence.

I see it in others and I know too that I have been that person.  Haven’t you?

The wisdom teachings of all faiths tell us that fixing our attention upon gratitude and trusting that all things have lessons for us and knowing that in the midst of the most gnarly and ripping of pain we are partnered with the Holy; these choices of thought lead to soul stretch and health and serenity.

So paying attention to what we choose to hold in our heads, what we choose to allow to gain purchase in our bodies, what we choose to ground our lives upon:  These things matter. 

What matters too is that the reach of God toward us throughout time is a reach not of retribution but of grace, love, and enfolding.

We are what we believe.  We are what we think.  We are what we practice.  We are. 

May we choose the expansion that is love and light.  It matters in the sacred gift that is our being, and in the impossibly pregnant gift that is the community of God.

Sometimes I get lulled.

I go about my days and encounter life and then a comment is made and I remember:  I am not a member of the dominant culture.  On many fronts, yes:  I am white of skin (if you don’t count the sprouting age spots), middle class, educated, employed, able to make choices. 

And, I am a woman. 

I am a woman in a culture that pays my sisters an average 75 cents for every  dollar earned by a male.  I am a woman in a culture where we number more than half the population and are not similarly represented by law makers in virtually all areas of government.  I am a Lead Pastor at a church where upon learning the gender of their new lead, some members reacted negatively and continue to refer to their pastor as “that woman” (a very very very small number of my congregation, I hasten to add).

I am a woman who knows fear on darkened streets.  I am a woman who came to her own sense of possibility late in life so I know the pains and glory of those who midwife their own souls later in life.  This is often the case for women.  Our futures and possibilities are peopled with the people we care for:  children and partners and parents and community.  The din of the competing claims for our time and energy juice is loud;  so loud that it can take years to listen to and value our own voices, our own needs.

When we begin to learn to listen and to speak, we do so tentatively, testing out the world of our own thoughts and values to see if it is safe and will it really allow our wholesome being?

If the bumps are not too violent, we continue to venture out into the world, taking our passions and our wisdom and our questions and sharing them and we sail along and through and natter a bit, perhaps, about the non-issue of feminism and equal rights and then we hit the glass ceiling or the wall of sexism and it takes our breath away.  Do we still live in a world where women are asked to somehow state a case for their full humanity? 

Ask the women who are bought and sold.  Ask the women who are not safe in their homes.  Ask the women who are left to raise children alone and then are condemned by culture even as they seek to cobble together a life for their children.  Ask yourself if you are a woman and your partner or sister if you are a man and you will find that being woman is living a cultural “less than”.  Maybe not discernible day to day, but insidiously and powerfully real.  For all the movement toward full equality that has been, there are still lessons which await fullness of lived life in our world.

So on this day, when I have been asked to “chill” because of my passion around this issue, I declare that I am woman.  And I will speak.  And I will lead and learn and live for a day when women are safe and heard and honored. 

I will not be lulled.

Others have survived it:  children coming home for the summer.  From college.  From total freedom.  From no governor but their own sweet sense of things.  From clothes carpets on bedroom floors and late night gatherings.  From volume on high.

To home they come.  Home, where parents are and rules are and sleep is celebrated (the kind where waking at 6:30 AM means eight hours of pillow time).  Home, where counter tops enjoy the freedom of being unlittered.  Home, where nooks of reading and silence are savored.  Home, where socks go into the dirty clothes basket.  Home, where dulcet tones waft from the stereo speakers.  Home, where parents have the crazy notion that they might have some input into the quality of life lived in their domicile.

I love my children.  Maybe most especially because my middle daughter who is newly graduated from college shared with me that she and her friends became aware that they don’t live in their “own” homes any more.  They live in our homes.  Theirs, surely, but the parental splash that makes for “ours” changes everything.  (Or at least I like to believe it does).

We’re figuring it out.  Do we like to have their friends over?  Yes.  Do we want to come home after a long day of work to ten of them crowding the kitchen and denuding the refrigerator?  No.  Will we survive this?  Yes.

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven (thanks, Ecclesiastes).  This is the season of welcoming and boundary making and negotiating and asserting.  We’ll survive it and more.  I trust that. 

Perhaps more troubling is the notion that once the lights go off as the sun is coming up and my children have gone to bed, the crusty socks that call our house home are off reproducing in the dark corners and under-couch lairs they seem to prefer.  They are taking over the house…..

It’s messy, love is.  There is no pain or savor like that borne in its being and there is no greater teacher than the insistent call that is love.

I spent Friday night with people who are students with me in the thing that is loving:  Cousins and offspring of same, siblings, uncles and aunts, my mother, and a whole collage of people marking the life and legacy of my aunt.  She set the table at which we gathered.  Her table, as my cousin John spoke it during her funeral, was one where good manners mattered, graciousness was foundation, and hospitality given gift.

Every family has their DNA.  The Fawcett strands?  Strength, laughter, dogs, rascal, integrity, loyalty, poetry, clan, beauty, soul, curiosity, people, vulnerability, grit, pride, humility, grief, heart, generosity.  Seeing cousins after a decade or more of living was wonderment.  In them beat the shared longings and promptings that were dished out through our births and around our growing up tables and we are many and we are one and we are blessed.  From a tall physician and a petite musician came this clamor of life in the bodies of their offspring.  And we have played it out, this clamor.

We have loved and lost, grappled with pain and betrayal, run from and run to.  The strands of our being have hummed with sureity and jangled with doubts and somehow we have come round right and Friday was reminder that there is no knowing like that of family.  We share a story deeper than the changing scenery of our days.

We have lived the challenges of the gift of love and we seek its wisdom yet.  Some of that wisdom can only find fullsome voice around the table that is family. 

For the gift and stumble of learning love through kin, my wondering heart gives thanks.

My aunt Carolyn is near death.

Her body is riddled with cancer and it came upon her quickly.  Her children and grandchildren are gathering as are siblings and other beloveds.

This hurts.  She is my mom’s older sister.  Tall and strong and talented and gracious and fierce and like no other, she is.  Private, oh so private about her thoughts and being.  And within that being, the glimpses I got of the woman are part of the who I am.

We would spend weeks with her and her tribe of five children.  I almost wondered if she and my mom conspired around childbirthing, because with the  exception of one child in the middle not represented in my family, the two sisters had four other children  born in pairs.  It made for raucous gatherings.  A cousin our own age for each of us.  There were summers at the cabin and weeks in Duluth spent at Carolyn’s and Thanksgiving feasts and loud poker games and not a one of my mom’s sibling laughs delicately.  Most of their kids share the same propensity for full-bodied laughter.  So the air when the family gathered was laced with conversation and laughter choruses and intrigue and warm.

We’ll gather soon to thank God for Carolyn’s life.  I don’t much know how to say thank you.  What I am thinking these days is what a powerful blessing family is:  Memories and traditions and relationships and bumps and the ongoing threading together that is sacred learning ground.  We learn from each other lessons that we can’t even speak.

The lesson I can speak has to do with french toast.  Aunt Carolyn taught me that french toast is a great way to use stale bread and it goes a long way for small cost.  That teaching I can speak.  But the other things she has deposited in my heart?  I can’t speak them.  But I know them to be grace. 

So I pray on this night: God’s blessings, travelling mercies, thank you, thank you, thank you.

For forty some years now a part of my heart has been lodged in the log embrace of my cabin.  My parents bought it when I was in second grade.  The day after school let out, my mother and my sibs were in the car and on our way to the cabin, where we would spend days barefooted and swim suited and blissfully at one with water and space.  My father would pay his visits weekly after he had finished worship on Sunday.  The same was true for the other men who owned cabins up and down our beach.  They would come, the men, and they would leave.  And the beach?  It was a community of women and children with an occasional and welcome male splash.

After a time, my father moved there and made home full time.  The power of his spirit was taken into the pores of the place.  When he died all too suddenly in its shelter, his wife muddled on for a time in the solitude and the stress of winter in isolated places.  She came to know the need to bail.

So I bought it.  I could not imagine it leaving the family.  I could not imagine my life without the sanctuary of its presence.  I could not bear the thought of leaving the community of women and children now grown and the generations beginning to find roots there.  I bought it and in doing so I am keeper of the light of hearth for me and for my kin who know it as heart home.

This summer it is not available to me.  For a time, it is being rented to another.  And oh, the ache for the smell and the feel and the hold and the song of it is visceral.  The rhythms of my life are jarred.  The crawling in that has long been is no more for a time.

I am learning things.  I am learning that I am a creature who must spend time by water, in wind, and under trees.  I am paying attention to the ache and seeking ways for my rhythm to be restored in other venues.  I am digging more in the ground of  my city yard.  I am seeking re-creation through lakes and grass and water never far from the armor of concrete.  I am learning gratitude for God’s creative glory in the birds that feed on the newly hung bird feeder in my yard.  I am learning.

And I know that after a time, the cabin that is the nest of my heart will once again take me in.  So this ode to ache is also song of gratitude.  She is, that log hug.  She is, and she waits for me and mine.  That is blessing, it is blessing indeed.