Category Archives: witness

ashes

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Today is Ash Wednesday.

In the Christian tradition, it is a time set apart to fully face our mortality and the power of our walk with the Christ.

This morning, our church hosted the annual Ash Wednesday service for clergy in the Metro area.  It is gift, this service, because clergy have the opportunity to be gathered with the faith community that grounds and holds us through this fully engaging art called ministry.  As United Methodists, we are deeply rooted in our connection, one to the other.  So gathering with our sisters and brothers to remember our brokenness and the invitation to knit our souls together through the transformational welcome of Jesus is soul feast of the finest order.

Too, I had the opportunity to craft and lead worship with dearly beloved soul sisters.  We have known and appreciated each other since forever.  “Working” with friends to create space for Spirit to bless is a natural voicing of relationship.  It is intimate and trust-grounded work.

Today, as we sat around round tables, one of my sisters invited us to be mindful of what it was we were doing as we marked each other with the sign of mortality and resurrection life.  She invited us to feel each other’s skin and being as we marked each other with ashes.  It was an invitation to give thanks for the body beauty walking in each.  It was holy, holy.

We are mortal.  We long for the sparking of transformation in our lives.  We muddle about longing for a sense of the larger picture of the Holy and sometimes, sometimes we find ourselves reminded.

We are created from the garden of God’s wildly loving imagination.  To that garden our bodies will return.  The in between is what we are given.

Sitting at table, remembering our connection and call, the Spirit spoke claiming and calm into our souls.  Tonight, gathered around those same tables will be members and friends of RUMC who bring themselves into a place where longing for life is named and cherished.  They too will be invited to be present to mystery.

We journey toward transformation in the company of the Holy.

Thanks be.

seeing

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Our church mission statement says that “We Seek to see the Christ in All”.

Sometimes the seeing is easy.

It seems like Jesus is all over the place these days.  From the cupcakes that are left on pastor’s desks (amazingly beautiful and ALMOST too pretty to eat) to the many conversations speaking heart, I am walking in wonder.

People are beautiful.

There seems to be an attitude in the air these days; an attitude of “why not?”.  Our sanctuary is being loved into new life.  Because we are in the midst of bringing a new organ voice to lead us in worship, we are ripping up carpet, putting down hard wood floors, soliciting favorite scripture verses and having the children and youth write them on the concrete to ground us (fear not, it will be covered with the new carpet put in this week) through the decades to come.  We will have a general cleaning party this Saturday when we all can get our hands on the place we call home and shine it up for its new life.

We have hauled pulpits from here to there on Sunday mornings.  We have adapted and made friends with chaos and we have embraced the unfolding of what will be.

Laughter rolls often within our church and the Spirit seems to be a loosened and sparkling presence.

It is one of those days in my heart where I wonder how it is I get to do this work.  We are many, heaven knows.  We are many of opinion and temperament and person.  And, we are one. One in the vision and power and presence of the Christ.

The issue for me throughout this redressing of our worship space adventure has been relationships.  Are we better for this adventure?  Have we learned things that further ground us in Christ?  Have we practiced forgiveness and grace and trust and discipleship?

I’m thinking we have had plenty of opportunity to practice.  That’s what life is for.  And I’m thinking we are better for it.

Every study you can ever imagine speaks of the clear good of being a part of a community of faith.  There are vexations by the boat load, God knows.  And, there are Jesus sightings that are shared and savored and marked and held and when one of us needs to remember what it is to feel hope in the Holy, Jesus in the form of a community member sits down and shares grace and we remember who we are.

It isn’t hard going to see the Christ in all.

It makes for holy sight-seeing.

 

welcome

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At a meeting today those present were asked to draw a card and respond to it.

My card had this question:  What blessing do you want to be a part of sharing?

My answer?  Welcome.  I want to be a part of a movement that shares the blessing of welcome.

My answer was prompted by two recent blessings I experienced.  One was the Freedom to Marry rally at the State Capitol.  There were hundreds of God’s children of faith gathered to speak about and respond to a vision of welcome to full participation in all facets of life, including the welcome to name sacred and covenanted relationships “marriage”.  The rainbow of beauty and heart in that rotunda lights my heart yet.

Last Sunday at church we held a luncheon for new and prospective members.  Gathered in the room were people ranging in age from their teens to their eighties.  There were same-gender-loving couples making life together seeking faith home to grow in and raise their babies in.

We ate and talked and shared and at the end, we stood in a circle, hands clasped, and I asked them to share what it is they are seeking as they throw in their lot with Richfield UMC.

Their answers move me yet.  They are seeking community, Jesus, and the people of Jesus who will move beyond the walls of the church and into the heart of the community with welcome.

Jesus invites all who are weary and heavy burdened to hitch themselves to the Holy and to Christian community in such a way that broken hearts mend and lives are transformed.

It turns out that our new members believe that through our church, they have found partners to help them plow the fields of their lives.  They welcome the yoke and the opportunity to experience and share the vision of Jesus.

Sometimes the gifting of parish ministry is profoundly humbling.  To welcome into our fold others willing to name their hunger and hope is amazing grace.

It is sacred trust, this building of the Body.

All are welcome.

cauldron living

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Sometimes it feels like there is a cauldron stewing in my soul.  Have you been there?

There are ingredients to the roiling stew:  impatience with a movement grounded in love that seems intent upon placating over boldness, concern about the front page news, awareness of finitude and the ticking off of days of engagement with life, and maybe most keenly, a felt sense of call to an unknown adventure.

The roil is not a bad thing.  It means that we are alive and ripe and full of life flavor and possibility is.

The issue is keeping the heat even whilst the cooking is going on.

Spiritual practices are not optional during such times of creating.  Going to the gym or listening to music or reading delicious things or laughing and talking with trusted souls;  all of those things keep the awareness of bubbling possibility real but not overwhelming.

Faith is key ingredient;  faith that the Holy Creator who stirred up the soup that we are has a hand in the seasonings of soul.

There’s something going on.  It’s not just in me.  There is an awakening stirring in this world we share.  Hunger for wholeness is being named, awareness of empty and the insufficiency of the tangible is growing, and a sense of kinship with all is coming to consciousness.

From Egypt to Richfield, voices are being found and communities and sanctities being proclaimed.

The roil is real.  God grant us the wisdom to live this time of immense power and creativity.  The world, as the Canticle of the Turning sings it, is about to turn.

This is holy, holy time.

 

 

paradox

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I’m speaking at a rally at the State Capital on Thursday.  It’s a rally in support of a notion that seems a no-brainer:  that all God’s children ought have the ability to live with their beloveds in such a way that they are accorded civic rights assumed by heterosexual couples.

It is a paradox.  In an age and time when our communities are desperate for the living of lives based upon love and mutual respect, there seems an insatiable desire to condemn same-gender-loving people.  Energies and money sorely needed for the growth of grace are expended trying to circle the moral wagons around an institution seemingly under attack from “those people”:  “Those people” who go to work, raise children, pay taxes, and love deeply people of their same gender.

Why the fear?  Will the house of cards based upon culturally mandated roles come tumbling down if same-sex marriages are accorded full rights and respect?  If gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, how does this threaten anyone?  In an age when nearly 50% of heterosexual marriages end in divorce, what would happen if our society’s collective angst were put to use supporting all couples and families?

Some fifty years from now, we will wonder that such injustice against our GLBT brothers and sisters went on.  Our grandchildren will wonder how it was unequal rights were explained and assumed.

In the meantime, rallies are scheduled and advocacy shared because the circle of grace threatens to be made smaller and smaller by the very folk who claim to speak for the heart of our expansive God.

It’s a paradox.

doing our work

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The truth is, until we have taken the time to discover and affirm who we really are and what we really want, we are left with only negative identities and negative passion…We are comfortable with rebelling, but fearful of creating. Laurence Boldt

I get a treat delivered to my email box each morning.  It’s a piece titled “Inward/Outward”.  Each day brings a brief quote and reflection.

This morning’s has to do with rebelling or creating.  It’s a glass half full/empty issue.  If we spend our days ungrounded in what it is we want and believe in, we are discontent with near everything.  It will never be enough, since we measure “enough” through the lens of discontent and a sense that something or someone ought fill the space inside that awaits our reflection and vision filling.

I think it is so.  What we’re trying to do at church is provide small groups and study circles with folk who want to make choices about how it is they will organize their lives.  We’re hoping and believing that if life is grounded on the teachings of Jesus, an unfolding into grace and grounding will emerge.

Through gathering at table and opening ourselves to each other and the teachings of our faith, we move into the power of discovering and affirming who we really are.  And we increasingly find supports to choose to live from a place of power and possibility shaped by the who-we-really-are of Jesus living.

Our church is alive and moving into a deeper place of Spirit life.  This new life is amazing grace.

My prayer is that we can evolve into the sort of Body that knows and affirms its identity and in so doing shares it lavishly with creation.  My prayer is that we can invite into communities of small groups the “half-fulls” who will join us in knowing the power of the God who calls us each by name.

The time for creating is now.

niggles

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People who are willing to work at life are glory.

There is this notion peddled by our popular culture that life is meant to be dedicated to the pursuit of happiness.  To be unhappy or challenged or stressed or vexed has come to mean that somehow there is some deep pathology within that must be danced from.  And dance we do:  we shop, we drink, we  over schedule, we watch hours upon hours of television in order to numb the niggle that will not leave us.

The niggle is holy.  The something-is-not-right-here that wakes us in the night or clenches our belly is holy attention clang.  What that niggle means is that we are called to turn and tend and learn.

Lots of folks find ways to dance from that learning.  Others learn to listen and do the sometimes agonizing work of exploring the meaning of the niggle.

Joseph Campbell maintains that the purpose of our life is not to find happiness, but instead to find and make meaning.

There is such grace in the vision of life as meaning making.  It implies journey rather than resolved landing point.  It implies falling down and getting back up and suffering and soaring and leaning into beloveds and our God.

Life is about making meaning.  Growth is optional, I suppose, but to choose soul numbing over growth seems a profound squander of the gift of life.

Jesus walked lonesome valleys.  He taught us we can’t walk them by ourselves.  We walk in the company of the Holy and our soul kindred.  This walk into wholeness in the way of Jesus is exactly why we are church.  Growing soul through the gift of community is why we open our doors each day.

Niggles are learning gift. Thank God for companions on our soul’s journey into meaning.

new life for all

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I have been asked to preach at a service of ordination.

I’m terrified and thrilled and moved and honored and oh, so hopeful.  The woman being ordained has been a pastor for years.  She has led and blessed and moved and witnessed as a whole woman of God in a denomination that welcomes her wholeness.

But she had to search far from home to find that denomination.  Because she is a same-gender-loving woman, she has been forced to wander through many places of parch and pain until she found herself in the Metropolitan Community Church where she was welcomed and is welcomed and there she has been.

And, her heart kept calling her home; home to the Lutheran church which, until a year or so ago, would not welcome the full glory of her being.

She is coming home on Sunday.  She will be ordained in the ELCA, a denomination willing to pray and ground and be in the way of Jesus; inclusive and welcoming of All God’s Children.

This is weeping material for my heart.  I feel such gratitude for her courage and tenacious belief that the church can be grace.  I feel hope for a world in which the church is willing to be living grace.  I feel humbled by the preaching task and honored and I pray so very fervently that some day my church, the United Methodist Church, will allow the floodgates of grace to open for all of God’s beloveds.

We need that washing of grace.

clarity

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The amount of money that goes into the misinformation of the American people is far vaster and far more enthusiastically spent than that which goes into the education of the American people. Stuart Ewen

 

Sometimes words land in my belly with the power of a clenched fist.  The above quote is one such collection of words.  I groaned when I read them, because they seem all too true.  Perhaps it is the word “enthusiastically” that hurts the most.

Our nation has been involved in a time of intense mourning and grief, followed within seconds by a time of intense finger pointing and dissembling.  The violence unleashed on a street corner in Arizona has touched us all.  As has the aftermath of that violence.

This Sunday is Human Relations Sunday in the United Methodist Church.  It is also the Sunday when we as a nation celebrate the message and ongoing witness of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The poignancy of considering human relations within the sloggy air of these political and cultural times is piercing.  I have held the task of preaching this Sunday to my heart and have given thanks while being daunted.

I am daunted because we have each been nourished on a steady diet of enthusiastically marketed misinformation.  How do we find truth in the miasma of spin and vitriol?

I am thankful because the core teaching that grounds any preacher’s task is the gospel of the Christ.  Over and over and over again Jesus teaches us to be open to others, to know our common heart beat, to see the holy that walks with each and to know that we are incomplete until all are invited to the table of grace and attention.

I will admit that I am afraid.  The above quote would indicate that we as citizens are more willing to be manipulated than educated.  We go along, it seems, content to huddle with our like-minded like children huddled in snow forts lobbing snow balls over the ramparts.

It’s not enough.  It isn’t enough for us as citizens of this nation.  And surely it is far from enough for those of us seeking to live the teachings of Jesus.

It’s time to put the snow balls down.  It’s time to leave the cocoon of our forts.  It’s time to breathe the sharp and clean air of grown up engagement.

life song

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I am a Sound of Music-crazy fan.

What to say about that…Christopher Plummer, Liesel’s dresses, unlikely love impossible to quench… ah me, so fine.  And then there is the singing.  I wanted to grow up and sing like Julie Andrews sings, whether on mountaintop or cloistered.

One of my favorite songs from the movie is not in the Broadway version.  It is entitled “I Have Confidence” and is sung while Maria is walking toward an impossible-to-imagine challenge in her life.  She takes it on, of course, guitar in hand, ugly dress belling out as she dances into believing in herself.

If only it were that simple.  But maybe it is.  There are times in life when we feel overwhelmed and run over and way inadequate and we want to wimper rather than sing.

But the world is made so small without our being fully in it and love and adventure await and the cobblestones of our life path await our tap dance and darn it, singing our way into confidence or whatever sort of mantra-like activity we want to embrace that reminds us that we ARE and we are meant to be fully and wildly and improbably alive; that kind of cavort is life and it is ours to take up.

So why not dance into believing in ourselves? 

Why not indeed.