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.