Tag Archives: religion

Goodness

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Behold, God is doing a new old thing!

I am retired.

I am retired and the sense of being un fettered means I want to be out in the world.

Cooper and I have a new camper. We are rookies at the craft of camping. We have so much to learn and time in which to learn it.

This past week we celebrated our longest occupation of the camper. We were out and about and having made a detour to attend a funeral of a beloved, we were on our way to our second destination – Bayfield, Wisconsin.

Motoring along on highway 53 there was a bump followed quickly by the realization that something was very wrong. We pulled over to the side of the road and discovered an incomprehensible thing. It wasn’t a flat or a fractured axle. The cause of the problem was that the bolt coupling the hitch to our car was gone.

Gone.

The camper had slid on the power jack and was unhurt and the chains held but the camper was now down off the hitch and to the rhythm of cars whizzing past at 65 miles an hour was added our sense of NOW WHAT?

A man pulled up in a not-new car. He engaged Cooper in conversation. I watched Cooper’s body language to ascertain the gist of the interchange.

The man got out of the car and promptly got to work. He jacked up the camper. He assured us that this devastation was not a big deal. He called a friend who lived nearby who happened to have the right-sized bolt and pin to secure the camper in its rightful place. He went and got that pin and bolt and laid on his back to install it while cars whizzed by.

As we were thanking him we exchanged information and it turns out we are all ministers: Cooper and me in the UMC and the gentleman as a Jehovah’s Witness. He shared a pamphlet with us and offered to talk more with us about his faith.

As we pulled away the power of the goodness of the Samaritan who saw the plight of two pastors in the ditch was not lost on us.

He saw. He stopped. He helped to gentle our jangled nerves and he knew what to do to help us and he did it.

He showed us mercy, did our neighbor.

We seek to go and do likewise.

Unfettering Grace

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On Sunday our church prayed for my friend the Rev. Marilyn Evans.

On Sunday Marilyn breathed her last.

Her death has given me opportunity to think about her life.  

Marilyn was whip-smart, people wise and she could laugh in ways that created celebration around her.

And, Marilyn was courageous.

The last time Marilyn was at Annual Conference she preached.  She unfolded in the midst of the 800 people gathered the needless soul carnage she lived as a lesbian woman serving in a church unwilling to acknowledge her fullness of God-created being.

Marilyn served the church as lay person, as ordained pastor, as mentor to many, and as a faithful witness to the transforming love of God as taught and lived by Jesus.

And, for too many of the years of her lived discipleship she was asked to be in the closet around one of the most spectacular gifts of her life:  Her beloved, Mary.

When such things became legal, Marilyn and Mary married.  I was blessed to sing at their wedding.  Those gathered with them and those who carry that day in their hearts were and are in awe of the goodness of their love.

Marilyn served in a movement – the United Methodist Church – that made her love a chargeable offense.

God have mercy.

The United Methodist Church is in the process of cleaving.  One set of Wesleyans will set up camp in what they are calling the Global Methodist Church.  God go with them.

As for those of us who are tired of the squelching of the good news, we will continue to live into the vision cast by Jesus and the Minnesota United Methodist Church.

We will celebrate the love given to all of God’s children and we will give thanks that persons continue to be called into ordained leadership and we will sing at weddings and surround those who have the courage to claim love with all of the support our good hearts can muster and we will do all of these things

in the open, out of any constructed death-dealing closet.

We will love and we will support love and we will live because women like Marilyn lived and loved and live yet.

God give us a sense of joy as the unfettering of grace commences.

what’s next

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I didn’t grow up in the United Methodist Church.

I made my way through young adulthood and into motherhood.  While we were far from home we happened into a United Methodist Church and there I found theological and heart home.

While attending seminary I was appointed to my first church.  I have been blessed (mostly!) to serve in United Methodist churches for twenty three years.

But all along I have felt the grinding wrongness of the United Methodist stance on full inclusion.

I organized regional conferences in Duluth and Minneapolis.  I twice spoke at the state capital during rallies organized by OutFront Minnesota.  I worked with colleagues in the Minnesota Annual Conference to speak out against the (anti) Marriage Amendment in MN and have worked for a day when all people are beheld as beloveds in all aspects of their beings.

I name the above because it helps me assuage my sense of complicity in the existence of an oppressive structure through which I receive benefit.

I cannot do that much longer, that assuaging.

The global church met in 2019 and came away a declared unsafe place for GLBTQI individuals, clergy, and allies.

No place is safe when core identity is perceived as suspect.

So what next?

I am a woman of 61 years.  I find myself exhausted by the grief of these days.

And yet, there is new life aborning.  Power is rising up from the too-long silenced and this power I seek to support.  A conference held here in Minneapolis called Our Movement Forward will center discussion of the future of the UM church in the community of People of Color, Queer and Transgender leaders.  I will go to this gathering as an ally.  I will go to this gathering to learn and to listen.

I serve a courageous church.  Christ UMC in Rochester is leaning into the questions and work of this time.  We own the grief and the opportunity of these days.  Together, we seek to offer welcome and hope in the way of Jesus.

Yesterday I was in the hospital room of a young mother.  We were gathered to celebrate her baptism.  Her young son held her as she received the sign of the cross on her forehead.

The song we shared before her baptism is one she loves:  We are a Gentle, Angry People, by Holly Near.

And so we are.  Gay and straight together, singing (and organizing and witnessing) for our lives.

apples, trees and wonder

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Today was the wildly joyful wedding of two people who have and will bless this world.

The service lasted nearly three hours. That was amazing.

Also amazing was the fact that my eldest daughter Leah took the pulpit.

She read from the Hebrew bible the account of how it was God appeared to Moses in the burning bush. It is a tale that calls Moses to remember that God is in all places and it ends with a recounting of how it is God was present through the generations. All those named as God-companioned were, of course, men.

Except when Leah read it. She read the account with energy and meaning and it ended with the voice of God assuring Moses that God had been present to his mother and to her mother and to Sarah and to Rebecca and to Leah and to Rachel.

And I thought as I watched my daughter launch her heart into proclamation that for too long astute and powerful women have been subjected to a recounting of God’s story that does not include them.

I have known this. I have named the scriptural and traditional gender warp that has too often cast women as bit players. I have mourned the ongoing (still???) challenge it is to find hymnody or liturgy that is fully inclusive of women as Holy reflectors.

Today, I know the enormity of woman loss in a place deeper yet because my daughter took the pulpit and made the story her own.

Isn’t that what we are waiting for?

Isn’t that what it’s all about?

From generation to generation it is our story.

It’s time for the women to speak.

in a day

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This morning I was witness to holy leave taking.

A church member, vibrant of soul and young of age, breathed her last.

She was surrounded by the resonant beauty of her fine life: Her partner, mom and sister acted as resurrection midwives. She had prayed that her death might be grace filled. And so it was.

All day today the church has been alive with the sound of music.

Tomorrow we will celebrate the marriage of two amazing folk. They have collected a tribe of singers and dancers who will lead us in a full-hearted celebration of love. There is music happening in most every space available. Our day care children are in awe, as am I.

Love. It’s what life is all about.

Today as Lori let go and tomorrow as Drew and Cassie cleave it is love that moves the loosing and binding that is life.

Love.

Born in the heart of the Holy.

Savored by the wise.

weave

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This has been a summer of prayer school.

Sure. I talk about it. I teach it. I do it.

And then family hearts break because of impossible tragedy. Then the chaos of misery strikes my child.

Then I realize that I am held by a weave of hearts connecting to the Holy and in that weave I am grieving sister and aunt and wracked mother and I am raw want and I am held.

I am held.

Love breathes through prayer. The number of people who have prayed and are praying for my loves and for others in this God blessed world is wondrous.

The song of prayer, whispered and bellowed and sung minute by minute and heart by heart.

Prayer; the heart longing of God reached out and returned as the breath that is life.

I’m learning.

Hallowed be.

in a name

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At the hospital where son Jameson stayed, there was a white board.

On the white board there was a spot for writing the names of contact people for the patient.

In said spot for said son, there were three names written, each with a different last name.

What’s in a name?

While going through the shatter that is divorce, it feels like the word “family” will be forever grief soaked. The days of assumed roles and relationships are forevermore gone. There is a deep sense of loss in that. The “who are we now?” is question near desperate for answer.

And, resurrection is real.

Those three last names? They represent a dad and a mom and a step-father committed to the body-soul-mind health of our beloved. Those three last names represent a tribe of people who are committed to companioning each other through love and life.

Three last names represent family in all of its complex stunning foibled power.

What’s in a name (s)?

Family. Our family.

Our answer.

Palm Sunday now

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The story of Jesus is not some long-ago drama we come to church to hear.

 

The story of Jesus is NOW.

 

All of the things that Jesus did and taught and longed for us to know with our whole lives.

 

Those things are NOW.

 

And the wild hope of Hosanna and the brutal chill of silence as lives are hung on a cross and left to die.

 

Those things are now too.

 

Jesus rides into Jerusalem yet.

 

Jesus rides in on the back of a humble beast meant to remind us that the way of power used by the world is not the way of God.

 

Jesus rides into the halls of power yet and the hopeful raise their song yet and Palm Sunday is now.

 

It is now.

 

Palm Sunday is now while the legislature of our state is in session hearing the cries of the hopeful – save us! – as housing for homeless and marriage for same-sex couples and health care for the poor and adequate education for our children are tussled over in the halls of power and Jesus rides into schools where bullying is being addressed and Jesus rides into nations grappling with how to deal with violence that mangles the souls of women.

 

Palm Sunday is now.

 

On Palm Sunday we acknowledge that Jesus is riding toward the cross.

 

The cross: the place where the passion of love hangs in agony as the wounds borne by those who work with their lives to overcome hatred and injustice are hammered time and time and time again.

 

The cross is the price of hope and loving:  tell me that is not so.

 

It was and it is and Jesus teaches us that we must be willing to know the pain of the cross.

 

It is our own.

 

The cross, as theologian Dorthee Soelle names it, is the world’s answer, given a thousand times over, to attempts at liberation.

 

In long ago Jerusalem, Jesus rode into the streets to the cheers of his hopeful followers.

 

He knew that the audacity of his message – that we are to love God with all our hearts and minds and imaginations and our neighbor as our very selves – he knew that such teaching was going to challenge those who made money and wielded power through cultivating a world where money and privilege were enjoyed by the few when the needs of the non-elite were deemed a non-issue.

 

Jesus knew that liberating the poor and the marginalized from the grinding injustice that kept them invisible and powerless could not be allowed to be imagined in the hearts of others.

 

He knew keeping people cowed and poor kept the privileged in power.  He knew.

 

And yet he got onto the back of that donkey and rode toward the cross.

 

The cross.

 

The place that waits for all who dare to love.

 

Come, you that love the Lord.

 

Allow yourself to feel and feel deeply.

 

Allow yourself to be swept into the hope in Christ Jesus that swells your heart with Hallelujah and shout it shout it shout it and follow it to the place where God calls you to witness for justice – in your school and in your work place and in your community and in your nation and in your home – and allow yourself to feel the pain of loving because through the present power of Christ Jesus – through the NOW of Christ Jesus – you are no stone.

 

You are a called disciple of Jesus. You are walking love and you will not let hatred and indifference to the pain of others numb your heart.

 

Oh, that we would ride into the Jerusalem that awaits us each.

 

Palm Sunday is now.  Jesus rides with us yet.

 

Amen

home

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Carole King’s Tapestry album was the soundtrack for my teens.  The album somehow found each part of me and gave it voice.

One of the songs that has been sounding in my being this past week is the song “Home Again”.  It begins: “Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever going to make it home again, it’s so far and out of sight.  I really need someone to talk to and nobody else knows how to comfort me tonight.”

Besides the fact that the song is soul-woven, it has sung in my heart because of the power of the story of the Prodigal.  Jesus tells a story about a man who loses himself in the so-many distractions that can lead us to groundlessness.  Jesus tells us that the man “came to himself” and decided that he wanted to return home to the place where he is known and taken in, stupendous stumbles and all.

It is our story in so many ways, is the story of the Prodigal.  We sing the song of “Home Again” so many times in our lives.

We wander seeking home throughout our lives.  We convince ourselves that home can be found in chemicals or time fritters or shopping or something someplace someway that will take away the great lonely of living.  We wander and long and wonder and then, oh then, we come to ourselves and remember Home.

Home in the great expanse of the Holy whose song dances through us yet.  Home in the wrap of claiming and welcome that awaits us if we would but cease our scurry.

Home in the heart of God;  taken in, welcomed and fussed over are we.

Home.

time and rivers

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Of time and rivers flowing
The seasons make a song
And we who live beside her
Still try to sing along
Of rivers, fish, and men
And the season still a-coming
When she’ll run clear again.

So many homeless sailors,
So many winds that blow
I asked the half blind scholars
Which way the currents flow
So cast your nets below
And the gods of moving waters
Will tell us all they know.

The circles of the planets
The circles of the moon
The circles of the atoms
All play a marching tune
And we who would join in
Can stand aside no longer
Now let us all begin.
                Pete Seeger

How is it we are given this gift of life?

Having returned from vacation a scant 24 hours ago, I officiated this morning at the funeral of a woman who blessed.  She blessed through laughter and quick humor.  She blessed through a willingness to “join in” as Seeger sings in the lyrics above.

She lived a singular life; unrepeatable and precious.

And so it is for each who join in.

I don’t know what tomorrow holds.  My prayers for my loves and the real clamor of my longings sound relentlessly in my soul.

Sometimes the “I want” is a gong noisy and clanging and that gong has the power to create such cacophony within that the still small assurances of the Holy are near overwhelmed.

And then I remember.

Mine is to cast my nets below; deep into the moving waters of grace that will tell me all I need to know.

Still.  Small.  Powerful.  Deep.

Let us all begin.