A new argument for being physically present

I was reminded yesterday that "90% of caring is just showing up", and for ministers (read: the priesthood of all believers), this is especially true.  Being a witness to the love of God most certainly involves the very rare occurrence of leaving the laptop at home, the iphone in the purse (maybe even on silent...God forbid), and giving our whole attention to someone who just needs to talk, cry, rejoice, or die.

Our digital addiction is a distraction not only from our time spent with God's people, but from awareness of the problems of the world.  How quickly we can forget that our neighbors (read: family down the street, or refugee family in Syria) make their beds in a shelter or an alley tonight when we enjoy our evening distractions and then sleep peacefully in our warm beds.  Yes, this technology can connect us with others around the world, arouse our inner fire of justice, but it can equally distract us and keep firmly the wool over our eyes.  Indeed, we often don't even need technology to distract us from the pain of others.

Yet here's a new article that might not only defend our (sometimes pathological) focus on our technology and concern for our neighbors, but get us out of the house too.  Apple's new "eyeglasses."  Yes, it's a new layer of technology, with its new realm of freedom and choices, and a new round of fear about driver safety and protection of personal information.

But what I see is that technology, as it moves toward more convenience, is actually doing the opposite of what it used to do.  Before, it kept children at home with their games, rather than pushing them outside to play ball.  It once kept parents tethered to a machine in an empty room, with distractions enough to fight off the inevitable existential battles of middle-age.  It forced families into separate realms of existence that were only broken by family dinners and electrical outages, a separation only before successfully seen through the Victorian architecture philosophy of a separate room for each person or each task.

Now, technology wants you to go outside and play.  It wants you to stay connected with your friends online so that you can visit with them in the real world.  It wants you to have the freedom to enjoy its convenience while still functioning in a basic physical capacity.  As I write this in my pajamas (it's a snow day- I see no reason to change) in the late afternoon, after spending all day working on a website, an email service, an e-newsletter, etc., I think about this battle between mental activity and physical presence often.  Of course, pastors, professors, and many others battle the realm of the overactive mind and the underactive body in many other ways that have little to do with technology.  Still, I see that as technology progresses, I'll have little excuse for sitting here in my pajamas like this in 10 years from now.  I'll be out playing in the snow, or visiting the coffee shop (wait, why am I not there now?), while I inform the church that the Wednesday night activities are cancelled due to snow.  Or maybe, we'll be having some of those activities online.  But I hope we'd never move all our activities online- I like hugging people when I share the peace of Christ with them, and breaking bread physically together.

I'll still turn it off my Apple eyeglasses/implant/brain-reader when talking to people though.  I hope that in 10 years, you can meet with a pastor and have her/his full attention, as we as a society build a respectful etiquette in relation to our devices and our fellow human beings.  I hope that if I am one day dying in my bed while my family is sitting with me, they'd have the courtesy to turn off their football game while I cross over to the other side.

What would you do?

So here is a hypothetical situation for you: you show up to the indoor track at the local gym, and you notice the sign about “track etiquette” posted on the wall.  On odd-numbered days, runners are to run counter-clockwise around the track.  On even-numbered days, runners are to run clockwise around the track.  There is only one other person running at the moment- counter-clockwise.  You quickly remember that today is an even-numbered day, so today is “clockwise” day.  You decide that you will:

A. Kindly but boldly proclaim to the man that he’s running the wrong way, thus setting him straight and keeping you from having to make the same horrid mistake to avoid a head-on collision.

B. Don’t say anything, but do the right thing by running clockwise like the sign says.  Head-on collision and strange looks might occur, but you’d rather do the right thing yourself, even if other people don’t care.

C. Run counter-clockwise also, only because it’s not a big deal.  It’s just running around a track.  Chill out already.  Poor etiquette ≠ a warrant for your arrest.

D. Run counter-clockwise because you also don’t care for anyone’s rules; did I mention that you consider yourself a rebel, and would revel in the chance to get arrested by the “track” police?  What a great story!

E. Avoid having to make a decision and go find a treadmill.

How you answer this question may or may not reveal the nature of your character and/or your reasoning skills.

Lenten discipline

I don't usually talk about my Lenten disciplines, in part because they are often too abstract for my life and they get abandoned due to lack of forethought.  However, I will share this time:

I shall challenge the notion of "progress" in my day-to-day life.

Yes, I know, this is again very abstract, but I've thought it through.  When I think of all the things that have stopped me, all the abandoned disciplines I initially took on when I moved to Waverly (practice regularly, exercise regularly, read extensively to feed the numerous translations and exegesis papers I would get to because I have the time and skills now), I realize that part of why I quit was because I wasn't sure what I was aiming for. I wanted an end-goal: a recital, a target fitness goal, and a call from a parish.  Then none of those things really happened.  While I'm sure I could find a way to schedule a recital, and just choose what I want out of my running, I really can't push the call thing.  I'm boxed in with several boundaries on the call (geographic location being one of the bigger issues), so that's a little bit harder to "accomplish."  Still, I think I am beginning to uncover one of my golden calves...the notion of progress.

After "progressing" though a music degree, my final year was spent in the purgatory of no real study, an early morning job stocking my local target, and no real direction.  Ugh.  No real thought to the present then...just what I could do to get out of that purgatory.  Then seminary was lovely enough to help me feel like I was "progressing" into a pastorate by leaps and bounds.  Life did improve greatly with a theological education.  It helped make sense of music school and the purgatory year.  I still helps me see and discern in ways I never would have otherwise.  It also gave me direction.

Yes, direction.  The trailhead.  It carries such anticipation, such purpose.  Oh, the Places You'll Go!  (I'm sure other people got that Seuss book when they graduated from high school).

Suddenly, I'm not at the trailhead anymore.  I'm not even on a trail.  I don't even know where I am.  I mean, I'm in an internship.  It seems like a trail of some sort.  But sometimes it's not.  It's not purgatory either.

I see no reason to think that I'm on some sort of road of progress right now.  I'm just being who I am, where I am for the moment.  The part of me that earns credit for hitting milestones, who is rewarded by looking back and seeing how far I've come, isn't getting fed right now.  So either I go hungry pining for the perfect meal of the future progress or I enjoy the food that is on the table at this moment- the feast of the present.

I will practice violin, not with a recital in mind, but because I love playing violin.  What will I play?  Scales, etudes, old sonatas.  Will I compare myself to how I once played them?  I might, but I won't end the conversation there, longing for the overly-glorified past or the ever-hopeful future.

I will exercise, not with the goal of a marathon or all-time record, but because it keeps me healthy, and it helps me sleep better.  I will neither compare myself to others or to my previous self.  I will just enjoy my time spent running, and, God-forbid, enjoy the fact that I am young and healthy and can still do these things.

I will wait for a call, despite feeling like a bum and a freeloader, because I know God is doing something in my life with this time.  I might translate some Hebrew, or I might not.  I'm not going to beat myself up over it anymore.

Last year for Lent, I gave up self-abuse.  It was largely successful, but now I have much more time to let the negativity gain traction.  Still, it's all embedded in these ideas of progress and hierarchy and control.  Maybe I'm just trying to say no to these things, but really, I'm saying yes to being present in this wonderful place with these wonderful people.  Besides, I didn't earn this time off (a nice way to say "underemployed"), but it is a gift from God.  I didn't bust myself in seminary and therefore become deserving of this time to rest- it's a gift freely given by God for my recovery of creativity and recentering.  I'm ready to embrace that.

What are you taking on for Lent?

Sermon- February 19, 2012

“Telling Our Story”  Cedar Heights Community Presbyterian Church, February 19, 2012

GOSPEL MARK 9:2-9

²Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, ³and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. ⁴And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. ⁵Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” ⁶He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. ⁷Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” ⁸Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

⁹As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

This is the word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.  Let us pray:

Lord, speak, for your servants are listening.  Then Lord, teach us to speak, that we might learn to tell your story.  Amen.

* * *

It seems like Christmas was not that long ago, and baby Jesus was quietly sitting there in a manger next to Mary and Joseph; shepherds and magi were visiting.  Outdoor manger scenes dotted the Iowa landscape, and people near and far came to see the latest baby born in the congregation take on an early acting role of Jesus in the church play.  Now, Jesus is in his thirties with a thriving ministry of healing and prophesy.  In our liturgical cycle, the cycle we follow that tries to fit the highlights of the life and ministry of Jesus between Christmas and Good Friday, we are coming very close to a time of Lent- the time of preparation for the cross, the death of Jesus.  Today we celebrate the lesser-known day of Transfiguration Sunday, based on the scripture we heard a minute ago.  It recalls a time during in Jesus’ ministry after which he has told his disciples that he will suffer and die and be raised up in three days.  After giving them this questionable piece of news, Jesus then takes the disciples Peter, James, and John up a mountain, undergoes some sort of physical divine transformation (or “transfiguration”), and talks with Moses and Elijah.  Time is seemingly suspended.  The future, the present, and the past- the vision of Christ in glory, the present disciples, and the past patriarch and prophet of Israel- all meet on this mountain, a “thin place,” where heaven and earth more than just approach, but suddenly overlap.  Moses and Elijah, though long dead, apparently have something to discuss with Jesus.  What the disciples don’t yet fathom, but we after-the-fact have been offered by the gospel-writer, is a clue that this mountain-top experience is a turning point for Jesus.  From here, he leaves toward Jerusalem.  This itinerate preacher who roamed around curing the sick, forgiving sinners, and frustrating the powerful is now pointed in one direction- the journey toward the cross.

Soon, this Wednesday evening, we will have a mixture of ashes and oil imposed in the shape of a cross on our foreheads, marking us for our death with Christ.  It is hard to believe that over the next few days, we’ll go from being on the mountaintop with Jesus to beginning the journey with him toward a cross.

What fascinates me about this scripture reading from today, however, is the reaction of Peter.  Jesus becomes transfigured so thoroughly that even his mountain-climbing clothes look well-bleached.  Then Moses and Elijah appear.  If we were present during such a divine mountaintop experience, what would we say to Jesus?  Would we say anything?  I imagine most of us would be too awestruck to speak.  Silence has never really been a problem for Peter though.  “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This, surprisingly, seems like a pretty good answer.  In a way, Peter might be indirectly telling us a story, about what he- a 1^st century Jew- might do when heaven and earth converge and the future, present, and past all meet- let’s build dwellings, markers, a meaningful space so that this meeting might be marked for our future generations to remember.  Peter’s suggestion might be in keeping with the tradition of building a temple for the divine presence of the Lord God on earth, or in the tradition of the Festival of Booths, when the Jewish people built temporary dwellings to recall their ancestors’ deliverance out of Egypt by God, or the tradition of building alters, signs of human-divine establishment, at the place where God has revealed a new sign to humanity of God’s transcendent presence.  While Peter might have sounded confident to our modern ears, the next sentence clarifies that, in fact, Peter and the other disciples were scared out of their minds.  No one really says anything to Peter about his brilliant idea, but the one who Jesus called “Abba” (Father) then overshadows the scene and declares in the direction of Jesus: “This is my son, the Beloved.  Listen to him!”  This final word closes the scene; the eschatological, divine experience is over.  Jesus returns to a somewhat normative state, the cloud is gone, Moses, and Elijah are gone, and the disciples are warned not to talk about it to anyone.

But let’s imagine for a moment that Peter, the talkative one, decides to do what the healed leper did last week in our lectionary texts- instead of telling no one about what happened on the mountain, Peter in fact told everyone.  What would he say?  How do you begin to tell such an improbable story?  Sure, the disciples know Jesus has been up to some crazy things- they might believe a complete retelling of what happened- but what about others?  If the chief priests and scribes asked Peter to retell the story, what would he say?  In reality, Peter does well holding his tongue.  Jesus conditions the story-telling to take place only after he has died and risen from the dead. 

Here in this transfiguration story, the fully-human Jesus is seen finally through the sight of his full divinity, co-existing side by side.  This story is in a 1^st century context where Jesus lived, worked, walked, and talked in a human realm (he touched the sick and healed them, he ate food, he was fully physically present), and on this mountain we and the disciples see a rare glimpse of his divinity peeking through.  In our 21^st century context, we so easily think of Christ who is fully divine, but whose humanity no longer appears to us.  In fact, the fully-divine Jesus does appear in humanity today- in us as the body of Christ.  I am reminded of a series of photos I once saw, where a picture of a rural African woman is displayed, and underneath is her name: “Jesus.”  Another picture shows a businessman in L.A. on his cell phone, and underneath is his name: “Jesus.”  There were dozens of pictures, and each person is described simply as “Jesus.”  As the church is the body of Christ, the communion of saints, renewed around the table where the bread is broken and the cup shared, we have become the imperfect image of Christ’s humanity in this world, we are the hands and feet of Christ.  Despite the dominance today of the image of a divine Jesus who has little left to say this world, the image of the human Jesus is indeed present in this world today, through those who express the loving compassion of God to which Jesus was completely devoted.  When we partake in the body and blood of Christ together in Communion, we pray what is called the “Great Prayer of Thanksgiving,” where we recall the story of our dealings with this God whom we worship.  We tell the story, every time we meet, every time we come around the table.  Not only that, we are a people who take the story out with us when we walk out the doors.  The story, in fact, claims us.

So how then do we tell this story?  As the body of Christ, how do we express the love of God, as exemplified through Jesus, to each other, to our neighbors, to our community?

The work of telling our story is a work easily neglected.  We are so busy telling our individual stories, through the things we buy, the things we wear, or our updates on facebook and twitter.  The individual narrative has taken such on ultimate and urgent importance in our context that we easily forget about how our individual stories actually connect with each other, how they give flesh to the stories of our holy texts, or how we understand the body of Christ in unity. 

In reality, we talk about our theology and our ethics all the time- even if we don’t name God in the process.  We are always evaluating our own lives and the lives around us.  As theologian John Calvin puts it in the beginning of his Institutes of the Christian Religion- the knowledge of God and that of ourselves are interrelated.  Maybe you didn’t realize that you are all theological thinkers- but how you understand yourself and how you understand the world ultimately points back to how you understand the nature of God.

So then how we think of ourselves as a community also says something about how we understand God.  When we claim that God is Triune- that God is one, but in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- we see that while God is united, God is also diverse.  Yes, we are one in the body of Christ, the communion of saints, but we are also diverse within that body.  This means we cannot always say one thing which describes us all.  The work of describing who “we” are is not such an easy task, but it is an essential one.  We are doing nothing short of describing who we understand God to be.

Who are “we” then?  How would we tell “our” story, as we know it is intimately related to God’s story?  Knowing that we are just a tiny portion of the communion of saints, how would we tell our story simply as Cedar Heights Community Presbyterian Church?  I ask this, because I already have an idea for an answer!  As the intern of outreach for this congregation, I help facilitate the telling of our story often- through the website and email correspondence.  I also get to tell our story through our monthly newsletter, the Shalom.  I challenge you to look through the stories of the Shalom and ask yourself what they might reveal about the nature of God.  Who do we say God is?  Peter said “the Messiah.”  Who do we say? 

Every one of us, through our daily lives, tells what God is doing in our midst.  Our lives are intertwined with Biblical and theological narratives.  Sometimes we are like Jonah, called by God to deliver bad news, and we’d just rather avoid our enemies and not tell them anything to make them mad.  Sometimes we are like Moses, who hears God’s voice in a burning bush and told to liberate the people of God from oppression.  Similarly, we are not sure we can get past our stuttering or endure the harshness of pharaoh.  Sometimes we are like Mary, humble in our offerings, but given a great responsibility anyway. 

It’s not that we equate ourselves with the massive importance of Biblical figures.  We are not engaging in a practice of narcissism and illusions of grandeur.  We simply mean to employ the Bible, the revealed word of God, as a way to digest and discern our life together as the body of Christ.  As ministers in the priesthood of all believers, we all have the task and the joy of living out the gospel with our lives.  Some are called to a ministry of proclamation.  Some are called to a ministry of clearing snow off the sidewalk.  Still others are called to the ministry of coffee-preparation for fellowship time.  We tell our story, intertwined with the story of God’s love for this world, not just through words, spoken or written, but through our bodies, through our lives spent physically present. 

Not only are we ministers called together to share the love of God with all people, but we are, in fact, a people called together.  You may think it is a coincidence that you are here today.  Maybe someone dragged you here.  Maybe you felt guilty that you weren’t here last week, so you came this week.  But I don’t believe that our life together here in worship is an accident.  You were called by God.  You were named and claimed by God long before you ever had a sense that you should come today.  You have been loved deeply in the heart of God, and for whatever specific reason, we have all been brought together.  Our mission here at Cedar Heights is to “nurture, inspire, and empower disciples of Jesus Christ to fulfill the CALL to ministry.”  It means that we all take part in the nurturing, inspiring, and empowering of each other and all others to fulfill their call, their vocation, from God.  That is the story we have been given to tell- this is the story that claims us!

In our shared life together, we have seen something quite rare- a glimpse of the kingdom of God.  We have had moments in our life together when future and present and past seem to blur, where heaven and earth overlap.  We see a glimpse of the kingdom of God in the compassion of the mission team, bringing warm meals to the elderly, traveling to tornado-ravaged Alabamans to assist in the rebuilding, helping a village in Rwanda educate and nurture their children and youth.  We see a glimpse of the kingdom of God in the faithfulness of the building and grounds committee- maintaining the basic things that allow us to even meet in this space, clearing sidewalks of snow and ice, keeping us warm in the winter.  We see a glimpse of the kingdom of God when the Deacons provide home communion for those among us who cannot be physically present among us anymore.  We see the kingdom of God through our “ACTS 16:5” committee as they do their best to help us navigate a new kind of world going on around us.  We see the kingdom of God when the Membership and Growth committee calls and visits new friends among us to share the hospitality of Christ with them.  We see the kingdom of God when members and ministers go to grieve with the families of the sick and dying.  We see the kingdom when we come together in small groups to read the book Soul Feast and take time to consider our individual and communal spiritual practices.  We see the kingdom when the teenagers here realize that this place is safe for them, that they will not be judged for asking tough questions.  We see the kingdom when the children are baptized (and in the process remind us of our own baptism), and when they remind the adults why it is that Jesus said that we must become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven.

We also see the kingdom in our beautiful broken relationships with family members, employers and employees, friends we meet for coffee, our teachers and our students, our mentors and mentees, people from our present and our past.  Where all has God revealed the kingdom of God to us?  We suffer loss when these stories are not told- they are the manna that sustains us.  They are a reminder to all of us that God is active and moving in our midst.  Who among us has been on the mountaintop this week?  Who among us has been walking through the valley of the shadow of death?  Who has seen the lamp that was not hidden under a bushel basket?  Who has tasted the salt that does not lose its saltiness? 

I must confess that I love being a story-teller for this community, through the occasional preaching and teaching, through the monthly Shaloms, through the emails that make it past your junk mail filter, through the website- the first thing many people see of our community.  But I am not the only story-teller here.  You are all story-tellers, called by God to tell the story we have seen of the kingdom of heaven come down to earth.  The best part is: we tell the story with our whole lives.  While words often fail to capture the image of the divine Christ, the overlapping of heaven and earth, we are people who also cannot walk away unscathed by that image.  We are a “mountain-top” people.  Though we soon walk with Jesus toward a cross of death, we are held tight by a God who reveals the promise of resurrection.  Yes, the story we tell is quite tragic at times- it may not always seem like such “good news,” but it ultimately speaks of a God who does not stop with death, but who walks with us through the journey that points to an empty cross and an empty grave.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.

* * *

I charge you now to go forth and tell the story, and if absolutely necessary, use words.  

The power of the pill

To my dear Catholic and politically Evangelical friends,

I'm getting frustrated, and a little depressed, at the nature of our current dialogue on women's rights and freedom of religion.  I suppose I didn't expect my vagina to be a main focus for the republican presidential nomination process, US election 2012, or the current news.  Here are some examples of what I've heard lately: Komen pulling non-abortion funding of breast exams and mammograms from Planned Parenthood, Santorum claiming that women shouldn't be in combat because of their "emotions", and now the possibility that your churches are what stand between poor women and their access to birth control (which Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, among others, consider an important step out of poverty in their book, Half the Sky).   I honestly keep my vagina and all discussion about it under wraps, so to have it brought out in the open in the news so blatantly is disconcerting.  However, this is not the first time my specific vagina has been the topic of your discussion.

First, you weren't very pleased about my candidacy for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  I understand where you are coming from, even if I completely disagree with you.  I hope that you understand that I have only tried to be faithful to God's call in my life.  And what did God do?  God sent me to the PCUSA and told me to walk with people through a difficult world where even good institutions make mistakes.  God called me to love people, in a special and particular way, and this came out as a calling to ordained ministry, one that my denomination has supported.  I respect that you have different ideas, even though some of you thought I deserve eternal damnation for this.  I hope you one day can allow the possibility that maybe God really did call me to this ministry, and moreso that God cannot be held captive by your pope, your catechism, or your politics.  Just like me, you might be wrong about some things.

Secondly, you tried to tell me that I wasn't living up to my calling because I am a married woman on birth control.  That's right.  I impede procreation.  I figured that if virginity wasn't an issue for Mary's procreation, I wasn't stopping God from nothin'!  Birth control helped me finish my Master of Divinity degree, and it is helping my husband and me prepare the best situation for a child to be nurtured.  I care deeply about how children are raised, the situation to which they are born (the foundation of why I care so much about the poor, just like you do), and I consider myself pro-life (for the life of mother and child alike, acknowledging a broken and complicated world with less-than-ideal options).  However, you've made it clear that this is yet another deadly sin of mine, maybe even worse than the whole ordination thing.  Any woman listening to the news right now would think that God hates her if she's on birth control- you say so.  She's not living up to her calling to be a mother (with too many children).  I know you're taking issue with "freedom of religion" and "freedom from Big Government," but listen to what you are saying in the process.  You claim that you will close every charity to the poor you operate in this country over this issue.  That sounds like a threat to me; it is not very loving.

Lastly, I haven't done this one yet, but be assured that I might in the future.  I will help re-elect President Obama, and this is why: between the two of you, Catholic/Evangelicalish (and the candidates you have rallied behind) and Obama, he's the only one who doesn't sound absolutely insane.  Seriously, read one chapter of Half the Sky about how women are treated throughout the world, and you realize that there's a reason our maternal mortality rate in this country is not the lowest in the world.  Maternal care (pre-natal, post-natal) is still considered an inferior recipient of money.  We maintain massive holes in our medical care for the poor, holes you have always been faithful to help fill, yet you maintain one of the biggest holes in medical care for the poor: birth control.  If you want people to stay poor, please go ahead and prevent their access to birth control/sterilization.  Since it came out that 98% of Catholic women have used some sort of birth control over their lives, I bet it's pretty embarrassing for you.  Maybe you even want to use the US government as a arm of control over your own women.  But in the way you have been so faithful in calling out governments to care for the poorest of the poor among you when they failed at doing so, I call you out now to care for those same people before they continue the cycle of poverty for the next generation.  Forgive the rebelliousness of this Protestant, but you blindly follow your church's teaching to the detriment of the people for which you claim have preferential treatment by God.  How do you possibly live in this tension?

So I know you all are really fired up about this, and I'm sure my musings here will garner even more of your negativity, and I can wrap my brain around why.  I still cannot support your efforts though.  I will work side by side with you for the eradication of crippling involuntary poverty, here and around the world, but I will not stop when you get sheepish about the birth control/women's autonomy issue.  I am from a tradition that supports women in this way, and it is deeply theological for us.  You do not have the only voice which speaks on behalf of God, and I'm gonna start with love.

With all love and commitment to you as well,
CK

PS- for something a little more upbeat...