Number in Series: First

Head, Heart, Hands

All That You Are Matters

Today we start a two-month series we’re calling An Embodied Faith. It’s about an exploration of life where all that we are matters. Where everything about the human body and mind and consciousness is spiritual. Where religion and spirituality speak to the whole earth and everything in it, and where our experience of everything and everyone in the earth can speak back to our religion as well. Embodied faith says that who and what we call God loves all the earth, and all of ourselves, and all of our neighbor.

Embodied faith is maybe easiest to grasp when we contrast it with disembodied faith. Disembodied faith thinks that the proper subject of religion or spirituality is something separate from our bodies that we might call the human soul or spirit. Disembodied faith thinks this is what God cares about: getting this part of us into heaven when we die, rescuing human souls from the inevitable destruction of everything else on earth. The God of a disembodied faith does not necessarily take interest in or love the whole of the earth, the whole of our neighbors, or even the whole of ourselves. So disembodied faith says we don’t need to either. Disembodied faith is dominant in the most common and powerful strains of American religious life, past and present. But it is toxic and limiting and not true to the liberating, good news of Jesus.

These two months we’ll make the case for the good news of an embodied, Jesus-centered faith and see where that takes us as we consider the implications for how we view and experience our own whole selves, our longings for justice and freedom, our experience of disability and trauma and more.

Let me start, though, with a story. A story of my body.

I’ve had the strange experience this year of being diagnosed with ADHD as a 44-year old. It’s weird to pick up a new diagnostic label so late in life, to learn this thing about myself now that explains so much looking back, but that I never knew.

Here’s how it happened.

I was telling a mentor of mine about the stress I sometimes still experience around writing and around preparing to speak in public. It’s not the actual speaking. I’m not stressed right now, I enjoy this. It’s the preparation, and the writing, the pulling things together I was talking about. And it was awkward for me to say this out loud to someone. Because I speak a lot – it’s part of my job now and of most jobs I’ve had for more than twenty years. And I write a lot too, and I used to be a teacher of writing, professionally. So that was awkward — to admit stress in this thing I was supposed to be an expert in.


I also don’t like admitting weakness in myself, that something is hard for me. I took a lot of pride when I was young at things that came easily, and I tend to experience my problems and failings and challenges with a lot of shame. If I can’t easily do something that’s important to me, I instinctively – right away – start asking what’s wrong with me. And how I need to fix it.

So I’m telling all this to this friend, and I’m kind of spiritualizing it a bit too. Like maybe I need to pray better or trust God better in my stress patterns, and my friend was like: Hey, it’s not my place to diagnose you, but have you ever wondered if there might be a simpler explanation for this, like maybe you just have ADHD. And he explained to me that it’s not that unusual that people who are hitting new challenges in mid-life can learn they have ADHD, which was not as much of a problem, or at least not diagnosed, when they were younger. This was intriguing to me, that there might be a body-brain explanation for something I’d seen as some kind of spiritual or even maybe moral deficit in me.

Now, for reasons we’ll look at next month in my talk on faith and disability, it took me two or three years from this conversation to actually get diagnosed, and then almost by accident.

But wouldn’t you know it, I passed the ADHD test with flying colors. I looked back and remembered that when I was a kid, I’d stand there sometimes with so much energy that I would shake my hands. I would get so hyper my parents would tell me to go run laps around our house. I used to lose stuff constantly too, well into my adult years, sometimes still now. Younger me was super-skilled and hyperfocused at things I liked and that came naturally and had next to zero skill and motivation for all the other things. Still true, on the whole. On and on it goes.

So with this ADHD label, my first thought, I think, Ah, this starts to explain some things. And then my second thought is, You know, I’m kind of curious about this part of myself. And so I’ve been learning about my ADHD brain and body. I’ve been learning I’m not just this bright, motivated guy who’s got all these screw-up parts of my life I’m ashamed of. That’s how I used to see myself.

Instead, I realize, hey, I’ve got the brain and body and personality that I have, and this ADHD piece is one part of that story. Part of what makes me, me. Annoying sometimes, for sure, but part of the man that I am, part of this person that God loves, just as I am. God doesn’t love my spirit or my soul but hate the brain and body I have. I am one thing. Just like every other human alive, you can’t split me up into matter and spirit, loved by God and not, or any other pieces.

And I’m learning that to manage my ADHD, to sort of get the best out of it but not let it hijack me, isn’t just a bodily or spiritual thing either, as if you could separate those. The same exercise that helps my brain focus gives me more joy and focus in prayer, and sometimes I experience it as a form of worship. And the same spiritual exercises that help me follow Jesus also unburden my mind and help me live with more peace and health in my body.

Like you, I’m one thing, a whole and embodied person.

Disembodied faith would tell us to not pay so much attention to our bodies or brains or contexts. They’re not so spiritual or important. Just believe in Jesus, pray.

But embodied faith gives us permission to bring our whole selves to the table, and approach God in a way that validates and nourishes the whole of our bodies and the whole of our unique life experience, and equips us to flourish and be agents of the flourishing of our neighbor and of our world.

These two choices aren’t just two ways of seeing ourselves, though. They’re actually rooted in two different ways of seeing God.

The Moved God

Disembodied faith tells us that God is all powerful and all knowing and never changing, that the good news of Jesus can be reduced to a simple formula that saves our soul, and therefore tells us that God doesn’t care about all of us, all of our body, all of our life context and experience. A disembodied faith’s God has more of a one-size-fits-all approach to people.

This has been a dominant way that Western culture at least has understood the divine, going way back to Plato, who thought of the divine in terms of a some kind of distant, unchanging spiritual ideal. And Aristotle, who imagined the divine to be an unmoved mover, that which shapes all events in the universe without ever being affected by them. The Christian faith, as it accommodated and acculturated to these Greek ideals, gives us a disembodied God.

But I’d argue that the God that Jesus worships and embodies, and the God that the Bible bears witness to isn’t like this at all. I think in Lydia’s talk next week, there will more about Jesus, but we’ll start today with a poem about God.

It’s a poem that was so beloved or so important that it’s one of the only things the Bible editors thought to include twice, pretty much word for word.

They thought it said so much about God too that even though these words were written down in the 8th or 7th century, they are put in the mouth, or the pen, of one of the Bible’s most epic figures from a couple hundred or more years earlier, King David. Now I kind of trashed David all summer, but — love or hate him — he’s a big deal in the Bible’s story and symbolism. And in this poem, we learn about the kind of God David was said to worship, and the kind of God the Bible again and again portrays. 

Let’s read it.

II Samuel 22:1-20 (NRSV)

David sang to the Lord the words of this song when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. 2He said:

“The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
3my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
    my shield and the horn of my salvation.
He is my stronghold, my refuge and my savior—
    from violent people you save me.

4“I called to the Lord, who is worthy of praise,
    and have been saved from my enemies.
5The waves of death swirled about me;
    the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
6The cords of the grave coiled around me;
    the snares of death confronted me.

7“In my distress I called to the Lord;
    I called out to my God.
From his temple he heard my voice;
    my cry came to his ears.
8The earth trembled and quaked,
    the foundations of the heavens shook;
    they trembled because he was angry.
9Smoke rose from his nostrils;
    consuming fire came from his mouth,
    burning coals blazed out of it.
10He parted the heavens and came down;
    dark clouds were under his feet.
11He mounted the cherubim and flew;
    he soared on the wings of the wind.
12He made darkness his canopy around him—
    the dark rain clouds of the sky.
13Out of the brightness of his presence
    bolts of lightning blazed forth.
14The Lord thundered from heaven;
    the voice of the Most High resounded.
15He shot his arrows and scattered the enemy,
    with great bolts of lightning he routed them.
16The valleys of the sea were exposed
    and the foundations of the earth laid bare
at the rebuke of the Lord,
    at the blast of breath from his nostrils.

17“He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
    he drew me out of deep waters.
18He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
    from my foes, who were too strong for me.
19They confronted me in the day of my disaster,
    but the Lord was my support.
20He brought me out into a spacious place;
    he rescued me because he delighted in me.

Do you hear it? The God David sings to is not an unmoved mover, unchanging, unemotional, stoically floating out somewhere in the universe, disinterested in the particulars of David’s culture and context and experience.

No this God is a God who changes course and acts in history. David says: in my distress, I called out to God, and then he listened to me, and then he started doing stuff he wasn’t doing before that. God hears a cry of distress, and God wakes up, or changes his mind, or gets started doing this intervention that God either hadn’t previously planned on doing or at least wasn’t doing beforehand. This is like a template for the Bible’s language about God – responsive, really particular, present in the moment.

This is also not an unmoved God. A God of just steady intellect or theory. This is a God who feels, and feels and acts with a kind of passion. David looks back on his life and borrows the central event of the Hebrew scriptures, the Exodus of his ancestors through the sea out of slavery, to symbolize God’s help for him in his own difficulties. And as he works this metaphor, he imagines that the hot breath of passion out of God’s nostrils parts the sea for the formerly enslaved children of God to march across into freedom. When I was starting to read the Bible a lot, this was one of my favorite images, the one of this song – which you find here and in Psalm 18 as well. It’s God like a dragon – hot breath out of angry nostrils, fire out of his mouth. God feels that much.

Now beyond the metaphor, God feels here about injustice and suffering. This is a God who cares about the whole human condition. The exodus, after all, was not in response to a crisis in religious freedom, or a need to get people praying more. It was a response to injustice and a need for liberation – not about souls, prayer, heaven, or all the other important stuff that disembodied faith limits its interest to. God cares about that stuff, but God cares about all the things, all of us, and – the arc of scripture says – especially about those that cry out in distress under injustice.

Speaking of God’s fond response to a distress cry, this is also a God who likes someone. David says, God was my support. When trouble penned him in, when he was confined and shrunken by stress and fear, God brought him to a spacious place. I love that image. That all of us, in our circumstance-imposed stress, and our self-imposed business and busyness and diminishment could hope for God to lead us into spaciousness, outer freedom sure, but also inner freedom and peace. Beautiful.

But whatever all this meant to David, whatever form his sense of God’s rescue took, he says God did it because he liked me. That liking he knows from God, that love isn’t cool or abstract but it’s formed and colored by affection and pleasure. What we translate from Hebrew as “delight” tries to capture the mind and the heart of God toward God’s kids. A smile of affection, a kind of I can’t help but be kind and generous to my kids. Look at ‘em, aren’t they great?

At risk of repeating myself, here’s what this means. God is not some kind of abstract, unmoved force or spirit who sent his son as with a formula to get his kids out of this hellhole and into heaven. God contains all the passion and wisdom and affection that comes with the best and deepest and highest love that God is. God is interested in and responsive to, God engages with, all that we are – our eternal destiny, our present challenges, our joys and our distress, our minds, our spirits, and our bodies – our whole indivisible selves.

Mind, Emotions, Body

One of the brightest and kind of geekiest people I know is one of my very best friends, who happens to be a graduate of MIT, just on the other side of Cambridge. And he wears his MIT class ring with pride. It’s got that beaver on it they call the brass rat. And my friend John at least tells me that stands for engineering focus of the school and its motto – Mens et Manus. Mind and Hand, or Head and Hand. And that motto has had an important place in my friend’s ongoing career in academia – where he’s argued that great scholarship, great work of the head, should find its connection to innovative application – to the work of the hands, the work of our bodies in the world. Just mind, just head, just intellect isn’t good enough for a university. It needs the hand, the body, expressive action in the world as well.

And that’s part way there, isn’t it, but not enough, because it doesn’t name the heart. I’ve followed closely through the campus ministry of our own Adam and Mary Reynolds the developments at MIT in recent years, where student problems of stress, and sleeplessness, and mental health challenges, and suicidality have been named as crises that call for a response of not just the head, or the hand, but the heart.

So I gather that this year’s class rings, the MIT Class of 2018 brass rat, had another motto on them as well – TMAYD. Tell Me About Your Day. A slogan members of this class tried to popularize on campus. Tell Me About Your Day – it’s a call to community, to empathy, to heart, really. Because we’re people of head, hand, and heart, people of mind, emotions, and body. All of that is made in the image of God. All of that is who we are. All of that is who God loves.

Disembodied faith in an abstract God can be reduced to assent to a creed, saying a certain prayer, or believing certain words and that’s it. You have faith. It’s simple, I guess, but not very interesting, not very helpful, I’d argue.

Embodied faith, though, is engagement. It’s what Jesus famously called loving God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Loving God with what we say we believe, sure. But also loving God with how we trust or feel, and even loving God – engaging in faith – with stuff we do, regardless of whether it’s even backed by any belief or feeling in the moment. Some people say faith is what they believe. For one guy I know, when people ask him what it means to have Jesus-centered faith, he’s like I don’t know what I believe, actually. That’s complicated. But I know I build a sukkot every fall. He – though he’s not Jewish – takes part in this Jewish seasonal ritual of community and connection to the land and gratitude to God. He’s like that’s how I engage in faith right now.

This speaks to me as I figure out and come to peace with my ADHD. Faith to me these days includes letting go of shame that parts of my brain are defective. It involves embracing that parts of what I love about myself are actually tied to some things I haven’t loved about myself, but coming to understand that God likes me in all of that. Embodied faith for me is learning more deeply that my practice of exercise and friendship and prayer and Bible reading and social justice advocacy are all tied together, all part of how I engage in faith and love the God who likes me with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.

I want to tell you one last story as I wrap up of a holistic faith helping us engage with our whole self. How embodied faith can affirm and free our interests and help spark a joyful life.

It’s the story of a fellow seminary drop out, but one that I heard on the NPR podcast for entrepreneurs called How I Built This. The story of Bob Moore, the kindly old man whose face you see on all his products in the store, the beans and whole grains and baking mixes sold by his company, Bob’s Red Mill.

Bob early in his life was not a seller of foods or miller of grains, but he was a businessman. He owned and operated a gas station and sold tires for a while and kind of accidentally picked up an interest in healthy eating, whole grain breads, and the old technology of stone ground grains.

Bob Moore also had a Jesus-centered faith and as he approached 50, he didn’t need to work quite as much and wanted to learn how to read the Bible in its original Greek and Hebrew, so he enrolled in seminary. And what he discovered, or was reminded of as he studied Greek was that God is a God of truth and that all truth is God’s truth.

And Bob was like, you know this stuff about whole grains matters to me, and you can actually read about whole grains here and there on in the Bible, and for me, faith is going to mean making and selling healthier grains in my time. And so Bob Moore engaged in his embodied faith, which included passions about nutrition and technology and healthy eating. Stuff of the world. Stuff of the body. And stuff of God’s interests as well. And as he ran a business, Bob Moore was like this business practice can be part of my faith engagement too, and he celebrated his 81st birthday by transferring a bunch of his profits to every one of his employees.

Because he thought if I’m going to love my neighbor with a good for the world product, I’m going to love my employee neighbors by having us share the profits too.

All of this — an embodied faith.

We’ll keep on this for a few weeks as we look at what it means for God to take on a body, and what all this embodied faith means for freedom and social justice and body image and disability and mortality and more.

But for today, as we just get started, I’d love to close with two invitations for you.

One, I’m calling this week’s tip for whole life flourishing, which is to task:

A Tip for Whole Life Flourishing: What part of yourself or your life have you considered beneath or outside of God’s attention? Imagine God takes interest in this. What does that say to you?

What would engaging this part of you with some kind of faith look like?

And secondly, what I’m calling our spiritual practice of the week, is this:

Spiritual Practice of the Week: Each day, take ten minutes to consider that God delights in you. God likes your whole self – head, heart, and hand; mind, emotions, and body – with affection. How do you react?

The Power of a Generous Question

For the last couple of weeks I’ve had the pleasure of having a new little commuter with me on my days that I travel over here to the office.  There’s a Reservoir family who recently moved from here to my town of Milton, south of the city – but just shy of the end of the school year, so they decided instead of disrupting their pre-schooler’s routine for just a few weeks of the school year – they’d keep her in her preschool which is over here in Davis Square.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a preschooler in the car, and I’ve never been so entertained. This girl is smart as a whip – and makes me laugh so much. And it’s been a long time since I’ve laughed out loud in the car on my commute! Part of the beauty, likely, is that it’s not my own kid, so everything seems endearing! I’d forgotten that part of this smaller human being land is really taking intense interest on certain things they are into – whether it’s a book, or a toy, a show, or a song! Despite the fact that kids often get a bad rap of having short attention spans, they really are able to hone in on what grabs their attention.

This little girl is absolutely head over heels for this movie/show called Minions.  Has anyone heard of it/them? These tiny little aliens? Creatures? I’m not sure what they are, but they became the stars out of a series of movies called Despicable Me, and evidently now have their own TV show.  Anyway, part of what makes these minions special is that they do little song numbers that are perplexing as much as they are addictive. And I have now listened to the minions soundtrack on repeat, many, many times. It’s hard to explain exactly what this experience is like, so I’m going to play you a little piece of one of these delightful songs:

[Audio clip: Papa Mama Loca Pipa – Minions]

You. are. Welcome.

((You might recognize the music from the comedic opera, Pirates of Penzance – by Gilbert & Sullivan.))

All of the minion songs are like this – it’s incredibly mind-twisting because I want to make it be real words, but they aren’t. It’s “minionese” –  but this little girl has memorized every, single word of this foreign language she has incorporated spotlessly.

Now – that song (and most of the other minion songs) is roughly 1 minute in its entirety.  Our commute over to Davis Square from Milton is 1 hour and 12min.

So I – feel like I’m learning another language, but it doesn’t have any apparent meaning – it’s real curious.

At one point in one of our drives, I started to think that something might actually be happening in my brain – like I might be going a tiny bit crazy.

So I suggested to this little girl that maybe we listen to the soundtrack of the original “parent” movie – the source that the minions were birthed out of…. With actual. Words.

So the theme song of all the despicable me movies is this:  

[Audio clip: Despicable Me Theme Song,  from 2:17 for about 30 seconds]

So much better, right?  I don’t know! But it does at least have words I can understand.

This little girl was stone quiet during the entirety of this song. The refrain “I’m having a bad, bad day” – is repeated 10 times throughout this song.

Not surprisingly – my little friend focused in on this particular line, and it was interesting to me how she started to process what she had heard. She started to ask some really inquisitive, generous questions:

  • “I wonder why that man thinks he’s having a bad, bad day?”
  • “Was he looking for something?”
  • “Was he wanting something he doesn’t have?”

I’m not kidding.  Word for word – I wrote these down, (once we parked in her pre-k parking lot, of course)!!

  • “There are kids singing with him – so I wonder if he talks to them?”

Are you kidding me with these questions. This kid is a tiny genius!

These generous questions she poses are ones that come from her attention and interest in life around her – even if it’s fictional – her interest inclines her to know more about what is happening to this man who is having a very, bad, bad day.

These generous questions seem to slice right to the heart of what it might look like to be interested in someone in your everyday interactions. These generous questions and ones like them seem to offer more than just an answer – they open up the state of the heart of the person in front of you.. . Perhaps we can take my little friends lead – and be invited to revisit and ask ourselves and others these generous question – as ones we haven’t considered in a while.

  • “What are you looking for”?
  • “Where are you left wanting for more of?”
  • “What about the connection/people around you? ”

This idea of a generous question – is one that relies on a posture of mutuality. And what I mean by that is that you – as the question poser – expect to discover as much about your own state of your heart, as much as the other – a receiving as much as giving kind of question.

Jesus’ forte are these generous questions.   They were embedded in the way he interacted and related to others around him…and we’ll get to take a closer look today!

Today we start a new spring series, that we’ve gathered some inspiration around – from a long-time friend of our church, Carl Medearis.  He recently wrote a book called “42 Seconds – The Jesus Model for Everyday Interactions”.

Now Carl’s premise is that if you take every single conversation that Jesus had in the Gospels, read them out loud, timed them, the average length of these conversations as recorded in the Gospels is 42 seconds long.  Taking in to account that some of those conversations were longer or shorter,and that some of what we read aren’t full conversations or what’s recorded in real time – Nevertheless….

MUCH of what we know of Jesus and how he related to people is found in these conversations.

The beauty of what this series invites us into – is not only the basics/maybe obvious points of faith (Kindness, be present, be brave – that STeve and Lydia will be up to share more about in the weeks to come) -but it invites us to think hard about “why”.  … Why does it matter that we take on these postures? WHy do we care? **And I think it doesn’t hang on an answer- but a question: “Who is Jesus to you”?

That’s a generous question! How does that generous question help us meaningfully go out in the world and live these ways out with people around us?

Attention Span:

A couple of years ago, a division of Microsoft published a 52-page report in 2015 that said the average human attention span had dropped from 12 (in 2000), to eight seconds in just over a decade. The report also offered this disturbing comparison: The average attention span of a goldfish, at nine seconds, was one second longer than the typical human.

Attention span was defined as “the amount of concentrated time on a task without becoming distracted.”  

*This study got lots of attention – some believe because it hit at a truth we all know and observe…. That *The true scarce commodity” of the near future, will be “human attention.” (NYT article).  That without a doubt the digital age is shifting us neurologically and not in a good direction….

 

These beliefs have impacted and shifted the way we put “content” out into the world..

IN many ways attempts have been taken to simplify and compress content (whether books, podcasts, blogs, sermons) – down to fit the attention span of a goldfish.

 

Yet others say this is not the complete picture – that shrinking our content might not be the best move… because our attention spans are not getting shorter – they are evolving – they are becoming more intensive, more efficient and able to extract more information more quickly.

So our evolving attention spans are actually nowhere near satisfied with eight-seconds worth of ideas or content.  ANd it’s not a matter of “length of time” – but whether the content is rich and substantial and worth consuming.

This take is interesting to me – because i can see in lots of scenarios where we are perfectly able to pay attention to what we want to—We can totally binge a Netflix series in a weekend if we want to…. Right?  Or in my husbands case, remember thousands of origins of wines, and their vintages and the type of soil that the grapes are grown out of – and the names of the growers and their family stories ,,etc..… when we are interested… (for instance)….

So perhaps it’s not our  attention span that’s in question – but more our interest span.

So if we can flip – and talk about our daily interactions with people on terms of INTEREST spans – I think it tells us something pretty interesting……What happens when we are in a grocery store line or waiting for the train… or at a traffic light….??  Or in the dentist waiting room? At a cafe? In an elevator? Do we reach out to the person near us?  Or do we tend to reach for our phones? Is this attention span or interest span?

Maybe a little bit of both – but it does lean a little more toward interest for me – and  begs for me the question – of are “we are really of interest to each other anymore?”  

And if it’s more an internal/heart matter of interest than attention …How do we ignite our interest span for one another again?  

I think part of what we might discover in that question if we give ourselves time to roam around in it a little bit – is that our interest for one another – might actually hang on our interest (where our heart is), for Jesus.  ***

So we are going to look to Jesus this morning and get inside one of his conversations and see if he can’t help us with this tool of asking a generous question – to help us grow our interest spans for one another …..

Let’s take a look!

Scripture #1:
Mark 8:27-30 (NLT)
27 Jesus and his disciples left Galilee and went up to the villages near Caesarea (says-a-ree-a) Philippi. As they were walking along, he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
28 “Well,” they replied, “some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, and others say you are one of the other prophets.”
29 Then he asked them, “But who do you say I am?”
Peter replied, “You are the Messiah.”
30 But Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

So there’s a tendency I think to read this scripture – at least for me – and only look at the answers that the people and Peter give.. And I think the tendency then that can follow – is to want to categorize those answers…. Into buckets of “right” or “wrong”.

 

Jesus doesn’t seem to focus too much on the answers given..  And infact I think he invites us to shift ever so slightly these scriptures in the light –  and read them through the questions that are posed.

“Who do people say I am”?  “Who do you say I am?”

WHat do these questions offer us?

 

Offers us the opportunity to imagine – at the very least right now to engage with a LIVING GOD in these scriptures – who might be showing us each a lot of different things!   FOr me – I can entertain the idea that the people’s answer really isn’t that wrong – or bad… that infact within their story and exposure and their journey at this point – Jesus did fulfill the types and symbols embodied in these characters of john the baptist and elijah….

It exposes that they could be actually interested – that there’s conversation happening among the people and crowds…… that they could be curious, (possibly trying to form and label and categorize Jesus) – but they also could be pondering – and leaning in to think about who this Jesus could be at a heart level…..what this Jesus they hear of, could mean to them…

 

And it offers me the opportunity to see that even an answer of Peter’s, which me might consider closer to the mark, “He is the Messiah!” – even if it’s the right theology in the moment  – it might still require more of a journey – more of an experience with Jesus – than a “right answer” can truly convey in a moment in time.

 

AND it allows us to see the heart of Jesus …. To see that he wasn’t quick to categorize,  “right or wrong” – but quick to engage, quick to try to build an interest span and model the value of space and conversation –  for the disciples.

 

“Don’t go and tell anyone about me”.

(yes – he likely wanted more time to do what he came here on Earth to do)…

But he warns really strongly!  Why?

I think it has something to do with this “content idea”….

Jesus might say:
“You will kill my content.”

“If – I, Jesus have content – then it is about a journey, it is about connection, it is about this deep participation at a soul level – a conversation with teh people around me. This is what I am about – this is who I am.”

 

“If you go and declare right now, while people are curious –  that “I am the MEssiah” – and I’ve have had no chance to get to know these people – and they’ve had no ENCOUNTER with me – then what is introduced to them in the word “Messiah” – is as empty as an answer that only seeks to be “right”.

 

“Who I am – does not fit in to an 8 second sound-byte. “

“I am rich – and I am worth consuming – and that builds through relationship and through living with me – and living out a life that values and roams around in questions.”

 

And so Jesus helps me here…..reorder the way I generally VALUE answers….   And invites me to consider that the questions themselves are the vehicle to waking our hearts out of dormancy for one another….. And that CONVERSatiON…. This very basic human method of relating – is the supernatural TOOL that Jesus gives us to build the Kin-dom of God here on earth – now…

 

“Who do you say I am?”

 

This question, is one that not only opens up who Jesus is to us – but also opens up our own human-ness….. That we were made and designed to ponder, to long for things, to be curious and to be in connection –     AND with that as a backdrop It gets back to my little pre-schooler’s questions…  What are we looking for?  What are we seeking? How am I seeing you, feeling you, interacting with you – Jesus? When we can move in those questions – we can find ourselves alive again to each other.

 

If it’s true that as a follower of Jesus – we tend to imitate the kind of God who is real to us…. Then we should be generous to ourselves and ponder this question that He poses, TO EXPLORE HIS CONTENT….“Who am I to you”? – It’s a crucial one as we move about in our world.  It undergirds – why we aim to be kind – why we aim to be present and why we aim to be courageous.

 

  1.  MID SCRIPTURE

We had a conversation around this very question at our table –  several months ago – as a family: “Who is jesus to you”? And let’s just say  we got a medley of responses: “Ranging on the spectrum from Jesus being Lord and Savior …..to….“I’m not even sure Jesus is real”….

 

No where on that spectrum of responses were the labels I would have sought to teach my kids – – if I had taken that route of providing answers … there was no “God is my teacher, my friend, my companion, my guide, mother God, ….the MESSIAH!

 

But what did follow was a heck of a lot more conversation that I don’t think would have happened – had I just dropped who I thought God was…. Our conversation was short on answers – But LONG ON generous questions….and the encouragement was to not tighten content  – but to encourage thinking and ASKING….

 

In Matthew it says:

“Ask and it shall be given to you”…..

I always read thru a particular lens – that whatever we need – we ask Jesus for it – and he gives it to us…this still holds true for me… but….

Today – I consider an additional layer – that the “ask and it shall be given to you”… is really about us – asking the questions..  That Jesus LOVES when we ask questions…. … ask yourself – ask others – ask God…. put into words what you are hoping for, living for, longing for, wrestling with, ask why it is you are having a bad, bad day – day after day….   What will be given to you is – I think – an invitation to keep walking that question out – in EXPERIENCE – AND in CONNECTION with a living God who is just as curious about your questions…  

 

The famous poet – Rainer Maria Rilke says, “Be patient toward the state of your heart (where all of these questions lie) and try to love the questions themselves….. like books that are written in a very foreign tongue….((or songs that have NO REAL WORDS)!!!    The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

 

So I could have tried to reframe the responses of my children, and I would have given  them the impression that answers are more important … I could feel bad myself that I haven’t taught Jesus correctly…. OR I could take seriously who Jesus is to me right now – to move out of that place….and see the beautiful journey in their  answers – to value exactly where they are (and not kill the content of Jesus for them).   Here I can see that just posing generous question is the gateway to the truest expression of the multi-dimensional love of God – that doesn’t hinge on a set of static beliefs… it goes beyond certainty, agreement, common ground – AND YET – it sparks INTEREST in me – of them ….. and it makes space and invites “honesty and integrity and dignity”. (Krista Tippett on Becoming Wise).

 

WHich if I take a step back – I can see that Jesus too, might just be a fan of these things!

 

#4:

This ancient tool of Jesus’ to keep us talking to each other in generous ways…Is a survival skill of today.   In our everyday actions to re-infuse our humanity with a sense of attention and interest.  Jesus asks questions to cut into a whole new level of understanding, not just used as a data gathering or informational data source – this is an incredible tool.

 

We are eager to have our attention matched at every turn – – but in very little ways grow our attention for each other… Conversation is a way to correct this  -to build interest and love for one another into the bones of our society.

Jesus shows us – this again and again….These generous questions are HOLY questions…He encourages us  -Ask generous questions….

 

Now – I get that it would likely feel a little odd to go up to someone at your bus stop – and pose the question, “You know – I’ve been standing behind you for a good 3 seconds now – and I was just wondering , “WHO AM I TO YOU?”

… and yet I think we ask generous questions everyday – we just don’t frame them as such …  A question Like: “How are you”?  – is actually a very generous question!

 

The real intent of that question is a genuine curiosity – “how are you?” – In many Muslim cultures this simple question is an entirely generous one – it means “how is the state of your heart?  How is your heart at this very breath, this moment?” It is a question that can build relationship – it communicates that you don’t want to label or presume what that person might be feeling.

 

I got a text a couple months ago from someone who I was just getting to know and the text came in – in the morning and all it said was, “How are you today?”

I waited – stared at my phone – waiting for the follow up text, of some detail of her life – or a question that I might be able to help her with… and that never came…

“How AM I doing?” (I have no idea!)

It seriously gave me pause – and the gift in that was it actually did allow me to check in with myself – and with God – where was he?  How was the state of my heart at that very moment?…and to pause because someone else prompted that pause – was even more meaningful.

 

Generous questions are the breath of humanity – it’s what keeps us receiving from the world around us – and giving in interest and attention to the world … this mutuality is where the Holy Spirit loves to hang out.  This is how we keep relating and engaged and thinking and leaning in toward each other…. And where we discover Jesus aknew again and again.

 

Jesus used questions to yes, know better the people in front of him  – BUT to also help them get in touch with and know themselves.

 

As we do this – and regard questions as a tool to better know ourselves and aid others to do the same- it will build our interest spans – and it will start to build a world around us infused with MULTI-DIMENSIONAL LOVE…

 

I want to end today – with this scripture  -where we read Paul’s prayer in Ephesians – and a pray for all of us today….

Ephesians 3: 14 – 18 (NIV)

14 For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

 

It seems strange to to think that tiny, ordinary interactions could build something as majestic as a world of multi-dimensional love – and  yet as a society – we are revisiting and asking questions that we thought we had settled and answered long ago – and turns out we hadn’t.. . . but it’s in the asking that we are building forward…

 

“Who is Jesus to you?”  Keep this question live – in your hearts….ask it again and again – …  Build forward with it… BECAUSE a heart in touch with this question is it’s own powerful content – to the world around it!

 

The Message version says:  “ LIVE  this LOVE – live it’s length – PLUMB the depths – RISE to the heights!!!  GO! – LIVE this love into being…… one that you can’t fall in and out of – and one that is found in the life of every person in heaven and on earth….found in every, normal day of your life.

 

To try this week, if you are up for it!:

 

  1. This week ask people a generous question like, “How are you?”
  2. Give your full  ____ second attention span to someone and be open to radical love.
  3. Use this tool of conversation to be an architect of multidimensional love.
  4. Journey with Jesus’ question, “Who am I to you?”
    1. Grab the centering prayer card and candle in the Dome Gallery.
    2. *also likely to have Carl Medearis book in our library next week.

Could Your Great Passion Be Hiding in Your Weakness?

Rev. Traci Blackmon’s Story

This past week I heard the Reverend Traci Blackmon speak at Boston University. She was there to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and was talking about the need for us to continue to do the work of justice that King was engaged in, particularly in his later years, and to do so with passion and courage.

But probably the moment that most gripped me wasn’t in the talk itself, but a trail from her own life she followed during the Q and A at the end. She was talking about how she ended up where she is today, a national voice for faith and justice, flying around the country, giving speeches this week.

And the story started maybe just 10 or 12 years ago, when she was a nurse who was also training to become a pastor. This was complicated by the fact that she was also a divorced mother of three school-aged children. As a single mom, a divorcee, a woman of color in St. Louis, she didn’t have a lot of give in her life in terms of time or money, or much of anything.

And there was this church with a vacancy for a pastor. It was out of her networks, but she drove by it every day – pretty big building, a historic church, and she had this strong sense that she should apply for the position. She thought this sense came from God, and maybe this would be a great job – a big church that could pay her full-time, so she wouldn’t have to keep working multiple jobs. Everything would work out. But she didn’t apply. And when she heard that someone else got the job, she felt terribly guilty, that she had ignored God’s voice. So she promised Jesus, I’m saying yes to anything from now on.

And the next day, she heard the person they had chosen for the job backed out. So she applied. And within a pretty quick period of time, they offered her the position. Thing was, she hadn’t visited yet on a Sunday. So she said, let me come to worship at the church, anonymously, no one needs to know who I am, before I decide whether or not to take the position.

The committee said fine, and she showed up on Sunday… and there were 12 people there for worship. 12. And she thought, my God, no, I can not come be the pastor of a church of 12 people. That is not going to work out for me and my family.

But she had made that promise to God, so she took the position. She had to keep working multiple jobs at that point, but since there wasn’t a lot to do pastoring a church of 12 people, she had time and energy to do stuff beyond the walls of the church. And one of the things she did was make it known to the neighborhood that anyone who needed a funeral could use their church building, and if they didn’t have a pastor, she’d be their pastor for it.

And one day, she met a family whose child had died, and she performed the funeral, and one of the ushers at the church gave Pastor Traci’s card to a woman who was a guest at the funeral, a friend of the young man who’d been killed.

For nearly a year after that funeral, she never called, but she kept that card with her until one day, she was one of the first people on the scene at the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. And she called Pastor Traci from the street that day and said we need you here.

Which is how Traci Blackmon ended up as the first pastor on the scene. Which is what propelled her to a position of leadership in the protests and activism that summer and fall four years ago, which in turn has led to all manner of opportunities for Pastor Traci to grow and work out of her passions for faith and justice, throughout St. Louis, and now throughout the country.

It started with a vulnerable person finding courage to say yes to God, even where that yes brushed up against this 12-person church that couldn’t provide for her and her children.

Courage: the virtue of virtues

The next few weeks we’re going to talk about courage and passion. As I pray for you all, over the past year, more and more I find myself praying for God to fill us with courage.

Courage has been considered one of the four primary virtues back to Aristotle (along with wisdom, temperance and justice). In the early Christian tradition, faith, hope and love were added to these, making courage one of 7 Christian virtues.

Sometimes courage has been seen as only the terrain of the brave or the strong (Greeks primarily thought of courage, for instance, when they thought about warriors.) But this isn’t right. Courage is more central thank that. (Without courage – fullness of heart – it’s hard to practice any of these virtues consistently or to practice them in hard times.) And I wonder sometimes if courage isn’t — with the help and strength of God — hiding right alongside our great weakness.

So for the next few weeks, Ivy and Lydia and I are going to retell some of the Old Testament’s, the Hebrew scriptures’ stories of passion and courage – some famous ones perhaps and some not so famous ones. And we’re going to tell you some other stories too and see what it is that people find in God that helps stir and activate great courage.

Gideon the… weak

Today we’re going to start with a story I love: the story of an unlikely leader named Gideon. It’s found in Judges, which is a collection of dark, violent, and mean stories from Israel’s tribal years. And so before I even read the excerpts from the start of the tale, I’ll warn you, it’s a story of violence. (So a heads up to parents and everybody, I suppose – in both the Gideon story and in another story I tell, there will be some violent turns.)

So with Gideon, Judges 6-8, first, it’s a tale of the violence being done to Israel by Midian – they are terrorized.

Then, when Gideon and Israel triumph over Midian in war, and they take Midian’s place as the conquerors, they act more or less the same – equally violent in their revenge.

And so, by the end of the three chapter long tale of Gideon, Israel returns to where they started, not really much better or worse off. Much as people from the ancients to us today think violence is going to fix violence, it never does. And Judges is no exception.

But as I read some parts of the beginning of this story, keep your ear out for something else, how this isn’t just a story of violence, but a story of fear and of courage.

Judges 6:11-16, 25-27, 34 (NRSV)

11Now the angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press, to hide it from the Midianites. 12 The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, “The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior.” 13 Gideon answered him, “But sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Midian.” 14 Then the Lord turned to him and said, “Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian; I hereby commission you.” 15 He responded, “But sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” 16 The Lord said to him, “But I will be with you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of them.”

Do you hear the fear here? Israel is afraid because of their economic insecurity, their lack, and their problems.

And Gideon is the very image of that fear and insecurity: he’s working in hiding — the winepress, which was the technology of delight turned into the technology of survival and the only safe place to harvest wheat without it being stolen. And then Gideon is the least in a family that is least in the clans of the “least” of the youngest child of Jacob – the bottom of the bottom of the bottom, in his own eyes.

So what does God, or God’s messenger, have to say to all that? The messenger says, God is with you, you mighty warrior. I used to read this as God seeing more in Gideon than he can see in himself. This is what so many mentors did for me when I was a young man, to see more in me than I could see. And maybe this is so, God calling out the inner warrior in Gideon, the person of deep courage that he really is.

But more and more, I wonder if God doesn’t just see us as the weak and flawed things that we are and say, that’s OK, totally good enough, because I am with you. I wonder actually if the messenger is teasing Gideon a little, in an affectionate way. Hey, little guy, youngest of this not very impressive family, so scared you’re doing your chores in hiding, you mighty warrior you, it’s OK. You can have courage because I am with you. You don’t need anything else. That’s what the messenger keeps saying after all: you’ve got a job to do, and I’ll be with you.

God’s made peace with all that Gideon is and isn’t. And Gideon can have courage not because he’s all that, but because God is with him.

Let’s read a little more.

In the part we skip, Gideon is afraid this call isn’t from God and asks for a sign. Just because he’s stepping toward courage doesn’t mean he’s suddenly not afraid. Then when he realizes he’s encountering God, he’s afraid in a whole different way – ah, my God. And he’s told: don’t be afraid, have peace. (So Gideon builds an altar and names it “The Lord is Peace”.)

Later, when it’s time for Gideon to lead people into battle, he’ll only go after designing an elaborate test for God and even after that, God says, Go, but if you’re still afraid, sneak into your enemy’s camp. There, Gideon hears their fear, and only then takes action.

The battle itself is a study in the power of weakness and fear – Gideon’s army is reduced in size to the point of absurdity, so they will know they depend on God’s strength, and then they “fight” with trumpets, candles and empty jars – using fear to rout their enemies.

We’ll read on, though, to the first courageous thing Gideon has to do, before any battling.

25 That night the Lord said to him, “Take your father’s bull, the second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal that belongs to your father, and cut down the sacred pole that is beside it; 26 and build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, in proper order; then take the second bull, and offer it as a burnt offering with the wood of the sacred pole that you shall cut down.” 27 So Gideon took ten of his servants, and did as the Lord had told him; but because he was too afraid of his family and the townspeople to do it by day, he did it by night.

34 But the spirit of the Lord took possession of Gideon; and he sounded the trumpet, and the Abiezrites were called out to follow him.

At the beginning of this battle story, and popping up again later in it, there’s this sub-plot of idolatry: who Gideon and his family and clan worship is as important as their freedom and economic flourishing. Seems like an odd element to the story, unless we realize that it’s their awareness of the living God’s presence with them that’s going to give them courage, and that idolatry – the devotion to other gods or other things – is itself a story of fear.

The gods in this story are Asherah, the Ugartic mother goddess, and Baal, the next-generation supreme Canaanite fertility god.

Archaeologists find evidence of these idols everywhere in ancient Israel. They were really, really common, as if most houses, even after they were part of a community that worships the God of Israel, kept around an idol to Asherah too, just to hedge their bets.

Idols were born out of fear – you cover yourself by honoring many gods to make sure you have kids that live past childhood and a harvest that can feed your family.

I’ve read that idol construction went up when threats of war were on the horizon, as people in their fear and awareness of their own vulnerability, reached out to more and more gods to protect them.

In Gideon’s case, his fearful family worships Baal, and Gideon is called to help them lean into the God of Israel instead.

Gideon does this and is nick-named the Baal-fighter. And that’s when he’s available to the Spirit of God: weak, vulnerable, aware of his own fear, he trusts God is with him; and God is, stirring him to courage.

Ironically, later in life, Gideon – installed as a leader of his tribe – taxes the people of their gold, himself makes a golden image of his authority for people’s security, and his children return to Baal worship – the cycle of fear and distance from God continues on to the next generation.

Before that happens, though, I think there’s some stuff for us here.

Do you hear it?

  • Our vulnerability that we’re so desperate to eliminate or avoid is not our enemy. God’s made peace with all our weaknesses. It’s OK. The stuff of our lives, as they are, is enough for God to be alive and at work in. Reality is God’s friend.
  • In fact, the seeds of our passion are often found in our weakness and pain.
  • And our pain, our limits, our weakness, and an awareness of God’s presence can lead to great courage.

And maybe one more here, bonus round. For those of us trying to figure out where our passion will be found, what we should be investing our time and skills and heart into:

  • Maybe we don’t have to go looking for our life’s work; it has already come looking for us. It’s there to be found in the circumstances and needs of our lives, even sometimes in our own pain and weakness.

This reminds me of the story of one of America’s great, great citizens.

Ida Wells’s story

The New York Times recently has been running a series of obituaries for people who have long been dead.

You see, they realized that in remembering the deaths of great and famous people, they’ve played right along with the patriarchy and white supremacy of our country’s past. So they’ve been trying to make up for lost time, and publish the obituaries of great women generally, and great women of color, in particular. And of them was the obituary of the pioneering American journalist, Ida Wells.

Wells was born in Mississippi in the 1860s poorer than poor. Her family literally owned nothing.  Circumstances improved modestly in her childhood, but when she was a teenager, both her parents and one of her siblings died of yellow fever. Ida was the oldest, at 16, and so she and the rest of her brothers and sisters were going to be split up and sent to foster homes. Desperate to keep her remaining family together, though, at 16 Ida found work as an elementary school teacher, and tag-teamed with one of her grandmothers to take care of her little brothers and sisters.

A couple of years later, Wells pulled a Rosa Parks on a train, long before there was a Rosa Parks, and when she was forced out of the segregated train car anyway, she won $500 in an anti-discrimination law suit. In the 1800s.

The decision was reversed by a higher court, though, and Ida Wells, a woman of great faith in God, cried out with words that could easily have been on the mouth of Gideon as well. She said:

I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people…O God, is there no… justice in this land for us?

Things got worse before they got better, though. When she was 25, I believe, she was working as a journalist , not a teacher anymore, and a good friend of hers, Thomas Moss, was an entrepreneur. In Memphis, Tennessee, he’d opened up a Black-owned grocery store. And Ida Wells was such a good friend of the family, she was the godparent to Thomas Moss’ first child.

But White people in Memphis were so jealous of his success, that they invented charges against him, he was arrested and then lynched by a mob. Wells was devastated, of course. She wrote that there was nothing left for Black men and women in her community but to save up their money, and get out of towns that wouldn’t protect their persons or their property.

And after all she’d been through, we’d understand if Ida Wells had withdrawn someplace quiet and safe. By her mid-20s, she’d been through so much in life already, so much to challenge her safety and her flourishing and her faith in God. It’d be understandable if she gave up.

But instead, she found her life’s work. She found her passion.

Wells became one of our country’s first investigative journalists and forensic reporters, writing detailed, fact-based, highly researched accounts of White America’s lynching of Black Americans.

Today’s investigative journalists continue to use skills and techniques developed and honed by Wells in her work. In part because of her leadership, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced into Congress during and after her lifetime. None were passed in the Senate, because powerful blocs of White democrats resisted, but the word was out. The nation knew.

And this was one of the fires that simmered and created the passion and strength that gave birth to the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and our ongoing efforts for justice and flourishing for all peoples today.

Wells found her life’s work in the painful circumstances of her own story. And she found her courage, best as we can tell, in her deep and abiding faith in the God who was with her in person of Jesus. 

Finding your life mission

What is your life’s work? What are you passionate about? What part of that, I wonder, is still hiding in your own vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and fears?

My own life mission is to help people and communities flourish. And for me, faith in Jesus, and education have been big parts of that. But this year, I’ve been looking for some new vision and direction in my life and work, and that’s brought me back to doing a lot of inner work this year: deep patterns of daily prayer and reflection and journal writing, regular therapy too. And all that’s taken me back first to some of my own vulnerabilities and weaknesses, places I’d really rather not go.

But my therapist has had this interesting line she uses when talk about a block or struggle or weakness in my life. She’ll ask, Can you make peace with that? Can you turn off the critic, the inner judge, and be compassionate toward yourself? Knowing my faith, she’ll ask, What does the part of you that is one with God see in yourself?

And she asks this because she knows the part of me that is one with God sees what God sees: a man who even though I still have parts of me that are weak and vulnerable, is absolutely loved and treasured and delighted in. A person that may not be enough, but because God is with me, has more than enough, for everything I’m called to. More than enough, with the God who is with me.

Like me, like Gideon, I suspect that no matter how purposeful or purposeless you feel, most of your life’s work is already part of your life. It’s hiding in the challenges of your circumstances, the public things of the world that cause you pain or frustration, the longings and desires and needs you already know.

And I’m quite confident that when God looks at your limitations and vulnerabilities, even when God looks at your fears and anxieties and insecurities, God sees a kid that God loves. God sees you and says I am with you, you mighty warrior. You have all that I am, so you have more than enough.

Can you see this yet?

Invitations

I want to give you three simple ways to see this more. And I suspect that for those of you that try this in the week to come, some of you are going to get something small but really good.

Some of you are going to find strength to do one courageous thing you need to do or want to do and that’s going to bring you and maybe someone else joy.

But maybe, just maybe, some of us are going to find some of our life’s work here, and the courage to go after it. Are you ready? Here are today’s closing invitations:

 

  • Self-acceptance is part of God’s self-transcendence. Make peace with your weakness. God already has.
  • Ask what one courageous next step God is leading you to take in your personal life.
  • Ask God for strength to see it through every single day until it is complete.

 

Bravely Eat These 40 Days

Today, we enter into one of my most favorite seasons of the year: this Lenten season – the 6 weeks leading into Easter – that we at Reservoir have taken to calling the 40 Days of Faith. It’s a season that calls us into an intentional personal and communal faith experiment (as we are all invited to engage with these 40 Days together). It’s an opportunity to scrub the windows of our hearts – where the dust and smudge of life have added it’s shadowy filter… it’s where we break pattern in our busy lives to get to know and see Jesus afresh – and alive in our own beings and in the world around us.

The 40 Days of Faith is a really powerful season where some pretty amazing steps of faith are taken and answers to daring prayers are realized and where we take this powerful journey together as a community.

We have a 40 days of Faith guide here in your programs that outlines the history of this season in our church — I believe this is our 16th year! And the fun story of how this building and campus came to be our home — as a result of the 1st 40 days of faith. And it also outlines what the invitation is in this year’s season.

This year we are calling this Lenten season, “Children of God in Fractured Times”. We’ll feature a Daily Bible guide we’ll read together in this mighty fun book of Revelation and outline some spiritual invitations, (ways to pray, different spiritual practices to try, fasting) — as a way to experience Jesus in ways that strengthen our courage, hope, and resistance as children of God and followers of Jesus in challenging times.

To be honest, I’ve been wrestling a bit with this phrase “child of God”. I’ve heard it most of my life, and so there’s a part that sounds too much like just a Christian-y phrase. It didn’t hold much authentic weight for me in my own experience of God. I wasn’t offended by the phrase, but it didn’t churn anything in me — it wasn’t a way I would frame my connection to God. And I had planned in this talk, to mostly touch the edges of the phrase without a lot of attention to it, because I didn’t want to speak out of something that wasn’t genuine for me. This plan, I realize, would have been a great loss for myself and all of you.

This past Thursday night however, “child of God” became live for me, and I wanted to share this small moment with you to frame how I see “child of God” now, and why I think this is super helpful as we kick off this 40 Days Season.

Thursday night my husband picked up my youngest from his after-school program and it was clear that he and his peers had talked about some of the events in Parkland, FL. Scott and him talked more about this on the short drive home. I was upstairs when they got home – and my son came running up the stairs to me and said, “mom I don’t want to go to school tomorrow”. I turned to face him and he smashed into my body full speed, threw his arms around my waist and exploded into tears… And he asked, “Mom – why can’t there be one place on earth where nothing bad happens?”

My only response was to hug him tighter, let my tears fall on the top of his beautiful head… and say, “oh sweet boy. I hear you. I hear you and I don’t know… I don’t know”.

This was a picture of being a child of God for me. And we are all children of God: a raw, vulnerable and brave posture — running full throttle into God with no filter. We are invited these 40 Days to throw everything we have and feel and can name at God — and find in return not a list of explanations, or rationalizations for pain, or check-boxes to tick off to return to sanity, but instead a warm, lavish love that embraces and shares in our madness, our pain, and outrage.

This phrase, “children of God”, is not just an over-used description; it’s the invitation of these 40 Days — an invitation that is a way forward in our fractured times and an invitation that is counter-cultural and straight up brave.

And so, if you are up for it these 40 Days are an invitation — yes — to carry on a tradition that for centuries followers of Jesus have engaged with to enliven their spiritual focus (and get to experience God more deeply). But these 40 Days are also an invitation to be courageous, to name your fears, right alongside your deepest longings and move through and out of this Lenten season with “child of god” stamped squarely on your warrior’s heart that’s also cloaked in the softness of God’s lavish love for you.

Back in September my husband, Scott and I started praying together in the morning. This had never happened before in our 16 years of marriage. We might pray for each other, (in separate spaces) — but not with each other and for each other , as an intentional part of our marriage.

We both are night owls — but tip that often to the point of exhaustion and crash pretty hard when we actually get to bed — so nighttime never felt like an opportune time to pray together. And Scott gets up and out of the house by 6am which just felt – absolutely unfathomable to me.

This year in particular, busyness seems as though it has ticked up a bit — just in family life — you know — kid activities and time commitments to those. So for me, it felt like our moments of connection were less than I would prefer… and I also noticed my own tendency to become a little more — let’s just say — “bristly” with Scott when we weren’t connecting. And by “bristly” I mean, pretty shut down to any kind words or extensions of kindness that he might offer me. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of them, but I just didn’t fully receive them or take them in.

It wasn’t necessarily a big warning flare going up — but it was a subtle and potent undercurrent of our interactions: a little more transactional in vibe than ‘loving’. A little more hardened than soft. And even more subtly — under my skin — a little more fracturing than I think I was aware of.

We have to acknowledge that being in a fractured world affects us as well — and not only in the areas that we are comfortable naming, but in systemic ways that spread throughout our whole being. Because it really is unrelenting.

Sure, as in Scott and my case, “busyness” is one identifiable piece of this fracturing. It makes us feel fractured in our brains, we have a word for it – “scatter brained” — brain-shattered.

But our fracturing is way more systematic than just one area. Every day we hear and read painful news headlines which don’t resonate in our beings as something a gentle heart could hold — and we become heart-shattered.  We see people we love suffer, endure and even die at the hands of violence, and we become soul-shattered.

Not to mention when our fractured world lunges directly at our bodies, with it’s sharp edges and weapons and causes pain and hurt — and we become physically-shattered.

Our minds, our bodies, our souls and our spirit are fractured too.

The spiritual growth we might hope for walking into the 40 Days of Faith together is not just a time to sit in our pain, or tick “spiritual” checkboxes, but it’s an opportunity to heal ourselves — and heal our fractured and broken world. This is one spiritual practice. And I think we are hungry for this. But we often displace our deep hunger and flail about our days in a state of starvation which yields more fracturing.

If you’ve been in the vicinity of a hungry child – you’ve probably recognized how quickly their demeanor can go from “sweet child” to “less than sweet child”. A missed snack/meal could result in crying, flailing on the ground, throwing things, or my favorite — chilling obstinate stillness. But likely you’ll miss the beat about it being about hunger, b/c likely the child is crying about his sock feeling funny, or the wrong colored cup, or the fact that it’s too sunny out. And so you go racing around, distracted looking for the gray lego piece that’s being demanded — with 6 connection points, shaped in the form of the letter “L”, but a flat “L’, not a thick “L” — and really the kid just wants a sandwich.

And we adults are no different. We, too, might just need a sandwich. I mean, really — maybe that’s what our fractured selves and by extension our world around us could use: something that we can take into our bodies, into our muscles and tissues and marrow of our bones – that would assimilate fully into our beings in a way that allows us to move and live out of this sustenance, where our internal systems are working together in a sense of wholeness and unity.

As I mentioned, we’ll be spending time over the next 6 weeks in the fascinating book of Revelation – Steve has written a daily Bible Guide for this that we’ll make our way through together – and he and Lydia, our newest pastor, will hit on Revelation a little more directly in the upcoming weeks. But I wanted to give us a taste of this wild book this morning, because I think it hits so nicely with how we can think about engaging in these 40 Days:

The author of this book, St. John, is a commanding figure. He was pastor of marginal, politically and economically powerless Christians, in a society in which their commitment to following Jesus branded them as criminals of the state. He was moving to keep their hope fresh against formidable odds, and to keep the living, speaking, acting Jesus at the center of their lives.

He had these wild visions that came to him one morning as he was worshiping on the prison island of Patmos, in which he saw this gigantic angel who had one foot planted in the ocean and the other on the continent with a book in hand. The angel was preaching from this book a sermon like nothing John had ever heard, and he started to write down what he was hearing. But a voice told John to stop taking notes and to do the following instead:

Revelation 10:9-10 (NIV)

9So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, “Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but ‘in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’” 10I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.

What a picture: eating this scroll! The angel doesn’t instruct St. John to pass on information about God — he commands him to assimilate the words of God into his being. To eat and ingest is so broad, so comprehensive, and yet so personal – especially as we are talking about taking in the words of God.

Our invitations are often to interact with the words of God, to read the Scriptures, to pray, to try spiritual practices in a particular manner. Rarely is it to take it all in and let the nutrients fall where they are needed most. The beauty of eating the scroll is that God does a fine job inside of us at directing these pieces to exactly the parts in us that are the most hungry and craving, and God starts a lot of times with attention to words.

And this is so personal. It’s why — if we had time to sit with even these two verses — there would be a myriad of responses if I were to say, “Close your eyes and invite God to highlight a word or phrase for you”. Some of you might say “Sweet” , some of you might say “sour”, or “I took”, or “angel”. We all are likely craving something specific, and these words start to orient us to the root of that hunger.

Eating the words of God, as John — and other biblical players, like the prophet Ezekiel — show us, allow them to have a breadth, not a narrow/prescribed way of living these words out. This approach to eat the words — to Eat these 40 Days — is huge for us because it releases the need to get the words of God — or God Himself — “right” in our HEADS, and instead absorb Him into our full bodies and let the nutrients fall where they are needed most.

Words spoken or listened to, written or read – are intended to do something in us: give health and wholeness, vitality and hope. And it effects all of our systems, right? When we take in food, it doesn’t just satisfy our digestive system – it enhances our endocrine system, our nervous system our immune system, our circulatory system. The words of God, whether we read them, hear them, or sense them — if we eat them, digest them– start to form new wholeness in our fractured, innermost beings — in our minds, hearts, bodies and spirits.

And that is not just good news for us; it’s good news for the world around us. Because just as when we take in the food we eat — when we are healthy, it is unconsciously assimilated into our nerves and muscles — it’s put to work in our speech and in our action: an unconscious outpouring of that intake.

Scott and my morning efforts of prayer together hovered around just about 47 seconds each morning: me, stumbling down the stairs at just the point Scott would be leaving the house, and mumbling, “Dear God – be with Scott today, love him and give him energy and a safe drive”.

But we went for it. Whatever our prayers looked like or sounded like, we ate it up. And what we ended up eating — was not just the words of our sleepy-formed prayers, but the words of God for us, individually and together. Turns out we were hungrier than we thought. We had become distracted looking for the obscure lego piece and had missed the sandwich on the table in the hustle of life.

But Jesus took our words and converted them into deep, rich words within us — words that said “you are ok, you aren’t failing”, “Yes this is hard”, and “i love you”. God is continually forming and shaping all things new within us, but it took our intention to tap the well of the love of God within us.

These 40 Days remind us of the offer on the table to take inroads back to our deep hunger — that our pain in this fractured world, is absolutely felt in real, visceral, concrete ways, and it is layered with hunger pains for the love of God, the words of God.

Scott and my experience of praying together — as it says in these Revelation verses — tasted “as sweet as honey”. I started to see new things about Scott that I had missed. I started to have a more generous heart toward him. I started to offer kindness (rather than bristly interactions), and lead with this posture of love (far beyond my human capacity). A wholeness was forming in me, God directing nutrients where they needed to go . That allowed me to have a broader view of Scott, instead of only seeing slices/fragmented parts of him. And that lasted for just about 18 days (that’s as long as we sustained it, as good as it was!).

And maybe this is a bit of the “sourness/bitterness” that John talks about as he digested the scroll. This new, upright posture that we might discover in ourselves as we sit in the love of God is actually hard to fully digest and take in, and live out in our real world. Because we get tired, people are mean, etc.

Sure, my story of Scott is a fairly straightforward one. We have relationship, history, trust, a motivating reason to continue to act out of love toward each other, and yet even within that framework it’s hard to sustain. And so the harder it becomes in the fuller stretch of our lives with our unpredictable, fractured relationships. Or the words that infiltrate our beings from our fractured social media feeds, newsfeeds, where we take in splintered jabs at our personhood? Or words that are just thrown at us as weapons? How do we continue an appetite for “Love” when so much churns our stomach and is unsettling?

“How do we live, fully live on every word that comes from the mouth of God?’” (Matthew 4:4)

The sweetness it seems is being a child of God and sitting in God’s lavish love. The bitterness that unsettles our bellies is realizing that this lavish love — this lavish love of the DIVINE — knows no bounds, evades no one, and is so compelling it demands we do the same. It challenges us! It doesn’t make space for stopping our “leading of love” when Scott does something that infuriates me. It challenges us to keep loving inspite of the pain.

Divine love does not come in digestible bites. God’s love douses us full force. As we encounter God’s love these 40 days, it will scrub our insides — the film and shadowy filter of our hearts — and it will give us a system reset, and that is hard to handle. It’s a lot to digest.

This is why, my friends, I say that if you are up for eating these 40 Days, if you are up for really digesting them, they will be brave, brave days ahead of you!

These days will invite us to not deny our pain, but to take it in and convert it to more. These days will invite us to not deny our fears, but to look at them squarely and name them.

These days will invite you to not just learn more of the words of God – but these days will invite you to integrate these words into your being and allow yourself to become more.

These days will invite us to peer into the dark tombs at our feet — where dead, unanswered prayers or unrealized hopes lay — and be open to the full force of the lavish love of God, that just might call them back to life.

So much of our 40 Days is this great exploratory journey of our inner self with Jesus. You’ll get a chance to put to words something you might be hoping God will be with you in or do on your behalf. You’ll have a chance to pray, fast, and try spiritual practices. But these 40 days are also a shared spiritual experience where we collectively are expecting God to catch our attention, to be alive to us, to help us breathe with belief for a new collective energy beyond 6 weeks — into our work spaces, where we play and live — not just for ourselves and our own health, but for this picture of a world that could be revolutionized by love.

I’ve been listening recently to the story of Valarie Kaur. In just a few minutes you’ll hear a piece of her story yourself. She’s been the direct target of a fractured world. She’s a Sikh American who grew up in the Sikh faith; she was bullied for having brown skin, for her family wearing turbans, and her experiences of discrimination turned to violence when her uncle was murdered in one of the first hate crimes post 9/11. And this propelled her into exploring and devoting her work to see just how love could be reclaimed as a public ethic. She’s a film-maker, a faith leader, and a lawyer.

She is currently the founder and director of the Revolutionary Love Project, where she encourages us to bravery, to love, and to birthing new ways forward in our world. Here’s a clip of her Ted Talk last November:

[Video: 3:30 minute excerpt of this video]

This picture of God as a midwife is compelling to me and feels so resonant in this season of Lent: a God who welcomes new life in even the most excruciating circumstances, and the one who calls us to look into the darkness and see with fresh eyes.

This is Lent – walking us right into the tomb. Staring in — do we see death? Or do we imagine and believe for life which is about to be birthed? The followers of Jesus breathed and pushed together, and kept going (even in the pain and the joy).

These are the components of the spiritual sandwich – that we are hungry for:
Joy. Love. Pain. Breath and Bravery. This is what we are invited to eat these 40 Days.

The hot winds don’t promise to cease, the waves dont’ promise to calm, but as the prophet Jeremiah found: “ eating the words of God – become the joy and the delight of our hearts”

Joy can be birthed. As we run to God as Children of God — with all our pain and our panic — and sit in His sweet love, here is where he converts all of our intake into love and joy that helps reframe our darkest times.

This allows me to hold my sweet boy a few seconds longer, to entertain the thought of getting up before the sun rises to drool prayers with my husband; because the love of God is so divine and compelling that I too, want to birth and create things new.

These 40 Days, let Jesus see you and sit with you. Let him tend to you. Let him love you. And let him whisper to you, again and again: “you are brave”.

And may this be the compelling Spirit to start our breathing and pushing together — as children of God in this world — through the power and the love of the Holy Spirit.

How Exactly Do I Eat These 40 Days?

1. Bravely embrace these 40 Days from exactly where you are at. Start by naming your fears (let these fears that you name – be their own prayers):

“Courage is fear that has said it’s prayers” – Gene Robinson, Bishop
Courage breaks forth from acknowledged fears – and these fears themselves allow us an opening to a deeper spot in ourselves, where our hopes and desires reside….
**take a few minutes to jot down any fears you might have***

2. Consider how you can find and savor your joy each day.

Valarie Kaur – says that “joy” is a move to not give into the darkness — to the fractured-ness around us. This is a form of resistance. Ask God what that might be for you

  • Try: a spiritual practice (where you might encounter unexpected “joy”)
    We’ll have suggestions of a spiritual practice to try in the daily bible guide. But maybe you have your own thoughts.
    “I’ll sit in my favorite chair, with coffee in the morning for 5 minutes and ask God to be with me”.
  • Try: fasting (Allows us to see the props that we’ve been resting on to satiate us – to bring us perhaps fleeting “joy” – and to kick those props out from under us – and make more space for God). Spirit of fasting – is to fast for what we want or hope to encounter with Jesus. And we direct our hunger toward God – and make space for that encounter to be noticed.

3. Ingest God’s words

  • Try: Participating in the Daily Bible Guide. It’s great – it promises to turn on circuits in our brains that we don’t normally touch!
  • Try: Eating a sandwich
    Give yourself freedom – to just practically take in what you need for sustenance, like literally a sandwich!

4. Breathe and push alongside others

  • Try: Joining a community group for these 40 Days
    I’ve heard these referred to as “moveable sanctuaries”: a place of respite, to be youreself, of safety, where anyone is welcomed. Where you can encourage one another to breathe deeply, and move and push with love at your core.

5. Invite the Holy Spirit to fan the flames of lavish love and protect you from the hot winds.

  • Try: Praying for yourself, your six and your church/community.