...In Transition

The Fur is about to Fly....

2012-02-03T08:17:00.009-05:00

The cat doesn't know

that her world will soon be turned upside down.

This spot on the footstool cushion feels familiar

and safe,

in the sun and out of the sun,

the day passing as many days have before.

The house is quiet,

apart from the occasional banging

coming from the workmen in the apartment downstairs.

She is unaware of the "For Sale" sign

that has been pounded into the soft ground

outside the window just below.

The cat doesn't know

that soon there will be boxes,

everywhere.

Boxes to explore and launch herself into.

Boxes to rub against and cut into with her teeth.

Boxes left half full and taped tightly shut,

stacked neatly, waiting to be carried away.

On each side black marker will announce

its destination:

KITCHEN

3rd BEDROOM

BASEMENT, DOWNSTAIRS, TO THE RIGHT

The cat doesn't know

that familiar pieces of furniture will soon disappear.

The dining room table that she perches on

to better oversee the dishing out of the evening meal.

The brown sofa that she summits in one leap

and quickly moves into the warm and vacant spot

when the phone rings,

or there is something else

to be tended to elsewhere in the house.

The many bookcases,

overflowing bookcases,

that fill the small room where the afternoon sun

forms rectangles on the carpet

in just the right spot.

It will all be gone.

Whisked away

to another home,

another state,

another universe,

waiting to be explored.

The cat doesn't know

as she shifts on the stool cushion,

stretching,

circling,

before curling back up against the legs

that always seem to be there.

Except when they're not.

And soon "when they're not"

will be the new paradigm.

The cosmic shift in her reality.

After a flurry of movement and men,

the house will go quiet.

The footstool and its soft cushion will be gone.

At least for a while.

The cat doesn't know

that the nearly empty house will only be temporary.

As the weather warms, the men will come again

and pick up the last remaining boxes.

Boxes marked:

STEPH'S CLOTHES

OFFICE SUPPLIES

BOOKS, UNREAD, MASTER BEDROOM

The cat doesn't know

that she and her carrier

will be the final item to collect.

As she crouches unsteadily in her plastic cage,

swaying down the walkway,

remembering that trips like these

always end up in the same place,

her eyes will be the last to see

the house that we once called home.

But right now,

she doesn't know.

The sounds, the smells, the warm cushion,

the shifting legs that cause her to stir,

are all as they should be.

Sermon: "Are We There Yet?"

2012-01-15T14:33:00.000-05:00

“Are we there yet?”

January 15, 2012

Deuteronomy 34:1-12

“The LORD said to him, "This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, 'I will give it to your descendants'; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there."

Deut. 34:4

The morning dawned cold and clear on that day in the valley of Moab.

The temperature had dipped into the low 30’s overnight, and we awoke to a layer of freshly fallen snow….covering the ground, and hanging on the thin walls of our woven cloth shelters.

A few of our people huddled together for warmth around the dying embers of last night’s campfire. Some of the boys had been roused from their sleep and were sent out to gather more wood, but they would come back hours later almost empty handed, as they did every morning in the preceding weeks, months, years.

They’d stagger back into our campsite with their spindly arms wrapped around a few broken twigs and some dry underbrush. Just enough to strike a flint to, to cook a meal and get us through the night.

One more night.

One more stomach rumbling, bone chilling, everlasting night,

in this God forsaken wilderness, that has been our home for 40 years.

We’d stopped complaining years ago.

When the older folks began to die off, and more and more children were born, we learned to accept that this was how life was going to be. This was the new status quo.

And after a few years it wasn’t so new anymore, and then it became all we’ve ever known.

Some us could still remember what it was like back in Egypt. A land that was then so far away I’d sometimes catch myself wondering if we hadn’t made the whole thing up.

The old men would sit around the fire at night with their graying beards and bent backs and tell tales of armored soldiers and speeding chariots.

The children would sit at their feet listening with wide eyes waiting for the part they knew was coming, the part where the raging waters came crashing down and the people, our people, were set free.

This is what our long and hard won past had become.

A bedtime story for children, and a way for old men to wile away the hours, waiting on a promise that more and more of us were beginning to believe would never be fulfilled.

Perhaps there was no land of milk and honey.

Perhaps it was all just a clever ruse designed to give us a reason to get out of bed every morning. If so, it was effective.

Every time we’d see a rise off the distance, we’d quicken our pace and push towards it for days on end, all in the hope that the Promised Land lay just on the other side. But time after time, our hopes were dashed.

We’d crest the hill and see miles and miles of more of the same.

The same scraggly trees, the same sparse underbrush, the same rolling expanse of barren soil, as far as the eye could see.

One by one our hearts would fall as we took in this vista and stepped into the void, with those filing up behind us still holding out hope until they too saw with their own eyes that the Promised Land had not yet been found.

With sagging shoulders and broken spirits we’d continue on, waiting for that next rise to appear on the horizon.

We were free, but we were still in captivity.

We had exchanged our shackles for stagnation, broken up only by an endless cycle of rising and falling hopes.

But throughout it all, there was Moses,

Walking before us and leading the way…..and giving us hope that one day, one day, the promise would be fulfilled.

All you had to do was look into that man’s eyes to believe that what we were doing was not futile, that there WAS some great land, some great future out there, just waiting for us to arrive.

Moses was the only human being among us who could say he’d seen the physical presence of God, and lived to tell about it.

Well, at least that’s what he said had happened.

But few of us had the nerve to question the visions and proclamations of this great man.

The truth is, he rescued us from the hands of Pharaoh, a man determined to beat us into the ground, every last one of us.

Moses led us out of Egypt, he found us food, water, and shelter.

Whatever concern we’d have, he’d listen to intently and run off to negotiate with God. Moses was our connection to divine intervention.

Without him, I wonder if God would have heard our pleas at all.

Without Moses, these children would not be running freely in the morning air, and these old men would have died long ago from the backbreaking work of hard labor.

Yes, Moses was a great leader.

But you may have noticed that I am speaking of him in the past tense.

For this great man is no longer with us.

It was on that fateful morning that we found him, with the frost still covering the ground and the campfire embers still sending up long thin streams of smoke into the cold morning air.

We found him in his shelter, huddled beneath the sheepskin blanket that some of our women had made for him many years ago.

He was usually an early riser, though in his later years, he wasn’t the first to greet the sun, but still, on that morning the time that we typically saw him stir from sleep had come and gone.

One of the men assigned to assist him in his daily tasks pushed through the shelter’s blanketed opening and emerged a few minutes later with a stricken look of grief etched upon his face.

We don’t know when the Lord took him.

Sometime in the night we suppose, or perhaps only moments before, as we all milled about the campfire preparing for another day of wandering, unaware of the presence of the angel of death in our midst.

Others who were close to Moses, rushed into the shelter to confirm what the aide could not bring himself to say, that Moses was indeed dead.

His skin was cold to the touch, although the same could be said of all of us on that frigid morning, but the color had not yet left Moses’ cheeks.

He was being held in the warm hand of God.

But he was with US, no more.

You don’t think it’s ever going to happen.

Or rather I should say, you know it’s going to happen, but you’re never prepared when it does….the moment when death takes someone you love. Moses was a very old man. Though he was still full of energy, we knew he would not live forever, and he knew it as well.

Which is why the day before he left us, he placed his hand on the shoulder of the young man named Joshua and steered him aside to speak to him privately.

You see, what we didn’t know at that time was that God had told Moses that he would not live to see the Promised Land.

His time to lead the people he knew and loved had come to an end.

The time of wandering was over, and a new leader was needed to guide us on the next leg of our journey. In the Promised Land, a land of abundance, we would face new challenges and new opportunities to be the people of God. The leader who held our hand and led us through the darkened and barren wilderness would not be the one we’d call upon in times of plenty.

It would take a different skill set, a fresher perspective, a less weary and more nimble spirit to guide us onward, and Joshua was the one God had called to do just that.

But still, I have to wonder what Moses must have felt when he was told that he would not be entering the land we had traveled so many miles, and so many years to see - to have this treasure dangled in front of him, and then be told it would not be his to hold, that the future he had imagined for himself was not to be.

But you know, after we had removed Moses body from his shelter and buried him in a simple grave in the valley of Moab, his friend, the aide who had found him, had a story to share.

The previous afternoon, after having his conversation with Joshua, Moses walked up the mountain that lay just ahead of us, and for the longest time he stood at the top of the ridge alone and motionless, just staring out at the horizon.

When he returned in the early evening the aide swore that Moses looked as if 40 years had been taken off his weathered face. He had a youthful glow about him, and his eyes radiated pure joy and contentment.

What we discovered ourselves as we crested that same ridge the very next day was that God had shown Moses the Promised Land, and despite the fact that Moses knew he would never live in that land himself, he was overjoyed for those of us who would.

He had done what he was called to do to get us there, and the knowledge that the people he so loved would eat the fruit, bathe in the waters, and bask in the sunshine of this land was reward enough for him.

God speed, our beloved leader, God speed.

May you fall gently into your Creator’s arms.

You’ve reached the true Promised Land that we all will one day see, when God calls each one of us home.

*****

In the book of Deuteronomy, God instructs the generations of Israelites who have come to be born after the Exodus to celebrate Passover as if each one of them has personally come out of Egypt. God’s lesson here is clear: only by entering the story ourselves can we truly understand its meaning.

Now in listening to this story this morning most of us don’t have to imagine what Moses must have felt when God told him he would not enter into the Promised Land. We’ve lived it ourselves - whenever we’ve had our heart set on something that never comes to fruition, or put years of sweat equity into a job or relationship that seemingly never rewards our efforts, or lose something or someone that we thought would be with us for many years to come.

In many ways we know what it’s like to be brought to that precipice and be shown what we could have, only to be told we never will.

But as writer Joseph Campbell so poetically said, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

We’re human beings, and it is in our nature as linear thinking creatures to envision a future for ourselves and to make plans accordingly.

I’m sure what got Moses through many a cold night as he settled down to sleep was imagining what his life would be like once he reached the Promised Land:

The clean, running waters, the rich, fertile soil, the abundance of milk and honey that God had promised him would be flowing from the land.

He could smell it, he could taste it…..and the trust that he had in God to deliver on this promise IS what got him out of bed every morning.

Moreover, he urged his people to live their lives as if they had already reached the Promised Land – to trust that food and water would be plentiful, to not gather more than what they needed for themselves, to share amongst everyone without fear that there would not be enough to go around.

Moses lived most of his life with faith in a promise that was both now-and-not-yet. The fulfillment of the promise was yet to come, but until then he could imagine how his life would change, and subsequently he changed his life in the here-and-now in preparation for what was to come.

We are living in that now-and-not-yet time as well.

We live it every time we make sacrifices now with our time, our money, and our resources to ensure that we’ll have something even more valuable in the future. Whether it’s a secure retirement for ourselves, an education for our children, a clean and healthy planet, or a music program for our church.

As Christians, the time of now-and-not-yet that we’re living in and the Promised Land that we’re walking towards is the Kingdom of God.

The time that God promised us would come, when a new world will be created right here in place of the current world – a world in which love, compassion, and forgiveness will rule our lives rather than hate, fear, and mistrust.

As the people of God we are called to be co-creators of that world.

We are called to follow Jesus’ example and to work in partnership with God to create a world that is free of injustice, violence, oppression, poverty, prejudice, and marginalization of any kind.

As Jesus was fond of saying, the Kingdom of God is here, and it is yet to come. Which means until the new world comes into being, until we reach the Promised Land, like Moses and the people of Israel we are to live as if we are already there.

We are to treat each other, and love each other as if we’re living in a land that flows with milk and honey, and give to each other out of a feeling of abundance rather than hold onto what we have out of a feeling of scarcity.

Like Moses, we are living in a time of now-and-not-yet.

We’re standing on that mountaintop, looking out over the Promised Land, knowing that we might not be permitted to enter it in our lifetime, but because of all the work we’ve done to get here, all the wandering we’ve done in the wilderness, our people, our children’s children, will one day step into that land.

Moses never made it to the Promised Land, and we might assume that he was deeply disappointed when God told him he would not live to see the fruits of his years of wandering. But in the end, his personal tragedy is offset by his ability to see what no one else could see.

Moses knew the land alone was not the destination; because the destination lies within ourselves, it’s in our hearts, where human beings live in communion with God.

We may think that it was cruel of God to show Moses the land he would never enter, but perhaps in the end when Moses stood atop that mountain he wasn’t even looking at the land. He wasn’t looking at the reward. He was looking where we all should be looking. He was looking at God.

As we leave this mountaintop, and return to our work-filled wandering in the desert below, let us remember the words of another great leader who led his people through wilderness, and did not live to see the Promised Land.

These are the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

Amen.

Weight Watching

2012-01-02T12:58:00.007-05:00

Like many of us, my new year’s resolution for 2012 (and every year prior) is to lose weight. I’ve been eyeing the bathroom scale for several months now and have yet to work up the courage to step on it. I’m afraid it will project my weight out the window and onto the sky for all the world to see – with giant flashing numbers surrounded by a rotating ring of all the cookies and cupcakes that I’ve eaten to get there…(actually, that would be kind of cool).

Truthfully, the weight I’ve resolved to lose this year has nothing to do with the number on the scale. There is weight that we all carry around that can’t be shed with a low carb diet and a treadmill. It’s the weight that we carry in our hearts and minds. This is weight that accumulates over time and we often don’t even realize that we’re carrying it until we finally set it down and feel how light we’ve become without it.

Here is just some of the weight that I’d like to lose this year:

The weight of regret.

We’ve all had roads that we wished we'd taken, or we've said and done things that we regret. Sometimes we have the opportunity to make restitution or to make things right…and sometimes we don’t. Either way, carrying around the regret of our missed opportunities and past mistakes has a way of tainting our present and our future. Regrets keep us from taking chances in life (“What if I screw up again?), and keep us from being as open and loving as we’re called to be (“She hasn’t forgiven me, so why should I forgive her?”). Regrets hang on our shoulders like 50 lb potato sacks and keep us from loving and moving freely through life. Lord, help me to let it go.

The weight of guilt.

If we’ve done or said something that caused pain to another and we haven’t owned up to it then guilt is our weight of choice. Denial and fear of reprisal is the two-headed dragon that has us hiding behind this one. Guilt is a heavy weight to carry, but we fear that admitting the role we played in generating it, and the consequences that will result from our coming clean, will knock us flat on our backs. In reality, the guilt that we carry often outweighs any punishment, imagined or real. And the relief we feel after admitting our guilt allows us to take on the weight of the consequences, however long they may last. Guilt eats away at us from the inside out. Lord, help me to let it go.

The weight of self-expectation.

This is one for the perfectionists among us (we know who we are). I’m just going to state the obvious here: We’re not perfect. We’re going to make mistakes, we’re going to say and do stupid and hurtful things, we’re going to run out of time, energy, and patience, and we’re going to set goals in life that we’re not going to reach no matter how hard we try, how many hours we work, or how “gifted” we think we are. It’s good to set the bar high in life. It keeps us from settling for less and for being less than God has called us to be. But if our self-expectations are too great they tend to feel like weights tied around our ankles. No matter how high we jump, we still feel like we’ve never left the ground. Lord, help me to let it go.

The weight of our expectations of others.

Once again, let’s state the obvious: We can’t control the behavior, thoughts, or beliefs of others. If we expect people to behave and think just as we do we’re setting ourselves up for a let down nearly every time. This applies to friends and adversaries alike. We may want our friends to be more open and giving of themselves and to offer us unwavering support without judgment. We may want our adversaries to see things from our perspective and to stop throwing up roadblocks in front of us. We may want both to view and understand the world in the same way that we do. But it would be a pretty boring world if we didn’t have these differences chafing between us. We’d never have to stretch ourselves to understand the viewpoint of another. Expectations get in the way of that stretching…their sheer weight keeps us from moving from our own position, and keeps us from seeing others and ourselves in a more enlightening way. Lord, help me to let it go.

The weight of excuses.

What is it that you want to do in your life and what is keeping you from doing it? Excuses have a way of keeping us small. “I’m too old. I'm too young. I’m too busy. I’m not good enough. I don’t have enough money. It’s too hard. It will take too much time. I can’t because…(fill in your excuse here).”

Excuses arise out of our fears. We’re afraid that we’ll fail, we’re afraid that others will judge us, we’re afraid that we’re not worthy enough to have or do whatever it is our heart is calling us to embrace. If you have a goal, a dream, a desire to make even the smallest change in your life, holding on to these excuses is like dragging a boulder up a mountain. Lord, help me to let it go.

We’ve all got baggage weighing us down.

We’re all carrying around the weight of regret, guilt, expectations, and excuses, and at any given moment in time we’re juggling any combination of all of the above - and the truth is, we’re never going to completely let go of any of these weights. Life is all about learning to let go of some and learning to live with those that we can’t seem to release from our grip.

But there is so much that we can let go of...once we find the courage to try.

Shedding these weights takes a lot of intentional inner work; work that hopefully will not be done alone but in community – with the love and support of family and friends, and the grace and mercy of our loving Creator.

I will get on that scale in the bathroom (eventually) and I’ll limit my cookie intake and get back in my routine of running, walking, and cycling. But I’m sure most of us realize that whatever resolution we’ve made this year – to quit smoking, to volunteer more, to work on our relationship(s), to be better people – all rely on our willingness to drop some of the inner weight that we’ve been carrying around, in some cases for far too long. We need to make ourselves lighter, or we'll never be able to see how high we can fly.

Blessings to all of my friends, family, and blogosphere readers in 2012!

May it be a fruitful and life changing journey for us all.

Sermon: "A Christmas Story"

2011-12-25T18:24:00.003-05:00

“A Christmas Story”

December 25, 2011

Luke 2:1-20

"I bring you good news of a great joy….for unto you a child is born this day in the city of David, and you will find him wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger."

This is good news.

This is good news to us because we know who that child is – we know the man he will grow up to be.

We know of his ministry and his teachings.

We know about the healings and the miracles he will perform.

We know that he will bring down the mighty and vindicate the lowly.

We know that he will suffer and die at the hands of those who fear him.

And we know God will raise him up out of his tomb and he will forever be a presence right by our side -

Guiding, comforting, strengthening and redeeming.

We hear the words “and unto you a child is born” and we see Jesus. Emmanuel. God with us.

And hopefully, we feel the great love that he has for us, and the great love that we have for him.

But to those shepherds standing out in that frozen field on a cold winter’s night 2,000 years ago, this GOOD NEWS brought to them by a heavenly messenger must have been puzzling.

Why would the birth of a child in a far away town have any bearing on what happened in their lives?

How could a baby save the world?

They had heard the stories of the great Messiah who was expected to come and vanquish those in power and set the oppressed free, but these were only stories.

These were tales that they told each other every night around the dying embers of the encampment fire.

These were stories that were intended to give them hope, to give them a reason to get up in the morning, to inspire them to go out and stand in that field day after day after day, doing a job that only the lowest of the low were expected to do, scratching out a living that left their stomachs rumbling on more nights than they cared to admit.

They did not want to believe that God had forsaken them.

They didn’t want to believe that it was up to them to lift the weight of poverty and oppression off their shoulders.

They knew they were not strong enough to do it all on their own.

The stories the shepherds told of the coming Messiah kept their hope alive.

The hope that someone greater than they would lift them up and set them free.

A Messiah is just what they needed – but they needed a full grown Messiah – a King, a warrior, a vanquisher – someone who had the power to step up and make their lives better, right here, right now.

What were they to do with a baby?

Even if that baby was the Messiah, few of them could expect to still be living by the time this child grew to assume power.

And if that baby was the Messiah, why tell the world about it now?

You may as well paint a target on the child’s back – every King and political leader in the region would want him dead, and what could his parents possibly do to protect him?

A baby is small, and vulnerable and weak.

The very things a Messiah is NOT supposed to be.

The very things a GOD is not supposed to be.

Which is why even in our time, so many question why we Christians believe this fanciful tale of a God who chooses to come into the world not in a blaze of glory, not through an awesome display of power and strength, but chooses instead to slip into the world in the quiet of a winter’s night, in the form of a crying infant, something so small, so vulnerable, and so weak.

What an improbable, implausible tale.

Who would be crazy enough to believe it?

But we have to ask ourselves, what are we missing if we don’t believe it?

When I was an undergrad working on my bachelor’s degree I took an introductory religion class, and when it came time to discuss Christianity and the incarnation of Jesus one of the students raised his hand and asked how anyone possessing even average intelligence and a rational mind would believe such a fantastical story.

Why would an all-powerful and infinite God diminish itself by becoming a powerless and finite human being?

Why would an all-knowing God have a need to become human to learn what it is like to BE human when God already possesses this knowledge?

And realistically, how could a being as large as God is said to be, contain itself inside the body of one tiny human being?

I still remember the professor’s response.

She looked at the student with a knowing smile, and said,

“Because an all-powerful God has the power and the ability to do anything that God wants to do.”

Even if it means becoming small enough to fit inside the body of a squirming infant.

Perhaps God did not need to become one of us to know what it’s like to be one of us - to know what it’s like to feel pain, to feel joy, to feel hopelessness and despair.

Perhaps God didn’t need to incarnate in the body of Jesus to know what it is like to suffer and die.

But perhaps God understood that WE needed to know that God felt and empathized with our pain.

Not as some distant deity, but as a God who is close enough for us to reach out and touch.

And the best way that God knew how to help us feel that closeness was to become one of us.

To know what it feels like to be born kicking and screaming into this world, to feel the chill of the cold night air and the warmth of a mother’s arms against newly bared skin, to look up through clouded eyes and see the faces of joyful parents and curious strangers, to be held in the supportive embrace of a loving community.

What a fantastic way to build a bridge between an infinite God and a finite human being.

God steps into our world, and in the process God allows us to step into God’s world.

As the infant Jesus, God depended upon us for food and shelter and even life.

And in return, God gave up power and control so that we would know that God understands what it is like to feel helpless and weak.

What an amazing and unexpected thing for God to do.

And what an improbable, implausible tale God has given us to tell.

Who would be crazy enough to believe it?

Despite their fear and misgivings, those shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night were crazy enough to believe it.

They went to Bethlehem, they saw the child, they believed the angel who told them the good news - that this baby was the Messiah, the Savior of the world.

And when they returned to their homes they told everyone within earshot that the wait was over, that the hope and light of God had been born into the world.

And 2,000 years later, we’re still telling this story, we’re still holding on to that hope, we’re still celebrating and sharing this good news.

Now, some of us may still shake our heads at the implausibility of this story.

We choose instead to see the social ramifications of the Nativity tale.

Jesus is born poor and homeless to an unwed undocumented teenage mother, under the oppressive regime of a totalitarian king.

Jesus is the poster child for all the social ills and human rights issues that we’re still wrestling with in our time. His birth serves as a reminder to us that great things often come from humble beginnings, and that all human beings have value, even those whom we tend to ignore, dismiss, or outright despise.

But I have to believe that there is more to the story than this.

If this is the sole message of the Jesus story than his story is no different from the thousands of other children who were born in his time, or in our time.

What makes the Jesus story so special is that God chose this moment in time to enter into our story.

On Christmas day we celebrate the moment when God became human and nothing is ever the same after that.

Incarnation means change.

It means God coming into our time and into our space and into our lives and into our comfort zone and shaking things up and causing them to be recreated in a new way.

The incarnation challenges us to initiate change and to be active, co-creators with God in the world around us.

What is the good news we are waiting to hear on this Christmas Day?

Perhaps like the shepherds we are waiting for a messenger who will tell us that the tide has turned, that the day of vindication and hope has arrived, that God is still with us.
Or, perhaps we have secretly given up hope, in spite of our best efforts at trying to hide our despair with holiday busyness.
Or worse, we may reached the point of assuming that it is entirely up to us to bring the peace that our hearts long for, and God will not bother to intervene at all.
But isn't Christmas all about God intervening in human history?
Isn't Christmas about God telling us not to give up hope - that it’s not up to us to do this all on our own? (1)

Isn’t Christmas about hearing and telling a story that is so implausible, it takes a leap of faith to believe it?

Once upon a time, in a far away land, a baby is born.

A baby that in many ways is just like you and me, and in many ways is the personification of who we are meant to be.

This baby embodies the hope and potential that each new life has to offer the world.

Yet this baby does not come into this world alone.

This baby has guardians, teachers, companions and friends.

This baby is born helpless just as we all are, and without the gift of human love and compassion, this baby will never grow to be the guiding light that many will come to rely on.

This baby is the expression of God’s love and grace entering into the world, and it is up to us to nurture it to fruition.

This baby is God incarnate.

This baby is all of us incarnate.

And I can’t think of a better story to tell on Christmas morning.

Merry Christmas to us all, and Amen.

1. Kathryn Matthews Huey, UCC Sermon Seeds

Sermon: "Hail Mary, Full of Grace"

2011-12-21T20:51:00.005-05:00

“Hail Mary, Full of Grace”

Fourth Week of Advent – December 18, 2011

Luke 1:26-38

She was thirteen.

She was thirteen, and she was engaged to marry a man much older than she was - a man whom she may not have loved or have even known very well.

And here was an Angel of the Lord, standing before her and telling her that out of all the women in the world, she had been chosen.

She was going to give birth to the Son of God.

And Mary responded to this miraculous declaration by saying: “How can this be?”

How can this be?

Do you remember what it was like to be thirteen?

To be stuck in that awkward stage between childhood and adulthood.

When it feels like your emotions and your desires and your whole world are spinning out of control.

And it feels like your skin doesn’t quite fit anymore.

And every time you look in the mirror all you see are the blemishes on your cheeks and the nose that suddenly seems too big for your face.

Parts of you have grown yet others betray the fact hat you are still a child.

And your body isn’t the only thing that is changing.

You once ran freely through life from one moment of joy to the next, not caring or having no awareness of how you looked, or what others were thinking.

Then suddenly you wake up one day and the protective bubble you once lived in is gone.

And you feel all eyes are upon you.

The eyes of your peers. The eyes of your parents and teachers. The eyes of strangers. Studying. Quantifying. Judging.

When Mary was coming of age in her time and culture things were different.

For one thing, the word “teenager” did not exist – in any language.

Unlike today, the ancient world did not delineate the years between 12 and 20 and mark them as a time of adolescent transition, a time spent with one foot in the world of toys and games and the other in the world of responsibilities and worries.

The concept of adolescence – where one still lives under the roof and guidance of one’s parents after puberty - is a relatively modern invention.

In Mary’s time, when you had the ability to have children of your own you were considered to be an adult.

Which meant you had the responsibilities and burdens of being an adult, without necessarily having the wisdom or the strength to carry either one.

We tend to forget how young Mary actually was when the Angel Gabriel appeared before her.

In classic works of art she is often depicted as a full-grown woman, which she was by the time she sat at the foot of the cross and held Jesus’ broken body in her arms.

But when she gave birth to her first son – the one she was told would be called Emmanuel – God with us – Mary was most likely still a child herself.

Now, we don’t know how old Mary actually was on that first Christmas. The text of Luke’s gospel makes a point to say that she was a virgin, and betrothed to Joseph but not yet married. Since young women were expected to marry soon after puberty, it is safe to assume that Mary was between 12 and 15 years old.

For those of you who have children that age, or if you remember being that age yourself, you can imagine how Mary must have felt when she was told that she had been chosen by God to the mother of the savior of our world.

Now much is made about the fact that when Mary received this news, she did not hesitate to say, “Here I am Lord…let it be with me according to your word.” [i]

And it is said that the lesson here for us is that we are meant to model Mary’s faith and obedience by responding to God in the same unquestioning manner.

But let’s take a step back for a moment.

Mary’s first reaction to the Angel Gabriel’s deceleration is not to shout confidently,
“Here I am!” but rather she offers up a question:

“How can this be?”

Mary may have been considered an adult in her time, but biologically she was still an adolescent – with all the aforementioned uncertainties and insecurities swirling around her.

So when she asked the Angel Gabriel, “How can this be?” she probably had more on her mind then a question about the logistics of how she could get pregnant when she was still a virgin.

We might imagine her thinking,

“How can this be, that this Angel of God is here standing before me?

“How can this be, that God has chosen this moment in time, in this tiny village, to make an announcement about the coming of the Messiah?”

“How can this be, that God has chosen ME to be the mother of our savior?”

Mary may have wondered,

How could it be that God considered her to be a favored one?

She was just a child, in a world that favored wisdom and maturity.

She was a poor female, in a world that favored maleness and wealth.

And she lived far from Jerusalem, the center of all that is valued and praised.

But as we learned last week, God has a habit of choosing folks who do not consider themselves worthy of receiving such an honor.

Mary would not be the first to respond to God’s call with a question.

Abraham said, "Why me, Lord, am I not too old?"

Jeremiah said, "Why me, Lord, am I not too young?"

Moses and Jonah both said, "Lord, surely there is someone else who is better equipped to do your bidding?"

But Mary didn’t ask, “Why me?” and she didn’t try to get God to choose someone else.

She simply asked, “How can this be?”

Her question appears to come more from astonishment than denial.

It’s the same way we might respond if we’re told we’ve just won a hundred million dollar lottery. (If you can imagine that happening. I’m sure none of us have.)

We might shout out “How can this be?”

It’s a momentary expression of surprise and disbelief because we can’t imagine what we could have done to deserve such a blessing.

And that’s the question that may have been on Mary’s mind.

What have I done to deserve such a blessing?

And the truth is, she didn’t do anything to deserve it.

She did nothing to earn God’s favor.

Because she didn’t need to earn it.

The Angel Gabriel said to Mary, "Greetings, favored one!"

It’s this verse from Luke’s gospel that has we hear echoed in the opening to the familiar prayer “Hail Mary, full of grace…”

In Luke’s gospel the Greek word used for “favored” shares the same root as the word used for “grace”…and as we all should know by now, we can’t do anything to earn God’s Grace – it is given to us freely.

So we should not be so surprised when we receive it.

But we are surprised, aren’t we?

Regardless of how faithful we are or how often we hear about God’s unconditional grace,

too many of us still think we need to earn it.

Through our obedience, and through demonstrations of our faith.

When I was serving as a hospital chaplain back in Connecticut this past summer, I sat and talked with quite a few folks who were struggling to comprehend where God was in their grief and their pain.

I was consistently confronted with the question, “How can this be?”

But in each case the question was asked not with a tone of joyful astonishment, but rather with mournful resignation.

How can this be?

"How can I have cancer when I have been such a good person all of my life?"

"My mother went to church every Sunday, yet she suffering so much, is this how God rewards her?"

"If I promise God that I will be a better person, will he allow my brother to live?"

These are the questions and the promises that we lay at God’s feet.

The God whom we believe bestows favors and blessings upon those who are obedient and faithful.

But this is not the God of unconditional grace.

The problem may be that we don’t have a clear understanding of what we mean when we talk about God’s grace.

We confuse it with God’s mercy, or God’s forgiveness, and assume that it is something we are given once we take a step towards God - when we repent, or change our ways to be more in line with God’s ways.

But Grace is not mercy or forgiveness.

It is not given to us in response to an action we take.

And it may not even be proper to say that God’s grace is the same as God’s favor, if we think of favor as something that some receive and others do not.

Grace as I understand it is simply this:

Grace is the relationship that God offers to us, and Grace is the way that divine relationship is expressed through us.

We are born into Grace, we were born into a relationship with God the moment we came into existence. It’s not something we can choose not to have in our life.

Even if we turn our backs towards God in anger or indifference, we still have a relationship with God.

We may think it’s estranged or nonexistent.

We may think we’re standing far off in a corner, with our arms crossed, and our brows furrowed in disgust.

Or we may feel as if God has abandoned us, and we’ve wandered into a dark corner where God’s light cannot reach.

But in reality God is right there with us, regardless of which direction we’ve turned.

That’s what grace is.

I have a friend who compared it to standing in an open field with rain pouring from the sky.

Now matter how much we dodge and duck, we’re going to get wet.

And the wonderful thing about God’s grace is that it is an expression of pure Love – so when it flows through us we can’t help but pass it on to others.

We express God’s grace – the relationship we have with God – by building relationships with others.

By sharing with others the gifts that we’ve been given.

By giving birth to God in this world.

Mary may have only been thirteen.

Before she uttered the words, “Here I am” she may have responded to God’s call with a question – a declaration of uncertainty.

And she may not have had the ability to say yes or no to God’s favor – God’s Grace – because she was born into it just as we all are.

But she did have a say in how that Grace came to be expressed through her.

And she said “Yes” to becoming the mother of God.

Mary gave birth to Jesus, she nursed him, she taught him how to walk and talk, she taught him how to pray.

She encouraged him when he tried new things, and I’m sure she reprimanded him when he pushed back against the rules that she and Joseph had set.

She must have been so proud of him when he began his ministry,

and when he drew the attention of those in power; she must have spent many nights lying awake with worry.

And like all mothers, she undoubtedly tore herself inside out with anguish as she watched him suffer and die.

We don’t know if Mary knew any of this was going to happen when she said “Yes” to becoming the mother of God.

We may chalk it up to adolescent naivety or the fact that as a young girl giving birth in her time and culture there was already a good possibility that neither she nor the child would survive. But this was God’s child and this was a risk she was willing to take.

This is a risk that we are called to take as well.

Every time we express God’s radically inclusive love in this world…

whenever we welcome the stranger, love our enemy, forgive those who trespass against us, and stand up for those who suffer injustice.

This is how WE give birth to God.

The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor describes it this way:

Like Mary, “You can decide to take part in a plan you did not choose, doing things you don’t know how to do for reasons you don’t entirely understand.
You can take part in a thrilling and dangerous scheme with no script and no guarantees.
You can agree to smuggle God into the world inside your own body.” [ii]

I love that image, and I love the idea that we’re smuggling God into the world by doing something as subversive as saying “Yes” to giving birth to Grace -

by saying “Yes” to loving others as freely as God loves us.

And we have Mary to thank for being the first to take that risk.

Hail Mary, FULL of Grace.

The Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women,

And Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

[i] Luke 1:28

[ii] BBT – Gospel Medicine, Sermon: “Mothers of God”

Almost there, but not quite.

2011-11-29T13:35:00.005-05:00

Advent has been very much on my mind of late - this time of waiting and hoping that we march through every year....and we do march. There's so much going on around us during the "holiday season" that we barely have time to catch our breath. Parties, pageants, and preparations for the 'big day' that is still a month away consume our thoughts, energy, and time. If we're church goers, we may take the time to pause for an hour or so on Sunday mornings and light a candle as we contemplate what it means to wait and anticipate, but after a few hurried conversations during the fellowship hour, we're scrambling out the door to accomplish the next thing on our list. During Advent there's no time to wait, in fact many would claim we need MORE time to prepare.

Thankfully for me, this is the first Advent season in 8 years that I haven't felt the impending deadlines of the end of a school semester. I don't have 5 papers hanging over my head and 2 weeks left to write them. That part of my journey is over. And I'm equally thankful that I no longer work retail. For most of my adult life there was no Advent. Christmas began on Black Friday and went by in a blur of extended work hours, constant crowds and increasing consumer demands (I need it now!). I spent my days surrounded by Christmas decorations with an endless loop of Christmas music playing in the background. I wasn't waiting for Christmas to arrive, I was waiting for it to be over so I could finally put my feet up and relax.

But this year, Advent for me truly is about waiting and anticipation.

Last month I retitled my blog "...In Transition" - because I am no longer "The 45-year-old Seminarian." I'm still 45 (at least for a few more months), but since I've graduated from seminary I no longer have the distinction of calling myself a seminarian. And I can no longer call myself a "Member in Discernment" in the United Church of Christ. I have been approved for ordination and thus I've "graduated" out of that system of preparation as well. As I search for my first call, I find myself in this in-between place that does not have a definable and recognizable label. I've been bumping into this as I've been doing supply preaching to fill this time of "in between" - I see it in the puzzled looks and inquiries I get in the churches where I preach - "You've graduated, but you're not ordained? So what are you?"

Many do not understand that ordination does not come with graduation, but rather with the first call.

I've received checks made out to "Rev." and been questioned as to why I wear a robe and a cross while preaching, but not a stole.

And then I must explain, it's because I'm not there yet.

But I will be.

In the meantime, I will wait.

I will enjoy this Advent, this time of anticipation of what is to come.

And I have plenty to do while I wait.

In two weeks, I'm headed up to New Hampshire to begin an extended supply preaching job that will last through Christmas and possibly into January.

If they don't need me in January, there's a church here in CT that has asked me to supply preach for them that month, and I've received several inquires from other churches about my availability in February.

Of course my hope is that I won't be available in February.

My Profile has been sent to all the UCC Conferences in my search area and I'm in the process of having it sent to the churches that have openings and have peeked my interest because I think we might be a good fit for each other. That's the first step.

The next step is to determine whether or not we both agree it would be a good fit, and ultimately, if God agrees.

This process can and often does take a long time. That's where the waiting comes in.

I can't think of a better way to celebrate this season of Advent.

In the meantime, prayers are requested for tonight.

I have a Skype interview with the Search Committee at a church that just may be the right fit I'm looking for....that we're both looking for.

May God be with us all.

Ecclesiastical Council

2011-11-13T22:32:00.001-05:00

Tonight I am grateful for a most amazing day.

I have been approved for ordination in the United Church of Christ, pending a call.

I feel blessed for having the opportunity to share this moment with some very special people - my wife, my friends, my pastor and mentor, and all the wonderful folks in my home church, King Street UCC.

Thanks be to God.

Prepare Ye

2011-11-12T11:52:00.000-05:00

Preparing for my Ecclesiastical Council tomorrow and this song keeps popping into my head.

I concur with John the Baptist:

"He who comes after me is mightier than I, and I'm not fit to take off his shoes, and he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire!"

Ordination Paper

2011-11-05T17:25:00.007-04:00

This is the Ordination Paper that I will present at my Ecclesiastical Council, which is scheduled for next Sunday, November 13th 2011. I will present the paper at my home church to a gathering of clergy and church members from the Fairfield East Association, in the Connecticut Conference, of the United Church of Christ. After I present the paper I will answer questions from the assembled body and then a vote will be taken to determine if my ordination has been approved "pending call" - which means I will be officially ordained after I've received a call to a church. Prayers are welcome!

******

My Journey

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Psalm 139: 1-6

Ascend

The sound of loose gravel shifting beneath my feet breaks the silence as I crest the hill leading up to Tiedemann Field. Tucked away on the grounds of a private school in western Connecticut, this tumbling expanse of soccer pitches and softball diamonds is my sanctuary. Embraced on all sides by wooded glory, the rustle of fallen leaves and the lonely caw of a distant crow are the only sounds accompanying the slow steady cadence of my own breathing. It is here in the solitude of a Sunday afternoon that I find the room to stretch my legs, to let my mind wander, and to open my heart to God. It is here that I talk to God. It is here that I listen to God. It is here where the veil between the material and the spiritual, at least in my world, is at its thinnest.

When I need to talk to God, to vent to God, to rave and rant at God, I run.

The words tumble out of my head so rapidly my body is forced to propel itself along in earnest just to keep up; turning my thoughts and fears over to divine ears as fast as my legs will carry me.

When I need to listen to God, to feel the presence of God, I walk.

Slowly, methodically, attentively. Allowing deep longings to rise up, quelling the inner chatter, and listening for God in the spaces in between.

Listening for God in the spaces in between.

This is the definition of theology that resonates most with me. We listen for God, we look for God, and we feel the presence of God in the vague, shadowed spaces that drift in between our existence in the material world and our understanding of the spiritual world. We search for language, images, and emotions that best describe our encounters with these spaces, in an attempt to bring order and meaning to that which is otherwise indefinable and unknowable. Theology is the bridge we build between the known and the unknown, between God and ourselves.

For some, this bridge takes on a solid unshakable form with extensive, ornate levels that tower towards the heavens while resting on a seemingly sound and sturdy footing.

For others, this bridge to God is strung together with fishing line and cotton thread.

It’s a seat-of-the-pants, cargo-net-like contraption with shaky handholds, unsure footing, and gaping holes in between. It twists and billows in the wind, changing form with every gust, and at times sagging beneath one’s weight, swaying dangerously close to the jagged rocks below, yet manifesting enough resilience to spring its occupant high up into the clouds on the rebound.

The theological bridge that best fits the way in which I encounter God is a cross between the two.

My faith is anchored in the hardwearing bricks of scripture, tradition, ritual and sacrament, but the structure that rises up from these sure footings is malleable and ever changing.

In this manifestation of Theos and logos, language and belief are fluid.

Ebbing and flowing. Coming and going.

Birthing and dying. Shrinking and growing.

With a gardener’s eye pruning the excess, the unnecessary, the no longer needed. Letting the sturdier offshoots spread at will, never quite knowing exactly where they will lead.

Theology for me flows in both the mystical and the practical. I go to church to worship God, to be in community with others who worship God, and to both serve and be held up by that community, and God. But when I need to talk to God, to listen to God, to meet God in a thin place where silence reigns, I come to this hilltop sanctuary. Where leaves tumble across the grass, where the wind whistles in baring branches, where shadows and sunlight continually shift form and place, changing perspectives, altering the colors, blurring the outlines of the world, and giving me a fleeting glimpse of the spaces in between.

Break

I was 11-years-old when I first felt touched by the hand of God. But in my youthful perception that hand was on my back shoving me out the door. Born and raised in the Catholic Church, the Catholic school system, and Catholic consciousness, there I was peering over my prayer-clasped hands in my First Communion photo knowing deep down in the marrow of my bones that God-would-always-love-me-no-matter-what. But I learned early on that those who build theological bridges of stone and steel do not take kindly to upstarts who question the builders’ methods of construction.

Why put this stone here when it could just as easily go there?

Why weld into place that which would serve a greater function if allowed to swing freely?

Why follow an incomplete and faded blueprint without first acknowledging the potential errors it contains?

These questions did not fit into the theological framework in which I was raised. The cartoon Jesus with children gathered at his feet that I was shown as a child had in my adolescence morphed into an intolerant Lord who demanded obedience or else. My God of Love had been replaced by a God of Fear. So I leapt off the bridge, leaving my only understanding of God behind.

I spent twenty years playing in the waters and the hills at the foot of the bridge. Distracted by the currents and the tides, the valleys and the peaks. Making no effort to find another bridge to cross to God. Making no effort to build my own.

I did not talk to God because I believed God had no interest in talking to me.

Theos and logos were of different worlds. And logos, the rational world, is where I wished to be.

Then something happened that changed everything.

Twelve years in the past, at another time, in another place, on another hill, I heard the voice of God. On that day I was going downhill, horizontally, sliding painfully along the pavement at 30 mph with a $3,000 bicycle clamped between my legs. It was the culmination of 15 years spent racing and training. Frittering away my Sunday mornings nosing the front wheel of my bicycle onto painted white Starting Lines, chasing the elusive sense of fulfillment and glory that only athletic prowess could bring. Or so I believed.

On that day there was no glory in my exploits, only a humbling ride in the back of an ambulance, followed by six months of recuperation from a fractured pelvis.

On that day the fog that had settled in my life, obscuring all that lay beyond the insulated hills and valleys in which I spun my wheels, began to lift.

On that day I had no choice but to lower the volume in my head and intently listen to whoever it was I swore was calling my name.

It was on that day God whispered in my ear, “Enough.”

Pull

That time and place seems far away as I kick through the tall grass at the edge of Tiedemann Field.

The time that I first put on the cloak of “seeker” and set off to find the God not of my childhood, but the God who had beckoned me from the silence that followed when my world came crashing down. The God who obviously had some great plan for me, or so I wanted to believe, to cause me to even consider leaving the familiar hills and valleys of my life behind.

I took tentative steps at first. I joined a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship where questions were welcomed and encouraged, the services were free of the God-Of-Judgment language that I encountered in my youth, and as a gay woman I was welcomed with open and accepting arms.

And it was there that I found my voice.

I had spent a lifetime locked in silence, burdened by the double whammy of a childhood speech impediment and a natural inclination towards shyness. But I long had a love for expressing myself through the written word. With the encouragement of our Fellowship's minister, I stepped into the pulpit one Sunday and it was like stepping into a world that was brazenly new yet comfortably familiar. On that day God whispered in my ear, "This is where you were meant to be."

But when the suggestion that I go to seminary came up over and over again, I resisted, over and over again. Ministry was too hard. I was too old. I already had a fulfilling job. It would take too long. I was too introverted. I was too busy. It would cost too much. I was too afraid.

These excuses, how they served me so well. They've kept me safe.

They’ve kept me small. They’ve kept me locked inside my shell.

The voice of Alanis Morissette flows from my iPod as I slide my hand over the rough surface of the boulder that sits on a rise at the edge of the field. Why did I need an expensive piece of paper to claim the title of minister anyway? I was already ministering. In the pulpit. In the classroom. At the crisis hotline. In the soup kitchen. At the shelter. In the thrift shop. At the senior center. Did I really need to have an R-E-V in front of my name to make a difference? Was it arrogant to presume that God was calling me to make this my profession? And if God was calling me, why was I not listening?

When a new job pulled me from New York to Connecticut in 2001, I went back to school part-time to obtain a bachelors degree in Religious Studies. I was 36-years-old, I was a first-time college student, I was working full-time, and it would take at least five years to complete my degree, but I knew I needed those five years to further discern whether the every growing chorus of voices I was hearing was leading me to where I was meant to be. In the meantime I settled into a new UU congregation, and with my faith identity beginning to take shape I was ready to test the waters of church leadership. I joined the Sunday Service, Membership, and Social Justice committees. I assisted with Religious Education and became a Covenant Group leader. I created and led my own worship services and began more and more to feel like ordained ministry could be the right path for me. Where else could I express my passion for preaching, teaching, and serving?

But something was missing.

Shift

Here on Tiedemann Field I often encounter that something, that someone, who was missing.

Walking in the distance ahead of me is a lone figure. He wears the prerequisite white linen robe and walks in sandaled feet—the image seen on all the Mass cards and Children's Prayer Books of my youth. He's always just ahead of me. Turning corners, cresting hills, moving in and out my field of vision. But still I follow. Sometimes I lose sight of him all together as the path in front of me twists and bends and rises and falls. Sometimes I find him walking right beside me, lending certainty to the path that I’ve chosen. And other times I’m convinced that he's behind me giving me a proverbial shove down the road less traveled by. Twelve years ago I set out on a journey hoping to rediscover the connection I once had with God, but I was missing a centering element - a stable ground on which to continue to build my faith. I was missing Christ.

As a UU I had the freedom to explore many spiritual paths but after seven years of path hopping I discovered that I was most comfortable on the one that brought me there. It was time for me to return to my religious roots and reexamine what it meant to wear the label of “Christian.”

And as I walk the familiar paths of Tiedemann Field the words of T.S. Eliot echo in my mind:

"the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

My desire to return to my Christian roots was due partly to what I was learning and experiencing in college as a Religious Studies major. Classes in Christology, Mysticism, and the Western Religious Traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) awakened in me a new understanding and embracing of Christian belief and practice. I began to sort through the Christian baggage I had been carting around for years and discovered that the things I had placed in the bag as a child looked quite different when viewed through adult eyes. I sifted through words and concepts like prayer, grace, sin, redemption, incarnation, and salvation, and began to look at them in new ways. I read the words of Isaiah along side the teachings of Jesus in the gospels and found a spiritual basis for the always present drive that I’ve had to work for social justice - to act on the overwhelming sense of empathy and compassion that I felt for those who were suffering under the yokes of poverty, prejudice, and oppression. The further I revived my Christian beliefs the more I longed to express them in community; and I soon came to the painful realization that my beloved UU congregation offered me neither the language nor the forum in which to do so.

In Unitarian Universalism I found my voice, but it was in the United Church of Christ that my voice found a home. When I began attending a UCC church on a regular basis in 2005, my calling, which had up until then been vague and amorphous, began to take on shape, form, and purpose. What had been off-center suddenly clicked into place, and my previously tentative steps towards the ministry progressed into a purposeful stride. I arrived on the doorstep of my current church, King Street UCC in Danbury, shortly before the arrival of their newly called pastor, the Rev. Cindy Maddox. As a first-time senior pastor, Cindy welcomed my eagerness to wade into the ministry pool. I led Worship when she was out of town, co-led Adult-Ed and confirmation classes, served as the Religious Education Ministry Team Leader, Sunday School Superintendent and Sunday School teacher, and sat on the Ministry Council. And Seminary, which had been languishing for years in the “what if?” column of my life plan, was moved solidly into the “definitely when” column.

Jump

As I enter the woods at the far end of Tiedemann Field my stride breaks into a run. Negotiating the unmarked, leaf-strewn paths is tricky but it induces a satisfying adrenaline rush, as I leap over fallen trees and duck under low-hanging branches. Few paths are worth taking if there is no sense that one has grown from having to overcome obstacles along the way. In May 2007, I graduated from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT with a BA in Religious Studies. In the fall of 2008, I began my studies at Andover Newton Theological School in Boston, MA and was blessed to receive a full-tuition Presidential scholarship. I chose ANTS because it offers the experience that every working pastor I’ve spoken to wishes they had in seminary – an equal mix of the theoretical, the practical, and the spiritual. I love that every class begins in prayer, challenges us as students to think beyond the theological boxes that we’ve encased ourselves in, and offers us ways to put what we’ve learned into practice in the real world.

In the summer of 2010, I was blessed with the opportunity to serve as the acting pastor at King Street UCC while the Rev. Maddox was on sabbatical. For 13 weeks I led worship, provided pastoral care, held office hours, and had my first opportunity to preside at a graveside service.

I enjoyed the creative challenge of crafting weekly worship and writing sermons that both challenge and inspire the listener to live out the Good News, but during that summer it was the smaller, less visible moments that solidified my belief that I made the right decision when I said “yes” to God’s call. Visiting congregants in the hospital, providing rides to doctor's appointments, sitting with them for hours after they've learned a loved one has died, and just hanging out and catching up during coffee hour. This is a big part of what ministry is about, and I loved every moment of it.

As I emerge from the woods and jog along the outskirts of Tiedemann field, I contemplate how far I have come in the twelve years since I began this journey, and I my heart leaps in my chest at the thought of the many unseen paths that lie before me. But I know I will not walk those paths alone.

Theos and Logos are no longer separate entities for me. They are infinitely entwined, with the branches of one irreversibly tangled with the other. God and the word/Word, God and service, God in the Kingdom above and beyond, and the Kingdom of God right here, right now.

So what does my theological bridge look like now? And how has it changed since my youth?

I ponder these questions as I stop moving forward and pause to take a rest beneath a tree…

My Theology

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,”

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

Psalm 139: 7-12

Recover

The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor revealed that when she was a child, she would lie in the middle of the grassy field behind her house and pretend that she was stretched out on God's stomach.

I love that image. Many of us tend to picture God as being above us, all around us, or within us. It's odd to picture God as being below us (that spot is usually saved for lesser, more demonic beings). Yet there is something comforting about picturing God as being the ground itself. God is not up there, out there, or out of reach. God is as close as the soil that slides between our fingers. God holds us up, yet is always there to catch us when we fall. God is where we can sit and rest, or lay our heads when we grow tired of moving forward. And no matter how fast we run, or how much we try to get away, God is always right there, beneath us. Scuffing up the soles of our shoes and surrounding us with all the beauty that is our natural world.

I believe that God is by nature relational, triune, and mutable. I believe that God craves relation and communion with us and with the created world; and we in turn crave relation and communion with God, the created world, and each other, because we are created in God’s image.

I believe that God is triune. God is one nature containing three faces, or masks. All three stand behind each mask, but we only see the one that chooses to show itself up front. Because God recognized that we need guidance, God revealed God’s self to us in scripture in the form of a Parent - encouraging, loving, punishing, judging, and forgiving. Because we could not comprehend God in God’s true form, God became human in the form of Jesus Christ, the Son. Because God as Jesus could not live forever in human form, God continues to act in this world in the form of the Holy Spirit. God is three persons acting in relation, and those three persons act in relation to creation through history, as scripture tells us, which reveals that God is neither stagnant nor unchanging.

I believe that God is capable of feeling love, anger, disappointment, mercy, and joy, among other emotions; and because I believe that all of creation is a manifestation of God, the changing nature of creation denotes the changing nature of God. I believe that God is the creator and sustainer of all things material and spiritual, and that God created humanity so that God could come to know God’s creation through us – through our experiences in the material and spiritual world.

I believe that God so loved our world that God revealed Godself to us in the form of Jesus Christ.

Through Jesus, God entered human space, and a human being entered God’s space. By becoming one of us, God made ordinary human experiences extraordinary, simply by experiencing what can only be experienced in human form – what it’s like to be born, to feel pain, to feel love, to suffer, and to die. It was also extraordinary that a human being, in the form of the man known as Jesus, had the experiences that only God can have. Jesus acted in God’s space when he prophesied that the Word of God and the messenger were one and the same; he did it when he forgave sins that were not committed against his own person, an act that only God could perform; he did it when human beings responded to him as they do to God, as when he commanded them to “Follow me” (Mt. 9:9); and he did it when he conquered death and was resurrected to eternal life. Through Jesus, God showed us in word and in action the potential that we have to walk in the ways of God. His ministry stands as a concrete example of how we are meant to live in this world. Jesus the man of Nazareth was the embodiment of God’s radically inclusive love, and through Jesus God calls us to hold each other in love, just as God holds us in love. Jesus dedicated his life and his ministry to lifting up the “least of these” – the poor, the oppressed, the weak, and the marginalized – and it is by mirroring this ministry that we are called to be disciples of Christ.

I believe that God continues to act in our world through the work and guidance of the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit, God speaks to us, acts through us, and transforms us. The Holy Spirit is a woven, continuous, invisible thread that connects us to each other and us all to God. When we recognize the attributes of Christ in others – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control - we call these attributes the fruit of the Spirit. We see God/Christ in the form of the Spirit indwelling in human form, and we get a taste of what it must have been like to be alive when Jesus walked the earth. I believe that the work of the Spirit is representative. The Spirit re-presents Christ and brings Christ into the here and now, and the Spirit inspires us to create a new way of life both for us as individuals and for our communities.

I believe that God created humanity to experience this world of matter as creatures of matter, and because this is a finite world we too are finite creatures. Death is not a punishment for our sins any more than death comes to a rose because it has wronged its creator in some way. Death is not the end that we perceive it to be. It is part of the cycle of life, and while we recognize ourselves as being part of the biological cycle of life – in which our decaying matter feeds the earth to bring forth new life – we are shielded from seeing the full circle of the spiritual cycle of life. We only see a small segment of it, thus we see death as an end, a loss, a move into physical non-being, a taking away of the form in which God created us, a brokenness that must be healed. The three disorders that theologians have traditionally said arose from our brokenness – sin, evil, and death – are, I believe, not unnatural, but completely as God intended it to be. We sin because God gave us the gift of free will; here I agree with Pelagius, who said that if God gave us no other choice but to choose good, or if we were incapable of choosing good on our own - as Augustine claimed - then our will would not be free at all. I do not believe in a narcissistic God who created us simply for adoration; or a tyrannical God, who created us to fail if left on our own. I believe God delights in watching us as we learn how to live in this world; and we cannot learn unless we have the ability to fail.

I believe we create evil in the world because we are imperfect beings who make bad choices, and the result is disharmony in our relationship with God, with creation, and with others. I agree with the liberal feminist position that interprets the fall of humanity not as a fall into a bodily, finite existence but as a fall into injustice. God put us in this world as finite, imperfect creatures, but our sin (the break in our relationship with God) was to organize our world in a hierarchal structure built on an unequal distribution of power, which led to the evils (the break in our relationship with each other) of domination, oppression, and exploitation.

My understanding of the function and origin of sin informs my understanding of the function of atonement. In my youth as a Catholic, my Christological focus was on the cross - in particular, on the crucifix – on the suffering image of Jesus, the one who died for our sins, hanging above the altar for all to see. Getting Jesus off of that cross and fleshing him out as a living, breathing, loving human being has been a large part of my Christological focus as an adult. I began to see him as a great moral teacher, a social activist and political revolutionary who was executed by a totalitarian regime and a religious tradition that elevated the letter of the law above the love of God. Taking Jesus off of the cross was a necessary step for me to make him more real - to land him in a time and place, amongst a people who were desperate for his help. The historical Jesus, the human Jesus, acted as a bridge between the human and the divine; a connection I could see even if at the time I still questioned whether Jesus himself was divine.

But as I grew in my faith, Jesus without the cross was not enough. The deeper I delved into the Jesus of liberation theology, the more I began to recognize the need for the cross - the need to see it in a whole new way. It is the suffering that Jesus experienced on the cross that links the oppressed to God. A God that does not understand our suffering is a distant God, an unmerciful God. Furthermore, a Jesus that does not understand suffering, cannot hold us up when we are crumbling beneath the weight of the world. A cross-less Jesus is a safe Jesus. This Jesus is a mere teacher of the golden-rule who never challenges us to face our demons, to risk alienation and pain, or to carry our cross and the cross of others knowing that God is with us every step of the way. A bloodless Jesus speaks to the comfort of the privileged, not to the pain of the oppressed. Jesus needs to suffer and die, so that he can come alive again right before our eyes.

I believe Jesus conquered sin and death not by offering up his life as payment for a debt or as ransom, but by becoming the last sacrifice, the last scapegoat. According to this theory of atonement, Jesus is the last innocent person to be victimized and labeled as the cause of evil or unrest. Before Jesus it was a self-fulfilling prophecy to choose a scapegoat and eliminate that person or group in the belief that the problem would disappear along with the scapegoat. With the focus of the unrest gone, the problem would subside, only to surface again in some other form and with a need for another innocent victim to be sacrificed in its wake. Jesus was the first visible victim. As theologian Mark Heim proposes, “God was willing to be a victim of that bad thing we had made apparently good, in order to reveal its horror and stop it.”

I believe that Jesus did not die for our sins, but because of our sins. Jesus is our Savior because his death and resurrection had a saving aspect to it – the resurrection was meant to serve as proof that the cycle of vengeful violence could be broken; that the scapegoat who is murdered will return bringing peace not revenge, thus proving the futility of violence once and for all.

The gospel, the Good News, is that this world is not as God intended it to be, and that with God’s help we have the power to change it. I believe salvation – the redemption and renewal of humanity and creation – will be realized when the Kingdom of God is realized. I believe that we are called to be co-builders of the Kingdom of God. We are called to follow Jesus’ example and to work in partnership with God to build a world that is free of injustice, violence, suffering, oppression, poverty, prejudice, and marginalization of any kind. I believe that as individuals we are saved by Grace through faith alone, but it is faith that impels us to want to do good in the world, and it is only by acting on our faith that the Kingdom of God will come to be built. In scripture, Jesus names the Kingdom of God as being not yet (as a destination for the righteous in the end days) and already - “The Kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:14). This implies that the Kingdom is currently being built but it is not yet complete. If God wanted to, God could create the Kingdom in an instant, but the implication that it is still in progress supports the understanding that it is being built at both human speed and Godspeed.

I believe that God craves communion, relation, with us and with the created world, and we in turn crave communion, relation, with God, creation, and each other. Eschatology is about the consummation of that relationship - the ultimate realization of our communion with God.

By following Jesus’ example we are doing our part to bring on the Kingdom of God - a new creation, a new earth, where God’s radically inclusive love is received and shared by all equally; where there will be no more gnashing of teeth and no more tears; death itself will be defeated, and humankind will be redeemed and restored to its original form as one who is made perfect in the image of God. But there is more to God’s gift then just the building of the Kingdom. Jesus promises us that once the Kingdom of God is at hand he will come back to us in a visible form. This is the promise of the second coming, the Second Advent. The second coming is a gift from God. It’s the return of our beloved friend, teacher, and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I believe that we are called to build the Kingdom of God through the formation and work of the Church. The Church has been charged with the duty of honoring and distilling the Word of God, both in its written form in the Holy Scriptures, and in its human/divine form in the person of Jesus Christ. It is in proclaiming the Gospel that we share the word of God; it is through service to others that we act on the word of God; it is by living in community that we embody the word of God; and it is in performing the sacraments that we participate in the word of God. Sacraments are “an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible Grace.” Sacred rituals like Communion (the Lord’s Supper) and Baptism are useful for binding a community together in worship and in identity, but they also serve the dual purpose of allowing us to experience anamnesis – the active remembrance of Christ and his works; and prolepsis – the active anticipation, or foreshadowing of the promised Kingdom to come.

Through the sacrament of Baptism we enter into communion with all Christians and are brought into union with Christ. The sprinkling or pouring of water upon the forehead and the invocation of the Holy Spirit is a mark of the candidate’s acceptance into the care of the church; it is a sign and seal of their acceptance of God’s forgiving grace; and it is done with the recognition that he or she will continue to grow into full Christian faith and life. Through baptism, the child or adult becomes a member of Christ’s church and is welcomed at Christ’s table. In the UCC, the Prayer of Baptism calls upon God, through the invocation of the Holy Spirit, to “Create new life in the one baptized this that she/he may rise in Christ.” This calling upon God to send down the Holy Sprit and thus initiate the sacrament has its roots in scripture, in particular Matthew 3:16-17, which describes the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. By invoking these words, it is made clear that it is God who is calling the individual into the community of Christ, and therefore the ritual is not merely symbolic, but rather it is a sacred and holy act worthy of its inclusion as a sacrament. The invoking of the Holy Spirit through Baptism is reminiscent of the day of Pentecost – the day that the Holy Sprit was sent into the world to transform the Church, making it a sacrament of the Kingdom becoming a presence in this world, and foreshadowing the world to come. Baptism is therefore a “personal Pentecost” for the individual receiving the sacrament. Just as the Holy Spirit descended upon the world, the Holy Spirit descends upon each individual who enters into the communion of Christ through the sacrament of Baptism.

Through the sacrament of Communion we join together with all followers of Christ to remember Christ’s presence in our world, to honor his presence in the here and now, and to anticipate his return with the coming of the Kingdom of God. We recite the words that Jesus spoke at his last Passover meal and share in the bread and the cup in remembrance of him just as he asked us to do. The sharing of the communal meal at an open table also serves as a sign of the abundance of the Kingdom yet to come, where all will share in God’s bounty with no restrictions or exclusionary factors in place. The UCC Book of Worship beautifully states that Communion is “open to all Christians who wish to know the presence of Christ and to share in the community of God’s people.” In sharing Communion, we call upon the Holy Spirit to dwell among us and to act through us, as we live out Christ’s teachings in this world. We confess our sins communally before God and ask for and receive forgiveness as we recognize the ways in which we fall short of Jesus’ example. We offer up prayers of thanksgiving for the sustenance that God has given us through the meal, and for the unconditional gifts of God’s mercy and grace. The sacrament of Communion connects us with all Christians, past, present, and future, as we come together before God, in Christ, and with the Holy Spirit, as one.

Bridge

This is the theological structure upon which I tread in this time and place. In some ways it is very similar and in some ways it is very different from the one that I built in my youth. In some areas I have restrung cable and re-trussed the supports to steady the sway that had been present in previous manifestations. In other areas I have removed whole sections or loosened the ties bound up by misconceptions and misconstrued ideas, setting them free to fall away or to reform in new and exciting ways. My theological bridge may look different in five or ten years, but only slightly I would say. The major rebuilding and restructuring has already taken place. But I know as I continue to grow and change, and the world around me continues to grow and change, my bridge will as well. That is the beauty of living in a world created, sustained and redeemed by our still-speaking God.

The United Church of Christ

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them existed.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end---

I am still with you.

Psalm 139: 13-18

Resume

As I rise up from beneath the tree and continue on my way on Tiedemann field, my mind moves to the sharp distinctions that can be made between my Catholic upbringing and the Protestant tradition in which I now find myself. In fairness, I have not experienced Catholicism as an adult, but my adolescent understanding was that I was not to question those whom God had called to stand “in situ Christi” – in Christ’s place. I was not to interpret scripture on my own, I could not receive Communion without first confessing my sins to a priest, and I was to hold fast to the belief that there was only one, holy, Catholic (with a capitol ‘C’), apostolic Church. In converting to Protestantism I quickly learned that catholic can also be spelled with a small ‘c’, and that to be “one in Christ” is not beholden upon one’s pledging allegiance to one particular Christian tradition.

Although my conversion came about in the late twentieth century, I suspect I felt many of the same feelings of newfound freedom and autonomy that the Puritans and Pilgrims felt when they established the first Christian communities in New England during the mid-seventeenth century. For these early settlers, establishing a church centered on congregationalism, with a small ‘c’ led to the birth of Congregationalism, with a capitol ‘C.’ The Pilgrims were Separatists who broke off all ties with the Church of England believing that ultimate authority in all matters related to the church rested with the local body of believers, not with a central governing body. The Puritans did not wish to separate from the Church of England but rather to purify it, but they too resisted centralized authority. The Salem Covenant, adopted in1629, speaks to the understanding that God, and God revealed in scripture, is the only authority that we answer to, and that we bind ourselves to God and to each other in covenant as we live out our faith:

We covenant with the Lord and one with another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.

In 1648, the Puritans drew up The Cambridge Platform, a doctrinal statement which proposed, “There is no greater church than a congregation which may ordinarily meet in one place,” establishing that the congregation itself is the highest level of ecclesiastical authority.

This emphasis on congregational authority, autonomy, and walking together in covenant flowed through all four traditions that eventually came together to form the United Church of Christ.

Established in 1957, the UCC resulted from the union of four antecedent denominations: the Congregational Churches, the Christian Churches, the German Reformed Church, and the Evangelical Synod of North America. The merging of these four denominations was preceded by the merging of the Congregational and Christian churches in 1931, and the merging of the Reformed and Evangelical churches in 1934. These four traditions had distinct differences but shared enough in common to facilitate their coming together as one. All four believed in the freedom of religious expression, in the authority of scripture as a guiding force in the life of the individual and the church, and in Jesus Christ as the sole head of the church.

The Puritans and the Pilgrims, both of whom were heavily influenced by John Calvin, eventually came together to form the Congregational Churches. Congregationalists placed a high value on education and stressed the need for educated clergy, which led to the establishment of the first colleges in America – Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth. For Congregationalists, spiritual practices and educational knowledge were both part of the process of becoming a more faithful Christian.

The mission of the Congregationalist Churches was to create a Godly society in which excessive materialism was eschewed, the focus was on the public good not the private, and accountability in ecclesiastical settings was seen to be for the public good. The Congregationalists were pioneers in mission work. They established some of the first mission organizations and worked on solving urban problems related to sanitation, immigration, and youth education – all for the public good.

The Christian Churches were birthed on the American frontier in the 19^th century as a result of the Second Great Awakening, with churches established in New England, the middle Atlantic region and the south. These churches rejected denominational labels and sought to erase all boundaries by simply calling themselves “Christian.” As a group, they shunned confessions and creeds that were required in other churches. “Christian character” was the only requirement for membership, and the “right of private judgment and the liberty of conscious” were to be considered rights and privileges for all. In 1830, the Christian Church developed “Six Principles” based on these commonly held beliefs and practices, which closely mirror the principles stated in the preamble of the current UCC Constitution and Bylaws.

The Evangelical Synod of North America was established in 1840 by German immigrants who settled in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa. They shared the same dislike for connectional authority as the Congregationalists. Each Christian was expected to make his or her own decisions about what was essential and what was non-essential in his or her theology and in the polity of the church.

The Evangelicals emphasized the expression of the inner devotional life, the sacraments, and the spreading of the Good News through evangelism. The denomination held three main principles which have come to influence the current United Church of Christ: pietism between orthodoxy and rationalism, no creed but Christ crucified, and what became the motto of Eden Seminary, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials freedom, in all things charity.”

The Reformed Church was founded by German and Swiss immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania and the mid-Atlantic region of America in the 1700’s. Unlike the Congregationalists who came in large groups and colonized early America, these immigrants came as individuals into existing seats of power. Its members were primarily working class and had close ties to the Lutheran church. These believers adhered to the Heidelberg Catechism and the Protestant belief in justification by faith through God’s free gift of grace alone. The Reformed tradition was at its center biblical, evangelical, and Eucharistic. The Mercersburg Movement, which grew out of the Reformed tradition, emphasized ecumenism – the understanding that we’re all part of the same church under Christ, the Eucharist as the center of Christian piety, and the lifelong need for Christian nurture – because there is no salvation apart from the church.

Breathe

The Mercersburg Movement painted an image of the church as a river with many tributaries, each of which could trace their source all the way back to the Catholic Church. I pondered this connection and how it mirrors my own journey as I circumnavigated Tiedemann Field one last time. I came to the United Church of Christ because I was seeking a denominational home where I could express my faith in Jesus Christ and openly worship God in an environment that encouraged questions and welcomed all. I had heard that the UCC was the more “liberal” of the Christian denominations in terms of theology and its stance on social issues, but it took a television commercial with the tagline, “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here” to make it real for me. When I saw the UCC “Steeple” ad in which two gay women are shown with their hands resting on each other’s shoulders, I could not help but cry. As an out lesbian I was struggling with the realization that there may be no place where I could go where I could be gay and Christian and be accepted. The welcoming and affirming stance taken by the UCC and many of its congregations was the reason why I was drawn to the denomination, but learning about the history of the UCC and the stand it has taken on issues of justice and social equality, is one of the primary reasons why I chose to stay.

The history of the United Church of Christ stands as a witness to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Through its reliance on the guiding force of the Spirit, this church has inspired people like Anne Hutchinson, a Congregationalist who risked expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony when she opposed the doctrine of the elect; Lemual Haynes, who in 1785 became the first African American to be ordained by a Protestant denomination; Antoinette Brown, who in 1853 was ordained as a Christian minister, and who was the first woman to be ordained in any Christian denomination; Isaac Scott, who was ordained in 1852 by the Christian church and was the first African American missionary to be sent oversees; and more recently in 1972, William R. Johnson, who became the first openly gay man to be ordained as a Christian minister, adding to the United Church of Christ’s long history of welcoming and blessing the ministry of those considered to be “the least of these” by other denominations.

These achievements by individuals are not the only “firsts” that are representative of the United Church of Christ and its antecedent denominations’ willingness to take a stand on the side of justice and love. In 1810, Congregationalists established the first foreign mission society – the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM); in 1839, Congregationalists worked to help free the slaves being held on the Amistad schooner; in 1846, Lewis Tappon, one of the Amistad organizers, establishes the American Missionary Associations, the first anti-slavery organization in the US with multiracial leadership; and in 2005, the UCC’s General Synod passed a resolution supporting same-gender equality in marriage, the first Christian denomination to do so.

The polity of the United Church of Christ is both congregational and connectional. The local church is a unit that functions both autonomously and in covenant with the other units that make up the UCC. Each local church has its own rights and responsibilities but each also holds a covenantal relationship, centered on mutual accountability, with the other local churches, the local Associations and regional Conferences, and the national Synod. The rights and responsibilities of each autonomous unit are guided, but not dictated, by the constitution and bylaws. Within the constitution and bylaws one will find an accounting of the responsibilities and rights of each autonomous unit but the document itself holds no power of regulation. Each autonomous unit is to hold “in the highest regard” decisions and actions made by the other units within the whole, but they are by no means compelled to adhere to or replicate those decisions and actions. It has been said that the Synod, the central body of the United Church of Christ, speaks TO the churches, associations, and conferences, but not FOR them – For “if the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?” (1 Cor. 12: 17) In the UCC, each unit is connected to the whole yet each functions autonomously, and all come together in covenant to form the Body of Christ.

The UCC Statement of Faith serves a similar purpose, in that it is “understood as a testimony of the United Church of Christ to the faith commonly held among us in the words of our time,” but it is not a creed in the sense that all members must adhere to its statements of belief. The Statement of Faith was approved and accepted by the 1959 General Synod, and it reflects both the kinship and the tension that exists between traditional and contemporary beliefs. The Statement has appeared in three different forms since its acceptance in 1959, and each successive rendition reflects changes in our understanding of theology and language, and how both often need to be adapted to be more linguistically inclusive and accurate, more just, and more theologically appropriate in relation to how we speak about our faith.

The Statement of Faith has evolved over time just as the United Church of Christ has evolved since its founding in 1957. While the UCC is rooted in the tradition, practices, and beliefs of Christianity and the Protestant reformers, it also “affirms the responsibility of the Church in each generation to make this faith its own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God.” This is the church of the still-speaking God – the God who continues to act in history and continues to live in relation with us and the created world. This is the God who spurred those who established the four traditions which now make up the United Church of Christ, to come to a new world and explore new ways in which to live out Christ’s message and express God’s love.

During the Great Awakening of the 1730’s, the revivalist Congregationalist preacher Jonathan Edwards proclaimed that the church was charged with recovering the passion of a transforming faith that “changes the course of [our] lives.” I believe the United Church of Christ has made valiant attempts to recover that passion and to change the course of the lives of those who choose to walk with God, and the lives of those who are suffering in God’s world.

Arrivée

The sun is setting here on Tiedemann Field, and as it dips below the treetops it sprinkles the horizon with thin, feathered lines of orange and purple. I imagine that these lines that stretch over the horizon are evidence of the connection that exists between the created world and God.

My goal in my ministry is to show others that it’s possible to build a bridge to God without having all of the answers, and that it’s possible to walk with Jesus without having a foolproof blueprint in-hand to follow. I want to be a pastor because I have a passion for making the word, and the Word, come to life – in story and in action. The joy of my ministry is to take the words of the tradition and shape them into something that is theo-logically meaningful to the person in the pew, the person on the street, and the person who is in pain.

This is what I love to do. To take up the multi-faceted stone that is theology and twist it and turn it, marveling at how the light refracted from each side can be so different while emanating from the same source. My goal as an ordained minister is not to focus on one facet of the stone and hold it up as the one and only true reflection of God, but to explore and celebrate many sides of the stone, and guide others to hold tight to that which we can know - God is Love - and not to that which we cannot know. Ordination will allow me to drape the cloth of “profession” over the aspects of ministry that I have engaged in joyfully for many years as a lay person – preaching, teaching, guiding, leading, creating, listening, and simply “being” – the ministry of presence. But more importantly, ordination will allow me preside over the sacraments – To actively invoke the Holy Spirit and bestow the sacred gifts of Baptism and Communion upon all those who feel called to participate in the church created in Christ’s name.

Vocationally, I am drawn to small town parish ministry - where it’s possible to know every parishioner’s name, where Sunday’s are for preaching, and the pastor’s work revolves around every birth, death and life in between. I am also drawn to the callings of social justice ministry - where ‘serving Christ’ is done with hands and feet, and heart and mind, and where ‘giving back to God’ is done every day and in many diverse ways.

And I believe I have found a home to practice this ministry in the United Church of Christ.

As I head for the gravel strewn path that will take me home I thank God for taking the time to walk with me. For giving me the chance to ask my questions and air my fears, for helping me to sort through the distractions and chatter and to listen for God’s response - “Deus Caritas Est” (God is Love) - in the spaces in between.

End

Seeking Perfection

2011-10-24T22:48:00.002-04:00

Your body is away from me

But there is a window open

from my heart to yours.

From this window, like the moon

I keep sending news secretly.

Rumi ♥

I’ve been trying to focus on L-O-V-E these past few weeks.

God’s love for us, the love we have for each other,

and all the emotions, feelings, and actions that should naturally flow out of that love -

kindness, compassion, empathy, grace, mercy, and forgiveness.

I’ve been trying to focus on these feelings and actions to stem the tide of opposing feelings and actions that have welled up from inside of me, and have been poured out over me, of late -

anger, judgment, misperception, pride, carelessness, and shame.

Two weeks ago, a friendship that I valued deeply blew apart right in front of my eyes and I still can’t wrap my head around how or why it happened.

In sharing this experience with others who saw me in pain and offered their support, I’ve been reminded that this is not an uncommon occurrence.

For many of us, the paths we’ve traveled through life are littered with the remains of broken relationships.

Often both participants are left standing with befuddled looks on their faces, saying:
“I can’t believe you did this to ME – can’t you see how wrong YOU are?”

When the reality is neither party is right, and neither is wrong. The truth often lies somewhere down the middle. But fear, anger, and our wounded pride prevent us from recognizing that.

So instead we toss out labels to explain away the behavior of the other - She’s crazy, he’s dysfunctional, she’s overly emotional, he’s neurotic, she’s irrational – and we paint ourselves as the normal, well-adjusted, and mature one who has the ability to see both sides with clarity and grace.

Sometimes, this is true.

There are some crazy, dysfunctional, neurotic people out there and as much as we may mourn the loss of a relationship we once had with them, we cannot fault ourselves for not having the ability to make it work. But I believe in most cases, the dysfunction that we think we see is more functional than we care to admit...it is a function of being human.

Some of us have had the misfortune of being placed in the middle of arguments between friends, spouses, and partners in which both sides have widely different interpretations of what the issues are, why the relationship is suffering, and who is to blame for its downfall.

As objective observers we’re often left shaking our heads because from our perspective neither interpretation rings true.

I hate that this happens.

I hate that this has happened to me, and to my dear friend.

It is not in my nature to sit peacefully with brokenness.

Those with astrological leanings may say it’s the Pisces in me that leads me to idealize relationships and to exist in a dream world where all must live in harmony.

Some may say it’s my Myers-Briggs INFJ personality type that leads me to feel connections and disconnections to others very deeply, and which compels me to want to bring order to chaos when things get messy around the edges.

Others may say I’m being true to my Enneagram types 4 & 9 combo, because I feel extremely unsettled when misunderstandings are left hanging in the air, and I feel driven to play the role of peacemaker whenever conflicts arise.

But I say it is the Christian in me that causes me to weep when relationships are in need of healing, or appear to be broken beyond repair.

And it is the pastor in me that causes me to lie awake at night wondering what I could have done differently, and what I should be doing to make this right.

I’m supposed to be better than this.

I’m not supposed to feel angry, or hurt, or betrayed, and I’m supposed to do all that I can to ensure that the other person doesn’t feel this way either.

Love is supposed to win out in the end.

I’m supposed to be able to fix this.

But I can’t.

I can’t.

I feel like I’m trying to pick through the jagged shards of a precious vase that has toppled off the shelf, and I can’t help but continue to cut myself painfully and deeply as I attempt to sort through the pieces, desperately trying to fit them back together again.

I can’t do this on my own.

I’m not that powerful.

In fact in this situation I feel quite power-less.

I think the problem lies in the belief that I’m supposed to be like Jesus.

I’m supposed to be perfect.

But perhaps sometimes we try too much to be like Jesus.

We are too quick to dismiss our human feelings as we try to elevate ourselves to “saintly” status.

“What would Jesus do?” we ask ourselves.

Jesus would forgive, show mercy, act and speak only from a place of love and compassion.

But we forget that Jesus was not only fully divine, he was also fully human.

Jesus expressed anger, he was sometimes quick to judge others, he felt the sting of betrayal, he felt both physical and emotional pain, he allowed fear to rule his heart, and he wept.

As I continue to weep over the loss of this relationship, I’m trying to keep in mind that Jesus allowed himself to feel both compassion and anger, and both love and pain.

What would Jesus do?

Jesus would be human, and then strive to be more divine.

We can only aspire to do the same.

A friend’s Facebook status this morning summed up brilliantly this daily dance that we do:

“It's Monday. The world's not perfect yet. I'm not perfect yet. And I suspect, without knowing for sure of course, that you're not perfect yet. Can we agree to get going anyway?”

Yes, let’s agree to do just that.

Statement on Ministry

2011-10-10T09:42:00.002-04:00

Human beings are amazingly fragile creatures.

We have soft underbellies, delicate psyches, and tender hearts that are so easily broken.

But human beings are also amazingly resilient creatures. We have backs that will bend to extreme angles long before they break, and we have the unsinkable ability to greet each day anew, despite the hours of darkness that came before.

Life will often toss us around like ragdolls, and sometimes we land in a heap and are unable to move, and other times we briskly, or gingerly, pick ourselves up and continue on our way.

We arrive on the doorsteps of our churches in both conditions.

Some of us come believing we are weak and vulnerable - and we need to be reminded that we are strong and valuable.

Some of us come believing that we are strong and valuable - and we need to be reminded that we are weak and vulnerable.

We’re all wounded and broken; and we all have the strength and the resiliency to heal.

A favorite cartoon of mine has a pastor standing in a pulpit with his congregation before him, and over their heads are thought balloons expressing what they’re expecting from his sermon, and from him as a pastor: “Feed Me!” “Encourage Me!” “Rebuke Me!” “Teach Me!” “Comfort Me!” “Humor Me!” “Counsel Me!” “Disciple Me!” “Visit Me!” “Love Me!”

No pastor can be all things to all people, at all times.

But I believe the good ones at least try; and are able to admit that they fall short most of the time.

The task – and it is a difficult one – is to strike a balance between being a pastor, a priest, and a prophet: a compassionate comforter, a sacred teacher, and a nudging instigator.

The pastor is the one we invite into our presence during life’s most intimate moments - when our children are born, when we celebrate new relationships and new commitments, and when we mourn the passing of our loved ones. The pastor is the one we lean on when our lives fall apart. The pastor comes when we call in the middle of the night, gives us a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold, and ears to listen; and will sit with us for hours doing all of the above. In times of uncertainty, the pastor is there to offer us an encouraging word, a concerned check-in at coffee hour, a gentle touch on the arm and the comforting words, “I’m here for you,” when we seem distracted, apprehensive, or overwhelmed.

The pastor walks beside us in our joy, and in our pain.

The priest is the one we call upon when we live into our desire to embrace what is sacred. We come to church to learn about God and to be closer to God. The priest is theologian and teacher, celebrant and sacramental liaison. It is through worship that we come before God both on bended knee and with hands raised high. In the silence we seek sanctuary, and in making a joyful noise we lift up our voices in praise. In communion (gathering with others) and in Communion (the sharing of the body of Christ) we celebrate the beautiful reality that we are never truly alone in this world. Through the art of preaching, teaching, and story telling, the priest takes the word, and the Word, and brings God to life right in front of our eyes.

The priest walks in front of us, and leads the way.

The prophet is the one who comes to us when we get too comfortable in our own skin - when we sink into the pew cushion and kick back to hear a pleasantly worded sermon before heading out to resume our busy, tunnel-vision lives. The prophet often grates on us like nails on a blackboard, making us cringe or lash out because the noise is too unsettling to hear. The prophet pushes us to do more, to think more, to BE more than we believe we can, or want, to be. The prophet prompts us to discern who and what it is our “still-speaking” God is calling us to be. Sometimes we’re ready to listen and we champion the prophet for being “inspiring” and “visionary,” and sometimes we’re reluctant to listen and we challenge the prophet for being too “radical,” too “political,” or too out of touch with reality as we know it.

The prophet walks behind us, poking us in the back, and nudging us towards change.

I feel compelled to bring elements of all three of these callings to my ministry. I love to preach and teach the message of God’s unconditional and radically inclusive grace, mercy, and love. I love to pray and worship and celebrate the Word and sacrament in the loving embrace of community. I love to pastor and counsel and be the compassionate presence that so many of us need in the tender moments of our lives. I love to lift up the voices of the impoverished, the marginalized, and the oppressed, and to encourage all within earshot to roll up their sleeves and to go out and be God’s hands and feet in the world – because the church that Jesus calls us to create cannot, and should not, be contained within the walls that we’ve built to surround us.

As a pastor, as a person, I try my best to do all of this with a healthy dose of humility and humor.

We are human beings. We’re going to mess up a good percentage of the time.

We’re going to hurt each other without intending to. We’re going to step on each other’s toes and bump into each other while trying to do this dance that we call living in community.

And when things get difficult and challenging and frustrating, what God calls us to do is to keep dancing anyway - to keep coming back together and having those hard conversations: about our mission, our vision, and how we see ourselves as being “church” in this ever changing world. And yes, we also need to talk about strained budgets, cherished traditions and worship elements that can and cannot be changed, much needed building repairs, and all those other conflict-inducing issues that are a part of life in congregations with long histories, housed in aging buildings, with passionate people giving it life.

There’s an old rabbinical teaching that says as people of faith we should greet each day with two slips of paper in our pockets. In one pocket we should keep a note that reads:

“God created the world for me” - and in the other pocket we should keep a note that reads:

“I am but dust and ashes.”

As always, exceptionality and humility go hand in hand.

Working together as pastor and congregation we should strive to be exceptional – to answer God’s call to take a step beyond where we typically feel comfortable going; and we should do it knowing that we’re not always going to get there – because we’re human.

We’re vulnerable yet strong, fragile yet resilient.

And we are just as God created us to be.

"Who do YOU say that I am?"

2011-10-05T12:02:00.000-04:00

I am at a standstill.
Well....not really. I led worship this past Sunday, and have another service to plan for next week. I'm co-leading an all-church retreat next week and I'm working on programming for that. I'm pulling together all the materials I need for my upcoming Ecclesiastical Council (references, transcripts, etc). I have my final CPE evaluation/interview this Thursday. And I'm writing my UCC Profile - which is essentially the resume that gets sent out to churches that are looking to hire pastors.
It's that last one that has me at a standstill.

As part of the Profile I have write what is called a "Statement on Ministry" - which describes who I am as a pastor and what I'm looking for in a church....in 1200 words or less.
This is the part of the Profile that churches are told to read first, and when yours is just one in a stack of 100 candidates or more, it had better stand out. It needs to be memorable, creative...it needs to grab their attention and scream, "Pick me as your new pastor!"....and it needs to be honest - a true representation of who I am what what kind of church I envision myself leading.
And I don't even know where to start.

I've been here before.
When I was writing my seminary entrance essay.
When I was writing my ministerial statement for my MDiv mid-program review.
When I was writing my CPE application essay.
When I was writing my seminary graduation speech.

It seems like such a daunting task......to be able to put into words what I've learned from my past experiences, how I see myself now as a person and a pastor, and what it is I envision for the future.
And to then tie all of that into what I believe God is calling me to do...and how that might intersect with the calling of a body of people, whom I don't yet know, but who call themselves "church".

I know what I need to do is to write about the church I want to serve, and then toss it out there and hope it lands in the lap of a group of folks who are looking for a pastor like me to serve with them.
And even if they don't quite match the description of my "desired" church, and I don't quite match the description of their "desired" pastor, if we're at least willing to take the steps we both need to take to get there, then that sounds pretty ideal to me.

I just need to figure out where to start.
"Once upon a time...."
"It was a dark, and stormy night..."
"In a galaxy far, far, away...."
"In the beginning, was the Word..."

And then trust the Holy Spirit to do the rest...

Sermon - "Into the Wild"

2011-10-02T15:39:00.001-04:00

King Street UCC, Danbury CT

October 2, 2011

“The LORD spoke to Moses and said, "I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, 'At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the LORD your God.'"

Exodus 16:11-12

“Into the Wild”

The Exodus story is one of those epic tales that has withstood the test of time.

Whether we believe the details are fact or fiction or a mythological tangle of both, the story of the people of Israel’s exodus out of Egypt is our story.

It’s humanity’s story.

The story of what happens when the chains that bind us are cut and we suddenly find ourselves wandering in the wilderness, learning what it means to be free.

For those of you who have not been with us every week since Pastor Cindy began this series in early September, let me give you the Cliff Notes version of the story so far to catch you up.

It began with the Israelites.

God’s chosen people – the people God called on to become God’s hands and feet in the created world.

God wanted to infuse the Spirit of the Divine presence into God’s people – to bring grace, mercy, compassion, forgiveness into our world on a human scale - and the Hebrew Bible tells us Abraham and his descendents were granted the honor of being the first to be called.

At the beginning of the Exodus story the people of Israel are pinned down beneath the heavy chains of slavery.

So God recruits Moses – who was born of a Hebrew mother and plucked from the Nile river and raised as an Egyptian – and calls him to lead the Israelites to freedom.

God appears to Moses in a burning bush, and Moses, despite his continued insistence that he is not qualified for the job, suddenly finds himself as the divinely appointed leader of a liberation movement.

In the climatic scene in the Egyptian Pharaoh’s chambers,

Moses cries out to Pharaoh – "Let my people go!" - and Pharaoh refuses.

In response, God sends 10 plagues upon the Egyptian people culminating with the death of every first-born child in all of the land.

Overwhelmed with grief and anger Pharaoh reluctantly complies and grants Moses and his people their freedom.

So the people left Egypt en mass, in a group that the bible tells us contained

600,000 men, plus women and children and livestock.

Now most scholars believe that this number is an exaggeration given the area’s population at the time and that the actual number of Israelite slaves was closer to 20,000 men, women, and children.

But that’s still a lot of people to care for on what was to become a long and arduous journey.

Using Moses as a guide, God pledged to lead the people to the Promised Land – the land of milk and honey.

But the most direct route to that land was occupied by the Philistines – and it would take a war to get them to allow safe passage for such a large group of fleeing refugees.

Fearing that violence would cause the already weakened Israelites to flee back to Egypt, God chose to send them on an alternative route – one that took them the long way around, and straight out into the vast and deserted wilderness.

But the fleeing slaves were not left to fend for themselves.

God was with them, always.

Appearing before them and leading them, via a pillar of swirling dust and cloud by day, and a pillar of wind and fire by night.

When the Egyptian Pharaoh realized that he made a grave mistake releasing his slaves and sent his army to retrieve the Israelites, the pillar of cloud and fire moved between God’s people and the advancing army, giving Moses the opportunity to use God’s power to part the Red Sea so they could cross safely to the other side.

And still God never left their side.

Only days into their trek into the wilderness, with the remnants of Pharaoh’s chariots still floating atop the Red Sea, the liberated slaves began to complain to Moses that they were thirsty.

And God heard those complaints and sweetened the bitter waters they had found to drink and led them to an oasis of 12 springs where they promptly set up camp.

It is here where God also promised to protect his weakened and vulnerable people from disease, saying to them, “For I am the Lord who heals you.”

And this is where today’s scripture reading picks up the story.

To the outside observer it appears as if God has placed a protective bubble around Moses and his people, and is determined to lead them unscathed to the Promised Land.

But the people are slow to realize that.

And still they complain to Moses.

This time they are hungry.

And God, hearing those complaints, tells them that they need not worry.

Each day at twilight they shall eat meat, in the form of quails that descended upon the camp, and every morning they shall have their fill of bread in the form of manna – a fine flaky substance left behind by the evaporated morning dew.

There were stipulations of course. The people were told to collect only what they needed for that day – there was to be no storing up of food.

And they were still to observe the Sabbath and do no work on the seventh day, for double the food would be provided the day before.

God was a visible and active God for the people of Israel.

Leading them out of captivity.

Eradicating an army to ensure their escape.

Providing them with water and food to sustain them.

And traveling with them, at least early on, as a physical presence in the form of a pillar of cloud and fire.

And still the people complained.

Still they did not trust that God would lead them out of the wilderness.

Still they did not believe that they had not been left on their own to fend for themselves.

We don’t know why.

We don’t know why despite the pillar of fire, the people lost sight of God.

We don’t know why despite God’s continued interventions, they lost their trust in God.

But we think we know enough to look back in judgment upon the wandering Israelites and lift them up as an example of who we’re called NOT to be.

A bickering, complaining group of ungrateful people who had no idea what it was God was leading them towards, or who it was God was calling them to be.

The opening line of this text says it all:

“…and the whole congregation complained.”

Now we modern day church goers wouldn’t have any familiarity with THAT would we?

The truth is, we can’t help but complain, we’re human beings.

For the majority of us, if you pluck us out of civilization, no matter how oppressive it is, and drop us in the middle of the wilderness with no food, or water, or shelter, and have us hike miles and miles every day in search of it, and the days turns into months, and the months turn into years, we’re going to complain.

Look what happened after Hurricane Irene when some of us lost power for a few days….take away our ability to cook food, take a hot shower, flush the toilet, watch our cable TV, and recharge our cell phones and we’re going to complain.

I did.

But I at least I didn’t complain to God about my predicament.

That’s what Facebook is for.

Even when our basic needs are being met, wandering in the desert for a few weeks has a way of playing with our mind.

Whether it’s the hot sun beating down on our head, or the fact that we can’t just pop into the kitchen for a cold drink or grab a snack whenever the mood moves us.

For the Israelites, who for years had been supplied food and shelter by their captors, however meager, being asked to trust that God would provide for them by sending them wandering quail and dewy bread was a hard leap for them to take.

Suddenly the slave encampments back in Egypt seemed like Club Med.

This is the tension we experience when we wander in the wilderness.

In the “in between” place where we’re no longer WHERE we once were, or WHO we once were, and we are not yet where we’re going to be, or who we’re going to be.

We’re in the process of becoming.

Becoming something different.

Becoming someone new.

Becoming who God is calling us to be.

God was calling the Israelites to be something new.

They had spent hundreds of years living as slaves in Egypt and were completely dependent upon their captives for survival.

They needed to learn how to live as free people again.

And that does not happen over night.

Which is why God didn’t just clear a path through the land of the Philistines and lead the people directly to the Promised Land.

They needed to spend some time learning to trust that God would provide for them.

That God would provide the resources – bread, water, materials to build shelters and clothing.

And that they were to use these resources wisely; to resist the urge to hoard or take more then their fill, insuring that there was enough for all.

For the Israelites it took about 40 years to learn that lesson.

Just enough time for a new generation to be born into freedom, and to embrace that freedom because it’s all they’d ever known.

The Exodus story continues with us. We’re living in a time where the resources God has provided are becoming scarce.

Fresh water, food supplies, and fossil fuels are all being used at rates that exceed their ability to be naturally replenished.

And with the world’s population at over 7 billion and growing there’s little hope that these trends will ever reverse.

But while some envision a future in which wars will be fought over natural resources and society as we know it will break down into a kind of Mad Max “every man for himself” existence….there is hope that things can be different.

That we as a people can learn to live without the chains that bind us – our dependence on fossil fuels, the imbalances of our food distribution systems, and our propensity to waste water - and to learn to live free, trusting that the divinely sent manna we gather each morning will be enough to sustain us.

It sounds like a fairy tale doesn’t it? - a tale like the story of the Exodus, worthy of repeating in church on Sunday morning but one that has little basis in reality.

But in reality, we’ve already seen it happen.

It happened in Cuba, just 20 years ago.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin.

This nation of 11 million people was almost completely dependent upon outside resources to sustain it.

The supply of oil was cut by more than half – and the food supply by 80 percent. Cars stopped running. Electricity was available sporadically. Lacking substitutes for fossil-fuel-based farming, food production was devastated. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds in the first year of the crisis.

But you may be surprised by how the people responded.

Without fuel for cars, Cubans walked and rode bicycles. People could no longer commute to far away jobs and thus found jobs within their own communities. Self-sustaining neighborhoods become the norm, with people relying on corner markets and local businesses for most of their resources. People got to know each other, and learned to care for each other.

City-dwellers planted urban gardens on every available plot, and reverted to organic farming to reclaim soils destroyed by chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

These local farmers reconnected with their neighbors and willingly supplied free food to elders, schools, workers, and pregnant women.

To increase food production, the government divided state farms into smaller private farms and cooperatives. Farmers replaced fossil fuels with labor-intensive practices, animal power, and Cuban-developed biofertilizers, resulting in increased productivity.

Less fuel meant less machinery, smaller farms, more crop rotation, better soil, fewer bugs, and less need for pesticides.

To help people survive, the Cuban government even expanded their free, localized medical system.

Doctors and social workers lived in the communities that they served and were considered an integral part of the social fabric.

Increased physical activity and the healthier diet lowered rates of heart disease and diabetes.

And despite its status as a Second World nation, Cuba’s life span and infant mortally rate is now equal to that of the US.

Cuba adapted, survived, and thrived because they mobilized their entire culture. They made changes requiring cooperation, adaptability, and openness to alternatives. As one Cuban remarked, “When we were told we needed to reduce energy use, everybody did it.”

But all these changes didn’t happen right away.

It took time and multiple false starts before people learned to work together to ensure their own survival.

Twenty years later we can look back at the results and see that the people are better off having been freed from the shackles that bound them,

but when we’re forced into the wilderness that freedom feels initially like punishment, and there’s no telling how we’re going to react.

Like the Israelites, at first we’re going to complain.

We’re going to look around and notice that the comforts we once had are no longer there.

And we’re NOT going to recognize that those comforts were actually holding us in place, keeping us from growing, keeping us from answering God’s challenge to live differently in this world.

Whether its our over dependence on our world’s dwindling resources;

our tendency to hold onto our love, mercy, and forgiveness as if they were scarce commodities rather than flowing from God’s abundance;

or our reluctance to open our hearts to new ideas, new ways of living, and new ways of being church in this ever changing world.

We hold on to our dependence, our fears, and our old ways because we don’t like how it feels to be in the wild.

We like to feel safe, and secure, and when God call us to move out of that place of familiarity we feel the urge to dig in our heels and say, “No, we won’t go.”

But like the Israelites – and the people of Cuba – sometimes we don’t have a choice.

The world changes around us and we’re forced to adapt – or die.

Sometimes God pushes us out into the wilderness and says,

“Go, learn how to be the people of God. I will provide for you.”

And we have to learn to trust that that this is true.

We are the people of God.

Our manna, our daily bread, is the world that God has created for us.

And our Promised Land is the Kingdom of God – the peaceful, grace-filled world that we are building together, with God’s help - but is still yet to come.

Amen.

For those interested in learning more about how Cuba survived after being cast into the wilderness, you can watch the fascinating and hopeful documentary "The Power of Community" on You Tube.

Love & Denial

2011-09-07T11:13:00.003-04:00

When I was nine years old I wanted to be Johnny Bench.
Granted, in 1975 the Cincinnati Reds were all the rage - I had a red cap that I wore every waking hour everywhere I went, and I had my mother spell out "Cincinnati" in felt iron-on letters across the back of my (red) jacket.
But in reality I didn't know much about Johnny Bench or the Cincinnati Reds.
I wanted to be a catcher, and that year Johnny Bench was the best there was.
When I was growing up I loved to play baseball.
My brother and I and a group of neighborhood kids played on one of the empty lots that were still around at that time. Housing developments, a restaurant, and a train station parking lot have since taken those over.
Occasionally we'd play in the street right in front of our house, giving no thought to the fact that we were smacking a very hard ball in the very close vicinity of some very breakable car windows.
When I couldn't find anyone else to play with me I'd stand on the front lawn and bounce a tennis ball off the sloped roof of our cape-cod style house. The ball would spring high in the air and I'd center myself under it with my mitt, pretending that I was shagging flies in the outfield.
I did this so often I wore a hole in the grass on our front lawn.
My mom didn't seem to mind....she was happy I wasn't in the backyard kicking around a soccer ball and using her rose bushes as the goal posts.
I wanted to be a catcher because I loved the equipment they wore.
I had a well worn outfielders mitt, that I lovingly oiled and kept tied with a ball in its pocket to break it in. But I wanted a catcher's mitt. It looked different from all the other baseball mitts. It was round with a deep pocket in the center.
And I wanted a catcher's mask.
With all its straps and padding and metal bars across the eyes.
Simply putting it on signified that you were a real baseball player....and not just any player, but the catcher. The one who calls the game behind the plate. The one whom all runners must get past to score.
To say I pined over that special catcher's equipment would be an understatement.
I used to stay up at night staring longingly at the pages of the sporting goods section in the JC Penny catalog; looking at pictures of the mitt and the mask that I so wanted...but I knew I would never have.

Catchers equipment was expensive, and it didn't make sense to have it unless you were playing in a real baseball game, on a real baseball team.....and that was something I could never do.
I was a girl...and in the mid-1970's on Long Island girls did not play Little League baseball, only boys had that privilege.
Girls played softball.
I hated softball.
The ball was too big and too difficult to catch.
I liked the feel of the small, hard ball in my hands. I liked the sound it made when it landed solidly in my mitt. I liked the way I could close the mitt around it and run without having it fall out.
Johnny Bench did not play softball.
Baseball was my love....but the only taste I had of it was those sandlot games and my late night day-dreaming over the JC Penny catalog.

I experienced the same dashed hopes sitting in the hard wooden pews at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church, as I watched my brother don a special robe, step up to the altar and assist the priests in serving at the daily and weekly Masses.
I wanted to serve as well.
I wanted to help the priests....to wear the special robe, to hold the book that they read from, and to be allowed to touch all the special things that they used.
I wanted to be behind the altar in that special place, close to God.
But that was something I could never do.
I was a girl....and at that time, in that place, girls were not allowed to serve at the altar, only boys had that privilege.
Girls were allowed to sing in the choir.
But I did not want to sing in the choir.
Being present in the place of Word and Sacrament was my love....but the only taste I had of it was viewed from the outer edges, when I walked up to receive Communion every week.

I left the Catholic Church long before I felt a call to the ministry.
Unless you count my longing to be an altar-girl as the first sign of a call.
But I didn't realize how deep the pain of hearing "you're not allowed" ran within me, until I heard a friend of mine who is on the path to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church, give voice to that same pain.
The Episcopal Church is her adopted home.
Like me she's in her mid-40's and she was raised a Roman Catholic.
But unlike me, she was very active in the Church right up until the time she felt the call to ministry. Two years ago, after many years of frustration and denial, she made the painful choice to switch allegiances.
I watched the tears flow out of her in heaving sobs as she spoke of her love of her Catholic faith, and the pain she felt when she realized she could not honor her call and that love in the same place.
She is grieving this loss at the same time she is going through seminary and preparing to be an Episcopal Priest. At the age of 46 she's learning new ways of doing "church"....she's learning new prayers, new litanies, new styles of worship, and a new system of church structure and politics.
But she doesn't love the Episcopal Church.
She still considers herself to be a Catholic...and she shed more tears when she spoke of being denied Communion when she returned to her family's Church for her uncles' funeral.
Her pain is fresh...but in listening to her speak of that pain it reminded me that I too carry the scars of being told I was not capable of serving the Church - of serving God - in the way that I wanted given the gender that God gave me.

Some things do change.
Girls can now play Little League baseball and serve at the altar.
But some things may never change.
There will always be things that we want to do that others will tell us we cannot do.
There will always be longings that we have that are destined to go unfulfilled.
There will always be love that we feel that we cannot express or live out in the way that we feel compelled to do.

This is because we live in a broken world.
But we also live in an evolving world.
A world where the Kingdom is both right now, and not yet.
A world where little girls can play baseball, but women cannot...at least not in the Major League.
A world where little girls, and women, can serve at the altar....but in most churches they still cannot stand in the pulpit or break bread in Jesus' name.

I don't expect the Catholic Church - or any other church that denies ordination to women - to change its ways anytime soon. At least not in my lifetime.
I'm blessed to serve a church that does ordain women....and just as importantly for me, ordains GLBTQ clergy as well. I admire women, like my Episcopal seminarian friend, who make the courageous decision to honor God's call even if it means leaving the faith tradition that they love. But I also deeply admire the women who have chosen to stay, even if it means denying their call, and have found other ways in which to serve God while continuing to push for change from within.

We live in a broken world.
A world in which love and denial often walk hand-in-hand.

But with God's help, we have the power to mend the breaks and heal the scars.
We have the power to erase the phrase "you're not allowed" from our vocabularies.
I for one, am tired of hearing it.

Let me grab my catcher's mask and I'll meet you behind home plate....we've got some work to do.

Losing my cross...

2011-08-27T20:27:00.000-04:00

[Midrash] poem/prayer for August 28, 2011

it's a whole lot

easier

to lose my

cross,

than to lose my

life

to leave it propped

up against the corner

of the closet, dust

bunnies sleeping

at its feet;

to ignore it

standing on the coffee

table, looking out the front

window, its cow eyes

brimming with tears,

as i pull away from

the curb;

to simply reply, 'i can't

remember the last time

i saw it,' when

i'm asked, 'what ever

happened to your cross?'

but

each morning, it puts

Good

into my hands,

closing my fingers tight

over it, whispering,

'don't let go; don't ever

let go.'

it tapes a picture of

evil

to my bathroom mirror,

so i will know it

when i see it,

and stand up to

it;

it spends each lonely day

at the loom,

weaving the yarns

labeled hope, love,

patience, perseverance

into that community

which helps me to

bear what is mine.

Thom M. Shuman

Interim Pastor

Immanuel Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, OH

Associate Member, Iona Community

Thoughts While On-Call

2011-08-07T21:11:00.002-04:00

I was in the chapel office when I heard this incessant beeping coming from the top desk drawer….the source of which I discovered was the back-up pager that our per diem chaplains wear when we CPE students are otherwise occupied in class or group time.

The pager is designed to continuously beep if a rapid response call has come though from the front desk and no buttons have been pushed to indicate that it has been received and read. I flipped through the contents of the tiny LED screen and noted the endless stream of multi-digit numbers listing the code status and the room locations of the calls received:

999-231

999-188

333-113

333-222

Stroke Alert 4ED

etc. etc. etc.

The pager had 25 calls stored in its memory, all of which also came through on the primary pager while this one sat idle in the desk drawer for the better part of a week.

Fifteen were rapid response (999) or emergency (333) calls, many of which likely resulted in a death or life changing experience for the patients and families involved.

Nearly every rapid response call I’ve been summoned to results in the same scene: 20+ people crowded into a tiny hospital room and flowing out into the hallway, as one doctor straddles the patient’s bed doing chest compressions. Nurses and techs fly in and out carrying syringes and pushing electronic equipment while I, the chaplain, hover around the edges looking for tell tale signs of family members in the melee. Rarely does this scene end well.

As I flipped through the list on the pager and deleted each call I couldn’t help but think of the stories behind each number. Some room numbers were familiar and I remembered the patients whom I saw in these rooms early last week. Often we don’t know what happens to a patient when their name disappears from the census list we print out each day. Some are discharged, some are moved to other units…and some end up as a string of numbers in the on-call pager.

Names and faces passed through my memory as I deleted each number, and a sadness fell over me as I contemplated the fragility and the futility of this act.

In a single second a life is deleted…a memory of a death erased to make room for those that are yet to come.

I know the memories of these individuals live on their family members and all those whose lives were touched by their existence…..and the brief memories that I have of these patients will live on in me. But in the chaplain’s on-call pager they exist for only a shift’s length of time. For a harrowing few minutes they are the source of activity, anxiety, and stress….and a few hours later they are deleted from existence, never to be seen again.

It’s a good thing people are not like pagers.

I cleared the pager of all it’s calls and placed it back in the desk drawer.

The one on my hip that has been going off all day remains silent for now.

I pluck it from its holster and scroll through the menu:

Erase all messages?

Yes. Please.

Messages erased.

A (Tired) Chaplain's Lament...

2011-08-03T20:31:00.001-04:00

I feel heavy.

I feel heavy under the weight of walking into hospital rooms and listening to stories of pain, loss, frustration, hopelessness, and despair.

I feel heavy under the weight of grief and anguish as it comes gushing out of family members who are anticipating the death of a loved one, or who have just watched their loved one die.

I feel heavy under the weight of standing at bedsides and staring down at hollowed eyes and gaunt faces and feeling the anguish of every… labored ….breath.

I feel heavy under the weight of shattered dreams, wounded hearts and broken promises that tear through the lives of those suffering with addictions. Over and over and over again.

I feel heavy as the last person peels away from the body, away from the room, and leaves me alone at the bedside praying for safe passage of a soul. Nurses return to their stations, doctors return to their charts, family members stagger down hallways and return to their homes, to get on with the horrific business of picking up the scattered pieces of their lives.

I feel heavy because as chaplains we are called to sit in this pain and anguish with those who are suffering through it. We are not there to ease their pain. We are not there to fix it.

We are not there to be “purveyors of hope” as professors in pastoral care classes gone by told us we as clergy are blessed to be.

We are weight bearers.

We lift up heavy-sashed windows and prop open triple-steel doors that people have shut tight to hold back their emotions, and we try not to get blown over as the pain comes rushing out.

We tremble under the strain of holding the weight of sobbing sons and daughters, parents and spouses as they fall into our arms and ask over and over again, “Why?”… “Why?” …“Why?”

We don’t have the answers.

We’re not expected to.

But still we stand on the front lines, inserting ourselves as a presence in the most painful moments of people’s lives. And we show up for this battle bearing no arms, except for the two that God gave us.

I feel heavy.

In the last 8 weeks I have learned how to stand in the pit with others, but I still have yet to learn how to climb back out.

Perhaps because as I stand in the pit I feel the weight of my own pain as well…

pushing me down, causing my knees to buckle, as I hold tight the windows and doors that are holding back the emotions I don’t want to leak out.

This chaplain needs a chaplain to be present in that pain.

I have only the two arms that God gave me.

And I can’t hold the world up, and myself, at the same time.

I feel heavy.

And I need someone to catch me, before the weight sends me crashing down.

Ruminations from Rumi

2011-07-29T17:30:00.001-04:00

Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

Painting ~ "Beach Cottage" by Joan Corretti

CPE - Week Three

2011-07-03T22:29:00.000-04:00

When they tell you in seminary that CPE will be the most rewarding, and the hardest thing that you will ever do, they're not exaggerating.
This has been a very difficult week, both in CPE and outside of CPE.
And when the two are added together one tends to magnify the challenges of the other.

On Monday I walked in the door of the hospital at 8:30 am and was promptly told that there was a death in one of my units that morning and I needed to head down and wait for the family to arrive. This is a unit that rarely experiences a death, and the staff were visibly shaken up. Over the next four hours I sat with the grieving family, consoled each member as they arrived and were told the tragic news, accompanied them to the morgue, held a sobbing spouse as he reluctantly released his grip on his wife's lifeless body, accompanied the distraught mother to the emergency room as she took care of a medical issue of her own, and checked in with each member of the frazzled staff to make sure they were holding up ok. Then I spent the rest of the day trying to deal with the aftereffects of having absorbed such a large amount of grief over such a long period of time.

On Tuesday I used my experience from the day before in the verbatim that I presented to my supervisors and peers. That was a huge mistake. The emotions were still raw, and at that time I needed to be lifted up, not taken down. And take me down they did. My peers who had not yet had an experience like this critiqued my pastoral care skills and made relentless suggestions for improvement. Despite my supervisors jumping to my defense and saying, "actually what you said there was appropriate" and "the staff said that you did an excellent job as did the family" all I heard were the criticisms of my peers. In our covenant group that followed I finally broke down in tears, admitting that throughout their barrage I wanted to shout, "You weren't there!" Afterward I felt ashamed for having shown so much emotion in the face of criticism. In my mind this was a sign of weakness....I had broken down under the pressure, and I feared that the others would think they needed to treat me with kid gloves from then on.

On Wednesday I went through the day feeling pummeled. More so by myself than my peers. It was a busy day. I did morning worship, carried the on-call pager, had individual supervision (more critiquing, self and otherwise), and led two spirituality groups, including one where a patient dealing with addictions admitted that he had tried to kill himself the day before. When I got home that night I was emotionally and physically exhausted. In one week's time I had dealt with four deaths and consoled three grieving families.
And then I received a phone call from a beloved couple in my church informing me that their son had passed away that morning. The pastor had just left on a 2 week vacation and the couple had assumed that I was in charge and that I would do the funeral. I felt awful having to explain to them that another local pastor had been left in charge and that I would have her contact them. Had I failed yet again? Should I have offered to step in and do the funeral? Should I have offered to drive over that night and sit with them? How could I? I had nothing left to give.

On Thursday I juggled patient visits, group time, and supervisor didactics while making phone calls to the grieving family in my church, the church secretary, and the pastor who would be doing the funeral. I came home that night and fell asleep in the chair at 8 pm.

On Friday I did a 20 hour overnight shift in which I spent the early evening shuttling between the bedsides of two hospice patients who were in the process of dying. Graciously, neither one of them was near death, and the rest of the night passed uneventfully.

Today I lead Worship and presided over Communion in the pastors absence.Thankfully, I did not have to preach and found the worship experience to be renewing and refreshing.

Interspersed between all of these CPE and church demands were other personal issues and conflicts that cropped up and offered additional stresses to my very limited reserves. Taken all together I feel like I'm getting a crash course in what it means to be a parish minister. I'm quickly finding out what it is like to juggle pastoral and personal demands, and the need to practice self-care.
I'm quickly learning that I am not Wonder Woman, and it is not possible to be "Super Pastor" - even in my own mind - and to still keep one's health and sanity.
Take note all, I am retiring my cape.
If you see me trying to put it back on at any point, do me a favor and slap me upside my head.
I will be sure to thank you for it.

CPE - Week Two

2011-06-26T14:04:00.007-04:00

Week number two at the hospital had me carrying the on-call pager for the first time and doing my first on-call overnight shift. What I've found most amazing about my CPE experience is that I never know what it is - or who it is - that I'm going to encounter at any given moment.
Every time the pager goes off, every time I knock on a patient's door, I never know what is going to happen next.
In the course of this week I met three woman who came to the hospital for three very different reasons. I had the privilege to step into the lives of these women only briefly, but their stories have stayed with me.*

*****

This week I met Evelyn, a woman in her late 60's who who came in for same-day surgery. She was sitting alone waiting for her husband to arrive when I approached her. She welcomed the visit. Evelyn told me the operation she was about to have was routine and she'd had the same operation several times before, but she was still nervous. We talked for about 15 minutes about her family, her hobbies and her work in the church. I offered a prayer and she accepted.
Then she asked me what denomination I belonged to. When I told her I was a member of the United Church of Christ her face took on a look of concern and worry....."Oh, I used to be a Congregationalist years ago, but then they started ordaining women when the Bible explicitly says that women should not speak from the pulpit....and THEN they went and started welcoming the gays - God does not want that, God says that being gay is wrong.....so I left that church. Now I'm a Baptist."

Her words stung.
In response, I acknowledged the distress she must have felt in leaving her church and left it at that.
I was conscious of the fact that the purpose of my visit to Evelyn was to be a calming presence in her moment of stress, and she thanked me for being just that. She was unaware that in expressing her views she had dismissed my calling, my understanding of God, and my right to be true to who I am. In her eyes I was a nice female chaplain who was doing the work of God. But I can't help but wonder how she would have reacted to my comforting presence had I told her that I preparing to be ordained, that I had spoken in the pulpit many times, and I am a lesbian as well.
I will never know. She will never know.
And that is how it has to be.

*****

This week I met Alice - an elderly woman who had taken a fall.
Alice told me that she used to work as a cleaning woman at a local hotel that no longer exists, and that she has 5 wonderful sons but she wishes God had given her a daughter.
Alice shared these details of her life with me and then proceeded to repeat them again, and again, and again. In the course of our half hour visit she turned to me 6 times and said, "Did I tell you that I have 5 sons?" Alice suffers from dementia. She lives in a world that exists in 5 minute increments. Every 5 minutes everything become new again...and in this constant newness she found joy rather than despair. Each time, after telling me about her sons, she'd look over at me with a huge smile on her face and say, "How nice of you to visit, and who are you?" - "I'm the chaplain," I'd say, "I'm here to see how you're doing....do you mind if I sit and chat with you for a bit?" - "Oh yes, please do!" she'd say with a smile, "How nice, I love to have visitors!"
We repeated this introduction four or five times, and each time Alice seemed equally thrilled by the prospect of our visit.
When I returned to the chaplains office to chart my visit I saw in the patient notes that another chaplain had visited Alice the day before. He wrote, "Length of visit: 10 minutes. Patient suffers from dementia. She is incapable of carrying on a meaningful conversation." End of notes.
Ouch.

When I spoke to Alice she was happy and animated and smiled and laughed often. She also expressed sadness and frustration with her pain, and lamented the fact that she could no longer do all the things that she loved to do.
Alice lives in a world that renews itself every 5 minutes, but it is a rich and full world.
Our conversation did not go very deep, we simply did not have the time to go there, but it was a meaningful visit. Alice loves to have visitors...and she experienced the joy of greeting a new visitor 5 times in the course of our conversation. She also repeatedly experienced the emotional release that comes when we're able to express our frustrations and pain to someone who is willing to listen.
In her mind she experienced both ranges of emotions only once, but I have to believe that she found meaning in them.
And if the visit was meaningful to Alice, that's all that matters.

*****

And finally, this week I met Rita, or rather, I met Rita's daughter...and her sons....and their spouses...and her grandchildren.
Rita was in her late 80's. On Wednesday afternoon she sat in a chair in her hospital room dressed and ready to go home. She had spent the morning with a big smile on her face, telling her family, the staff, and the chaplain who came to visit her how happy she was to finally be going home.
She came in with a simple infection but given her age the doctors wanted to monitor her for a few days. Now she had been given the ok to go home.
At ten minutes to five, just after her daughter arrived to pick her up, Rita began to motion that she was having trouble breathing. A Rapid Response was called and within seconds doctors and nurses descended upon the room and placed Rita back in her bed.
That's when my pager went off.

When I arrived all I could see was a swarm of medical personal surrounding the bed, with one doctor making a valiant effort to perform CPR on Rita's small, frail body.
Then I noticed her daughter and her granddaughter crying in the hallway.
"Mom, this is not what Nanna wanted!" the granddaughter shouted through her tears.
"I know," her mother cried out in response, "But we have to at least try!"

It had all happened so suddenly. No one was prepared for this.
Over the next 10 minutes I sat with Rita's daughter Susan, as she made the difficult decision to have them stop the resuscitation efforts and let her mother go.
Then I spent the next hour and half with Susan, and her ever arriving family, as she had to say those horrific words over and over again - "Mom is gone."
In the end I felt like I had done very little but be present with this family in their grief. I handed out tissues and scooped up used ones, and I rubbed their backs and gave them a shoulder to cry on.

I had no words to ease their grief. They shared their own comforting words - "She's in a better place." - "She is finally home." But I had nothing to add to the conversation other than, "I am so sorry for your loss" and "No one is every ready for the passing of a loved one."
This was my first serious Rapid Response pager call, and the first situation where I encountered a grieving family. At times I felt completely inadequate and unsure of what to do or say. At times I felt as if I was just getting in the way. But in the midst of their grief the family does not see it this way.
In the end Susan and her family expressed gratitude for having the calming presence of a chaplain in the room. I felt as if I had done so little, but for them it was just enough.

*****

In the midst of all three of these encounters I tried to be mindful that it is not about me.
This is a ministry of presence.
While my supervisors and my peers may want a blow by blow account of what was said and done so my performance can be critiqued and suggestions may be offered on what I could have done it better, this is of no concern to the patients and families that I encounter.
I may not always say or do the right thing, but I'm quickly learning that just being there, and offering a listening ear, is all that matters.

*names and details have been changed to protect patient anonymity

CPE - Week One

2011-06-18T23:43:00.006-04:00

I think I'm going to like being a chaplain.
I really do.
Granted, with just one week of CPE under my belt I've barely dipped my toe in the water, but where I once thought the experience would leave me feeling extremely anxious and stressed I instead find myself feeling enthusiastic and hopeful about going through this program.

The floor assignments I received have me doing a little bit of everything, and for that I'm grateful. My primary units are Medical/Surgical (which includes a 4 bed hospice unit) and in-patient Psych. I also have the Childbirth Center, and I'll be running an evening spirituality group at the out-patient Addictions/Mental Health unit across the street from the hospital. I'll also be running a weekly group in the in-patient Psych unit. When I'm "on call" I could be called anywhere in the hospital including Critical Care and the Emergency Room.
And I will be on call a lot.
Each student has to carry the emergency on call pager once a week during the day shift, in addition to that we have to do one 15-hour on call overnight shift every week and three 24-hour on-call weekend shifts during the 10-week program. There's also a back-up on call pager that has to be carried by someone every day, so I could conceivable be "on-call" for 55 hours during any given week.
They say the "Summer Intensive" CPE program is 40 hours per week.
That's not quite accurate.
At this hospital it's more like 50-70 hours.
Ouch.

There are seven students in our CPE group. Two women and five men. One Catholic, one Jew, two Lutherans, one Episcopalian, one Presbyterian, and me, the lone member of the UCC. Our immediate supervisor is a Quaker and the program supervisor is an ordained Disciples of Christ minister. As a group we have very interesting conversations at lunch. ;)

We spent the first few days getting to know each other, getting to know the hospital and the staff, spending time in the classroom, and doing role plays.
On Wednesday we shadowed the per diem chaplains, on Thursday we went out and did a few visits on our own, and on Friday we had 5 hours to do patients visits in our assigned units. I've found that getting into the rooms, introducing myself as a chaplain, and asking patients if they'd like a visit has been easier than I thought. A few years ago I volunteered at a health/rehab facility and it was my job to go around and ask patients if they'd like me to take them down to the recreation room for the regular Friday afternoon entertainment. I also had the chance to visit with patients afterward, many of whom where elderly and were long-term residents of the facility. Having that experience has eased my nerves of "cold calling" on patients in CPE...it's what to say AFTER I get in the room that has me stumped at the moment.

We're supposed to keep in mind that these are not social visits, but pastoral visits, so we have to do our best to steer the conversation away from the normal niceties and explore any underlying feelings or spiritual issues that crop up. That's a lot to do in a 5-15 minute visit with someone you've never met before.
I expect I will be grappling with this social-pastoral dichotomy throughout the 10 weeks that I'm there.

My first week of CPE ended with my first opportunity to sit with a fellow human being in the last hours of his life. At 9 am Friday morning a call came in from the hospice unit to let us know a patient was dying and a chaplain was needed. This is my assigned unit so I was sent. Thankfully the program supervisor went down with me and got me started. The patient, Bob*, was in the last stages of lung cancer. He had no family, and had only one friend who was on her way. My job was to sit with him until she arrived and then be a presence for her, and for the staff, who were visibly shaken.
I was quickly reminded that these caring compassionate people never "get used to" dealing with death.
The staff expected that Bob's passing would be quick but he ended up hanging on for most of the day. Jay (a fellow CPE student) and I tag-teamed through out the day, relieving each other as needed and spending time talking to Sister Jane, Bob's friend. It turns out that Bob was a Franciscan "novice" and was a few months short of taking his final vows in the Order. Graciously, just the day before, his Order made the decision to fast-track him and that night Bob chose his Franciscan name, Brother Jacob. Bob had a hard life. He suffered from mental illness, struggled with addictions, and was often homeless, until he found God, and Sister Jane.
It was an honor to spend those precious hours talking to this wonderful woman as we sat with Bob in the last hours of his life.
I was not there when Bob passed. Jay and I were called away for classroom instruction, and Jay took the call when we were notified that Bob was passing.
Bob was already gone by the time Jay arrived, and Sister Jane, spent from the experience, left soon afterward, grateful that her beloved friend's pain was finally over.
Rest in peace, Brother Jacob.

When I was first brought down to the hospice unit on Friday morning it was chaotic. Nurses and doctors were milling about with two crisis cases unfolding in adjoining rooms. At one point we had 4 chaplains tending to patients, family, and staff in this one small space. And in the midst of it all I was amazingly calm. It was my first day going solo, it was my first call, and I was told that Bob's death had the potential to be difficult and "messy." But I felt privileged to be there. I felt like I had a purpose and the staff wanted and expected me as the chaplain to be there. God was present, the Spirit was present. All I had to do was be present as well.

I expect to face much more difficult, and chaotic situations in the coming weeks.
The thought of it makes me anxious, which is to be expected, but I no longer feel afraid. And I never expected that I would say that, just one week in.
I think I'm going to like being a chaplain.
I really do.

*Names and details have been changed to protect patient anonymity

The World I Know

2011-06-08T14:40:00.009-04:00

My family threw a joint Graduation/Birthday birthday party for me and my mother this past weekend. My mom turned 85 on May 17th. It was a wonderful party and it was great to see everyone again, but the highlight for me came when my partner Stephanie sat with my mom in a quiet part of my sister's house and showed her the video of my graduation speech.
Stephanie told me that half way through the video my mom started crying.
And afterward she sat with Stephanie and talked with her as she never had before.
She told her about the difficult time I had when I was growing up....how shy and withdrawn I was, how I felt as if I would never "fit in," and how much pain I experienced just trying to make it through high school when I had no hope for the future, and saw no value in my own existence. My mother told Stephanie how worried she was for me as I struggled to get through those difficult years, and how proud she is of me and what I've accomplished.

Hearing this made me cry.
My mom is not one for huge shows of emotion, and she has never been one to feel comfortable in the presence of those who are showing emotions.
It took many years for her to return the "I love you" I shared at the end of our phone conversations without hesitation. I don't recall her saying those three words very often when I was growing up, although she showed her love in a million other ways.
When I was going through those difficult years, I would often pour my heart out to her at the kitchen table, and not knowing what to do with my pain or how to ease it, she would simply get up and go about her business. As I sat there crying she would get up from the table and go fold the towels in the laundry room.
I now understand that after years of listening to my fears and frustrations she had run out of calming words to offer. She felt powerless in the face of my pain, and feeling her own discomfort with my displays of emotions she reacted in the only way she knew how.
I understand that now.
But at the time I felt abandoned and unheard.

For years as a teenager and young adult I had nightmares in which I was following my mother from room to room, screaming to get her attention and she would never even turn to acknowledge that I was there. In other dreams I would tell her one thing and she would hear another, and I'd spend the entire dream trying to get her to listen and understand that she had misunderstood me.
Feeling abandoned.
Feeling not heard.
These have been life long issues for me.
And I know these fears originated long before I became a forlorn teenager.

As I've mentioned here before, I was born with a cleft palate - both my hard and soft palates were not fully formed (I was essentially missing the entire roof of my mouth), which made eating difficult and caused a noticeable speech impediment. Before the age of five I had several operations to repair the hard palate deformity, all of which were unsuccessful. The scar tissue that formed as a result of these operations precluded any further attempts to fix the deformity, and I did not have my cleft palate completely repaired until a new type of operation was presented to my parents when I was 16-years-old.

But the emotional scars that formed during the early years of my life went much deeper than the physical scars. I had my first operation when I was 18-months-old and I vividly remember standing in a crib in the hospital, reaching over the side and crying hysterically as I watched my mother walk away. I was too young to understand what was going on or where I was. Even at the age of 5, I don't recall having any comprehension of what was happening to me. My mother tells me that I screamed so much after each operation that I tore the stitches out every time. For weeks after I was brought home I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night and calling for my mother.

These early experiences influenced the fear of abandonment that overwhelmed me as a teenager. Added to the mix was the fact that I was naturally shy, and the speech impediment only enhanced my social inhibitions, and I was not yet fully conscious of the fact that I was gay, which led to all sorts of issues surrounding gender expression and feeling like I didn't "fit in." Add these all together and you have a recipe for one unhappy teenager.

And then there was the bullying. Taken by themselves any one of these factors would have been enough to slap a target on my back. Taunts about my speech impediment in parochial school led to outright expressions of hatred and disgust in high school. By that time I was so withdrawn and experiencing the symptoms of depression that my mere presence seemed to trigger the worst in my peers. I didn't talk in class, I didn't socialize with anyone, and like many who experience depression I had little concern about my appearance - I would often wear the same clothes day after day and showered only once a week. In the societal microcosm that is high school I was "the other" in a group of young adults who were desperately trying to find and assert their own identity while trying to conform at the same time. I was the weakest link.

I am still amazed that I made it through those years without taking my own life.
I thought about it. Often.
I saw a psychiatrist briefly who prescribed some anti-anxiety meds for me - which I rarely took but instead saved in massive quantities for the day when I would finally end it all.
When I was 15-years-old I was convinced that I would not be alive to see my 18th birthday.
But yet I was.

I can't put my finger on any one single reason why I made it through those years.
I had the operation that finally fixed my cleft palate when I was 16, which helped me feel more confident about my speech.
I saw the move "Breaking Away" and fell in love with the sport of cycling - Cycling gave me a sense of freedom and accomplishment that I so desperately needed.
And I had a friend, a pen pal, who reached out to me and helped me to feel valued and special. She would end each of her letters with "I love you" - the words my own mother had such a hard time saying.

As these three influences converged in my life my depression seemed to wane and I grew to be more comfortable in my own skin.
I stopped caring so much about being different and not fitting in, and instead embraced it.
And once I learned that I could face this kind of adversity, and live through it, there was no experience or fear that I couldn't face, and ensuing disappointments would not bring me down for long.
Life was a roller coaster, with ups and downs.
And it's realizing that the downs don't last forever that is the secret to survival.

I don't know if my mother has ever fully understood what I was going through during those difficult teen years. I don't know if she has ever realized how close I came to taking my own life.
But she knows that I was in pain.
She knows that I had lost hope.
And feeling partly responsible for that pain (she often blamed herself for the fact that I was born with a cleft palate) and feeling unequipped to restore my sense of hope, she clawed and dragged her way through that period of my life the same way that I did - Not knowing what to do or say, and often doing or saying the exact opposite of what we should, but holding onto each other none the less.

In recent years my mother has never held back from telling me how proud she is of me and what I've accomplished, and how much she loves me. And I know in the core of my being that she has felt this way all along.
Hearing that she cried upon viewing my seminary graduation speech connects two moments in time.
One moment I am standing in the pulpit using the voice that God has given me, and in another I am sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, trying desperately to speak from my silence.

Both moments are gifts from God.
Both are woven into the fabric of my life experience and both moments inform how I have come to live and be in this world.

This world is not perfect.
Our lives are not perfect. Not by a long shot.
There are many reasons why we might lose hope.
But this is the world that God has given us.
These are the lives that God has given us.
What we end up doing with both is up to us.

When I think about the days when I felt as if the only way to end my pain was to end my life, I can't help but cringe at the thought of what I would have been throwing away.

These lyrics from a song by Collective Soul come to mind:

So I walk up on high
And I step to the edge
To see my world below.
And I laugh at myself
While the tears roll down.
'Cause it's the world I know.
It's the world I know.

This is the world I know.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Happy Birthday, mom.
I'm glad I was here to celebrate your 85th year.
And I'm glad you were here to celebrate my graduation from seminary.
I can't wait to see what we'll do next!

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