Ripple

 

Yesterday, I said that a true Mordecai in our life won’t make up false urgency to decide right now.  Yes, some decisions are time-limited.  But many of the decisions we face in such a time as this have a spaciousness for us to breathe, ponder, pray, and listen to God, others, and ourselves ~ that last part of listening to your life is vital.  A true Mordecai’s doesn’t reduce decisions or give me advice, but joins me in the messy middle and the squeeze between the rock and hard place.  Yesterday, I invited you to listen to the decision you are facing personally.  This could be medically or vocationally or volunteering, or which issues you are called to offer your life to or where you want to live.  Some of these decisions are thrust upon you, not of your own choosing.  The decisions we face rest not only in our one wild and precious life but can have ripple effects and ramifications on those we care about.  If I decide that I really want to become a clown in the circus, that is going to impact Gina.  Decisions can have relational ripple effects and religious effects.  How we see God matters here.  Is God a judge waiting and watching for your decision to render a verdict on your life?  Or is God the caring, compassionate one sitting with you and reminding you that you are beloved, whether you go left or right or stay put or dig deeper?  Finally, some of our decisions impact our community and country.  This is true of voting.  This is true of what we post online.  This is true of how we speak outside our homes.  Today, ponder the decisions you are facing, and ask if there are others who this choice will impact.  Esther’s choice impacted a whole group of Jewish people.  Most of my decisions rarely mean life or death for others or myself, even when it feels that way.  From yesterday on that page with pros and cons or if you made a decision tree, name and notice others who might be impacted by what you are facing.  Sometimes the pressure we feel is because there are people quietly and silently on the margins of the page who we haven’t noticed, but our hearts know our choice will effect and affect.  Hold this truth alongside God, who is there with you in the rock and hard place moments we all are wedged and wiggling our way through in such a time as this.  Amen.

False Mordecai

 

Yesterday, we played with the idea that lots of people want to wear Mordecai’s sandals in our lives.  There are lots of people who want to fix, advise, save you, tell you what to do, how to do it, when and where you should show up, and to act now or you will fail!  And these messages tell us, send $50 now to support the cause, because don’t you care?!?  False Mordecai’s come to us as marketing schemes and fundraising demands.  False Mordecai comes to us wearing masks of urgency and pulling the strings of compassion.  False Mordecai comes to us through social media platforms or 24-hour news cycles or political machinery.  How do we know when our still-speaking God is showing up wearing the skin-suit of another?  How do we tell a true Mordecai from a false?  First, pause.  Breathe.  False Mordecai, like all salespeople, operates with made-up urgency.  You must act now!  Unless someone is dangling from a ledge or playing out in the street with a speeding car zooming down the road, chances are you can breathe…even walk away… to tell the “Mordecai” that we want to pray on it, rather than be preyed upon.  Second, pray.  Listen for God.  Several weeks ago, when we read 1 Corinthians 12, Paul talked about the spiritual gift of discernment.  Discernment is a wonderful dance between the individual and collective.  One form of discernment is to use the tool of listing the pros and cons.  For Esther, the pro of speaking up was saving her people, including Mordecai, who was her adoptive father.  The con was that she was risking her life from a King who had already banished one wife.  The pro was she could make a difference.  The con was that there were no guarantees of success.  Do you see that this was not a slam-dunk decision?  Oftentimes, A False Mordecai preys upon the idea that their way is the only way and that other ways will make you less of a person.  Ultimately, Esther needed to consider the consequences.  She could hold onto her life and possibly watch her people endure the heartbreak and soul ache of genocide, or she could risk her life for the sake of others.  Finally, let me be clear that even though my mind wants to make so many life-or-death decisions, rarely do I wear Esther’s sandals.  Yet, A False Mordecai makes it seem that if I don’t do this now, donate now, act now, I will be seen as less than and a failure.  Today, I invite you to ponder prayerfully the decisions you are facing.  Write them down.  You may make a list of pros and cons.  Or you can Google how to make a decision tree.  After you put down your thoughts, listen for God’s guidance.  And there is a third step.  Find a trusted friend.  A true Mordecai in our life will sit with us in the rock and hard place moments, not telling us what to do or trying to advise/fix/save us…they will help you listen to your life and how God is seeking to show up.  Tomorrow, we will ponder the true Mordecai in our life, but for now.  Name and notice the decisions you are facing personally, religiously, relationally, and as part of wider communities/groups/country/world/cosmos.  Amen.

For Such a Time as This

 

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld once said we spend a lot of time talking about time.  Whether we are rushing around at a frenzied pace ~ feeling like a Tasmanian devil who just drank ten cups of coffee!  There is an image for you.  Or we are frustrated that the line is moving too slowly, or wishing we could turn back time, rewind, and revisit that moment when we blinked and missed a significant event.  Of course, the concept of time is part of human invention.  Our ancestors didn’t wake up to an alarm clock when tending sheep or cultivating crops.  Their bodies lived closer to the earth and its rhythm.  Plus, we know that gravity affects time.  Time moves a little faster at the top of the Empire State Building than at street level.  Who knew your Morning Meditation was going to include a science lesson?  I think about this when I hear Mordecai say to Esther that perhaps she had come to her royal position for such a time as this. (Esther 4:14).  Remember from yesterday’s sermon a few key fun Bible Nerd facts.  First, Mordecai and Esther are strangers living in a strange land.  They are foreigners, refugees.  They are not Persians; they are immigrants.  Not only are they marginalized ethnically, but also religiously as Jewish people.  Third, Esther was an orphan, which meant she found herself at the intersectionality of discrimination based on family status, gender, religious affiliation, and nationality.  That is a place of vulnerability and fragility.  She is so far on the margin that a stiff breeze could blow her over the edge.  The interesting plot twist is that Esther catches the King’s eye, and he marries her.  Well, he added her to his harem, because let’s not try to frost over the burnt cake of sexual oppression of women/sisters in faith by men, both in scripture and in our society still today.  But Esther’s does have access to the King.  However, this particular King was not a great guy, because he had one of his wives banished for refusing to participate in a beauty pageant he was putting together during a six-month party.  Seriously, who has the time for a six-month party?  But I digress, or maybe that is part of the point, too, in this story.

 

Mordecai is asking Esther to play the only card she has in her hand to advocate for the Jewish people whom the King is plotting and planning to kill.  This reminds us that the Bible is an adult book written for adults with themes and threads that are still woven into the fabric of our society.  Do I speak out or stay safely on the sidelines with my head down?  Do I dare step into the arena, or should I stay in the stands amid the masses?  When and where do I use my voice today?  Let me be clear that you may have a Mordecai calling you to do something that your heart objects to.  The truth is, there are a lot of voices out there demanding and decreeing that you do something NOW.  That you must act now or else you are being complacent and complicit with the enemy.  That if you will miss your chance to be Superman and Wonder Woman and Mighty Mouse here to save the day.  Good grief.  There is so much money wrapped up in playing us against one another.  As the mystics say, when pulled left or right, I choose to go deeper.  Too often, pastors can play the Mordecai card, telling you what you should do.  But ultimately, Esther had a choice, and so do you.  Who is a Mordecai in your life?  How is that person speaking to your life?  Through face-to-face conversation or over emails that flood your inbox or by being an influencer pouring out hours of content that you consume?  Where do you feel energized to stand up and speak out, and where is there reluctance?  Let’s sit with this today, asking God to cut through the chaos and clutter of our noisy world with a voice we need.  Amen.

Prayer

 

God of light and love, we don’t always understand Your ways.  We wish loving other humans didn’t feel like trying to hug a porcupine.  We wish that love could follow a formula or process that would guarantee results.  And yet, such a static world would be stale.  And such a world would not reflect You, O God, as You evolve and expand with each experience in this world.  God, help me continue to sit with the hard questions and invite Love to have a voice in this dialogue.  Help me stay engaged at the table, not searching for easy answers, but committed to continuing the wayless way of showing love in very human-sized approaches.   When I make mistakes, may I seek forgiveness.  When I feel my heart burst with love, may I enjoy that too.  When I am tired, hold me in an embrace I need every day.  God of love that never lets us go, help me lean into Your everlasting arms and feel Your presence filling and fueling my life.  Amen.

Wait...Another Assignment??

 

Religion helps us ask hard questions, but it does not often offer us easy answers. ~ Rabbi Shai Held.

 

I find this quote very helpful.  This quote reminds me that I don’t have to be a SuperSpiritual Answer person…not that I was very good at the job anyway.  I kept tripping on my cape, and don’t get me started on how I can’t fly, jump over even a regular-size building, or even bend a twist-tie back around the bread wrapper.  Yet, there is disappointment in this quote.  Why go to church if not to receive good advice and moral lessons to apply to your life?  Thank you for that hard question.  I believe we go to church to live the questions with others.  For me, the most meaningful questions need dialogue partners.  How do I love my enemy?  I can’t solve that Rubik's Cube-like question on my own.  I can’t figure out forgiveness in a vacuum.  While yes, I can love God and myself in isolation, I would be missing that pesky part about loving others/neighbors/family/friends/and that annoying person whose views feel like nails on a chalkboard of my soul.  I think part of the difficulty we face today is the sheer number of people we encounter in life, many of whom we do not know.  We have digital “friends” who we see only in their posts on the social platform of your choice.  And those people get under our skin.  Moreover, because those posts are visual, that activates and animates another part of our brain.  It is one thing to read words about destruction; it is another to see it.  Moreover, the amount of news that comes to us daily is more than I think my brain can process.  The pace of news exhausts and overwhelms us.  No cape can rescue everyone; we live with the hard, unanswerable, sometimes unsolvable questions.  We do so faithfully.  That is foundational and formational to the idea of “Love Makes a Family”.  Love is an active verb in that sentence/sentiment.  Love is changing and challenging.  Love involves more than just yourself.  Your love longs for expression in the world.  If you sat down with Love for a meal, what questions would you ask?  I mean that.  Write down the questions you have for Love.  I hear you thinking, “Great, another homework assignment this week?!  What is it with this guy?”  Imagine Love is sitting across from you at the table.  Talk to Love.  May this invitation awaken your imagination and creativity.  May your conversation engage your mind, heart, soul, and life this day.

Crumpling Up Our Charts

 

As you try to chart love, you may be feeling some resistance, reluctance, or resentment.  Love can’t be charted, contained, or controlled.  You may look at your chart and just think, “This tiny box doesn’t do justice to what I felt with mom/dad/divorced spouse/child who broke your heart or a friend who fills your heart so full it could burst.”  You may wonder, “Why am I doing this again?”  You don’t have to.  Not that you need it, but you have permission to stop working on the chart.  You can rip it up and recycle it.  The chart is an invitation to explore why the word love lands in different ways within us.  My prayer was that it would help you notice and name why your inner defense attorney yelled, “Objection,” when you hear this word in church.  Our Hebrew friends talk about love manifest in kindness or walking in God’s ways.  Rabbi Held says that love is an “existential posture”; it is how I show up and stand in the world today, the ways I orient my life, the direction and destination.  Held also says love is a commitment to work that takes a lifetime.  Love becomes less an emotion to tend, and more a way of tending our lives.  Love is willing to be a dance partner with countless other emotions.  This means that love and anger can co-exist within us at times (although both emotions burn a lot of calories, so it is hard to maintain them both over time).  How can we let love and anger talk to each other?  How do we let love and exhaustion inform each other?  Are we willing to take our place in exploring the whole wheel of emotions?  Trying to walk the tightrope of exploring our experiences of love is not easy.  Perhaps, given all that is going on in the world outside your window and as you peer into the window of your soul, it might just be too much right now.  So, set aside the chart.  Not every tool is helpful for every prayer practice.  I don’t want a sledgehammer when I go out to garden.  I don’t need loopers to fix a leak under my sink.  Same with the way-less way of life.  I pray that you might write down what is stirring within you as you ponder how the ties that bless us can also bound/bind us, cutting off oxygen and leaving hurtful wounds.  How the ties that hold us together come unraveled.  Take what you can from what I am saying, leave the rest.  May you experience and encounter God’s presence in these days in countless ways.  Amen.

Contemplating the Chart of Complex Love

 

Yesterday, I invited you to make a chart of the various relationships and expressions of love.  On the left, you wrote down the relationship: parents, grandparents, aunts/uncles, spouse, children, friends, and church members.  I invited you to name names and try to describe the texture of that love.  The third column of the chart, trying to define how love was OR wasn’t expressed.  This is often the hardest part.  It can be painful to say that a parent withheld love.  It can brush or bump up against an old scar to say that love has faltered, or forgiveness was not given in a relationship.  Today, I want you to notice God who is next to you, looking over the chart.  There are two prayers I have for this invitation.  First, for you to see the complexity and contradictions around the four letters of love.  There is a reason why we find love both fascinating and frustrating, which you can begin to see when you write down all the ways love has both held and hurt you.  When you are honest that your dad's leaving you was traumatic and caused love to lose its luster.  When you are honest about your grandmother’s love, which was through food, but never in hugs, or maybe came with expectations too high a pole vaulter couldn’t clear them.  When you are honest, you drag into your life these experiences (good, bad, and ugly) of love like a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe that you don’t notice.  Second, I believe this chart helps us see the expansiveness and diversity of love that we hold in our hearts but don’t often talk about.  This helps us see the experiences that have shaped you, made you who you are.  You may think, “No wonder I am suspicious of all this love talk when I see firsthand that I’ve never felt the unconditional and unceasing part of God’s affection.”  Or no wonder I doubt that love is a force, because too many people have used love to manipulate.  While God’s love doesn’t come with terms and conditions in fine print you can’t read, human love rarely can embody God’s call.  We keep trying.  The more we awaken to how the past is impacting the present, the more we can begin to let God have the brokenness and less-than-perfectness of affection in our lives.  May you discover and uncover God’s presence as you keep working, adding to, writing on your chart of love this week.  Amen.

 

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