25 Years in the Making

 

On September 9, 2001, I was ordained as a minister at Urbandale United Church of Christ in Iowa.  I still have a photo of Gina and me at the front of the church after the worship service.  After 25 years of ministry, I still remember the messy mixture of confidence and confusion stirring within me on that day.  Confidence because I now had a piece of paper conferring on me the degree, “A Master of Divinity.” Looking back now, I laugh at the absurdity of that document.  How in the world do you ever “master” Divinity?  You don’t!  I can’t.  No matter how many books I read, papers I write, sermons I preach, pastoral care visits I do, hands I hold, or vigils for justice I attend, I don’t master anything.  Isaiah was right, “For my thoughts are not Your thoughts, O God, neither are my ways Your ways” (Isaiah 55:8-9).  There is an honest confession there that is echoed in the Lord’s Prayer when Jesus says, “Thy/God’s will be done”.  As Richard Rohr says when Jesus prays, “Thy Kin-dom/realm/reality come ~ that means my kin-dom/realm/ and reality has to go!”  The Psalmist echoes and amplifies this by praying, “When I look to the macro-skies, dark and enormous, your handmade sky-jewelry, moon and stars mounted in their settings.  Then I look at my micro-self and wonder, why do You, God, bother with us?  Why take a second look our way?”  The more I’ve learned over the last 25 years of ministry, the less I know.  The more I want to hand back that piece of paper and sheepishly say, “Um, there has been some mistake here.”  There are days I wonder if I will ever complete the class called, “Ministry,” because the church is always changing, even though we sit in the same pew and try to frost over the shifting sands of the world with the same format of worship each Sunday.  The church is always changing, but like shedding skin cells, which we do each day, we don’t notice the new things God is doing.  The church is always changing, and too often we miss this amid “Robert’s Rules of Order” and voting on motions to help us feel in control.  God offers us the Wayless Way that doesn’t neatly fit into what our structured, stability-craving selves believe we want/need to thrive.

 

Two days after my ordination, our country experienced the violence, heartbreak, and deaths of 9-11.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed, alongside encouragement from our government to get out and spend money ~ because consumerism is the altar we are constantly called to worship at.  The financial crash of 2008, the politics of division and dismissing the “other” as dangerous to our country, declining membership of the mainline church, the COVID pandemic (which seminary really didn’t teach me how to lead!), and now we wrestle with faithfulness in a world that disorients us at a dizzying and disheartening pace. 

 

One of the earliest images of the church was a boat.  In fact, if you look at the ceiling of our church, with its peaked roof, it looks like a boat turned upside down.  The church was to be a safe space, not to disconnect from or deny the storms roaring outside, but to dry off, sing, support, and practice God’s love with each other.  You will hear a lot this week about 25-years since 9-11.  We will remember when and where we were when we heard the news and witnessed the heartbreaking images of the gray smoke billowing against the blue sky.  We will hear stories of family and friends who are still grieving loved ones who died in the planes, towers, and acts of terrorism ~ as well as the war that was started in the aftermath.  When we look back, it is always an invitation to look around ~ the past is always part of the present.  So ponder where you were living in 2001.  What were you doing on September 11^th?  How have the last twenty-five years left an impression on your soul that you are still trying to sort through prayerfully and with God’s love?  May this week offer us fresh insights and true experiences of God’s love we need in these days.  Amen.  

The Beauty of the Ordinary Prayer

 

Guide me, O my great Redeemer, who holds my loves, longings, and losses.  Guide me, O my great Sustainer, who gives me strength each second of each day.  Guide me, O my great Creator, who isn’t finished with me yet.  Guide us, O God, for I am not some isolated individual on an island.  The “me” who stares from the mirror is a combination and conglomeration of places, people, events, and experiences.  I create stories, sometimes wildly creative fiction, about who You are, God, who others are and why they are such meanies, and who I am.  Sometimes I am the hero, sometimes I feel like a zero, and sometimes I just want to nap on a pillow.  I confess that I get frustrated when others won’t be who I want them to be, even as I notice that I am not the me I want to be either.  God, I get so confused by You.  Your ways are not my ways.  You are not some puppy I train, but the One whose presence makes all the difference.  I offer this prayer with equal parts exhaustion, exhilaration, and exasperation for the beauty of this ordinary life.  Take today like a lump of Play-Doh that I let You guide me- heart, hands, and head in collaborating with You to create something beautiful for the world through me.  Amen. 

The Beauty of Ordinary

 

Please pray with me…slowly, savoring each syllable…Psalm 139 from the Message:

God, investigate my life;
    get all the facts firsthand.
I’m an open book to you;
    even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.
You know when I leave and when I get back;
    I’m never out of your sight.
You know everything I’m going to say
    before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you’re there,
    then up ahead and you’re there, too—
    your reassuring presence, coming and going.
This is too much, too wonderful—
    I can’t take it all in!

 

(Pause, breathe, and ponder which word/phrase/image captures your heart.)

 

Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit?
    to be out of your sight?
If I climb to the sky, you’re there!
    If I go underground, you’re there!
If I flew on morning’s wings
    to the far western horizon,
You’d find me in a minute—
    you’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark!
    At night I’m immersed in the light!”
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you;
    night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.

 

(Pause, breathe, and ponder which word/phrase/image captures your heart.)

 

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
    you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!
    Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
    I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
    you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
    how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
    all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
    before I’d even lived one day.

(Pause, breathe, and ponder which word/phrase/image captures your heart.)

 

Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful!
    God, I’ll never comprehend them!
I couldn’t even begin to count them—
    any more than I could count the sand of the sea.
Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you!
    And please, God, do away with wickedness for good!
And you murderers—out of here!—
    all the men and women who belittle you, God,
    infatuated with cheap god-imitations.
See how I hate those who hate you, God,
    see how I loathe all this godless arrogance;
I hate it with pure, unadulterated hatred.
    Your enemies are my enemies!

 

(Pause, breathe, and ponder which word/phrase/image captures your heart.)

 

Investigate my life, O God,
    find out everything about me;
Cross-examine and test me,
    get a clear picture of what I’m about;
See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong—
    then guide me on the road to eternal life.

 

How might God guide you lovingly this day?  Amen.

The Beauty of Ordinary

 

Gordon MacDonald once wrote about how churches should have X-ray machines for your soul when you walk in for worship.  But unlike the TSA, we are not searching for weapons or what is dangerous, but rather we want to know what is in our soul.  Church as a space to go into those cobwebbed corners in our lives that most of us don’t dare to step into most of the time.  Unfortunately, the church, with our love of words, doesn’t give you much space or a place to pray your high, low, and just so-so of life.  We fill every second of worship with some sound or song, lest you become bored.  We jam more content in and then offer you a Morning Meditation each day so that we can point to being productive (eek! that hits close to home!).  The X-ray machine MacDonald imagined wasn’t for judgment or to rain down guilt, but to open space for grace to do its work.  God is not the audience receiving our prayers and praise at worship.  God already knows us fully.  The psalmist says, “Search and know me, God.”  (Psalm 139) because we need God to hold up the mirror to our lives. 

 

What is in your soul today?  There may be clutter from this year or dating back decades.  Maybe it is something fresh and raw that we don’t care to admit and aren’t ready to accept.  Maybe it is a moment of peace sipping tea or stillness at night. 

 

Note: our church will not be installing X-ray machines…I hear you saying, “Thank God!”  Because God already knows us fully and loves us unconditionally.  It is a great lie to think, “God won’t love me if God knew…”  God knows your wounds and wants.  God knows your longings, losses, and loves.  And prayer is a practice of bringing this into the light of affection and acceptance so God might help us process the pain rather than keep passing it along to others. 

 

What is the high, low, and so-so of your soul today?  May this invitation awaken you to the One who is at work here and now.  Amen.

The Beauty of Ordinary

 

Yesterday, I invited you to stay awake, alert, and aware of God as a prayer practice for September.  If taking deep cleansing breaths every hour helps you notice God, keep going.  Or maybe you are pausing before each meal or meeting to notice God is already there.  Another great practice is to write down your high, low, and just so-so.  Start with the high moments: what sparked joy or peace in you?  Maybe a conversation with a friend where you laughed.  Or maybe singing along with a song you hadn’t heard since high school. Next is a low: what drained and dragged your soul down?  Maybe a person who is so creative at getting your pulse to elevate and setting your soul to agitate.  Maybe listening to humans dehumanize each other.  Finally, what was just so-so that day?  Where was the beautiful ordinariness that fills so much of our calendars and lives?

 

I encourage you to write these down for the whole month of September.  Please know that if you miss a day, this is not an assignment for a grade, and this is a “smite-free” invitation.  I would love to talk to you about what you are sensing God is up to in your life.  You may only do this once a week, which is great too.  This prayerful practice, which is a variation of the St. Ignatius’ Examen, is a wonderful way to realign our mind, heart, and soul.  I pray this practice gives you life and lets God’s light reveal and remind you that you are beloved.  Amen.

The Beautiful Ordinary

 

When you hear the word “Ordinary,” what comes into your mind?  Maybe the box of cereal you’ve been buying since the Carter administration.  Maybe you hear other words like “ho-hum” or a day that has all the flavor and nutritional content of Wonder Bread.  Ordinary in a world that worships at the altar of splashy and spectacular, where every day must have something Instagram-worthy, or we will lose followers, ordinary feels boring.  Yet, ordinary is where we live our lives and our faith.  While every Sunday is a celebration of the incarnation of Christmas (God’s love in the flesh and breath of Jesus) as well as Easter (God’s new life being written on our souls), we miss what God is up to in our lives when between holidays and Holy Days.  For me, the analogy is that you are constantly creating new skin cells, but you don’t usually look into the mirror each day and notice you have over 40 million new skin cells since yesterday.  At least, I don’t!  We miss the traces of grace and movement of love because we are distracted by news blaring, bodies aching, people saying stuff that frustrates us, and making sure we get milk at the grocery store.  We miss traces of grace and movement of love because the kindness of the store clerk who checked us out is covered by brash bullies whose egos feed off our attention and energy.  We miss traces of grace and movements of love because we don’t trust God fully to be God.  Historically, a branch of Christianity was Deism: the idea that God was like a clockmaker who made this elaborate creation around us.  God set the clock ticking and then stepped back.  The problem with Deism is that Scripture shares that God is intimately involved in our lives.  Genesis 2 preaches and proclaims this promise.  God sinks God’s fingertips into the soil of your soul every day to fashion and form you.    

 

God invites you to be open, awake, and aware of God amid all the other voices that speak/shout into your life, including your own.  As humans, we are given free will.  We don’t have to listen to God.  We don’t have to love.  We don’t have to do anything; our inner toddler screams whilst stomping a foot in protest…you can’t make me! 

 

The holy practice of staying alert to God is one that the church is called to cultivate and curate and help you practice.  But sometimes amid the administration, broken toilets, stewardship campaigns to plan, people who are grieving and hurting to visit, and oh yeah, a sermon to write; I can put this task of prayerfully living my life in the category of, “I will totally get to that…later…when I have time…after I try to save the world and fix this darn toilet…again!” 

 

How might you stay alert to God?  In monasteries, they pray at set times, like a reset to remind them that God is already and always there.  During COVID, I encouraged you to pray the Lord’s Prayer when you washed your hands.  Or maybe taking a deep breath on the hour, every hour ~ saying the words, “Here I am, God.  Here You are, God.  Here we are together.”  I pray this week, and the whole month of September, we might find ways to open our sacred imagination to the holiness of the ordinariness of these days.  Amen.

Love, Longings, Losses

 

Photo by Wes Bixby

God, You are woven into every week.  You are found in the highs, lows, and just so-so’s in this week.  The mystery of Your incarnation is not just at Christmas but every day.  The Holiness of Your presence is found as we grieve our losses, name our longings, and are honest about the love that holds us each day.  Help us as summer starts to wind down, at least up NORTH!, to be awake and aware of what You are up to in the world.  Help us prepare to turn the calendar to the month of September.  What are we longing for?  Where are we grieving?  And how is Your love still showing up every day?  Let these questions fuel and feed our lives as we take bread, drink from cups, absorb the pain and pleasure of life, and try to find meaning in new ways.  In the name of Christ, whose wisdom we follow and who transforms how we live.  Amen.