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.  

Lent Leads to Life

 

Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).  John’s telling of Easter in chapter 20:16

 

On the other side of the empty tomb of Easter, Christ meets us.  In the garden where we weep with Mary over the losses we all encounter each day and the longings we have, Christ says our name.  When we hear the Holy speak our name, we are filled with a love that cannot be contained or controlled; instead, it takes the steering wheel of our life, setting us in a new direction and destination.  Easter is a beautiful mystery.  Easter is fragrant like lilies.  Easter is spine-tingling like brass playing as we sing out, “Christ the Lord is risen”.  Notice the present tense verb.  Easter is not some historical reenactment; it is a promise of each day.  With the rising of the sun or son, God offers us newness.  Today need not be like yesterday.  Our lives are infused and inspired with God’s unfinished work of reconciling love.  How might you practice Easter today, especially when there are no Peeps to eat or ham dinners to prepare or Easter eggs to color?  How might you practice resurrection, especially when the rest of the world is getting ready or has already gone back to school?  Let these questions interrupt your life, helping you realize that Ash Wednesday, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter can be found anytime and every time we wake up to the One who is still at work in this world.  Amen.  

Lent Leads to Life

 

For six weeks, we pray our longings and losses until we reach the Holiest Week of the Christian year.  From Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday (Maundy means commandment and honors Christ’s call to love; you can remember that because the word looks like mandate), to Good or God’s Friday, to Silent Saturday, to Easter Sunday.  In many ways, this culmination of Lent is a model/message for every week of faith.  We start with the joy of Palm Sunday, waving palm branches high and shouting, “Hosanna!”  But this isn’t a pep rally for Jesus during the parade or some kind of victory march.  Hosanna means help us.  Help me, God, because I cannot help or save myself.  Lent brings me close to my own vulnerability, woundedness, and boneheadedness or stubbornness (I am an Iowan after all!).  Lent lays bare that I am part of systems that benefit me and that I can’t seem to untangle/untwist myself from these systems.  So, shouting and singing, “Hosanna” is a cathartic release.  Hosanna is confessional to say, “Thank God, I am not the savior of this world,” even though many humans and pastors can forget this.  As the “hosannas” hush, we move to the Passover/Communion table.  In an ordinary loaf of bread and cup of wine, we encounter God’s grace.  Grace, Dallas Willard said, is opposed to earning, not effort.  That is, I don’t deserve grace.  Grace is fully, freely given.  And when God’s unconditional grace gets into my life, my life changes.  Because we are what we eat, we need to feast on God’s grace and love.  Bread and cup symbolize this.  Jesus says every time you eat bread and drink from a cup ~ in other words ~ every meal is communion.  Sit with this beautiful truth today.  Jesus embodied God’s presence in ways that captivated hearts in real ways, each day, then and now.  This threatened both the political and religious hierarchy.  Jesus was killed not because God couldn’t balance the Divine Excel spreadsheet.  God has been against sacrificial killings since Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac.  But still, we believe in quid pro quo faith.  We still believe that we need to be “good” and earn badges for our heavenly sash to impress St. Peter at the gate.  We still believe that it is our beliefs that save us, rather than God’s love.  Caught up in a consumeristic culture that clings to the cliché, “There are no free lunches,” we have never really accepted a table open to all and a cross of God’s love poured out to show us the hurt and harm humans do.  Good or God’s Friday says that if we do not practice love, we will just keep on killing each other.  That is as true as the news you read today.  Jesus, God’s love incarnate, didn’t have to die, but rather, holy love knows that grief will always be part of the recipe with humans.  This brings us to Saturday, where we sit silently in the mystery of all that we’ve encountered from Ash Wednesday, Lent, Maundy Thursday, and God’s Friday.  It is too much.  Perhaps this is why we keep telling the story again and again each year, because this week is like a mirror reflecting our lives.  When we stare in a mirror dimly (1 Corinthians 13), we start to see how God’s grace will never be contained and can’t be killed.  So, we come on Easter to shout and sing, “Alleluia,” to the One who was, is, and will be forever our strength and source of life.  Easter re-orients the stories we tell.  Hold the promises and possibility of Holy Week today, letting it sink in and sing ~ meeting you in your life.  Which day described above feels like a fit for what you are carrying to this Morning Meditation?  Or how does each day meet a particular part of your life?  May our meditations lean in and listen for God, who is with us every week and day.  Amen.  

Lent Leads to Life

 

Yesterday, we looked at Ash Wednesday as the beginning of Lent (40 days prior to Easter, not including Sundays).  Yet, one day isn’t enough to grieve all our losses and name our longings.  This is a daily invitation to be honest with God.  Recently, I heard of a youth pastor who began each gathering with middle school youth with a prayer practice.

 

First, she asked the middle schoolers to complete this sentence: God, I don't understand ______ and let them fill in whatever they wanted.  What don’t you understand today?  War?  Hatred?  Hurting/mocking others?  Your family member who posts AI-generated slop online like they’ve discovered the holy grail?

 

Secondly, she had each person complete this sentence: God, please fix ______.  What would you like God to swoop in and save the day, restore, and reconcile?  I know one response my shy soul whispers is, “me!”

 

The third prompt, God, I will trust you with my future even if _______.  Even if God doesn’t repair or respond according to our best-laid plans.  Lent is a time to return to trust and how difficult/demanding trust is for us.

 

The fourth, final, prompt is like number three, God I will praise you even when _____.  This points out the ambiguity and mystery of faith.  Faith is about non-duality.  Things are not either/or, but rather both/and.  There is goodness and great suffering today.  There is holiness and hatred.  There is delight and discrimination. 

 

I offer this prayer practice for you this day, this week, and to continue to hold onto this for the rest of the year.  Amen.

Lent Leads to Life

 

Life is a series of ungrieved, unhealed losses; this is the wisdom of Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent.  There is a holy timing to Lent, beginning anywhere between mid-February and early March.  Unlike Christmas, celebrated on the same date every year, Lent dances around the lunar calendar.  To figure out when Lent starts, you first pinpoint Easter.  Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox.  Who knew you needed a degree in selenology (study of the moon) to understand our faith?  Why is it this way?  Great question.  One response is that Christianity grew out of Judaism, which follows the lunar calendar.  Secondly, our ancestors lived closer to the earth.  What guided/governed their lives was creation's rhythms.  People in Jesus’ day were keyed into the seasonality of God.  Just as the earth went through a cycle of planting, growing, harvest, and rest/barrenness, so did every part and parcel of human life, relationships, and faith (we talked about this when we studied Ecclesiastes 3).  Creation also taught and told people how to celebrate new life with the first fruits of the field.  So many Jewish festivals are tied to harvesting and offering to God our response.  People knew that they couldn’t make the fig tree grow faster.  Yes, they could tend, trim, water, and watch carefully, but there was so much beyond their control (rain, droughts, or the size of the harvest, because even if you poured all your energy into caring for that fig tree, it might only give you enough for one fig newton …whomp, whomp!). 

 

While the exact date of Easter can move around, we do know the Spring Equinox falls between March 19-21.  Once we find that exact date, we can see when the next full moon is, and the following Sunday is Easter.  Lent is the forty days before Easter, excluding Sunday.  We do this because we live on the other side of the first Easter; we know the ending of the story, so every Sunday, even in Lent, is a celebration of resurrection, new life, and that God isn’t finished with us yet.  When you count backwards from Easter Sunday, excluding Sunday, forty days falls on a Wednesday ~ which we call Ash Wednesday.  Usually, the day before Ash Wednesday is a feast day.  Traditionally, on Fat Tuesday (which is what Mardi Gras in French means), early Christians would make cakes and treats to get rid of all the sugar and flour in their homes.  It is like a science and history lesson combined into one Morning Meditation today! 

 

As a culture, we are allergic to grieving our losses and naming our pain.  We take very seriously those words in the Constitution, “pursuit of happiness”.  We pour our lives, energy, and money into this.  Come hell or high water, we can’t and won’t be stopped.  Yet, grief is not the absence of happiness or joy; grief is a natural and normal part of life’s holy equation.  Anyone who has enjoyed a good meal knows it needs to end.  You can’t sit at the table forever.  Anyone who knows the passion of falling in love knows that at some point, such fire of dating and the honeymoon can’t be sustained.  Yet, love can be transformed. 

Ash Wednesday brings us back to our agrarian roots.  Just as the farmers of Jesus’ day couldn’t control the amount of the harvest, nor can we completely control our lives.  There are parts of the equation each day that won’t contort or conform to our willpower.  Ash Wednesday opens space for us to say that we’ve caused hurt and heartbreak, and that others have caused us.  We can be honest with ourselves and seek to grow into the image of God.  What losses are you grieving today: personally, familiarly, culturally, or in faith?  Hold this holy question, letting it interrupt this August day with heartfelt honesty that we all need in this world.  May God’s love hold you as you listen to your shy soul share what is stirring within.  Amen.