Shape of Faith, Collective of Hope, and the Way of Love

 

And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.  1 Corinthians 1313 (NRSV Updated Translation)

 

Yesterday, I invited you to look at the mystery of your life, that we don’t always know fully what we are doing.  Every day you wake up with the ingredients and information from your past to meet the unknown present/future moments you will encounter.  The story in your mind, heart, and soul all try to help you navigate the waters of today.  Side note: sometimes the story in your mind is different from the story in your heart.  Hence, we don’t have a single, unified story, but rather, stories all competing to control the steering wheel of our lives.  I know this is happening for me when I feel a pit in my stomach.  When my mind, heart, soul, body, and life are out of alignment, that is when I wake up at 3 a.m., which is the worst possible time to try to figure out life! 

 

On your art/chart this week, I want you to trace the three words of God’s story: faith, hope, and love.

 

Look at that early column of where you lived, the people you knew, the stardust of experiences/encounters in that place, and who God was; what did faith feel like there?  I know for me in Cedar Rapids at my UCC church, faith at an early age was a box to fit into.  God was a certain way, and I had to appease or impress God to earn a gold star, which, by the way, was exactly what I got on the attendance chart in Sunday School!  As a teenager in Des Moines at a different UCC church, the wider culture was all aflutter about “thinking outside the box”, so I thought God couldn’t be contained or confined; God was the “holy other” (thanks to Karl Barth for that phrase).  In seminary in Minnesota, I learned God was the ground of being (thanks to Paul Tillich for that phrase).  God in my first church became the stable ground where I could build my deep desire to be a good minister.  Do you start to see how faith has taken different shapes depending on where I was, who I was around, and what was happening within/around me?  Faith is never constructed or deconstructed in isolation.  Faith is impacted and influenced by what is all around us and who is around us.  Remember from yesterday, in the nanosecond between an encounter and your response, your mind/heart/soul fills in a story.  And because our body is built to conserve calories, we will take the easiest path/the one that is known.  You see, Frost was right that to take the path less traveled involves intentionality, attention, and doesn’t happen all that frequently because it requires energy in an exhausted world.  Today, you may want to draw a shape of your faith or write down descriptions of faith tracing through the timeline of your life.  Or maybe what role faith played in that moment.  I realize all three words (faith, hope, and love) are not easily captured.  Please be gentle with yourself.  Remember, you are not turning your chart of the art of your life for a grade.  Nor do you have to finish this right now!  There is grace and space as you listen to your life.  If you have questions about this, let me know.  Amen.

Shape of Faith, Collective of Hope, and the Way of Love

 

I invite you to look at the art/chart of your one wild and precious life that you have been working on with God over the last month.  One of the invitations of this process is for you to see your life for the mystery it is.  You are a combination and conglomeration of experiences and encounters, events and emotions.  This makes you, you.  No one else has the same recipe for life, even though every human shares the same 99% DNA.  Hold that mystery in your head, heart, and soul.  We are the same and different.  From the recipe of your life, you tell a story.  A story about needing to do things for yourself, cause no one else will do it for you.  Or a story that the world is a dog-eat-dog place and you are wearing Milk-Bone underwear, so you better protect yourself.  Or a story that if you want peace in the world, you need peace in yourself.  Is there a story you tell yourself about yourself? 

 

As your story unfolds unpredictably and uncontrollably every day, you keep adding ingredients to your life.  You talk to that person or go to that meeting, for example.  And let’s say Fred says something sarcastic.  In the split second between the words leaving and leaping from Fred’s lips and your response…in that nano-second…. your brain will fill in a story.  And because your brain is built for efficiency and wants to take the path of least resistance, the story will be familiar, firing along neuro-pathways that have already been formed and forged in the past.  Your experience with Fred, coupled with your past emotions with Fred, alongside how you have been taught/caught to deal with sarcastic people, in that blink-and-you-miss-it moment, fills in space and fires a reaction or response.

If you happen to like sarcasm or agree with Fred, you join him in laughing.

If you happen to believe that Fred doesn’t know his head from a hole in the ground, you go a different direction.

If you think Fred is the odd-ball and should be ignored, you go to that place.

You have a story you tell yourself about yourself, others, and God.  I am inviting you to become awake, aware, and alert to that story.  One invitation for this summer homework is to wake up to why you do what you do when you do it.

 

The challenge of our faith is to let God re-write our narratives in new ways.   Or as Ian Morgan Cron once said, “You need to give up the old idea that you know what happened.”  Eek!  What do you mean?  “Of course,” my inner defense attorney jumps to her feet and declares, “I know what I am doing!  I am an adult.”  But my shy soul says, “Wait, let’s see where this goes.”

 

We live in a world addicted to certainty and confidence.  We live in a society that preaches assertion and get what you can while the getting is good.  And we bring that bigger story into church with us and expect, demand, that the Gospel of Jesus conflate and conform to our story, or else we will find a new church that doesn’t challenge us as much.

 

Where does the idea that you, I, we, me, none of us really know fully what is happening land in you?  When Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13 that we see in a mirror dimly, I think this might be part of what he is saying.  Does the idea that we have stories operating in our minds and controlling our lives/reactions/decision make sense, or do you resist, even reject such an idea?  Hold this invitation as you look at the art/chart of your one wild and precious life this week.  May you hold your life lightly for the mystery it was, is, and will always be.  Amen. 

Where God Shows Up Prayer

 

God of many names and who shows up in so many ways, thank you for Your presence in my life.  With Jacob, I give thanks that I now see You were there in that moment where I first thought You had taken a trip to Pluto.  With the Psalmist, I now notice that You were there in that pit experience.  Thank you for the people and places because I trust there is nowhere You are not.  Thank you for the good and the bad, for I trust that You are not finished yet.  Thank you for the incompleteness of my life this day.  May You and I continue to collaborate on the story of my life.  Loosen my grip on the keyboard, thinking that I will write down first.  God, find ways to interrupt my life with goodness and grace I need and that You have always overflowed my life with thus far.  In the name of the One who shared Your love everywhere he went, to every person he met, in every moment (the good and bad) where he found himself, Jesus our Christ.  Amen. 

Where God Shows Up Part 4

 

Our Buddhist friends have a wonderful phrase: “When the student is ready, the teacher arrives”.  I’ve had lots of teachers over the years.  Some of these professors shaped my soul, others left me feeling cold.  Some taught in formal classrooms, and others, in places where I didn’t expect to learn a lesson. As you look over your artwork and chart of your life, where are the teachers?  Sometimes, teachers in my life didn’t show up in the best of times.  Sometimes the teachers came at the exact moment when I was overworked, overwhelmed, and overextended.  Sometimes the teachers came not with calm, comforting words, but with coals, like the ones that burnt Isaiah’s lips.  Other times the teacher wasn’t a fellow featherless biped at all.  The teacher was a canyon or cave that taught me something I couldn’t learn from a book.  The teacher was a song that my soul needed.  God, for me, is at work in both the tending to our exploration and our moments of quiet.  God teaches in words, people, silence, confusion, slowly figuring something out, and continued mysteries we will never completely resolve but that keep us curious.  Where, when, and how has God been a teacher in your life?  Note this on your artwork/chart of life.  Then, what does that say about God?  For example, if God shows up in a tree swaying in a breeze teaching you how this part of creation weathers storms of life, maybe God is more than an old, white man on a throne with a long beard.  If God shows up to tell you about love in the form of someone who previously hurt you, maybe God is more than a cuddly, cozy blanket of complacency.  How, when, and where did God show up in sanctuaries and beyond the four walls of a building, reminding you that God is never contained or confined.  May this truth awaken You to the fingerprints of the Divine, God who continues to sink God’s loving presence, shaping you in beautiful ways.  Amen.

Where God Shows Up Part 3

 

Yesterday, you looked at the places and spaces where you have found yourself.  The soil that still rests and resides in your soul.  And I asked you to ponder: where was God, especially in moments when you felt in Exile or Sheol or a Pit?  Where was God amid the difficult experiences you named and noticed last week?  Sometimes God shows up disguised as other people.  Sometimes God shows up in ways we never anticipated.  One of the tensions is that highlights and lowlights live side-by-side without neat and tidy conclusions.  One of the tensions is that we can’t resolve everything like a balance sheet.  In Genesis 1, God/Spirit/Logos/Word surfed over the chaos in creation.  That isn’t just some ancient truth; it is a promise of God in your life every day.  God surfs over the chaos creatively trying to bring forth life.  And yet, I have free will to either listen or get caught up in focusing only on the brokenness.  This week, we are diving deep into where God was and how God was weaving threads of love into our lives.  This is never a one-and-done assignment.  Sometimes the more distance I get from a moment, the clearer I see.  Sometimes what seemed like the worst thing ever in that moment twenty years ago feels now like a blip.  Maybe you’d even forgotten about that moment until you started working on these invitations in the Morning Meditations.  Which you say, “Thanks a lot, Wes, for bringing back that memory!”  And, perhaps you are now remembering the sweetness of a moment in your 20s that also had gotten boxed up and stored in the cobwebbed corners of your life.  Keep looking at the places, people, highlights and lowlights, noticing how and where God was at work in you, through you, and I know for me, sometimes despite me!  May these moments of meditation help you glimpse the mystery of your one wild and precious life.

Where God Shows Up Part 2

 

We all need safe, sacred spaces.  Even before Maslow offered his hierarchy of needs, Scripture shares with us places where God’s comfort and care made all the difference.  From a Garden of Eden given to our ancestors, to wrestling with Jacob beside a river, to even a foreign land when Egypt became a place of security in a time of lack during the life of Joseph.  Scripture is also clear about moments when the places we find ourselves don’t seem safe and secure from all alarms.  We hear about the crying out in Egypt when the Pharaoh didn’t learn his history and oppressed the people.  We hear about Exile when the people of God found the promised land in rubble and ruin.  We hear about the Roman occupation in the time of Jesus.  In fact, so much Scripture is written for and by oppressed people.  The Psalmist describes this as Sheol, or a pit.  Jesus called it Ghanna, or a burning garbage heap.  And, Scripture proclaims, even God is there.  As you look back on the places that have left soil in your soul, where are those Sheol, Gahanna, places?  Or maybe you were living in paradise, but it felt in your life was shattered and scattered because of oppression or grief or pain you couldn’t process?  Look back over the places you’ve lived/named in previous weeks as well as the corresponding lowlights.  Was there a tension?  I know that well, living in a place where people come to vacation, and yet, here in the tourist mecca of Florida, people struggle to make ends meet; we do not care for our unhoused neighbors, and our immigrant friends live in fear.  People are grieving and hurting.  We pass laws discriminating against our LGBTQ+ siblings and those whose skin tone is not white (even though we still share 99% of the same DNA).  Prayerfully ask in those moments where you felt far from Eden: Where was God?  For some, you felt God show up in hugs and love, even in the pit.  For others, you felt alone, confused, and angry that God didn’t swoop in and save you instantly.  Today, just notice the threads and themes that tether and tie your life together.  We don’t always have answers for what God is doing or how God shows up.  The mystery that both fascinates and frustrates is that God is not predictable or plays by the script we want God to write.  Yet, with the Psalmist we can say, “Even if I make my bed in Sheol, You (O God) are there.”  (Psalm 139:8).  Or with Jacob we can profess, “God is in this place – truly.  And I didn’t even know it.”  (Genesis 28:16).  Let us sit with our lives, not as math problems to be solved, but mysteries that are unfolding before us and within us.  Amen.

Where God Shows Up Part 1

 

In Isaiah 6, we hear how God swooped in and showed up in Isaiah’s life in a way that discombobulated and disoriented him.  Isaiah had just gone to church, thinking, “Maybe I will have a bagel for lunch.”  At some point, Isaiah realized God was there.  The truth is that God is always there.  As the mystics say, “There is no place God is not.”  Yet, there are certainly places and among certain people where it is nearly impossible to figure out what God is up to in that moment.  When I look back, with my soul squinting and mind spinning, I suddenly realize the Sacred had been there all along. 

 

When have you felt like God showed up in your life?  To be sure, it might not have been as splashy and spectacular as Isaiah 6.  God’s robe may not have cuddled you.  God’s angels probably did not serenade you.  But your shy soul, like Isaiah, shouted out, “Here I am, God!  Pick me!  Pick me!!”  Like you were back on the baseball, kickball, softball field of your youth, hoping not to be the last one standing waiting. 

 

How has God shown up in your life?  Maybe through music, art, reading, conversations, hugs, friendship, smiles, listening ears, trees swaying in the breeze, or wading in the water.  Maybe through laughter or quiet, maybe in your home or thousands of miles away from your bed at a place you always wanted to visit.  As you look over your timeline of places you’ve been, people you’ve met, highlights and lowlights, where has God been? 

 

I confess that I have a hard time finding God in the difficult parts of life.  When my soul is sagging or when grief has paid an unwelcome visit.  Where is God among people whose presence is like fingernails on a chalkboard of my soul?  Sure, theologically and theoretically, I say that everyone is created in God’s image, but some people offer abundant evidence to the contrary.  Today, scan over the artwork/chart of your life from the last few weeks.  Think back to your childhood home: was there a cozy corner where you felt safe, wrapped in the Sacred?  Or in College, was there a church you wandered into or went to because of friends, and suddenly God was there?  Look back over the last ten years in the photo album of life: where have you encountered God?  May you discover how God’s light and love have led you thus far and continue to be part of your life to this day.