We protest because we love

 

Review your sheet with “Faith” at the top, and re-read what you’ve written on the sheet with “Hope” on top.  Now, I want you to list the names of everyone who embodied and expressed love to you in your life on the sheet with “Love”.  Family, friends, a random stranger this week whose name you don’t know, but paid for your hot chocolate during these chilly days.  We are overwhelmed with the Hallmark-zation of “love” in these days.  Too many stories show love as being fluffy and fuzzy.  But ponder these insights: the great Howard Thurman once said, “The formula is very neat: love begets love, hate begets hate, indifference begets indifference. Often this is true. Again and again, we try to dispense to others what we experience at their hands. There is much to be said for the contagion of attitudes.”

 

Or take Maya Angelou who wrote: “Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, and penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope. Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.”  (Tie this back to the story of Phontine and Jesus on Sunday in your heart.)

 

Toni Morrison said, “Love is or it ain’t.  Thin love ain’t love at all.” 

 

Or what about, “We do not protest because we hate, we protest because we love.  We protest for the beautiful future we know is possible.  We do so with joy, because the music of community plays in our hearts and we cannot help but sing.”  Now it is your turn, what questions stir and swirl in your heart when it comes to the word “Love” right now?  What comes up when you Google “Love”?   How does love play with faith and hope?  I recently heard that annoyance is the price we pay for community, connection, and love!  Let’s keep playing and praying and vulnerably living the word love in these February days.  Amen.

Hope of sinew

 

Way back on November 30^th of last year (which feels like forever ago), we lit a candle of hope.  That wasn’t just some ritual for Advent, it was a prophetic prayer for our lives every day this year.  Hope is not just wishful thinking.  Frederick Buechner said, “For Christians, hope is ultimately hope in Christ. The hope that he really is what for centuries we have been claiming he is. The hope that even though sin and death still rule the world, he somehow conquered them. The hope that in him and through him, all of us stand a chance of somehow conquering them too. The hope that at some unforeseeable time and in some unimaginable way he will return with healing in his wings.”

 

Walter Bruggemann says this, “Hope in gospel faith is not just a vague feeling that things will work out, for it is evident that things will not just work out. Rather, hope is the conviction, against a great deal of data, that God is tenacious and persistent in overcoming the deathliness of the world, that God intends joy and peace. Christians find compelling evidence, in the story of Jesus, that Jesus, with great persistence and great vulnerability, everywhere he went, turned the enmity of society toward a new possibility, turned the sadness of the world toward joy, introduced a new regime where the dead are raised, the lost are found, and the displaced are brought home again.”

Slowly savor this blessing of hope by Jan Richardson:

So may we know the hope that is not just for someday
but for this day— here, now, in this moment that opens to us:
hope not made of wishes but of substance,
hope made of sinew and muscle and bone,
hope that has breath and a beating heart,
hope that will not keep quiet and be polite,
hope that knows how to holler when it is called for,
hope that knows how to sing when there seems little cause,
hope that raises us from the dead—
not someday but this day, every day, again and again and again.

Now it is your turn, add questions, quotes, and random thoughts on your sheet with “HOPE” written at the top.  How is hope different than wishful thinking for you?  What percolated when you read Jan Richardson’s prayer of blessing in your soul?  How can hope have a soft heart and a strong backbone in the world today?  Keep playing and praying the word “hope” on this first Wednesday of a brand-new month.   Amen.

Faith Explored rather than Explained

 

What did you come up with on your sheet for the word faith yesterday?  Maybe somewhere in the cobwebbed corners of your soul, you recalled from Confirmation this scriptural gem, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1).  Here are a few of my favorite quotes about faith:

 

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars. Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.  Barbara Brown Taylor

 

Franciscan Blessing:

MAY GOD BLESS YOU with discomfort, at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears, to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain to joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in the world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done, to bring justice and kindness
to all our children and the poor. Amen.

 

Now it is your turn, add questions, quotes, random thoughts on your sheet with “FAITH” written at the top.  Where did faith show up yesterday in surprising ways?  Did faith fill you with living water like in John 4 ~ Phontine and Jesus?  Or did faith feel like an empty bucket right now?  Keep playing and praying with the word “Faith” as we begin this month of February.  Amen.

Faith, Hope, and Love

 

As we begin the month of love, with Valentine's Day around the corner, we focus on the final words of Paul’s ode to love as the mission/vision/purpose statement for the church in Corinth and our church today.

 

There are, in the end, three things that last: faith, hope, and love.  But the greatest of these is love.

 

Today, I invite you to take each of these words and reflect on your experiences and encounters.  How would you define faith, hope, and love separately?  What do faith, hope, and love feel like?  Is there someone who embodies each of these words in your life?  How do these three interact and overlap?  Is your faith strong or running on fumes?  What is the dashboard of your soul saying about your level of hope and your trust in love?

 

Author Kathleen Norris once wrote, “This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.”  As much as we may desire/demand a concrete, never-changing definition or description of faith, hope, and love are fluid, constantly in flux ~ just as relationships continue to evolve/expand.   Any attempt to confine these words soon eludes our intellectual efforts.  Norris continues, “But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.”   Wait, is there something you need to unlearn about religion today?  Consider how this connects to the story of Phontine at the well with Jesus yesterday ~ those two breaking down boundaries and biases.

 

So, get out three separate sheets of paper.  Write “faith” at the top of one sheet; “hope” at the top of another; and “love” at the top of the third.  What have you gleaned from hymns, sermons, prayers, and the glimpses of God that left angel dust in your hair through your life with each of these words?  Who inspires and infuses your faith ~ sets your soul ablaze and alive to flourish?  Where is hope knocking on the door of your heart to live this year differently?  How does love walk through the door of your life without knocking, without RSVPing, with arms wide open, taking you into an unexpected bear hug? 

 

I pray this exercise might help you rewind and review your experiences and encounters with each word.  Norris writes, “Faith is not discussed as an abstraction in the gospels. Jesus does not talk about it so much as respond to it in other people, for example, saying to a woman who has sought him for a healing, “thy faith hath made thee whole” (Matt. 9:22, KJV). And faith is not presented as a sure thing. Among Jesus’ disciples, Peter is the one whose faith is most evident, always eager. Then, in the crisis of Jesus’ arrest and trial, Peter is the disciple who denies him three times. I do not know the man, he says, and weeps. The relentlessly cheerful language about faith that I associate with the strong-arm tactics of evangelism fails to take this biblical ambiguity into account. I appreciate much more the wisdom of novelist Doris Betts’s assertion that faith is “not synonymous with certainty ... [but] is the decision to keep your eyes open.”  Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith  May your words mix and mingle with Norris’ thoughts as we live with and into faith, hope, and love this week and month.

Prayer

 

My knowledge is imperfect now; then I will know even as I am known.  Please pray these words with me.  God, I don’t know everything, even with the internet at my fingertips.  Reconnect me with my humanness, which is to say, my humble/made of soil and stardust truth in my soul.  My knowledge has gotten me where I am, but might not help me get where I want to go.  So, help me find places where my curiosity and creativity can be shared openly in this art project of life.  God, You know me fully.  My blessedness and brokenness, my faithfulness and fragility, my boneheaded-ness and beloved-ness.  I don’t know how You can love my worries and warts, but I trust that You do.  Let Your love sketch on my heart, soul, words, and life.  God, pick up the crayons and color my life with Your presence to infuse the ways that I show up.  God, continue to create within me a desire to be part of what You are up to in these days.  And when my brain starts bossing and bullying me (wants to tell me it is foolish to be playful or naïve to be loving) help my shy soul softly say to my brain, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it from here, because Your love, God, has me, holds me, heals and helps me.”  May it be so, in all manner of things today, may Your love be so.  Amen. 

Be Child-Like...Not Childish

 

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, and reason like a child.  But when I became an adult, I put childish ways aside.  Now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror; then we will see face to face. 

 

Go back and look at your drawing from Monday.  Look at the words you wrote inside your heart.  Where have you lived those words this week?  Look at the words outside the heart.  Did you have experiences of the Eternal this week that helped draw those words closer to you?  Were there any experiences that caused the initially objectionable words to inch closer to your heart?  In many ways, our inner child never tires of coloring on the canvas of life.  Our inner child loves to play and participate in this beautiful, if broken, world.  Our inner child knows that laughter is a prayer.  Our inner child knows that a cookie with milk is communion.  Our inner child knows that God is found in trees and birds and snails that have so much to teach us, if only we stop scrolling and staring at our phones.  Lacy Finn Borgo tells us that there is a difference between being childish and being childlike.  Childish is throwing temper tantrums (note how often adults do this at meetings and on social media).  Childish is always wanting your way.  Childish is thinking that the world revolves around you.  Child-like is to be lost in wonder, love, and praise.  Borgo writes, “Children possess a natural, unique to them, connective consciousness. It has not been chosen or even cultivated through hours of meditation or psychedelic trips. Instead, the plasticity of the developing brain offers connective wonder through a lack of previous experiences and an innocent openness to the world. God has wired each and every one of us for this.”  How can you let loose your inner child today?  What if you went back and read 1 Corinthians 13 with the whole box of crayons to permit your inner 5-year-old artist who loved to color before the art teacher started grading your effort?  What if you went and gazed at a lake with awe, noticing every inch?  What if you built with Legos?  What if you did what you loved to do when you were ten years old?  Let loose your inner child, who still has something to teach and tell your adult self.  May this experiment help you see deeper into the mirror of your life, where all the versions of yourself (from your earliest memory to today) are reflected in how you show up and speak up in such a time as this. Amen.

How do you know what you know?

 

Our knowledge is imperfect, and our prophesying is imperfect.  When the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. 

 

Yesterday, my inner defense attorney objected to the idea that “love never fails.”  Today, my inner know-it-all feels exposed.  I don’t know what I don’t know.  On Sunday, I spoke about the question, “How do we know what we know?”  Stop, what is the foundation of your explanations and exhortations?  We live in a Google-dominated world where we are convinced that we have it all figured out.  Brian McLaren says we are attracted to leaders who are confident even when they are not competent.  We like strong people, because we don’t believe Jesus saying that the peacemakers will inherit and usher in the realm of God.  We have tried for centuries to bomb our way to peace.  Even though it has never worked, we still go back to that as our first, last, and only resource.  Einstein was right: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Faulkner was right, the past isn’t dead and isn’t even the past.  Today carries the brokenness of yesterday because we keep clinging to our way, rather than God’s way. 

 

As a recovering perfectionist, who is still in process, I shudder at the idea of the phrase, “when the perfect comes”.  Another word that could be faithfully substituted into the above translation is “whole”.  “When the whole comes, the incompleteness will pass away.”  This echoes the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kin-dom/realm come, here on earth, fully, completely, wholly and holy”.  N.T. Wright says that the goal of religion is not to get your soul to heaven, but to get heaven into your soul here on earth to spread out from you to others.  The pathway to heaven isn’t only through your intellect.  You don’t need to write volumes of Church Theology arguing every point.  You need to let love be written in your life every day.  Karl Barth, who wrote 12 volumes of a book called “Church Dogmatics” (talk about thinking your way through faith!), was once asked to summarize those million words he had written.  He said, “Jesus loves me (and everyone), this I know for the Bible tells me so.”  May that truth challenge you, be lived in you.  May God continue to sketch, draw, and color in your life today.  Amen.