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.  

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.