Values that Matter

 

So far this week, I have asked you to listen to the stories you tell about yourself to others and where you inherited that story from.  Today, I invite you to reflect on your values.  Read through the list below and circle the words that jump off the page.  Then go back and whittle down to five or seven that are the most important.  Remember, you don’t need to defend these ~ all these values are needed and necessary in the world.  But you are the only you in the world that can bring your particular values forward right now in your unique way.  Here is the list:

 

Authenticity                             Achievement                  Adventure

Authority                                 Autonomy                      Balance

Beauty                                     Boldness                        Compassion

Challenge                                 Citizenship                     Community

Competency                             Contribution                   Creativity

Curiosity                                 Determination                Fairness

Faith                                        Fame                              Friendships

Fun                                          Growth                          Happiness

Honesty                                   Humor                           Influence

Inner Harmony                         Justice                            Kindness

Knowledge                              Leadership                     Learning

Love                                        Loyalty                          Meaningful Work

Openness                                 Optimism                       Peace

Pleasure                                   Poise                              Popularity

Recognition                             Religion                         Reputation

Respect                                    Responsibility                Security

Self-Respect                             Service                           Spirituality

Stability                                   Success                          Status

Trustworthiness                       Wealth                           Wisdom

 

Hold these values as a gift of God’s presence in you.

Still Editing God

 

Yesterday, I invited you to pay attention to the story you tell others about yourself.  How did that go?  Honestly?  Maybe you were cautious about selecting your words ~ not wanting to boast/brag/berate yourself.  Maybe you held back, not wanting to bring your fully beloved and beautifully broken self out into the light.  Maybe you didn’t have the energy to do this because we all live in a world that is exhausted, underslept, overcaffeinated, and overwhelmed.  Today, consider the stories you heard from your parents growing up.  Were your parents optimistic, pessimistic, or a little of both?  What about your relatives?  I remember I would go to family reunions with kin who were farmers.  And there was always too much rain or not enough rain.  My uncle especially loved to use some “salty” language about his vegetable garden.   Consider what narratives you caught from culture?  You are a mixture of what you’ve absorbed from others and the conclusions you’ve come to in life through your experiences.  Continue today to listen to the story you tell yourself about yourself.  Do you use words that are biting and bitter?  Do you tell yourself that if only others would listen, the world would be a Willy Wonka chocolate factory of joy?  Keep listening to the stories that define you.  Do you ever feel like your stories sometimes confine you?  I know I do!  What threads/themes do you see woven in your life?  List those.  Is there a rhythm that has been pulsing, a beat that has been playing all along in your life?  Does your life have a theme song or a soundtrack?  Let’s keep listening to the story we tell and hold that in the story of Christ, whose resurrection love teaches/tells us that brokenness is never the last word and that God is still editing our lives.  Amen.

Put Down the Mask

 

Just as the season of Lent lingers, so does the season of exploring and experimenting with being an Easter-ing people.  Lent is forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday (February 18-April 5 this year, not including Sundays.  If you are wondering why, it's because we live on the other side of the first Easter; so we do not count Sundays in Lent.  Every Sunday is supposed to be Easter Sunday, even in Lent.)  Lent lingers like a house guest that hasn’t caught on to the social cues that you’d like them to leave.  Even when you turn off the lights and start cleaning up the kitchen, Lent comes in and has the gall to start drying the dishes, patiently/persistently waiting for you to listen to your shy soul.  Lent prepares us to roll back the stones that block and barricade our lives.

 

We live in a culture where vulnerability is seen as a liability.  We deny and dismiss our own biases and brokenness.  We don’t like to admit that, like Lazarus, we are bound by the wounds and wants that keep us up at night.  And lest you think that you are beyond shadow boxing with yourself; lest you think that you have dealt with your own demons that make every day Halloween; I want to invite you this week to listen to the stories you tell about yourself to others.

 

Do you tell stories about how you have it all figured out, and people just need to listen to you?

Do you tell stories about how someone else has done you wrong, and your life is always singing the blues?

Do you tell stories about how you continue to succeed even when others are out to get you?

Do you tell stories about how you are such a bumbling, stumbling idiot that, amazingly, you can dress yourself?

Do you tell stories that cause you to puff out your chest or hang your head or maybe you find yourself on the sidelines silently praying that people will notice you, and at the same time hoping they don’t see you, because you don’t know what you’d say?

 

We are complex, contradictory, and compartmentalized people.  We often think that we should be further along than others in our comparison-addicted culture.  Then, in the stillness of the night, when all the words we say to someone else, or we replay the words we absorbed from others, we wrestle with our shadow. 

 

Easter lingers even longer than Lent.  Easter is fifty days.  Easter began a month ago and still has a month to go until Pentecost on May 24^th.  At the halfway point, can you and I listen to the words that fall from our lips and the ones that we think but don’t dare say aloud?  Sometimes we can put on the mask of kindness while in our minds we are fuming and frustrated.  Sometimes we let loose our tongue with anger and judgment, thinking we are prophetic or righteous.  Sometimes we don’t know what to think, say, or do, or be in this world today. 

 

Pause and breathe in.

 

You are the beloved of God.  Full stop.  Period.  This claim was affirmed at your baptism and can be celebrated with every splash in the ocean, washing of your hands, and sip of cool water as the weather turns warmer.

 

How might you live as God’s beloved Easter-ing person this week?  Let that question interrupt and intercede in your life this day and in the days to come.  Amen.

Prayer

 

What Creation Preaches

 

The unfathomable cosmos came into being at the word of the Eternal’s imagination, a solitary voice in endless darkness. The breath of God’s mouth whispered the sea of stars into existence.
God gathers every drop of every ocean as in a jar, securing the ocean depths as God’s watery treasure.

Let all people stand in awe of the Eternal; let every man, woman, and child live in wonder of the Creator/Gardener/Composer of the symphony of life.  Psalm 33

 

Creation is God’s first testament.  Before there was a Bible, there was creation.  The world around was alive with the glory of God.  Before people read the Bible, birds preached through songs, while the stars above drew people’s attention to the vastness and unknowingness of the world.  Before people gathered around a book with leather binding and tiny print that is getting harder for me to read, it was a campfire under starlit nights that called people to ponder the meaning of life.  To be sure, I can be lost in wonder, love, and praise while gardening or mowing my grass or hiking in a forest.  This is not my everyday experience.  Too often, I am sheltered (and I think I am shielded) by cars, roofs, and walls.  Too often, this constant disconnection from the earth leads to disorientation and even dis-ease within me.  I can be lured to believe that rain, which is needed and necessary, is an inconvenience to my plans.  I can be lured to think that I can weather and withstand every storm ~ but some are stronger than a hurricane or hurt worse than baseball-sized hail.  I can be lured from interacting with the world, which continues to be how God shows up and sings out each day.

 

Today, I invite you to go outside.  You can go for a walk.  You can wade in the water.  You could sit on a chair on your porch/lanai/under a tree.  The invitation is to pay attention to what you are seeing/smelling/hearing/tasting/experiencing.  Let your five senses be open to the One who can be encountered in more ways than we can explore or exhaust in one life.  Let your mind, heart, and soul find alignment with the world that is mysterious and marvelous.  Let Creation connect to you, because you are part of creation.  Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor says, “The body is a great focuser, whether the means is pain or pleasure. The body is a great reminder of where we came from and where we are going, on the one sacred journey that we all make, whether we mean to or not.”  Today, connect with the creation with which we are caught in a web of mutuality.  You cannot exist without water, or the nutrients of the carrots that grow in the dirt, or the oxygen invisibly floating around you/yet sustaining you, trees to absorb your carbon dioxide, and the sun that warms your skin.  Listen to our original Gardener, who is still tending the garden of your soul.  Amen.

Earth Day and Easter

 

Happy Earth Day ~ consider the soil in your soul ~ the good earth from which God fashions and forms you into being.  Consider the water that renews and re- stories you.  Pause ~ how can water help you write another story that is soaked by the sacred of God’s baptismal promise to you?  Consider the birds singing, the tree of your life growing in the forest of others.  Slowly read these words:

 

God’s glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon.
Madame Day holds classes every morning, and Professor Night lectures each evening.

Their words aren’t heard, their voices aren’t recorded,
But their silence fills the earth: unspoken truth is spoken everywhere.  Psalm 19

 

Day and Night have something to teach and tell us.  Too often, we are tripped up and trapped by an either/or view of the world.  We classify and compartmentalize everything (and everyone).  Yet, day and night each preach and proclaim truths for our life, the Psalmist says.  Day can teach us to notice and name what we might miss when the sun sets.  Daytime can help expand our gaze beyond the intimate and immediate ~ to the horizon.  Daytime is when the subtle, even subversive, details come into focus.  And daytime can blind us if we stare at the blazing sun too long.  Daytime can lure us into complacency, especially when the surroundings are familiar.  We can push our bodies too far during the day, thinking that “we’ve gotta make hay while the sun is shining.”  Such overstimulation from over-caffeination causes our souls to grow weary and worn down.

 

Night can teach us to slow down and focus our attention on the next step, because we cannot see for miles and miles.  Nighttime reveals the stars that are always there, but are shut out because of the brighter sun.  Nighttime invites the body to reset, renew, and rest.  Night sharpens our hearing.  Night can also be when all the things we said and did that day come back for a visit ~ not always in a way we welcome or want.  At night, we can rehearse and replay a meeting where our jaw was set on edge or face the uncertainty of a medical condition.

 

What else would you add to the above lists?  What are the blessings and brokenness of day and of night?  What causes your soul to leap in joy in day and at night?  Ponder what Madame Day and Professor Night are trying to tell you?  Listen.  Lean in.  Learn from the power of every hour, for each moment is saturated and soaked with the Sacred.  Amen.

What Tree Would You Be?

 

Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers,
but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.
That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season.  Psalm 1

 

I often wonder if the Psalms were written while the prophet/poet was wandering in the wilderness of the world.  Psalm 1 draws on the image of creation ~ God’s creativity seen in clouds and heard in birds and felt in breezes with the sun on our face, which in turn can infuse and inspire our imaginations of faithfulness.  When we read the Psalms inside under the hum of fluorescent lights and the breeze from air that has been filtered and conditioned with chemicals to keep us cool, we might miss the metaphor.  Please don’t hear me complaining, I couldn’t live in Florida without air conditioning!  Yet, the Psalmists lived closer to the earth, soil, dirt, and dust from which we are all made.  The soles of the Psalmist's feet touched the sandy soil of the earth, felt the fear of storms raging in their face, and knew the beauty of a starry night where no light pollution could drive away the darkness.  The Psalmist was intimately interwoven with creation.  The very first Psalm draws on the image of your life being like a tree.  This gives the reader pause:

 

What kind of tree would you like to be?  A redwood?  A sugar maple producing delicious syrup?  A dwarf willow that creeps on the ground rather than reaching for the sky?  An ordinary tree that blends into the background?  A palm tree waving in the salt sea air?

 

What would the bark of your tree feel like, look like, taste like?

 

What about the rings of your tree?  Have there been years of tremendous growth when the circle in your soul is wide and years of scarcity where the ring is narrow/tight, trying to conserve energy?

 

Today, go out and touch a tree, listening to the wisdom of creation ~ absorbing the holiness of this part of God’s creation.  Consider what is nourishing your soul?

 

Where are your roots twisted and tangled with others in the forest of life?  Your tree is connected to those in our church, neighbors, friends, family, and people whose path you cross now and again.

 

What fruit comes from your tree?  Is your fruit sweet or savory or maybe you are in winter right now, where there is no fruit, as your roots are conserving energy?  Is your fruit ready or still slowly ripening? 

 

Let this metaphor infuse and inspire your imagination, deepening your faith in these days. Amen