Lent Week One ~ Quotes for the Soul

 

The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.  Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

 

Today is our third day of letting the prophetic, poetic, and powerful words of Pastor Barbara Brown Taylor guide us, teach us, and stretch us on the Lenten journey.  Yesterday, we heard her call us to account on the ways church and state can team up to hurt and harm others.  Today, we listen to the ways the church has its own issues. 

First, read the quote, and notice/name your response.  This reads my mail and makes me squirm.  Of course, I think God agrees with me!  Or as Anne Lamont once said, “Of course, I think my opinion is right!  Otherwise, I would get a new opinion!”  Yet, when I conflate, confuse, and convince myself that God is on my side, I make an idol of my own understanding.  God is beyond my comprehension.  In what ways do we as a church need saving?

 

Second, re-read the quote, this time letting the words/ideas/thoughts expressed above intersect your life.  I pray that every person in our church would take time to ponder prayerfully where we need saving.  As much as I love the algorithm that keeps spoon-feeding me more of the same ideas to keep me clicking, God doesn’t do that.  God’s unconditional and unceasing love finds me where I am, but doesn’t leave me there. 

 

Third, re-read the quote, and sit silently with Rev. Taylor’s wisdom.  Today, may we pray for God’s wisdom to be a light to our church, showing us where we’ve convinced ourselves that we are right while “those” people are wrong.

 

Finally, what might our church try differently because God is not finished with us yet?  How might God be refashioning, reforming, re-storying our church to align with our self-giving, suffering- embracing God?

 

May today’s wisdom work and wiggle and even bring us to the edge of where we feel confident and certain and in control ~ because at the end of our rope is often God’s address.  Amen.

Lent Week One ~ Quotes for the Soul

 

Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware of those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware of those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar.  Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

 

This Lent, we are opening our hearts, minds, and lives to the wisdom of fellow travelers in the Christian faith.  Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus who encounter Jesus, this Lent we are listening to fellow pilgrims who go beside, before, and have traveled this road to Calvary and the empty tomb a few times in the past.  Like a trail guide, these quotes have beautiful suggestions to teach and tell us.  This week, we are letting the wisdom of Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor be a light to our path.  Each day when I offer a quote, I invite you to a four-step process:

 

First, read the quote above, and notice/name your response.  Let it tickle your imagination, let it roam around your heart, let the words stumble around your soul.  Pay attention to your response to the quote.  Does the quote make you smile or feel like sandpaper to your soul?  Does the quote evoke or provoke a passionate reaction, or taste like bland bread without any salt?  Sit with the quote over a cup of tea/coffee for a few minutes.

 

Second, re-read the quote, this time letting the ideas and insights intersect your life.  For example, with the quote above, I feel chills down my spine.  I sense the hard, harsh truth of Taylor’s words ~ law and order allied with religion as a toxic, nauseous liquor that too often the church still gets addicted.  This Lent, we are offering a series of discussions on Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited (March 11 and 25 at 3 p.m.), where he offers a voice of caution to blending and bringing together of church and state.  When the line between faith and political power becomes blurred, that has historically been oppressive, hurtful, and harmful.  Yet, we keep returning to this recipe as if it is ordained by God.  Remember, in the Hebrew Scriptures, God never wanted to give the people a king.  God resisted until our human stubbornness and stiff-neckedness demanded we knew better than God.  And God is still rubbing her forehead in response.  Let this quote disrupt you and connect to a few weeks ago when Paul said to the Corinthians that we never, never can “understand all mysteries”.  We don’t know what we don’t know.

 

Third, re-read the quote, and sit silently with the wisdom, letting it stir and swirl within you.  This is your chance to quiet your mind and let these words work on you, rearrange the furniture of your mind, and even cause you to be agitated and antsy in beautiful ways. 

 

Finally, consider the quote: how might the world of these words inform and inspire your living today and this week?

 

May you and I find ways to let God’s peace and presence open our hearts from the demands and decrees of Caesar today.  Amen.

Lent Week One ~ Quotes for the Soul

 

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.  Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

 

During the season of Lent, I want us to lean in and listen to the wisdom of preachers who continue to inspire, inform, challenge, and change me.  This week, we will meditate and ruminate and let the wisdom of Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor sing to our souls.  Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest who served congregations in GA until she was called to join the faculty of Piedmont College (a UCC-founded college).  Over the course of her teaching, she has written numerous books, spoken at hundreds of conferences, but her favorite gig (according to her website) is being a full-time caretaker of a farm in the foothills of the Appalachians, where she lives with her husband, Ed, and many animals. 

 

Each day, when I offer a quote from Rev. Taylor, I invite you to engage in sacred reading.  Take a deep breath with me and slowly exhale. 

 

First, read the quote above, and notice/name your response.  Let it tickle your imagination, let it roam around your heart, let the syllables of the sentences stumble around your soul.  Pay attention to your response to the quote.  Does the quote make you smile or feel like sandpaper to your soul?  Does the quote evoke or provoke a passionate reaction, or taste like bland bread without any salt?  Sit with the quote over a cup of tea/coffee for a few minutes.

 

Second, re-read the quote, this time letting the intent of the words intersect your life.  For example, with the quote above, think about the other featherless bipeds you interacted with last week.  Did you try to use, change, fix, help, save, convince, or control?  I know I did.  How might someone that I meet today free me from the prison of myself?  What does that look like?  Pro tip: You may want to imagine a friend freeing you from the prison of yourself first, because immediately jumping to that person who makes your blood boil.  Just a thought.

 

Third, re-read the quote, and sit silently with the wisdom without trying to wrestle a meaning or a blessing.  As Rabbi Heschel once said, “Words create worlds.”  Enter the world of this quote with a curiosity and an openness that shape you.

 

Finally, consider how the world of these words could inform and inspire your living today and this week?  Try to set a practice to embrace and embody these words at a specific time and place today.

 

May the wisdom of fellow travelers on the road of faith give us strength during this season of Lent and during these wilderness-wander wayless way days.  Amen.  

Fast...Feast

 

Blessing

 

On this second day of Lent, how is it with your soul?  Honestly.  Are you sensing the sacred stirring, or does the Divine feel distant/disconnected?  Do you feel grounded or awash in a sea of negative news cycle?  Does your back ache and soul break from all you are carrying?  Let me offer a blessing to you on this day:

 

Blessed are you who are weary from racing around trying to do it all.

Blessed are you who feel worn down by trying to show up at all the events.

Blessed are you when you fall into bed at night, exhausted and wake up the next morning feeling behind.

Blessed are you when you yell, “Stop” to the planet, to the schedule demands, to trying to save the world, because you realize your cape has too many holes to support you when you fly.

Blessed are you when you sit in silence and pray, “Help”. 

Help us, O God, this Lent to find a gentleness with ourselves.  Help us remember that this is the first time I have been this age at this point in history, facing these events.  Who says I should be further along?  And further than what?!?  What is the measuring stick?

Help me, O God, remember this yoke isn’t mine alone.  You, O God, are a dancing Trinity of relationship, and You create/craft/carve into us a craving for connection.

Help us remember that our soul finds rest when we let go of outcomes.

Thank you for the friend who calls or I can text today.

Thank you for a burden I can set down today, trusting God, You can carry this.

Thank you for this earthy body that is trying to tell me that You don’t demand more, but for me to be/rest/reside in belovedness.

Let Your wisdom guide me, O God, as I face this day and interact with other featherless bipeds who are also carrying their backpacks that I know nothing about.

May Your holy yoke today be a support I need to face the unknow-ness of this moment.  Amen.

Dust

 

I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  Matthew 11:29

 

On this day, ashes are placed on your forehead.  Words are spoken over you, “From dust you are, to dust you shall return.”  As a death-denying culture, we don’t want to think about our death and demise.  We don’t want to consider the fact of our frail, fragile, finite lives will one day cease.  We will live forever with cold plunges and Keto diets and whatever else the market sells us to promise us our best life now. 

 

The church doesn’t do that.  “From dust you are, to dust you shall return.”  You, me, and we were crafted from the soil and stardust of creation.  We are earthlings, dust-beings, connecting the soil to our souls to the soil beneath our feet.  Up from the ground God raises a people again and again ~ connecting us in creative ways (see yesterday’s meditation about the yoke).  And one day, we return to the good earth that has nourished us so that we might nourish others.  We return to that which has supported us, so that we might support those who trudge this earth after. 

 

When Jesus says he is humble, the word is humility or humus or earth.  When theologian Steve Cuss invites us to be “human-size,” it reminds me that I don’t have to have it all figured out.  I won’t ever have it all figured out.  I don’t need an opinion on everything that is neatly arranged and artistically presented.  I, like the earth, am in process/evolving/exploring.  The earth has billions of organisms living in a teaspoon of soil.   The earth is constantly shifting and stirring, changing right before our eyes.

 

The word, gentle reminds me that I can either hurt and harm or help and heal.  Jesus’ yoke doesn’t demand and decree, like Caesar, but invites us to be infused with another realm.  God’s realm, that we pray for every Sunday and sing about in the Lord’s Prayer during Lent, calls us to reorient our hearts and lives to the One who is gentle and humble.  If this is the center and core of Jesus’ teaching, if this is the yoke we are called to take up with Christ helping and holding us, how might that shape you in the coming days?  May that question bless you as we move deeper into these forty days letting Christ be at the heart of all we seek to be, do, and live in these days.  Amen.

What Are You Yoked To??

 

²⁸ “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰ For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Matthew 11:28-30

 

Yesterday, we prayerfully pondered, what are we carrying that we need to set down?  Often, I carry the thought that I need to be all things to all people (even though my defense attorney correctly points out that this is impossible!  I still think, but maybe I should still try, just in case).  I can carry people's words that feel like a thousand paper cuts to my soul.  I carry responsibility and accountability around because I think someone must do this!  I carry around the idea that it is all up to me, even though God’s presence in my life reminds me that I am not in charge or control of the world.  I hope you will consider what you are carrying as we reach the midpoint of the second month of 2026.  This is never a one-and-done activity, but a daily practice of paying attention to the backpacks we all lug around with us and that people add stuff into, often without asking permission first.

 

Jesus says that he will give us a “yoke”.  This is one of those wonderful images in scripture.  A yoke was a tactile, tangible tool ~ a wooden beam that sometimes connected oxen or other animals to work together when pulling a load.  Pause.  Notice that a yoke is NOT a tool for you to go solo through life.  Theologically, Jesus is saying, there is no such thing as an individual Christian.  A yoke connects you to God, people who long to lend a hand, and the fact that we are not alone.  A yoke can also be something that binds, confines, and burdens us.  Oxen didn’t get to vote whether or not they wanted to wear a yoke.  In this meaning, a yoke wasn’t only something that helped, but also hindered.  Sometimes people plop their problems into our lap and expect us to fix it, after all, aren’t Christians supposed to be known by their love?  Paul in Galatians 5 talked about a yoke of slavery.  We can become enslaved to political ideology, religious beliefs, our own biases, addictions to substances, shopping, or technology. 

 

One final meaning of a yoke was a religious teaching.  In this case, a rabbi or pastor would give you an understanding, and to follow/live this understanding meant you took upon yourself the rabbi’s yoke.  Still to this day, some pastors' teachings are heavy.  You must color inside their lines, affirm that set of dogma they espouse, do whatever the elders say or risk being exiled from the island of that church.  Jesus describes his yoke as a release from what is weighing us down.  Church isn’t the place for more messages about not being enough, but about being beloved.  Church isn’t the place for more “thou shall nots”, but could be a space of releasing our resistance and reluctance.   And because the church is made up of people (remember we started the year with 1 Corinthians 13, the church that was fighting about everything!), we will always need to be honest about the fact that we make mistakes and mess up.  We don’t have to carry our brokenness and boneheadedness alone.  Jesus invites us to bring that to him.

 

What has the church taught you that felt heavy?

When has the church offered you the chance to set down that which was breaking your back to keep lugging around?

Is there some understanding, belief, doctrine, dogma that is hurting you that God might be calling you to set aside this Lent ~ knowing that you can always pick it up again later if needed.

 

May these questions cause you to consider ways you can enter Lent this year open to Jesus’ care and love for you.  Amen.