Exploring Our Prodigal-ness Part 4

 

This week, we are beginning to enter and explore the Parable of the Prodigal-ness that is our life.  We have drawn our family trees with those who share our DNA and friends who know us better than we know ourselves.  We have reflected on the fact that there are lost years in between verses 11 and 12 that we are more than glad to fill in with our own assumptions.  And then, we land on verse 13 ~ “Not long after (the younger son received his share of the inheritance), he got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.” 

My internal Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg immediately loves to say, “Guilty as charged!  Book ‘em Dano!”  My internal prosecutor cries out, “What more evidence do we need?  Kids today are so entitled…not like when I was younger and had to walk to school in the snow uphill both ways.”  And you probably already know that I am going to say that these conclusions say more about us than they do about the point Jesus was trying to make.  Maybe you wanted to travel the world or go away to school but stayed close to home to care for mom and dad.  Maybe you know that deep down we have all squandered parts of our lives, we have all made boneheaded decisions that we regret, we have all had moments of letting our hair down and praying that no one finds out.  When has the younger son been your story?  When did you do something that you wish you had not done?  Daniel Pink in his book, “The Power of Regret” defines and describes four kinds of things that happen in our life, where our story shares the younger son’s story.  Those are:

Foundational regrets around education, finance, and health.  Times we have overspent and under saved.  When we didn’t live up to our hopes or pursue an educational opportunity.  Or have sought solace in the drive thru of our favorite fast food restaurant.  Second, there are moral regrets where we took the low road, did something we are not proud of, or compromised on our values.  Third are connections regrets when we failed to honor the people who matter.  Or we lost touch with friends or family.  These are relationships that have frayed or fizzled or faded and we long to rekindle.  Finally, there are boldness regrets that we didn’t dare to dive into an opportunity when the door was opened to us.  Do you start to sense where your story might connect to the younger son’s story here?  Does one of those regrets leap off the page/screen to a place in your soul you usually don’t talk about?  I pray this day, we might not hold the younger son at a distance or judge him as being less-than, but open our hearts to see the beautiful wandering off we have all done ~ physically, emotionally, and spiritually in our lives.  Amen.

Exploring Our Prodigal-ness Part 3

 

Yesterday, I invited you to ponder prayerfully your relationships with family and friends who are like family.  The person who knows the ‘you’ you hide away.  The person you are estranged or cut off from.  The people who love you and the ones who wounded you.  And in-between the words, “A man had two sons…” and “the younger one said, ‘Father, give me my share of the inheritance’”…there is a history wider than the Grand Canyon.  We don’t know the age difference between the older and younger.  We don’t know what their childhood was like or how many fights they had or their personalities.  We don’t know where their mother is.  We don’t know why the younger one asks for his inheritance.  I have barely scratched the surface of what we don’t know.  We could keep making a list of all the ways our minds fill in the backstory with assumption after assumption after assumption.  Our minds want to create linear logical narratives, we do this in the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and we do this when we meet someone else.  Krista Tippett once said, “We see others as monolithic and ourselves as complex.”  Wait, go back to that quote.  We love to make others fit in neat and tidy boxes, we compartmentalize and categorize and confine others, while saying about ourselves, “I don’t fit in boxes.”

This is not to judge the ways our minds fill in the blanks the size of the United States that Jesus leaves open in this story.  But rather to be curious about the assumptions we make.  Why do I see the younger son as ungrateful?  Is there something about my story that fills in that blank?  Or why do I cheer him on to go beyond the horizon of the farm to wander the wide world, because maybe you have felt confined to people please and be the rock of your family.  Why do I shake my head at the mothering-father being so indulgent of the younger son, because maybe I wonder if I have been too lax or messed up with my own children.  Why do I see the older son shedding a tear on the outside and smiling on the inside when his brother packs up his belongings and sets out on his own?  The more we pause to name and notice the assumptions we bring to this story, the more we let this parable interrupt and disrupt the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.  Between verse 11 and 12, there is a whole history that we know nothing about, how do you fill in that blank of missing years?  What might that say about each of us?  May those questions invite holy reflection and investigation into the stories that shape us and saturate our lives.  Amen.

Exploring Our Prodigal-ness Part 2

 

The Parable of Prodigal-ness begins with the words, “A man had two sons…”  Remember in Jesus’ day that story was as old as time and a song as old as rhyme.  Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel.  Abraham had two sons (Ishmael and Isaac).  Isaac had two sons (Esau and Jacob).  Jacob…well he took the ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ to heart and had twelve sons.  We start to see that Jesus is picking up a thread and theme that has been woven throughout scripture.  He is calling people back to the truths of Genesis and our own beginnings.

“A man had two sons…” evokes and provokes connections to our own family.

Do you have siblings?  Do you have friends you’ve adopted as brothers or sisters?  Some families we choose and others we are born into.  I have one older brother, and our relationship is good.  But I know this is not the story of every person reading this morning meditation.  For some the ties that bind us through our DNA feel constraining and restraining.  For some our family has hurt and harmed us leaving woundedness that we are not sure will ever heal.  For some, we feel like we have been prodigal ~ lavish and outlandish and even wasteful ~ in trying to share love and support with our family and don’t feel appreciated/accepted.  For still others we may have insight into why the younger son wandered away, because he may have felt pushed out or unwelcome.  Maybe the older and younger brother had a relationship like Esau and Jacob ~ constantly wrestling emotionally and physically ~ and the younger brother thought, “I’m outta here!” (Jacob himself runs away after stealing Esau’s birthright blessing ~ perhaps there is an echo of Jacob’s story in the Prodigal Son). Sometimes we both wander away and other times we are nudged to go.  Sometimes we can wander away emotionally and never leave physically (this is the older son’s story).  We can live in proximity, geographically close, to family, but emotionally we are residing on Pluto! 

Today, I want you to write down the members of your family, try to use the most expansive and elastic definition.  Feel free to list people you share a roof with and those you’ve connected your heart with.  Family can be friends who have become as close as siblings or mentors who are like mothering-fathers to us.  Prayerfully ponder each relationship with each person.  If you would like to include parents or siblings or relatives who are in God’s eternal embrace, you are welcome.  You may want to put that great cloud of witnesses together at the top of the page.  To be sure, even when someone dies that relationship lives in us.  We carry the good, the bad, the ugly, the unresolved, unsaid, romanticized, idealized relationships with us, even when someone is no longer in our life.  There is also ambiguous grief that can happen with a divorce or when you get cut off in a relationship with someone who lives five states away.  Even though both people are still walking this earth, they don’t speak or acknowledge each other.  Our relationships are complex and complicated and contradictory.  And Jesus this morning steps right into this provoking and evoking the childhood/adolescent self who still lives in our soul, to wake us up.  Jesus opening words blows the dust off the cardboard boxes of emotional baggage we’ve tried to hide away in the cobwebbed corners of our soul.  Let Jesus into that space and sing to our beautiful, broken, human-size relationships this day.

Exploring Our Prodigal-ness Part 1

 

For the last three weeks we have let the Parable of Loving Kindness/Good Samaritan guide us as we entered the season of Lent.  We have pondered how to adapt/adopt the gaze of God (rather than the glare, glance, gnawing way of the seeing).  We have pondered how God’s gaze sings and settles into our soul.  We turn now to Luke’s other famous parable, The Prodigal Family.  Remember since Jesus didn’t title his parable, translators and scholarly committees did later, we can feel free to find ways that describe and define the story we are hearing.  In fact, each time we hear a parable we could try to re-title it to name and claim where the parable is meeting us, challenging us, stretching us ~ because if we think we have a parable “figured out” we need to go back and re-read!

That is certainly true of the Prodigal Family (Luke 15:11-24).  Wait, you may think, my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Lord (by the way, my third grade teacher was actually named Mrs. Lord!), always called it the Prodigal Son to describe and define that ingrateful brat of the younger son who wanders away selfishly, while the dutiful and diligent older son works his fingers to the bone “slaving” away on the farm whilst singing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows my sorrow”.  Insert breath here after reading that sentence.  The word prodigal means, “lavish, outlandish, and even wasteful.”  Given that definition, I would say the whole family ~ both sons and the mothering father ~ all fit somewhere in that definition.  The younger son goes out and spends his share of the inheritance in ways that are lavish and wasteful.  And then, when he comes to his senses, he heads home with a prepared speech.  Note whether you think the speech is genuine or sincere or authentic, can be a mirror a truth to your own soul.  Ask yourself why you see it that way?  Chances are there is someone, a family member or friend who tricked or deceived you with false humility or humble mumble that you felt duped and vowed to always keep your shields up and engaged. 

The mothering father is lavish and outlandish and wasteful because he runs to his wayward son.  Men in Jesus day did not run!  He hugs and embraces his son.  Men in Jesus day did not show public displays of affection.  He puts a robe and ring and sandals on his son ~ who just lost a portion of the family money ~ some scholars suggest that than likely what the younger son received was the father’s own robe and ring and sandals!  Then, if that wasn’t outlandish and wasteful enough…he goes and kills the fatted calf, hires a DJ, and throws the best party ever!!  And if I still haven’t convinced of the prodigal-ness of the mothering-father, he goes out to his other older son who is fuming and flushed faced with anger outside the back porch door ~ the older son who is mumbling and muttering to himself and you can see the steam rising off his head.  The mothering-father goes out to him too and says, “All that I have is yours!”  The mothering-father has given away his life to his sons in lavish and outlandish ~ and given the ways both sons treat him is wasteful of such a relationship!

And the older son is prodigal in that he wastes the goodness of the mothering-father’s love.  He is so stuck in scarcity that he cannot see his own blessedness.  He is too busy glaring and gnawing on what others (particularly his brother) have, he doesn’t gaze on his own life.  This was before there was social media to compare and compete our lives with thousands of other people!  I invite you today to hold the word, “prodigal” as an invitation, a doorway, into God’s unconditional and unceasing grace.  We don’t “earn” God’s love, as the older son believes.  God’s grace is not some prize for our busyness and necessary-ness.  We can’t speechify our way into God’s heart with pious petitions that we’ve prepared.  Grace is given freely…or with a prodigal-ness that we may never comprehend or control but can accept.  May this truth rummage and roam around your life this week.  Amen.

Friday Prayer

 

Loving God, Your ways are not our ways.  Your presence perplexes us.  What are humans that You are mindful and love us?  It doesn’t make sense, God.  And sometimes I can intellectually know Your love but close/lock the door of my heart to experiencing Your love or expressing Your love to someone else, because in the algebraic equation of my mind that other person doesn’t deserve it.  I pass by so many people physically and emotionally and digitally ~ we swim in a sea of humanity and so many people cry out from the ditches of life.  Our compassion can malfunction, and cynicism can roar to life, O God.  Help us.  Return us to the beautiful simplicity of the parable that calls us to love ~ not perfectly and maybe not in ways that will be recorded in some gospel ~ after all we don’t even know the Good Samaritan’s name!!  Perhaps we don’t need to have our name be remembered centuries from now.  Perhaps we don’t have to leave a digital footprint that will attract millions of likes and fill areas of adoring fans.  Perhaps what we need is to receive Your love, to hear anew and afresh Your truth that our first, middle, and last name is “Beloved”, and to let that truth loose in our lives in beautifully imperfect ways.  May this prayer make a difference to one person or tree or butterfly or snail or neighbor today.  May it be for days to come, O Love that will not let any of us go.  Amen.  

Life Long Process

 

The last few days we have done a deep dive into the invitation to love God with our full selves and our neighbor with loving kindness.  I have invited you to experiment in the laboratory of your life, even when the chemical reaction of relationships goes up like baking soda and vinegar you mixed for your sixth-grade science project in your paper mâché volcano.  Today, I want to turn toward our neighbors, the people who might live physically next to you or the ones you sit next to in the pew on Sunday mornings or the ones you interact with weekly or monthly or the ones you see when you volunteer or now the ones we connect with digitally.  As humans one of our needs is connection.  To be sure, some feel this need more acutely and deeply.  Some desire relationships like oxygen.  Others prefer the company of people in the form of words and ideas in books.  Others prefer being in proximity to others.  The current surgeon general of the United States says that loneliness is an epidemic.  After the COVID virus snaped a thread in the social fabric of trust, we know can feel our hearts race when someone sneezes or coughs.  Our amygdala is constantly on high alert, scanning the landscape for any sign telling us to be afraid.  And the gospels of the world (from politics to religion to media) are all too glad to show you all sorts of people to fear.  We love “othering” those people, because just look at them breathing ~ inhaling and exhaling like they deserve the same oxygen you do.  Who do they think they are!  No wonder this passage about love sounds like a fairy tale.  No wonder this passage about loving God and neighbor sounds like good advice we will never put into practice.  No wonder G.K. Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal (or way) has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult; and left untried.”  No wonder people walk away from the church when we struggle to live this way with each other inside the walls of the church, not to mention outside.  The story of the Good Samaritan is a gospel within the gospel because it will take us a lifetime to explore and experiment.  We will go out full of vim and vigor to show love at that meeting today, only to have that person say something or stand in the way of our good idea or just be a jerk to us, causing us to throw in the towel.  How might the church, like a good 12-step program, be a safe space to show our human size-ness?  How can we show up and tell each other that I struggle to love that family member right now who isn’t talking to me?  How can we create spaces and places where our confessions are not just printed in the bulletin but are expressions from our heart?  I don’t have answers to all these questions, but I am so grateful that this parable provokes and evokes more than just one moral lesson to apply to your life.  Three weeks we have held this passage close ~ and we could do so for the rest of your life, because like a flowing stream that is never the same when you step into it, so too with this story it keeps changing because you bring your evolving and expanding life to the words.  May all that is swirling and stirring within you, continue to percolate and ponder as the Good Samaritan and Loving Kindness sings to our souls in these Lenten days.  Amen.

More than a brain with legs

 

Yesterday, I invited you to practice paying attention and setting your intention toward being open to and receiving God’s love.  How did that go?  Seriously.  Some of you are thinking, wait that was an actual assignment?  Can you give homework in mediations?  If all we do is think about love or stay too much in our heads contemplating love, we might get cut off from experiencing love.  You are more than a brain with legs.  Yes, your mind matters.  Yes, your intellect is important…but so is your heart, hands, and feet.  In the West, since the Enlightenment, we tend to over-emphasize our mind.  If we just think about it or dream it, we can do it.  The formula for success is ~ think it plus do it plus will power equals fame and fortune.  But life is messier than that.  You have emotions and soul and relationships and societal forces that all get thrown into the stew of your life.  To be love, we are invited to explore and experience love with our full self.  To put on a white laboratory coat this Lent and experiment with the mystery of your life.  What does loving God fully mean for you ~ intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, in your flesh and breath life?  This is not a one and done question, but one we must return to time and time again.  Just because we have the “right” answer doesn’t mean it will make a difference right away and forever and ever.  Knowing and doing are two different actions in our life.  The lawyer gives the right answer.  You can memorize this short verse of scripture and it can get caged in the cognitive cobwebs of your mind never to see the light of day in your words or actions or presence.  To come back to this verse about loving God and neighbor every day and set your attention and intention on how/who/when and where you pray for strength of the spirit to embody these words in your human size self (which is to say, I won’t do it perfectly, but in my beautifully imperfect way with God’s grace something sacred might stir).  Let loose these words from your head to heart to hands and feet this day.  May God’s love fill you to the brim of your soul to overflow to others.  Amen.

Practicing Love

 

This week, we are focusing our intentions and attention on how to love God fully and let that love loose to those we encounter on our path of life ~ also known as our neighbors.  We are able to love, because we have first received love from God.  This was the truth at Christmas.  God’s love could no longer be confined or contained but came to us in the flesh and form of Jesus.  God’s love found a home in a manger (an animal’s feeding trough).  God’s love matured as Jesus grew in wisdom and in years (Luke 2:52).  Then, God’s love burst forth in the preaching, teaching, healing, and presence of Jesus as he wandered from community to community.  Note, this was not all pony rides and chocolate rivers for Jesus.  Everyone didn’t break out in songs and dance like in my favorite musicals.  Nope.  People got angry with Jesus.  Misunderstood Jesus.  Threated Jesus.  Eventually falsely accused him to get rid of him and his persist insistence that God is God, not Ceasar.  The gospel of Jesus confronts and challenges the gospels of domination and revenge and scapegoating ~ exposing these other “gospels” as false and that they will never lead us to full life.  And yet, the gospels of us verse them, might makes right, and if you are not with us, you must be my enemy still swirl and stir, especially in an election year.  Two thousand years of knowing the truth of loving God and neighbor, yet we still resist this way because we can’t take our eyes off the imaginary scoreboard of life ~ especially because we keep doom scrolling social media. 

 

Yet, to love God, we must marinate in God’s love.  As John Mark Comer says, you are constantly being formed by something.  Is it the news?  Is it the political landscape?  Is it your bank account or golf score or likes from friends on your recent post?  Is it God?  There have always been many gospels swirling and stirring in the air, both in Jesus’ day and in ours still today.  To focus our attention and intention on God will take effort and energy in following the way of Jesus.  Just as I can’t go out and run an entire marathon without weeks of practice, why do I think I can just flip a switch and start loving my enemies because I read a morning meditation?  Just as I can get physically injured if I run too fast or too far, so too I can get emotionally and spiritually injured by trying to love people ~ because people are messy (or like onions according to Shrek!).  We are complicated and contradictory mix of messiness and dustiness as we heard on Ash Wednesday.  True for me, you, and that person who doesn’t pick up their dog deposits from your front lawn…how rude!  If we don’t know ourselves fully, how can we claim to know another?  If we don’t love ourselves fully (which honestly, we tend to default to the factory setting of letting our inner critic have the last word rather than our inner ally), how in the world can we love another fully?  You can encounter God’s love in so many ways, there are so many paths of being formed and reformed by God’s love.  It starts with acknowledging where you feel most alive ~ where every fiber of your being tingles with enthusiasm (which literally means in theos or in God).  It might be sitting outside in the sun and feeling the wind.  It might be splashing in the Gulf waters remembering your baptism.  It might be music.  It might be good food with friends.  It might be silent prayer.  It might be reading.  It might be…fill in the blank here.  Now, go and find space in your life to be fully alive in ways that connect you to the Creator who longs to pour love into your life on this day.  Amen.

Embodying Love

 

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27).

As we have held the parable of the Good Samaritan/Loving Kindness close to our hearts over the last two weeks, I pray you have discovered new nooks and crannies in this passage.  I pray you have found yourself pondering new titles for the parable.  Most of all, I pray you have found your life in this passage ~ for it is a gospel within a gospel ~ it is a summary of how we can embrace and embody God’s grace that is poured into our lives every single morning and with every single breath. 

Breathe in God’s grace for you this morning, breathe out the prayers that whip and whirl like the wind during a storm in your soul.

Breathe in God’s grace for you this morning, breathe out prayers for how you might find ways to practice the wisdom of the Good Samaritan ~ try to name a specific meeting or moment ~ person or place ~ when that might happen today. 

Before we leave this passage, I want to focus on the “correct” answer the lawyer gave to Jesus.  Remember, the lawyer had asked about full life ~ authentic life ~ thriving and meaningful life.  Eternal meant now.  Eternal meant residing and resting in the God’s realm before we breathe our last breath.  Eternal is being opened to God’s presence that is woven into everything and everyone all around, but we are too busy glancing or glaring or gnawing (see Morning Meditation from the week of February 4).  This parable invites us to gaze at what God is up to in our lives.  The lawyer’s question was about life ~ which is always our most basic question.  We are all longing to find the fullness and holiness of life.  And Jesus, as Jesus is oft to do, asked a question in response to the question.  How do you read, what do you think?  Jesus is inviting the lawyer to listen to his life, heart, and soul.

Pause and be in the prayer posture of gazing.  Slowing down long enough to listen to the rhythmic beating of your own heart and stirrings of your soul, because God shows up in our own lives. 

The lawyer responses by quoting two passages of the law.  The part about loving God from the top of your head to your pinkie toes comes from Leviticus 19:18 (who knew there were good verses in Leviticus of all places ~ the Bible is endlessly fascinating!!).  And the second part is from Deuteronomy 6:5.  The shorthand summary of the lawyer’s answer is love God, love others as you love yourself.  Full stop.  Love here is more than an intellectual ascent or re-arranging our cognitive furniture to a feng shui way of inner peace.  Love is work.  Love is fragile like Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall.  Love is resilient and will pick up the brokenness like a glass that has shattered into a thousand sharp pieces.  Love can become complacent, contradictory, and grow cobwebs like a muscle that atrophies.  Love can have a strong back and soft front ~ I can share my voice and be open to another’s voice too.  Love is so much more than words can ever describe or define.  Love lives in your body.  Today, I invite you to draw a stick figure.  This doesn’t have to be a Van Gogh level masterpiece, the more rudimentary, the better.  Next to the head write down definitions of the word, “love.”  Next to the ears write words someone said to you recently about love.  Next to the mouth write words you said to someone expressing your love.  Next to the nose write words about the aroma of love (stretch yourself beyond “chocolate-scented”!).  Next to the heart write a moment when you felt the warmth of love wrap around you.  Next to the hands write when you shared loved with another through your actions.  Next to the feet write people who are accompanying you on the journey of life.  I pray this might begin to give voice to the multitude of the ways love is experienced and expressed in real ways in our lives in these February days.  With God’s love to you.  Amen.

Friday Prayer

 

Storytelling God, thank you for narratives that open worlds to us and open the stories we tell ourselves like a mirror reflecting back who we are.  We all long for a full life in this beautiful and broken world.  We all long to live in the eternal now of this moment, but sometimes the heart break and soul ache pushes us into the ditch where we cannot help ourselves.  We have moments when our bootstraps that we are supposed to pull on have snapped or we don’t even have boots in the first place.  We all have moments when we have stood silently as spectators on the sidelines because there is so much that clamors for our attention and energy and says we are not doing enough.  Help us, God, because on the journey of life there are so many pains and people we encounter that we don’t always know what to do or how to help.  And help us, O God, realize that we are also the ones who need healing and help, which is a narrative most of us prefer to distance and disconnect ourselves from telling.  God of loving kindness that poured into the cup called, “life”, meet us this day in our life.  God of healing meet us in our woundedness.  God of people who help and those who pass by for reasons we may never know help open us from glaring to gazing.  God of messy stories that don’t just have one moral fairy tale message that we can put in our pocket and apply to our lives.  Thank you, O God, for words of wisdom that we need now more than ever.  Let the parable of our humanness and helpfulness and brokenness continue to speak and sing to the script of our life this day and this season of Lent.  Amen. 

 

Fun trivia fact from the Salt Project: February 16 is also the day in 600 that Pope Gregory, the story goes, recommended “God bless you” as the appropriate response to a sneeze. The plague was at its height in Europe, and the idea was that the blessing would help protect the sneezing person from sickness and death. As the plague spread, so did the custom.  May your life be a blessing as you sense God’s presence blessing and overflowing your cup today.

Parable of Loving Kindness

 

Before we leave behind the Parable of Full and Authentic Life (aka ~ the Good Samaritan but since Jesus didn’t title it that way, neither do we have to accept or adopt that as the only title), I want to focus on the beloved in the ditch.  We live today in a world that has left too many bruised, battered, and on the fringe and fray.  We know that too many people are hurt by systemic racism, trapped in generational poverty because cost of living is too high, legislation continues to tell people who they can love and how they can identify.  I know that each person reading these words has pain that is unprocessed and grief that is shoved into the cobwebbed corners of your soul in cardboard boxes layered with dust (note the image from Ash Wednesday that there is dust and stardust in you).  And yet when someone asks us how we are doing, we quickly say, “Fine”.  Because we are not sure we can say truly or fully are we are doing.  Or better yet we say, “Busy”, because everyone loves to be needed and necessary.

 

But I know I am in the ditch of life.  I know that I sit by a pool of my own tears.  I know that there is a woundedness that needs more than good advice.  I need gospel medicine that tells me a different story.  I need to hear that sometimes the one who can provide a balm in the Gilead of my soul will be the least likely person, even my enemy.  Gulp and Zoinks…that doesn’t sound like something we want to accept.  If you hold the Parable of Loving Kindness close to your ear and heart you might hear the man in the ditch trying to get the attention of the religious folk.  Who is trying to get our attention today but because of compassion fatigue or busyness or our own dusty brokenness we can’t hear or don’t want to help?  Maybe the man in the ditch is afraid with the Samaritan stops.  I don’t know if the man was conscious (literally or figuratively) of who was helping him!  We don’t know if there was ever a reunion that could be featured on the nightly news where the two met up again to share life.  There is so much in this parable that tells us not just a different story but gives us a different script then we were taught in school.  And it is a script that will frustrate and flummox us, because we know our friends and family may not understand.  While the world continues to pass by, we are called to tend those who cross our path.  While the world justifies their behavior and doubles down on their righteousness, we tend the wounded in ourselves and others (seeking to be what Henri Nouwen called, “Wounded Healers” ~ imperfect as we all are and in our how dusty humanness).  I pray this story doesn’t just sit on the shelf of your soul but starts to rummage and roam around your life creating all kinds of good chaos that faith is about.  May you and I be open to the profound ways that we are both wounded and healers and passers-byers and sometimes silent spectators on the sidelines or color commentators on what others should do and sometimes, by the grace of God, people who have experienced loving kindness and share that force with others.  Amen.

Happy Lent!?!

 

Happy Lent everyone!!  What better way to spend Valentine’s Day than to have your pastor put some ashes from the palms of last Palm Sunday on your forehead (trace the place where the baptismal water of your “Beloved-ness” once evaporated as an eternal claim on your life)?  What romantic words to warm the cockles of your heart than to hear, “From dust you are and to dust you shall return.”  Good lord, I hear you thinking, thanks for this Pastor Eeyore, as you grab your keys to head to the store to get some dark chocolate to take the taste of the Morning Meditation out of your mouth.

 

I get it.  Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday are as different as night and day.  Only that Ash Wednesday is an affirmation that God loves us not in spite of our humanness, but because of it.  God takes on human flesh and form.  I know Lent is often wrapped in a heaping helping of blame and shame and guilt, but that isn’t the only interpretation of this day.  Lent is a season to reflect on our humanness.  The moments our religiosity can cause us like the Priest and Levite to create borders and boundaries to those who are hurting and in the ditches of life.  Lent is a season to honor how we find ways to let loose loving kindness.  Lent is a holy time to also name that we are the one in the ditch needing help and healing from others.  We are all the characters of the Parable of Loving Kindness as the way to life.  We do this through the dust from which God lovingly formed and fashioned you and me.  We are both soil and stardust.  We are both beloved and broken/bruised by the forces of life.  We embody both moments of grace and glaring at others.  We are both reaching out and retreating.  We are messy.  We are beautiful.  We are complicated and contradictory and held by our Creator.  I pray the Parable of Loving Kindness will be an invention to let the words of Jesus lose in your life and be a prayer practice for you and me in the days of Lent.  I pray that we will look at our life seeing when we are wearing the sandals of all the characters in the story of humanity.  I pray God will grant you and guide you through a holy Lent.  With God’s loving kindness to enfold and hold and empower you in these days.  Amen.

Titles Matters

 

We have been playfully and prayerfully pondering the Good Samaritan for the last two weeks.  And it is important to note that Jesus didn’t title his parables.  Wait, you think, what?  Jesus didn’t say to the crowd, “I know present to you the parable I have entitled, the Good Samaritan,” pause for dramatic effect.  Nope, he just launched right into a story and people had to keep up.  There was no color commentary from the disciples that interrupted the flow of the conversation.  They didn’t say to the people, “Everyone, listen up here, Jesus is going to tell us about a parable with a life lesson we can apply to our lives like an ointment…you might want a pen and paper ready.” 

 

Nope.  If you go back and re-read the parable, Luke gives the reader (you and me) a clue that Jesus switched from conversation to story.  But for those who were eavesdropping and observing the conversation between religious lawyer and Jesus, they heard the lawyer’s question about neighborliness and Jesus saying, “There was once a man…”  Now, to be clear, it doesn’t take a MacArthur Genius to realize that an opening like that has shifted to story.  It would be like me saying, “Once upon a time…”  You recognize that familiar opening as the start of a fairy tale, so your mind shifts to story mode without a lot of confusion. 

 

Since Jesus didn’t title his parables, who did?  Scholars and Biblical translators added these later.  Now, before we jump to conclusions about conspiracies, let’s take a breath and give ourselves permission to re-title the parables.

 

Wait, you think, can I do this?   Yes, yes you can.  As a matter of fact, it is a wonderful way for you to be aware of how you are reading.  Maybe this is a Parable about the Ditches of Life that we all fall into.  Maybe this is the Parable of Good Intentions Unacted Upon that are part of all our stories.  Perhaps this is a Parable of a Guy Just Trying to do what he can.  Afterall, I don’t think the Samaritan was thinking, “Boy, people are going to know my name centuries from now.  I will trend on Twitter and in Morning Meditations.”  Most of our acts of loving kindness go unrecognized and unrealized.  The nightly news doesn’t show up at my house with a reporter saying, “Breaking news, Sally, a pastor in Sarasota just cheered up his college-aged son and is spending time with his wife.”  Titles matter.  And, and, they also can cause us to read a story in a certain way, they give us a lens of interpretation that can color how we see/read/understand the words.  So, play with the titles of this parable today.  Jesus said it was okay…after all he didn’t title it!  May the words of this Parable of Loving Kindness as the way to full life provoke and evoke how you live your life today.  Amen.

Good Samaritan Week 2

 

Last week we explored and examined the 4 Gs of life (glance, glare, gawk, and glaze) as each word relates to the narrative of the Good Samaritan.  We let these words be a framework for how we read this powerful and profound parable.  You may want to return to the words of glance, glare, gawk, and gaze as you move about your days.  This week we are going to stick and stay with the Parable of the Good Samaritan because there is so much in this story that can sing to our faith these days.  In some ways, it is a Gospel with the Gospel, a summary of who Jesus is and what he is about.   This morning we will slowly savor this story.  My prayer is that each of us will awaken to and aware of which words/phrases leap off the page and land in your soul.  What questions and insights are provoked and evoked by these words:

 

Just then a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life/find meaning/purpose/passion/joy in this life?”

(Pause ~ what questions do you have for Jesus today?)

 

He answered, “What’s written in God’s Law? How do you interpret it?”

(Pause ~ how are you reading the garden of your life today?  How are you reading others is it with a gaze, gawk, glare, or gaze that we pondered last week?)

 

He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself.”

(Pause ~ how might you embrace and embody these words this day, this week?)

 

“Good answer!” said Jesus. “Do it and you’ll live.”

(Note ~ Jesus is clear here how to live life to its fullest!  Do we trust Jesus?  Does it seem too simple to love God from the top of our head to our pinkie toe ~ then let that love loose in the world?  Does the cynic who lives inside us want to sarcastically say, “Yeah that will work in an election year!”  Name the responses you have to this first part of the parable)

 

Looking for a loophole and to prove himself, the scholars/lawyer/fellow featherless biped asked, “And just how would you define ‘neighbor’?”

(Pause ~ name your neighbors next door, name the people you sit in the pew next to in worship, name those life is connected to the circle of your life.)

 

 Jesus answered by telling a story. “There was once a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the way he was attacked by robbers. They took his clothes, beat him up, and went off leaving him half-dead. Luckily, a priest was on his way down the same road, but when he saw him he angled across to the other side. Then a Levite religious man showed up; he also avoided the injured man.

(Pause ~ when have you found yourself in the ditch of life and witnessed others pass by?)

 

“A Samaritan/one of those people/our enemy who makes our flesh creep and crawl who we “other” traveling the road came on him. When he saw the man’s condition, his heart went out to him. He gave him first aid, disinfecting and bandaging his wounds. Then he lifted him onto his donkey, led him to an inn, and made him comfortable. In the morning he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take good care of him. If it costs any more, put it on my bill—I’ll pay you on my way back.’

(Pause ~ let this climax of the parable disrupt the cultural scripts where we “other” people.  The ways we see others as monolithic and ourselves as complex).

 

“What do you think? Which of the three became a neighbor to the man attacked by robbers?” “The one who treated him kindly,” the religion scholar responded. Jesus said, “Go and do the same.”

(Note ~ the lawyer couldn’t even say the word, “Samaritan”.  When I hold the Bible close I hear a sneer and frustration dripping as through clinched teeth and a locked jaw and glare the lawyer/religious guy said, “The one who treated him kindly” ~ or with hesed in Hebrew or loving kindness.  What would it mean to show loving kindness to the very people who don’t think deserve and haven’t earned it?  Can we really go and do the same?)

 

May your life do more than read these words, let this story find a place in the story of your life embodying and embracing these words through your words/actions/and being today.  Go and do likewise.  Amen.

Friday Prayer

 

Gazing God there is so much we need to learn about how You move in our midst and show up disguised as our lives.  What we have been taught and caught in the world, our default mode of operation is to glance ~ keep on moving.  We find ourselves glaring at others, especially those who don’t see the world the way we do.  We gnaw on the problems because they gnaw at us and we are convinced that if we just think harder, do more, we can solve the wounds of the world ~ all will be well.  Disrupt and interrupt our operating systems with a factory reset to gazing as the way of being.  Disorient us from turning to the same old script and expecting different answers.  Reorient us to return (repent and change our minds) that another way of being, Your way of being, in the world is possible.  When we pass by those who are hurting, sitting by a pool of their own tears, and are battered and bruised by the world/fellow featherless bipeds, awaken within us the gaze of the Good Samaritan.  When we are the one in the ditch, stuck and stymied by our own egos or glaring at others who have hurt us, help us see those who are anointing us with Your loving kindness.  May the parable of the Good Samaritan not just be words on a page, but a gospel, good news, to our thirsty souls in these days.  In the name of the One whose stories interrupt our story in the most beautiful ways, Jesus the Christ.  Amen. 

Four Gs of Life Part 4

 

Yesterday, we talked about the Rabbi and Levite passing by, how they might have (we really don’t know) been glancing and glaring and gnawing on life.  Today, I want to focus on the Samaritan who gazes on the one in the ditch.  This way of being is counter cultural because it will ask us to slow down.  There is a tension between glancing and gazing and the culture encourages you to do the former not the latter.  Case in point, your social media fed with its thirty second videos and immediately another one pops up.  No time to digest or reflect or respond, keep moving.  We do this in worship, too.  Move quickly from one thing to the next with little space or silence in-between.  We live in a time when someone asks how you are doing, it is acceptable to say, “Busy”.  Wait, what?  Is the meaning of life a full calendar?  Is the meaning of life defined as being necessary and needed?  To gaze is counter cultural, because often we skim the surface on the first pass of encountering and experiencing life and rarely reflect on what we might have missed.  For example, most of us will listen to a song once, do a thumbs up or down, and move on.  But what if we need to linger and listen again to the song?  What if we need to slow down and talk to someone who made a bad first impression?  What if our operating mode was gazing?  I fully appreciate that what I am writing here will cause others to glare and gnaw at you.  I can hear the objections from my own inner critic, “This will never work, Wes, life is too crazy busy…and look at all the needs in the world ~ so many storms out there and in here to use the passage from Sunday.  Don’t just sit there, do something!”  Perhaps our frantic and frenzied pace of life isn’t saving the world the way we think.  Perhaps our glancing, glaring, gnawing ways of being are not helping to heal the world or work to repair the world alongside the One who is still creating.  Pick one meeting, appointment, time in your calendar today when you can gaze.  It doesn’t have to be hours…it can be a few minutes.  What if you continued this prayer practice throughout the month of February and into the season of Lent?  May God continue to help us see, not just with our eyes, but gaze with our hearts and souls upon each other and this world God so loves.  Amen.

The Four Gs of Life Part 3

 

This week we are playing with the Good Samaritan and the 4 Gs of life ~ glance, glare, gnaw, and gaze.  Yesterday, we examined and explored a few definitions, and I invited you to listen to your own life when each of these ways of being/seeing/living showed up for you.  Today, I want to suggest that in the parable, the Rabbi and Levite (that is, the good religious folk) who passed the man in the ditch badly beaten and bruised were perhaps in glance or glare mode.  Ever wonder if the Rabbi and Levite were so busy trying to get to their destination that they really didn’t “see” the man in the ditch?  I wonder how many hurt people I pass by each day without realizing or recognizing?  I get in glancing mode and spend too much of my time there.  Or maybe they glared at the man, wondered how he got there?  Maybe their amygdala went into overdrive thinking that the bandits/robbers were still nearby.  Maybe they lost cell phone reception and thought they would call as soon as they got a signal for help.  Maybe they thought, “better him than me.”  Or maybe they gnawed on this scene when they tried to go to sleep.  The truth is that the line of good and evil is not just out there in the bandits and evil of the world ~ no the line of good and evil runs right through each of our hearts.  Maybe the Rabbi and Levite saw the man, feared for their own life, but that night stared at the ceiling thinking, “I shoulda done something.”  How many times do we rewind and review the movie of our life when we are trying to fall asleep?  Maybe the Rabbi and Levite felt awful about passing by on the other side.  The point is we don’t know.  Jesus doesn’t say.  If we judge the Rabbi and Levite, it might say more about us than it does about them.  Where/when do I wear the Rabbi and Levite’s sandals?  Sure, I want to be the Good Samaritan, I want to be Mighty Mouse with the cape singing, “Here I come to save the day!”  But most of the time I can’t save myself from myself.  To be honest about the places and spaces our humanness shows up is one of the ways we can let this story speak and sing to our story this day, opening our eyes beyond the default of glance, glare, and gnaw to gaze upon this world God continues to call, “Good”.  Amen.

The Four Gs of Life Part 2

 

This week, we are playing with the 4 Gs of life ~ the 4 ways of seeing and being and living in the world today.  These are: glance, glare, gnaw, and gaze.  To glance at the world means that we are so busy, amid the flurry and frenzy of life, that everything becomes a blur.  Our sight is constantly surveying our surroundings, we see but we don’t see, because life is swirling past us like a car racing down the interstate at 125 mph.  When do you find yourself glancing at your life?  I can do this when my schedule is too full, or I am running late, or my list is too long.  I can do this in the grocery story, when I am just looking for my normal box of cereal and miss the new and improved brand of Cheerios.  I can do this at meetings when I think I am listening but I am looking at my phone. 

Speaking of meetings, sometimes my glance turns into a glare, which happens when I feel threatened and my amygdala sounds like the robot from Lost in Space, “Danger Wes Bixby, Danger”.  This is usually not because there is a lion in the room, but because the other person is challenging me, or I feel foolish, or I am tired or hungry.  We start to glare when someone presses the nuclear code of our emotional well-being.  They say something political or make a joke based on race or sexual orientation or just say something cruel.  We live in a world today, where our default is glance and glare.  We are usually scrolling our social media feed until someone’s comment causes the tiny vein in our neck to pulse with rage and we want to respond with a witty, sarcastic comeback that puts Uncle Sal in his place. 

Sometimes this glaring turns to gnawing.  We can chew the actions and words of others constantly.  Or they can chew on us!  We let the news simmer in our souls, drowning out the good news, because we are not fed a steady diet of the loving kindness that is happening in the world right now.  Sure, each news cast has one Good Samaritan story to wrap things up, but after twenty minutes of telling us the world is going to hell in a handbasket…and ten minutes of commercials telling you that your life is clearly lacking this new brand of Cheerios you missed at the store last week and you will thrive if you just go buy a box today…how does one story at the end of the newscast tilt the scales of our emotional amygdala back in balance?  It doesn’t.  Then we wake up the next morning ready to glance, glare, and gnaw on life again. 

To gaze is different.  To gaze is what Mary does in Luke 2, Mary ponders all the shepherds tell her in her heart.  She doesn’t just “see” with her eyes, but with her soul.  She doesn’t glance at the ragtag group of shepherds who came to the makeshift delivery room, she doesn’t glare at them interrupting her, even though she is exhausted after giving birth, she doesn’t gnaw at them, saying, “This is who God chooses to be our social media reps?  Good Lord!”  She gazes because she stares into the eyes of God’s love poured out in Jesus.  Today, be aware of the ways you glance, glare, gnaw, and gaze.  Note when and where and who can cause you to shift how you see and what you see.  You may want to make a chart ~ because everyone loves a chart ~ and in each box write one experience and example of when you did each of the four “G” words we talked about today.  I pray you will be playful with this.  I pray you will ponder this in your heart as Mary did at Christmas.  I pray this practice wakes you up to both how you see and what you are seeing ~ or to connect with the Good Samaritan how you are being and what you are bringing into the world today.  Amen.