Letting the Light of Easter In

 

As we wrap up and wind down this first week after Easter, I want to offer an invitation to you from Pastor Steve Cuss.  I recently heard him describe what he calls “Life Giving List”.  The instructions are to come up with the range of activities that fill you with life/energy/cause your soul to stir/embraced by goodness.  These can be things that take just a few minutes or need several days.  There may be no cost, or you might need to save your pennies.  Pastor Cuss says you need to be very concrete about what is life giving to you, intentionally take time for these activities, and that in those moments you are worshipping God. 

Here are some examples from my life-giving list:

Hiking with a camera in my hand, out in nature, preferably where there is no cell tower so I can be offline.  Cost might be a tank of gas.

Walking with my wife at night around our neighborhood, processing our day, living our wedding vows to comfort and support each other.  Cost might be a new pair of shoes every now and then.

Writing these morning meditations for you to share what is in my heart.  The only cost I can come up with for this is my time.

If you want to explore more about this invitation, click on the link below.

May you find moments in the days to come to write down your life-giving list.  More importantly, may you experience moments of embodying the very activities and ways that you find the Spirit stirring and swirling in your life.

https://store.stevecusswords.com/life-giving-list

Letting the Light of Easter In

 

As we cross the threshold into Thursday, pause with me.

Start with exhaling all that you have been holding this week, then into that empty space let in the breath of God.

Be with me in this moment with all its beauty and brokenness; with all it celebrations and concerns.  With its befuddling faithfulness.

This series of morning meditations was inspired by the work of Richard Rohr.  He talks about what he calls the Cosmic Egg.

No, this is not some dish you can order at a local farm to table restaurant.  Nor is it a recipe for you to use up those hard-boiled Easter Eggs from Sunday. 

It is a symbolic, Easter-inspired, image for you and me.  Rohr says at the center of the cosmic egg is you.  You are like the yoke of an egg.  You are full of the building blocks of life.  Not just in random order, but crafted, created, loved into being by God. 

The white part of the egg is known as “our story”.  This refers to the people you connect to and find meaning alongside.  You can think of communities like your family and friends.  Or you might view this through the lens of your neighborhood, city, or state.  Your community might be on-line with group chats.  You can think about your political community as many scholars suggest that our political identity/connects have become more important than family in recent years (that is another whole series for the morning meditations).  What connections/community impact and influence who you are?

Finally, there is the shell of the egg which is the bigger story or what Rohr calls, “The Story”.  As people in the world today we are very suspicious of anyone telling us something is “the” story.  It sounds oppressive and we often find ways to criticize how that story isn’t true for me in my story.  To be sure, the vast variety of voices and beautiful diversity means that trying to capture “the” story is fraught and fragile.  The story can silence or sideline people.  Perhaps that is because what we are often told is “the story” is only “our story”.  Trying to name “the story” is challenging.  But I do believe, deep in my heart, Holy Week is one example of “the story” in which we can find both “our story” and “my story”.  I can find myself in the Hosannas of Palm Sunday, brokenness of bread, suffering of Good Friday, and the hope (even when baffling) of Easter.

I invite you to hold this image prayerfully in your heart this day.

Prayer: God who is the author of a story that connects us to each other and is at the core of who I am, let Your words and wisdom be written upon my heart in these days.  Amen.

Letting In the Light of Easter

 

At some point in our education, we heard the wisdom from the Ancient Greeks, “Know thyself.”  Did you know that is the first of three maxims that are inscribed outside the Temple of Apollo?  The other two, because I know you are curious, were: “nothing in excess” and “surety brings ruin”.  Suddenly you might realize why the other two maxims never quite caught on in our current climate.  But we are fascinated by trying to know ourselves.  Exhibit A of evidence for this is the “Self-help” section of any library has pages upon pages of words devoted to this topic.  Exhibit B are podcasts produced every day for you to living your best life every where you thrive.  Exhibit C is just Google “how to know yourself” and in less than a second there are almost two billion possible responses and results for you to view.  So, you know, feel free to look over those at lunch!

The quest to know ourselves is endless and eternal.  Actually starts at a young age.  I remember moments when one of my children colored on the wall or didn’t study for a test or did something I wish they had not done.  When frustration fumed off me I would ask, “Why did you do that?”  Of course, the reply was often, “I don’t know.”  Looking back, I now see how that is so true for me.  Why did I say that last night at the meeting?  Why did I procrastinate when my gut was saying, “Go head take the risk.”?  Why do I do what I do.

It wasn’t just philosophy that finds this mystery of why we do what we do fascinating.  The Apostle Paul says in Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” 

We are a mystery.  Or as Kristen Bell once said, “We are our own best science experiments.”  To explore our lives with an endless curiosity is an invitation.  But we need to be careful because often when we begin to ask why we are doing what we are doing, we have to get out the umbrella because it is raining guilt.  This is perhaps because of those childhood memories of being disciplined when we disappointed our parent.  But grace and good news of Easter says, we can ask questions of why trusting in God’s original blessing and God who calls each of us, “Beloved.”

Keep turning the question, what is it like to be you, in your mind, heart, and soul.  Keep prayerfully pondering how the past, present, and future are meeting in you.  And continue to find ways to explore your life gently and gracefully.  Stay open to the faithful, fascinating ways you embody and live in these days.

Prayer: God, continue to open me to the ways You are at work within me and beyond me and beside me this day.  Amen.

Letting the Easter Light In

 

God’s grace and love enfold and hold you.  How is the sacred, scientific experiment of exploring your life going?  What insights or ideas did you discover as you held the question, “What is it like to be you?” yesterday?  What might be breaking forth this morning as we return to this inquiry right now? 

This question gets to me in such a profound way.  I feel it right in my gut.

This is a holy question as we are all living through how to emerge from the COVID cocoon of the last year. 

For some of you, you are ready to break, burst out of that cocoon like a butterfly and take flight to somewhere, anywhere than the four walls that you have been staring at the last twelve plus months.

For others of you, there is still this twinge of uncertainty. What really is safe, even after I have my vaccine?  Why can’t the CDC send me a personalized scientist to guide me through every decision each day?  Has Apple developed an app for that yet I can put on my phone?

For still others, you are somewhere in-between ready to roam freely about or still sticking close to home.  You want to dip the tip of your toe back into the waters of life, but just don’t know if you want to dare to dive.

What is it like to be you has baked and built into that question the past, present, and future.  What is it like to be you is about what led you to this point.  You didn’t wake up this morning for the first time.  You have a past that has left the impression of the good, the bad, and ugly upon you.  You have this present moment you are trying to navigate and perhaps feel stuck like that cargo ship recently in the Suez Canal.  You have the future, what is unfolding and being unveiled in your life.  All that is present, just beneath and behind the surface of this question.

I invite you today to keep that white lab coat on, your pencils sharp and the clipboard ready.  I ask you to think about the good, the bad, and ugly of the beautifully created in God’s image known as “you” that stares back from the mirror each morning at you.  You may want to make a chart, get out a piece of paper, across the top write, the good, the bad, and ugly.  Along the side write the past, the present, and the future.  And in each box see what awakens within you.  By naming and noticing what is within us, I believe is one of the ways God gets a word in edgewise in our lives.

Prayers: God who loves both the ways we try to categorize, compartmentalize life only to discover the confusing and confounding mystery, meet us in this moment and throughout every hour today.  Amen.

Letting the Easter Light In

 Click on the video above for the Morning Meditation

The Melody of Lent

 As we center our hearts for this Holy Friday, when we stand/kneel beneath the cross of Jesus, let these words of Richard Rohr sink/stir in your soul:

Today the primary human problem is both revealed and resolved. It is indeed a “good” Friday. What is revealed is our human inclination to kill others, in any multitude of ways, instead of dying to ourselves—to our own illusions, pretenses, narcissism, and self-defeating behaviors. Jesus dies “for” us not in the sense of “a substitute for us” but “in solidarity with” the suffering of all humanity since the beginning of time! 

I invite you to lean in and listen to the beautiful Spiritual, He Never Said a Mumblin' Word.  Let its mournful melody and profound preaching invite you in the sacredness of God in solidarity with our suffering.  

Prayer: Beneath the Cross of Jesus, we take our stand, guide our feet and hold our hands.  Let our mumbling words today, O God, give voice to the ways You meet us in the messiness of life.  Let Your love shown on the cross challenge our lives every day.  Amen.  

The Melody of Lent

 

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee
In life, in death, o Lord, abide with me
Abide with me, abide with me.

Today is Maundy Thursday.  Maundy, like “Abide”, is not exactly a word we use a lot.  Okay, honestly, we don’t use it at all.  When was the last time you said this word in a causal conversation?  Maundy means commandment.  At the Last Supper, Jesus gives the commandment to love.  The fact that Jesus is talking to his friends, the disciples, about love isn’t all that surprising.  But, consider that these so-called, “friends” are about to desert, deny, and betray him.  Talk about actions that are the exact opposite of love.  Jesus preaches and teaches about love and the very next moment the disciples leave skid marks in the sand running away from Jesus or turning him into the authorities.

With friends like that…who needs enemies?

Jesus didn’t just talk about love, he embraced and embodied this word.  He activated and animated love in his life.  He radiated love from the core of his being.

I have said that the Holy Week story is your story.  You know moments of being betrayed or denied.  You know moments when people hide knifes in their words or smile to your face only to criticize you behind your back.  Tonight we will gather with bread and juice/wine because Jesus preached the commandment on love around a meal.  And you have had holy meals before too.  Meals where laughter is practiced as a healing art.  Where what is served is about more than what is on your plate, what nourishes you are the connections around the table. 

Tonight is a night that is metaphor rich.  Broken bread – symbolizing the brokenness of life.  A cup of grace poured out to saturate our lives with unconditional love.  Human emotions of distrust and distain and distance.  And the shadow of a cross across our path because grief is woven into our lives. 

Hold all of this.  Abide in all of this.  And bring all of what you have experienced this Lent to our service tonight.  Bring your whole self – that your whole self might dwell in the one who meets us in our woundedness, wants, longings, hopes, fears, prayers, concerns, celebrations, deepest desires, all of this, and so much more.

I will see you tonight at our service.

Prayer: God of broken bread – meet us in all that is unresolved and uncertain; God of grace poured out, saturate and soak our souls on this day with Your love that overflows our lives.  Amen.