Friday Prayer

 

God of laughter that is prayer.  God of holy foolishness that is a path (one path of many) to faithfulness.  Disrupt our dourness and frownie faces with contagious joy.  Remind us that Your expansive embrace holds both the broken and beauty, both the hurting and humor, all the vastness and diversity that is life.  When we get caught in ruts of thinking that it is all up to us to save the day and the world, remind us that You are not silent or sleeping, but still singing.  When we get caught up in thinking that if we just worry more, rather than curiously wonder, we can solve all of this…whatever this is…interrupt us with memories of our younger versions of self that were convinced we had the way only to fall flat splat on our face.  When we want to shout or fight or verbally punch our way to Your realm, remind us of how Jesus told subversive stories of Samaritan love, prodigal grace/forgiveness, and gazing openness that sees Your world of its profoundness beyond our explanation.  Invite us, as You did Job, into the whirlwind that doesn’t answer the questions, but asks us ones that remind us that our point of view is a view from a point and then laughs with us once more as we delight in this human-size-ness of an art project called, “life”.  May this weekend lead us to find ways to celebrate Your holy foolishness once more.  Amen.  And Amen.

Holy Foolishness

 

This week we are wading in the waters of holy foolishness that is faithfulness.  Yesterday, we shined a light on the cultural narrative that is the American way of seeming “sad even in our pleasure” (de Tocqueville).  That phrase not only breaks my heart, but it also breaks open my soul because I have embodied those words.  I can’t laugh, I tell myself, “Bombs are being dropped and kids are going to bed hungry and people in our own community are homeless.”  Yes, all that is very true.  And there are moments of joy that sit right alongside the heartbreak.  It is not either or, emotions can co-exist and contradict and be complicated.  Perhaps, it is just easier to go around like we just ate a bag full of sour patch kids candy whilst sucking on a lemon and sipping on vinegar.  Maybe it is more socially acceptable to look depressed than delighted.  The deep truth is that it is hard to embrace the everything-ness of this holy chaos called, “Life”.  I would love to talk to you more about this tension we all try to sort through!

 

It is important to recognize that such a choice of how to be in a beautifully broken world is not new.  In Jesus’ day, Rome ruled with an iron fist, there was taxation without representation, Caesar claimed to be son of a god, and many people lost the family farm ~ then had to hire themselves out to work on that same land as servants (talk about pain).  Jesus told a story about Lazarus ~ a name that meant, “God helps” and whose life didn’t even begin to look anything like that ~ whose life looked a lot like Job’s in the Bible.  All of this puzzling paradox is part of the foolishness of faith from the very beginning. 

 

And one of the earliest, most prolific authors of the New Testament, is Paul.  Many of you know that his original name was Saul.  He was a religious person ~ a Pharisee ~ who thought and taught you had to follow the laws to be a good person.  Saul persecuted early Christians, until he was blinded by the light of God’s love, changed his heart, and started following Jesus’ wayless way.  Can you imagine the membership class when Saul walked in?  Talk about awkward…and hilarious.  Can you imagine him telling this story about how he has seen the light and changed the errors of his ways ~ and people in that membership class are thinking, “Sure you have Saul…or Paul…or whatever you call yourself”.  Can you imagine that this would be the guy whose writing occupies over half of our New Testament?  This guy?  And maybe he is thinking, “What you are still reading, First Corinthians?  You should see the nineth letter I wrote them that is the best!” 

 

It is Paul who writes in 1^st Corinthians, “We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are sensible people in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are honored, but we are dishonored” (1 Cor. 4:10).

 

Notice that even among the earliest followers of the wayless way of Jesus, there was a deep desire to be seen as sensible and credible and honorable.  We love the pedestal and the thumbs up and shares on social media.  We crave the spotlight and roses thrown to thunderous applause.  But the wayless way of Jesus is not upward mobility, but downward.  The wayless way won’t look like success and can’t be measured by balance sheets or membership numbers.  The wayless way feels like we are going backwards or even stuck in the muckiness muddiness of the pigsty of life (see Morning Meditations on the Prodigal family from March). 

 

I invite you to keep holding the theology of Holy Foolishness and what it is provoking and evoking in you.  Where do you sense resistance?  What logical dissertation is being written in response to all this?  I would love to talk more about this, because I certainly get it wrong more than I get it right.  I am certainly foolish and boneheaded and human size.  I laugh at that prayerfully and hopefully trusting that in those moments when I see my own less-than-perfectness that even this part of me is being shaped in the image of God for the shape of the other.  Amen.

Holy Foolishness

 

This week, we are exploring, experimenting, and hopefully encountering moments of holy foolishness.  It is important to name and claim, we don’t like feeling foolish.  We don’t want to be the punchline to someone else’s joke, we don’t want to feel our face turn the six shades of red with the warmth of embarrassment.  We would rather be seen as intelligent, brave, and the hero of the story, rather than the comedic sidekick with the one-liners to relieve/release the tension.  Maybe you are thinking, “Wes, this was a nice little morning meditation because of April Fool’s Day.  And the joke yesterday was okay.  But, come on now, life is way too serious for us to be foolish.  There are problems to be solved, bills to be paid, and jokes don’t fold the laundry!”

 

You are right.  The world is a beautifully broken place.  Life will lead us to repeat and replay the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday dramas/realities/stories of a week ago, time and time again.  We know all too well friends who say things that are like a thousand paper cuts.  We know all too well grief that weighs us down.  We know all too well the pain that aches and we can’t seem to shake.  In some ways, this is not a new phenomenon.  Alexis de Tocqueville wrote,

 

“In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men (sic) placed in the happiest condition that exists in the world; it seemed to me that a sort of cloud habitually covered their features; they appeared to me grave and almost sad even in their pleasures.”

 

That was written in 1835, almost two hundred years ago.  Maybe it is in the air we breathe, or the DNA passed down to us from our ancestors, or the cultural sea we swim in that wants to resist and reject seeing life as anything other than a seriously somber march of time.  Yet, God has moments of joy.  God makes the platypus and manatee and the puteketeke bird in New Zealand (you really need to Google this bird to bring a marvelous laugh to your face and how John Oliver conspired to have people vote the puteketeke to be the bird of the century!).  God has moments of laughter with Sarah on her being pregnant when her AARP card was tattered and torn ~ God is never finished with us.  God has moments of foolishness calling people who are very human-size (just read King David’s story or Zacchaeus the wee-little man to climb a tree).  The Bible has a talking donkey and a fish be an Uber for Jonah and cows wearing sack clothes of repentance ~ not sure what the cow needed forgiveness for in the first place!?! 

Maybe, friends, we need to let the Holy Foolishness of Easter disrupt the narratives we too easily claim as gospel.  Maybe, friends, we need the gospel medicine and prayer practices of holding the hurt and holy humor of life ~ that it isn’t either/or but a beyond binary choice.  Yes, there will be times we don’t read the room and laugh at the wrong moment.  Yes, there will be times we frown while others have tears of laughter.  But maybe those experiences can help us continually explore what it means to live as an Eastering people.  The call to keep opening to God’s sacred serendipity.  Or maybe we prefer to just keep shaking our heads with the disciples saying, “It is all an idle tale.”  May God’s holy foolishness keep showing up in your life and my life in these days.  Amen.

Holy Foolishness

 

Yesterday, I invited you to ponder doing something foolish, not just for April Fool’s Day, but as a prayer practice for the coming Easter Season.  Easter lasts all the way to Pentecost, forty-eight days from today.  The invitation to be foolishly faithful is not just a one and done practice, but a daily one.  In honor of continuing to find moments of laughter and joy, here is a joke:

 

A Christian guy named Bill saw an ad online for a Christian horse, so he went to check it out. The horse’s owner said, “It’s easy to ride him. Just say ‘Praise the Lord!’ to make him go and ‘Amen!’ to make him stop.” Bill got on the horse and said, “Praise the Lord!” Sure enough, the horse started to walk. “Praise the Lord!” Bill said again, and the horse began to trot. “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!” he yelled, and the horse broke into a gallop. Bill was enjoying his ride so much that he almost didn’t notice the cliff he and the horse were about to go over. Bill shouted “AMEN!” at the top of his lungs, and the horse stopped right at the edge of the cliff.  Bits of dusts and rocks tumbled over the edge.  Relieved, Bill said, “Phew! Praise the Lord!”

 

May God’s laughter find ways to interrupt and disrupt your life this day and throughout the weeks to come.  Please feel free to send me your favorite joke because I do believe laughter is a form of healing prayer.  Amen.

Holy Foolishness

 

Happy Easter Season!!  While the stores begin to clearance the green, plastic, faux grass, and Cadbury crème eggs, we are an Easter people who continue to explore the mystery and marvel of the Empty Tomb for the next forty-nine days.  In many ways it is appropriate that today is April Fool’s Day, a day of laughing and joy.  The season of Easter to be filled with wonder, awe, cultivating joy, and staying open to the sacred serendipitous of God who has a peculiar proclivity for the unbelievable ~ born in a manger, friend to those on the fringe and fray, calling disciples who betray/deny/desert, facing death on a cross, and resurrection of new life.  The holy humor here is that none of this plays by the rules/gospels of domination or retaliation or revenge or cynicism or economics that we swim in everyday; Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection doesn’t make linear, logical sense and at the same time tastes like good news to the tip of my tongue.  There is a holy foolishness to being an Easter people, to practice resurrection, especially in a world that loves to point out why such a way is naïve and cynically point out the flaws and faults in our thinking.  Some people love to offer color commentary on our lives, even though we really didn’t ask them to apply for that job.  I guess, they willingly volunteered themselves?!? 

 

There is the great line in Luke’s Easter story after the women run back from the empty tomb they tell the disciples, who are held up or hiding in some random room, what they witnessed.  And Luke writes, “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”  In our Enlightenment world we believe that more education, evidence, studies, and research using the scientific method will right all wrongs.  But knowledge alone doesn’t change people ~ case in point, we know smoking is bad, fast food isn’t great for our bodies, and alcoholism remains a deadly disease.  Yet, all these items are readily available at a store near you.  Knowing isn’t the end, living is.  Just hearing the Easter story, smelling the lilies and singing, “Christ the Lord is Risen today…alleluia!” isn’t the end.  Living as a holy foolish Eastering people is the invitation for the coming days and weeks.

 

What foolish, playful, joyful, engaging, enlivening, and holy practice might help you embody/embrace being Easter person today?  You can get out your crayons and color with every one in the box, let lose your inner-Van Gogh.  You can go buy bubbles or go for a hike listening to the trees.  You can make soup for someone or call a friend to go to a movie that makes you laugh.  You can sit outside.  Without intention, living as an Easter person doesn’t just happen.  Too many other demands and decrees and people who are self-appointed to tell you what to do will keep on clamoring chaotically in your life.  God’s emphatic, “Yes” to life and love was to set our hearts on a different path that won’t stand up to Enlightenment reason and rational, but that is okay, because we are a Holy foolish Easter People.  Happy April Fool’s Day and may this season of Easter awaken the child-like wonder and joy in serendipitous ways for you.  Amen.

Good Friday Prayer

 

Hear these words from Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber:

Richard Rohr once wrote that “Holiness never feels like holiness, it just feels like you’re dying”.  Maybe this is what Lent is about. Not giving up chocolate, but giving up on the things that, let’s be honest, weren't working anyhow. Denying yourself might be as simple as letting yourself off the hook for having to be God.  So if you are faced with your own limitedness right now.  If you are exhausted by our achievement culture. If your me-based solutions to your me-based problems keep failing you. Christian, know this: there is no shame in that.  Not really.  I mean, not with the kind of God we have. Because as St Paul said, God’s strength is perfected in your weakness.  Denying yourself might be as simple as letting yourself off the hook for having to be God. Every time our me-based solutions to our me-based problems fail us, just know this: it is in the tombs of our self-manufactured darknesses that God always shines brightest.

 

God, we come to the cross today to lay down our solutions and our problems, individually and collectively.  There is so much to grieve this day, did you read the paper this morning, Holy One?  It causes our souls to break and hearts to ache and minds to short circuit.  It is easier to blame those people and believe that if we just elect the right person then everything will be chocolate rivers and pony rides.  God, help me lay down at the cross today my inner critic who loves to keep ruminating on the words of others, especially when that person touches a nerve of pain I have not process.  Help me lay down my three a.m. arguments that I have with people in my mind.  Help me lay down my need for perfection and busyness and proving that I am a good pastor.  Help me lay down my anger at the leaders, the Church, fellow featherless bipeds, and myself.  Help me lay down my grief at the constant, dizzying disorientating rate of change, with transitions happening in my family, at work, and in a world where no one wants me to be King (no matter how many times I post my opinion online).  Help me lay down my brokenness when I have spoken too quickly and held back love because I believed someone didn’t earn or deserve it.  Help me lay down my fears, failures, and humanness.  You are God and I am not.  I don’t need to solve every issue and cannot.  Like Moses I stutter, stammer, and stand silently today drenched in a love that will not ever let me go ~ even and especially when I am suffering.  Only a suffering God can save, let that truth undo the other gospels of the world and rewire my heart, head, and whole life not just this day but every day for the rest of 2024.  Amen.

Bread Crumb Prayer

 

Bread and wine and water, O God, You always seem to find the holiness in the ordinary.  Not us, O God, we like the special and spectacular.  We crave the Instagram worthy photo to post online, with a humble brag.  We long to feel needed and necessary.  We are not sure we want to wash another’s feet and feel uncomfortable having our feet washed.  Meet us, O God, in the messiness and less than perfectness where the communion bread broken leaves crumbles, just as brokenness leaves a trail in our lives.  Meet us, O God, in the cup of wholeness that we all seek but the wayless way of faith can feel frustratingly slow and lacks the marketability or branding of the waters we swim in.  Meet us, O God, in the wordless prayers because we don’t know what language to borrow and the words can’t capture what we long to say.  We live in a liminal space of Already and Not Yet.  We know Easter is coming, the candy is on sale, the eggs are ready to dye, and the ham ready to cook.  We know that death has lost its sting and yet it still hurts when we say, “Goodbye” at funerals.  We have been taught and caught that we can think our way through any problem, just form a committee, develop a plan, and hire someone to do the work.  And when that fails, we try again, thinking we just didn’t find the right fit on Indeed.com.  O God, meet us in our humanness with bread and juice tonight.  Wash us in the water we wade into, just as the Israelites found a way where there was no way.  Continue to guide us deeper into a week that is a mirror for how You are there from parades to meals to betrayal to death and to new life that are threads woven into the garments of our lives.  Amen.