Prayer for this All Hallow's Eve

 

Prayer for Halloween ~ God, You hold us and know us better than we know ourselves, be with us this day.  We know that too often we get caught in ways of being that feel like shoes too tight on our feet.  We long to be grounded and guided by You in how we show up, but at the same time we need approval and acceptance from our tribes.  Help us, O God, for we don’t always know what the next right step is.  The thick fog that clouds our thinking can make it hard to be certain which way we are going.  Our ears thick with the noise of the world can make it difficult to hear Your still singing voice.  Our souls are confounded by all the “advice” can make it nearly impossible to know whether what we are sensing is a nudge from You or slight indigestion.  Help us.  Hold us, and all the costumes we wear.  Guild us as we turn toward the last two months of the year.  In the name of the One who promises to abide with us, Jesus the Christ.  Amen.

October Days

 

As October days dwindle, I invite you today to look back at the last year.  I know, we usually do this on December 31 or January 1.  But honestly, why conform to the cultural expectations?  Today, I will write down the highlights of the last year.

Write down the lowlights.

Where did Your soul feel like a fountain?

Where did Your soul feel drained?

Whose love in your life makes a difference?

And whose love makes demands and decrees you don’t want to obey?

Where was an ordinary moment a holy moment?

 

Hold your life for the mystery it is as the season of autumn is ensconced around us.  Amen.

Reflections on All Hallows Eve part 2

 

I remember one year I what as a ghost for Halloween.  I did this because we had just purchased new sheets, and my grandma (a child of the Depression) would not allow anything to be thrown away.  She recycled or repurposed before it was trending.  It was also the easiest costume to make.  A few holes for my eyes (I don’t think my grandma cut one for my mouth to breathe ~ but breathing is overrated).  She used some markers to make the eyes stand out.  And voila, instant Halloween costume. 

 

The truth is we are all haunted by unholy ghosts in our lives.  We may no longer be afraid of monsters under our bed, but we are afraid of the images we see on the news and the voices that tell us the world is dangerous. 

 

What ghosts and ghouls do you deal with? 

Tie this to what we talked about yesterday with systems.  How do you show up when the gathering sends a chill down your spine?  You know that meeting you dread each month.  Or that broken person who keeps calling?  Do you keep putting on the same costume to show up?  This is not meant to blame or shame, but to notice.  In fact, I would contend that noticing, rather than moving ahead on autopilot is a brave practice we need now more than ever.  This starts with noticing the places where your stomach does summersaults, your mind races like a hamster on a wheel, and your heart sounds like a bass drum of a marching band.  Hold those moments and think about what you said or didn’t say ~ the truth is that in anxious situations we can get bigger (raise our voice, pound the table, demand our way or the highway) or we can get smaller (sink to the sidelines and stay silent).  How you stay human-size, as your authentic self, is hard holy work ~ as hard as trying to maintain the status quo that goes against your values.  

 

I pray for all the ghosts and ghouls that show up in daylight in your life ~ for all the aches and heartbreaks and overwhelming sense we are all lugging around in the luggage of life.  May God who also hold you right now, be felt as we reflect on this one holy, beautiful, broken, precious life.  Amen.

Reflections on All Hallows Eve

 

This week we will celebrate Halloween.  Kids will come by dressed in costumes, carrying pillowcases that will be full of candy, that parents will eventually sneak and steal from.  In 2023, Americans spent 12.2 billion dollars on Halloween…3.6 billion was on candy.  Most of us spend over $100 on candy and costumes.  Some of the most popular costumes last year were Barbie, Ken, and Spiderman.  Who knows who will show up at your door on Thursday night?

Whether you decide to dress up or not, the truth is we all wear costumes or masks.  We all are impacted and influenced by the people around us.  We just finished a series on “Gospeling your life”, because we know there are many gospels around us that want our attention and affiliation.  We all want to be part of the group, we are social creatures, who don’t want to be kicked off the island.  There are moments we might be laughing and then someone walks in the room and the jovialness stops ~ insert the sound of crickets here.  Systems Theory says that we play roles ~ in our family, with our friends, and even in church.  And all systems long for equilibrium.  If someone wants to change something, the group will resist such efforts.  Maybe you have felt this when you shared a dream with your family, and they immediately told you why it was a boneheaded idea.  Or you suggested a new restaurant to a group of friends who always meet at the same place, only to have that idea poo-pooed.  Or maybe at church you suggested a new paint color and you would have thought that you said there was no God for the reaction and response you received.  Systems like the status quo or homeostasis.  This is one of many reasons why sacred conversations on race and gender and sexuality are difficult.  The hard holy work of undoing racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia is long, because those are built and baked into the very system around us.

Today, I encourage you to pause.  What costumes do you wear with your family?  What masks do you put on with friends?  How do you show up at church?  When was the last time you felt like you could be fully and authentically yourself?  May God, who calls your truest parts of yourself, “Beloved” hold you in this holy pondering.  Amen.

Gospeling Prayer

 

Gospeling God, continue to write Your story in our heart, soul, mind, and body in these days.  Storytelling God, continue to shape the narratives we tell ourselves about You, others, and ourselves.  Composing and Conducting God, continue to write a symphony in our souls that inspires and infuses our living every day.  God of four distinct and different narratives of Your love incarnate, in the flesh of Jesus, continue to let the wisdom of the last fifty-ish days spark and saturate our lives.  Help us wrestle with what we don’t understand.  Help us rest in the comfort we found in narratives where we felt You close as our next breath.  Continue to let Your good news be the first and last word of our lives from the rising of the sun, to the going down of the same.  You sing within us, You move within us, Your rustle and roam and re-arrange our lives in ways we celebrate and can confuse us.  Continue to Gospel our lives as we turn to November and into the holy season of opening our sacred imaginations to the One who is born, lives, faces death, and shows us resurrection life, Jesus our Christ.  Amen.

Gospel within the Gospel

 

Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Love God.

Love Neighbor.

Love Self.

 

In these words we have three invitations to a God-soaked, Spirit-saturated, Gospel-inspired, and Disciple daring life.  In many ways these three invitations in these three verses take our entire life to explore, experience, and express.  How are you loving God with your heart?  This could be through prayer, listening for God in music or being in silence, going out in Creation to hear the sermon of the songbirds.  How are you loving God with your soul?  Your soul longs to express creatively the ways God forms and fashions you.  Your soul is an unfolding, never finished art project.  I love God with my soul through how I show up for my family, through worship, sermons, morning meditations, and I pray opening spaces where people can realize like Jacob, ‘God is in this place and I didn’t know it.’  How do I love God with my mind?  This calls me to pay attention to what I am consuming in the media, but those voices will consume me.  What do I encounter online or in the 24-hour news cycle or what am I engaging that can stretch me out of this moment to the wideness of God’s work over years and centuries (this is exactly why we read the Gospels!!).  Loving God is our primarily calling.  As we love God, God loves us.  God feeds and fuels our lives, God shows up disguised as our lives, often not in the ways we planned or predicted.  You can go for that walk outside and no birds may be singing, you may stub your toe and get splashed by a car driving through a puddle.  You may come home, towel off and think, “That was the dumbest idea I ever read.  Thanks a lot, Wes!”  Then, God shows up in a sip of warm tea that satisfies or in a friend as you share walking experience with and start laughing uncontrollably.  We don’t control or confine God’s love, God’s love is expansive and evolving beyond our comprehension. 

 

We do channel, in our very human-size ways, God’s love to others.  Our neighbors, both those next door and down the street and around the world.  A neighbor is anyone who responds with God’s love, remember this from the Good Samaritan Luke 10.  The question the lawyer asked was, “Who is my neighbor?”  Who do I really have to be kind to, Jesus, because I would like to have a sacred script that tells me step-by-step.  And Jesus tells an offensive parable, because the hero is a Samaritan, who many of Jesus’ followers would ‘other’, push to the fringe and fray, not see as fully human or God’s beloved.  The Samaritans exist in your life.  They are the people with that political sign, posting that misinformation, pushing all the emotional buttons, and causing you to think, “That’s it, I am outta here.”  To channel God’s love to the very people who are un-lovable is the scandal of the Gospel.  Caesar’s gospel said might makes right and power rules the day.  Jesus’ gospel preached and proclaimed a diverse, inclusive, equitable love that saw all as beloved. 

 

Jesus also recognized that this wasn’t easy, because we don’t really love ourselves.  I mean seriously, if you heard the endless chatters and color commentary of the play-by-play voices in the booth of my brain – you would question everything I write and speak.  What do you say to yourself when you make a mistake?  What names do you call yourself when you put on an outfit that doesn’t quite look as good as you thought?  How have you internalized the voices of mentors who demeaned and demoted you rather than treated you as beloved?  And why, for all that is holy, do we let those voices of our worst critics live rent-free in your minds? 

 

Love God

Love Neighbor

Love Self

 

This is truly the calling of being a disciple, an apprentice and follower, of Jesus in these days that takes a lifetime to explore.  Amen.

Reflections on Gospeling Your Life

 

As we reflect on the fifty-ish days of reading all 89 chapters of the four gospels, did you find yourself with a favorite narrative of God’s love incarnate?  Maybe you like Mark’s just the facts, no-nonsense approach.  Maybe you appreciated Matthew’s intensity, that what we do matters and makes a difference, that something is at stake which is why Matthew can feel a bit rough around the edges (I mean some poor chap getting thrown into the outer darkness at a wedding for not putting on the right robe – Matthew 22:1-14, seems a bit extreme).  Maybe you liked Luke’s version of service, caring for the least, lost, lonely, crossing over borders and boundaries with God’s prodigal love.  Maybe you prefer the mystery of John where Jesus seems to talk in puzzles and riddles (it is like trying to understand some of the desert mothers and fathers!).  Or maybe it is like trying to pick your favorite child, you liked a bit of each.  I invite you today to write down what warmed your heart in each gospel and what tasted like stale day-old coffee?  Where did you sense God’s presence and where did you think, “Clearly God didn’t write that!”  You may do this Gospel by Gospel, or maybe make a list of five gospel stories that you found meaningful and why.  The “why” is always important even when it feels like your words don’t quite capture the fullness of what is in your heart.  Then, please share your top five Gospels and why with me.  I would love to talk to you more about how these gospel stories right now are good news to your life and how you are venerating and emulating the truths of God’s wisdom.   May the One who continues to infuse and inform and inspire our living go with you.  Amen.