Beside Still Waters – Weekly Spirituality Blog

March 19, 2024

Palm Sunday is messy and not merely because of discarded Cabbage Palmetto leaves. Palm Sunday is the day he went to the city, the day Jesus entered Jerusalem. The urban stage was an altogether more complex political environment than the hills of Galilee. Competing factions warily stalked each other seeking advantage—Romans vs. Priests vs. Sadducees vs. Pharisees vs. Zealots. Everyone had their own interests and prejudices. And ultimately those are precisely what got Jesus killed.

On Palm Sunday the crowds welcomed Jesus with open arms crying our Hosanna! Of course, those palms they were waving were in direct imitation of the welcome of the last rebel king who overthrew the Jerusalem establishment two centuries earlier. Riding on a colt with cloaks strewn across his way, the Biblically literate could not help but notice the messianic symbols mentioned in Zechariah.

To make matters worse, it was the national celebration of independence, which is always a fraught time in a country under foreign military occupation. The Passover celebrated Israel’s liberation from Egyptian tyranny. It was no stretch of the imagination to substitute Caesar and his Prefect for Pharaoh and his task masters. Pilate marched an extra cohort of auxiliaries up from Caesarea just in case things got out of hand. Troublemakers were arrested all week. But more sicarii (literally “dagger men”) mixed in with the crowds waiting for the ideal moment to strike.

Spectators watching from the city rampart walls that Sunday afternoon would have left wondering what was going to happen, because something, or someone, was going to break. You could feel the tension then build all week.

He would not be defined by our politics. Instead of a king, he offered them a question. What is truth? Jesus of Nazareth became the ultimate Rorschach Test that defines us not him . . . who do you say that I am? Everyone in our tense tragedy—Judas, the crowd, Peter, Pilate, Caiaphas, and an anonymous Centurion–would answer in turn.

The most dangerous thing in the world is a mob disappointed. He did not fulfill their expectations. He would not follow their script. He would not take on the Romans. He did not storm the Temple, as they saw it. He did not inaugurate a new Kingdom, at least not one they would recognize. Instead, he refused to submit to their labels and projections. He refused to follow their politics. And so, they abandoned, then betrayed, and then killed him alongside two terrorists (lestai are no ordinary thieves).

Politics tends to suck everything good out of life including life itself. It will not save you and will not lead you into life, joy, or love. It will divide you from your neighbors and yourself and then break your heart. Taken to extremes, it may even take your life.

Politics is all about power, acquiring, wielding, and preserving it. Jesus however is about the opposite of power, letting go. He let go of divine glory, authority, honor, and eventually even health, freedom, and life itself. Only by letting go would he show them what true freedom looked like. Only in letting go could he show them the essence of love.

Consider it all as you wave your palms this Sunday as Jesus takes on the city and our projections. Who are we cheering for? The messiah we want? Or, the unexpected one who comes to save us but first will challenge and transform us to the very core of our being?

One way or another we all answer the question.

March 12, 2024

Sabbath Rest

At the gentle nudging of the Personnel Team and Pastor Brian, I took a week of Study Leave at the end of February after our planned Study Leave trip to Israel was cancelled for obvious and deeply sad reasons.

“Take a week and rest your body, mind, and spirit. Find a peaceful, quiet place where you can pray, read, walk, rest, and find renewal.” So I went to the place where I feel most at rest – my parent’s homes in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

When I am home with my mom and dad, I find rest. My days are quiet, relaxed, peaceful. I read, pray, journal, walk, nap, eat, rest, and bird watch.*

I gratefully receive the gift of meals lovingly prepared for me or meals-out graciously paid for by mom and dad. I soak up the peacefulness of being in a familiar and loving space where I can simply be and not do. For me, home is a healing place. I am known and loved as I am.

So it is with God. God is our home. God is a place of healing and renewal. In the presence of God we find Sabbath rest. In God’s presence we are known and loved as we are.

The prophet Isaiah writes in Isaiah 55:1-3:

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.

God calls us to come home. To rest in God’s love. To quench our thirst. To delight ourselves in the richness of God’s presence and live. Only in God will we find who we are created to be.

This sacred season of Lent is a season of listening, of waiting, of yearning for that which has always been within us. God incarnate in Christ, revealed in us through the Spirit.

The Spirit is calling us to come home to the One who knows us and loves us and created us. The Spirit nudges us to leave the behind the noise of this world – if only for a short while – and find Sabbath rest in God.

May you know the healing place of God, our home.

Pastor Kelley

March 5, 2024

One of the major problems with thoughts and feelings is that sometimes they lie. Our culture tends to express a certain Freudian presumption that all feelings are inherently good and must be expressed for one to be emotionally or psychologically healthy. Suffering and emotional distress arise under such assumptions when feelings are not fully expressed. But not all feelings are created equal. Some feelings tell us we are no good. Some feelings tell us that we have failed when we have not. And some feelings tell us we are not worthy to be loved. Sometimes our feelings and our thoughts trick us with ideas that are not true and, in the process, they can snag our lives on their lies.

The early Christian monks did not differentiate thinking from feeling.  They treated it all as one giant mess inside our heads. The modern habit of separating discursive reasoning from emotional reaction only dates back a century or so. The ancients were more honest in recognizing that it is nearly impossible for us to clearly distinguish one from the other. We just have this internal conversation between our ears filled with rational thoughts, imaginations, desires, reactions, feelings, fantasies, images, and sensations. We experience it all together as a giant cacophony that we collectively call our life. Those early monks recognized that it is so easy for that mess to take over your life. It is so easy to lose your sense of self to your thoughts.

There is a better way. You can quiet your thinking. You can learn the delicate arts of intention and attention. By attention you can begin to notice how exactly you are being influenced by a given thought, fear, or desire. You can ask where it comes from and what it wants. You can ask whether it is helpful or harmful. You can decide whether you want to devote some of your precious time and attention to it or not. And then you can exercise the practice of intention. What exactly do you want to devote your time and attention to? Does this thought, feeling or desire correspond with reality as you know it or is it something made up? Does it help you to do or be what you seek? And if not, are you willing to gently let it go? These are the questions of intention, placing a watch over your mind and heart.

Most people lead most of their lives sleepwalking through little dramas inside their heads written by our subconscious fears, wants, and shames. We experience life as circumstances imposed upon us when in fact, we each write our own scripts. Attention is simply the practice noticing that we are all making it up as we go along, and intention is simply asking what kind of story do I want to live? The world is more that happy to give you answers to those question, but beware because the world lies all the time.

The only thing that Jesus ever offered us was the truth. The truth is enough. If you put it at the center of your life, the truth will set you free. But you will need to wake up and pay attention and intention.

February 27, 2024

One of the great things about reading through Paul’s letter to the church in Rome is that it forces one to re-consider so many assumptions that we bring to our faith. The problem is that we often presume to know far more answers than we do. We learn some nebulous notion of what God is up to in Jesus and in us through music, culture, and vague memories of Sunday School such that what the Bible actually says can often be shocking. Indeed, the most rebellious thing you can do in church is read the Bible.

The Letter to the Romans unsettles so many of our churchy presumptions–Jesus died to destroy sin and death rather than to save us from ours individually; God works to resurrect our bodies in this world transformed not extricate our souls to heaven; the covenant with Israel is not replaced but rather expanded by the work of Jesus; and finally, human beings have a very special role within God’s creation resurrected and renewed. It is this last thing that keeps niggling at me this lent. Maybe we get our categories all wrong. So often we think of the end of Christian life as all about salvation (whatever we may mean by that). But maybe salvation is simply the beginning of a bigger chapter of life—vocation. To ask it plainly, if the restrictions of sin and death are no more, what exactly are human beings for?

Putting our salvation, as the Bible describes it the resurrection of the body to eternal life, as the sum total end goal of Christian life is rather short sighted and to be honest rather self-centered. At Easter we celebrate the resurrection of the body, both Jesus’ and ours, as an end in itself. But what comes next? Why would God care? Why does resurrection matter? And here is where Paul redirects us back to the beginning. Human beings were created to be the image and likeness of God, that is shining and showing God’s identity, love, creativity, wisdom, and character, into this creation as creation’s proper custodians and stewards, Genesis 1:26. We are resurrected in a renewed and restored creation now freed from the decay of sin and death to finally take up our true vocation and identity as its stewards sharing, shining, and showing God’s identity through us. That role gives human beings responsibility over the universe and all the creativity that lies potential therein. This is the “inheritance” Paul talks about, custodianship of creation.

What are you called to do and be? You are called to nurture and guide creation to its utmost creative potential in ever greater beauty, complexity, and intimate connection with God the creator. Resurrection of the body and restoration of this creation are simply necessary preconditions before we can commence our true work and true identity as literal icons of the Creator. We are the one that creation looks to in order to get an impression of who the Creator must be. And in this life, our mortal lives, we get to run this as a sort of provisional pilot project for what will become new creation.

On Easter Sunday we celebrate that as Jesus’ grave was empty so to will be ours. But then comes the interesting part. With new life comes a new role as a full partner and participant with God. And that is when and where things start getting really interesting. There is so much to do.

We were made for this.

February 20, 2024

Modern people seem to have an allergic reaction to guilt. Most churches, at least popular ones, have excised prayers of confession from their worship as an unwelcome downer. Sin has been subsumed through therapeutic language into a form of individual neurosis best treated by counseling and psychopharmacology. Freedom to achieve individuals’ desires has been elevated to the position of supreme good. As a necessary corollary, anything that gets in the way of that freedom is necessarily unhealthy, distorting, and an unforgiveable impediment to human beings expressing their authentic selves.

It was not always so. Once upon a time not so very long ago, human beings’ authentic selves were deemed to be precisely what we needed to overcome. Left to our own devices, we often did rather awful things to ourselves and other people. What was needed was not ever more transparent expression of the authentic self, but the repair and improvement of that self to become a better self. That work of repair and improvement was the long slow work of morality as it slowly shaped first behaviors and then ultimately character. That transformative work was guided by conscience, the innate sense that we do not always do as we ought and that we could be better.

Guilt is the universal feeling that we all experience when we violate conscience. Guilt is a feeling in response to an action (or failure to act) that somehow falls short of what we know we can and should do (or not do). If you never feel guilt, you are not a saint, you are a sociopath. Guilt can be closely related to regret, but regret arises whenever we fail whether such failure violated conscience or not, such as when we simply are in error. Similarly, grief often accompanies guilt, but relates to a loss and not our behavior in causing it.

The big problem is shame. Shame is the erroneous inference that because we may have done something wrong, we are necessarily wrong. Shame is the mistaken attribute that we apply not to our actions, but to ourselves. As Brene Brown said in her original TED talk that has had over 61 million views:

Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake?” How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I’m sorry. I am a mistake.

Modern people are quite right to regard shame as an unproductive, harmful, and erroneous conclusion that we impose upon ourselves that leads to innumerable forms of emotional, relational, and spiritual harm. Shame leads to nothing good at all.

But I do want to put in a word in favor of guilt. Sometimes guilt can be an important guide for how to live and love better. Guilt is the tugging reminder that perhaps I should have done differently. Conscience can redirect us towards how we can be a better person, not just more authentic. You can be authentically cruel as well as kind, authentically destructive as well as creative. What is needed is not simply authenticity but transformation and improvement.

The season of Lent is the traditional penitential season of the Christian calendar. It begins with examining your life, your actions, and your relationships. What have you done that you ought not to have done? What have you failed to do that you should have done (hint, inactions are usually the much longer list)? If you are a psychologically and spiritually healthy person, you will have lots of both. Know what those actions and inactions are, own them and name them. We call this self-examination contrition and its naming confession. By naming them to ourselves and God, we can be freed of any further burden they may seek to impose upon us. We can try to right any wrongs we may have committed understanding that sometimes we cannot. And in doing all of this we can be not simply forgiven, but freed so that we can change and grow.

Guilt is hard and sometimes painful. And if you simply hold onto guilt then pain is what you will receive. But if you instead use guilt as guide, a navigational aid to lead us toward a better life and a better self, it may be the most helpful compass you will ever find.

The compass towards who you are supposed to be is already inside your heart. God put it there.

February 13, 2024

Valentinus (aka Valentine) was a third century Christian clergyman who was martyred for his faith. We celebrate and remember this Christian martyr through the purchase of chocolates and roses and the celebration of romantic love which is ironic because Valentinus himself was probably celibate. Veneration of Valentinus on February 14 goes back to the ninth century, and he continues to be dear to epileptics and bee keepers for whom he is patron.

As with many early Christian martyrs, his biography is intertwined with legend. According to his hagiography, Valentinus was arrested for evangelizing and brought before the local Roman magistrate Asterius. Asterius asked Valentinus to prove the veracity of his faith which he did by restoring sight to Asterius’ blind daughter. At this miracle, Asterius and his entire household converted to Christianity. Valentinus continued his evangelizing work, eventually running afoul of the emperor. Sentenced to be beaten to death with clubs, on the eve of his martyrdom, Valentinus wrote a note to Asterius’ daughter signed, “your Valentinus.”

How exactly that story passed through the blender of Medieval culture, got repurposed by Chaucer, perhaps alloying with the wild traditions of the Roman Lupercalia, got demoted by Pope Pius XII, and completely transformed by fantasies of high medieval courtly love, is an epic of cultural appropriation and transposition that will never be fully told. All we know for sure is by the time we get to Shakespeare, the practice of giving Valentines notes was well established. It then only took the entrepreneurial genius of the British Cadbury candy company to complete the transformation in the nineteenth century into what we know today as cards and gifts have largely replaced actual letters that explained how we felt about someone we loved.

But beneath it all there is still a name and a man behind the name who was faithful to the end. Cultures change and history rewrites everything. But still, we remember even when the world tells us to forget.

The homes screen on every computer I have owned since 2010 has been a picture of the great fresco of the resurrection from the Chora monastery in Istanbul. I took the photo with tears running down my cheeks trying to hold the camera steady in between breaths in the ancient chapel. The fresco is one of the last great works of late Byzantine art, a final masterpiece before Constantinople’s sack and destruction by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. It depicts a muscular Christ pulling Adam and Eve up out of their graves as the saints and apostles cheer him on. Above the scene is a single word, Anastasis—Resurrection.

Yesterday I read that the Turkish Government led by the Islamist Ak Party determined that the little monastery is an affront to Islamic dignity and would accordingly be converted into a Mosque (in a city where there are already 3267 mosques).  The beautiful mosaics will be whitewashed over. No one will ever see them again except in pictures. The Sultan will have his way and one more connection with ancient Christianity will be lost.

Politicians and culture rewrite our stories. Time, politics, and markets whitewash over our heroes and our art. Nothing lasts. But we can remember even when the world tells us to forget.

I have no faith in my own memory or that of future generations. But I have all faith in God who is beyond time and for whom every moment of our fleeting chronology is eternally now. While we may forget, God cannot. Nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten. And on that day when those strong arms haul us from the drowsy sleep of the grave, then we will know, then we will be known, and then all will be restored.

February 6, 2024

I have always been surrounded by books. There are 1452 volumes presently in my office (yes I counted) and that is just a part of our library. Books remind me that I am not alone. They remind me that I am part of something much bigger than myself, a conversation and a community that stretches across time and space. Books are artifacts of belonging.

The act of reading teaches me to pay attention. Television and internet scrolling reward idle passing inattention with constant dopamine hits. The simple act of following the play of ideas across lines of prose however conditions one to be fully present. At its simplest, your eyes and your mind need to attend to the lines of text unfolding sequentially down the page. The best teachers of attention are poems that reward the attentive with hidden treasures. Sometimes I sit at night in bed with my dimly lit Kindle slowing my breathing to the phrasing of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and realizing that while I will never own a Picasso or Rothko, I can fully inhabit a poem and be possessed by it just as the author intended. When that happens, I know I am not alone.

Contemplative reading has been a practice of God’s people ever since God told Moses to take dictation. We hold as precious that the otherwise unknowable Creator condescends to our dim comprehension through our crude, but sometimes iconic, medium of language handed down through the generations with love and care. So, we read. And when we read, we seek, hope, and sometimes even experience through the words an encounter with the Word. Sometimes when we read, we may even perceive through the pages that we are the ones being read.

I have never met my most important teachers. Indeed, most of these authors died long before I was born. But I have come to rely on them as old friends. Any life that does not make friends with the dead through their writings is severely impoverished. They all remind me that we are all part of vast conversation between God, a people, and a book. And that conversation is never the exclusive property of those who simply happen to be living today.

During this Lent I want to invite you into that conversation with one of my favorite authors (who happens to be alive). For this Lent we will be sharing together in Martin Laird’s Into the Silent Land: a guide to the Christian practice of contemplation (Oxford, 2006). This little book (142 pages) provides a beautiful introduction and meditation upon silence as the pathway to contemplation of God. This will be my third read through it and it continues to sustain my practice and hope for encounter and connection with God. Laird, in addition to teaching early church history at Villanova, is also an Augustinian Friar, well-practiced in the daily rhythms of contemplative prayer.

If you would like to join me on this Lenten read, you can pick up a copy on Amazon (or download for your reader or audio book as you may prefer) or order one through your preferred bookstore. The church office also has a few copies to sell if you would prefer ($16.46).

If you want to get closer to God and the heart of all things, it only takes a little practice and a little commitment. We can help each other with that. And so can our books. So, let’s read together.

January 30, 2024

I am trying to find ways to safeguard my soul and that of others in this election year. The formidable powers of our media industry will be directed towards stirring up the worst in human nature–fear and anger. The rhetoric of our politicians will seek to divide us into mutually exclusive hostile camps. This year calls for courage.

Courage does not mean the willingness to say or do something other people do not like. If that were so, any provocation or outrage would be courageous. Courage instead concerns the human heart. The root of the word is Cor, which is simply Latin for heart (think coronary). Courage is the willingness to live with your heart open to the world, not in the sense of being foolishly vulnerable, but rather in the sense of being authentically honest. Courage therefore works in two directions. First, it means that you are willing to honestly share with others without fear. And second, it means that you are willing to receive honestly from others without fear.

One problem in our society is that we have lost that latter half of courage. We ascribe courage to anyone who honestly speaks out against what they perceive as wrong or injustice despite institutional or peer pressure to remain silent. But we utterly fail to remember the second part, to open our own hearts to receive, hold, and companion other people’s pain, grief, concerns, worries, and hopes. Our lopsided understanding of courage merely promotes speaking past each other as we each make our univocal proclamations that persuade no one, connect with no one, and merely drive us further apart. True courage requires us to stand firmly as we hold others’ pain.

Throughout his public ministry, Jesus’ politics are notoriously slippery to discern.  He steadfastly refused to be drawn into direct political conflict with Rome but left no doubt about where his ultimate allegiances lay. Some of his most famous alleged political teachings were notoriously ambiguous. Does “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render unto God everything that is God’s” mean you should pay your taxes on time or that we owe everything to God? When Jesus overturns the money changers tables in the temple is he angry because of economic exploitation or because they are defiling the sanctity of the temple? The more closely you look, the blurrier Jesus’ politics become.

What distinguished Jesus’ ministry is not his political stances, but rather his courage in both sharing and receiving. Jesus demonstrated both sides of courage. He taught and spoke boldly and at the same time, empathized caringly with everyone he met. He would both denounce religious hypocrisy wherever he encountered it and at the same time welcome back wayward sinners with rejoicing instead of judgment. He would go so far as to empathize with those who condemned and murdered him, praying for their forgiveness. Jesus’ whole life is a story of a courageous God opening up God’s own heart to all the joys and all the pains of this world and human life.

What might our communities be like, what might our relationships be like, what might our politics be like, if we were equally concerned with holding the experiences, both the joys and pains of others, as we were with sharing and persuading what is most important to us? Jesus taught us that when we are uncertain what to do, compassion and curiosity are always a good start. But compassion and curiosity require courage.

If you want to change your government, vote. If you want to change your world, change your heart.

January 23, 2024

There are few things in life that are improved by the insertion of politics. Nonetheless, we are in an election year. Discordant voices of fear and anger will again tear at the common bonds of our shared humanity and community. Our various media channels will again amplify and tempt our baser instincts. And all the while, we will be encouraged to think of others as “them” as opposed to “us.”

At the start of this election year, I find myself sad and scared. Sad because I see Calvin’s notion of total human depravity yet again on full public display and scared because I worry about the corrosive effects our divisive politics has, first, on our shared bonds of connection and, second, on the condition of our souls.

In the face of the rage of social media it sometimes feels like we are powerless to reclaim our own lives let alone do anything about our shared discourse and life together. But we can.

I am still haunted by my encounter with all those starfish on the beach in the Outer Banks. Many of those little invertebrates would of course die. But not all. Some of them would live. I just had no idea which ones. So, it was no use at all worrying about the efficacy of my actions. All I could do was toss every starfish I came across back into the sea. Furthermore, I would never know the consequences of my actions. Some might grow up to become big starfish, but I would never know. The only helpful, hopeful, and oddly rational choice was to treat each starfish as a possibility filled with promise without my misplaced and unhelpful judgment, evaluation, and sorting.

I am trying to think of the starfish this year. We all find ourselves on the unfamiliar beaches of this this life washed ashore by the storms and circumstances of life. Some of us are dead, some are dying, and some are desiccated, but not all. We can each strain our lives (or in the case of starfish, arms) to better be caught by the life-giving tides that will bring us back home. As wanderers on those same beaches, we can take every opportunity we find to bestow mercy, compassion, and kindness on one another. The world is saved by irrational, inefficient, unmerited acts of compassion. We call that grace. And the great irony is that it is precisely in showing such compassion to others that we lift ourselves up from the mire to be embraced, held, and saved.

January 16, 2024

Last week Lisa and I spent our holiday vacation on the Outer Banks in Duck, North Carolina. We walked 5-6 miles each day along empty beaches, passing perhaps one or two other people. After a particularly pronounced storm (I had never been in a waterspout watch before) the entire shore was littered with seashells. The curious thing about shell covered beaches is that you are essentially walking over a cemetery of aquatic invertebrates. Their squishy little bodies are long gone and all that is left behind are their stunning exoskeleton suits of calcium carbonate armor. Beautiful in form, they are spent monuments to lives once lived.

I then started noticing starfish among the shells. For no particular reason I started throwing them back into the ocean. Many were non-responsive, brittle, and stiff to the touch. But others were more pliable and seemed to want to be picked up. When you touched them, they arched their arms so as to be more easily picked up by a passing wave or wandering tourist. They had no means to propel themselves back into the life-giving waters. The best they could do was make themselves as easy to pick up as possible. I tried to send those responsive starfish into deeper water without too much concussive skipping across the surface. All this starfish tossing slowed down my pace considerably until Lisa reminded me of the starfish story that has become part of our shared folk wisdom. It comes in many slight variations, but all share a common punchline:

One day a girl goes walking down the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have been trapped by the tides and are now drying and dying out under the sun. She starts throwing them one by one into the sea so they would have a chance to live. An older man walks by and sees her curious if inefficient efforts. He asks her why she is throwing them back and tells her, “there are thousands of starfish, surely your efforts cannot make a difference.” The girl looks at him with an air of confused frustration as she flings another into the waves. As the star plops back under the waves she turns to him and responds, “It made a difference to that one.”

The story has been told a thousand ways. It has been a refrain for countless motivational speakers and preachers since the 1970’s. Like every classic folk tale, it grows with each retelling while always retaining its central claim—acts of kindness, charity, and care, no matter how small or insignificant by the objective standards of the world matter. It is a useful reminder for anyone engaged in something as impractical and outwardly unproductive as ministry.

The story actually has far deeper foundations. It can be traced to the essay “The Star Thrower” from the 1969 collection, The Unexpected Universe by anthropologist and science writer Loren Eiseley. Eiseley’s story is actually a deep meditation on the interconnection between human beings, nature, and the cosmos that wanders between the beach of his mythic memory through Goethe, Darwin, Jesus, Einstein, and Freud. After wading through deep waters that connect all things living, he arrives at a most astonishing conclusion for a scientist:

From Darwin’s tangled bank of unceasing struggle, selfishness, and death, had arisen, incomprehensibly, the thrower who loved not man, but life. . . Somewhere, my thoughts persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat.

I throw starfish back into the sea along that sandy cemetery in imitation of another thrower who also wastes time on foolish, inefficient acts of kindness. I do not do so because I am particularly kind or charitable. I do so because deep down I know exactly who those starfish are.

They are you and me.

January 9, 2024

The new year brings the gift of new beginnings and contemplation of our days. In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus was the god of beginnings. The god of transitions and new passages, encompassing all images of doors, passages, and the ever-moving river of time. The Romans named the month of January after Janus, the god of new beginnings.

We, the people of God, are a people of new beginnings. In the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we find our new beginning.

Hope for a better day.

Forgiveness for the past.

Grace for the future.

Sustenance for today.

It is cleansing to begin anew. We have a gentle sense that we are allowed a new beginning, a chance to love more purely, to live more compassionately, and to follow more faithfully the One who gives us new life.

We move liturgically in January from the short season of Christmas to the Day of Epiphany and then back to Ordinary Time. It is in Ordinary Time that we are reminded that God is the God of all our days – especially our ordinary days. Holding on to the truth that God is with us every day – ordinary or extraordinary – is our challenge in this new year. It is easy to remember that God is with us in the high holy days of Advent and Christmas but we quickly forget and move back into the routine of our ordinary lives, forgetting that we belong to God and are called to live in Christ.

For the past few years at Fairmont we have shared in a simple spiritual practice of Epiphany Prayer Star Words for the new year. On Epiphany, which is always January 6th, we remember the journey of the Magi who followed a star across thousands of miles seeking the Christ child that they might worship him and bring him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Our Epiphany Prayer Star Words are simple reminders that God is with us and that our heart’s true longing is for God. You are invited to take a Prayer Star Word for the new year. Keep it close and visible. Use your word in meditation and study of scripture. May it be a simple spiritual practice that keeps your ordinary days tethered to our extraordinary God.

There are baskets with Prayer Star Words in the Sanctuary and Fellowship Hall on Sundays, and in the office during the week.

May God’s light lead you in this new year.

Pastor Kelley

January 2, 2024

It is odd for me to be writing today. Since 2014, with the exception of 2021 because of Covid, I have been flying to Israel and Palestine on the second day of each year taking groups of seminary students for their intercultural immersion trip. This year, with rockets still flying from Gaza and Lebanon and the jagged trauma of October 7 and everything that has followed both for Israelis and Palestinians so fresh, I sit a world away at my desk with my cup of tea. The television news paints surreal images of violence and suffering. But these are not digitally enhanced special effects. Beyond the media’s outrage machine, the suffering is raw and yet for me, sitting apart so far away, beyond imagining.  The awkward truth is that I do not even want to imagine such things. And so, I feel simultaneously useless, sad, and guilty.

Inaction is not always the product of apathy. Sometimes, it can be the product of empathy confounded by the inability to help. Perhaps that is why so many people seem so distanced from these tragedies unfolding in our world. Whatever small gestures we may muster seem so inadequate swallowed up in a sea of disaster and despair. Caring about others is not draining. What is draining is caring about others and being unable to do anything about it.

I cannot ever feel what I cannot imagine. That means that my empathy is always biased towards people I identify as like myself, with similar values, hopes, and fears. My empathy reflects and refracts me.

Instead of empathy, I am trying to practice simple compassion—paying attention to other people’s feelings and offering simple kindness. Whether I feel someone else’s pain or not, I can always be kind. I can always take notice of others’ distress and acknowledge it. I cannot make anybody else feel anything, but I can make them know that they have been seen, and in that beholding, know that I care. I can always choose to be kind.

Politics in our world is soaked in trauma. In Israel and Gaza, it is the literal kinetic trauma of metal tearing flesh. And closer to home it is the trauma of violent rhetoric and partisan division that denies a common humanity in favor of tribal purity. We are not powerless to respond. While our tools may seem mismatched to the task, they are more powerful than we realize transforming us and those we encounter. We can be kind. We can be curious. We can be gentle. We can reserve judgment and simply meet each other with

compassion. We can acknowledge and share our pain rather than trying to compare and evaluate it.  You and I cannot heal the world, and certainly not the Middle East or American electoral politics, but we can help someone else. And when that helping is contagiously repeated by enough people in enough places the world changes.

The slow, subtle art of changing the world begins with changing the way we relate to those we meet along our path. This was Jesus’ way, and his truth, and his life. It will never be dramatic or sensational, but God’s ways rarely are. And the most amazing thing of all is that if you simply follow Jesus’ way of kindness in the world the person who changes the most is you.

May the better angels of our nature—kindness, self-control, morality, and reason—once more guide us in the year ahead.

–Brian

December 26, 2023

The day after . . . The leftovers have all be tightly wrapped in the refrigerator and the cyclone of ripped wrapping paper and bows are now deposited in the trash. A small mountain of Amazon boxes sits next to the recycling, and everyone is enjoying a nap. The day after Christmas is most often simply a day of rest, a break from the frenetic pace of Christmas, but if you pay attention, it has far older foundations.

They do not write many day-after-Christmas songs. But there is one. Although most people presume it to be a Christmas Carol it is not. And it tells us exactly what kind of song it is in the very opening lines, “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen.” Good King Wenceslas, that also ran among the carols, is no Christmas carol at all. It is a St. Stephen’s Day song. Saint Stephen’s Day, the Feast of Stephen, is December 26, the day after Christmas. It is largely ignored in our culture, washed out by the brilliant lights of Christmas. But St. Stephen’s Day is actually the application of Christmas and its provocative lessons for humankind.

Luke is the most political of all the Gospels. With deft literary mastery his birth narrative contrasts the world of the powerful and mighty (“In the days of Caesar Augustus . . . when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”) with a young Galilean peasant couple desperately looking for shelter for the night. That night a child would be born not in a palace or a temple, but in a shabby stable attended by shabby people. Theologian Gustavo Guttierez reminds us that the incarnation of Jesus in Bethlehem is “an incarnation into littleness” as Christ comes into the world smelling not of frankincense but rather vaguely of the stable. Throughout his life and his ministry, he would focus his attention not on the wealthy and the powerful, nor on the religious and spiritual elites, but the ordinary and the poor.

After Jesus’ death and resurrection, his followers organized themselves to continue his work. They recruited new people for new roles. The very first was Stephen, recruited for a new function, to care for the poor, sick, and needy. He was given a new title, Deacon. His role was necessarily very public, and his caring ministry caught the attention of the authorities. Stephen became the very first martyr of the church as recounted in Acts 6:8-7:60, dying while praying for the forgiveness of his killers. And on the day after Christmas, St. Stephen’s Day, we remember him and the work he continues.

During the middle ages, poor boxes collecting alms throughout the year would be opened and distributed on St. Stephen’s Day. Landowners would distribute boxes of food and coins to their tenants and servants on St. Stephen’s Day, hence the English tradition of “Boxing Day.” Martin Luther summed it up well: “He who gives his goods to help the poor, to send a child to school, to educate them in God’s Word and the other arts . . . he is giving to the baby Jesus.” The special concern of Stephen for the poor that is celebrated this day is the application of Jesus’ own mission and ministry.

It can be tricky to talk about wealth and poverty in comfortable mainline churches. To broach the topic risks crossing fraught political divides. We are, by all objective material measures, among the wealthiest, healthiest, best educated, and longest-lived generations in human history.  And that raises an uncomfortable question for us. What does that baby Jesus born among the poor in a stable require of us? That is the implicit question of Christmas eve that we delicately glide past in Luke. But that is the question that Stephen and his day ask directly of us.

King Wenceslas, in real life the Tenth Century Duke of Bohemia, poses the same question to us through his legendary virtue as poetically described in the song. He leads his servants on despite the cold and the wind and all the frustrations they face. And there amid the howling snow poses the challenge and the promise of this newborn baby and his mission:

Therefore, Christian men, be sure,

wealth or rank possessing,

Ye who now will bless the poor,

shall yourselves find blessing.

           The child of Bethlehem promises us gifts beyond our imagining, but before the gifts come the demands of change. How will you respond? What shall we give?

December 19, 2023

One of the most indelible childhood memories of Christmas was the exquisite tension between the interminable waiting to open presents and the riotous cyclone of wrapping paper, bows, and boxes that would follow as we all indulged in the endorphin fueled bliss of raw consumption. Every year, my parents’ litany was the same: “This year we are cutting back.” And, every year, only too much would be enough.

Gift giving frequently gets a bad rap in the church around this time of year. The commercialism of Christmas, spurring an anticipated 969 billion in retail sales this year, makes for a stark contrast to the quiet, humble, downright shabby image of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and some shifty shepherds trying to stay warm for the night in an animal stall. The arrival of curious Iranian astrologers (you could spot them because they wore pants) adds a bit of stylish couture to the scene as they delivered flashy and decidedly impractical gifts.

Gift giving at this time of year predates Christmas. Romans exchanged gifts and invitations to feast every year in the week following the Winter Solstice for the Saturnalia. While some fret about keeping Christ in Christmas, I have longed to hear a representative of the national federation of retailers urge us to keep Saturn (god of wealth) in the Saturnalia. Gift giving was a way of cementing social bonds and client/patron relationships throughout the Roman world. You can see its direct descendant in the traditions of wealthy landowners giving boxes of treats and coins to their servants on the day after Christmas, aka “Boxing Day.”

Saint Nicholas in the Fourth Century emphasized the anonymity of gift giving that was altruistically motivated without any hope for reciprocity. His practice of secretly dropping gold coins in people’s drying stockings continues albeit more often with chocolate. Such giving still can be tremendously meaningful for both the giver and the recipient.

The most memorable gifts are however not the anonymous ones, but the ones from those who love us most. The gifts we all remember are those that somehow demonstrate that we have been seen, known, and loved. The real gift is therefore not just the object given but the relationship that shares it. Such gifts are all the more memorable when they involve the real effort of the gift giver even if it is a rather lop sided third grade art project.

And so it is with Christ.

One way of considering the celebration of the Incarnation that we call Christmas is as a gift exchange. The incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth is an exchange of our admittedly rather shabby possessions—fear, anxiety, ignorance, doubt, desire, and alienation—for God’s glorious gifts of divinity, eternity, wisdom, righteousness, hope, and love. God becomes one of us so that we may become a bit more like him/her/it.

The birth of this God/Man Jesus in Bethlehem means many things but chief among them is that it begins a process of divinizing us. The Gospel of John addresses the cosmos spanning implications of the self-organizing and self-willed intentfulness and pattern of creation itself, that exists in itself in joyful and creative self-giving love, to so unite itself with this creation as to become a creature, one of us, in the flesh, incarnate. The enormity of this exchange boggles the imagination and depletes our vocabularies as we struggle for better suited poetry and paradox.

The gift exchange is all the more remarkable for its imbalance. We share precisely what we despise, the weaknesses that make us us and keep us apart from God, others, and ourselves that we collectively label “sin,” and in exchange discover all those empty hollow, hungry places inside us filled with an odd contentment that is the precursor to the real gift of love. We deliver the worst elephant gift imaginable and yet it is somehow not merely accepted but cherished, and in return we receive life and being that we not even dared to hope possible. We trade alienation and fear for belonging and love.

On Christmas Eve, we gather to remember and celebrate. But more important than all that, we gather with hungry hearts to simply receive the greatest gift of all.

December 12, 2023

Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest

in the kingdom of heaven. -Matthew 18:4

There is nothing as wonderful, holy, messy, and meaningful as a Children’s Christmas Pageant. No matter the planning or organization, the glorious innocence, energy, and honesty of children is unpredictable and simply sacred. In the words, faces, actions, and pure wisdom of children, we draw closer to God.

I am delighted to have twenty -four of our Fairmont children participating in our annual Children’s Christmas Pageant this year. On this third Sunday of Advent, our children will bring God’s word to us in worship, as they tell again the story of God incarnate in Jesus.

Mary, Joseph, Innkeeper, Donkey, Shepherds, Angels, Doves, Magi, Sheep, Camels, Cows, and Narrators will fill the chancel of our sanctuary proclaiming the good news that Christ is born!

I remember with such joy, a simple Christmas gift given to me many years ago by one of the neighborhood children in the first church I served in Long Beach, California. I had hosted an after-school Christmas party for the children in our downtown neighborhood during my first year of ministry in 1987. Most of the children in the community surrounding our church, Covenant Presbyterian, were from low income families – families who worked multiple jobs to care for their loved ones.

The gift – from a young boy who came often to our afterschool program at the church – was a small stuffed animal, a donkey, clearly loved and clearly worn out. It was not a new or expensive stuffed animal but it was the most precious gift to me. Given with the love and innocence of a child who had very little to give other than love itself. I still have that worn out, used stuffed animal and treasure it to this day.

I invite you to join us for worship this Sunday at either the 8:30am service where Brian will preach or the 10:30am service where the children will “preach.” Come hear the good news of Immanuel, God with us. I know your hearts will be filled with much joy.

Pastor Kelley

December 5, 2023

Tonight, in many places in the world, shoes will be carefully set outside the front doors of homes. In the morning they will be filled with chocolates, candies, and small gifts. Tonight, December 5, is the eve of Saint Nicholas’ Day.

Saint Nicholas of Myra was a fourth century Bishop in what is now Turkey, but was then the Eastern Roman Empire. Nicholas became renowned for this sanctity and generosity.  Unlike some other philanthropists, Nicholas insisted on giving gifts anonymously to not embarrass or dishonor the recipient. He would by night covertly deposit gold coins in stockings hanging for drying. His gift giving practices did lead to several awkward nocturnal encounters with the town watch. He was particularly well known for providing suitable dowries for families’ daughters so they could obtain respectable marriages. Through these gifts and his protection of children from slavers, he became renowned during his lifetime as a patron and protector of children. He is also said to have calmed storms at sea to protect innocent travelers. While we know very little about his career (he is listed among the attendees at the Council of Nicaea in 325), his fame gradually spread such that he is now considered a patron saint of: sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, unmarried people, and students. I am aware of no other saint with such a broad portfolio of patronage.

Last Spring while on a cruise in the Caribbean, while other people were lounging about by the pool, I took a tour of the engine room.  In the main engine control room, high above rows after rows of LCD monitors displaying every imaginable dynamic condition throughout the entire ship stood large silver frame with a portrait of an elderly man with a beard. My guide never pointed it out, but I recognized it instantly. Despite all the modern technology of seafaring, the Greek crew of my ship took no chances. Overseeing it all was silver framed icon of Saint Nicholas.

I am intrigued by the ongoing significance of this rather minor church father. He left no writings that we are aware of. Instead, he left an example. In the Roman Empire, the week after the Winter Solstice was celebrated with feasts, general carousing, and the exchanging of gifts. These gifts were given to cement bonds of fealty and loyalty between patrons and clients. The gifts were the visible glue of hierarchy in the Roman world. Nicholas turned this on its head. His gifts were meant to be anonymous and were given to precisely those who could never reciprocate in kind or coin. Nicholas’ gift giving did not seek to aggrandize the giver. Rather, his gift giving sought to lift up the recipient.

Economists forecast that as a nation we will spend just shy of one trillion dollars on gift giving between Thanksgiving and New Years’ (one followed by twelve zeroes!). That is a lot of gifts. But I wonder how many of them come without any expectation, prior relationship, or hope for future reciprocity? I wonder how many of those gifts are like Nicholas’s?

At the heart of what we long for this Advent and celebrate at Christmas is to fully experience the admirabile commercium, the “great exchange,” in which God takes up our broken, wayward, confused humanity and grants to us the seed of divinity. Athanasius expressed it best, “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” It is all a gift, undeserved, unmerited, and one that can never be reciprocated in kind. Perhaps that was what Nicholas was trying to show us.

So, this year, if you wish to participate in the vast divine conspiracy we call salvation, instead of putting your shoes outside tonight, or even hanging your socks by the fire in a few weeks, keep your eyes open for the empty socks and shoes, and even more the empty lives of others. We give because we have already received and, in our giving, we participate (however provisionally)

with the giver of every good gift.

Happy Saint Nicholas’ Day!

November 28, 2023

Every December there are countless concerts featuring Handel’s oratorio, Messiah. People come and expect to hear the famous Hallelujah Chorus. The problem is that the Hallelujah Chorus is the conclusion to Part Two of the oratorio, which is all about Jesus’ saving death and resurrection. Handel drew upon Revelation 11 and 19 for its lyrics, not the infancy narrative. In other words, the Hallelujah Chorus has absolutely nothing to do with the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Indeed, a performance of Messiah focused on the birth of Jesus would normally conclude with the final chorus of Part One, His yoke is easy, His burden is light.

The problem is that we like the Hallelujah Chorus and demand it be sung at Christmas regardless of what it is actually about. And so, the Chorus stays in and slowly becomes associated with the birth of Jesus, even though it narrates Christ’s final defeat of death and Satan. Slowly, we compress revelation and salvation history into a single event. And then we wonder why Christmas, among other things, does not seem to make sense.

Handel understood two things that we have forgotten. First, the lived experience of the vast majority of human beings is not the singular celebration of the birth of Christ Child, but rather the achingly long waiting, seeking, and searching for Christ. This plaintive yearning for God and God’s Kingdom is the lived quality of our lives stuck in between promise and fulfillment. Liturgically we call that wistful yearning, Advent, a season of waiting, wanting, seeking, searching, and preparing. None of us attended the birth of Jesus. None of us bumped into the sneaking shepherds or encountered the somewhat lost Iranian astrologers wandering the hills. We remember the Christmas story, celebrate it, and cherish it, but we did not experience it. We instead live our whole lives inside of Advent.

The second thing Handel understood that we have forgotten is that there is not one single Advent of waiting for the Lord. There are actually three. The first Advent occurred 2000 years ago as the people of Israel, subject to foreign overlords and foul tyrants, scoured their scriptures and hoped for the Return of the King who would set things right. Of course, that King did not enter as they expected, rule as they wanted, or save as they hoped. Most troubling, he did what they least expected of all. He died. On a cross. That King was nothing like what they anticipated so they can perhaps be forgiven for not flocking to his movement. This waiting, watching, and questioning was the first Advent, the Advent of the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, the God Man. But it is not our Advent. It happened long long ago.

There is a second Advent, the one Handel focuses most of Messiah on. A day will come when history will end and God’s reign will be made complete, the Day of the Lord, the Final Judgment and the Kingdom, the restoration of all things. Jesus is quite clear that we will never know when or how this will come, so we need to live lives of preparation and readiness. We scan the world for signs while scouring our own hearts to align with God’s. We yearn for Christ’s coming, but not as a child in Bethlehem but rather as the conquering lamb who will finally and fully put sin, death, and Satan, underfoot. This season of waiting and watching is the second Advent, the eschatological Advent, the Advent of the Kingdom of God. The whole church and each of our lives are lived within this ongoing season of Advent and its undefined but finite duration. Perhaps it will come next year, or perhaps in a billion? We do not hasten its coming. Instead, we are called to live our lives in preparation.

There is however a third Advent that we normally ignore. God does not just come to us upon the whirlwind of the conquering heavenly host, or in the quiet, humble manger. God also comes to us here and now in Spirit. God shows up in the mundane ordinariness of lives, whenever and wherever we simply pay attention. We numb and distract ourselves with our self-satisfied busyness and lose ourselves in the never-ending cacophony of our own self-absorbed thoughts. The problem is not that God is absent, but that we are inattentive. Our seeking therefore is less a matter of scanning the horizon for signs and portents and more a matter of simply sitting quietly with ourselves and paying attention to what is at work both within us and between us. What is at work is God the Spirit, the presence, power, and potentiality of God transforming us here and now. This third Advent is both the most immediate and the most challenging because it demands a response from us. This third Advent is the invitation to start living into Christ right now.

I love Handel’s Messiah. It stirs the soul and imagination. But for my own life, here and now, living my little wayward, yearning life of Advent I will stick with something a bit more plaintive than triumphal, a bit more longing and less accomplished, and certainly a bit easier to hum as I walk along the paths of the forest at twilight. Ever since I was 13 years old, on lonely nights, and in the silence of my room, and even under the celestial grandeur of the Aurora Borealis, I have falteringly hum, sung, and mumbled a less triumphant tune that reflects both my constant hope for the rather tardy coming of God’s Kingdom, and my desire to enter ever more deeply into Christ’s presence and transformation here and now. So, my prayer turns to a much older song, probably the oldest in our hymnal, a Gregorian chant actually. You know it as O Come, O Come Emanuel. I prefer to sing the original lyrics because when I do on a quiet night alone in the forest, I somehow feel like I am singing in with the communion of saints whose longing and yearning I share.

Veni, veni, Emmanuel captivum solve Israel,

qui gemit in exsilio, privatus Dei Filio.

Gaude! Gaude! Emmanuel,

nascetur pro te Israel!

I will wait for the Messiah. Yes, I will wait for the Messiah. Even though He may tarry. Yet, I shall wait for the Messiah. This I believe.

–Brian

November 21, 2023

The first step is the most important. The first step is to pay attention.

Attention is both the foundation for both morality and spirituality. Attention is by definition to focus on something, someone other than yourself. Attention necessarily shifts the center of our own personal universes from our unending personal dialog in which “I” am the one who always perceives, feels, judges, and wants, to something outside ourselves. Attention is the intentional choice that opens us up to learning, wisdom, and love. The problem for most of us is that we are all consumed by our endless internal monologue in which the “I” is the absolute center of experience which becomes subjectively indistinguishable from reality itself.

I would like to propose attention as the most important thing we need to nurture this Thanksgiving. Gratitude, awareness and appreciation of the magnitude of the gifts and gifting we have received, Is one of the many benefits of attention. The older I get, the more I prefer Thanksgiving to Christmas. Christmas, as we culturally celebrate it, is wonderful, especially for children. But Christmas is a nonstop blur of colors, lights, music, food, and most of all presents. Christmas is a sensory overload of music and tinsel with each new feature seeking to grab our attention for a fleeting moment. The colors of Christmas are bright green and red with shiny gold and silver twinkling from garlands and the tree. Christmas is a holiday that rewards attention deficits with the dopamine hit of ever greater novelty all set against the stark white background of fresh snow.

Thanksgiving is altogether more subdued. Its rewards are subtle but less fleeting. The colors of Thanksgiving, muted browns, rusts, and beige, do not clamor for our attention. The leaves underfoot provide a mottled mosaic that softens the diffuse afternoon light. And while there may be high drama in the kitchen trying to reconcile the cooking temperatures of white and dark Turkey meat, after all the food is served, after the plates have started their long soak, there is nothing more to do. Sated, rested, and together, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. Thanksgiving, specifically the time after the meal with family, is perhaps the closest Christians come to a true experience of sabbath. There comes a moment after the meal when the world is precisely the way God intended.

Then and there, if we choose, we can participate in a remedial lesson of paying attention. All the hurried busyness is over, and nothing needs to be accomplished.  In that moment you can experience the world precisely the way God intended it to be. You can simply be. And in that being, paying attention especially to those around you and the blessed state of contentment, can lead to a deeper experience of gratitude and grace.

The world spends a lot of time and energy to keep us perpetually distracted. Billions of dollars are spent on the Internet to keep us diverted and preoccupied with things people want to sell us. Ever since Immanual Kant, we have been taught that the crucible of all meaning, purpose, and value dwells exclusively between our ears. Ever since Friedrich Schleiermacher, we have been taught that what passes for religion in our culture dwells there also. And today our culture demands that we live not so much in the present moment but in a constant tensive state of desiring (or stressing over) the future. We no longer live fully in the now but in the indeterminacy of what could be. Desires and their fulfillment are what our society defines as “The Good.” Delving ever more deeply and attentively into me and my passing wants has never brought me anything except selfishness, anxiety, guilt, shame, and depression. The way out is simple, but it requires a conscious choice. You need to start paying attention.

Thanksgiving can be much more than a day. Thanksgiving can be a way of living into a life of gratitude, connection, belonging, and delight. And it all starts by paying attention.

November 14, 2023

This past Sunday afternoon I had one of my rare opportunities to talk to some honest spiritual guides and teachers. Over pizza and sippy boxes of juice I talked to our youth about their experiences of the divine. The beautiful and insightful gift that young people offer is that they have not yet learned what sorts of answers are out of bounds in our polite, flattened, disenchanted world. They have not yet been secularized by reason. Instead, if you take the time to build up a bit of trust and honestly listen to their stories, they can tell you about things, events, experiences, sensation, and perceptions that adults ignore, discount, or exclude as possible.

We talked about spirituality–the seeking of, experience of, and reflection upon encounter with the divine. Spirituality is the vital energy that infuses not only religion but life with meaning, purpose, and value. Spirituality is the common human itch that cannot be scratched by anything in this creation. Spirituality is the shared human predicament and experience of connecting with someone, something utterly unlike us and yet connected to us. Over time, our culture slowly suffocates any sense of actual encounter and instead offers up a secularized, hedonistic notion of spirituality as whatever makes you feel good. But before that happens, young people still have an opportunity to perceive, remember, and share.

Churches are equally culpable in flattening our spirituality into either ethics (being good) or self-congratulatory satisfaction (being saved). Sometimes when we talk to children in church we speak of “God Sightings” by which we actually mean some behavior or phenomena congruent with God’s stated intentions for our lives and world. For example, when someone is especially kind to another, we might call that a God sighting. What we most definitively do not mean by “God Sighting” is an actual visual appearance of the divine person, power, or agency. Those sorts of actual God sightings are what people may have experienced way back in Old Testament times, but we, especially in the church, no longer expect God to actually show up. So, we content ourselves with teaching our lessons from the Bible on theology and ethics and content ourselves with that.

Children and youth have not yet learned the implicit assumption of divine absence. They have raw, visceral, inexplicable experiences that they want to share and in doing so somehow connect or validate. The briefest study of the history of Christian mystical experiences quickly confirms that their experiences are fully consistent with those of believers down through the centuries. Since Paul’s first encounter with the risen Jesus, men and women have been seeing, hearing, and sometimes bumping into some sort of manifestation of Jesus ever since. Visual, auditory, tactile, and emotional encounters with some sort of supernatural presence that seems to seeks to connect, heal, and embrace are a core, although often overlooked, dimension of Christian witness. So, when our children tell me about a word they heard on the wind spoken by no human voice or a moment when the doorway of perception is opened to reveal a real beyond our normal perception, I know that they are not hallucinating or mentally ill. Quite to the contrary, they are spiritually healthier than most of us. They are catching glimpses, hints, and whispers of what saints and mystics have been sharing for centuries. God is in fact all around us simply waiting for us to pay attention.

Participation in religious communities in the United States declines every year. We often blame the forces of secularism. What we fail to consider is how we have secularized the church. Have we so diluted the good news of a passionate God actively seeking communion with us such that we would not even notice if that God actually showed up in our lives? Have we flattened the agency and intent of the Creator of the Universe into optional, passive, ethical preferences? Recently I attended a church gathering of pastors and other church leaders where we were encouraged to share “good news” from our congregations. Every item shared was about expanding programs, funding, or membership. Every item shared could have been shared by any other non-profit social service organization in our community. God was never mentioned. Jesus was never mentioned. The Spirit was never mentioned. If all we have to share and show or even yearn for is what we can see and touch and count, then we have truly lost our inheritance.

Sometimes you need to talk to a child to be reminded of the things that you once knew that the world made you forget. Sometimes you need to talk to a child to remember how to see, hear, and feel. There is more around us, more presence, more happening than we could possibly imagine. All we need to do is remember how to pay attention.

November 7, 2023

In 1938, two young Jewish musicians—Hyman Arluck, the son of a Synagogue Cantor from Buffalo, and Isidore Hochberg, a son of Russian speaking Orthodox Jews from the Lower East Side—wrote a song that nobody wanted. They had been commissioned to write it for a new film, but the producer did not want to put it in because it seemed so out of place. The original screenplay never included it. Nonetheless, they persevered. They wrote the song from the uniquely Jewish perspective of yearning for deliverance from oppression and the desire for a better life somewhere else. Their music and lyrics gave expression to the plaintive yearning of children raised in ghettos and yet somehow touched the universal human hope for the future. They wrote perhaps the most deeply Jewish and most deeply human song ever penned. They called it Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Perhaps you have heard it.

I have been thinking about that song and its yearning in the past month. The war in Gaza continues in its daily crushing toll of human lives and misery. Some 240 hostages are still held by the government of Gaza ruled by Hamas. Worryingly, Hamas now reports that they have now “misplaced” 60 or so of them. And all the while the civilian population of Gaza continues to suffer horrifically as their government uses them as human shields. It is all tragic and so much more complicated than reported in our media. But that is not what concerns me most pressingly.

Jewish friends and neighbors here in Dayton, staff of Synagogues, and teachers have all reported a frightening and tremendous increase in incidents of anti-Jewish hate speech, threats, and warnings. Anti-Semitism has erupted in Dayton threatening the lives and safety of friends and neighbors. As Christians it is our ethical, moral, and Biblical duty to call out, denounce, and eradicate such hatred whenever and wherever it arises. Prejudice against Jews is an outward expression of sin, contrary to God’s intentions and diametrically opposed to Jesus’ saving work, that same Jesus who was born, lived, and died a faithful Jew.

The relationship between Christians and Jews has always been conflicted and often tragic for the Jews. As Reformed Christians, Presbyterians take Romans 9-11 seriously, that is we believe that God has one continuous plan for the salvation of humankind called covenant. That covenant is first with the Jews, that is the people of Israel, and then through the grace of Jesus Christ with the gentiles, that is the rest of us. Jesus’s saving work does not undo God’s promises to Israel, but rather extends those promises to us. Eventually, “all Israel [including all of God’s children] shall be saved.” Romans 11:25. Consequently, Reformed Christians do not evangelize or discriminate against Jews because they are, in a sense, our older brothers and sisters in the family of the people of God. And we further believe that as part of the people of God, Jews must be shown the same respect as fellow Christians.  It is perhaps not surprising then that Jewish communities in nations led by Reformed Christians like Holland and Switzerland have generally found their lives safer than elsewhere where ancient slanders of “deicide” still linger. To express hatred of the Jews as Jews is therefore not merely vile prejudice, it is willful blasphemy and potentially a denial of the work of the Holy Spirit, the only sin that Matthew mentions shall not be forgiven.

Does this mean that the government of Israel or particular decisions by particular people of Jewish ancestry cannot be questioned? Not at all. The government of Israel, like the government of most nation states, has made many stupid decisions. Jewish people are not necessarily angels by any means. What we must instead eradicate is any group identification, group slander, and collective blame against a people simply for being who they are. Moreover, we should never hold one people to a moral or legal standard that we would not impose upon ourselves. Anything less is rank hypocrisy. And these standards are equally applicable to Arabs and Muslims more generally just as they are to Jews.

My concern about rising anti-Semitism is both pastoral in that I see it as a dangerous cancer in our community and personal. The first Jewish family I ever knew were the Fienbergs who lived down the street from me when I was in elementary school. I would play with their son Anthony who occasionally left school early for Torah classes. His mother Joyce was always so kind to me when I came over to play offering me wonderful cookies. They were not strange or exotic, but just really good cooks with a house made for playing hide and seek. They moved away when I was in fourth grade but I always remembered her gentle kindness. Joyce Fienberg, along with ten other worshippers, was murdered while attending Shabbat morning worship at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 18, 2018. The murderer explained in his social media post that he wanted to kill Jews.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.” So Edmund Burke, one of my heroes, is reported to have said. That means that we cannot politely ignore evil: lesser, greater, middling, it makes no difference. While that evil, prejudice, bias, and slander is always directed against “them,” it is ultimately directed against all of us.

We all long for somewhere over the rainbow, a place without hatred, prejudice, and violence. Yearning for a better tomorrow is part of the human condition, but so too is our capacity to act. A couple ideas for things we can do in our community: write a letter of support and encouragement to the senior rabbi at Temple Israel, Temple Beth Or (both Reform), Beth Abraham Synagogue (orthodox) or Chabad of Greater Dayton, with our friend Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin. Support Temple Beth Or’s Brisket & Art Fair on December 4th. Send donations to the Jewish Federation of Dayton or even subscribe to The Jewish Observer, Dayton’s Jewish monthly. Similarly, local relations with Muslims always need intention for open-hearted curiosity and welcome. Learn about the Dayton Mercy Society and/or the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton for events and services, or support the Dayton Islamic School, located in Beavercreek.

There is a better future out there and not merely in the memories of lullabies or the dreams of bluebirds. We can build the bridge to that future and make that hope our world every day.  You can pay attention, use your words, and shape your actions to help to build up and heal relationships right here in Dayton. This is not politics, driven by intergenerational wounds from afar; this is faithful stewardship of Jesus’ way of the Heart, Mind, and Courage. The dreams that you dare to dream really do come true, if each of us will choose and act.

–Brian

October 24, 2023

Warning, this may be a little nerdy.

Last Saturday night while trying to relax into sleep I was read an article from the current issue of The American Journal of Physics (like we all do) with the wonderful title, “All Objects and Some Questions.” You can read it here. It presented a thermal history of the cosmos. One chart caught my imagination, a logarithmic plot of everything that exists or can exist as graph of mass versus size as measured in radius. And by everything, I mean everything from the smallest possible quantum particle at the Compton Limit to the Hubble Radius, which is the size of the observable universe. You can awe at the chart here. This chart does not merely include everything that is, but everything that could be in our universe. It also illustrates the bounds of what is possible in this universe. Relativity will not permit black holes smaller than the Planck Limit. Similarly, quantum uncertainty rules as out of bounds particles beneath a certain size all fading into a probability function. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the chart is the patterned procession of creation in ordered arrays.

Logarithmic charts like this that embrace, well everything, have always inspired me. Why this universe with these parameters and not another? For that question there is no answer. What is the relationship between mass, size, and energy? Now that is a question worth pursuing. In seeing it all plotted out so simply I am first struck by the harmony of it all. It resonates (at least logarithmically) with pattern, subtle but comprehensible. Catching a barely informed glimpse of that pattern makes me feel like a part of the whole, everything that ever was, is, and ever will be in this creation.

It may sound odd, but I find the process of doing science, or at least me vicariously reading about and sometimes catching fleeting glimpses of the doing of science, pastorally comforting. Mutual comprehensibility connects us and reminds me that I live in a universe filled with mystery, wonder, and awe just waiting to be discovered. One of my heroes, Johannes Kepler, discoverer of the three laws of planetary motion, and occasional chief astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor wrote:

We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for their song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens . . . The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment. Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)

Not only was this universe made from mysteries and wonders, but we were made to perceive, delve, wonder, and explore them. The mysteries and the awe-struck wonderers were made for each other.

We live today in a violent world filled with outrage, anger, ignorance, greed, incivility, and constant anxiety. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Institutions, the rule of law, civil society, and religion itself all appear under dire assault. Of course, that was also true back in Kepler’s day as the Thirty-Year War raged across Europe and committed Christians killed a third of the population of Central Europe to persuade each other of their opinions about Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Despite or perhaps because of all that Kepler turned away from the court and politics and gazed deeply into the night sky, glimpsing patterns no one had ever imagined before. Behind our parade of shambling calamities, there is a still order, beauty, pattern, and purpose.

So, I turned off my doomscrolling on the Associated Press. I let go of Gaza and Ukraine, our anxious and vengeful politics, global warming, economic inequality, and the endless decline of the church. I let go of it all through a simple chart. Because I knew what its authors did not. This chart was not really a logarithmic plot of density. This chart was an icon, an image painted by the creator. And as with all icons, you do not look at it but rather look through it like a lens to the one who created it.

October 17, 2023

I am sad and mad and scared. I am sad grieving the senseless loss of life in Israel, the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. I am mad that death dealing cynical, terrorists like Hamas could cause such suffering both for Israel and for the Palestinian people. And I am scared for what this means for the future of a land that I love.

In great suffering, the calling of all faith communities is to hold space for people to honestly grieve and remember that even now in the middle of such loss, God is not done with us or with those who have died. Most of all, we sit in silent witness with those who are in such pain where there are no words. Dear friends have lost family members, some to death and others to the uncertain fate of captivity. Other younger friends and acquaintances are now deployed in harm’s way. There is nothing I can do to help them or relieve their pain, so I simply hold them in prayer, envisioning them all happy, healthy, whole, and together.

My sorrow is tinged with rage. I rage at Hamas and their calculated murder, rape, and abduction of civilians, as well as rage at their total disregard for Palestinian safety and security. I rage at Hamas for their destructive and publicly affirmed creed seeking the destruction of all Israelis everywhere simply for who they are. The timing of these massacres was intended to prevent the one thing that Hamas cannot countenance, the possibility of old enemies in the Middle East making peace. As someone who seeks to follow Jesus, I abhor war. However, sometimes, there are things worse than war. Sometimes force must be used to protect the innocent and stop evil. This is a lesson that my Jewish friends have taught me well. Powerlessness in the face of evil is no virtue.

I am angry at voices that create a false moral equivalence hinged on the word, “but.” I want to excise our use of the word “but” in our moral discourse and imagination. Evil is evil. Period.  For beheading of children and dragging elderly civilians to their deaths through the streets there can be no moral or political justification. Yet so many in the chattering class insidiously insert the “but” of cynical relativized doubt mocking the pain and slyly insinuating that those civilians somehow indirectly deserved their fates. “Yes, what happened in Israel is tragic, but look what the Israelis did in Gaza!” The “but” denies everything that goes before. The “but” says I am ritually saying what I am required to say even though I do not believe it. “But” removes us from shared compassion as fellow human beings and sets us up judge over our neighbor. “But” replaces morality and simple honesty with cynical rhetorical spin.

Instead, I would like to suggest the expanded use of the word “and.” “And” includes and acknowledges the reality of everyone’s pain and loss without comparison, evaluation, or justification. “And” bears witness without judgment. Israelis have suffered tremendous pain and loss. And Palestinians have suffered tremendous pain and loss. “And” does not try to balance the equation of terror or hint at false equivalencies. It merely acknowledges the pain of both sides. Today especially I am haunted by another terrible loss, another terrible evil, in the murder of six-year-old Wadea Alfayoumi, killed in Plainfield, Illinois simply because his family was Palestinian. Shedding innocent blood, solely because of one’s identity is abhorrent evil for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Finally, I am scared, scared for the people of Israel and Gaza. I am scared for the hundreds of civilian hostages and their families. I am scared for the citizens of Gaza callously and forcibly being used as human shields by Hamas. I am scared for how this conflict might spread to Lebanon or elsewhere. I am scared about the possibility of a regional war and all of war’s uncertainties. I am scared about how this conflict will cause new wounds, harden hearts, and foreclose hopes.  And finally, I am scared how all these new hurts, wounds, angers, and scarred hearts will drive us all further away from the life and community intended by the Father of us all.

To confront this all I know how to do is preach, pray, and teach. So that is what I intend to do. I hope you will join me.

If you might want to hear more about the Gaza conflict, I invite you to watch the interview I conducted with my dear friend Rabbi Brad Hirschfield yesterday. You can watch it by clicking here

October 10, 2023

Matthew’s gospel brings us a healing story of two blind men who not only beg Jesus to heal them but yell loudly at Jesus to heal them. The feelings are definitely on the surface in this story! It is a short pericope of scripture but there are deep truths to be found here.

You may be more familiar with this story from Mark’s gospel in Mark chapter 10. It is the healing of Bartimaeus, the blind beggar. The passion is the same in both gospels but Mark gives us a few more details and one less person to be healed. But what Mark’s gospel does not give us is what Jesus was feeling. Compassion. Jesus is moved with compassion and touches the men’s eyes and heals them.

It might seem like a small detail and, of course, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel is the same compassionate healer. But the writer of the gospel of Matthew seems to bring the focus of this story straight to Jesus. The men who are healed are unnamed. We know very little detail about them. The story is shortened. But Jesus is spotlighted for his compassion. We see Jesus as fully human and fully divine.

This Sunday is Children’s Sabbath. A day we celebrate the gifts of children and remember children here and across the world. Every year, places of worship across the nation and from every religious tradition, join together in common concern for the struggles children, youth, and families face. This Sabbath is our expression of shared commitment to listening deeply to the voices of children and youth.

The beloved children of Fairmont will be leading the entire worship service at 10:30 a.m. I know you will be blessed and will see and hear God in their faces and through their voices. The children will be lifting prayers and liturgy about the compassion of Jesus and his healing touch.

Our 8:30 a.m. worship service will also be held as usual in the Fellowship Hall with our wonderful Praise Team! Join us either service (or both) for a meaningful sabbath day.

October 3, 2023

Sometimes one seeks out meaning and purpose in life. And sometimes, a meaning and purpose seek out you.

Please consider this my confession, or perhaps explanation, or perhaps an apology.

I have been serving in ordained ministry for the past 19 years. And now almost everything I once knew about ministry is now obsolete. In past generations it took many decades, even centuries, for this to happen in ministry and in other professions. Now it happens in just a few years. Luckily, I still obsessively read and learn trying to keep up with the constant waves of change, but admittedly it takes more and more effort. The problem is not so much the speed at which I learn. The problem is that time itself is accelerating in our culture. The rate of the rate of change has increased.

We live in a culture and a world that is in a constant state of acceleration and this impacts every person and every institution. The primary impact of this acceleration on people is exhaustion and anxiety. The exhaustion is self-evident. The anxiety is the result of our nagging sense that we are not keeping up. We are all haunted by a nagging sense of guilt or perhaps doubt that we are not running fast enough or doing enough. And of course, we are not because we cannot. You cannot ever do enough.

I am 54 years old. There are fewer days ahead of me in life and in ministry than behind. I need to be a bit more strategic about how I spend them. The great pastoral cause to which I feel drawn is the issue of time. Behind so much of the stress and anxiety that I hear about in people’s lives and all the consequences (depression, stress, disease, despair, divorce, addiction, etc.) lies the problem of time and its acceleration. We are busy with busyness and have redefined a purposeful life as busyness. And in doing so we are now moving faster than our souls can go.

I would love to say that the solution is simply to slow down. We could all become a lot more Amish. But that is not going to happen. Instead, I suspect that our response will need to be both more subtle and insidious. We need to change our relationship with time right in the middle of the accelerating torrent of the busyness we have made.

The word “secular” does not mean without religion or spirituality. “Secular” literally means the world of chronological time, the saeculum in Latin. Moreover, the word “world” is not a designation of place, but rather a designation of time. World comes from the Anglo Saxon “wer” meaning man (e.g. a werewolf) and “alt” or “elt” meaning age or time. Wer-alt or world is literally the age of man. So, when I say that what I want to pastorally address the secular world in the years God grants me to serve, I am not talking about a place or even a concrete thing, but rather our relationships with time. What I really want to be about is pointing beyond our secular world towards that which is beyond it and our human constructions of time, namely eternity.

I cannot change the world. And neither can you. But we can point beyond it. We can refuse to be captive to it. We can help others see the chains of bondage that we have forged for ourselves out of our culture’s conditions and presumptions. We can help to free ourselves and others. And we can all, together, point towards a far-off horizon of a place and time so different from the age we have made. I think that is precisely what Jesus was trying to do in all his rather cryptic messages about this hazy notion of “The Kingdom.” He could not really point to anything in his world that was like it, but he could point beyond us altogether.

Time, as we have fashioned it and accelerated it, seems to be keeping us apart from God, apart from our neighbors, friends, and families, and apart from our selves. The technical name we use in the church for those impediments that keep us alienated and separated from God and each other is sin. It is not a moral failing, but rather a structural precondition of our lives in this secular world. That is what we need to identify, map, contain, constrain, circumvent, breach, disrupt, and ultimately restore because we were not created to live in the secular world. We were both made and destined for another Kingdom beyond all our time altogether.

This will not be easy. The world has some rather pointed ways of pushing back. The Greek term in the New Testament for one who gives witness, one who points, is martyr. But a little death to the world can sometimes be good for the soul. And according to Jesus, the cosmic irony is that the more loosely one holds onto one’s own life, the more connected one becomes with life itself.

To point both to and through those moments of eternity poking through into our secular world is to be about the work of reenchantment, reclaiming the holy and transcendent amid the banal, material and mundane. But that is our work because that was Jesus’ work. Now it is our turn.

–Brian

September 26, 2023

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a world before time. Not a world before the sequential passage of causal events, the web of space time linking cause and effect that started at the Big Bang, but rather a world before the mechanical measurement of time. I wonder what it would be like to live in a world in which the passage of time and the passage of life were and the same? What would it be like to live in a world where the passage of time was only measured in natural events of sunrise, sunset, phases of the moon, and seasons? And while I would not like to live in such a world if it meant giving up on modern medicine and sanitation, I do wonder whether I would think differently in such a world, whether I would be different in such a world.

For the vast majority of human history, the vast majority of human beings lived their lives to the rhythms of the natural world.  You got up with the sun and went to sleep when it set. There would be no urgency or rushing because things would simply come in their natural order. There was always a lot of work, but you could not speed it up. You can only milk your cows once a day no matter how productive you might want to be. In such a world, there would be little room for increased efficiency and productivity. Time management would be an oxymoron. The daily rhythms of the natural world would rather manage human life.

Without a sense of mechanical time, I doubt I would ever feel rushed. Tired? Certainly. But the anxious hurried panic set against the stopwatch would be literally unthinkable. Time present would unfold coextensively with life lived. The very modern notion of getting our work done so we might have time to live our lives would be nonsensical. Instead, undistracted by imperatives other than custom and nature, we might actually have an opportunity to pay attention. In such an extended world of the present, it may even be possible to notice ways in which the past was still with us.

I have been wrestling with the notion of time and all the mischief it causes our souls. It impacts all of us and everything we do. In my real life I am always living partially in an imagined future, seeking to shape its outcomes through my efforts today. I live in a mental world of multiple possible futures each shaped by my own presumed agency for which I am responsible. Nearly infinite causally linked lists of what-ifs endlessly cycle through my mind each demanding urgent attention. The ability to influence events often feels less like freedom than a burden constantly trying to wring some marginal agency out of each and every labor. Since we can shape the future, our to do list are necessarily endless. This is the gift and the curse of the Enlightenment. Human beings have stolen the ability to shape our own future, but like Prometheus, we pay a price. We now must toil, not just in our labor, but our in anxiety about our labor. There is always more to be done. There is always a way to be more effective, efficient, or productive. We will never do enough, produce enough, be enough. And then we wonder why we are so exhausted.

There is another way. The modern world does not like it. You will need to let go of some control over the future (it was always a bit of proud fantasy anyway). You will also need to let go of our fond status symbols of self-important busyness that we wear like a badges of honor. Instead, you can relocate the center of your identity, value, and worth away from our long lists of what we do into who we are in relationship with others. We can imagine our lives and our very selves not as achievements, but rather emergent expressions of connection with others. We can let go of all our human doings for human being and in doing so perhaps discover true freedom for the first time.

Jesus’ invitation to a new way of life he calls the Kingdom of God is not so much a place as a time. Eternal life is not really really long life. Eternal life describes the quality and not the quantity of life. Eternal life (Zoe Ainon) literally means life of the age of the Kingdom, a quality of life contrasted with the realm of time, the secular (saeculum). And that life is grounded not in achievement but in connection, belonging, and relationship, especially in and with a God who is connection, belonging, and relationship. According to Jesus, it is for this kind of life we are made, summoned and destined. And you do not need to wait until you die in order to experience it.

Sometimes I grow weary of this world of clocks, calendars, and to-do lists that we have made. And when that happens, I pause. Slowly, I breathe. I pay attention. And sometimes, just sometimes, eternity erupts again into the now reminding me that despite all the distractions, I belong.

–Brian

September 19, 2023

Literally beside often not very still waters . . .

If you take Highway 61 North from Duluth, Minnesota you soon enter another world of rock, wind, waves, and trees. The road hugs the shore of Lake Superior as it winds past waterfalls, hidden inlets, and around, over, and occasionally through solid stone hills. It is a hard land of taconite stone. The hills are literally made of iron. After about two hours of this scenic drive, you will come to the tiny fishing village of Grand Marais (population 1,340). You will not get lost. Highway 61 is the only paved road in Cook County. If you see welcome to Canada signs you have gone too far. When you get to Grand Marais, turn right off the highway past the old Coast Guard station and park your car. Head towards the breakwaters and ignore the no trespassing and “Danger Navigational Structures Use at your own risk” signs. When you cannot go any further without getting very wet (the average water temperature is 43 degrees), turn left into the giant maze of basalt stone that makes up the breakwater forming the harbor. It looks rather like a labyrinth designed by giants playing with Minecraft. And there you will find my temple.

A temple is a place where the transcendent God of the universe is mediated through and encountered in the material world. The rocks, actually one giant quarter mile long rock, is such a place for me. Here the continental shield juts out onto the surface. The sub-basement of the continent holding North America together for the past billion or so years extrudes from the depths of the earth. The Basalt was formed from when the world was young, far too old for fossils. This rock is not older than dinosaurs. It is older than life itself. Innumerable ice ages and their scouring glaciers have only polished it.

Since the last ice age, a mere 10,000 years ago, the middle part of the rock has been colonized by life. Dwarf spruce trees, mosses, ferns, and lichens cling tenaciously to the rocks despite the soil being only inches deep. They grow slowly here, sprayed by the icy waves that often lap and sometimes pass over the island.

All is quiet here, with only the wind, waves, and the occasional precocious Herring Gull. Since 1985 I have been going there to belong, connect, and listen. This is where I prayed through loneliness and despair. This is where I sought clarity in vocation and relationships. This is where I go to say thank you and to grieve. And in due time, this where I hope to have my material remains to be scattered, becoming a part of the island itself awaiting the day when all things are made new. I keep a picture from that spot to remind me of the view from which I will wait.

One of my favorite things about this place is that it has no formal name. People call it “Artist’s Point,” but that is just a local convention since the 1970’s. It has no name on maps. Even the Anishinaabe/Ojibway simply used their generic word for land between bodies of water to describe it. Naming things tends to be our first step in making them idols. This holy spot is anonymous.

I live my life mostly in a world in which accomplishment and efficiency are valued above all else. I know that is not so in my better and more grounded moments, but the constant messages of our culture are hard to ignore. I work hard today hoping that some day life will calm down. But there is no way of knowing whether I have ever done enough. That is the logic of secular modernity. And that is why I retreat to this nameless rock forming Grand Marais’s harbor. Countless worries and lives, peoples and empires, species and epochs rise and fall before it, yet it quietly remains itself. There is no doing here, no achieving, only the wind and water. Even though I cannot directly perceive the holy, numinous, and eternal intersecting and penetrating this world, I can experience hints, feelings, intimations, and an uncanny sense when I walk on holy ground.

Despite our best efforts to the contrary, despite our culture’s willful denial and all its rewards for collaborating with the secular and chastisements for suggesting there is more going on beyond our philosophies, this world is porous. Time and eternity touch here and there, now and then. The transcendent and the immanent permeate each other and interact in subtle and surprising ways. That interaction, that enchantment, cannot be observed and described so much as beheld and participated in because to observe would mean to hold yourself apart in order to observe. In those places and moments the opposite happens. Difference and separation are overcome. Communion happens. And, if only for the most fleeting of moments, I belong. I am home.

–Brian

September 12, 2023

I believe the last time I logged onto Facebook was in 2018. Generally, my inattention has served me and my blood pressure well. There are however some important things that happen in social media. Pastor Kelley, who is infinitely better informed about contemporary church conversations than I will ever be, thoughtfully shared with me one of these conversations that arose over the past two weeks.

Recently, a Presbyterian Pastor named Alexander Lang quit his position as Pastor of The First Presbyterian Church of Arlington, Illinois as well as ministry altogether after ten years of service. He shared the reasons for his resignation in his final sermon posted on Facebook. That sermon and his associated articles triggered a tsunami of blogs, applause, condemnations, sympathy, blame, handwringing, extolling, trolling, and even some thoughtful reflection by the vast, verbose, and well-connected commentariat of mainline pastors. The past two weeks have been a time of reckoning among pastors.

Pastor Lang stated that his reasons for quitting ministry were: (1.) stress; (2.) loneliness; (3.) increasing division within the church; (4.) adverse impacts on family; and (5.) doubts about the future of his church. These are all heavy burdens to bear. I empathize with Rev. Lang and the adversities he encountered. His pain was palpable and heart breaking. I hope that he and his family find rest and healing. And, I have no doubt that given his considerable gifts, he will do well in the future however he wishes to invest his efforts.

But then, like every other pastor who dipped into this torrent of commentary, I began to think about myself. Do I experience those burdens and how do I react to them?

The immediate answer was that his experience was not mine. I experience stress, loneliness, division, imposition, and doubts from time to time. But those are all temporary sensations, not permanent conditions. They pass in time, and I have come to trust that they will pass. Ministry, like any profession, has good days and bad. Fairmont, like any community, has good days and bad. And I, like any person, have good days and bad (often exacerbated by fatigue and hunger). I expect and anticipate setbacks and frustrations but know and trust that there will not be only setbacks and frustrations. There will also be new opportunities and satisfactions.

As I listened more closely to Rev. Lang’s sermon something else struck me. He was trying to do ministry on his own. He never mentioned colleagues or friends, counsellors or coaches, clergy groups or communities of shared practice. Ministry can be lonely, but one can choose to be less alone. But you must choose.

I have been blessed with an abundance of relationships. I am blessed to share in ministry at Fairmont with Pastor Kelley who is not only my professional colleague, but my trusted friend. My clergy group has met for over seven years now twice each month with pastors from across the United States, Australia, and England. My book group meets to discuss arcane texts. My pastoral counsellor always directs me to look for what God may be doing in any situation. I have found sharing with many of you so meaningful as we look to how our stories connect with each other and God’s story. And in all things, my partner Lisa is always there to listen, comfort, and challenge. Like so many middle-aged men, I am not particularly good at friendships, but I am learning, and I know it takes choice and a risk.

There was someone else missing from Rev. Lang’s painful confession. He never mentioned God. I firmly believe that my actual work of ministry is absurd. What I do makes no sense in the world and is exceedingly unlikely that what I do will achieve any of my desired purposes. My sermons, teaching, leadership, and companionship outwardly accomplish very little. Religious participation in the United States is plummeting and I cannot slow let alone stop that trend. And if I believed for a moment that I am either (A.) responsible for any of this, or (B.) capable of changing any of this, then I would indeed be despairing and morbidly distressed. But I am not for the simple reason that I am not in charge. God is. And that fact simultaneously relieves, reinforces and redirects me out of potential gloom.

Rev. Lang, as far as I can tell, was trying to do ministry without reliance upon God. Secular ministry is an oxymoron. Without God, we are bound to not only fail but fall into misery along the way. My most important prayer in worship is the one you never hear. Just before preaching, I always something like, “Well God, I have these words. They are not particularly good words. Someone else could provide better ones. And some of my thoughts may be just wrong. But I am the one showing up today and there does not appear to be anyone else. So, between my speaking and their hearing, please substitute your own. Speak to their hearts so that they may be healed. And please forgive me for my slapdash prose.” What you hear is not me. A sermon is not a performance. What you hear is the living encounter between you, a book, and a supernatural deity, an encounter we call the Word with a capital W. Like a mediocre volleyball player, my goal is not to get the ball over the net and score. I only need to set the ball up so that it can be played by the Holy Spirit. In this modest role I find enormous relief.

Rev. Lang never mentioned his prayer life, his practices, his study, or his contemplation. Doing ministry is my day job. Seeking union with God is my life’s work. Whenever I take the time and pay attention, I know that God is there. My problem is not God’s absence, but my inattention and nearly infinite powers of distraction. In quiet stillness I am returned to the mystery at the heart of all things that I seek to serve and share. Moreover, in my reading I get to learn from all my fellow seekers from centuries past with whom I share in this relational power that sustains all things, including me.  God’s faithful presence and this great cloud of witnesses hold me up when I just want to crumple away.

Finally, this relational, trans-subjective, supernatural, autopoietic, emergent mystery that I summarily call God redirects me away from my own self, my desires, and my frustrations towards it/her/him and everyone else along the way. There is a pull, a hunger, a yearning that realigns my life like iron filings around a magnet. In this moral life I can perhaps get a bit closer knowing I will not arrive. The motion of the journey is what brings delight, purpose and hope. What I really want is to return to that destiny that is also source even though I am not there. My life is not really mine. It is God’s. The very best I can do is simply point towards a distant horizon for which I yearn.

The great theologian Karl Barth framed a print of a portion of Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altar Piece behind his desk. It depicts John the Baptist, in the corner away from Jesus, standing off in the shadows away from the piercing brightness of heaven’s light, simply pointing towards Jesus. I cannot get to God myself. I cannot directly help you get to God. Only the Holy Spirit can do that. Truthfully, I cannot do much. But I can point. And so that is what I labor and love to do.  I can point towards what I have seen and felt. I can point towards my greatest desire knowing full well that I do not yet fully know it.

My heart laments that Rev. Lang appears to have genuinely suffered for his failure to do what mortals cannot. At best, we point, pray, and hope together, pilgrims all sharing in this journey in all its delights and hardships.

I pray for the healing of Christ’s church and all its ministers who suffer. But for me, I delight in sharing with you in this crazy, confounding communion we call church. I find inspiration in those fleeting theophanies that propel my life. I find resilient confidence in the ever-accessible silence of God’s immanent presence. I find direction from the desire, the God-shaped hole in my heart, drawing deeper into the mystery. And I find deepest satisfaction in sharing all this with you while you share your own deepest desires, satisfactions, and encounters with me and each other.

Alone, there is no hope.

Together with each other there can be joy for today.

Together with each other and with God there is joy everlasting. So, do that.

The work may be hard, but it is good. And we do not do it alone.

–Brian

September 5, 2023

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. John 10:10.

The question for us is, what exactly is an abundant life?  For Jesus it was a life lived in rich, intimate relationships with God and other people directed towards the ultimate saving purposes of God. I am not so sure that distant horizon still informs our imaginations. For most of us, abundance is understood to be busyness.

Being busy gives us a sense of importance and value. Being busy is recognized and rewarded by our culture and economy. Interconnection, efficiency, and ever-expanding productivity and achievement are the markers of a good life well lived. Being busy makes a strong claim about what is good. And so, we go faster, afraid of not keeping up and missing out. Despite that strong urge, nothing in our culture tells us where to go so quickly. Speed of life is its own goal –speed– without any particular direction or purpose. You simply know that you must be or are supposed to be a happy, fulfilled self because you are busy.

The problem is that being busy all by itself brings us no closer to any particular goal, meaning or purpose. We have simply learned to run faster in circles. And it is killing us. Our lives move at an ever-greater pace going nowhere.

One aspect of morality is having a goal or aiming towards a purpose. That end, whatever it may be, provides a guide to structure our practices, habits, values, and character. When an end goal is shared by a community over time, it becomes the organizing principle structuring our institutions across generations connecting the living and the dead. The meaning and meaningfulness of such a life  or a community are defined not so much be the arrival at those ends, but the striving towards them.

In our own Reformed theological tradition, the chief end of human beings is not an open-ended question. The purpose of humanity has been defined: to glorify God and enjoy God forever. We exist to delight God and in doing so, reciprocally experience the delight of God. Our purpose, our destiny, an delight is to enter ever deeper into that kind of love and belonging that resembles God’s own love in Trinity. But how often do you get up thinking to yourself, how can I worship and enjoy God today as the first and primary aim of my life and work?

This next year, we will be considering the accelerating busyness that infects the modern heart and mind and how it makes us miserable. The Germans have a word for it, Zeitkrankheit, literally time-sickness–the psychological unease and spiritual atrophy that comes from a need to constantly do more faster.  It is the existential condition of a life moving faster than the speed of a soul. It impacts congregations as well as individuals and whole nations.

The solution is to exit from our accelerating treadmill of time. Eternity intersects with time, penetrating every moment, if only we pay attention. That attentiveness is what we seek to nurture and strengthen, a faculty for human beings to pay attention and in doing so to resonate ever more deeply with God and neighbor.

There is a way forward towards abundant life. The world will not teach us.  But God will.

–Brian

August 22, 2023

I read an extraordinary article in this week’s issue of the Atlantic by David Brooks entitled, “How America Got Mean.” Brooks observes the massive increases over the past 25-30 years in all measures of depression and despair ranging from suicides to feelings of hopelessness alongside increases in judgment, hostility, and violence between people in the United States. While he notes many contributing causes like social media, economic insecurity and inequality, growing cultural diversity, and the privatization of American life (all of which I have commented upon at one time or another), he concludes that the underlying problem is moral:

The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. . . In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation. 

We all seem to have some sense that something is broken but no clear sense of the underlying nature of the problem let alone how to fix it. Brooks offers at least one cogent explanation.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, moral formation was a central part of education nurtured by not only churches, but schools, civic organizations, professional groups, and even government. Forming and equipping people to be good people was central to the work of churches, schools, fraternities, civic organizations, professional groups, and even government. Forming good people to live good and meaningful lives together in close knit communities was the goal of these labors striving to shape people who would be, “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.”

This work was possible because there was still some sense of a shared moral vision. Truth, goodness, justice, and beauty were not matters of personal opinion and taste but had an objective claim upon our lives. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s focused on engaging that shared collective conscience and social institutions reinforced it and applied it to individual lives.

And then, Brooks observes, it all went away.

The changes happened shortly after World War Two with the growth of expressive individualistic humanism. Carl Rogers, Norman Vincent Peale, Dr. Spock, and basically everything in the 1960’s pushed the notion that the problem of human nature was rigid authority structures that prevented us from expressing our “authentic” nature. What was needed was liberation from all that stuffy morality. This view presumed that people are inherently good and only need express that goodness to lead necessarily healthy, meaningful, and helpful lives.  To serve that end, all institutions, practices, and even cultural habits that reinforced moral formation were dismantled to serve self-expression and the liberation of the authentic self.

Meanwhile, at a much higher level the same thing happened among the curators of thought at universities as they shifted from questions of ultimate meaning to matters of research. Not only does one not get tenure for asking what is the meaning of life, the question is not supposed to be asked at all because there is presumed to be no answer beyond what a particular individual believes at a particular moment. This shift then slowly trickled down the education ladder to preschool in which skills and abilities, the tools necessary to compete in the market, have supplanted instruction in manners and morals. We end up with what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called emotivism: whatever feels good or makes me happy is the good and right thing to do. It is not the case that people who do not believe in God or any objective truth are necessarily bad people. They can choose to be good. The difference is simply that such goodness is merely a personal matter of taste.

In the postwar era, psychology replaced philosophy, theology, and ethics as a guide to healthy and meaningful human life because psychology promised to liberate the self from structures that might constrain it. Self-realization became the highest goal of human life. Duty, morality, service, devotion, and even worship were downgraded to be useful if and only if they served human self-realization. And all of this simply presumed that there was an actual self somewhere down inside us worth realizing.

Moreover, morality was subsumed under psychology such that personal will, choice, and character were buried under therapeutic diagnoses. Cruelty, self-centeredness, greed, lust, sloth, and wrath were replaced by the DSM’s penitential lists of personality disorders. And as disorders, no one is actually responsible for anything. Good and bad were replaced by healthy and unhealthy.

The problem is that absent guard rails to human wants and desires most people tend towards self-centered narcissism and absent a shared system of meaning most people live meaningless lives. The result is fragile narcissists who think they are the center of their worlds but who cannot tolerate the slightest setback, frustration, or slight. That pain is then compounded because there is no broader system of meaning to buffer or make sense of it all. People experience meaninglessness and the despair and anxiety that go along with it because they have never known meaning. Instead, they turn to the numbing or distracting charms of tribal politics, chemicals, entertainment, or acquisition.

So, if that is the problem. What is the solution?

We are.

At least we are a part of it.

The Reformed theological tradition begins with the well demonstrated observation that people left to our own devices tend to serve our own wants and interests to the exclusion of others. “Natural” human life is as Hobbes noted, nasty, brutish, and short. Human nature is precisely what we are trying to overcome. What we need is not ever more “authentic” expressions of our nature, but an altogether new nature. And that is what we seek, nurture, and offer.   It does not come from us. Rather it comes as gift from somewhere and someone else entirely.

We tend to forget that Jesus is not merely God, but human. Not a human like us, but a human the way humans are supposed to be. Jesus is the prototype for what we can be once perfected. Jesus emphasizes this when he tells his followers in John that he is the way, the truth, and the life. I believe he meant that quite literally. Our aim should not be to be ever more ourselves but more like him. Human nature is what we are trying to overcome, not unleash on the world and other people.

Second, we try on, practice, explore, and apply that new identity in life together with other people, especially people who are not like us. We make mistakes, lots of them. And so, we learn forgiveness and humility. We learn other people’s stories. We learn to love across differences through analogical emotional imagination we call empathy. And slowly, ever so slowly, we start to grow up together. You cannot do this alone. You specifically need to do it with people who drive you nuts. They are precisely the people who have the most to teach you.

For our children we start out with some basic rules that are like training wheels for virtue. Hopefully they do not bump into them, but if they go too far off the mark you will hear a horrible rumbling noise to let everyone know something has gone wrong. Over time, the rules matter less and less because children learn to live life inside them. They learn unconscious habits of behavior that dwell somewhere below conscious thought. That is the thing about virtue; it is not a decision it is a persistent habit. We learn to become moral beings by acting as moral beings around other moral beings in community. Moral formation is less like an academic class and more like learning sport. Patterns of thought and behavior sink down deep into our bodies like muscle memory unreflectively activating into moments of courtesy, courage, and compassion.

Finally, we need to push back against our culture’s nihilistic

obsessions. Efficiency, performance, achievement, and ability are good and important things. But the moment they become the chief ends and goals of human life they become idols. The Church of Jesus Christ points in a very different end that leads past the negation of all human achievement, performance, and success in the cross towards a very different end goal. You and I were made for intimate belonging and sharing with God and each other. If you can hold onto this why for living you will be able to endure every how. Unpacking how we do that and what that means is a noble pursuit not just for this life but for your life to come.

Our work is clear and urgent. We are not so much meant to be the school of morals as its gym for training and practice. The lessons are clear but demanding. The work will demand your whole life and give you back a better one. And the work is good.

–Brian

August 15, 2023

In Praise of Adiaphora

I do not participate in social media beyond these weekly emails. I find very little worthy of our time or attention in those echo chambers where everyone seems angry all the time. My only contact with cable TV news comes indirectly while sitting hostage in various waiting rooms. It always surprises me how much we describe as news is not, and by news I literally mean new events that should be announced. Instead, so much of the content appears to be people venting outrage over things others have done, or in a weird meta-discourse expressing outrage that others have not expressed sufficient outrage. Yeats described our predicament well, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”

A category of thought that I find helpful is adiaphora. Adiaphora comes from Greek, and it literally means things undecided or lacking in moral consequence. There are good things like virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope, and love). And there are bad things like the opposite of the virtues (foolishness, tyranny, gluttony, lust, cowardice, despair, scorn, and hate). But most things in this world and most choices in this life fall between these poles. Most things lack moral valence. Most things are undecided. Most things are adiaphora. Two people can disagree about adiaphora and both of them may still be good and virtuous.

While the term comes from ancient Greece, it became very important during the Reformation. There are things that the Bible commands that we must do. And there are things we are forbidden from doing. But then there is a vast undefined middle ground. For example, during the Reformation the Lutherans and the Anglicans held that as long as they did what was required (like prayer and reading the Bible) and refrained from doing what was prohibited (like sacrificing a goat) other practices were permitted but not required (like candles, flowers, hymn singing, and instrumental music in worship). Our puritan ancestors took the opposite position that anything not required was prohibited (which is why Presbyterians did not sing hymns until quite recently).

What I would like to suggest is broadening our scope of adiaphora. There are so many questions, issues, and challenges that are now alloyed to righteous indeed holy anger. The left and the right cudgel each other with scorn and judgment over the slightest perceived infractions. Our culture rewards the cultivation of rage. Temperance, equipoise, detachment, balance, and self-restraint are not our culture’s preferred modes of being. We now live in an emotionally adolescent world. One way to push back on this infantilizing trend of discourse and thought is simply to expand the realm of what we do not know and even if we do know, do not value it as absolute moral truth. My education keeps revealing to me vaster realms of my own ignorance at higher levels. Moreover, my education keeps revealing to me how utterly unqualified I am to judge others or their ideas. All that I do not know and all that I cannot ethically evaluate is adiaphora and the bigger that realm becomes, the better human I become.

Heaping scorn and derision upon others appear to be a popular form of entertainment in our culture. Of course, it is only fun when “our” side is heaping scorn and derision on “them.” Over time, conflict as our preferred mode of communication is driving out trust and actual sharing. As a result, we find ourselves more and more isolated. One tiny suggestion to help fill in the gap between us is to renew that ancient category of adiaphora to, if not to backfill the chasms between us, at least make them less fraught with toxic danger.

What we do not know is a lot and what we cannot judge or evaluate is equally vast and the sooner we let go of those things, the sooner we can actually be present with and for each other to learn, connect, belong, and love.

Adiaphora is not indifference; it is the start of wisdom.

In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.

August 8, 2023

In the past 45 years, approximately forty million Americans stopped attending church or other religious worship on a regular basis. Meanwhile the total population increased from about 275 million to about 340 million. This shift we have observed since the late 1990’s is the largest change in religious participation in American history, bigger than the Great Awakening (s), bigger than the post war church boom, and it has all happened right in front of us.

Some secular voices celebrate this change as undoing religion’s position in American society. If the decline in religious participation was associated with improvements in American mental and physical health, community participation and solidarity, lifespans, chemical dependency, loneliness, civic participation and engagement, family stability, philanthropy, and overall happiness, they might have a point. But all those indicators of social and individual health have declined along with religious participation. As we have become progressively more “dechurched” we have slowly become sicker, lonelier, shorter lived, angrier, more isolated, more addicted, more disengaged, divorced, depressed, anxious, uncertain, belligerent, intolerant, lonely, and despairing. Even for purely secular reasons, the dechurching of America is a cause for concern.

So, why has this happened. Like many huge social changes there are several dynamics at play. First, our society no longer rewards religious participation. You get no social capital from participating in church. Whereas a few generations ago church attendance was expected if you wanted to be considered a good citizen, that is no longer true. Absent that incentive, many people simply stopped coming.

At the same time, American life has become increasingly hostile to religious participation. Our society is not built around the values and ends of life together in the church promoting mutual care, love, a search for ultimate meaning, personal sacrifice, and seeking the common good. Instead, we live in constant meritocratic competition seeking to maximize individual successes both professional and financial. Because the competition is constant, so must our efforts. The average number of working hours is growing not shrinking. Efficiency, getting ever more done with our finite time, is the chief value. We prepare our children for lives of workism through the ever-expanding list of extracurricular activities in an endless arms race for credentials and experiences. Meanwhile longer lifespans mean that families are now increasingly responsible for the care of aging family members. It all adds up to insolvable time pressures in which the easiest thing to discard is church.

Underneath it all we have undergone a tectonic shift in the unstated assumptions that once undergirded religion. The way we think about ourselves, and our world is simply different than that a few generations ago. We usually do not notice it, but the ways we think about ourselves, God, and church have changed. We tend to measure the vitality of church by secular measures, counting people and dollars. We in turn value our religious participation for the ways it can outwardly impact us—giving us pleasure, greater efficiency, or aiding us in hardship. A few generations ago, those things would have been valued, but all derivative from the simple fact that God is God. But now in order to keep up with consumerist demands and expectations the church must constantly offer more, better, faster. Modern churches often aspire to becoming vaguely spiritual self-help not-for-profit organizations meeting collectively on Sundays for life advice and perhaps a positive emotional experience. Having surrendered to secularism’s assumptions, the church finds itself exhausted and often exhausting.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas observed that the church no longer seeks to heal the human soul of sin, but rather, “pastoral care has become obsessed with the personal wounds of people in advanced industrial societies who have discovered that their lives lack meaning.” The problem of course is our way of life. We try to offer up a prayer and a kind word to help people get back into the competition when the problem is our way of life itself. Like physicians in the corner of a boxing ring, we lance the blood blisters so the competitor can compete, not so they can actually be healed. We encourage people to belong and connect more deeply with community, when community for so many no longer exists. We urge people to be authentically themselves and find their truth, when the truth is not in us and we know full well that it never has been.

What then should the people of God do? Go back to the beginning. First, this shared way of living that Jesus taught us that we would later call the church was then, has always been, and is now profoundly counter cultural. The church does not exist to make it easier to get by. The church exists to invite you into a shared new life. That new life will not necessarily be the one valued by the dominant culture. The church from its earlies days was both gifted and equipped to help nurture genuinely new patterns of living. And a church that offers anything less in the face of modernity’s secularism and alienation will not long survive. Nor should it.

This will require us to offer genuine community and belonging. And that requires courage, vulnerability, and sharing. A church that does not demand this from its members is not the church that Jesus spoke of. It is mutual self-giving that makes the difference. It does not merely change the one receiving, it changes the giver. In a world starving for genuine connection, this self-giving in community could make all the difference.

The second thing we can do is re-enchant the world. We can begin to root out the insidious ways we have let go of ultimate meaning, truth, and God, in our habits of mind and feeling. We can attend to mystery and cultivate awe. We can blur the presumed boundaries between you and me, between I and world, and between God and all of us. We can look at the world as an exquisite loom of self-replicating connections rather than individual selves living in splendid isolation. We can begin to tell our story as part of the old, old story in which we are not the sole purpose for our lives, but rather in which we all live to participate in something deeper, older, and more beautiful than anything we can imagine.

None of this will look all that impressive by the world’s standards. The marketing skeptics will scoff at us. Religion’s despisers may not even notice any more as the church begins to look less and less like our culture. There will be no more cathedrals or monuments to religious vanity.  Politicians will ignore us. Rather our work and our love will take form in the only monument Jesus ever sought, human beings, born anew together, starting with you. Jesus calls that untried alternative ekkleisa, literally the gathering, what we have translated “church.”

The path forward has always been with us since Pentecost. We simply need to choose to follow.

August 1, 2023

Tonight, a rare event will occur. Tonight, there will be a Super Moon, a full moon coinciding with Moon’s closest approach to Earth in its orbit (perigee syzygy to be precise). Tonight, the Sun, Earth, and Moon will all be aligned. Accordingly, the Moon will be about 6% brighter and there will be stronger than normal tides all around the globe. Moreover, in August there will be not one but two full moons, the second of which is called a “blue Moon.” The infrequency of this calendrical event leads to our expression about infrequent events.

We tend not to notice the moon and its cycles so much because we organize our calendar and the patterns of our lives around the sun. The moon’s phases shift around in our calendar because we pay attention instead to the much brighter light of the Sun. But the world of nature, for example tides, the migration of birds, and reproductive cycles, all take their cues from the Moon’s subtler cues. All the oceans of the world slosh about from one side of the globe to the other in predictable rhythms as the moon exercises its gentle pull. Consider the next time you take a dip in the ocean and feel the movement that you are moving and feeling a vast cosmic dance of gravity, matter, and space time. And of course, as creatures made mostly of water, these same forces and rhythms act upon us.

This summer even subtler interactions were discovered. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) appears to have observed a very powerful but very long (like a light year) wave of gravity pass through our solar system and us. Like throwing two sufficiently large rocks (think two supermassive black holes colliding) into a big enough pond (think the universe), all observable creation momentarily changes in motion and dimension for a moment as the ripples in space time itself radiate outward. You probably did not even feel it, but for a moment you became taller and shorter, heavier and lighter.

At every moment of every day we are deeply connected, interconnected, interpenetrated, and affected by forces beyond our understanding and imagination. We move to the rhythms of powers unseen. The more carefully you look, the fuzzier the line gets between inside and outside.  And yet, we maintain a carefully curated fiction that we are somehow autonomous individuals, alone, apart, detached, and sovereign. Intellectually and scientifically, we know that is wrong, but we build our lives around that falsehood. Even worse, we build our culture around this lie.

You and I are all embedded creatures. We are embedded in thick overlapping networks of connection, influence, attraction, development, and motion. We are affected not only by our immediate environment but also by forces beyond our perception. We are porous, not bounded, beings. Unfortunately, the habits of mind perpetuated by secular modernity impose unscalable boundaries between mind and world, self and nature. And along the way, we gather all meaning, all truth, all beauty, goodness from the world into the mind of the detached observer. We have disenchanted the world and left it sterile all for the goal of creating our own autonomous order to life.

This may all sound like prattle, but it has an urgent point. The reason we feel so disconnected from the world, each other, God, and our selves and relatedly the reason that religion, spirituality, and all systems of truth that look beyond the individual are collapsing is because we have chosen to think and live in ways that no culture or society ever has before. We feel separated because we have chosen to separate the self from everything else. We have slipped from the constraints of belonging at the price of alienation and in return have received power, agency, and control. For me, it was not worth it. I will take belonging over power any day. Or, as the great prophet Don Henley wrote, “Freedom, oh freedom, well that’s just some people talking. Your prison is walking through this world all alone.”

So tonight, if the sky is clear as it should be in Ohio this evening, go out and do not just look at the moon, go out and behold . . . and be held.

July 25, 2023

You have too much to do. So do I. We all want to be a good employee, citizen, father/mother/son/daughter/aunt/uncle/grandparent/grandchild, and friends and some of us want to be good golfers, artists, bakers, poets, wood workers, writers, healers, listeners, students, savers, leaders, fantasy football players, crafters, volunteers, and spouses. All these roles are expressed through our actions and the more roles we have the more actions we must undertake. All this work has both accelerated and expanded by technology such that we are all expected to respond to everybody right now. Our relationships require constant review and updating on social media. And it never stops. This endless work is the price we pay to live in the modern world. Nowadays we do not live our lives, we perform them.

The solution that we are offered is ever greater efficiency, doing more work with less time. We multi-task, overbook, sprint from one meeting to another enabled by Zoom, and read Wikipedia summaries instead of books.  We bring to do lists on our vacations are check our email from beach.  In the end we fail. We run out of time. Our bodies demand our attention through exhaustion, stress, or illness. Our cardio vascular systems get a vote on our productivity. Unfortunately, it is called a heart attack. For the modern world there are only two speeds: fast and dead. And even the dead do not get a respite. Funerals are now regularly arranged for Saturdays so as not to conflict with people’s work schedules.

The world of time, the vast space time in which dimension and chronology define not just ours but every life is formally called the saeculum. The saeculum is the realm where measurement, action, and temporal causation matter. We live most of our lives within the saeculum and often do not notice when it defines not just what we do but who we are. While you may never have heard of the saeculum, you are probably more familiar with its adjective form describing our world of time—secular.

There is an alternative, but the world does not like it very much. You can step out of time for a moment. An instant, a gaze, a breath, a conversation with a stranger or someone you love, or a glimpse of beauty can all pull you out of time into timelessness. Secular is not a world without God. Secular is a world flattened and compressed without access to eternity. Despite the secular’s best efforts to conceal, confuse, and make us forget, little invitations to eternity keep popping up in time—a child’s unfiltered laughter, a sense of awe that drops you to your knees, a glimpse of beauty that makes you gasp, an unexplained tear as the final note fades. The invitations are all around us and within us, if only we pay attention. Greater efficiency will not help you find or embrace them. You will need to pay attention and be fully present here and now.

Memory creatively writes an unreliable narrative about our lives that we call the past. Our desires and our fears constantly restock a showroom of attractive and terrifying possibilities all demanding our attention that we call the future. We do not live in either one.  We live in the present, that infinitely brief instant of now. Although it may be short, perhaps infinitely so, it is only here and now that intersects with timelessness. The exit to eternity does not lie in the future. It is right now.

Do you want more to do? Or, would you rather be more?

The choice is yours.

Right now.

–Brian

July 18, 2023

It comes as a surprise to most Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land to discover standing immediately adjacent to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the holiest place for Christians containing both the traditional locations of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Islamic Mosque of Caliph Umar. One generally does not expect to find a mosque in the courtyard of a church or vice versa. But the long, complicated story of Jerusalem produces more than a few incongruous neighbors.

In 637, an Islamic army swept out of Arabia led by the second Caliph, Umar Ibn al Khattab. The city of Jerusalem, now without its Roman garrison, faced a dire situation. They could resist and be destroyed; indeed, everybody expected a bloodbath. Or, they could talk. The Christian Patriarch Sophronius negotiated the protection of the Christian’s civil and religious rights in exchange for the payment of tribute. No homes would be destroyed, no churches would be plundered, and no lives would be taken. The Caliph entered the city not so much as a conqueror, but rather as new management.*

To celebrate their mutual cooperation, Sophronius invited Umar into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to pray together. The Caliph politely but firmly declined. He explained to the Patriarch that while he appreciated the hospitality, it would be a very bad idea. If he were to enter the church and pray, the Caliph clarified, some of his followers would someday turn the whole building into a mosque. So, the Caliph and the Patriarch knelt down together out on the bare pavement in the courtyard under the open air. And just as Umar predicted, a mosque was built over the spot of their shared worship.

As a curious dilettante of late antiquity, I know that early Muslims and Christians were not singing Kumbaya together. But they did manage to live alongside each other in relative peace and harmony for the next four hundred years. They did manage to work with their Jewish brothers and sisters to clear the Temple Mount and helped build the Dome of the Rock (with its admittedly supersessionist propaganda towards both Jews and Christians). They did not create an ideal society of angels, but in an age when my Northern European ancestors were still enthusiastically practicing human sacrifice, they created a community of relative tolerance, creativity, and peace. It was the unfortunate unsettling of this delicate equilibrium by invading Turks some 450 years later that would set the crusades in motion.

I study history to nurture a sense of incarnate as opposed to idealized hope. Human nature does not appear to change very much. We are all alike in the ways we can be appalling to each other. But despite that tendency or pervasive flaw, there are times and places where creativity, compassion, and connection seem to happen. If the people of the past could overcome the worst of our natures, then so can I and so can we. So, I imagine a world where political and religious leaders are so considerate of one another that they seek ways to honor each other’s traditions. It can happen because it did happen.

It is easy to despair. Our doom scrolling media readily confirms our gloom. But if you look back carefully, our story is not merely one awful thing after another. People can learn. People can surprise. And of all the places on Earth, Jerusalem and its stories seem to have more than its share of surprises–stones that listen and speak, and dead men who get up and walk. Jerusalem still tells us who we really are and who we can be . . . if we listen.

–Brian

*A truly nerdy endnote—With two short exceptions the city of Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control for the next 1300 years until the surrender of the city by the Ottoman Empire to Great Britain in 1917 during World War One. The final flag of surrender that marked the formal end of thirteen centuries of Muslim control can be seen today in the Darke County Historical Society Museum in Greenville, Ohio.

July 11, 2023

A Grief Observed

Over the past two weeks, I have spent 28 hours in airport terminals waiting for things to happen that were utterly beyond my control. While frustrating, boring, and a bit uncomfortable, this time has provided helpful perspective into how I and other people relate to ourselves and our world.

In my attempts to fly to Israel and lead a study trip for 24 pastors, I experienced four consecutive flight cancellations across three days, three airports, and two airlines. While the first cancellation and crestfallen return home to try another day felt like a defeat, the second became interesting, the third revelatory, and the fourth comical. By the third day I arrived at the airport with the preternatural certainty that my flight would be cancelled but that I nonetheless needed to sit and wait. At one point I considered asking my fellow passengers if they too were waiting for a gentleman named Godot. I ill-advisedly told an agitated and self-pitying fellow passenger on flight four that this was in fact my fourth consecutive cancelled flight, to which she responded, “Ah, then you’re the problem. Do not get booked on a flight with this guy.”

Understaffed air traffic control centers and insufficient flight crews are the mundane causes of my odyssey. The more interesting aspect was what I saw in myself and others.

Days of cancelled flights are an opportunity to observe grief in clinical miniature. Denial passed quickly with gasps of “Oh Come On!” and plaintive sighs of “no.” It usually took people several minutes to comprehend their situation and begin to respond. This usually provided me the opportunity to quickly rebook through the airline apps before all the surplus seats disappeared (to no ultimate avail). Denial was quickly followed by the loudest and ultimately most self-destructive response of anger usually directed at the nearest innocent gate agent. It struck me as curious and counterproductive that so many people complained, insulted, berated, and bullied gate agents who had no culpability in the cancellations and were often the only people who could assist the now stranded travelers. Anger emerging from the travelers’ grief led them to act against their own self-interests leaving collateral emotional damage in their wake.

While I relied on the airline’s own computers and bypassed human interaction altogether, I felt the need to thank the gate agents for their assistance, equipoise, and grace. After the desperate mobs dispersed, I spoke with the airline gate staff who spoke of their genuine sadness about the travelers’ circumstances and their relative powerlessness to do anything about it. They talked about their own stress of trying to help but all the while being blamed for the mistakes of others up the chain of command. I asked them how they coped with the abundance of anger that was heaped upon them and they told me about their employee training on deep breathing and conflict de-escalation. I commended them for their fortitude and wished them well.

Bargaining unfolded across apps, call centers (after a two and half hour wait), and airport desks, as travelers desperately attempted to preserve vacations and appointments. They all attempted to exercise some degree of agency in a system that was conspiring against them. Failures in anxious bargaining simply made the anger worse or else redirected the emotional energy inward into despair.

You could hear depression follow bargaining. People grew quiet with hushed tones as they soon realized there was nothing they could do to change their immediate circumstances. They would not be getting to Brooklyn, Baltimore, or wherever tonight and no amount of cajoling, bribing, or scheming would change that. Their plans had irrevocably changed without their consent and facing that reality forced them to face just how powerless they were.

And finally came acceptance. Okay, tomorrow then. Maybe. In my case tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow (which did indeed creep along in this petty pace albeit only till Wednesday not the last syllable of recorded time). Acceptance was not merely passive resignation to new facts. Acceptance necessarily led to a new understanding of the limitations of our own will, agency, and control. When flight five finally did take me to JFK, it was a cause for giddy surprise and celebration. Low expectations heighten life’s pleasures and intensify delights.

Waiting around for cancelled flights at airports is one of our many many teachers of humility.

I imagined pilgrims to the holy land across 15 centuries waiting in ports or walking beside dreary endless caravans in journeys measured in months and years not hours. Subject to heat, hunger, thirst, bandits, storms, pirates, and plagues, my delayed journey was luxurious in comparison. But what we shared in common is that the journey changes you by redefining you on a new scale. Removed from the familiar, what we can see and touch, and control, we are forced to reckon with our own smallness, finitude, and limits. Our wills and desires count for far less than our autobiographies and egos can healthfully comprehend. We are little people in a big world far beyond our control.

Humility is the foundation of wisdom. It is the starting point for all our true journeys. And sometimes the delays carry you further than you could imagine.

–Brian

July 4, 2023

On this Independence Day as we celebrate the ratification of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 by the Second Continental Congress, I wish you, most of all, a safe and joy-filled holiday. I know there are many who are working on this holiday, and I am grateful for their labor and service as I am enjoying a day-off with my family.

I must be honest to say that as a wife of an Air Force veteran who served in multiple wars, as a mother of three children – two of whom have been burned by fireworks, and as the master of two labradoodles who were shaking in fear last night, I am not a big fan of fireworks, especially the local amateur kind. When I was in high school, a stray bottle rocket landed on the shingles of a neighbor’s house. The neighbors were not home but their basset hound was in the backyard. A friend and I climbed the fence and carried that dog out of the backyard and to safety until the firemen and the owners arrived.

I do love celebrating our country. I could just do with fewer fireworks and more community service and celebrations that don’t trigger war-weary veterans and terrified animals. The Fourth of July has the highest number of lost pets than any other day due to dogs and cats that bolt from the house in fear, so take extra care with your pets today.

My celebration of this day is simple gratitude to God for God’s abundant goodness and grace to each of us and to our nation. We don’t always deserve it, but God is gracious and kind, even with our erring ways.

We sang one of my favorite national hymns last Sunday in our second service of worship: God of the Ages, Whose Almighty Hand.

God of the ages whose almighty hand
Leads forth in beauty all the starry band
Of shining worlds in splendor through the skies,
Our grateful songs before thy throne arise.

Its powerful trumpet calls on organ – especially with our talented organist, Judy Bede – touch the heart strings and fill us with pride. The lyrics of the hymn were written by Daniel Crane Roberts, the priest of a small rural parish in Vermont, for the nation’s centennial celebration in 1876. Roberts served as a private in the 84th Ohio Volunteers during the Civil War.

Sung originally to the tune Russian Hymn, Robert’s lyrics were later sung to a new tune written by George Warren in 1894 called National Hymn. It is a soul-stirring hymn which reminds us that we are blessed recipients of a gracious and loving God.

This Fourth of July holiday may we lift our voices in praise to our God, who abundantly provides.

Blessings,

Pastor Kelley

June 27, 2023

Summer Sabbath

In the quiet, peaceful setting of Bergamo Center in Beavercreek, Ohio, twenty-six women from Fairmont joined together this past Saturday for a day of sabbath rest and renewal. What a gift it was for women of faith to be together to reflect, rest, and respond to God’s call for sabbath.

Time was spent in conversation, connections, and even meditative coloring. We hiked, walked the labyrinth, and shared quiet time in the Bergamo grotto. It was a healing time of sabbath renewal and covenant community.

Sabbath is sacred. Our deep need for sabbath worship, rest, relationship, and renewal is critical to our spiritual life. Sabbath is life. And yet, so many of us – I included – short-change our time of prayer and connection with God.

In Genesis 1, the first of two creation stories in the book of Genesis, God creates all of life out nothing, out of the formless void and darkness. Each day brings a new creation from God, deemed as “good” with each day of creation completed. But on the seventh day, God finished the work of creation and rests, calling that seventh day of rest, “hallowed.” Sabbath is the completion of all of creation.

Hallowed. Sacred. Set apart. Holy.

Most of us think of Sabbath as our recuperation time following a busy, chaotic week of work, school, caregiving, and family demands. We labor during the week and we find sabbath rest on the weekend. Our labor and the need to renew ourselves for our labor becomes the end goal for Sabbath.

But Sabbath is not recuperation time. Sabbath is life. Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. Sabbath is our end goal; Sabbath is our calling.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes in his beloved book “The Sabbath”:

To observe Sabbath is to celebrate the coronation of a day in the spiritual wonderland of time, the air of which we inhale when we ‘call it a delight.’

Sabbath rest and worship can happen in a myriad of ways:
-Sunday worship
-personal prayer
-communal prayer
-prayer walks & labyrinths
-centering prayer
-mandala meditations
-retreats
-meditation on scripture
-Lectio Divina
-singing
-Examen of each day

The most difficult part is simply beginning. Finding and committing to Sabbath worship or daily prayer or meditative practices is the first step.

No shame, just invitation to enter into God’s holy and loving presence.

So what is holding you back from sabbath time? What one small step can you take to incorporate more sabbath time with God and God’s people?

We are truly in this together. And our God of love is calling us.

Peace,

Pastor Kelley

June 20, 2023

One of the most important lessons I ever learned came from almost failing Calculus II. I had been quite good at Math in High School, at least as grades might suggest. Then my freshman fall term in college I met my limit. Try as I might, I did not understand. Russ, the saint of the math lab at Carleton College along with his tutoring minions, tried to help me. I spent hours in the library trying to solve ʃ sin³ x dx using U substitution. No amount of effort, study, or raw repetition helped. I had reached my limit. Because of a merciful professor I pulled out a B.  In the next term I changed my major from economics to history.

While I cannot perform trigonometric integration to save my life, I learned something important that perhaps actually did. There are things in this world, in this life, that I simply cannot understand no matter how hard I try. I have limits (which is an ironic thing to learn from a Calculus class).

Father’s Day can be somewhat poignant for me. My father died suddenly and unexpectedly of a cerebral aneurysm at the age of 57. I was 31 years old and in seminary when he died. There are so many moments that I have wanted and still wish to share with him. There have been so many conversations I would have wished to have. But they were not to be. I felt the grief, the pain, the sadness, and the longing for what cannot be. But what I never felt was the intense questioning over why—why him, why now, why this way? I knew, not so much as an intellectual matter but rather as a given fact of being a mortal creature who almost failed Calculus, that there were things utterly unknowable to me. Given that I cannot understand Trigonometric Integration, I really had no business presuming comprehension of God’s deep providential plans for creation and everything in it. There is a horizon to my perception, deduction, and comprehension beyond which I simply cannot see. That does not make me stupid, unmotivated, or uncurious. That makes me human.

Beneath so much of our pain, underneath our angers and rage, buried somewhere below our fears and anxieties, you will usually find a deeply buried bitter taproot of grief. We preserve it just beneath conscious perception and defend it against direct rational interrogation afraid that somehow to address it directly would be to lose the precious connection that once stood where the grief now lies. We crave the attachment that once was so precious that sometimes we settle for attachment to the pain. And then we amplify that pain by the unanswered questions of why. The why’s never seem to go away. They mock us like cruel ravens of ceaseless thought croaking a chorus of questions for which there are no answers only greater resentment, frustration, and alienation.

I do not think that I will ever know the why of things, at least not in a fashion I can summarize, integrate, and ultimately use for my own purposes. My sneaking suspicion is why is well beyond my understanding and always will be. What has surprised me is that in accepting my own ignorance, or perhaps I should say mortal ignorance, I have found a kind of comfort. Hard limits provide firm boundaries for both my anxieties and my ambitions. Frustrated by not knowing the unknowable, bit by bit by bit, one begins to let go of questions that will only frustrate. I no longer ask so many why questions. Instead, I try to focus on how, where, when, and who.

Where and when lead me to be fully present here and now. They remind me to be full attentive to the weight under my feet, the air moving around me, qualities of color and line I construct into an image of space, and my presence within that space. How directs me towards my being in the world and towards others in that moment. How am I being me? How am I relating to others. How am I engaging in gratitude, expressive delight, and love? How am I giving expression to my one wild and precious life? How am I moment by moment, through every thought, action, and reflection, becoming me?

I do not ultimately find value in why and its solicitations of meaning and purpose. Why offers empty promises of satisfaction and wholeness that never satiate our yearning. I think it may be because we are not made for the why’s of this creation. There is no why shaped hole in my heart.

Instead, I think we were made to find our ultimate meaning and purpose in a different question altogether, a question that will take us a lifetime of struggle, unpacking, discovery, and surprise, and perhaps a good time longer. Our lives our made to engage the question of who. Who are you and who am I and how do all our collective who’s fit together into a vast cosmic who that we collectively call God? Who is a relational question. Who brings us together. Who necessarily draws us out of our selves into encounter and surprise with another. Who brings us into communion where we can share our pain and our joy and in that sharing find healing. We heal the pain not by asking why, but by safely sharing it with those who share their wounds too.

The incarnation of the creator of the Universes that we call God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth preferences the question of who over every other question. I leave the why’s to the religions of the world and the philosophers. For me, I will follow the question of who and look forward to being surprised in our shared becoming, especially as we share our wounds.

I am a mortal.
I have limits.
What I will never know is a lot.

But I am not alone.

This I know.

–Brian

June 13, 2023

Sound of Silence

Kent and I attended the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra concert last Saturday (a favorite cellist of ours was playing).

It was a special concert with “an evening of music from the legendary Paul Simon, exploring his unique artistry as a songwriter from his years with Simon and Garfunkel through his solo albums Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints. An evening of timeless hits and poetic storytelling ignited by a rock band and the sublime power of a full symphony orchestra.” The soloists, band, and orchestra were outstanding.

I grew up with the music of Simon and Garfunkel. Their fifth and final studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, released in 1970 was the first album I ever owned. I was eleven years old. Out of the nineteen songs on the concert playlist for the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, I knew every word of every song. I have listened to the comforting and harmonious voices of Simon and Garfunkel for over fifty years.

Hauntingly beautiful ballads and folks songs such as The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Waters, America, Scarborough Fair, and The Only Living Boy in New York carried me through the fickle and fragile days of childhood and youth. But the song that has been playing non-stop in my head since the concert last weekend is one that has been called “the anthem of our generation.”

The Sound of Silence.

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again…

I have heard that song hundreds of times and still am deeply moved by this solemn hymn of darkness and silence. It is so beautiful. I could not imagine this song being any more powerful than it was.

Then this happened:

I asked some of our Fairmont youth if they had heard of Simon and Garfunkel. Most of them had not heard of them nor did they know the music of Simon and Garfunkel, except for one song –The Sound of Silence.

And they did not know the Simon and Garfunkel version of The Sound of Silence. They knew a cover version of The Sound of Silence by a band called Disturbed sung by their lead singer, David Draiman. I began to hear about this cover version by Disturbed again and again.

Disturbed is an American heavy metal band from Chicago formed in 1994. Heavy metal is not my thing when it comes to music, although I respect all genres of music and musicians. How could a heavy metal band cover a song such as The Sound of Silence – an anthem of sorts for our generation – and do it any justice at all?

So, I listened to David Draiman sing The Sound of Silence. And I listened to it again and again and again. And I wept each time. In what is a completely different version of Simon and Garfunkel’s anthem for our generation, David Draiman and his band Disturbed have brought this 1960’s song of darkness and silence back to a new generation of people, and made us hear the angst and the longing in this song, as if for the first time.

You may or may not like Disturbed’s cover version of The Sound of Silence but you have to listen to it. With his deep, warm baritone voice moving from gentle, flowing notes to passionate, angst-filled words, the listener is brought back to the powerful and disturbing meaning of The Sound of Silence echoed by Paul Simon in a recent interview:

We don’t know how to talk to each other, we don’t know how to listen to each other, and therefore we don’t know how to love each other.

The third verse of the song speaks it clearly.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

I am moved so deeply by Disturbed’s cover of The Sound of Silence because when I listen to their version – which is rough and dark and resonating – I feel the brokenness of humanity in their music, and I know that we have to do better.

We don’t listen to one another.
We don’t talk to one another.
We don’t know how to love one another.

In our scripture passage for this Sunday, from Matthew 11, Jesus speaks with angst to the people:

But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ 

We are talking without speaking.
We are hearing without listening.
And the silence is not disturbed.

God is calling us to do better. To listen to one another. To talk with one another. To love one another.

God can do the impossible, even with us.

Peace,

Pastor Kelley

June 6, 2023

We are now about half way through the Gospel of Matthew during year two of the Great Story series, the story of Jesus. And while Matthew contains some the loftiest ethical visions of the New Testament, I find its lived reality altogether more challenging.

One of my difficulties is that Matthew is more critical of Jews and Judaism than any of the other Gospels. I have no idea how I will preach on chapter 23 (just take a look and you will understand, it’s a lot of woe). Part of the problem is that when we read a Gospel, we get more than just a story about Jesus. We get the story of Jesus revised according to the lived memory of an author and a community with all their real concerns, hopes, regrets, wounds, and biases. This is of course how all human stories get told, through human lives. In the case of Matthew, between the lines of the text we can overhear the very real pain of a people who have been excluded from their communities and in some cases their families because of their devotion to Jesus. Pain kindles resentment that sometimes bursts out as judgment. Curiously, the group Jesus attacks more than any other in Matthew’s Gospel are the Pharisees, who are barely mentioned in Mark’s Gospel and do not appear to have been socially or politically prominent during Jesus’ lifetime. But they were important when Matthew was being written. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, they were the only Jewish group left standing who began the centuries-long work of transforming ancient Second Temple Judaism into the Rabbinic Judaism we know today. I presume that Matthew’s audience thought of themselves as good Jews, albeit worshipping the Jewish Messiah. No wonder they reveled in every instance when their Jesus threw a rhetorical punch at their critics.

Another or my difficulties arises from Matthew’s lack of interest in or concern for women. Matthew’s Gospel tends to leave them out. Perhaps this is because of the lack of women in the original oral source material. Or, more likely, it reflects the patriarchal chauvinism of Matthew’s culture. One could imagine a reactionary response to female leadership among the traumatized survivors of the Great Revolt. Amid the plundered wreckage of Israel, there was likely little room for more egalitarian leadership while everyone focused on material survival and doubled down on centuries-old gender roles.

I approach all scripture as inspired by God through the Holy Spirit, but then transmitted through human beings with all our flaws and failings. Culture, language, emotions, and experience all color our perceptions and shape our recollections. Discrepancies between the Gospel stories do not disturb me. Those sorts of discrepancies are precisely the way eye witnesses provide slightly different accounts of the same incident. The Bible is both divine and profoundly human.

One of the recent creative adaptations to fully explore this idea is crowd funded television series, The Chosen. Textually, critically, and canonically, the show is a mess with its writers taking generous speculative liberties with the Biblical narratives. But at the same time, I do like the way the show urges us to inhabit the narrative from inside the lives of its main characters, considering their motivations and their flaws. Given our focus this year on the Gospel of Matthew, I could not help but be drawn to the character of Matthew in the show. Matthew is portrayed as a young man on the Autism spectrum, perhaps with Aspergers. Because of his cognitive differences, as much as his profession, he is excluded from community and belonging. For him, the problem is not sin as immorality, but sin as separation and exclusion. For this version of Matthew, Jesus’ invitation to salvation is an invitation to belonging.

This led me to reconsider the Gospel of Matthew as a whole. Matthew’s community was a dead end in the history of the church. They were Jews preaching to Jews, probably in the Golan Heights or lower Syria. It did not work out. Their neighbors rejected their message. They instead doubled down on the oral law, which would eventually become the Mishnah. You can feel Matthew’s community’s pain and worry throughout the Gospel as the people they loved the most rejected the message that made sense of their lives and gave them hope. They were a community defined by the trauma of ostracism, isolation, and failure. And yet they clung to a hope beyond all those separations.

Traumatized communities (and individuals) sometimes produce poignant literature and art revealing in all its discomforting particularity the awkward unprocessed pain of life and sometimes inflicting that pain on others simply because it has nowhere else to go. I have seen it in families. I have seen it in churches. And in Matthew, I think I see it in scripture.

The Gospel of Matthew testifies to the good news, teachings, and mission of Jesus of Nazareth, but if you read carefully, it also testifies to the tenacity and hope of a community that held onto that good news when everything told them to do otherwise. The Gospel still troubles me, but I also love it, because in its struggles and occasional outbursts I can see glimpses of not just God, but myself.

–Brian

May 30, 2023

Memory is a slippery thing. It is far more than a record of events and sensations. Memory actively edits our recollections of the past, hiding some things, elevating others, and modifying the past we connect with internally in ways sometimes obvious and sometimes hidden even from us. This past week I was reminded how much those subtle forgotten memories can impact us.

Two weeks ago, Lisa and I went to Princeton New Jersey to attend Rachel Boden’s graduation from Princeton Theological Seminary. Lisa and I both graduated from PTS (Lisa earning both her M.Div. and PhD. From PTS) about 20 years ago. I had not spent any time there since and was looking forward to reveling in fond nostalgia. But that is not what happened.

The campus was the same. The literally ivy colored stone quads were the same. Even Hoagie Haven (a storied Princeton dive) was the same. The continuity of place and memory should have brought contentment for happy memories well preserved and a feeling of gratitude for a meaningful life lived since. Instead, I felt a growing sense of slightly claustrophobic unease. It was not that some long hidden suppressed memory was now brought to light. My factual recollection of events was unchanged. Rather, I began to feel the subtle shadows of memories of feelings instead of events–feelings of isolation, the alienations of class and caste, and the imposed shame of competition, comparison, and judgment.

Princeton, at least to a Midwesterner, is a town defined by old money and class. Everyone is outwardly friendly with well-practiced smiles, but inwardly aloof, constantly assessing and evaluating, making minute evaluations of status anxious about one’s own. Princeton is filled with beautiful private gardens and private preserves to which only the select are invited. The Seminary often reflects the culture of the community more than the ethos of the Church. I distinctly remember being told that in my first ministry appointment at the local Presbyterian church as the Presbyterian Chaplain at Princeton University, I would not be invited to eat lunch with the other pastors but was welcome to eat instead with the support staff (who were not invited either). Our low status did not merit inclusion. Lisa remembers going to sing Christmas Carols at the President’s home and being told that as a student she would need to go around to the back of the house and enter through the servants’ entrance. And above it all loomed the constant sense of judgment, evaluation, and comparison instilled by professors who themselves had been so wounded by judgment, evaluation, and comparison. The summary of Princeton’s rather deprived spirituality among my classmates was: 1.) pray; 2.) do it on your own time; and 3.) do not talk about it.

After 20 years I thought all of this was well in the past. But walking down Nassau and Alexander Streets it all came back not as memory but as mood. I found myself becoming more self-critical, quicker to evaluate and judge myself and others, readier to speak than listen, and vaguely ill at ease in my own skin. What I was remembering were feelings as they came creeping back into subconsciousness. Frustratingly, those feelings stayed with me for a time after I left like sticky mildew.

Then I returned, back to Ohio, back to Fairmont, and back to me. The daily rhythms of life with their subtle satisfactions rolled back the memory of feeling with the sensate immediacy of the now. I walked my dog, read scripture, worshipped with you, met with our staff . . . and then I was clear again. Again, I was me. Something inside me kept whispering, “be here now.” And so, I am.

We all carry baggage. Mine is mostly carry on there to remind me when I am where I am not supposed to be. Others carry far heavier and more pressing burdens of trauma and loss. Some baggage will be clearly remembered as formative events from our past. But far more of us carry hidden burdens of emotion that we cannot quite identify until they begin to impose upon us. Disposing of them is challenging. True total forgetting is nearly impossible. While we may not be able to excise the past, we can learn to live with it more healthily. Memory, even the lasting stains of emotions, need never define us or control us. We can leave them contained and undisturbed in the past where they cannot hurt us. We do not meet ourselves, others, or God in the past, only the present. Freedom and healing are available, here, now. All we need to do is show up and be fully present to the here and now.

My future, insofar as I can imagine it, is shaped too much by my anxieties and uncertainties. My past, as far as I can recall it, is tinged with too many regrets and criticisms. There is only one good place to live free from all that. There is only one place to live and love in freedom. Be here now.

–Brian

May 23, 2023

One of the unstated presumptions of our society right now is that we are saved, redeemed, and sanctified through separation. We sort ourselves into like minded communities with similar attitudes, lifestyles, and beliefs. We prefer consuming the media and literature that validates and endorses our preexisting opinions. We avoid anything we might perceive to be unduly provocative, challenging, or threatening. Indeed, we may seek to label such expressions with a trigger warning or drown such voices out entirely with our disdain. We ostracize those who fail to maintain the boundaries of our preferred group’s orthodoxy. And then we find ourselves far more divided than ever before.

We are all familiar with the symptoms of this polarization impacting everything from our politics to light beer. But what lies underneath is this unstated desire to associate with others who are like us. Encounters with others and otherness only produce anxiety. So, we double down on our fences on our lawns, social media accounts, and in our hearts. We divide and then enforce those divisions with our judgments enforced by contrasting acts of exclusion and embrace.

In the church, I have been struck at the number of people and organizations that want us to sign onto petitions, manifestos, open letters, and pronouncements. When asked, I always politely explain that we do not sign onto statements of any sort regardless of what they are purporting to support or decry. We do not do media statements; we do ministry. The problem is that for many people, if we do not literally sign onto their preferred beliefs, we are necessarily opponents. This frustrates me because our reluctance has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of their causes. The reluctance comes from the functional foundations of the church—why we exist and what we are on earth to do.  The church was not created to be right. Being right and being with the right people will not save us.

We are not saved by separation, no matter how just, merited, or righteous. We are saved by association. And that free association is what the church of Jesus Christ on earth is called to proclaim and practice.

This weekend, our text from the Gospel of Matthew encompasses Jesus’ embrace of three outsiders: a hated tax collector, a socially marginalized hemorrhaging woman, and dead little girl. Each embodies different sort of outsiderness. The man (Levi/Matthew) was hated for his political and economic associations. The woman was ostracized for her physical disability, unhygienic appearance, and ritual impurity. And the little girl was the most separated of them all. She was dead. And yet Jesus traipses over each of these boundaries of social, political, economic, cultural, religious, and even biological  separation to embrace, welcome, and restore.

I was struck by how quickly our society settled on a common vocabulary for imposing and sustaining intentional social isolation during COVID—Social Distancing. It is telling that we have never agreed on its opposite.  Would it be social gathering, social, social assembling, getting close, coming near, or something else? They all sound awkward and not quite fitting not so much because of our limited vocabulary, but rather because of our limited imaginations that are always quicker to separate than connect. But that connection is precisely our task and our purpose.

I have another name for the opposite of Social Distancing. I like to call it The Kingdom of God.

–Brian

May 16, 2023

The Surprises of Grief

Grief shows up in unexpected places. I was running errands on my day off yesterday, and found myself thinking “I’ll go visit my mother-in-law and check in on her,” only to quickly remember that she is gone, no longer living at Randall Residence, no longer living. Grief seems to be an ever-flowing underground stream, not always visible but always present, always moving and changing, always showing up in surprising ways.

During our prayer time at a home communion gathering today, grief was spoken again and again: a daughter newly diagnosed with cancer, a beloved family pet that had died, a dear friend under hospice care, the death of a family member. Grief is woven in and out of the daily fabric of our lives, always present, always moving and changing, always showing up in surprising ways.

Sometimes the only way to heal from loss and death is to sit with the grief, name the grief, befriend the grief, lift the grief to God.

Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.
-Psalm 30:5

God is ever present in our grief and our suffering. The dark nights may be long, but joy does come in the morning. Healing does come. And our faith gives us tools for healing, too. Studies have clearly shown that prayer and meditation change our heart, soul, body, and mind. There are spiritual practices which allow us to sit with our grief – all the while never alone – and give that grief and pain to God.

Meditation, prayer, walking, journaling, the examen, and even storytelling are spiritual practices which allow us to befriend our grief, find healing, find a way to live with grief. Being together with God’s people, sharing our stories and wisdom, is also a way to sit with our grief, together as fellow travelers in this fragile world.

What are your stories of being surprised by grief? What are your stories of being surprised by God in the midst of your grief?

I am grateful to be on this road with you.

Pastor Kelley

May 9, 2023

We appear to be in something of a mental health crisis, especially for the young. Anxiety, depression, addictions, post-traumatic stress, eating and identity disorders, attention problems, and a whole range of other maladies are at epidemic levels. These problems appear to be interfering with people’s abilities to make meaning, hold jobs, learn, maintain relationships, and enjoy life. The problem is that the tool kit we use for addressing these problems, what we collectively call psychology, is in its infancy and often more art than science. Our solutions are inadequate for the problems we face.

Psychology is the study of the psyche, which is the literal Greek word for soul. It is not simply our rational, cognitive, problem-solving mind, but the whole of the rich and often hidden internal landscape that makes us hidden including impulses, instincts, and emotions. We are each comprised of hidden enigmas often unknown to ourselves. Yet it is from precisely those hidden parts that we are propelled to act in ways that often surprise or even disturb. We do not simply choose who we are. Instead that complex bundle of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make us us appears to be an emergent phenomenon.

Once upon a time, before Freud exiled religion from psychology as a collective delusion, psychology took as its focus the total whole of a human being, including the spiritual bits. Early pioneers like William James and Carl Jung recognized that not everything that was going on inside of us was us. Sometimes, somethings inside of us appeared to be coming from somewhere or perhaps someone else.

William James, the first professor in the United States in the then-new field of psychology was particularly interested in what he called “spiritual experiences.” His monumental 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience, examined in exquisite detail the patterns of people’s experiences with the transcendent, divine, holy, or numinous, however they may have understood that. He interviewed people from across diverse faith traditions, religions, creeds and none at all and identified certain commonalities.

Across religions and faiths and cultures for thousands of years people have been and are now experiencing moments that are characterized as ineffable—incapable of clear description in language yet somehow overwhelmingly powerful and important. These moments are what James called noetic—these experiences convey a tacit of knowledge, often of a sense of unity or connection, that seems connected beyond human reason to divine knowledge or wisdom. People who experienced these moments all described them as transient—brief passing moments as measured by our watches that somehow feel timeless. Finally, James noted that in all these experiences, the person experiencing them was utterly passive. Something was being done to them or through them. They did not cause it, bid it, or conclude it. Taken together—Ineffable, Noetic, Transient, and Passive—these criteria provided James with evidence of a common human spiritual faculty. It seemed to James that we were somehow wired to resonate and connect with something or someone at the very foundation of our being. Moreover, James noted that individuals who had such experiences tended to healthier, happier, wiser, calmer, and more hopeful.

Of course, what James described psychologically, the church has understood theologically. Part of our shared work is the tending and mending of human souls beginning with our own. Interestingly, new functional MRI imaging of test subjects in deep spiritual states demonstrates simultaneously intense activity in the prefrontal cortex areas associated with attention and perception and a noticeable decline in activity in the parietal lobe that, among other things, provides us with our bounded sense of self in the material world. It is almost as if these deep spiritual states permit us to slip out of ourselves for a moment.

Modern psychology, psychiatry, and even psycho pharmacology are all important and valuable tools that help millions of people. I have found their therapies to be tremendously useful in my owns struggles with anxiety. If you struggle with a mental or emotional issue, I urge you to seek competent help. And, they are incomplete if they fail to recognize the importance and function of the human soul. There are fundamental parts of us that are not us. If we ever want to find true healing and wholeness, we need to consider our connections to that something and not merely our behaviors and emotions.

Hamlet reminds his friend and us, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Not all of those things are “out there.” Some of them are inside us, fascinating mysteries that lead beyond our lives to that somewhere or something to which I simply ascribe the label God. That is where the real healing waits.

–Brian

May 2, 2023

The Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, recently released a report on a pressing public health problem leading to significant increases in chronic disease and premature death. The problem is loneliness.

Approximately half of all Americans report measurable levels of loneliness. This cuts across introverts and extroverts, urban and rural, young and old. It is not the same thing as solitude, which is always voluntary and intentional. Loneliness is the rather the condition of being disconnected from other human beings. Chronic loneliness increases the risk of heart disease by 29%, dementia by 50%, and stroke by 32%. The overall increased change of premature death causes by loneliness is comparable to that of smoking daily. Moreover, loneliness hurts whole communities, decreasing civic engagement, economic productivity, educational performance, and cultural expression. When we are disconnected from each other, we are far more prone to make harsh judgments of others, lack compassion and empathy, and work for the betterment of the community. Dr. Murthy concludes, “the epidemic of loneliness and isolation has fueled other problems that are killing us and threaten to rip our country apart.”

The problem of loneliness has been greatly exacerbated in recent decades by profound social, technological, and cultural changes. Our society is premised on portability and mutability. Fewer and fewer people remain in the communities of their birth. Economics separates us from the actual act of production. Job security and its corollary loyalty have been sacrificed for efficiency. Family breakdowns have separated generations. And our technologies have fueled ever more alluring media delights, but always private ones. At the most expansive level we no longer appear to be sharing the same narrative or playing the same game with commonly agreed upon goals. We are wealthier and at least theoretically healthier than any human generation, but ironically growing steadily less happy.

Using purely secular language, the Surgeon General eloquently and warningly describes this condition well known to the Christian tradition. We have a name for that human condition of separation, isolation, and alienation. We call it sin. Not sins (plural) which are the manifestations of the underlying problem, but sin (singular) the essential problem itself: alienation from our selves, alienation from nature, alienation from other people, and alienation from God. We cannot ultimately “cure” sin. Sin is not a developmental problem that can be overcome through education and effort. However, some of sin’s worst effects can be ameliorated through our attentive effort and care. That is in fact what Jesus set out to do during his lifetime and the purpose for which he now sends us, understand that in seeking to heal the world we heal ourselves.

Reducing loneliness is not difficult. It can be literally child’s play. It begins whenever and wherever you take a tiny step to establish, re-establish, or expand connection. Answer the call. Send the congratulations note. Do not stop with the polite “how are you?” but really ask. Compliment someone. Imagine what you could do for both others and yourself with just a few minutes each day of striving for connection. We should of course do everything we can do strengthen the social infrastructure that connects us. Churches, civic societies, interest groups, volunteer associations, and even sports leagues all help us to do this better within structured communities. All these external connectors have struggled, especially because of the pandemic. And we need to carefully reconsider our use, dare I say our addiction, to technology that distracts and disconnects us from one another.

It does not take so very much effort and no money at all to let someone know that they are truly seen and appreciated. Neglect of relationships can be reversed in an instant of attention. It is not that hard to do. Often the only things holding us back are our sloth and our shame, neither of which has done us much good anyways.

So here is what I propose during this Easter Season. If we really are called to go out ahead of Jesus spreading his life and his hope, maybe a good place to start is simply to share the warmth of his welcome, hospitality, and companionship with everyone, okay let us start small, with someone you meet. A warm conversation of genuine care and curiosity, rather than an instrumental exchange aimed at getting something, may not change the world, but it may change somebody’s day. It will certainly change yours.

The social fabric of America may have frayed, but it can always be rewoven by those of generous hearts. Listening, service, attention, and curiosity will be the media through which we can regenerate community and in doing so participate in regenerating ourselves.

We were made for connection, with each other, nature, self, and God. It is only in those connections that we find our real value and life. We have everything we need to participate in the healing. We have today.

–Brian

April 25, 2023

I returned on Friday from a vacation. Lisa and I took our first non-family-visit vacation since the onset of Covid and went on a cruise. While there were many pleasant aspects of the trip, my favorite thing was simply walking on the top deck at night when almost no one else was there. Sailing somewhere north of the Bahamas (technically in the “Bermuda Triangle”) there was no light pollution, so the stars were beyond counting. I would try to find the darkest corner of the deck and slowly let my eyes adjust. As my pupils slowly dilated to take in the darkness more and more stars came into view. The longer and more intently I looked, the more I saw. Soon, my peripheral vision could see things I could not perceive in the center of my sight (thanks to the arrangement of rods and cones in our retinas). To see the really deep, faint objects, stars I could never see in Ohio, I needed to actively look. I needed to shift my gaze a few degrees left or right to perceive these faint stars just on the edge of my perception.

The more way pay attention, the more carefully and deeply we look, the more we perceive.

The problem for me is that it is hard to pay attention and look deeply. My life is filled with constant distractions all clamoring for my attention. I receive on average about 35 emails each day and about as many text messages. My news feeds are constantly offering up things to be anxious about. My church news mailing lists are constantly telling me all the things I am supposed to be doing as pastor but usually am not. And Facebook tends to just make me feel like my life is decidedly more boring than everyone else’s. Nobody wants to hear about the incredible nap I took yesterday.

In August 1986 I received my personal account name for my college’s mainframe computer. It was about 36 characters long. The only thing I used it for was for sending messages to my friends at other colleges and universities. We called it Vax mail (short for Virtual Address Extension) that allowed mainframe computers to connect with other mainframe computers. Once or twice each day I would stop by the computer lab to find out if I had any messages from far away friends. Later on, they started calling this network of connected computers the internet. And today, my access terminal rests in my pocket.

Things were far more manageable when I had to actually go into the computer lab after Calculus II class to log on and read my messages (I always needed something fun after Calculus). Now my messages come looking for me, asking and sometimes demanding my attention.

My problem is that with all those messages and texts and newsfeeds and alerts, I cannot seem to see the stars.

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus points us towards the lilies of the field and the birds of the air as teachers. Compared to us, their lives are simple. They are not so intelligent by our standards. They are instead much more focused. They really only know one thing; they are living creatures of God. And in that clarity of knowledge, they possess a wisdom that all too often escapes us, escapes me.

There are more stars than we will ever be able to count, and they are right in front of us in the sky. We do not see them because we are distracted by all the other little lights we create (or admittedly the big light of our sun during the day). But just because we cannot always see them does not mean they are not there. It is our perception that is flawed, not their radiance.

For me the most important part of my vacation was watching my cell phone connection bars slowly drop away as we pulled out of Miami. Disconnected from the very long leash of the internet, my mind quieted down. As the distractions disappeared, I was able to see the stars once again.

There are yet deeper mysteries out there waiting to meet us in this very moment, if only we pay attention.

–Brian

April 18, 2023

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for the will be filled. – Matthew 5:6

It is ironic that often when our lives are most full – work, family, bills, taxes, cleaning, meetings, cooking – we often feel the most empty. We are almost zombie-like as we move from one commitment to another, one deadline to another.

We understand “being empty.” At least we understand our human way of “being empty.” Empty of energy, empty of compassion, empty of joy for life, empty of purpose. At times we live in a state of emptiness, devoid of physical rest, emotional health, spiritual fulfillment. We create our own kind of human emptiness and then try to fill it up with the wrong sustenance.

We fill our emptiness with fast food and material possessions and false identities. And soon we find that our empty place inside is still empty.

As we have been journeying through the Sermon on the Mount and hearing these challenging words of Jesus, it is clear that we feel empty because we hunger and thirst for the wrong things. Even when we know that material possessions or earthly powers are fleeting, we still try and fill up our spiritual vacuum with earthly things. And so we come away empty, having fed ourselves on that which is fleeting and fragile.

Before resurrection, there must be death. We can only experience resurrection life when we empty ourselves of all that is not life-giving, when we die to our sin. Jesus lived out this emptiness, this “kenosis” in his incarnation, death, and resurrection. Jesus emptied himself of his divine power in order to become human, to become one of us. We must empty ourselves of spiritual clutter, spiritual sin, the signs of death within us, in order to become that which God created us to be.

The tomb was empty! Jesus emptied himself so that we might die and be raised again to new life. It is an upside-down, radical kingdom that Jesus is teaching about in the Sermon on the Mount. We must hunger and thirst for righteousness, for the heavenly treasures, for that which fills us eternally.

We have come through Lent, the season of death, into new life in the Risen Christ. May we hunger and thirst only for God.

Pastor Kelley

April 11, 2023

I have been thinking about death more than usual this Lent-into-Easter season. My husband’s beloved mother died the Wednesday before Holy Week, and the grief has been more palpable for our family in the midst of remembering the crucifixion and death of Jesus.

I find comfort in Holy Week and in the Lenten journey. To know that we are not alone in our suffering or grief is life-sustaining. It is everything to our faith to know that God in Christ entered death and dwelt in the depths of Sheol for us, for all of humankind, for all of creation.

A clergy friend whose mother died a few years ago during Lent shared passionately that in the midst of her grief she needed to know not only that Jesus had risen from the dead but also that Jesus had entered first into death to open the way to life again – for her, for her beloved mother, for all.

Easter Sunday – resurrection morning – is the glorious reminder that God in Christ entered into death and destroyed it for all of time. Our death, our loved one’s death, all of death, is defeated by God incarnate, Jesus the Christ.

Presbyterian poet, Ann Weems, was a beloved writer, speaker, liturgist, and worship leader. My thirty-five, almost thirty-six, years of ordained ministry have been interwoven with the poems and prayers and writings of Ann Weems.

Weem’s son, Todd, died tragically at the age of twenty-one, and she carried her grief through the years of her writing as she penned of the mysteries of life and death, of God and God’s people, of hope in the midst of despair.

In her unpublished poem, “When You Hear of My Demise,” Weems wrote:

I left this earth in Alleluias
Dancing with the angels of life
Among the stars of God

We are Resurrection People and “Alleluia” is our song! All of our suffering, our sin, and our broken humanity, find their shalom in the empty tomb of Easter morning. Without the hope of resurrection, death would have no meaning.

Christ is risen! Alleluia!

Pastor Kelley

April 4, 2023

At the center of it all . . . silence.

My earliest memories of Easter involve uncomfortable polyester. Every year we would get a new outfit for Easter that was invariably less comfortable than my normal Lee blue jeans. Everybody had to dress up, so I did too. The church always seemed decidedly busy on Easter Sunday, lots of choristers running around, and everyone seeming rather stressed, happy but anxious as if they had a lot of things to tend to. Then there was the matter of Easter Brunch which was my favorite part of the day, the only meal of the year when I could get both lasagna and caramel pecan rolls on the same plate. I remember how tired everyone seemed that night as The Ten Commandments played on ABC.

Christians have a funny notion of sabbath. Contrary to scripture, we tend to exert ourselves on the holiest of days with ceaseless busyness. Perhaps that is why our holy days no longer seem quite so holy.

I like Easter. The bodily resurrection of Jesus stands at the very center of my faith. Insofar as Easter is the remembrance and celebration of that event it provides the axis around which my hope and vocation revolve. The curious thing is that Easter is not exactly the precise remembrance and celebration of Easter. Easter is instead the remembrance and celebration of the women’s discovery of Jesus resurrection. It had already happened. They simply found out about it on Easter morning. And that discovery changed their world and mine. But the actual change happened sometime earlier.

While I like Easter, I love Holy Saturday. Easter gets all the attention because scripture focuses on the events of the next morning. Of Holy Saturday, scripture is utterly silent. Yet the deep changes in time and the cosmos that God wrought through the resurrection of Jesus were first unfolding, recreating, and resurrecting on Holy Saturday. The silence of sabbath preserves the veil of mystery and awe from our crass celebrations as well as the babbling idolatries of our speech. Not even the angels dare say a word about Holy Saturday. I suspect they held their breath. Holy Saturday is complete and total mystery.

In our earliest creeds we affirm that Jesus, “descended into hell.” This outwardly discomforting notion is known as the Harrowing of Hell. It means that Jesus did not go to Hell to be punished, wounded, or scorned. Rather, Jesus went to that place precisely furthest and most God, the uttermost antipodes of heaven, on a rescue mission—broke the security system, shattered the prisoners’ chains, dragged out anyone willing to go, and left the front gate busted off its front hinges on his way out. Perhaps he even sarcastically vandalized the place with his eternally ironic signature symbol, the cross. Jesus was not just dead and then later not dead. Jesus broke death from the inside. It does not work the same way anymore. So, we no longer need be afraid of it. And all this happened on Holy Saturday.

There are no hymns for Holy Saturday. No, “he is almost risen, he is almost risen indeed!” We are left with the silence echoing in our ears. Celebrations, triumphant stanzas, resplendent lilies, tables overflowing with hams, and even brand-new polyester pants can all wait a day. The only mortal response to Holy Saturday is awe.

I do not understand resurrection, but I do feel it. Something happened in that cramped little hole just outside the Joppa gate over a long sabbath in the spring of 33 AD. That something still resounds, echoes, and impacts life in ways both obvious and subtle. Creation changed and so did we.

Happy Easter! But before that, pause for a moment on Saturday and just feel the wonder of it all.

–Brian

March 28, 2023

Palm Sunday always unsettles me. Beneath the greenery and triumphal songs lies profound irony. That irony is perhaps because of the triumphal songs, both then and now. A man comes riding a donkey down the hill from the poor shanty town on the edge of the capitol. What do you see? A righteous holy man coming to worship in the national shrine? A political revolutionary stirring up an insurrection? A prophet fulfilling ancient expectations? Jesus riding down the Mount of Olives presents us with a Rorschach Test for our spiritual imagination. What do you see? You answer will tell you as much about yourself as it will about Jesus.

Matthew is the most explicit of the Gospel writers. He even appears to have Jesus riding two animals in order to fulfill his mistranslation of Zechariah. The crowd welcomes Jesus as King. Not King of their hearts. Not King of Heaven. The crowd lauds him as the rightful King of the Jews, a title no one has held since Herod the Great died, a title that could only be granted by the Roman Senate. A politically astute observer watching this rag tag procession and all the commotion it caused that Sunday could not have helped but shake their head thinking, “this is certainly not going to turn out well.”

The crowds who greet him with shouts of Hosanna on Sunday are soon disappointed. He will not confront the Romans. He will not overthrow the High Priest. His followers will not seize the city. He seems content to teach in the porticoes of the temple by day and each night depart the city for the ghettoes over the hill (Bethany literally means the house of the poor). He will not even reach out to sympathetic Pharisees on the Sanhedrin with whom he could reform the Temple establishment. Jesus of Nazareth is many things, but he is not a political operator, community organizer, or slick publicist.

One of the many problems with crowds is that when you disappoint them, they can turn on you in an instant. Those adulating acclaims of Hosanna will soon become angry condemnations of Crucify Him! All it took was four days of disappointing the mob and frustrating their expectations. We want what we want and we will not be denied. With Sunday’s now-trampled palm branches still billowing down the empty sidewalks, they turn and walk away.

Whenever I sing All Glory Laud and Honor or some other triumphal Palm Sunday hymn, something in the back of my mind sings a counter melody, “Mine, mine was the transgression, but thine the deadly pain.” It is an awkward thing to hold two diametrically opposite ideas in your mind at the same time with equal conviction, but that is precisely where Holy Week leads us into the antinomies of religion and politics, faith and doubt, hope and fear, and ultimately life and death. Holy Week confounds all rational efforts to reduce its drama to a single monolithic “meaning.” It is not an event to be observed, analyzed, cataloged, and described. It is an event to be experienced, an encounter that examines, challenges, questions, and confronts us.

Even most Christians tend to gloss over Holy Week. We jump from All Glory Laud and Honor to Christ the Lord is Risen Today without considering everything in between. What unfolds in between is frustration, confusion, anger, wrath, fear, conspiracy, lies, torture, and murder. What unfolds in between is God’s own judgment and condemnation of every system of knowledge and power based on human desire, ego, will, fear and attachment. Jesus is not the only one to die on the cross that Friday. A big part of us—fear, anxiety, rage, shame, wrath, desire, despair, and self-control—die with him. Pilate renders judgment on yet another foolish failed Messiah on that cross. Meanwhile on that same cross, God renders judgment on the world.

If you want to begin to explore the deep mysteries of the cross, you will need to delay the satisfactions of lilies and Easter baskets for a moment. You will need to relax our natural tendencies towards dualistic thinking. You will need to imagine yourself shouting both Hosanna and Crucify! You will need to fix in your imagination triumph and tragedy, life and death. Poetry and art sustain these creative contradictions far better than prose.

Up ahead lies Holy Saturday. The holiest day of the year. Remember that on Easter the women simply discovered the tomb was empty. They discovered a past event that had already been completed. On Holy Saturday, the day of mystery and awe of which no Disciple dares to speak, something happens.

The consequences of that something define our lives and our world. Welcome to Holy Week.

–Brian

March 21, 2023

Three years ago this week the world changed. And while the memories of those uncertain and frightening times now recede and we rush to assure ourselves of the return to “normalcy,” I am still haunted by the perception that something is amiss. You need not look too hard for confirmation. Our communities feel more divided than ever. Anxiety and depression, especially among our youth, are rampant. Social media serves as an echo chamber for the lesser angels of our being. And churches, and every other institutional expression of communal values and purposes, have seen a drop in participation and interest. There is persistent sense of malaise that lingers like a damp stain, not dramatic so much as dreary. Somewhere just beyond tangible perception I feel an absence.

The world changed. Of that I am certain. But I do not yet know exactly how. For many of us, life became smaller. By all social measures, we eat out, travel, attend movies and concerts, visit friends, and participate in religion less than before. Meanwhile, you can now purchase an 85-inch television to fill your living room wall for less than a thousand dollars. Staying home has never before been so appealing. And so we do, lulled into unblinking unthinking stupor by endless binge watching on endless streaming services. It is not a bad life, in some ways materialistic bliss, but neither is it abundant, vibrant, and fruitful.

Last week while driving with Lisa, we listened to part of Katherine May’s new book, Enchantment, awakening wonder in an anxious age. It gave me a name and a description for what I feel is missing: a sense of enchantment. May defines enchantment as “small wonder magnified through meaning.” Enchantment comes to us in small doses of awe woven together through memory and story that binds us one to another, to this earth and all things in it, and to the creator of it all. Enchantment binds fleeting moments of attention with meaning, purpose, and truth. And when taken together, all those moments of enchantment lead somewhere far more real than my “real life.”

While I quite like May’s prose, we differ on the story that binds us. She follows the path of spiritualized nature deism, while I cannot shake the claim of a deity who takes on incarnate expression and acts in history and transforms it. I tend to notice those moments in silence, nature, and fleeting instances of connection with another person that, while perhaps not flashes of communion, echo as chords of resonance. They connect in the calendar of deep time and the unfathomed purposes of God. But they still provide a pattern and direction. Those moments even join the so-called living with the so-called dead. Theologian Karl Barth once observed that what we call the present itself is constituted by grace as encounter with God in time. And that means that there is no such thing as waiting. There is only anticipation. We live in anticipation of God’s restoration of all things, a hope first hinted at in Easter.

Anticipation extends the moment of the present through both desire and our own formation to shape our lives towards it. Our lives are sailed on an invisible river hiding in plain sight, rather like the mid-Atlantic Gulf Stream. If you set your life in the same direction and just give a little push, it will take you further than can possibly imagine. And along the way you just might notice the albatross overhead soaring upon those same currents, moments of enchantment, signposts for the way home.

–Brian

March 14, 2023

In This Season of Lent

I am having trouble marking my days of Lent. One day seems to blur into the next day, the critical voices in my head are particularly loud these days, and even those things in my life that are intrinsically “good” are robbing me of the “mindful marking” of Lent. So, I find myself already half-way through this penitential season of Lent and longing to be marked with ashes again.

On Ash Wednesday we marked our foreheads with the ashes of “remembering our death” and began a season of remembering that:

We are dust.
To dust we shall return.
From dust we shall be raised.

Lent is a season which runs counter to our culture. Every bone in our body and every ounce of our soul must roar against the voices of society that will deceptively tell us:

-we don’t have time to be still
-we have too much to do
-we must be productive
-we must avoid silence
-we cannot speak of death or sorrow
-we are not worth saving

Lent calls us to look at the cross. Lent calls us to see death. Lent calls us to see our brokenness, our sin. And Lent calls us back to the one who has conquered death.

My Epiphany Prayer Star Word for this year is the word mindful. In the midst of the noise and chaos of our world, I am seeking to be mindful of God’s presence, mindful of God’s love, mindful of God’s Spirit, mindful of my own sin, and mindful of my words and actions which have the power to heal or to hurt.

The Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount which we are studying this Lenten season are all about being mindful, mindful of God’s way of living. I am deeply challenged by these words of Jesus found in Matthew’s gospel. They have a way of marking me unworthy and yet also marking me as Christ’s own.

These words of Jesus invite me to be mindful of my days and to mark them with a love like no other love.

I am moved by the words of Rev. Donna E. Schaper, a United Church of Christ minister, in her Lenten reflections, Calmly Plotting the Resurrection:

We enter Lent to begin a journey. A journey to a place called resurrection.
We are on our way to a different room in our house.
The room is called Life-After-Death. Life-Instead-of-Death.

May we be mindful as we journey together to the cross. May we be marked by the love of God in our journeying.

Peace.

Pastor Kelley

March 7, 2023

The Sermon on the Mount is a detailed diagnosis of the human condition. Like most diagnoses, it is something we often do not want to hear. Like most clinical reports, it details our problem and it also describes the way things should be. Functionally, it is intended to help us heal and grow.

A big problem arises when The Sermon on the Mount is used as a weapon. Jesus’ sermon, that warns us not to judge, is often used by people to judge others. Jesus’ careful exposition and application is used as a cudgel to beat the conscience of the unwary. Of course, in doing so the moralizing critic is violating its core tenets and opening himself or herself to judgment.

The topic of the Sermon on the Mount is humanity, its problem, and its solution. The problem with humanity is sin. Not sins. Sin, in the singular. Sin is not the naughty things you may have done or the probably much longer list of good things you have failed to do. Those things are the consequences of sin, but not sin itself. Sin is simply separation. We are alienated from each other, ourselves, and our God. That alienation is the essence of sin and it is simply a part of being human.

Sin is not something you choose, not a bad habit, a moral failing, a defect of character, nor a developmental issue. You cannot overcome it by changing your behavior, growing up, or making better choices. It sticks to you like gum on your shoe. We are all tainted by it. It is everywhere in our world. I can observe this to be so for the simple reason that the most prominent sign of sin’s presence—death—seems to be everywhere.

During the Middle Ages, the church graded sin on a curve. The problem with that is twofold. First the church just made it up that distinction that is nowhere found in scripture to support their own penitential system. Second, it ignored the problem that all sin, all separation, all alienation is potentially fatal.

Next week we will examine the portion of the Sermon on the Mount that addresses divorce and adultery. It is a small section. Jesus seems much more concerned with anger, violence, forgiveness, and prayer. And yet it has provided a perennially popular club that some people have used to flog others for purported failings, somehow ignoring that in doing so they run afoul of the rest of the sermon. Nevertheless, I know that this topic causes pain and hurt for so many people.

Jesus is clear about God’s intention for us. A human being fully alive and thriving is one living in covenantal relationships with God and other people and at peace with themselves. Whenever we do not live like that we are, by definition, living in sin. Consequently, almost every human being has lived and is living almost every moment of their lives in sin. That is not because we have failed. That is because we are human.

Because Jesus is clear about God’s intention for us, anything less is necessarily a consequence of sin. Divorce is a consequence of sin contrary to God’s intention. So too are loneliness, despair, rage, anger, jealousy, betrayal, addiction, pride, envy, sloth, gluttony, avarice, arrogance, apostasy, cheating, fraud, detraction, lying, insecurity, profanity, aggression, scandal, ghost lighting, abuse, domination, narcissism, neglect, callousness, unfeeling, prejudice, disregard, disrespect, ruthlessness, indifference, apathy, disdain, rancor, resentment, gloom, despondency, spite, dissemblance, scorn, disdain, haughtiness, dispassion, petulance, ridicule, caliginosity, and odium to name a small representative sample. All these things keep us separated from God and other people. All these things, and millions more, are the consequences of sin contrary to God’s intention. They are not rated, graded, or weighted on a curve. Sin is sin and all of it keeps us apart and alienated from God, ourselves, and other people.

The Good News of the Gospel is that sin and its consequences, which we cannot remove, are removed by God. Separation can, will be, and is being overcome, not simply forgiven but removed. But not by us. Separation is overcome by the one who overcomes all separation, even that between heaven and earth, even that between life and death. Jesus lived, and died, and lived to remove that separation once and for all time. That means that though we are all sinners by birth, we are all forgiven through Him. And may God have mercy on any human who presumes to wield divine judgment over another to whom God has already rendered pardon.

The message of the Sermon on the Mount is clear. Do not worry about judging others. Do not worry about judging yourself. Love God. Love other people. That is more than enough. God will take care of the rest.

–Brian

February 28, 2023

One of the most lessons I have finally learned in middle age is the importance of forgetting. Memory is not a simplistic recording of sensations and experiences. Memory is the complex redaction of our own self-constructed narratives of our lives illustrated with carefully chosen sensations and recollections. Memory is the mind’s greatest creative achievement carefully editing sights, sounds, and smells through the filters of emotion, perception, and experience. For some, this produces a lifetime of beautiful treasures, precious moment captured in memory’s amber for eternity. For others, this produces tearing wounds of traumas reexperienced again and again.

All our memories have subtle emotional tags attached to them. Fundamentally every experience is either good or bad. That simplistic reductionism is helpful when, for example, you are trying discern your favorite flavor of ice cream or when trying on shoes in a department store. It is less helpful when those reductionist judgments are applied to other people or ourselves. Very few people are wholly and completely good or bad. We tend to be complex combinations of virtue and vice. That complexity is precisely what makes judging other people, or ourselves, so tricky.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes the Sixth Commandment, “Thou Shall Not Kill,” (Exodus 20:13) and consider the full breadth of its implications. If we truly hold each other in relationship, then how we consider, how we evaluate, how we judge another person, is who they really are to us. Violence may be able to destroy the body, but words, resentments, prejudices, rumors, and presumptions can kill the connecting relationship. I think that is why Jesus extends the prohibition on killing to a general prohibition on anger and judgment (Matthew 5:22) because such anger and judgment destroys relationships and connection. And without relationships and connection, the Kingdom of God is impossible.

Over time lots of people wrong us in a variety of ways. We can carefully archive and catalog our growing list of offenses and grievances. Or, we can forget. Memories all have emotional values assigned to them. You know what they are. You can choose to simply not bring to mind the angry, bad, hurt, offended ones. Whenever your mind reaches for a memory to recall, you can consider its emotional charge and choose whether to bring it fully to conscious consideration. The more often you leave the bad memories and harsh judgments tucked safely away the less hold they have over you. Anger, offense, and grievance all fade with lack of use.

In Jesus’ prayer contained within the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord’s Prayer, we are asked to petition God to forgive our debts as we have been forgiven. That tiny contraction “as” denotes identity in method. We are called to forgive in the same manner as and to the same extent as God forgives us. The Hebrew for forgive (Kaphar) literally means to cover something over so you cannot see it anymore. Forgive does not mean to forget or somehow be completely reconciled. It simply means to obscure something so you no longer notice it.

I have a hard time with Jesus demands for radical reconciliation. I am neither that nice nor that courageous. But forgetting, I can do that. I can learn to not pick up that sharp memory that will only hurt me and other people. I can learn how to forget and in forgetting learn to forgive or at least not judge.

We live with people who hurt us all the time, especially the people we love. One part of learning to love is learning to forget. God forgets our sin. Perhaps we should forget each other’s and perhaps even our own.

–Brian

February 21, 2023

For the past two weeks I have been travelling around Israel with a very special group of people. I shared with them what I have learned about the land, its history, archeology, and importance. They shared with me their stories, experiences, hopes, and challenges. I think I got the better end of the exchange.

When I was first asked several months ago to help lead this group of 27 United States Army Chaplains on a renewal and educational trip, I was not sure exactly what to expect. I have escorted groups of seminary students and pastors, in addition to some of you, but military chaplains were a bit outside my experience. What I discovered was a group of curious, caring, dedicated, and compassionate women and men who, although from a diverse spectrum of theological traditions, were utterly united in their commitment to service. While they all hold deep faith commitments, sometimes from rather exclusivist versions of Christianity, they shared their ministries with everyone within their respective units regardless of theology, faith, or the lack thereof. And their field of ministry is vastly more diverse than any congregation in the United States. One chaplain told me that the fastest growing faith declaration in the army was “Norse Pagan” (perhaps because of the beard exemption). They do ministry with and for everyone.

And their ministry is a difficult one. For the past two decades, the United States military has been in constant oversees combat deployments. The chaplain corps has deployed alongside them sometimes for years at a time. The exhausting burdens of such duty, along with disrupted relationships, endless hours of wearying struggle against often invisible enemies, homesickness, the ambiguities of government policies, and the very real burdens of post-traumatic stress provide the chaplains’ corps with never ending needs. In particular, the real stigmas associated with psychological care in the military, make the chaplains not merely the spiritual, but also emotional and psychological care givers for the units they serve.

Who cares for the care givers? Frontline chaplains who give and give also need to be replenished not only with rest but also renewal. That was the purpose for our trip, to reconnect chaplains with original source of our spiritual hope and truth. Walking the streets and hillsides where Jesus walked, where David played his harp, where Peter prayed, and the prophets preached, connects us tangibly, bodily to the Great Story.

My goals were simple. I wanted every chaplain to walk away from the experience with a renewed foundational sense that it was all real. Faith is not rooted in sentiment or opinion, but in God’s mighty acts in the particularity of place and time. Second, it is also complicated. The morally ambiguous, politically conflicted, intellectually confusing times in which we live are the rule not the exception. God’s revelation in human history first through Israel and then through the incarnation make things more complicated not less. The complexities of ministry today are not so different than those of nineteen centuries ago. Nonetheless we are called to minister amid the complexities. And finally, the story is for them, or more precisely they are a part of it. Military chaplaincy predates the institutional church. Next to the barren Tel of Megiddo in the Jezreel valley stands the remains of an ancient church built some 90 years before Christianity became legal. It was built inside a Roman legionary fortress by and for soldiers. The mosaics within it remember the soldiers’ families from the far corners of the empire. The story of the soldiers who built and worshipped at that church was also the chaplains’ story. We belong to a story greater, deeper, and more enduring than our lives.

Based on our conversations, I think the chaplains returned with something of lasting and sustaining value. So did I.

In many congregations in the United States there is anxiety about declines in religious participation, congregational membership, attendance, and giving. The chaplains reminded me that while all of that matters institutionally, what matters to Jesus is simply to meet people precisely where they are as they are and offer them compassion and hope. We are given access to the infinite well of that compassion and hope through the Holy Spirit. And that well of living water still flows. In order to live into the Great Story and be a part of Christ’s Church all we need do is share it.

–Brian

February 14, 2023

“An Invitation to Be Shriven”

This Sunday, February 19 (Transfiguration Sunday) we are going to observe the tradition of Shrove Tuesday Pancake Meal which is usually the evening before Ash Wednesday which is the beginning of Lent! But instead, we are going to observe Transfiguration Sunday by sharing a Shrove Sunday Breakfast and reading the Sermon on the Mount in worship!

Have I thoroughly confused you?

Here is all you need to know:

Join us for worship this Sunday at either the Early Service or Later Service and be served a Lenten Breakfast in-between the services from 9:30 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. Pancakes, Quiche, Sausage, Orange Juice, and Coffee will be served by the Deacons as we prepare ourselves for Lent.

Shrove Tuesday Pancake dinner comes from a long tradition observed by Christians across the world of preparing oneself through confession for the observance of Lent. This tradition of shriving goes back as far as 1000 AD:

“In the week immediately before Lent everyone shall go to his confessor and confess his deeds and the confessor shall so shrive him as he then may hear by his deeds what he is to do in the way of penance.” – from Ælfric of Eynsham’s Ecclesiastical Institutes, 1000 AD.

The word shrove is a form of the English word shrive, which means to obtain absolution for one’s sins by way of confession and doing penance. Shrove Tuesday was named after the custom of Christians to be “shriven” before the beginning of Lent.

What a wonderful way to prepare ourselves for being shriven! Pancakes, quiche, sausage, orange juice, and coffee!  Come, let us prepare for Lent together.

February 7, 2023

Baptismal Promises
A Word from Pastor Kelley

In the Sacrament of Baptism, when we baptize an infant or child, the parents and the congregation make promises to that child. We promise to tell that child the stories of our faith and to teach them about the One who loves them more than they will ever know.

Of the parents we ask:
Relying on God’s grace, do you promise to live the Christian faith and teach this faith to your child?

Of the congregation we ask:
Do you, as members of the Body of Christ, promise to guide and nurture this child by word and deed, with love and prayer? Do you promise to teach them the good news of the gospel, that they may know all that Christ commands, and in doing so strengthen their family ties with the household of God?

In that moment of baptismal waters and covenantal promises, we remember who we are:

A child of God.

And in that moment we remember that in this alone we find our identity. We remember who we are in Christ.

The last week of January, I spent a week of renewal, prayer, and study with a dear clergy friend. For an entire week we read and reflected, wrote and discussed, rested and prayed, and shared simple meals which we prepared in-house. My time of prayer, reading, and reflection was centered on my call to youth ministry here at Fairmont. I read a book by Andrew Root entitled “The End of Youth Ministry.” Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary and has written a series of books on Church and Secular Society.

The heart of the book affirms that which I already knew deeply but needed the discipline of reading and reflecting to confirm:

Many wonderful and good secular activities create community and give purpose in the life of children, youth, and their families but the community of faith alone is the one space for them to find their only true identity:

A child of God.

The lives of our children and youth are filled with many good and meaningful activities that create community, teach compassion, build character, and provide happiness. These activities are good. My children spent their growing up days learning music and dance at Interlochen Center for the Arts, earned their Black Belts at ATA Martial Arts, lifeguarded at Johnsonburg Camp, danced with the Princeton Ballet summer program, spent a summer at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and played classical guitar at McCutcheon’s Music. I am grateful for these deeply enriching experiences for our children.

But these activities, as enriching as they were, do not answer the question, “Who is your child?” Our children and youth are not defined by what they do or do not do. They find their identity as children of God. We find our identity as children of God. In relationship with God and with one another, we can answer the question, “Who Am I?”

Who are we? We are God’s beloved, baptized in the waters of forgiveness and new life. We are children of God. We belong to God and to one another as God’s family. And in the promises of our baptism we remember who we are – God’s own.

I have known all along – in youth ministry in the 1990s and now in youth ministry in the 2020s – that the church and its ministries cannot and should not compete with society and secular activities. The church uniquely has this to offer to our children and youth – an encounter with God!

Together as God’s people, in relationship with God and one another, we are the Body of Christ called to worship, serve, study, pray, and be in covenant community. God calls us to claim our waters of baptism and keep those baptismal promises to nurture, teach, and guide our children and youth to study Christ, to know Christ, to love Christ, and to serve Christ.

And so we invite you once again, “Come, friends, and be the Body of Christ.”

January 31, 2023

Two of the holiest sculptures on earth for me are really the absence of sculpture and were never intended to be art at all. And yet these two voids convey testaments of human longing for the eternal.

As you step into the ancient Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem you must kneel to pass through the four-foot-high doorway of humility. Many people trip because the marble threshold stone has a three or four inch depression in it. That smooth depression was made solely by millions and millions of pilgrims’ feet. Similarly, the marble steps leading up to Golgotha in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are unevenly concave, worn out by millions of pilgrims’ steps. The indelible erosion of stone is the collective work of millions of pairs of feet, not the work of an individual. If you ask, who then did this, the answer is all of them.

Next week I will be returning to those stairs with a group of 25 United States Army Chaplains. What I want to share with them is threefold: the great story of the Bible is real, it is complicated, and it is for you, or more precisely you are a part of it. As I have already written, what God has done, is doing, and will do does not exist inside our ideas or sentiments about God, it all unfolds in space and time. That ongoing process of revelation and restoration is complicated because it intermingles with all the intricacies of human thought, emotion, memory, politics, economics, and history. But finally, and foundationally, that story of what God is up to in the world is our story. Or, to put things in a more proper scale, the stories of our lives, the narrative from which we draw our individual senses of identity, purpose, and meaning, are all little parts of a vast narrative in which God creates, laments, restores, and ultimately reconciles. Your life is a part of the story of God’s life.

When you travel to the Holy Land, you can easily be overcome by the strangeness of it all. Priests, Rabbis, and Imams from dozens of traditions (you can distinguish them by their hats) jostle each other in the crowded medieval streets and the claustrophobic corners of worship. The strange smells of frankincense and the summons to prayer, whether they be bells, muezzin, or clapping boards, assault the sense. Clearly, you ain’t in Kansas anymore. But if you care to feel your way beneath all the cultured expressions and aesthetic differences, if you have sufficient curiosity to peek behind all the pluralism, what you find is a story that still throbs and invites you. Moreover, if you let go of our own cultural presuppositions, you just might find something more, welcome, belonging, and home.

The prophet Isaiah and John of Patmos were clear and unambiguous about our destination and true home. We all are bound for Jerusalem, not Jerusalem as it exists today, but Jerusalem transformed, a home for all people, Jews and gentiles. In that transformed city there will be no temple because there will be no need for it. God will simply dwell with God’s people. Separation will be overcome. Belonging will be restored.  And in the center of it all will be a garden, a new garden, just as there was at the beginning.

As a Christian, I believe in the incarnation of God by, in, and through Jesus of Nazareth. Because God has walked this earth, that means that the Holy Land is not ancient Palestine. The Holy Land is this planet and we all walk upon it. It is no coincidence that Jesus began the work of reconciliation and restoration by simply telling his stories and asking people to share their own. The lived experience of our lives, the stories of who we are and who we are becoming, are the crucibles in which reconciliation, restoration, and ultimately salvation happen as we smelt, refine, and alloy one life to another and ultimately to God’s. Weaving our stories together, one to another and to God’s, is the central task of our shared work of recreation.

Roughly 78 generations separate us from Jesus–78 generations of striving, seeking, building, loving, suffering, and sinning. It is a large, but not unimaginable number. Modernism would say we are all progressing. I am not so sure. What I am sure of is that each of those 78 generations matter. The stories they tell matter. The way they connect to the generations that have gone before and those that go after matter. If any had simply failed to share their story and connect their lives to God’s life to the next generation, I would not be writing this today. 78 generations have not merely carved stone with their bare feet, they have sculpted lives and one of them is mine. And if you ask who did this, the answer is all of them.

We all have a part to play even though we may only be familiar with a single scene in a single act of this vast divine drama. The Holy Spirit provides stage direction, if only we permit her and participate. You and I were made for this story, we belong to it, and to the extent we participate in it, it becomes our lives. And if you want to discover who you really are, if you want to experience your life the way it was intended to be, give yourself over to it. Add your story to the great story and belong.

–Brian

January 24, 2023

One of the primary learning goals for all of the trips I have led to the Holy Land is simple. When students return, I want them to say, “it is more complicated than we know.” The humble confession of complexity and lack of complete understanding is the beginning of true wisdom. This is all the more true whenever and wherever our lives intersect with the action of a infinite God who is utterly beyond all understanding. In the Holy Land, that intersection is everywhere and consequently it is a land that confounds, confuses, complicates, and humbles me every time.

Our problem is not fundamentally with politics, history, or archeology. Complexity begins with our theology. We believe in a God who is both utterly transcendent, beyond space time, matter, and energy, and at the same time utterly immanent, acting in and through space and matter and taking on flesh as one of us. That paradox guarantees complexity. Add to that the mysteries of God as a relational being (i.e. Trinity) and real human understanding of God and what God is up to seems right out of bounds. If it is understanding you seek, I would suggest a simpler religion.

The paradox of the incarnation gets expressed in the Holy Land in landscape edited through the lens of history and devotion. Something happened here. What exactly and where exactly are often subject to debate. We can trace centuries of veneration of particular places, collect hundreds of pilgrim accounts, map the topographical contours of the land, and even dig up related bits of archeological evidence. But it is all circumstantial evidence. You cannot “prove” by the standards of modern evidence that anything happened anywhere in the ancient world. Nonetheless, circumstantial evidence in sufficient quantity can be persuasive. I do believe that we have identified the location of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection with sufficient precision that you can actually touch those places where a transcendent God and an very mundane world touch. And in touching those places, we are invited to connect with and participate in objective holiness, not in my heart, but in the world.

One of my favorite teaching venues in the Holy Land is the so-called Garden Tomb. A rather cranky retired British General, Charles Gordon (later played by Charlton Heston in Khartoum) visited Jerusalem in 1883.  As a Western Protestant, all the exotic smells and bless of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher offended his aesthetic sensibilities. Near his guest house, he noticed an ancient tomb adjacent to a hill that looked kind-of, sort-of like a skeletal face. He concluded immediately that must be the place. It was quiet and watered and looked like the kind of place he imagined for Jesus’ death and burial. Unfortunately for Gordon, that tomb actually came from the First Temple period, about 800 years too early. And that hill has been constantly eroding and collapsing. The nose fell off a few years ago. The face Gordon saw would not have been there in Jesus’ day, indeed it is not there now. It is a beautiful place for worship though, and I use it as an example of how we import our own ideas about the Bible and impress them onto the land conforming landscape to our expectations.

In order to receive what the Holy Land teaches you need to be open to both surprise and complexity, things we generally avoid. We prefer our answers to be certain and complete. But such certainty is a sure symptom of idolatry. If you ever firmly grab hold of the wild, unpredictable God of the desert, understand that you are grasping an idol. Complexity is the boundary that contains and confounds human pride.

The Holy Land is no less complex in all its modern problems. The land is contested and conflicted. Palestinian refugees expelled from their homes by Israelis struggle again Jewish refugees expelled from their homes by Muslims. The Ottomans, British, United Nations, and Americans have all tried to resolve the conflict and failed. And this is nothing new. There is no point in the history of the Holy Land when the land was not the subject of conflict. The reason it seems so complicated is because it is.

Complexity does not challenge faith. Complexity is the sign of mature faith that takes the paradoxical nature of our God and God’s relationship with the world seriously. If you “keep it simple,” know that you may be comforted but you are also twisting God’s own revelation to satisfy our agendas and preferences. God who works through human history and particularity of place, let alone God who becomes one of us, will always get very complicated very quickly.

Understanding is highly overrated. There is a far more accessible and potentially life-giving alternative. You can let go of what you know and what you think you know and simply be. Unlearning is harder than learning. But according to Jesus, letting go may be the very essence of the way into belonging and being.

Jesus let go. We call that resurrection.

— Brian

January 17, 2023

Last week I returned from leading a ten-day study trip to Israel with a group of seminary students. I do this rather often. You might wonder why I use my vacation time to guide students rather than lounging on a beach in Mexico. Sometimes I wonder myself. But as soon as I get off the plane at Ben Gurion airport, the answer always returns to me. And that answer is relatively simple, although it has three parts. It is real. It is complicated. And it is for me.

It is real. It sounds simple to say, but it entails a cognitive and emotional leap unlearning centuries of Enlightenment habits of mind. For most Protestants, faith is an internal, subjective experience concerned with our thoughts and emotions related to the divine. We say things like, “I’ve got Jesus in my heart.” We talk about a journey of faith as if it were a process of persuading ourselves with ever greater levels of surety of ever more unlikely things. We read Paul through the lens of Luther to perceive that God’s primary concern is with my individual salvation and well being and I experience that concern (i.e., grace) through my own subtle internal experiences and feelings.

Since the nineteenth century, polite mainline Protestants have moved the essence of our encounter with the divine from the world into the interior of our experience, specifically a feeling of absolute dependence (thank you Schleiermacher). By moving Christian faith from the contested world of objective claims to the internal world of feeling, religion can be safeguarded from intrusive evolutionary biologists, archeologists, sociologists, linguists, interpreters, scientists of every variety, and the diverse array of other religions and their contesting claims. By retreating from the world and moving into feeling, Christian faith can avoid all the messy conflicting claims of modernity. And so, our churches have cooperated obligingly. For example, consider worship. What makes worship good or bad? The truth of the claims of worth asserted about God (which is what “worship” actually means) or the way we are made to feel in worship? Is it about God or us? The answer of modernity is unequivocal. It is all about us. Even God is about us.

But what if modernity is wrong?

What if God is on the move, breaking things and remaking things, in the real world of objective, tangible, history, matter, and space time? What if faith is not so much a subjective feeling reflecting back only our own longings and hopes, but rather the affective response in memory and expectation of experiences, real experiences, both our own and those of other people? What if faith is not an emotion but a conclusion that organizes and gives meaning to all our memories and feelings? What if it were all real?

As a Protestant I affirm that God can be anywhere and anywhen. As someone who holds dear the tradition preserved by Jews and Christians in the Bible, I affirm that God seems uniquely interested and active in this particular patch of land about the size of New Jersey on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. God did something here. Regardless of how anyone feels or believes, God actually did something not in the abstract, but in the messy particulars of mortal lives, politics, stone, water, wood, iron, and blood.

I return to this sacred landscape again and again to listen to the wind, feel the rocks under my feet, lose myself in the jostling labyrinth of the Old City of Jerusalem, smell deeply the musky aromas of Bethlehem tinged with car exhaust, frankincense, and sewage, and gaze from my balcony as the moon rises over the sea of Galilee. I return to stand in a synagogue where Jesus preached and wander around the elevated remains of the disused quarry where he died and rose. I return to remind myself that my faith is not built upon feeling so much as experience, both mine and hundreds of generations that have preceded me. I return to touch as an embodied creature and know that it is real.

My cure for the cultured cynicism of modernity in all its anxiety and despair is simply to walk by a lakeshore in Galilee and remember. The answers are not inside of me. The answers are out there looking for me and for you. It is all real.

And . . . it is also complicated. But we will leave that for next week.

–Brian

January 10, 2023

Covenant Community.
Belonging.
Church & Society.
Our Youth.

These things have been on my mind and weighing heavily upon my heart recently.

I served as a youth minister at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Long Beach, CA from 1987-1990 and then again at La Grange Presbyterian Church in Chicago, IL from 1990-1993. I was young, new to ministry, and full of energy. In the remaining thirty years of my ordained ministry, I have served as a solo pastor or an associate pastor in varied areas of ministry but not youth ministry…until 2020. The pandemic and changes in staffing required us to rethink our gifts and needs at Fairmont.

And so, with much joy, fear, and trembling, I found myself once again working hands-on in youth ministry. I would never have imagined myself – a 63 year-old pastor – back in the vulnerability, liveliness, and richness of youth ministry but it has been pure joy!

These are difficult days for our youth. Our societal voices tell youth that their value comes only through individual success, power, popularity, and wealth. The lies of individualism spew out daily in a constant barrage of media and commercialism. All the while, our youth simply long to belong and to be loved; to be part of a covenant community that is safe and welcoming.

The relationship between church and culture – church and society – has changed drastically and was already changing years before the pandemic flung that relationship even farther apart. In the days of my youth, church was the social thing to do; church was highly valued in society.

Church and faith are no longer of value in our society. The relationship between church and society has completely changed, and our youth are living in the midst a myriad of choices that are vying for their time and commitment.

In the midst of these critical changes in our society regarding faith, community, belonging, and purpose, Fairmont has stayed faithful to the call to create a place of welcome, love, and spiritual growth for our youth. The numbers don’t matter. The youth matter. Our faithful remnant of youth at Fairmont Presbyterian Church are intelligent, humorous, compassionate, creative, and committed.

For me, the youth are the imago dei – the “image of God.”

I see, feel, and know God when I am with our youth. The light of the incarnate God in Christ shines brightly in them. They are a gift to me and to this congregation. I invite you to get to know the youth of our church as they worship, fellowship, and share in mission with our family of faith. Our youth meet weekly on Sundays following worship (except for a multi-youth gathering of other Presbyterian churches once-a-month) for a meal, faith discussion, service projects, and games. You are always welcome.

I will be spending a week of study leave at the end of January reading a series of books by Andrew Root (Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary) – Faith Formation in a Secular Age and The End of Youth Ministry? – that I may more fully understand what is happening with our youth in today’s society and how we, the covenant community of faith, can create a space that is welcoming to our youth and their families.

Thank you for your generous support of our youth at Fairmont. Thank you for keeping your baptismal promises to teach them to know and love Christ.

Blessings,
Pastor Kelley

January 3, 2023

Epiphany Prayer Star Words

This Friday, January 6th, is the Day of Epiphany of the Lord. Epiphany comes from a Koine Greek word “epiphaneia” meaning manifestation or appearance. It is a celebration of the manifestation or revealing of the Christ Child to the Magi (Wisemen) who travelled from the East to worship the Babe born in Bethlehem. It is also the celebration of God’s appearance to us in the Christ Child.

Although, for most of us, Christmas is over, Christmas does not really end for most of Christendom until the celebration of the Coming of the Magi or Three Kings Day or Epiphany.

The tradition of the Twelve Days of Christmas is marked from the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day to the Visitation of the Magi or Wisemen twelve days later on Epiphany.

The Twelfth Night, the night before Epiphany, for many Christians outside of western Christianity is a time of festive celebration. As late as the 4th century, Jesus’ birth was celebrated by the church on Epiphany, January 6th. In 325 A.D. Emperor Constantine moved the celebration of Jesus’ birth to December 25th which was the day of the “Sol Invictus” – the “unconquered Sun” – celebration.

As we observe Epiphany and celebrate the coming of a new year, we will be sharing again in a year-long spiritual practice as a faith family. Each of you are invited to take an Epiphany Prayer Star Word with a “prayer word” on it. This word is your “prayer word” for the year 2023. Through the year, each of us are to use this word in prayer, in bible study, in faith conversations, in study, and in times of reflection and meditation to see how God will speak to us through this one “prayer word.”

Epiphany Prayer Star Words are a simple spiritual practice tool to help us grow closer to God and to one another. Keep your word close to heart and in your mind. How might God speak to you through your Prayer Star Word? What might you learn in scripture about your Prayer Star Word?

Join us again this Epiphany Sunday as we remember the story of the Magi and their journey of faith following the star. Epiphany Prayer Star Words are available in baskets in the Fellowship Hall and the Sanctuary.

December 27, 2022

Starting last Sunday, we have begun our year-long walk with the Gospel of Matthew. The Christian tradition is the only religion that I know of that self-consciously embraces four distinct portraits of its founder written from four different perspectives. While this can be confusing at times, it adds to the richness and reality of the Gospels, recognizing that every one of us would have experienced this curious God-man Jesus differently.

Matthew is the earthiest of the Gospels. There is no time in Matthew’s account for hanging out in Bethlehem after Christmas. The Holy Family immediately flees to escape Herod’s massacre of the innocents. From the second chapter of the Gospel, we know that Matthew’s account of Jesus’ life and ministry will collide directly with the kingdoms of this world.

Matthew is also the Gospel most concerned to demonstrate how Jesus comes in fulfillment of Jewish expectations. Baby Jesus miraculously escapes a homicidal king’s wrath, just like Moses did in Pharaoh’s Egypt. And after being tested and ordained to his pubic ministry, Jesus like Moses will immediately pronounce the law, a guide for how human beings can live into right relationships with God and with each other. Finally, this Jesus will center his teaching on the promise of citizenship and belonging in the Kingdom of Heaven, just as Moses led his people into the Promised Land.

The Gospel of Matthew was written by someone who was born, raised, and wrote this Gospel as a Jew about a Jewish Messiah. That does not mean that this Gospel belongs to some other community. Quite to the contrary, Matthew begins his story not in the birth of Jesus, but rather in Abraham. Abraham was the progenitor of many many nations. All modern Christians, Jews, and Muslims look to him as their human origin. And God’s promise to Abraham was not only to bless him and his descendants, but through him to bless the world and all people in it. Matthew takes this promise to Abraham seriously and shows how through Jesus God finally fulfills it. For Matthew, the life, death, and life of Jesus of Nazareth are not the replacement of Judaism but rather its fulfillment, finally demonstrating the full love and transformative power of the Creator to all people.

Matthew also includes some of the harshest words in scripture against Jews. But we must always remember that these hard words were spoken in anger within an essentially family argument. They were spoken by people who all considered themselves Jews who valued the traditions of Moses and Torah so passionately that they would and did lay down their lives for it. The great tragedy of the second century was the parting of the ways between factions of the family as Christianity looked increasingly beyond Palestine and its Jewish population for its future, but that great divorce happened decades after Matthew’s Gospel was written. We need to be very careful in reading Matthew’s cutting remarks from our modern perspective. 2000 years of anti-Jewish violence and anti-Semitism separate us from the author.

Matthew’s earthy particularity and his fascination with the ways in which Jesus fulfills prophecy are two of his themes that lead me to my work in Israel. Next week I will be leading a group of about 17 seminary students to Israel with my friend Rabbi Brad Hirschfield. While there, we try to share and show how the land in all its maddening, messy, complexity, and the relationship between Christians, Muslims, and Jews is intertwined not just in the story of modern Israel, but ancient as well. People who go to the Holy Land seeking simple answers often return frustrated. My teaching intention is simply for participants to return concluding that it is more complicated than they realized. That complexity, tearing away all our fond mental images of the Holy Land often fabricated in Sunday School, is the unsettling but necessary beginning of wisdom.

Matthew offers us insight into Jesus of Nazareth’s teaching, healing, and working in this world in all of its frustrations and filth. It is not a Gospel for angels but rather one for women and men looking for within this world for its redemption. Matthew offers us drama, surprise, and challenge on every page because his plot is nothing less than the breaking of sin and death and the triumph of God’s redemption for all people.

So, it’s only 28 short chapters. Let us begin.

–Brian

December 20, 2022

“Christmastime is here. Happiness and cheer. Fun for all that children call their favorite time of year.”
So goes the song from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Like countless other classics it conjures up an image and an experience of time, but not any old ordinary time, not time you can simply identify and circle on the calendar around December 25. Christmastime is a particular time set apart and made special by personal relations and connections. Christmastime is time consecrated by connection.

Even a purely secular Christmas (e.g., The Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special) that has no outward religious content still seems to resonate with at least the aspiration for and hopefully the experience of deep personal connection between people. Christmastime is a time when we reach out to connect and act for and with each other in love. It is a season to bridge our isolated and often alienated sense of self with other selves out there in the world.

Ebeneezer Scrooge realizes his grave error in detaching himself from everyone and dashes around town in a generous Christmas frenzy not only sharing abundance, but real connection, compassion, and gratitude. George Bailey realizes that his true worth and value lie not in his financial management skills nor in the market valuation of his business, but the deep web of interpersonal compassion, sacrifice, and care that he has tended across of lifetime. Sometimes this connection is frustrated by distance or circumstance as can be plaintively heard in Bing Crosby’s I’ll Be Home for Christmas as it gave public witness to a generation of young American men headed overseas into an uncertain future. And you can even overhear it in The Pogues altogether more recent classic Fairy Tale of New York, which in its final verse reaches beyond all the failures, passive aggressive putdowns, addictions, and betrayals to embrace another in compassion and communion.

Deep resonant connections between persons, that is what Christmastime is all about. Seeking or celebrating that kind of intimate, honest connection is what defines this time, not a calendar.

You can remove all the outward symbols of religious tradition, but you cannot so easily change human nature. Religion’s cultured despisers can pack away every creche and silence every Christmas carol, but they cannot reprogram the yearnings of the human heart. The sacred is not written so much in our symbols as in our deepest desires, the ones we are not supposed to admit publicly. What we want is precisely the deep intimate connection that Christmastime teases but that Christmas fulfills.

Our search for belonging and connection is usually a fool’s errand. We do not even know what we are seeking most of the time. If we do happen to find real connection and relationship with another, it is always marked by its bittersweet impermanence. That grief is the price paid for loving impermanent beings.

But what if it was the other way around? What if instead of us seeking belonging and connection that we never seem to find (e.g., Charlie Brown, Seinfeld, and all of existential philosophy), that belonging and connection was out looking for us? What if we did not have to find anything, make anything, or do anything and just simply receive?

The Gospel of Christmas is simply this, the One who is connection and belonging from the very beginning, that which is the Creator’s action, affection, and intention comes to us, for us, and with us. What Scrooge, George Bailey, and The Pogues go looking for has already arrived on a cold winter night in the sleepy village of Bethlehem some two thousand years ago and has remained alongside us faithfully ever since. He comes looking for you. And if you will receive him, you will not enter Christmastime. If you receive him, you will enter into belonging and communion itself, not a time consecrated and made holy, but a life, your life inside his.

–Brian

December 13, 2022

I was annoyed. On Monday morning I created my “to-do” list with 13 small (ish) tasks to be completed. Number 11, tantalizingly close to the end of the list and the promise of leisure, purchase sour cream that I had forgotten on the previous day’s grocery fun. Every task on my list had a built-in time allocation. Purchasing sour cream at Kroger’s=12 minutes. But now my plan was being ruined. A certain person ahead of me in line had entered into an extended conversation about family Christmas gatherings with the cashier. Thirteen minutes and counting. As a former Target cashier myself (Yay T-8!), I valued efficiency and frictionless commercial transactions. Here there was plenty of friction. I was terrified they might start sharing photos. Fourteen minutes and counting. Finally, the customer stopped sharing but then to my horror started writing a personal check. Fifteen minutes! I felt panicked. I felt defeated. I felt Zeitkrankheit!

Zeitkrankheit (one of my newest favorite words) is a marvelously descriptive German term literally meaning “time sickness.” It is the sense of unease, anxiety, and uncertainty whether you are actually keeping up to speed with the world. Time may be measured objectively with clocks, but it is experienced subjectively embedded in our experience and expectations. That sort of time, time actually lived and experienced, has been and is accelerating constantly at the speed of technological and social change. Sometimes I just cannot keep up and that feeling produces first anxiety, then frenetic activity, then sober realization, and finally despair.

Zeitkrankheit becomes particularly acute every December. We have some sense of what we are supposed to be doing and the kind of life we are supposed to be living. Normally this is informed by Hallmark holiday movies and lifestyle magazines selling us commodities to simplify our lives. December can be a constant sprint of family gatherings, parties, important get togethers, and thoughtful gift getting and giving. Remember even Charlie Brown is ordered by his therapist to get more active and participate. We perform our frenetic pace on social media and are positively reinforced for it with a shower of likes. Church usually just adds to the busyness. And at the end of all our strivings and labors, come December 26, it all somehow seems rather empty. We have been moving faster than our souls can go. We are suffering from Zeitkrankheit.

The ironic thing is that Advent was never intended to be a sprint towards Christmas. Advent is slow. Advent moves at the speed of a donkey’s plodding pace picking its way among the river stones of the Jordan Valley. Nothing about Advent and Christmas happens quickly. Walking from Nazareth to Bethlehem takes about five days and all of it is rocky and hilly. If your ambitions move faster than your feet, you break your ankle. Similarly, moving large flocks of sheep is not a particularly efficient way to cross open country. And those Magi had to traverse the whole length of the fertile crescent from what is nowadays central Iraq, up and over Kurdistan and the Al Jazeera plains, crossing not just one but two giant river, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and then needed to navigate the mountains of Lebanon. Advent forces all of its participants to slow down and pay attention.

I fear that the pace of my life is set by technology and culture constantly urging ever faster innovation as we seek to “hack” our own lives. “Move Fast and Break Things,” is the internal motto of Facebook, but could be the motto for our age. Accelerating change in a community, an organization, or an individual life is seen as the outward measure of success and value. But I fear it is making us, our families, our relationship, and our communities sick.

I do not seek change for the sake of change. I seek transformation and that requires time, attention, sacrifice, and participation from someone or something beyond myself. It can only start when we honestly observe and question our cultural obsession with acceleration. It can be nurtured in silence and stillness when, perhaps only for a moment, we are open and vulnerable to be touched. Then and only then can our own souls catch up with our lives.

Sometimes I fear that we move so fast that we leap right past our goal and heart’s desire failing to recognize our destination in the rear-view window. The salvation and transformation of all humanity proceeded nicely towards its fulfillment at the not-so-breathtaking speed of two and half miles per hour, the speed of a plodding donkey.

If you want get to Bethlehem, I suggest observing the speed limit.

–Brian

December 6, 2022

Thoughts Upon Watching the Charlie Brown Christmas Special

for the Fifty Second Time

For the modern world, Christmas is all about desire and its satisfaction. Think of the modern carol, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” every Hallmark Christmas rom-com movie ever made, or innumerable car commercials with bow-wrapped automobiles on Christmas morning. The meaning of Christmas is quite clear. Christmas is about the fulfillment of our desires, whether they be for toys, a new Lexus, or a romantic partner. Joy is fulfilled by acquisition and possession.

This is the first year since 1965 in which the Charlie Brown Christmas Special will not be shown on network TV (Apple having acquired the rights in 2020). I have watched it every year for as long as I can remember. Unlike almost every other made for TV offering, the Charlie Brown Special does not purport to offer the meaning of Christmas as possession or fulfillment. And that makes it interesting.

Growing up with this 1965 TV special, I forgot how radical it was–the first children’s TV special with actual children’s voice acting, a cutting-edge jazz soundtrack, no laugh track to tell you when to be amused, a dry sense of irony appealing to adults and children, and at its center the Gospel of Luke as the climax of the story, so central no editor could remove it.

The show begins with the unstated presumptions of all network TV specials—Christmas is all about desire and its fulfillment. Lucy wants real estate and celebrity, wryly sharing with the audience that Christmas is actually the work of an East Coast syndicate. Sally, who would feel at home in any Hallmark Christmas movie, wants money and a boyfriend. Schroeder wants artistic recognition. And even Snoopy wants “money, money, money!” Bill Melendez’s “artistic blandishments” makes it all look so innocent, but the Charlie Brown Special is a radical critique of consumerist individualism and materialistic nihilism. The vacuum of meaning results in a genuine existential crisis for Charlie Brown who knows he is depressed because he cannot surrender to self-deception and cannot make sense of any of it. His depression is amplified by his general anxiety disorder. He is “afraid of everything” by his own acknowledgement. Finally, all of this is made vastly worse by the honestly depicted cruelty of other children who will not invite him to their parties reinforcing alienation and loneliness. They shame him by publicly denying him even polite Christmas greetings. Confusion, shame, anxiety, social isolation, and bullying beat him down. Unsupported and alone, it is no surprise that Charlie Brown is oppressed by this holiday that is supposed to bring joy, but instead perpetuates only dread.

Charlie Brown’s answer is the solution of the modern world—endless productivity. If only he can get involved, if only his industry can remain one step ahead of his pondering melancholy, then perhaps he can escape his questions and reside happily ever after in self-important busyness and achievement that is readily rewarded by his peers in the Christmas pageant. But it does not work. First, he cannot achieve enough. The rehearsal crashes down in a managerial disaster. Second, he cannot let go and give himself over to decadent pleasure seeking as the sum total of meaning with the rest of the cast. The other children are lost in a musical reverie, courtesy of Vince Guaraldi’s classic soundtrack, but their exuberant joy only sharpens the contrast with his own plaintive longing and despair. Exiled from the theater company and its unstated but powerful social norms, he heads out alone in exile into the wilderness.

One of the ironies of the children’s quest to fulfill their desires is of course it does not work. Lucy receives no real estate. Sally obtains neither cash nor a boyfriend. Schroeder is reduced to playing showtunes. With no small measure of irony, the only one who fulfills his desire is a dog. Snoopy receives the first-place cash prize for Christmas decorations.

Trudging into the empty auditorium, Charlie Brown asks the universe, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” To which the ever-faithful Linus responds, “sure Charlie Brown,” and proceeds to quote the Gospel of Luke 2: 8-14. The interesting thing about Linus’ choice of scripture is that it is not the account of the birth of Jesus. Rather it is about the shepherd’s reaction to the announcement of the birth of Jesus. The meaning Linus shares is not the dogmatic fact of Jesus birth but rather alienated humanity’s response to Jesus’ birth. And that reaction is one of overwhelming gratitude, joy, and curiosity about the scope and nature of what God has done, a curiosity that will lead them up into Bethlehem. The meaning is not a fact, not something that can be reduced to a declarative sentence. The meaning is a movement of the heart, a quickening of the pulse, a sense of wonder, joy, gratitude, and utter surprise. Indeed, only upon restating this good news that Linus finally lets go of his own anxiety and outgrows his need for totemic protection as he drops his blanket on stage.

Finally, with all the children, Charlie Brown goes out into the snow and does not answer the meaning of Christmas because he finally realizes it has no declarative meaning, which would be just another fact we can control. Instead, Charlie Brown along with all the children give the only honest answer possible. They live it. They enact and participate in the shepherds’ response. They let go of their desires, wants, and attachments and instead give themselves over to the witness of praise, gratitude, and exuberant joy. It is no coincidence that they sing Hark the Herald Angels’ Sing, because in the final frame, they join and become one with the angels in a chorus of praise.

The most humble, downright shabby of organic Christmas trees was dwarfed by the towering artificial aluminum monstrosities. But in the end, that humblest of scrubby trees is revealed for what it truly is, the most perfect of all. It is perfect not simply in its form and appearance. It is perfect in its genuine authenticity as opposed to our shallow artificiality. It is perfect in its authentic completeness and the relationship that it shares with the children. And it all gets expressed in the world in the most outwardly humble of forms. Through the joy, gratitude, and exuberant love expressed by the children, the tree is perfected. And so is Charlie Brown. The children together become a community bound not by shared desire, but shared gratitude. And so, if we are willing to join the chorus, can we.

The truth of Christmas is not a meaning or a fact, let alone an event. The truth of Christmas is a poignant feeling perched between already and not yet. It is the sensation of a dull ache of something missing inside, but that could be. It is the desire for something deeper than our wants that we cannot quite imagine or name. We are born with this sense of longing. It is an innate part of what makes us human.

I hope you have a merry Christmas. But more importantly I hope you touch and feel that longing that lies somewhere beneath all our desires because that longing leads not to pleasurable satisfaction but to God. Charlie Brown, in his anxious seeking and dissatisfaction with all the world’s empty answers, was on the right path to what he sought all along. Perhaps we should follow.

November 29, 2022

Advent always confuses me. I never know which way to face. Most of the hymns and symbols of the church look backwards to the curious events around the village of Bethlehem during the last days of the reign of Herod the Great. We sing our carols as if we were somehow those people back then look forward with plaintive anticipation for the coming of the baby Jesus. But of course, nobody back then was looking forward to the coming of the baby Jesus except perhaps his immediate family and even they were anxious. Nobody was looking forward to his birth because a baby born into a feed trough was the exact opposite of the sort of messiah that they hoped for.

To make matters more complicated, their potential anticipation was already fulfilled in the birth of Jesus. He was born, lived, died, and lived. It is not something I can look forward to because it is already completed.

Advent can also look forward in time. The alternative that I have held onto throughout most of my adult life is that Advent is the season of the church that looks for Jesus’ second coming in power and majesty to bring all creation to its restoration and perfection. Advent then becomes the season of apocalyptic expectation for the return of the King. We wait and watch and stay awake for the big return when all will be put right knowing not the time or the hour of his coming. This is the hope that sustains me when the world seems overwhelmed with despair. God’s Kingdom is coming, and soon. But of course, it tends not to happen today. Resurrection and Revelation seem to take an awfully long time, much longer than the early Christians anticipated. So while I affirm the need to wait and watch and prepare, I also recognize that I may never live to see the coming of that glorious day.

There is an alternative understanding of Advent that falls squarely between the birth of Jesus and his dramatic return. You can choose to look neither to the past nor to the future, but to the present. You can choose to look neither backwards nor forwards but inwards.

The arrival of God in the flesh takes multiple forms, as a peasant child born in Bethlehem and as a liberating sovereign. And it happens in one other manner as well. In you. We believe that at Pentecost, the God of Creation and the God-Man Jesus came to us by one other way—through Spirit. The Holy Spirit is as much God as is Jesus and that Spirit now abides in us as close as our breath. Indeed, the word Spirit in both Hebrew and Greek also means breath. Every moment you inhale and exhale and in that moment are invited into participation with Spirit. God is as close as your next breath, but only if you pay attention.

It is no surprise that every major prayer and meditation in every world religion focuses on breath because when we focus on our own breath we force our minds to slow down and pay attention to the here and the now. The Advent of the Spirit is always Advent in the present tense, available to you now in this moment every bit as much as it was for ancient shepherds or future witnesses to Christ’s return. Practicing Advent of the Spirit simply means paying attention to the miracle all around you and the miracle that is you. We celebrate it simply by waking up from our distractions, numbing, and endless internal chatter. Waking up we begin participating in God with us, Emmanuel, not simply God with first century Galileans. Waking up we begin to breathe more fully into Spirit, trust more deeply in it, and open our very selves to ever greater vulnerability and hope. In doing so we slowly move from waking up to growing up, growing up to become the new kind of humanity that Jesus both described and demonstrated.

At Fairmont our mission is help each other become inspired in its original and fullest sense of Spirit-breathed. That way and that way alone is the way to becoming fully alive such that death cannot contain us. We believe as followers of Jesus in the possibility of life before death and it is all made possible by the Advent of the Spirit.

The Spirit gets short shrift at this time of year. You will find no cards about it. It is so much easier to focus instead on events long ago and far away. But maybe the greatest gifts of all lie right in front of us, here, now—life abundant and eternal and participation in the community of Trinity.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Slowly. Pay attention. Slowly wake up from your slumbers. Slowly grow up from our anxious adolescence. We are star stuff breathed into life by our creator who is always as close as our next breath. God may have come to us and God may be coming, but far more important, God is already here.

–Brian

November 22, 2022

Blessings

As part of our Epiphany Prayer Star Word practice this past January, I drew the word “Blessings” for the 2022 year. Epiphany Prayer Star Words are meant to be simple tools for meditation, study, and prayer for the year; a word to bring spiritual inspiration and focus in the midst of our busy lives.

Blessings. Honestly, I wanted to put the word back and pick another word for the year. I don’t like the words Blessings or Blessed. They have lost meaning for me. Too common. Too overused. Too simple. Too privileged. Too trite.

Have a blessed day.
Count your blessings.
Too blessed to be stressed.
A blessing in disguise.
Be grateful for small blessings.
Give thanks for your blessings.

I have struggled this year to find meaning in the word Blessings. What does it mean to have gratitude? To be blessed? To give thanks? To be a blessing? As we approach this Thanksgiving holiday, where is God in the midst of this season of Thanksgiving?

I struggle because I am ever and always aware that I have everything I need or want, and more. I am ever and always aware that I am privileged, that I have family, friends, meaningful work, a beautiful home, food, clothes, and all the extras of life. I am ever and always aware that I am “blessed.” While all along, I am ever and always aware that millions of people do not have everything they need, let alone what they want. I live in the comfort of never being in want for anything material or earthly. Yet, children of God across the world live without food, housing, and medicine on a daily basis.

When I was a student in seminary in Southern California, I traveled often across the border into Mexico with a seminary mission program that ministered with and for poorer families. I remember clearly the genuine joy that radiated from these families as they shared their food and drink with us, scarce as it was.

I do not mean to glorifying poverty. Poverty is horrible. Those precious families suffered greatly and worked hard to feed their families. But they understood “blessing” in a very different way than I ever could. The children giggled with delight when they were given a fresh lemon off of the lemon tree. Each day and each meal was a gift to them. A gift from God. And they knew it. They felt it. They lived it.

All good gifts, indeed, come from God alone. We are deceived if we think we have earned that goodness that God gives. In humility we receive the gift of God’s blessings and grace, even and especially when we do not deserve it.

When Jesus was gathered with those he loved around the meal of Passover, he took the bread and after giving thanks to God, he broke the bread. Jesus understood that every gift, earthly and spiritual, was given by God alone, and therefore was life-sustaining.

May we approach this Thanksgiving with deep gratitude in our hearts for God’s abundant goodness and grace. And may we in turn be a blessing to others.

With gratitude,

Kelley

November 15, 2022

Over the past year in worship, we have been reading through the Old Testament and lifting up the themes and major events of what we are calling THE GREAT STORY PART ONE: ISRAEL. We call it the Great Story because it is a story that makes sense of every other story including our own. There are two more parts that we will be exploring in 2023 and 2024 respectively, THE GREAT STORY PART TWO: JESUS and THE GREAT STORY PART THREE: THE CHURCH.

One of the great missions of the church is to help each individual and each generation come to see their lives in a vast context that provides a foundation, meaning, purpose, and hope. That foundation is the Great Story. That story begins with creation as an extroverted eruption of God’s own superabundant love and creativity. But to create something separate and apart from God admits the possibility of true freedom. Separation from God (what we call sin) is the logically dependent corollary of that freedom. But God has plan. Creation will be redeemed. So, God calls a people to do precisely that: Israel. Israel is summoned to be a faithful people to bring the world back to loving order. But Israel has its own problems. Israel is very very human, which means they make a mess of it. So, God creates a faithful human being, a new prototype for what we can become. His name was Jesus. This God-Man Jesus enters our world and our lives and in doing so, makes a mess of the brokenness of the world. He teaches and preaches a better way. And when he dies, he does not fit inside death. So, death broke. And after that his followers, the church, went out filled with his same spirit and changed and change the world.

There is a GREAT STORY PART FOUR. It is called THE KINGDOM. We do not know how to preach or teach about it. We do, however, know how to hope for it and, however provisionally, try to emulate its ways in our living. We call that hope and the intentional process of living that way faith.

The culture we live in does not have a story to shape our lives. The only story that matters is your own. There is no purpose other than the fulfillment of personal desires. There is no duty except to seek the freedom and the power to fulfill those desires. There is no destiny other than pleasure in all its forms. Beauty is purely a matter of taste. Truth is personal choice. Goodness is merely a lifestyle decision. What matters is authenticity, but authentic to what? And if you fail at fulfilling all your desires, that is your own fault. It is also a very lonely world we have created where there is only us. We have disenchanted creation and disconnected from each other. We have successfully alienated ourselves from God, creation, our communities, our friends, family, and ultimately our very selves. And then, all alone with our self-fulfillment and our stuff we wonder why we are so anxious, depressed, and miserable.

One great overarching value of the modern age is authenticity. But authentic to what? What I am, who I am, arises from the thick web of relationships, commitments, communities, cultures, and institutions in which I live and grow. We are made to be relational beings. Moreover, we are always changing and growing. There is no such thing as a static self. We are emergent beings, never defined, always becoming.

To make sense of my life, my world, and my destiny, I need a story to hang all my hope and meaning on. My life is not my own ultimately, I am merely a player in a vast drama that began long before I was born and will go on long after I die. I only need play my part today with conviction. Some days I will not even do that so well, but there is always tomorrow. So, I imitate those who went before me. I try to emulate the patterns of lived behavior taught, which we call virtues. And I look to the East in the same direction from which they were sure their hope would come because come it surely will.

The Great Story is your story and our story because it weaves together all our stories and gives them meaning and purpose. How will you write your next chapter? Who will you emulate? How will you advance the plot? This is a vast unscripted drama in which we live.

And the director is curiously waiting to see what you will do next.

–Brian

November 8, 2022

Today is election day. You should vote. Then go home. Maybe, go for a walk. Tell your family you love them. Make something nice for dinner. Read a good book. And under no conditions whatsoever should you turn on the television. It will be good for your soul.

It does not matter who is winning or losing. The problem lies deeper. The problem is that all our news stations do not really sell information. They sell advertising. They make money by keeping you watching. And the way day do that is by hooking your emotions. Human beings are wonderfully unique in our geniuses and delights. We all tend to be the same in our baser feelings. Fear, anger, and anxiety sell. Our media trades in these base impulses along with the occasional dabble of sexuality. Television news stations use image and rhetoric to trigger those feelings and keep us watching. It does not matter which station you watch, whether Fox or MSNBC, they all play the same game. And we are all the losers for it.

I do not suggest willful ignorance. Tomorrow, or better yet the day after tomorrow, either go online or pick up a paper. Actually, pick up lots of them. Somewhere between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times you will get a clearer sense of what happened, but without the raw trigger of images. We probably will not know what happened tonight for a few days anyway, but the babbling classes still need to fill all that on air time.

Jesus seemed remarkably unconcerned about politics, even when it killed him. Jesus never appears to have engaged in any direct political action (the whole money changers in the temple thing appears to have been a purity issue). He could have. No doubt some of Jesus’ disciples wanted him to take a clear political stance. But he did not.

Paul taught the earliest church to be good Roman citizens and subjects. Pay your taxes. Obey the law. But never ever forget that the Empire is not your true home, Caesar is not your true Lord, and the ethnic and class labels the Empire assigns to you are not your true identity. Instead of endlessly fighting the world of politics, create a new one. Create small cells, little beloved communities of genuine sharing, compassion, and hope as an alternative to a world of greed and violence. Then use the Empires magnificent communication and transportation networks to spread the invitation to those new communities regenerating them throughout the Empire. The early Christian church spread rather like cancer through the lymphatic system, reprogramming people and parts of the Empire to become something, someone profoundly different than the Empire intended. Except this metastasis (literally the movement of change) did not spread disease. It spread life.

For its first three centuries the Christian Church was a small and persecuted minority. The Bible and the early church fathers and mothers were profoundly ambivalent and skeptical about all political power. During the Middle Ages, Popes and Bishops dabbled in power politics. It did not end well. And even at the height of Papal investiture crises, people seemed to know that something was profoundly out of order. Since the Seventeenth Century, things have settled down, at least in Europe and the West.

The church has flourished and spread its message under democracies, republics, autocracies, oligarchies, aristocracies, monarchies, dictatorships, tribal chieftains, nomadic hunter gatherer family groups, and the occasional bout of utter chaos. There is no preferred or natural political home for the Christian movement. And that is sort of the point. The Good News of Jesus offers us a home, an identity, and a hope from the declarations and projections of politics.

The affairs of public life are worthy of your attention, intelligence, and resources. Jesus calls us to fully engage in and with the world, not retreat from it. So, please do seek the common good. Seek after policies that best serve the needs of the people and support candidates that you believe will do so. But then let it go. Turn off the TV. It will only tend to make you upset (regardless of your opinions).

Politics does not define our world for the simple reason that humans created politics and nothing human made is of permanent or ultimate significance. So, take a night off. I promise your favorite news channel will be there when your return.

And if you want to simply catch a glimpse of something permanent and of infinite significance, go out under the night sky beneath the blanket of stars. And behold.

–Brian

November 1, 2022

Today, November 1, has special significance for me for two very distinct but connected reasons. First, today is the Solemnity of All Saints, aka All Hallows, aka the Day of the Dead. It is the day in the Christian calendar when we remember and celebrate all those who have died in Christ who now await in him the resurrection of the body. It is also the day my wife Lisa and I adopted our dog Nala. The events have more in common than you might think.

Nala was a stray running loose in Fairborn. Her original owners had abandoned and perhaps abused her and she ended up in the care of Greene County Animal Control, from which we adopted her. We do not know the circumstances of her early life. But please know her story took a positive turn a few All Saints Days ago when she entered our family. Today, on her “forever home” day she will dine on a tiny filet mignon with a cocktail of beef consommé. We named her Nala because it is the Swahili word for “gift” for that is what she has been to us.

Today is also All Saints, a day to remember, celebrate, and give thanks for those who have gone before us. Originally in the Roman Catholic tradition, All Saints was reserved only for those who achieved spiritual maturity for which they were canonized. Tomorrow, November 2, was All Souls Day for everybody else. While I am all for aspiring to spiritual maturity in this life and celebrate that rare and wonderful quality in the lives of others, I recognize that all our strivings are incomplete in this life. But I do recognize that they are made complete in union with Christ, a state of being that can only happen upon letting go of everything that is not God. In other words, a state of being that can only be realized upon death. One may or may not be a saint in this life, but all are saints in death for the simple reason that all who die in Christ now know and are truly known. They stand upon a distant shore and in a brighter light. Now they know.

All Saints is not intended as day for grief. It is a celebration of the ultimate destination of all grief in gratitude and the daily practice of incubating that gratitude in joy. Our creaturely hearts are fearfully and wonderfully made to love impermanent beings, and that means letting them go. Both that overwhelming sense of joy at the sheer gift of it all and the truth of letting go applies as much to my own life, as to those I love. As the poet Mary Oliver observed, “Of course I wake up finally thinking, how wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints —all that glorious, temporary stuff.”

Dogs (generally) have much shorter lifespans than people. You cannot fail to notice their relative impermanence. Perhaps that brevity gives our relationships with animals a certain license to love with abandon. And should you ever wish to see incarnate holiness, by which I simply mean God coming to live God’s life in us, all you need do is watch a dog fly off its leash across a meadow.

Sometimes I feel we do not love each other, our family, our friends, let alone strangers, and even less ourselves with that same kind of delight and abandon. We conform to socialized expectations and maintain the illusion that there will always be tomorrow. But it is not so.

All Saints is not ultimately for the dead, who now reside quite contentedly in the love of Christ, but for the living. You and I and everyone you will ever know will die. Death is not a problem to be overcome. Death is the reminder that our role is not to grasp and cling to that which cannot be held let alone possessed, but instead to simply pay attention and live and love completely today.

No one and no thing belongs to us. It is all a gift.

–Brian

October 25, 2022

I love the Sixteenth Century. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Galileo, Michelangelo, Catherine De Medici, Cortez, Shakespeare, Magellan, and John Donne, are just some of the fascinating characters of that most vibrant century. It was also a time of intense social, political, and economic conflict both between and among nations. It was an age of competing faiths and rival fundamentalisms. And it was an age of anxiety when wars, epidemics, and economic ruin waited around every turn. In short, it was rather like this age, albeit with less attention paid to personal hygiene.

On Sunday we celebrate our Reformation heritage. Our particular little branch of the Christian faith got started when a group of stubborn Scots threw their imperious bishop out a window (please remember that I am not a bishop lest you get any ideas). Their resistance was both theological—opposing the Roman church’s corruption and additions to scripturally founded practices—and political—opposing the overweening power of the aristocratic prince bishops in favor of a crude but effective representative democracy. They opposed the authority of both the Pope and King to rule over peoples’ consciences. And all of this unfolded as unprecedented economic and technological changes unsettled communities as never before making the world both smaller and more anxious.

The Scottish Reformation in turn looked to a former lawyer, John Calvin, who laid out the foundations of a reformed church on three foundations. First, everything we can or ever will know can be reduced to two topics: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. And you cannot have one kind of knowledge without the other. The more you want to really understand God, the more you need to know yourself. Second, people when left to their own devices generally mess up. We are an anxious, greedy, nearsighted lot. We mess up our own lives, the lives of others, and our world. This is perhaps the only theological doctrine that can be empirically demonstrated. Finally, the only way that anything really good happens is through God making it happen according to God’s own sovereign and sometimes utterly inexplicable grace. On our own, we tend to create a world in which what really matters is what we do, but that is an arrogant illusion. What actually matters is not what we do nor do not do, but what God does.

Taken together, these new foundations provided the sure footing for the Reformers and their descendants to first challenge and then overthrow the drowsy dogmas of the past and open up new realms of discovery in the Enlightenment. While their world came crashing down around them, they now had a new fixed point of certainty from which to observe one world disappearing and another emerging all around them.

And so can we.

Our world is changing socially, economically, politically, culturally, and technologically and the rate of that change is accelerating. That constant acceleration of change lies beneath every conflict and tension we observe. The constant acceleration of change infects everyone with anxiety. There is an alternative. We can, like Luther, Calvin, and Knox before us, leave the outcomes of all our predicament to the all-powerful God who is also the God of love. We can let go of our need to maintain illusory control and instead fall with an open heart into God’s receiving arms of grace. And we can engage in every challenge to create a more loving, more beautiful, more just world, knowing that in body and soul, no matter the outcome, we belong to God.

We are creation brought to sentience and gifted with soul by the Creator not for our ends, but for God’s. So, do not be afraid. Instead, participate, celebrate, and in all things, belong.

Happy Reformation Heritage Sunday!

October 18, 2022

I am sorry I could not be with you for Children’s Sabbath this past Sunday. I was preaching with our friends at Hilliard United Methodist. While there I encountered a teenage woman wearing a button that said, “Smart and Sassy Theologian.” I complimented her on her commitments and public witness. In conversation with her I quickly realized that the button was truthful, she did indeed have her own clear and articulate ideas about God and the church. I do however wonder whether she would ever wear such a button outside of church. The secular dogma of expressive individualism looks down on anything or anyone who points to some foundation of truth and identity beyond individual choice.

If you were born in the 1960’s or earlier, you grew up in a different universe than the one that exists today. You grew up, whether you knew it or not, within a giant shared narrative about the way the world works, where it is heading, and what it means to be a good person. That narrative was shaped, at least in the United States, by the ancient faith stories of the Bible and the institutions of the church and synagogue. That culture could be autocratic, patriarchal, and racist, but it provided a shared grammar with which to discuss meaning, purpose, value, and identity. Such a world is populated by “givens,” the assumptions of thought and behavior that passed by unnoticed and unconsidered. One of those givens was at least some generic acquiescence to a supernatural entity that was both creator and concerned with our lives and well-being. Due to a variety of social changes (including but not limited to distrust in institutions, rise of expressive individualism, economic commodification, breakdown of families, breakup of communities, the rise of mass communications, failures of religious institutions, social mobility, social media, and a normative culture of secularism) that shared narrative first wobbled in the late 1960’s and has progressively disappeared ever since.

If you were born in the 1960’s or earlier, that shared narrative and the social expectations that went along with it guaranteed that most people belonged to a religious community. No individual was necessarily more spiritual or devout, it was simply the social expectation to belong and participate. Social rewards in terms of group belonging and status went along with that. This explains the meteoric rise in church participation from 1945-65, which have never been as high before or since.

The ”Smart and Sassy Theologian” I met on Sunday was probably not aware of the social and ideological history that led to her cultural predicament. But I guarantee that she knows only too well that committing your life, meaning, value, and purpose on something beyond individual choice and fulfillment, let alone on something as unfashionable as a supernatural ground of all being we summarily call God, no longer grants you access to the popular “in” crowd. For secular society, religion is a hobby, not all that different than stamp collecting, needlepoint, or fantasy football—something you choose to do privately that gives you pleasure. The thing about hobbies, as opposed to say vocations, is that they are purely private pursuits shared by and meaningful to only their fellow devotees.

The problem with secular society’s accordance with religion as a private choice is that faith cannot be a private choice. If the foundation of faith is simply private option, then what we call religion is at best an aesthetic preference. All the Abrahamic faiths rail against this notion of choice and flip it on its head. It begins with choice, but not us choosing God, rather God choosing us. That foundation threatens all of secular modernity because it acknowledges an authority independent of and superior to personal choice. And while secular modernity may not consign its heretics to the auto da fé, there are far more insidious punishments and banishments.

Sometimes I hear people lament why there are not more young people in church. I hear that as an expression of grief for a lost world that I never knew. When I see young people engaged at church, I reach a different conclusion. There surely must be a God because it is astonishing that any young person in our age and culture so hostile to faith would choose to explore a spiritual community at all absent actual divine intervention. And so, I celebrate and congratulate our youth not for their polite piety but for their ferocious courage.

The church that will first nurture and then be led by these young people will look different and act different than what has gone before. We have already seen in young people’s passions for justice, authenticity, intimacy, and truth telling the outlines of a movement very different from the denominational corporations of the past. The “Smart and Sassy Theologian” and her colleagues seem to have little patience with polite, socialized religion and seem far more concerned about the messy, unsettling, Spirit driven work of transformation, both individual and social. They want to know the truth, not the right answers. They want to know themselves, and their peers, and you. In learning each other’s honest stories, they slowly collect data on the activities and purposes of this subtle but persistent supernatural entity at work in our lives.

I thank God for the children of Fairmont, for their patience with some of our fussy ways, for their bold questions, for their smarts and sass, for their intolerance of tired social dogmas, for their courage to pursue a difficult path through this age, and for their passionate integrity to seek God’s ways for them and this world today.

The world has changed. Christendom has ended. Now the church emerges again. And the children will lead us forward.

–Brian

October 11, 2022

Last week I travelled with 23 other pastors to Alabama on a civil rights pilgrimage. We visited many of the sites of the civil rights movement, museums and memorials, and we visited the churches that were directly involved in the civil rights struggle and heard from participants in the actual events. It was moving, exhausting, and unsettling.

I have visited over 30 countries, but have always avoided the deep south. The pain seemed too raw and the evils perpetrated there seemed too fresh. Now I realize that in avoiding that land, I also averted my eyes from the many of the saints of God who, under threats I cannot imagine, bravely gave witness to the equality and worth of all God’s children whether white or black. In turning away from them and their stories, I was turning away from the Spirit’s work in America.

In Birmingham I was confronted by the ultimate price of not seeing clearly. You can walk the city and see the churches that were bombed, the little plaques where people were beaten or murdered, and the now understated but persistent presence of Confederate “heritage.” You can also see the aching vulnerability in the searching eyes of the racism’s victims as displayed so powerfully at the National Civil Rights Museum. These places and the people’s stories pose an uncomfortable question. How can one person treat another this way? The answer is of course that one person cannot treat another so. To murder, torture, isolate, impoverish, or simply denigrate another you first must stop viewing them as fully, equally human. You must view them as a thing and that distortion in perspective is the original sin that underlies everything that happened in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, as well as Auschwitz, Armenia, Nanking, Wounded Knee, Sichuan, Kigali, Srebrenica, and hundred thousand other places lost to memory where human beings forgot who we are and committed atrocities beyond description and tears.

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was a reluctant participant in the civil rights struggle. Its professional, middle-class congregation tried to stay out of all the unrest. But the unrest came for them. One month after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall, terrorists planted dynamite outside the women’s washroom on Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The timer was set to detonate seven minutes before worship began. The day the terrorists chose was Youth Sunday. Four young girls, preparing to lead in worship were killed that day. Although there were many witnesses, the police made no arrests. Indeed, no convictions would occur for over thirty years.

What struck me most about Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was the stained-glass window that stood along the south wall where the blast occurred. It depicts Jesus patiently knocking at a door: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.” Rev. 3:20. The stained-glass window amazingly remained intact except for two partial panels. The image of Jesus’ face and his heart were blown out by the blast. It was as if the face of God turned away from us in grief and shame while the heart of God itself was broken.

The image of the faceless, heartless Jesus will forever haunt me along with its associated verse. Jesus’ question was directed to the people of Laodicea who ran neither hot nor cold. They were moderates. They avoided conflict. They avoided taking stands. They paid attention to their own lives and their own concerns and failed to notice the pain and injustice all around them let alone do anything about it. In doing so they locked Jesus out of their lives and the humanity of their neighbors.

I do not pretend to have answers, but I cannot unsee what I have seen or unlearn what I have learned, most of all from my African American ministry colleagues. But from now on, I can pay attention.

–Brian

October 4, 2022

Healing

It has been a long month away from you, my beloved Fairmont family! I am grateful for your prayers, cards, calls, texts, flowers, visits, and love as I have been recovering from surgery (second Hiatal Hernia surgery in two years). I am doing well and feeling stronger and more whole each day. It was wonderful to be with you again this past weekend as the speaker for the Women of Fairmont Gathering on Saturday, leading worship Sunday morning, and blessing furry animals on Sunday afternoon (St. Francis of Assisi Blessing of the Animals).

Healing has come in many forms and through many agents of healing for me. Physical healing came through the gifts of doctors, nurses, and medical professionals, and through IV drips, robotic laparoscopic surgical tools, and modern day medicines. Physical healing also came through long naps and quality sleep. And physical healing came most definitely through the ability to eat and drink once again after months of an esophageal blockage and a liquid diet.

But there are other kinds of healing that must happen in order to be whole and “human” again. There is the emotional healing that comes through the love and support of family, friends, church, and the faithful visits and pastoral care of Pastor Brian.

And there is the spiritual healing, maybe the most important healing of all. I was blanketed in your prayers and I felt those prayers. I was reminded each day of the grace given to me as Pastor Brian, Loralei, Jennifer, and many faithful volunteers covered for me in my absence. It is hard to receive such grace but I am grateful.

And the physical, emotional, and spiritual healing were woven together for me when I was finally able to take long neighborhood walks on these beautiful autumn days.

Thank you for being the Body of Christ for me in a time of absence and healing – physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Love,

Pastor Kelley

September 27, 2022

One of the problems that I struggle with is anxiety. By anxiety I mean the undefined, inchoate fear that something is wrong or about to go wrong and I have somehow failed or am unable to fix it. It is sort of like an ambient precursor to fear that has not yet found a specific threat to attach itself to become a particular fear. It is the vigilant, hyper attention that keeps the prairie dog perched on her mound alert to danger. It is the over reactivity to every loud noise and the assumption that every phone call will bring bad news. It is also quality that keeps a single line of “what if . . . .” spiraling in your mind at 3:00 a.m. Based on what many of you have told me, a lot of you struggle with it too. Based on what young people are telling researchers it is epidemic accelerated with all the persuasive power of social media.

There are lots of causes for anxiety—e.g., childhood trauma, environmentally stressors, chemical imbalances, physical insecurity—but they all arise from two underlying assumptions that are so basic that we tend not to notice them. First, we assume that the world in general and our lives within it are unsafe. That is the “something is wrong even when I am not quite sure what it is” part. The second assumption that again goes without mention let alone proof is that as individuals we possess some specific agency, control, authority, or responsibility to address that problem, which we have failed to exercise. That is the “and I have somehow failed” part.

As adults we learn to conceal anxiety well behind our various masks (bravado, ultra-competence, and perennial incompetence all work), numb it (alcohol and food are always popular), hide from it (binge watching Netflix at home), hide it from others (expressive confidence unto arrogance), or (confusingly) amplify it through unhealthy risk-taking, aggression, violence, and self-harm. None of these behaviors leads to helpful or healthy outcomes.

I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or counselor. Various therapies and interventions can be enormously helpful for people struggling with anxiety and if you struggle with anxiety, I encourage you to seek them out. But I am a pastor and as a pastor my interest is theological. Anxiety is grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of fact. It is a misunderstanding so fundamental that we do not even notice it because it is part of our internal and social realities in which we live unreflectively. To notice these faulty premises requires us to pay exquisite attention because they are so easily assumed. First, this world is not at its essence a dangerous place out to get you. Creation is created good and beautiful and while it has been defaced by sin, the signs of the Creator’s providential care and concern are all around us. We have a perceptive negative bias that amplifies the bad to the exclusion of the good. Moreover, the threats we feel and the dangers from which we recoil, pale in comparison to the promises, possibilities, and destinies we have received. The world is not as bad as we fear. The world is fundamentally good even when certain bad events occur within it.

The second faulty assumption is that we dramatically overestimate our own competency and agency to change it. The great humanistic move of the Enlightenment was to locate the center of all meaning, purpose, and truth inside the individual. That results in the hyper-expressive and expansive individualism that defines our culture, but the individual is simply not big enough to carry ultimate meaning. Our lives are contingent, given meaning by and part of a much grander narrative that began long before we were born in which we play meaningful but not necessarily starring roles. We are characters in that story, not its author. You do not “create a life,” you simply live it. And compared to the vast sweep of history, human or divine, all our lives are small precious moments in the great unfolding of truth that we cannot yet perceive. That means that the purpose, the optimal strategy of our lives, is honest faithfulness not perfect fulfillment that will never happen. And sometimes, despite that faithfulness, things simply happen to us because we are not in charge.

When I talk to our students who have not yet been taught adulthood’s lesson to hide it all away, I can see the burden of anxiety on them. I can see the crushing weight of expectation if we in our lives are expected to bear the weight of all meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and value. What I so want to say to them is just what Jesus says to me and to you,

You are not in charge

Do not be afraid

My burden is light

God has a plan

And do not worry, you are loved.

–Brian

September 20, 2022

With a few hundred million other people, I woke early on Monday to watch the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. The pomp and pageantry were extraordinary to behold as the longest reign in British history concluded. One moment that struck me was almost the final one. Just before the coffin was interred at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, the Lord High Chamberlain took the rod of office, symbolizing the Queen’s power at court, and snapped it in two. The broken fragments of the wand were then interred with the Queen. It was a simple and at the same time profound public act symbolizing that this too has now come to a conclusion.

One thing that the Crown understands well is the power and potential of ritual. In a national shared ritual of mourning and transition, emotions were poured out, gratitude expressed, change recognized, and ultimate hope affirmed. A funeral is not for the dead. The dead do not need our prayers or ceremonies. The dead now dwell in God’s care. A funeral is for the living in helping us get to where we need to go: the future. When a community shares in that together it taps into an unseen power in the course of human life, the power of human hearts and bodies feeling, yearning, grieving, and hoping as one. You could almost feel the United Kingdom straining forward just like the 146 Royal Navy sailors pulling the gun carriage. The British remember and hold on to something that most of us have long forgotten. Our identities are bundled together—family, community, nation, and faith. A shared sense of grief or loss is simply the flip side of a shared sense of community and belonging. The power of the ritual comes from the down-to-the-marrow sense that we are all together, and not just those privileged to be living, but also the living and the dead.

In the era of expressive and expansive individualism in which we live our lives, the notion of shared grieving with the living and the dead has been supplanted by the, “celebration of life.” Thanksgiving and gratitude are always important. But all by themselves offer little comfort and even less of a foundation for moving forward. We lift up the deceased’s resume and achievements politely ignoring that their chief current attribute, namely being dead, is held in common by all, princes and paupers alike. I worry sometimes that the notion of “celebration of life” looks for ultimate meaning, purpose, and salvation in the wrong place, namely inside our lives. Death is the great equalizer that forces us to consider the hard truth that if our life and all its many blessings is indeed the crucible of ultimate meaning and purpose, then it all ends rather abruptly upon our expiration. If all we celebrate is a life now ended, then every human joy is necessarily abbreviated and contingent, ending far too soon. If something as fleeting as human life is the sole bearer of meaning and purpose, then there is no such thing as meaning and purpose at all.

Ritual reorients us away from this trap and shows us a way out of existential despair. A funeral is fundamentally about truth telling. First, our beloved has died. Second, our beloved shall be raised. And third, we will be with them again and until that time we try to be inspired by them. The part we often fail to mention is that by inspired we do not simply mean motivated to emulate their virtues. By inspired I mean that they pray for us urging us onward by and through the Spirit. The dead literally breathe spirit through us in prayer, in Latin In-Spire. Words help, the Word points us in the right direction, but the embodied ritual conveys these truths in sighs of the Spirit deeper than our words.

We shall never again hear the proclamation, “God Save the Queen,” of Elizabeth Regina. There is no point to such an intercession because God already has done so. Instead, the intercessions are for us, the living who need all the help we can get. The foundation for that help is the simple acknowledgement that our salvation and purpose, whether mighty or modest, do not come from us and are not contained by us. They are from God and carried by God. So, we do not need to be afraid anymore. And the whole purpose of our shared enterprise called church is to simply remember and live into that hope.

We live and we die . . . and we live. Thanks be to God who saves us all.

–Brian

September 13, 2022

What does being faithfully fit mean to you? Brian is right now taking a deep sigh at these words, because I’ve gotten fascinated with the “sport of fitness,” i.e. CrossFit, which is not his calling. But it’s never too far a lunge (or sit-up or barbel lift…) for me to wonder about how my worlds ‘talk’ to one another, or how they fit together. Particularly when last year I heard a senior CrossFit Level 1 trainer tell his own vocational story of surprise and delight. The parallels for a seminary professor were too uncanny to not invite y’all into these wonderings…

At the weekend training, Joe told us of his early love of athletics, which naturally led him to pursue it in college. He dove into kinesiology as a major, then trained for his certificate as a personal trainer. Setting about creating his own small business in the personal training industry, he encountered a bit of a conundrum that none of his formal training really crafted for him. What IS fitness? What does it even mean to be fit? He realized he couldn’t actually say!

He could give detailed schematics on the healthiest movement patterns for the human body. He could advise on nutrition, shaped by the nutrition professionals of the day. He could develop a marketing plan for his business, with catchy phrases and eye-catching images. But he realized he did not have any concise or holistic definition of the word fitness. Toward what end would he be training clients, as diverse in age and ability as human beings come? Are marathoners exemplars of fitness? Weight-lifters? Buff men or women at the gym, making a lot of noise? Then he landed into the sport of fitness, or CrossFit, which actually has an articulate, empirical and evolving-with-data definition of fitness. (It’s jargony, so just ask me sometime).

Sitting there in that training, I felt the aha! in my body as a number of jumbled puzzle pieces dropped into place. The history that my body had lived—constantly shifting sands of becoming slender or attractively feminine in our market-driven media—opened into a stunning beautiful vista of fitness that could be adapted to my own body. Just get better, however I might define better, for now? I had heard an expert in the fitness industry fess up that all his training did not prepare him for the integrative work of training for fitness, though he had all the specialized pieces. This was/is particularly germane, as much of our managed-care medicine is organized around disease, not health. Medical experts are trained to treat symptoms, sometimes to the detriment of seeing the whole person. (Channeling my med-school-prof. father here…).

As a seminary professor, I cannot help but feel the resonance and challenges in our faith world(s) today. What does it mean to be faithfully fit? I can tell you that most faculty are exquisitely trained in their specialized disciplines AND would be hard pressed to give a concise, articulate definition of being fit in faith. Each of us would encourage deepening in our own disciplines of interest—scripture, theology, history. And we train faithful leaders in the traditions we’ve inherited. But knowing more bible, more theology, more history…does that make one faithfully fit? How often are congregations today trying to diagnose and react to symptoms because we have no confidence in our understanding of faith?

So…noodle on this with me for a while… How do you recognize fitness in Christian faith? So many of us have been reared in the idea that fitness is having nothing but certainty in what one believes. I’ll show my cards now: that’s not it. Certainty is arguably a lack of faith. It is reason toward what one desires, sure, but not faith. I’m surrounded by certain-ized folks who cannot love, forgive, or walk into any unknown (to them) future. Others might suggest fitness is demonstrated in the most rigorous piety or discipline (holiness, we might say). Or demonstrating one’s greatest alignment with the historic tradition, so to belong within already accepted norms. Or perhaps it’s speaking in tongues. Or mystical experiences. What do you think? (Feel free to email me too, if ye like: lmhess@united.edu).

I’m most interested in listening into a co-emergent future with interesting people of faith, bumbling along. I don’t really have an answer, but I’ll offer what I’m noodling with, these last two decades. Being fit in faith is risking doubt-uncertainty-curiosity into God’s abundant mercies, accompanied by scripture, leading into an expressive delight and unearned belonging that companions the suffering of self and others. Whatcha think? Better, whatcha feel?

— Parish Associate, Rev. Dr. Lisa M. Hess

September 6, 2022

How many times a year—or a week?—do you get that breath of fresh air, that sense of starting something new? Do you wander in a retail establishment and feel an urge to buy school supplies? Perhaps you felt an autumn crispness to the air for the first time in a while? Most of us are well-socialized to lean into the autumn with a sense of beginnings, even though our calendar year begins January 1st. Myself? I reorganized our home a bit, cleaned off new spaces for work and writing, and prepared healthy foods for us to eat this week. Starting anew… What might give you a bit of a jumpstart in this new season?

Curiosity sent me exploring a bit, wondering why we celebrate New Year’s Day in January instead of September anyway. Calendars are quite fascinating collective endeavors, though we always take ‘ours’ for granted as how time has always been organized. Sun dials and water clocks used to be the only ways to keep track of the passing of seasons, believe it or not. Not surprisingly, leaders of political factions in ancient civilizations used to argue for changing the calendar days to postpone elections or favor their particular candidates.

January 1st wasn’t celebrated as New Year’s Day for the first time until 45 B.C.E. The Roman Emperor of the time (Julius Caesar, of course, therefore Julian) decided to reform—i.e. systematize—the calendar beyond its traditional solar or lunar origins. He and his astronomers didn’t get the rhythms quite right in calculations, however, so sometimes ‘harvest season’ would move into winter or spring. Not good. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII instituted the calendar we have today, keeping autumn in autumn and spring (i.e. Easter) in spring. Better.

And do you know what year it is, really? You could argue it’s 5782. Or 1443! The first is the Jewish calendar, second, the Islamic calendar. When I began to teach interreligious and intercultural learning at United, I learned in much more detail the diverse calendars operative around the world. The Jewish calendar remains on a solely lunar pattern, adding an additional month seven times over nineteen years, so to keep the harvest in alignment with the seasons. The Islamic calendar remains in the lunar pattern, but does not have any ‘leap months’ to correct the lunar-solar patterns aligning with seasons. This is why the month-long fast of Ramadan can move from spring to summer to fall to winter.

The world is always much more mysterious and wonderful than we might imagine on any given day. The Jewish New Year is upon us, beginning sundown September 25th. Our big church kick-off begins this Sunday, September 11th. I’m feeling the anticipation of a new season, with some new invitations into prayer and contemplation. I may dust off my Centering Prayer app, tending to my contemplative heart once a day for 20 minutes. Perhaps your heart’s desire is to learn more deeply in community? There are weekly Zoom sessions with interesting topics that await. Perhaps your heart needs more social connection, even though we’ve gotten accustomed to the physical distancing. Try Family Night or Theology on Tap. You won’t regret it.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning… (Lamentations 3:22-23). No matter what year it is, or even what day!

— Parish Associate, Rev. Dr. Lisa M. Hess

August 30, 2022

Certitude scares me. The more I learn, the less I know. Moreover, the more I learn, the more I know how little so many others know. What masquerades as knowledge is more often than not merely rhetoric, artificial communications intended to persuade. Aristotle warned the people of Athens about this deception 24 centuries ago. A few centuries earlier, the prophet Samuel, and then later on Isaiah, Micah, Amos, Jeremiah and Ezekiel would make the same point. The Bible includes a whole book (Ecclesiastes) on the limits of human reason and the consequences of those limits experienced as folly. Human beings only know so much and can only analyze what they think they know so much. Beyond those limits lies the vast unpredictable and often unknowable future. Those hard limits of knowledge place a fence around human agency. We can only know and do so much.

Last weekend I sat in a waiting room where I was a captive audience for daytime television news. It was not actually news in the sense of new information. It was instead a group of people each expressing their opinions quite loudly and vehemently. The issue does not really matter, nor do their opposing perspectives. While claiming to be advocating for radically different positions they were actually doing the exact same thing. They were simply loudly expressing opinions about what might happen. The conversation became heated and then rude as they spoke over each other. In the end nothing was resolved, no one convinced, and nothing “new” revealed. And that is not merely the state of our politics right now. That is the state of our relationships and our own inner worlds.

I fear that our world is rather lacking in modesty right now. Acknowledging the limits of one’s knowledge is tantamount to surrender in the marketplace of ideas we have created. We pick our leaders based on the certainty they demonstrate even when we all know their performances are at best vanity and at worst intentional deception. That is a not a new problem. It bedeviled ancient Israel and Judah with Kings who thought they knew better than God. They were deluded from the truth by their pride. Such presumptions need not be of power and knowledge. False presumptions of failure and ignorance are what we call shame and are just as misleading. Both deceptions poison our communities and the human heart.

What the Bible nudges us towards is the virtue of humility, neither thinking too much nor too little of oneself. Humility is simply seeing the world and our place in it for what it is. We have some knowledge of and some influence over a very narrow span of actions and relationships in this world. The vast majority of creation is utterly beyond our understanding let alone control. The only thing we can have direct knowledge of and control over are ourselves and for most of us we do not even understand half the things we do. Humility is the habitual practice of returning to ourselves to honestly consider what do we really know and what can we realistically do. That requires the us to distinguish between what is, what we fear, and what we want. The latter two are helpful in understanding ourselves, but not our world let alone other people. It requires careful attentive practice to gently set them aside in order to both focus and then act upon the truth. In the ancient church they called this examen, picking up each though in turn to consider whether it is knowledge, fear, or desire. This is also, coincidentally, the central practice of cognitive behavioral therapy.

I know some things and not others. I can do a few things well and most not at all. I can touch a few lives and make a positive impact on some, but I cannot change the world. Sometimes I do good and selfless things. At other times I can be selfish in my wants and reactive in my fears. None of that makes me bad or good. It makes me human. I am certain of little. But I am certain that I am profoundly human. And as a human, I am not God and will never have God’s knowledge or control. That certainty is the foundation of true wisdom.

–Brian

August 23, 2022

Last week Frederick Buechner died in his sleep at age 96. Buechner was, among other things, a teacher, novelist of some renown, a chaplain, and a Presbyterian minister. Like that other modern Saint Fred among Presbyterian pastors (Fred Rogers) he has always been a presumed part of my theological world without ever receiving the attention he deserved. I often found his writings a bit too literary, a bit too fussy for my simpler tastes, but that too deserves some reevaluation. Instead, it has been in reading his obituaries that I have found a teacher I never knew.

A eulogy is literally “a good word” and that is oddly what I have found in the tributes to this curious, sensitive, and open-hearted man. He was a Presbyterian minister who never served a church and yet ministered to more pastors than anyone else in the past century. Living on the frontier between the literary chattering classes and the church, Buechner had the courage and open-hearted honesty to admit that doubt and faith are both necessary parts of the human journey. The mere titles of his novels—The Longing for Home, Eyes of the Heart, The Sacred Journey, and Telling Secrets—disclose the orientation of his heart and its yearnings.

Frederick Buechner taught me, and generations of seminarians, the destructive power of secrets, how they separate us from others, from God and ultimately from our selves. His own father’s suicide was kept as shameful family secret disrupting and corrupting lives down the decades. Buechner speaks for so many of us when he shares that his family’s unspoken motto was, “don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.” Such disconnection from pain slowly metastasizes into a sclerotic heart permanently closed to the suffering of others and to the darkest corners of our own. Secrets are the contagion of that alienation that we call sin.

Growing up among Swedish Lutherans in Minnesota I understood this condition all too well. We never talked about or even acknowledged the pains and the shames. We never admitted those we lost like a grandfather lost to an overdose or suicide (a distinction with hardly a difference). What mattered was simply getting by and getting on. Better to dwell on the positive and put forward a good face. But building a wall around your heart comes at a steep price. As Buechner observed, “steeling yourself off from the pain is to simultaneously close oneself off to the transforming power of life itself.”

The alternative explored by Buechner is radical heroic vulnerability. It requires careful attention to your life. In perhaps his most famous dictum Buechner advises, ““Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it now less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” For Buechner, revelation is always right in front of us. All you need to do is pay attention. “If indeed there is a God, which most of the time I believe there is, and if he indeed is concerned with the world, which the Christian faith I saying . . . one of the ways he speaks to us, and maybe one of the most powerful ways, is through what happens to us.” The problem, of course, is that the world excels at distracting, numbing, and otherwise avoiding the deeps that rise up to meet us in every moment. Curiosity, openness, and attentiveness are the virtues that lead us into this revelation, not certainty, correctness, coherence, or consistency.

Faith, for Buechner, was not the assent to some long list of highly improbable propositions. Instead, it was more like sensing something than buying into an argument. “Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward.” Buechner is not suggesting faith is a subjective emotion but rather the necessarily subjective experience of an objective reality. We experience the simultaneous sensation of belonging and separation, possibility and present problematic, now and not yet. Most of all the human spiritual experience is simply summarized as homesickness for a home we somehow know and yet have never known. I know of no more accurate description of what faith actually is as opposed to what theologians mutter it should be.

Buechner, like us all, was a child of this age. He accepted modernity in all its criticisms and doubts. He studied the historicity of scripture and shared the many legitimate criticisms of organized religion. But yet he found himself inexorably drawn to something he could not name or explain. “In the midst of our freedom,” he wrote, “we hear whispers from beyond time” and “sense something hiddenly at work in all our workings.” For Buechner those whispers took on coherence into something like faith. “Something in me recoils from such language,” he said, “but here in the end, I am left with no other way of saying it than that which finally found me was Christ. Or was found. It hardly seems to matter which.”

May he, may we all in due time, rest in that grace that pursed him so long. But before that rest, may we also recognize who it is that has been following us all along.

August 16, 2022

Summer is supposed to be a time of rest and relaxation. For most, summer months carry promises of pool parties and barbecues, juicy watermelon and fresh corn, family vacations and lazy, sunny afternoons in the hammock.

My summer looked just a little bit different.

I spent my summer at Grandview Medical Center in downtown Dayton completing an internship with the Kettering Health Network, training to be a hospital chaplain should God call me into such a vocation. My summer consisted of deep theological conversations, spiritual encouragement of the downtrodden, prayers with families saying goodbye to loved ones, holding hands and speaking words of encouragement through gunshot wounds and miscarriages, gowns and gloves and masks in rooms with Covid patients on ventilators (yes, still), and even a baptism of a tiny, stillborn baby. Not exactly the beach vacation, campfire s’mores summer I had envisioned. And yet I found the experience of this summer’s work to be one of the most enriching and beautiful of my life.

Our first, last, and deepest lesson? “You never know the whole story.”

Every time you interact with someone, you are entering into the middle of their story with only the data they choose to provide. During my months as a chaplain intern I worked with, visited with, and prayed for human beings of every background, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, political party, economic status, and religious affiliation. Criminals, moms, drug dealers, abuse victims, a 7-year-old and a 97-year-old. But I soon learned that such demarcators belong only to us. There are no such labels in God’s kingdom, and so there are no such labels for a chaplain. In fact, I took to deleting some of the information columns on patient lists. It just didn’t matter. A child of God is a child of God, and you never know the whole story.

Our world is hurting. Our world is sick. And not with any illness that can be cured in any hospital, by even the most skilled doctor or nurse. As the planet continues to suffer a barrage of both human-made and natural disasters; as her people continue to argue over who is right, who is better, who should be in charge, who has a say; as the eldest generations fight for a past and a patriarchal society that no longer exists, while the youngest generations raise their entitled yells instead of their pens; as the Church preaches that God loves all while at the same time barring from their pulpit anyone who does not look or love or worship like them…the care our world needs comes in this simple knowledge: you never know the whole story.

I truly hope your summers were spent in delighting in the joys that CAN be found – because even in the midst of illness, they can – and I hope, too, that as the air crisps again and the leaves begin to change, that we can begin to change, as well. What wounds can you heal? What illnesses can you remedy? What relationships can you mend? Whose story can you choose to enter – or reenter – this week, this month, this year…ever present in the knowledge that you never know the whole thing?

I look forward to being part of all of your stories as together we work to be chaplains to our world.

Peace,

Rachel

August 9, 2022

“Home”

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Psalm 90:1

I just returned home from two weeks of vacation visiting beloved family in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Family, as in my father, mother, brothers, and sisters-in-law. Heart family. Beloved family. Close family. My family.

I also spent a few days with ten dear female friends with whom I went to middle school and high school. We marched together in the “Hale Marching Hundred” band and have known each other for over fifty years.

We did not go anywhere fancy or make big plans. We just spent precious time together laughing, crying, talking, eating, and relaxing. Life really doesn’t get much better than that! Time spent with beloved family and cherished friends. Time spent at home with people who know me and love me. Home in the truest sense of the word.

Most of my days were spent in Oklahoma in the home I grew up in as a youth and in the neighborhood I lived in since I was a child. Every one of my senses – sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch – were flooded with memories.

The sound of the cicadas singing in the trees at night, the smell of the Oklahoma heat rising off the sidewalks, the taste of my mom’s iced tea, the feel of the mulberry tree in our backyard, the sight of the purple lilacs planted upon the birth of my first child – all these things and so much more are home to me.

I walked the streets of my childhood neighborhood each morning (when it was ONLY 90 degrees instead of 100 degrees), sometimes with my mom, sometimes with my dad, and most times with my dogs. I loved every step of those walks as I remembered childhood friends, sleepovers, birthday parties, school days, and bicycle rides.

You know the meaning of home, too! For most of us, it is a place of deep peace and unmatched joy. A dwelling place like none other, where we are known and loved.

Upon my return from my childhood home, I came back to another kind of home, the home and family of my own making. And once again my senses are flooded with the familiar feel of a beloved place called home.

You, Fairmont family, are “home” to me also. A place where I am known and loved by God and by you, my family of faith. There is deep belonging we share as a community of God’s people, as family. And we need that belonging, especially in these post-pandemic days of finding our way again.

In God, we find our home, our dwelling place. And there is deep peace and unmatched joy in our family of faith. God is our home and we belong to one another.

As these lazy, hot days of summer begin to wind down and we prepare for a new church year together, my prayer is that we will find our way back to each other in our place called “home” where we truly are family.

Peace and love to you,

Kelley

August 2, 2022

Let the wise, too, hear and gain in learning. Proverbs 1:5

One of the important skills that has atrophied for lack of use over the past two years for me and many people is the art of attentive listening. Listening, attentively listening, is hard. The lack of real listening is all too apparent. Too often we talk past each other. At best we seek validation for preexisting opinions. At worst, we use our questions as a rhetorical technique to criticize.

Real listening requires both careful attention and intention. Attention must of course focus on not just the words, but the nuances, body language, inflections, and assumptions of the person you are listening too. Attention must be paid not only to the words spoken but also the deep wells of feeling from church those words arise. To listen deeply requires one to listen empathetically. You need to imagine the emotions that underlie the words. And that empathic imagination and perception needs to be directed not only to the speaker, but also to yourself. Attentive listening requires the listener to keenly aware of your own mental and emotional state. Are you getting triggered by what is said? Are you getting defensive or angry? Are you focusing more on what you are going to say next instead of what the other person is saying now? Attention is key, but it focuses in two directions. You must be attentive to both the speaker’s emotions and your own. If while listening you are planning what to say next, you are doing it wrong.

The other necessary quality for listening is having the right intention. Why are you even asking the question? Do you genuinely want to learn something about the other person? Questions can become a cunning rhetorical technique to belittle, criticize, undermine, and mock (just watch some Congressional hearings to observe this). If you are asking a question, do you genuinely want to learn something about another person or are you simply making small talk? I do not particularly enjoy chit chat. But I always am blessed to discover something honest about another person.

I fear that our Covid isolation has impaired our ability to listen to each other and as a consequence has weakened the social bonds between us. We see this all too vividly in our politics where questions are merely weapons. But we also see it all too well within families, neighborhoods, and the church where our lives seem more disconnected.

If you want to connect with someone, ask them a genuine question for which there is no presupposed answer. For example instead of asking about the weather you could ask: what brings you the greatest joy, what has been your most important learning over the past year, if you wanted to change something about yourself what would it be, what is the most important memory of your childhood, who do you try to emulate, what is something you cannot live without, for what or who would you sacrifice, what is your biggest fear, how would you like to be different in ten years, when you make decisions what motivates you, where and when do you experience mystery, where does you mind go when you are silent, how do you forgive others and yourself, what burdens would you like to set down, where have you beheld beauty, what would you like people to know about you that they do not know, how do you rest, what are the most important things in organizing a life or a community, what are you hopeful about for the future, what do you need that you do not currently receive, and for what would you like to receive a standing ovation?

Asking and answering questions requires trust and vulnerability. But people can instinctively tell if you are genuinely interested or merely posing. Listen attentively and you will at the very least discover something new about a unique person. Listen attentively and you just might change your own life.

Jesus’ public ministry was simple. He wandered around and talked to people. The Gospels record the dramatic moments of supernatural healing. I wonder how much more healing arose from simply listening to people. Listening is not dramatic or showy. But it just might help heal a life and that life might be your own.

This is how we help to heal the world, one story at a time.

–Brian

July 26, 2022

Sometime this summer, I have preached or will preach my thousandth sermon. My records are not quite precise so I do not know exactly when this will happen. But it is a personal milestone that causes me to reflect.

Preaching has become my primary spiritual discipline. The regular practice of digging into the text, imagining it, dreaming it, studying its language and context, and learning from scholars (both living and dead) about it has grounded my life of faith for nearly two decades. Every week I am privileged to travel to some undiscovered country and bring back amazing things to share. Unlike some more contemplative disciplines, preaching has a very particular and necessary public outcome. Every week I need to say something, more or less comprehensible, about the unsayable. Every week I get the opportunity to give witness to what God may be up to.

Preaching of course is a conceit. No one speaks for God, but God. The best one can do is point: “God seems to be up to (fill in the blank).” When done well, this iconic practice of giving witness invites others into a God-filled world of possibility. In this sense, preaching is simply narrating a story that God has already composed in which all our lives are chapters. Good preaching helps people perceive the meaning and purpose of their lives as a part of God’s own meaning and purpose. But, when done poorly, it is simply arrogant drivel. Most often it is something in between. Preaching is also arrogant in that there may well be those to whom I am speaking who have a far more intimate connection with whatever may be revealed that week. My primary calling is teaching and I hope, if nothing else, I may share may something new. I do however worry about the hierarchical nature of what I do. I literally stand in box above the congregation and talk at you. I rather doubt that is the best way to discover God’s truth.

The single most important thing that I do in preaching happens about two minutes before I preach. I pray. While you are listening to a beautiful anthem, I am having a rather frantic conversation with God. It usually goes something like this. Brian: “So, O Lord King of the Universe and Ground of All Being, I have these words. They are not particularly good words. I should have done better, more eloquent, more evocative, and definitely shorter. But they are what I have on hand.” God: silence. Brian: “Please come, please come down and intercede somewhere between my rambling and their ears. Please come and whisper some truth that they need to hear. Do not let them hear me. Let them hear you, for their sake.” God: silence. Brian: “Okay, take me out of the equation altogether, I know you need a prophet and a sage, but they are in rather short supply right now and you’ve just got me. So how about this, I am going to start saying something and you take over. Piggyback on my words. Most of all say something to them.” God: silent. Brian: “Bless them with your love, your presence, your truth, your life, because they really are trying to find you and live the life you want.” Then you may notice me looking around at your faces in a furtive glance. Actually, what I am doing is trying to lift you up by name and face to God. And finally, Brian: “And if I say something downright foolish or daft, please do not hold it against them. It is all my fault, put it on my (admittedly rather large) account. So, here goes nothing. Your call.” It is not a great prayer, probably blasphemous, but it is an honest one. It is a shabby invocation aspiring and reaching unto something utterly beyond us, encounter.

God does not actually remain silent. God subtly answers in ways that I cannot clearly articulate or describe. Sometimes it may be a certain energy otherwise lacking. Sometimes a certain inspiration to improvise. And, more often than not, I find a curious phenomenon that people come up to me afterwards and comment on the significance of things I never said, yet they clearly heard.

I believe with all my heart as Thomas Merton prayed, “I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.” I have tried to follow that dictum in every sermon. Some are good. Some are bad. Most are somewhere in between. But all of them, at least all that memories’ subtle edits allow me to remember, were sincere.

So, on the declarative landmark of my thousandth sermon, to some of you, I am sorry. For a few of you, you are welcome. To all of you, thank you for politely listening through the good and the bad. Thank you for reaching and aspiring with me. And to God, thank you for the privilege of sharing in the miracle that happens every time you show up.

–Brian

July 19, 2022

Just around the corner from the famed Western Wall in Jerusalem lie the southern steps to the Temple Mount. Unlike the Western Wall Plaza, the southern steps are usually empty of people. They lead up to what was once the main entrance for pilgrims into the Temple. A double and a triple archway blocked up for centuries by the Muslims but still quite visible led to long internal passageways that opened into the middle of the vast Temple courtyard. These broad entrance and exit passageways were the primary way that ordinary people, as opposed to the priests and the elites, would approach and then enter the temple. And the steps to those entrances are still there.

After 2000 years of weather, wars, and wear those steps have eroded a bit. The Israeli Ministry of Antiquities has conveniently resurfaced most of them to provide a safer approach for tourists. But I am always attracted to the old, worn, original steps. These were the steps that Jesus and his followers would have walked up. These are the steps that James, Peter, Paul, and the early leaders of the church would have used to gather in the Temple. These were the steps that saw the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, centuries of forgotten neglect, and tides of Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, the British, and the Jordanians come and go each in their turn. The stone steps bear silent witness to it all.

Walking up to those steps a few weeks ago I felt an odd urge to take off my shoes. Like Moses before the burning bush something sacred radiated from the place. Long since worn smooth, the steps felt so solid under my feet. But you cannot lose yourself in spiritual reverie on those steps. The architect made a brilliant theological statement. The steps are not uniform. Some are low and broad, others high and narrow, some come in matching pairs, others in triplets. Unlike our stairways, there is no regular uniformity to the steps. This means that as you face the Temple and ascend to the holiest place on earth, you cannot fix your eyes on the horizon and simply be guided by muscle memory or the paced rhythm of stepping. You need to actually look down, pay attention, and put your feet in the right place at the right time or else you will trip. Faced with the overwhelming spiritual attraction of the Temple, the architect forces you to pay attention to precisely where you are and what you are doing in the moment.

The anonymous architect of those stairs was a psychological and theological genius. So often we fix our gaze on the distant objects of our life, both great hopes and great fears, that we simply shuffle along not paying the slightest attention to where we are and what we are actually doing in the moment. We do not pay attention. Guided by our desires or our fears we imagine ourselves already there not noticing the present unfolding now. It is far too easy to let one’s life slip away always pursuing that endless horizon. But the Temple steps will not let you get away with that. They will trip you up and give you a good bruise on your knee to remind you to pay attention.

This summer we seem transfixed on what comes next. Our attentions are pulled to life after COVID or a recession yet to come. Our passions and our fears are yanked by elections yet to be held or some potential calamity yet to unfold. We set nameless hopes and fears on the horizon of our imagination and shuffle aimlessly towards them.

But there is now. There is here. And in this moment and in this place is all the holiness and hope you will ever need. If, you pay attention.

I wonder if the architect of those Temple steps was making an ironic statement about the Temple itself, “stop looking up for God, look instead right where you are.” This ground, directly under your feet, this instant of pause could the place where God touches this world and your life. Of course, you will never know if you do not pay attention.

Take a moment today to take off your shoes and step onto the green grass. Breathe deeply. Look around you. Listen. Smell. Feel the grass between your toes. Do not hope or fear or imagine. Tomorrow will come all on its own, no need to rush it. Simply pay attention.

And you are home.

–Brian

July 12, 2022

Late last Thursday night I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport to fly back from Israel to the United States. As I entered the arrival hall, I had to rub my eyes to confirm what I saw in front of me. A crowd of at least 10,000 people stretching from the front doors all the way beyond check in desks. And I do mean a crowd, not lines per se, more of a giant mob. You could smell the anxiety and frustration. Everyone was generally polite albeit frustrated. Slowly we snaked our way through preliminary security and check in. But then came the interesting part.

After checking in you entered a different part of the airport thinking you were now home free. But then you rounded a wall and were confronted with another line of about 8,000 people stretching from one end of the airport to the other. They were sneaky in concealing this second line. As people rounded the corner and realized their predicament, you could see in their faces despair. After three hours of waiting in various lines, I finally entered the airport proper and arrived at my gate 20 minutes before boarding.

As many of you know, flying is no fun this summer. Flying internationally is even less so. Everything is hot, crowded, slow, and unpredictable. Slowly shuffling my feet in line for three hours gave me some opportunity to reflect on the experience and my own emotions. The delay itself was not so problematic. The frustration that bordered on despair was instead the sense of having no understanding of what was going on and no ability to control it. Watching flights on the departure board randomly switch from green on-time to yellow delayed to red cancelled, created a creeping sense of dread.

Delays in international travel are of course a very privileged problem compared to the wars, famines, natural disasters, and economic meltdowns this summer. But the underlying emotional dynamics and pitfalls are the same. Utter bewilderment over what is really going on compounded by a complete lack of agency let alone control seems to be the order of the day.

But somewhere in the middle of my three-hour shuffle of feet I found something oddly comforting in the companionship of others. Yes, we were all tired, stressed, and generally miserable, but we were together. Now that togetherness comes at the cost of COVID exposure, but the hardships were not personal, but rather systemic and communal. Even more importantly, although the lines were long and snaked from one end of the airport to the other, they did move however slowly. There was nothing to do, no decisions to make, just keep moving along. In the end I found it oddly comforting.

We face another summer of discontents. None of us caused this. We are all shuffling forward together. If we keep some measure of perspective, our baser instincts may be kept in check. I really do not know what is going on, but understanding is always highly overrated. I do not control what is going on, but when I am honest with myself the only thing I ever had any chance of controlling is myself. So just keep walking.

Christians are a people conditioned by waiting. We live in anticipation of a tardy Messiah. In the interim between resurrection and return, we have the opportunity to remake the only thing we have ever had any control over: our own hearts. Maybe as we wait for Jesus, Jesus is also waiting for us to do our work.

Looking out over that vast mob of God’s children in Ben Gurion—Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those of no confession—was like looking over humanity, stressed, confused, but somehow stumbling forward on hope. They were . . . beautiful.

I know its hard right now. Just keep walking.

–Brian

July 5, 2022

Summertime

There is a sacred gift of sabbath in the summertime. Schools are closed, families take vacation, the sun lingers longer in the sky, and our busy schedules slow down, if only for a brief time.

Even for those for whom summer brings extra work – planting seeds and plowing fields – there is the hint or promise of Sabbath time, a reminder of seasons.

I am one who loves warm weather, even hot weather! Summer is my favorite season of the year. I have vivid childhood memories of playing outside in the sweltering heat of Oklahoma summers with the smell of hot concrete rising up below my feet. To this day, I prefer the heat of summer to the bitter cold of winter. I will be visiting my parents in Oklahoma again this summer and look forward to daily walks around the neighborhood of my childhood, relishing the warmth, the sounds, and the smells of those summer days as a child.

God calls us to slow down and seek sabbath rest. The cycle of the earth and the coming of spring, summer, winter, and fall reminds us of the words of Qoheleth, or the Preacher, from Ecclesiastes:

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…”

This season, summer, is a sabbath season. A time for rest and renewal. Yet even with the cessation of fall-to-spring activities, we find it hard to change our patterns of busy days and hard work. And for some, a slower pace is not even possible due to job commitments and family responsibilities.

God calls us not only to slow down for sabbath rest but also to create sacred space and time for Sabbath worship. As creatures of the great Creator, we need the healing that Sabbath worship brings.

As the summer days are quickly rushing by, may we find a change of pace just enough to stir our hearts and spirits, just enough to slow down to listen to God’s voice speaking to us. And may we find our sacred space for Sabbath worship no matter where we find ourselves in these fleeting summer days.

Sabbath rest and peace to you,

Kelley

June 28, 2022

50 Days of Embodiment:
Living the Great Story in Daily Life

For 50 days following Pentecost, Fairmont Presbyterian Church and Hilliard United Methodist Church are sharing in daily somatic spiritual practices as we seek to live out our faith in our daily lives. You can find a digital copy of the “50 Days of Embodiment” attached to recent Fridays from Fairmont emails or you may pick up a paper copy in the church office.

Here are the opening words from the “50 Days of Embodiment” booklet:

“Embodiment” simply means a tangible or visible form of an idea,
quality, or feeling: the representation or expression of something
in a tangible or visible form. Living into our faith as Christians
has always been a full body experience.

How is your Embodiment spiritual journey going? Which practices are you drawn to most naturally? Which practices are most difficult for you? How did you carve out time for these daily practices? What did you notice or feel in your body as you experienced a practice? What have you noticed about your spiritual awareness since beginning this post-Pentecost journey?

I knew I would be immediately drawn to the kinesthetic practice of Walking Meditation since “praying while hiking” has been my regular spiritual practice. Praying while walking the Camino de Santiago brought a completely new dimension to this spiritual practice as I become acutely aware of my physical pain and my struggle to complete the 15-18 miles per day of walking the hills of northwest Spain. True pilgrimage always involves pain, and it was harder to hear God’s voice when I was solely focused on the painful blisters on my feet and muscles that were cramping.

I was also immediately drawn to the spiritual practice of “Walking a Prayer Labyrinth” and am grateful for many such experiences over my 35 years of ordained ministry. Both the Bergamo Retreat Center in Beavercreek and the Kirkmont Center in Zanesville have beautiful outdoor Labyrinths or you can find a Labyrinth near you at https://labyrinthlocator.com.

I was also drawn to the spiritual practice of Mindful Eating. I have sought to practice Mindful Eating for many years but it is so easy when we are hungry or in a hurry to forget that our body, and specifically our stomach, is a vessel for God’s goodness and pleasure. Embodying the practice of Mindful Eating also humbly reminds us that a warm meal is a privilege that too many people live without on a daily basis.

I was more challenged by spiritual practices that required of me to be still and quiet in a place of solitude. My mind became easily distracted and surrounding noises sounded louder than they actually were in real life. One of the opening questions in our booklet asks:

Silence, solitude, and/or stillness: Which of these three best helps facilitate your awareness of your own body?

My answer to this question is “all three!” I become all too aware of my own body in times and spaces of silence, solitude, and stillness. Therein is my challenge, to find a place of acceptance and peace within my body, even when I am not walking outdoors or following the rhythmic steps of a labyrinth.

What are your stories from these “50 Days of Embodiment?” How are you living the Great Story in your daily life?

I am grateful we are on this journey together – body, mind, and spirit.

Pastor Kelley

June 22, 2022

For the past two years and four months, I have only travelled a few times to visit family. I rarely eat indoors at restaurants. I have not been to the cinema. I have attended one orchestra concert. We have however refurbished our home making it a more comfortable nest. My world has become smaller.

Next Sunday afternoon I will be departing with some dear Rabbi friends to lead a study trip to Israel with 25 pastors. I love Jerusalem. I love teaching in Israel. I even enjoy the super Glatt Kosher meals on El Al. But this year I feel a certain reticence. It is not fear about Covid (I just got my second booster). It is not even anxiety about cancelled flights (I have learned to do the trip with carry-ons). It is more like a gentle persistent pull towards home. I genuinely like to be at home.

Every Sunday I look out over the congregation assembled in worship. I know that there are many more who are watching online but I cannot see them. The numbers are smaller than they were just a few years ago, about a third smaller. Sometimes I wonder where everyone went. Sometimes I wonder if we are doing something wrong. Sometimes I just wonder what changed. And every pastor I know is asking themselves the same questions. But then I think about my own domestic instincts that may not be so different. I too understand the allure of coffee in bed on a Sunday morning or any morning.

Rather than trying to swim against the tide of culture and our changed social circumstances, maybe the solution is to simply acknowledge right where we are as a community right now. We are all a bit weary, anxious, and longing for the security of the certain. We all like to stay close to home right now. So instead of asking ourselves, “What can Fairmont do to attract people back to more active engagement?” maybe the better question is how to meet people precisely where they are. Maybe the better question to ask is how do we make Fairmont more like home?

Fairmont is like a large, diverse, sprawling, and sometimes frustrating family. We accept people as they are. And folks genuinely want to help each other. We are not the flashiest congregation, but we are sincere. We are not the biggest, but we are big enough to do all sorts of wonderful things. We are curious, open minded, generous, and welcoming. Bring your coffee to worship. Wear your fuzzy slippers (sometimes I wear cowboy boots and Hawaiian shirts). It’s okay. What is important to us is what is important to God, not the outer display but the inner truth. And the inner truth is that we are all wounded sinners looking for healing and forgiveness trying to help each other along the way. It is true that sometimes, Jesus’ followers can be uniquely annoying, but not all of them and none of them all the time. We live together in this family with profoundly compromised people so we can learn the delicate art of loving our neighbor. Loving your neighbor, the one you are otherwise under no obligation to love, is the chief lesson of living together as Christ’s church. Like all families, we love each other most when we do not deserve it.

Your work loves you for what you do. Family loves you because of who you are. At our best, we are that family already. And at our worst, well we are learning together. We aspire to love as God loves us and we cannot do that without you. Similarly, you cannot do that without community.

For the next two weeks I will miss my home and my family, including you. But visiting the holy city always reminds me that we all already belong. Our world is not smaller. Our world is one. And if you choose to participate in it, you can live your whole life in that unity of belonging, purpose, and love.
–Brian

June 14, 2022

Rock Walls, Eucalyptus Trees, and a Long Way to Go

I am still processing my time in Spain after walking a portion of the Camino de Santiago with three beloved friends. As I told a clergy friend recently, my Camino pilgrimage was “…wonderful, difficult, and complicated,” to which he replied, “As all pilgrimages should be!”

I have heard often regarding the Camino that it is “life changing,” and I know that it is for many pilgrims or peregrinos. It was not “life changing” for me but it was “life sustaining.” I needed to walk the Camino for me. I needed to honor the dream I had of walking step after step on this ancient way of pilgrims. I needed to leave home for a short while to remember, once again, that my family (and my dogs) can survive without me. I needed to put to test the miles and miles of hikes that had prepared me for this pilgrimage. And I needed to celebrate and participate in my own spiritual practice of walking the journey which thousands of pilgrims have walked since the ninth century.

One of our spiritual practices as we walked each day was to answer these two questions:

1. What will you leave behind on the Camino today?
2. What will you take with you from the Camino today?

The answers varied each day depending upon the pilgrims we met, the elevation of the hills we climbed, and the number of blisters on our feet.

My answer to these questions today, almost a month after departing for Spain, would be:

1. I left behind deep grief and anxiety that had permeated my days at home due to the suffering of loved ones.
2. I brought home with me the physical, spiritual, and emotional healing that walking brings me, and the joy of knowing that my body was strong enough to walk the miles that needed to be walked each day.

I also brought back with me the fragrance of the eucalyptus trees which covered the Spanish countryside, the wisdom of the ancient rock walls which lined every meadow and village through which we walked, the gentleness of the local villagers along the Camino whose faces carried the wisdom of their years, the gift of farm fresh meals prepared for us with true hospitality, and the knowledge that I have a long way to go on this journey.

A few fun facts to know about our pilgrimage:

1. We walked 76 miles (122 kilometers) in five days.
2. We walked from Sarria to Santiago.
3. It rained three of the five days but the rain was gentle.
4. I only got two blisters and they healed each night enough to walk again the next day.
5. The northwest part of Spain, Galicia, is known for its hilly landscape.

I will be sharing more about my Camino de Santiago trip on Sunday, July 24, following worship where you will be treated to a few tasty Spanish snacks and a visual presentation of the journey. July 25th is the Feast of St. James for whom the Camino de Santiago is named, so it is an appropriate time to celebrate together. I will also be sharing about my Camino trip at the Women of Fairmont Fall gathering.

On Pentecost Sunday, June 5th, we shared with the congregation a book of guided spiritual practices called “50 Days of Embodiment: Living the Great Story in Daily Life.” We are sharing this journey of somatic spiritual practices with our friends at Hilliard United Methodist Church in Columbus with whom we have been studying the Great Story of the Old Testament this year.

In that book of “50 Days of Embodiment” there are multiple ways to practice our spirituality in body, mind, and spirit including the practice of prayer walking. I invite you to join in this journey with me as we embody our faith in this season of Pentecost and walk in the steps of the pilgrims who have gone before us.

Buen Camino!

Kelley

June 1, 2022

Reading through the Old Testament this year keeps reminding me of one central impression. The Bible is weird.

I spent a few hours today trying to wrap my head around the symbolic or allegorical significance of removing certain choice bits of fat from internal organs of sacrificial animals prior to burning them as a sacrifice to God. Elsewhere, we have curious tribes with more curious customs ranging from unique dietary habits to a rather excessive interest in skin diseases and bodily discharges. The Book of Leviticus is the only book of the Bible that, as my former teacher Ellen Davis once quipped, “Christians ignore as a matter of principle.”

But it is not just Leviticus (which admittedly could be exhibit one). The whole Old Testament centered first on its wandering nomads embedded in a world of patriarchy, blood feud, and the almost magical power of words, and then on Iron Age Israel with its palace intrigues, blood sacrifices, and xenophobic fear of otherness is so alien, that I understand why the church tends not to go there. In particular, I have an extraordinarily difficult time getting past the violence: toward women, towards animals, towards anyone who violates the slightest infraction of the law in the smallest way, and towards anyone who tends to get in the way, and sometimes towards people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

My problem is that I cannot read the Bible as somebody other than me. I can imagine how a scribe from the ninth century BC might read it, but that is really just my imagination. I cannot get out of the assumptions, culture, methods of reading and thinking, life experiences, and learning processes in which all my perceptions are embedded. So, when I say the Bible is weird, what I really mean is that it does not tidily fit into my assumptions, culture, methods of reading and thinking, life experiences, and learning processes.

Professor Ellen Davis once told our class that the best interpreters of the Old Testament she ever met were a group of pastoralists from the South Sudan that attended one of her Bible Study classes in that war torn nation(s). They understood its stories because they lived them. They knew intimately how violent life could be and they understood the importance of sacrifice because sacrifice was life. For them, the world of the Old Testament was all too familiar, which made its promise all the more powerful.

Christians tend to love the prophetic books of the Bible with their profound ethical reflections. We also like the narrative bits with dramatic stories fit for television miniseries. What we avoid are all the technical bits on how this faith really operates. We prefer our deity a bit more domesticated. We like buddy Jesus a bit more on our terms. We create a God in our own minds who operates as a sort of cosmic concierge, whose primary aim is our own contentment. We presume a God who does not ask or expect too much and only intervenes to solve our problems. And we assume that this is precisely the same God behind most of the major world religions urging people to be nice to each other and willing this contentment for everyone.

The thing I cannot shake from my mind as I read the superlatively weird (by my standards) books of the Bible is how absolutely honest they were about how utterly, incomprehensibly, and to our experience terrifyingly other, different, and overwhelming God really is. The Book of Leviticus reads vaguely like the operating manual for a nuclear power station. They took their service in the temple with the disciplined seriousness that only comes from knowing that their lives and the lives of their community were at stake. They treated the Holy of the Holies like a reactor chamber, carefully maintaining its rituals. The priests understood intimately that they worked alongside the unfathomable mysterious power of creation itself always on the edge of our understand and always a bit beyond our control. Can I, can we appreciate the infinite, and totally unhuman, mystery we point to every time we utter the word, “God?” Although they would not have had language for it, I think those ancient Israelite priests might have been a lot better at it than we are.

One of the dangers of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is that we might become a bit too comfortably familiar with the divine and forget that this is God we are talking about (and of course the opposite danger is just as true). That danger is addressed by the Ascension, which we celebrate next week. The Ascension is the metaphorical embodied upload to Bethlehem’s metaphorical incarnational download. Whatever is truly human, of, by, and in Jesus of Nazareth, is now a part of God. Jesus is with God, in God, and is God.

Orthodox Christian faith is in essence to think to hold with complete conviction two irreconcilable things at the same time. God is that utterly terrifying, totally alien, terrifyingly powerful otherness that is the intentfulness, origin, and destiny of all creation. AND part of all that strangeness is the strangeness of us.

Yes, the Bible is weird. And God is weirder still. Thanks be to God.

–Brian

May 25, 2022

I am sad.

I tried to write something yesterday afternoon, but I could not. My heart kept sinking as the full extent of the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas became apparent. At least nineteen elementary students and two teachers were murdered by an eighteen-year-old. I cannot fathom the loss. I do not understand why and I do not care to try.

Two weeks ago, ten grocery shoppers were murdered and two more severely injured in Buffalo. The shooter was another eighteen-year-old man apparently motivated by racist hatred.

Two weeks ago, a lone gunmen stormed into an after-worship luncheon at Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, California. One worshipper was killed and five others wounded, four critically. The shooter was purportedly motivated by hatred of people of Taiwanese descent.

My rational mind reminds me that the rate of murder in the United States has declined through most of my lifetime. I also know that the absolute number of murders is at an all-time record. But most of all I know that those statistics are not what I feel right now. Underneath the sadness is not a feeling of hopelessness. Underneath the sadness is anger. It does not need to be this way. It is not supposed to be this way.

“You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20:13). In Hebrew the commandment is only two words long. The unlawful killing of human beings is absolutely forbidden as the primeval breach of community and covenant. The consequences of that breach injure not just the victims and their families, but all of us.

And God weeps.

What we are witnessing is the opposite of God’s intention and hope for our lives and our world. We have a word for the opposite of God, opposed to God’s intention for life and God’s healing work. We call that evil.

My problem is that anger is not the antidote to evil. Jesus knew that. Jesus lived that. It is outrageous, confusing, frustrating, annoying, offensive, and I really do not like it, but it is also true. The only way to drive out great evil is even greater love. I do not love that deeply, vastly preferring retributive justice. But God does. And if we are willing to take risks and practice it and if we ask for it, maybe Jesus will replace our meager love with his.

For today, we practice that love simply by weeping with those who weep.

–Brian

May 17, 2022

In 63 BC, the Roman General Pompey intervened in a Jewish civil war. After a brief siege of Jerusalem, Pompey installed a client King amenable to Rome and then decided to take in the sights. He barged into the inner sanctum of the Holy of Holies, the most sacred precinct of the Temple where only the High Priest was permitted and then on only one day each year. As Pompey departed, he remarked to his aides (and this is my paraphrase of the Latin), “Hunh, it’s just an empty room.”

Last week a global team of scientists revealed an extraordinary image of the supermassive black hole that lies at the very center of our Galaxy (posted above). Named Sagittarius A* it lies concealed by the massive dust and plasma clouds surrounding the very heart of the Milky Way. Its mass is more than four million times that of our sun. It is so massive and its gravitational field so strong that it structures the motion of every star in our galaxy. In other words, everything you have ever seen in the night sky with the naked eye (except Andromeda if you know where that is) essentially revolves around it. The earth revolves around the sun, but our sun revolves around this black hole. Sagittarius A* is the central organizing structure of our galaxy without which we would not be a galaxy at all.

The extraordinary thing about black holes is that despite being some of the most massive objects in the universe they are not, properly speaking, a place or even thing at all. Black holes occur when a supermassive star collapses in on itself. If they are big enough, and four million sun masses is way more than enough, they just keep on collapsing. As all the matter swirls around it like a toilet bowl vortex getting faster and faster the matter gets hotter and hotter. That is what we can see in the image, the accretion disk of matter flowing into the black hole glowing X-ray hot. There is no force in the universe that can stop the collapse. Stars, asteroids, gas clouds, brown dwarfs, nebula, all smoosh into a rather mysterious something that we vaguely call a singularity that is both enormously massive and not really a thing at all. A singularity is cosmically massive nothing; but a nothing that shapes space and time for everything.

Sometimes nothing is the most important thing (non-thing?) of all.

An icon is an image perceptible by human senses that provides a lens through which we can perceive an aspect of God. An icon is not an object of prayer or devotion, but an aid to prayer and devotion. One does not pray to an icon. One prays through an icon. That means that an icon is a kind of visual metaphor that helps us perceive God or something about God. For me, that ghostly image of Sagittarius A* provided just such a metaphor. The most massive thing in our whole galaxy, indeed one of the most massive things in the entire universe, is quite literally not a thing. It is nothing. Yet our solar system follows its bends of space time, orbiting around every 230 million years. Everything we have ever known or experienced bends to its sway swept along at a staggering 490,000 miles per hour.

And God is kind of like that.

On Sunday I will be preaching on the most popular religion in the history of humanity, namely the worship of us we call idolatry. The ancient Hebrews supremely annoyed Moses after all his efforts and instructions by constructing a Golden Calf, something they could see and touch as their focus of the divine. Moses, who always had some anger control issues, loses it. There is no human construction, artifact, experience, idea, belief, or feeling that can represent God. They are all, at best, metaphors. Behind them all lies the vast mystery that is no thing, no place, not something we can measure, predict, or even describe. God is beyond all that. Every thought we have ever considered about God is wrong because to think about God is like trying to model the CGI special effects of a superhero movie on a hand calculator. It is not simply that we lack data or our analytical abilities are not sufficiently developed. God is not an object that we can consider. God is not a thing. And you cannot think on nothing. You can think on your idea of nothingness, but not nothing itself.

Physicists have made tremendous progress in understanding the universe. General and Special Relativity make sense of the very large structures of the universe while Quantum Mechanics, counterintuitive as it may be, can at least probabilistically predict the very small. But what no one understands is the precise relationship between those two very different systems. In a black hole, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics unite and what happens then we have no idea.

There is a word for the nexus where the cosmic dynamics of the divine meet the petty, pedestrian, microcosm of human life. We call that meeting event the incarnation and everything and everyone revolves around it. It radiates backwards and forwards in time bending space and time, life and loves. Incarnation is not a thing or even a person. It is an event that changes everything yet itself is nothing. Indeed, it is precisely the letting go of everything, letting go of life and existence itself, cosmic kenosis that no force in the universe can stop. But in that meeting unto nothingness that the irreconcilable is overcome, opposition is resolved, separation is reconciled, and a new pattern emerges in which difference is replaced by unity. In such unity, there is no separate observer to observe or report. There is just us. Just us and God. Together.

We have a word in the church for that new emergent pattern arising from the divine and human collapsing into each other through the incarnation. We call that new pattern resurrection.
–Brian

May 10, 2022

Unfinished

Tucked away in a box of memorabilia from my childhood and youth is a poem by Lona M. Fowler entitled The Middle Time. It is printed on the front cover of an old newsletter from First Presbyterian Church of Tulsa, the church of my growing up, the church where I first heard my call to ministry, and the church where I was ordained as a Minister of the Word and Sacrament on May 17, 1987, almost thirty-five years ago!

This poem spoke to me as an awkward, struggling teenager unsure of my purpose in life, and speaks to me now so many years later. I read this poem when I preached for my Youth Sunday as a high school senior in the youth group of my home church. I read this poem the first time I preached as an Associate Pastor of my first call in Long Beach, CA. And my daughter read this poem for my installation service here at Fairmont in September of 2018.

One verse of the The Middle Time speaks especially to me:

And we in our middle times
of wondering and waiting,
hurrying and hesitating,
regretting and revising –
We who have begun many things,
and seen but few completed…

This week feels very “middle time” to me. I have important work to be done for church and home but seem only to be “hurrying and hesitating” and “regretting and revising.” I am leaving for Spain next week to walk a portion of the Camino de Santiago with three other women of faith. I leave on May 17th, the 35th anniversary of my ordination to ministry. I have “begun many things but seen but few completed” or so it seems.

But it isn’t my “to do” list that is creating this “middle time” feeling. I have been preparing for this trip for a very long time and I will finish all that I need to do before I leave. It is, rather, a feeling that I am unfinished, I am incomplete, I am in-between.

As I leave for Spain:

-a beloved family member is not well mentally or emotionally
-my husband is still grieving the death of his father
-my mother-in-law who just moved here is adjusting to life in a new home

People I love are grieving, hurting, struggling, and so am I.
We are all incomplete, unfinished, in-between.

As people of faith, we live in the “middle time” of the “here and the not yet.”
We live in the realized presence of God with us here and now, and the “not yet” of what we will be one day. We understand “middle time” because we who are made new by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are still ever aware of our sin and brokenness and how unfinished we are.

Fowler ends the poem with the eschatological promise that we will not always be unfinished.

Jesus Christ is the completer
of unfinished people
with unfinished work
in unfinished times.

May we know such hope and live in the fulfillment of what is now and the promise of what will be.

Peace,

Kelley

May 3, 2022

Next Sunday morning we will gather together for a special service of worship focused on music as not merely the best way to praise God, but the ways in which worship both informs our understanding of who God is and perhaps more important, who we are in God.

Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament extol the singing of Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs as uniquely important and powerful means of praising God. The Psalms of course are themselves a hymn book, for which we possess the lyrics but sadly no longer the score. The oldest texts in the Bible, Miriam’s Song of the Sea and the Song of Deborah, proclaim the power and majesty of God. Jesus and the disciples were formed by these songs from childhood and according to Matthew, Jesus ends his life with these songs on his lips.

Music provides the master metaphor for God. Unseen without visible form, it moves, breathes, takes one life, sweeps up the listener, incorporates discordance into deeper harmony, and ultimately reveals itself beyond form as pure beauty. Unlike other art forms, it is always ephemeral. Music makes a lousy idol. It is instead a relational experience involving the musician and the hearer, but always more than the sum of playing and listening. Symphonic music incorporates dozens of disparate voices in their own unique identity and melds them together into something no single voice could ever produce or even imagine. When you sing in a choir is it both the sum of all the individual contributions and at the same time emerges as something more. That something more that is both manifestation and catalyst of beauty is what we call Spirit.

One of the most important qualities of the very best music is the way that it can incorporate the dissonant themes along the way. Ugliness, awkwardness, tears and tragedy introduce new notes into the score that sound distinctly out of place. A good composer avoids them. A master composer weaves them into ever deeper and more complex harmonies in which all the pain is remembered, but now reset in a consonance that could not have been imagined from only the initial melody.

Music unfolds and finds its true expression in time, just like mortals. The relationship between pitch and time is what we call melody just as the relationship between love and time is what we call life. Nothing can be rushed because time is the dimension of expression. For music, time is neither an arrow nor fleeting. It is the canvas giving depth to beauty.
At its best, music takes us outside of ourselves. We release, if only for a moment, our death grip on anxieties, desires, and endless to-do lists and for a moment find ourselves not so much transported but transmuted into a different state of existence. Music is an invitation to Ecstasy, which literally means to step out of yourself. Music is an aesthetic means to step outside of self and giving yourself over to something or someone else.

Music is not God. Music is not even like God. But music is sometimes like my experience of God. I try to learn the score. I try to play my little part in a work of art that is bigger, deeper, and older than anything my mortal mind can conceive. What matters is simply my participation as a master creator somehow manages to incorporate even my wrong notes into something beautiful. The melodies pass beyond all hearing giving structure and meaning to the void as I wander amid mansions of sound.

I remember hearing a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, The Resurrection, in 1987. I had a cheap, student rush ticket and a shabby coat looking rather out of place among the well to do orchestra patrons. But in the final movement, I felt myself enter the music and follow it along the path that Mahler had laid for me. In the final bars with tears running down my face, I did not just hear Mahler’s Resurrection symphony, I caught a fleeting glimpse of Resurrection. It was the only time in my life I was the first on my feet in the hall for a standing ovation as I beat my hands until they bled.

I love music because music pulls back the curtain for just a moment so that we may catch a glimpse, or hear whispers of the Real. On Sunday do not just listen to the music. Listen through the music to hear the still soft voice who still speaks and sings.
–Brian

April 27, 2022

There was one moment during Holy Week that I keep thinking about. Seeing so many friendly faces in worship on Easter Sunday was a special blessing that filled me with joy after two years apart. But the moment that stays with me was far more intimate.

On Maundy Thursday we shared together in the rite of foot washing. Most respectable church goers are resistant to foot washing. It is too intimate, vulnerable, embarrassing, and shameful, not to mention ticklish. That is precisely the point Jesus was trying to make. In the Gospel of John, on the last night of his earthly ministry, Jesus takes a towel and washes his disciples’ feet. And I guarantee that in an arid world without stockings their feet were nastier than any of ours. Jesus then tells them, “You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” John 13: 13-15. This is not a suggestion. It is a commandment, in Latin a mandatum, hence Maundy Thursday.

There are two sacraments in our Reformed Tradition: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They are communal rituals in which we believe that we are brought into the presence of God by the Holy Spirit. And they are communal actions in which Jesus himself participated and commanded his disciples to enact in their own ministries. By those two criteria, foot washing should also be a sacrament. For a variety of historical and rather pedantic theological reasons it is not. I suspect that it never became a sacrament simply because it made people too uncomfortable as we tend to want God close, but not too close.

We prefer to present an edited version of ourselves to each other and to God. The warty, stinky, calloused bits we hide away. Yet, it is precisely those shameful bits of our lives that most need to be touched, healed, and redeemed. Hiding away our shame only makes it more powerful and difficult to heal. Worse yet, we our shames away from ourselves, denying their existence and thereby give them insidious power over our hearts.

For me foot washing is symbolic foreshadowing of what Jesus is about to do the next day on that Friday we call Good. He is going to wash away all the pain and shame and separation through humbling himself even unto the cross even unto death. But foot washing is something more, it is a communal act of both remembering and ritually sharing in Christ’s own redeeming work. We humble ourselves as servants on our knees washing each other’s feet as our most embarrassing, concealed parts get washed in mutual love and honor. When we do that together, we collectively participate in what God is doing in the world. We simultaneously humble ourselves and honor our neighbor in love. Unlike Baptism or the Lord’s Supper, foot washing is vulnerable for both the one doing it and the one receiving. And it not reserved for some specialized clergy but is open to everyone. Foot washing together marks us as Christ’s people.

This year we invited you to not merely receive, but to wash each other’s feet. I know that this was a stretch. I know it makes us uncomfortable. It is supposed to make us uncomfortable because that is how we feel when our normal ways of life bump into Jesus’ ways. And yet an intrepid few took up our invitation. I remember as one of you tapped me on the shoulder to trade places. In that instant, for just a moment, with my bone spurs, bad toenails, and embarrassment, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the Kingdom.

There are signs and moments of the Kingdom popping up all around us in sacraments and the sacramental ordinary. Most of all there are mundane revelations every day when we share together as Jesus taught and showed us. I know that Easter happened because I see, and sometimes ticklishly feel, its aftereffects all around us. The work of healing and redeeming continues and now we are invited to participate.

“How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” Romans 10:15.

–Brian

April 19, 2022

Solvitur Ambulando

In the way of all things spiritual, I am not one who is drawn more closely to God in the solitude of a silent, dark room. I am much more kinesthetic in my approach to meditation and prayer. I pray most naturally with my eyes open and looking up at a clear, blue sky. I feel God’s presence more acutely when I am moving my body and using my senses of sight, sound, touch, smell, and even taste! I am drawn to God when I walk and hike. Walking is my place of peace and quiet with God. I find God in the journey of life and walking helps me embody that journey.

Solvitur Ambulando is a beloved Latin phrase meaning “it is solved by walking.” Many faithful pilgrims over the years have understood these words deeply within them. And many have been the times that walking has allowed me to find clarity and peace in the midst of chaotic and painful times.

One month from today I will be walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain with three other women of faith. I have dreamt of doing this for a very long time. We will be walking a portion of the Camino de Santiago (110 miles) because the full Camino takes at least a month to complete. I hope to walk the full Camino one day when I am retired.

The Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, is a pilgrimage of Medieval origin to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, in the northwest region of Spain. Legend has it that the remains of the Apostle, Saint James the Great, were buried there and discovered by a shepherd in the 9th century. The city, Santiago de Compostela, is named after the apostle and means “St. James of the Field of Stars.”

Hundreds of thousands of Christian pilgrims have walked this sacred journey over the years. It is a journey of community and fellowship. It is a journey of the saints who have walked before us.

The symbol of the Camino is a scallop shell. Tradition tells the story that early pilgrims used seashells to drink water from the springs as they walked. The clergy would also give shells to pilgrims upon their arrival at the Cathedral and completion of the Camino. Today, all pilgrims who walk the Camino carry a scallop shell with them as they walk.

The shell is also a symbol of baptism in Christ; a symbol shared by Christians across the centuries who have been baptized in the waters of forgiveness and new life. It is a powerful symbol for the pilgrims who walk the Camino de Santiago.

I will be holding you in prayer as I walk. As those who have been washed clean in the waters of baptism, we are bound together in Christ. So, you will journey with me as I walk. And I would covet your prayers, too!

Almighty God, who called your servants Abram and Sarai
out of the Chaldean city of Ur and watched over them
during all their travels; you who were the guide of the Hebrew
people in the desert; we ask you to take care of these your children,
who, for the love your name, start their pilgrimage to Santiago
de Compostela. Be for them a companion on the way,
guide at the crossroads, strength in weariness,
shelter on the way, shade in the heat, light in the darkness,
and comfort in despair. Amen.

I will be sharing my Camino de Santiago journey with you when I return through an all church gathering in the summer or early fall.

Go in the peace of the Lord who is the Way.

Kelley

April 12, 2022

On a spring morning in the year 30 or 33 AD, in an abandoned quarry, just beyond the north wall of Jerusalem, something happened. Precisely what happened and its implications resonate not only to our day, but unto eternity.

Critics, skeptics, and scoffers will say that a recently executed, failed messiah’s body was stolen by his followers and dumped unceremoniously in an unmarked grave. Those same followers then proceeded to proclaim that this purported messiah was in fact now raised from the dead. The fundamental problem with that view is that no one in first century Judaism or first century Palestine would have anticipated a resurrection as a sign of messiah-hood. While the ultimate resurrection of all the dead at the end of time was widely anticipated within Judaism, and still is among Orthodox Jews, the one-off out-of-sequence resurrection of a purported messiah would not have won friends or followers. It is simply not the kind of story one would have made up to advance such a messiah’s movement.

More recent critics, skeptics, and scoffers will say that powerful emotions and trauma can profoundly influence one’s perception. The purported messiah’s followers, according to their view, had some sort of extraordinary emotional or spiritual experience that led them to believe that their teacher was no longer dead. The problem with this view is that it would have been perfectly acceptable and anticipated in the first century to claim that the spirit, ghost, or genius of a dead person was now somehow still with and influencing his followers. The Romans believed in the spirits of dead. So did the Greeks. Such “ghost” stories were commonplace throughout the Empire. But that is not what this messiah’s followers claimed. They did not claim to see the “spirit” of their teacher. They claimed to have seen his actual, physical, fleshly, body, walking and talking to them. Their account of the resurrection is not a ghost story. It is instead an assertion of something far more radical and challenging: this Jesus of Nazareth was really truly dead and then was not dead.

I fear that we lose the revolutionary quality of the resurrection beneath the crush of Easter lilies. “He is risen, he is risen indeed!” can easily become rote. I much prefer the recommended Easter proclamation of one of the youths at my old church—someone should sprint into the sanctuary and after a few situationally appropriate expletives declare, “he was dead and now he’s not dead!” and then run off in confusion and terror.

Both parts of that declaration are important. First, he was dead. Jesus really truly actually died. He did not fake it. Resurrection is not the denial of death. Rather it is its vindication that never repudiates the very real pain, loss and grief. Jesus shares the fullness of our humanity to its ultimate limits, even unto pain, abandonment, despair, trauma, bleeding, suffocation, loss of consciousness, cessation of metabolic functions, and cellular decay. That means that there is now no place, no experience of humanness that has not been shared by God. Morally and metaphysically, we expand that in our creed with the affirmation, “and he descended into Hell,” to affirm that there is now no place and no possible place beyond God’s reach. Death is real and never denied, not even for Jesus. The difference is that death is no longer final.

“Now he’s not dead!” I have heard far too many vague sermons about how the resurrection of Jesus gives us hope for the future and how Jesus is now alive in our hearts. Jesus does indeed give us hope and does indeed influence our hearts and minds, but the whole point of Easter is that Jesus is not in the ground. And that absence means that everything we thought about the world, all our certain assumptions about the finality and certainty of death, all our cynicisms about how might makes right and the futility of hope are all categorically wrong. The world is not the way we thought it to be. There is a higher reality of possibility, promise, and spirit interpenetrating our entire universe that occasionally pokes out into our space time revealing, however provisionally, a deeper more mysterious, “real” than we ever imagined.

Resurrection is not merely the declaration that Jesus somehow recovered from his wounds and stumbled out looking for a snack. He was transformed. And this is where we reach the limits of the disciples’ vocabulary. Like all good observers beyond their depth, they switch over to metaphor. It was clearly him, in the flesh. They could touch him and talk to him. And he was also different. He could somehow pass through matter and space. Others would not be able to recognize him until they connected with him relationally and then they not only recognized him, they recognized the Truth.

Resurrection is not one idea among many within Christianity. It is the axis around which our faith turns. Either Jesus rose from the dead by the power of God, or we are at best a bunch of non-practicing, heretical Jewish God-fearers. Either Jesus rose from the dead, or his message and teachings were a lovely albeit overly idealistic set of aspirations. Either Jesus rose, or our only hope lies in the general, often inscrutable, and vaguely stated providence of God. As Saint Paul wrote after he was gobsmacked by the power of resurrection: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” 1 Cor. 15:17-19.

I believe in the resurrection. I believe in it because it makes sense of all available evidence. But far more importantly I trust in it because I keep bumping into its promise and power. I feel its echoes in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I am lifted up by its affective promise in moments of grief. I have witnessed its transformative effect in the lives of those who get swept up into its motion. The history of the church only makes sense through its propelling energies. And I have caught glimpses of it on the horizons between death and life. Jesus has risen, and by that divine intrusion reality has changed forever. Fear and death no longer get the last word. A moment of our distant future has erupted into our ancient past. Everything is different. Everything is possible. And so, we begin anew.
–Brian

April 6, 2022

Last November our dishwasher broke. For the past five months my wife Lisa and I have been washing dishes by hand at the kitchen sink. Tomorrow, after lengthy delays due to supply chain issues, we are getting a new dishwasher installed. Tonight, will be our last time scraping, scrubbing, rinsing, and drying together.

I do not particularly like washing dishes. I do however like working alongside Lisa. And while I do not want to romanticize it, part of me will miss this simple shared labor. One of the consequences of disruptions in global supply chains over the past two years as well as the difficulty of travel is that it has made us find satisfaction in the ordinary things of life. If you cannot buy more and more, you learn to find delights elsewhere. I have given up on my quest for a PlayStation 5 and find myself surprisingly content in replaying old games. Once we thought about moving, now we realize that our old home just needs some new paint and floors to make it quite cozy. Although I still long for a driving trip through Quebec, visiting family is more than enough for now. It is all enough, more than enough. And while there are many that lack the necessary resources for a safe, healthy, and wholesome life, many of us have more than we need.

Part of growing up is learning to let go of ambitions that are not your own. Our economy is based on a collective addiction to more. Seeking out new stuff, better stuff, and more pleasurable experiences is presented as the way to happiness. But it does not work beyond the initial euphoria of novelty. The Hedonic treadmill keeps us working harder and harder to obtain what we are supposed to want leaving us poorer, less satisfied, and exhausted. There is no absolute measure of wealth. Wealth is simply having more than you need. You can become wealthy by increasing your income or simply moderating your wants and needs.

I am far from an ascetic. I will be quite happy to finally have a new dishwasher. But I am more happy to have a partner to share with. And when I think about the moments in my life when I have been most happy and felt fully alive, they all involved either loving relationships with people or mysterious, awe-filled moments with God. Not one of them involved “stuff.” Saint Augustine once quipped that human beings were put in this world with other people to love and things to use. The problem, he observed, is that we get that backwards and love stuff and use people.

This Sunday we will begin talking about the Exodus, not just the book, but the event. Exodus was a migration by giant mixed crowd stepping off into the unknown on the basis of a promise. Along the way they would be provided with what they needed, but only what they actually needed, to survive to another day. They had to learn to trust and follow into a crash course in national identity formation as God hammered them into a people on the hot forge of Sinai. Some of them remembered longingly what they had back in Egypt, namely meat. And when they finally got their destination, they had to fight for the promise. None of it was what they wanted. But it was enough. And it was precisely what they needed in order to grow up from being a defeated mob of assorted forced laborers into a new people and a new identity called Israel. Along the way they had no material resources to rely on except each other and their curious and sometimes cranky God who followed them just outside of camp.

I am not Hebrew and we are not journeying by stages through the deserts of Sinai. But we are all on a journey of discovery and exploration that leads us home. We all will learn the importance of traveling light, letting go of old burdens that weigh us down and no longer help us, and relying in deep and intimate trust on each other. More stuff does not help us along the way. Only relationships do, with God and one another. It is a simple lesson that our culture will never teach except by accident. Sometimes it may require a supply chain disruption to remind us who we are and who we can become.

I am grateful to have the resources to afford a new dishwasher. I am far more grateful for my friends and family and meaningful work. The true gift from God is neither the resources nor the relationships, but the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other and value them according to their true value.

You never know what you might learn while washing dishes if only one pays attention.
–Brian

March 29, 2022

Law came in, to increase the trespass; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. Romans 5:20

My life has been punctuated by moments of grace. Such moments are of necessity pure gift, unexpected and unearned. The moment that I knew I became a Christian of the Protestant variety happened in the back corner aisle of my college bookstore on a Tuesday afternoon in March of 1988. My college was known for being liberal unto hostile towards organized religion and the bookstore’s meager theology selection was limited to a dozen or so titles. I pulled out a slim green volume, The Collected Paul Tillich. I had heard the name Paul Tillich before, but had no idea what he thought or why it might be worth publishing. The volume was a collection of short essays and sermons. I flipped to one simply entitled, “You Are Accepted.”* My life has not been the same since.

I remember standing there in the aisle with tears running down my cheeks, mercifully no one saw. This German theologian who died four years before I was born was speaking across the veil directly to me. More precisely, he preached the word I needed to hear. Religion is filled with antiquated words that seem out of place in the modern world, words like sin and grace. But there is no adequate substitute because they speak to the universal human experiences of alienation from self, other, and God and the universal invitation to reconciliation. Using the language of existential philosophy and psychotherapy, these clunky old words suddenly made sense. More importantly, I recognized both the separation and the yearning for belonging inside myself. In a phrase, Tillich summarized the Good News, the central theme of Paul’s writings and the essence of the Protestant movement: You are accepted.

I have always felt a separation between myself and other people. No matter how close we may love someone, they always remain apart. We all know what it feels like to be lonely in a crowd. I regularly experience separation within myself as I simultaneously observe and am observed doing precisely those things that I want not to do. And finally, God almost always feels a long way off. These lived experiences of separation and anxiety are the phenomena of sin erupting into my life. Sin is not naughty things that I have done, rather those naughty things and a good deal else (e.g. shame, anxiety, pride, and desire) are the consequences of sin. Sin, rightly understood, should always be singular as it is one underlying tear in reality that rips through every moment and every human life.

Our responses to this estrangement tend to fall into two categories. First, we can numb it and deny it through avoidance, pleasure seeking, or chemicals. Second, we can try to bridge it through our energy, effort, and enterprise by building and nurturing relationships, organizations, knowledge, skill, craft, understanding, art, achievement, and excellence. The problem is that neither approach works. The clear realization of our failure is the essence of despair. And despair is oddly enough the beginning of grace.

The cross is the ultimate symbol of despair in which Jesus is abandoned not only by his friends and followers, but even by God. This is the image that came to Paul in his moment of ultimate separation when he was actively hunting and persecuting Jesus’ followers. Despite his despair, despite his separation, despite his rejection, Paul simply experienced that he was accepted. He was accepted by one who already knew the ultimate and infinite estrangement of death itself. The curious thing is that the moment you simply accept that you are accepted, you also discover that you can accept yourself and other people. The moment we accept that we are accepted is the moment that the gaping chasm of sin begins to heal.

The problem for me was that accepting that I was accepted is far easier said than done. I had been trained, educated, encouraged, and rewarded to achieve. Accepting acceptance has nothing to do with achievement and even less to do with understanding. Our perennial desire to become “self-made” women and men leads us astray. Moreover, I thought that such a moment of acceptance would have more immediate and obvious consequences in my life. Despite feeling an enormous wave of energy followed by a rush of emotion manifesting as tears, my life went on much as before. I did not necessarily become a better person. I was still subject to anxiety, pride, jealousy, and misguided desire. But one thing did change. I knew that I was accepted. And that made all the difference.

Theology is often the art of attaching labels to the unnamable and then presuming to call it knowledge. Theology, doctrine, and morality, can all get in the way of simple acceptance of acceptance. The moment we lay claim to this acceptance with our claims, it ceases to be grace and becomes mere doctrine. Instead, it is pure gift, unearned, unrequested, and unmerited. It can only be experienced, not deduced. For many of us, nothing is more uncomfortable than receiving a gift we have not earned.

Sometimes trying gets in the way. That is why it is easiest to accept that you are accepted in precisely those moments of despair when all our trying comes tumbling down. If you want to find the foundations of faith, do not look to Sunday morning worship. Look instead to those moments of pain, abandonment, shame, meaninglessness, and disgust. Those are the moments when grace can bypass our egos’ exquisite defenses to extend an invitation. You are accepted. And all you need to do is simply accept that you are accepted.

Accept that you are accepted. Its utter simplicity would be comical if it were not so powerful because from that moment of acceptance springs every form of healing, reconciliation, restoration, and life. Indeed, what Jesus taught Nicodemus was that to accept that you are accepted is to be reborn.

* To fulfill all righteousness under copyright law, I cannot share with you the text of the sermon, however, if you simply search Tillich You Are Accepted, you will find it quickly enough.
–Brian

March 22, 2022

Sacred Voices

Thirty faithful Fairmont women gathered together this past weekend in the beauty of Hueston Woods State Park for a time of rest, renewal, and relationships. Our twice canceled (due to COVID) Women’s Retreat was a welcome respite from our weary lives after two years of this pandemic.

We listened, talked, laughed, and reflected on our theme of Sacred Voices:
-the sacred voice of Eve from the Creation story
-the sacred voice of Mary the mother of Jesus
-the sacred voice of Hildegard of Bingen a beloved writer, mystic,
composer, and visionary from the 12th century
-and our own sacred voices

In between gathering sessions and meal times there were 11 prayer stations for silent reflection and prayer. The heavens poured steady rain throughout our time together except for a moment of grace during our Friday night bonfire.

As we reflected on hearing God’s voice through these sacred voices, we were reminded once again that if we are to hear such voices we must be still and listen. We only grow closer to God and to one another when we create intentional time together. In our final session of the retreat we shared together in the ancient practice of Lectio Divina which we have been practicing as part of our Lenten School on Zoom at Fairmont. Psalm 42 was our scripture focus for this meditative practice of hearing scripture.

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you,
O God. Psalm 42:1

These short days of retreat and rest allowed us the gift of time to seek after the God for whom we so long. My prayer for each of you as we move back into safer COVID days and busier schedules is that we may set aside sacred time to listen, learn, and be loved by God.

One of our resources for our retreat was a list of reflection questions to take home with us for the days following our time together. One of those questions I also ask my youth group when we meet weekly for spiritual growth and fellowship:

Where did I see God today?

Maybe this one reflection question will help us hear God’s voice through the sacred voices around us.

How good and pleasant it is to dwell together as family in Christ!

Blessings,

Kelley

March 15, 2022

Apology appears to be dying art in our culture. After, please note never before, a media personality is reported to have done something awful, the formula is always identical: “I am sorry if you feel (bad, neglected, cheated, injured, offended, betrayed, insulted, belittled, or belittled take your pick).” Please note that technically that is no apology at all. It is an expression of regret that somebody feels something. An actual apology is not conditional on how the aggrieved feels, but instead takes responsibility for the apologizer’s action and subjects that action to critique. So, for example: I am sorry I shaved off your eyebrows rather than I am sorry if you feel disfigured; I am sorry I forgot your birthday rather than I am sorry if you feel sad that no one attended your birthday; and, I am sorry that I published your second-grade tap dance recital on Facebook rather than I am sorry if you feel embarrassed. A real apology requires ownership and responsibility for an offense, not a vague and likely false expression of empathy.

The problem goes deeper. Apologies are of only limited utility. An apology is technically an explanation. Originally an apologia was a speech given in defense of one’s conduct against accusations. The focus is less on restoring the offended than it is on protecting the offender’s reputation.
Apologies are a form of culturally conditioned performance art. They are intended to mitigate harm to one’s reputation, not to heal the party offended or seek reconciliation. So, instead of apologies we might need to seek something bigger.

The Bible rarely talks about apologies. The Bible is interested in forgiveness. And forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness never comes from the offender; it always comes from the aggrieved. That means that forgiveness usually requires the power dynamics of most relationships to be flipped. Forgiveness is a power play by the weak against the strong. The most offensive thing Jesus ever said to the Romans was I forgive you.
Forgiveness also gets muddled with justice as we lose ourselves in endless debates about forgiving but not forgetting. Justice, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, is an imperfect substitute for love, but better than nothing. The problem is that justice often requires virtue (chiefly wisdom) and discernment that is in short supply among humans. While seeking justice we tend to achieve neither justice or forgiveness.

The Bible seems far less concerned with abstractions and far more concerned with relationships. Forgiveness in the Bible is always about restoration of a relationship after a breach. The focus then is on removing anything and everything that gives that breach persistent form including but not limited to: anger, shame, revenge, jealousy, justice, morality, and righteousness. Can you forgive without forgetting? It depends on the relationship and the forgiver. If the nature of the breach between you and another person is constructed out of memories of old hurts, then forgetting will be a necessary condition for forgiving. Forgiving in such a relationship may therefore require truth telling, restoration, and apology a necessary prerequisite for the forgiver, but not forgiveness itself.

Forgiveness is the choice to remove whatever it may be that gives form to the rupture in the relationship. That means that forgiveness is always available, albeit never easy. Forgiveness is an act of will, a choice to discard something for the sake of something else. It may be a difficult choice, but it is always a choice to opt for a relationship instead of a wound.

Later this week we will be looking at the story of Joseph and his brothers. Years of suffering in prison (somewhere between two and twelve) have humbled and sensitized Joseph. He is not the man we met at the beginning of his story. He has learned wisdom the hard way from the stern teacher of suffering. He has learned the folly of aggrandizing his own ego. He is no longer seeking revenge or even justice. Indeed, in the chancelleries of New Kingdom Egypt, he was justice. He has learned through hardship who he is and what is important to him. He no longer needs others’ guilt or innocence, apologies or contrition. Joseph seeks one thing only: relationship. With genuine tears of joy, he embraces his brothers because he has learned the hard way that in the end relationship is the only thing that matters.

When we say that God forgives us it is not because our contrition, penance, apologies, shame, guilt, or absolution are sufficient. Maybe they are; maybe they are not. When we say God forgives us, it simply means that God is choosing relationship with us as more important than anything else about us.
–Brian

March 8, 2022

Every pastoral prayer is, of necessity, a conceit. There is simply no way that impoverished prose can give voice to the honest yearning, joy, and very real pains of a single human heart, let alone all our hearts. There are too many thanksgivings and far too much suffering to remember let alone record let alone express.

My heart is admittedly sorrowful this day, doomscrolling the news from the Ukraine. I see the pictures of terrified people fleeing collapsing apartment buildings, grandmothers squeezing into refugee trains bound for the West, and young volunteers stoically sealing Molotov cocktails. Ukraine is of course not unique in human suffering. Scenes like these are played out every day in Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The invasion of the Ukraine just happens to be much better publicized and also has disturbing similarities to footage from nearly a century ago involving other tyrants and their irredentist demands. The eternal constant is the image of ordinary frightened people fleeing with only what they can carry not knowing if they will ever return.

Prayers of lamentation have a long and distinguished pedigree in scripture. Rather than being comprehensive catalogs of human suffering, they are particular, embodied, and earthy. To paraphrase Elie Weisel: the danger is not that we will forget the millions; the danger is that we will forget the one. The language of prayer is neither manifesto nor political rhetoric. Prayer is simply attentive witness.

A Prayer of Lament for the People of Ukraine

God of the suffering and the forgotten, God of fearful and fleeing,
God of the Cross
You never employed empires and armies but make yourself known
in the most humble moments of gentle care.
You know that history is not drawn on maps, but in the interwoven
tapestry of peoples’ hearts.
We go about our daily lives and complain about the price of fuel.
And a little girl hurriedly packs a single suitcase for a lifetime.
An old man gets lost in the panicked crowds of the train station.
A dog sniffs at the bowl in its yard to which its owners will never
return.
Fear begins to creep over the city like a cold damp stain blotting
out life as hatred vies with terror for supremacy.
Let loose your better angels O Lord. Shield and guide your people
who pray more fervently than we can imagine in our secure
rest.
Show yourself now in word and deed. In miracles and the
mundane.
Rouse up your heroes and stir the hearts of the multitude so your
Kingdom may be manifest amid the wrack and ruin of our
vanities.
Remind leaders everywhere that they stand under your judgment
for eternity.
And most of all, remember the one we forget,
the one of no account,
the one without money, fame, or followers,
who runs into the night alone and afraid.

You know your child by name even when we do not.

Save your child O God from the scourge of war let loose by evil
men.
All our hopes and all our ends lie in you,
your light shines still, even in the darkness. Amen

March 1, 2022

Sometimes spirituality can be like acne. What is important is maintaining healthy open pores. Clog up your pores with gunk which is to be honest you, and what you end up with are nasty pimples and inflammation. Yuck. Clean up with a proper skin care regime, get your oil and debris out of those pores and voila. Healthy skin is restored!

But healthy spirituality? Blasphemous! Perhaps, but not heretical. Consider that skin is the organ of the human body that provides our interface with the outside world. It needs to be impermeable enough to keep our delicate insides intact despite all the nicks and bruises that the world offers yet porous enough to breathe and sweat as well as delicately sense our environment. So does our spirituality. We need to maintain some sort of bounded sense of “I” to live and work as an organism in this creation. But if we have an overabundance of “I”, if our sense of “I” begins to clog our spiritual pores, then we find ourself cut off, plugged up, inflamed, and sick. The biggest problem for our spirituality is not God’s absence, but our own overbearing presence.

In the Old Testament Jacob is a rather scandalous spiritual hero. He is, among other things, a cheat, trickster, con-man, occasionally a cad, a coward, and when opportunity permits a thief, but he is not a hypocrite. When God finally and unmistakably shows up, which non coincidentally requires an extended divine introduction as Jacob has never shown much interest in the God of his father and grandfather, Jacob acknowledges his gross misperception. He smacks himself upside the head and acknowledges, “Indeed THE LORD is in this place, and I did not know.” Genesis 28:17. God was already there, but Jacob never before noticed because Jacob was too busy advancing the interests of Jacob.

There is a grammatical curiosity in the Hebrew text. Jacob repeats the “I” unnecessarily. Our English translations smooth this out, but what Jacob literally says is: “and I, I did not know.” Jacob’s confession is about more than perception. Jacob appears to acknowledge that what has obscured his vision, understanding, and ultimately relationship with God is himself.

There are lots of ways we clog our spiritual pores and keep God far away. Pride and ambition are obvious in the case of Jacob. But there are subtler barriers: fear, shame, anxiety, and desire. Actually, anything can get in the way of connecting with and to God if we give it ultimate meaning, purpose, and value in our lives. The Old Testament name for those things is an idol. The modern therapeutic name is an attachment. They keep us separate from God, a separation that both tends to make us miserable and prevents us from becoming what we were meant to be. The Bible simply calls that separation sin.

One way to consider prayer is that it has nothing to do with adding the right words or sentiments no matter how heartfelt. One way to consider prayer is that it is all about taking things away. First gently set aside our endless to-do lists, the distractions of our bodies, the unfocused meanderings of the mind. Do not worry they will be waiting for you when you are done with prayer. Next, set aside using language inside your head and trying to understand things and wanting things. Your will and wants will be okay on their own for a few minutes. Finally, and ever so gently in this newly quieted internal landscape, gently relax your grip on “I.” Hold your own sense of self loosely so that it is no longer the central focus of all thought and experience. Your ego can safely handle this for a time. And now, with infinite attentiveness just be. That is the purest form of prayer. To offer yourself to God in perfect vulnerability offering to God the path of least resistance and obstruction. It is not easy, nothing important ever is. But with intentional practice you can clean up your spiritual pores and offer God a ready way inside. The nearly universal experience of such practice is to discover that you are not alone, not lost, but found, held, and loved from a place beyond language or reason.

It is no coincidence that Jacob finally learned his lesson in spiritual perception when he was on the run, beyond the borders of everything familiar, where all his tricks and schemes failed him, in a liminal space beyond his control. And while being chased across the Negev desert by 400 homicidal Bedouin appears to do the trick, I much prefer simply finding a quiet place in my own home.

We cannot find our way to God. But we do not need to. God is constantly trying to find a way to us. All we need do is clear the path a little bit.

And a regular practice of washing with non-comedogenic cleanser and a little salicylic acid does wonders for my pores.
–Brian

February 22, 2021

“Now I know.” Genesis 22:12

In Sunday School we teach that God knows everything. At one level that is axiomatically correct if one assumes that God is that being who is omniscient and omnipotent. I do not question God’s all-knowing faculties (omniscience to use the fancy term). Instead, I have begun to wonder about the orders of things that can be known and those that cannot.

Genesis is all about messy relationships. Most of the book of Genesis is specifically about God’s relationship with a dysfunctional family of desert Bedouin whose personal scandals would fit nicely into the Jerry Springer Show. The patriarchs and matriarchs are jealous, dishonest, unfaithful, cowardly, greedy, conniving, and occasionally blasphemous. They are also hopeful, courageous, creative, trusting, resilient, and loving. In other words, they are a lot like us. And their similarity to us makes God’s knowledge of them and their lives important for understanding God’s knowledge of us and our lives.

“God tested Abraham.” Genesis 22:1. Scripture does not describe precisely what God was curious about. The test unfolds as one of the most scandalous passages in the Old Testament: the binding and near sacrifice of Isaac, painfully described as Abraham’s son, his only son, the one he loved. The standard Christian answer down through the centuries has been that God was testing Abraham’s faith. But God could have just as easily been testing whether Abraham might object and haggle for the boy’s life as he did for the residents of Sodom. Even more disturbingly it is not completely clear whether the test is for Abraham or for God.

Genesis describes in excruciating detail all of Abraham’s preparations for the sacrifice—he builds an altar, assembles the fuel, binds his son, lays him on the wood, reaches out his hand, and takes the sacrificial knife. Then an Angel yells STOP! The Angel then explains, “Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” (22:12).

If the Angel and presumably God now know, that means that before they did not know what Abraham might do. A test is not really a test if you know the result beforehand. Taking the text at face value, the test is God’s effort to honestly find out something about Abraham that God did not know.

God can know all things and still not know what cannot be known. If creation really is a free, autonomous system then that very freedom may limit what can be known. In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the more one knows about the position of a particle, the less one knows about its momentum and vice versa. In mathematics, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrated that in any formal proof, there are factually true statements that cannot be proven. And if particle physics and formal logic are not your preferred disciplines, consider human relationships and the universal experience in which you can know everything that can be known about another person and still never know them let alone predict her or his behavior with perfect accuracy.

Relationships are messier than set theory and quantum wave functions. Relationships have far more interrelated moving parts. If, in this creation, an electron’s spin and position cannot simultaneously be known, how much more inscrutable is the human heart that knows not even itself. Indeed, the human mind and heart seem perfectly designed to deceive their owners.

Genesis cuts through all this theological chatter with a simple assumption: relationship. What God wants is relationship. What connects us to God is relationship. And what the Bible is about is the exploration and evolution of that relationship. This relationship is not a metaphor, but an actual connectional bond between human beings and the supernatural entity we rather presumptively call “God.” As in any relationship there will be questions of commitment and fidelity, boundaries and trust, expectations and even mutual growth. How far can God trust Abraham? How far can Abraham trust God? Do remember that this is the beginning of the story, the first book of the Bible. You cannot honestly insert later answers. Genesis is not the final answer. Genesis presents us instead with the first question.

How far will Abraham go? How far will God? If God’s post-flood plans to repair creation hinge on this one man and his messed-up family, you can understand the gravity of the questions. The answers are dramatic and disturbing where morality and faith collide. The answers from this encounter are for God and any human presumption to possess such knowledge is likely to end in blood. God gets an answer, but I am not sure whether Abraham, let alone Isaac ever do. Instead, consider the questions. How far can God trust you? How far can you trust God? These questions are not a test. These questions and their embodied answers are the definition of your life.

–Brian

February 15, 2021

I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God. -Psalm 69:3

Grief is exhausting.

All who live with the deep grief of the death of a loved one know the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional exhaustion of grief. And grief does not just dwell with those who have lost a loved one. Grief can be found wherever there is loss.

The loss of health.
The loss of vocation.
The loss of friendship.
The loss of dreams.
The loss of community.
The loss of life as it once was.

I have held my own grief tightly these past few years as I have continued on with the single focus of taking care of my family and being faithful to my calling as your pastor. I have not given grief much time to speak its voice, let alone find healing. The denial of grief is also exhausting.

The companion Psalm for our Genesis scripture this Sunday is Psalm 69. It is a deeply personal psalm about grief and suffering. It is painful to read. The psalmist cries out to God, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.”

For thirty-six long verses the psalmist writes about grief…but sprinkled throughout the psalm are glimpses of hope such as this one in verse 13:

“At an acceptable time, O God, in the abundance of your
steadfast love, answer me.”

In God’s time and in God’s love the psalmist will find an answer to his grief.

We have all been living in the rising waters of grief and anxiety for the past two pandemic-laden years and we are exhausted. The waters have come up to our necks and we, too, cry out to God.

Our Fairmont family of faith has grown in miraculous ways during this difficult and draining time. We have learned new ways to worship and we have grown together but we still have not completely grieved what has been lost.

Naming that grief is a good first step to healing. It may be hard to envision God’s answer to us in these uncertain days but in God’s time and in the abundance of God’s love, we will find an answer to our grief.

In God’s time and in God’s love we will find an answer to our grief.

I am grateful that we are not alone in our grief nor in our healing and hope. God is ever present with us, always. And we have each other in this journey too.

Thanks be to God!

Kelley

February 8, 2021

One of the keys to contentment in life is to understand the difference between the things that one can control and the things that one cannot. Our attention needs to be focused on the former over the latter. However, we often get that backwards. We often stress about precisely those things over which we have no control making us both miserable and exhausted in the process. It is an irrational and self-destructive habit that I try hard to avoid. So, as a practical matter, if I cannot control it, I may try to be aware of it, but do not waste too much time or attention on the matter.

Despite my best efforts, this neat and tidy division of creation has not been as comforting as I wish. There lies a vast frontier zone between these poles of human agency. There is a third category of things over which I have some influence, but not control. The world is complicated and messy. My choices influence all sorts of things I do not fully understand that are in turn influenced by the decisions, often completely unknown to me, of countless others. Most events in this world are not the result of single variable functions of my choices. My actions are often only one of a vast multivariable mix. Complexity obscures the individual’s role as it equally conceals or highlights one’s assumed agency. That leaves me with a creeping sense of expansive uncertainty. If I have influence but not control, how do I know whether I have done what I should, let alone all I can. The result is a pervasive sense of anxiety born of the complexity of the world we have made.

Right now, the world seems to be a profoundly anxious place. No one is sure exactly what is going on, let alone what will happen in the future (insert here whatever it is you may be worrying about). Lacking clear information, we make decisions on the basis of the past that may no longer be a reliable guide to the future. We do not even know how our choices may or may not influence outcomes at all. This perpetual unfocused fear that paralyzes is what we call anxiety. And running a million “what if” scenarios through your sleepless hours will not cure it.

I learned one of my character defects honestly in early childhood. One way to contain anxiety is to nurture competence, to know what to do in a given situation. If you generally knew what to do and tried to do your best, then most situations would turn out on balance favorably. Competence worked well for me throughout most of my life. The problem is that competence as a strategy only works for problems over which one has control. If all one has is influence, without causal agency, competence is a trap that leads only to anxiety not solutions.

There is a way out. Actually, there are two interrelated exits. The first is Biblical. Trust. Trust that despite the mess our world or our lives might seem, God has a plan and wills good for us. This is Abraham’s solution and up to a point Job’s. It is no coincidence that the word the Bible uses for faith could just as easily be translated as trust. The problem for us nowadays is that we have been fed five centuries of humanism presuming that although God may in control in the heavens, we are very much in control on earth. Our honest confession of operative faith is, “God helps those who help themselves.”

There is a second way out of the trap. It works on its own, but works even better alongside trust. One needs to let go of all our cultured assumptions of our own agency, power, intelligence, control, and dare I say it, competency. Humility provides an escape from anxiety, albeit at the cost of a downgraded ego. Humility, being humble, does not mean of little or no worth. Humility derives from the old Latin word humus, literally of the earth. Humility is neither the lack of self esteem nor meekness, but simple honesty about who and what we are, created material beings within this creation. Humility is simply knowing yourself as you truly are.

Going on two years of Covid, my attempts at competency are now spent. My bag of tricks is empty and sometimes the boundless enthusiasm may ring a bit hollow. Perhaps you face some of the same challenges. If all I have to depend on is myself, I will never be enough. But I do not have to and neither do you.
Know who you are. Ignore what you are “supposed” to be. Simply, honestly, gently, charitably, know yourself. That is the essence of humility that sets us free from the crushing weight of infinite oughts. And then as you, not your persona or Facebook profile but simply as you, trust. Trust that the Creator is not a liar. Trust that the Creator really does love you and wills for you good.

The only thing I really need to do is to be me and as me be in relationship with that which made me and with other people. All the rest is simply the illusions of anxiety, shame, and pride.

Learning how to be and how to trust is not so different from learning how to float in deep water. All you need to do is let go and relax. The deep waters will hold you.
–Brian

February 1, 2021

Fluency in Hebrew is not one of my gifts. I find it to be an annoyingly imprecise language. Unlike the mathematical exactness of Greek, one is often left interpreting meaning on the basis of context alone. Hebrew suffers in particular from a dearth of prepositions. Without those little words in between nouns, it is difficult to establish the precise relationship between things. You can perfectly translate a Hebrew verse and end up with, “A man, a tent, and a camel.” It is then up to the reader to decipher the relationship between them.

One of the most important verses in scripture, the turning point of the Genesis story, the birth of the Jewish people, and the origin of all three Abrahamic faiths is Genesis 11: 1: “YHWH said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” That command, “Go forth” (Lekh Lekha, לֶךְ-לְךָ‎ ) provides the divine impetus to the entire story of God and humanity that follows throughout scripture. The problem is that phrase in Hebrew is famously multifaceted and slippery. Any translation into English necessarily flattens what God is saying into a single dimension and loses most of the meaning.

At one level it is simply the divine command to go. Leave your family and community behind and trust in me as I bring you to a new place. Abram goes solely on the basis of his trust in the divine promise.

It also means go for yourself. Do not go for God or for family or community or any other reason except to explore exactly what this creation and this life have in store for you. Let go of the past in order to acquire a new and vibrant future.

It also means go with yourself. Bring with you all the beliefs, values, and ways of life and living that are important to you. Bring along your culture and habits of mind so that wherever you go, you will spread and share your way of living with the world.

It also means go by yourself. You are unique, and individual, perhaps the first in history. No matter how many people in your household you may take along on the journey of discovery, we all make the journey alone because the journey touches us each differently and takes us to a unique destination of identity.

And it also means, go to yourself. There is a you out there waiting to be discovered and embraced. Go to your identity, your true identity, not the person your family, community, clan, and culture say you are. Go and find your true name that is both birthright and destiny. Go knowing that any other life, any other identity will be tragically too small for you.
Go, Lekh Lekha, means all of this simultaneously. It calls us to both do something and become something all on the basis of a little trust and a little curiosity. No wonder that it is the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam because it is fundamentally an invitation to finally and fully be human.

What we call “religion” is not found in our rites, rituals, sacred texts, or even communities. According to Genesis “religion” is grounded in trust and the courage to change recognizing that such change may take us away from all our fondest attachments. Abram is not particularly pious, as the rest of his story will describe in scandalous detail. The only quality that seems to differentiate Abram from the mass of Mesopotamians is his dual sense of trust and curiosity that leads him down the long road south to Canaan and there find not so much who God is but rather who he is.

The command and the invitation are not just for Abram, but for each of us. The invitation is neither to escape this world or become a saint, but rather simply to become you, the glory of God, a human being fully and gloriously alive. “The kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:21.

So, go!

–Brian

January 25, 2021

An editorial note from Pastor Brian:
Over the course of this year, we are collaborating with our friends at the Hilliard United Methodist Church in our reflections upon God’s Word for us. Together we are examining the major themes of the Old Testament. From time to time we will be sharing reflection pieces from each other’s congregation. Last week I had the opportunity to share a reflection with the Hilliard congregation. Today, I am so pleased to share with you a reflection from my dear friend, Rev. April Blaine.
_____________________________________________________________

I remember the first time I ever saw an iPhone – this was early when they came out nearly 15 years ago.

I, like many of you, was in awe.

There was such a wow factor. Many of the technologies that they were using, weren’t entirely new, but they had put them together in such a beautiful, sleek, accessible way that was also practical and functional. It was an engineering marvel and it would forever change the rhythms of our daily life. Because now, smartphones were able to do much more than just communicate with other people. They became our gateway to the web, our cameras, our GPS, our exercise and sleep trackers, and even our personal assistants.

Now, most of us cannot imagine our lives without them. For many of us, our phones are with us at all times and they are the first things we look at in the morning and the last things we see before we go to BED.

And everything in between.

This innovative technology can do extraordinary things that we never thought possible – and in itself – it is neither good nor bad.

It’s also new. In the scope of human history, it’s very new. We as human beings are still very early in the process of understanding all the implications and ways to properly integrate this technology into our lives.

Interestingly, the ancient story of the Tower of Babel, that we will encounter this week, also finds humanity wrestling with a new technology. It’s written less as a historical record and more as a cautionary tale.

We were told in Genesis Chapter 1, that all of humankind was made in the image of God and said to be good. That one of the great purposes for which humans were made is to continue the creative work of God. To go forth and multiply. To use our creative drive to continue God’s purposes in the world.

Last week, in our shared journey through the Great Story, we arrived at the story of Noah’s Ark, a kind of Creation 2.0 story. We see the introduction of a basic sense of morality for all humankind… one that honors the sacredness of life and invites us to see the world from another’s perspective. Once again, God prioritizes the relationship with humanity and makes the first covenant with us. This first universal covenant is God’s commitment to remain with us and to continue showing us a better to live… a way that will preserve life and invite us to do the same.

By Chapter 11, humanity has increased again and now, human ingenuity and creativity have come together to create a new marvel in technology – one that would greatly improve human capacity and efficiency.

And the new technology is BRICKS.

The old way of building things would have been to take various shaped stones that were either carved or cut or gathered and to put them together to build various structures. You don’t have to be an architect to understand that this isn’t a very efficient way to build and there is a limit to how large and how high such structures can become.

But bricks – in their uniformity and capacity to create large volumes – this made all kinds of things possible that had never been possible before.

The people are enamored with what they will be able to now do…

“Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

To give you more background on how the early Hebrew people might have heard this story. In the chapter before, we read of a ruthless dictator named Nimrod, who is organizing and creating an empire, constructing cities, consolidating power, subjugating others, starting in Babel.

If you read ahead, the next time bricks are mentioned is in the first chapter of Exodus 1, when the Hebrew people are enslaved in Egypt. They know where this inclination to build bigger, higher, and taller is headed.

I appreciate the many biblical scholars who write from a marginalized point of view and remind us how often language has been used to subjugate and oppress people. Forcing groups of people to assimilate to the dominant language has been a common practice throughout history, including the history of our own country. This is part of how empires were built. When they read this chapter in Genesis, they see the dangers that can come with “all the world speaking the same language.” In this case, the coming together and the building that these bricks facilitate isn’t the kind of unity that is about the sanctity and preservation of life.

God chooses to disrupt the efforts of the people. First, the tower is disrupted, and the people are scattered. The second, and perhaps more significant disruption comes in the chapter we will read in the first week of February. God chooses to disrupt the efforts by creating a tribe of people who will live in a new way. A way that honors the sanctity of life and becomes a blessing to the whole world. But… we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The stories in Genesis continue to ask us questions about the kind of world we want to build. How will we do this in ways that honor and preserve life? When new technologies arrive, how will we use them? Will they create further isolation and violence between ourselves and God? Can we continue to listen, learn, and create in ways that prioritize relationship over power? Can our creative drive be used in ways that further the purposes of God in the world?

I’m grateful to be on this journey together across two churches exploring and listening to one another as we ask these challenging questions. God doesn’t give us simple answers but invites us to use our agency, creativity, and capacity to engage the complexity of these moments… with one another and with the movement of the Spirit.

And so we keep listening and learning… together.

With gratitude,

Pastor April.

January 18, 2021

The story of Noah forms the basis for innumerable Sunday school lessons, children’s books, and nursery decorations. Like many of the most familiar stories of the Bible, I fear that very few people have actually read it. If people took the time to consider what it says and what it means, I wonder whether we would still tell the story to children.

The story of Noah begins full of expectation and promise. “Noah was a righteous man, faultless in his generation. Noah walked with God.” (6:19). Nobody else receives such accolades, not Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or even Moses. Noah as a paragon of obedient faith and righteousness is the image that sticks for most people and how we portray him to our children. But that is not exactly how he is portrayed at the end of the story. The children’s story Bibles all end with Noah and his family waving goodbye to all the animals. But the actual Bible story continues. “Noah was a man of the soil and was the first to plant a vineyard. And he drank of the wine and became drunk and exposed himself within his tent as he passed out.” (9:21-22). Noah, the great hero of faith in chapter 6 ends our story as a debased and broken man, lost in alcohol, cursing his grandsons. It is a quite a dramatic fall and it begs the question, why?

We often fail to consider the psychological and emotional trauma of this story. Noah was directly implicated in the greatest act of genocide in human history, the wholesale destruction of humanity and the terrestrial natural order. Noah participated in all of it. That alone would be ample cause for post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt. No wonder he tried self-medicating. But we cannot really know about Noah’s internal motivations or his inner demons because Noah never speaks. Across three chapters, Noah never says a single word. Instead, he silently obeys God’s every command. Without questioning, he constructs a vast ark 300 by 50 by 30 cubits (I presume he knew what a cubit was). Without questioning, he collected pairs or seven pairs of all the animals. Without questioning, he sealed up the ark and waited for the rains to fall and the waters of the deeps to open. Without questioning, he listened as the rains fell and his neighbors pounded on the hatches begging to be rescued until all went silent. Through all this, not a single word, but he did everything that the Lord had commanded, to the letter.

Sometimes, I hear people talk about obedience to God as the very essence of faith and the highest virtue. Some religions elevate obedience to God to be the purpose of human life. In Christianity and in Judaism, it is not. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his Covenant and Conversations, pointed out that one of the curiosities about the Old Testament is that despite containing 613 commandments, there is no word in ancient Hebrew for “obey.” The Torah urges people to hear, listen, understand, respond, and attend, but never obey. When the King James Bible tried to render it into English they had to invent a new word to cover its absences, so they used “hearken.” We don’t “hearken” much anymore. When they started writing the Israeli legal code in Modern Hebrew, they had to invent a whole new word for obey.

I don’t think that God wants us simply to obey. If God did, I would think that the Bible would say so plainly and celebrate such obedience. It is not that obedience to God is wrong. I just think that obedience, all by itself, is insufficient. Over and over again in Genesis we are confronted by God challenging us not so much to be obedient, but rather to be responsible, to use our freedom, choice, and judgment, to be mature and deliberative in participating in God’s work. God seems to want us to internalize God’s own values, methods, goals, and objectives because we trust God, not because we are merely creatures who obey. God could have worked exclusively through mindless robots, but instead chose to work through us as partners and in doing so seeks something greater than obedience. God seeks responsibility.

Noah is an obedient man, the most obedient of his generation. But I am not sure he is a hero. He does what God commands, but nothing more. Contrast Noah to Abraham, who we will start hearing about in a few weeks, who is quick to argue, bargain, persuade, and harangue God whenever human lives were at stake. When God threatens to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham starts haggling with God to mitigate the scope of the destruction. Noah faced with the destruction of all flesh, says nothing. Always obedient, Noah was the first human in history to offer up the cowards’ excuse, I was only following orders.

Noah saves only his own skin and his own family. The story ends with Noah passed out, naked, drunk, a shameful embarrassment to himself and his children. So, I wonder, if you save only your own skin while doing nothing to save your neighbor or the world, maybe you lose yourself in the process as well.

Faith requires obedience to God, but it is never only obedience to God. It requires more of us. It requires our creativity, our morality, our courage, our hope, and love. Noah has obedience, but never displays any of these other dimensions of faith. Perhaps that is why when the ark finally lands, he does not open the door until commanded to do so by God. Noah may be obedient, but he cannot comprehend what God is up to. He cannot envision a new world with new possibilities. He cannot leap at the chance to restore creation and heal a broken humanity. When it comes to rebuilding a shattered world, you do not wait for permission to start, you roll up your sleeves and get to work to creatively make hope a new reality. Abraham, Moses, and Jesus all could and did. The question for us faced with the example of Noah is whether we can do any better?
–Brian

January 12, 2021

What the Snake told me . . .

The story that we often call “the Fall” begins with a snake. Not the devil, not Satan, just a snake. The snake is not evil, it is however gifted. The snake is the first theologian, the first being who asks questions about God. “Eve, did God really say that you shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden?” The snake is of course wrong in its premise, God had given them all the trees to eat with a single exception. But the snake’s question places Eve into an awkward response defending God. No, we can eat from all the trees except one and if we touch that one, we will die. Eve got her information from Adam and she gets it wrong. For the first time, but far from the last, God’s people mess up by making God’s commands stricter than they actually are.

The serpent’s response is factually accurate, but also contradicts God. You won’t die if you eat it, but your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God knowing good and bad. Notice how the serpent has changed the topic. They are no longer talking about God. They are talking about the tree and its fruit. Specifically, they are talking about what the tree can do for us if we consume it. The garden starts in Genesis as an expression of God’s love for human beings and ends as a commodity feeding human power and pleasure. Humanity begins with a focus on relationship with God and ends in acquisition and control.

Eve determines that the fruit is good. For the very first time in all creation, something is pronounced as good separate and apart from God’s verdict, but instead rooted in its appeal to the human senses and utility for human will. The allure of the forbidden is as irresistible to Eve as to any twelve-year-old. She sees that the fruit is good and enticing to the eye. For the first time a human being aches for something it does not possess. Taming our desires is not chief among humanity’s strengths, not then, not now. So, she eats. And . . . nothing happens. They did not die, but something had changed forever. Adam and Eve are alienated from themselves or at least who they thought themselves to be. For the very first time they felt shame and guilt, the pain that separates who we think we are from who we want to be. Shame is the original wound.

God addresses humanity, both of them, for the very first time. The Creator’s first words to us will echo to the last page of the Bible, indeed to the last moment of time. “Where are you?” says the creator like a worried parent looking for his children. “Where are you?” seems a rather curious thing for the all-powerful creator to be asking. But apparently God can no longer see them. Something has shifted in the universe. God cannot see them as they are, and they cannot see God. Adam does not confess. He does not explain. He starts making excuses. He blames Eve. Eve, no doubt looking rather peeved at Adam for throwing her under the bus, turns and blames the snake who prudently is nowhere to be found. And we are left with God’s haunting question, “what have you done?”

This is not a story about how evil started. It is a story about how human beings started. And human beings are marked from the beginning not so much by wickedness as anxiety.

The serpent asks a question and Eve starts to doubt God’s loving providence. That’s where it all starts, not in desire or lust or any of those other things. It starts in an unnamable, undirected, inchoate fear we know so well as anxiety. Maybe God does not care? Maybe I am missing out on something? Maybe I am not the person I could be? Maybe my whole life is based on false assumptions? The anxieties begin to whirl around like giant flock of crows croaking in ceaseless thought inside our minds as Eve’s whole way of relating to God and herself begins to change. She starts asking “what if” questions. These unanswerable anxieties begin to push her apart from God. No longer does she talk to or with God. She starts to talk about God. God becomes third person. God becomes an object.

Anxiety kills. Anxiety begins in the assumption that we are separate and apart, apart from God and from each other. So, we revert to seeking control, asserting God is at best an object far away, a paper tiger, an idle threat, a literary or theological hypothesis. We start to pursue our own identity and wants to regulate our anxieties rather than relationship. We were created by God with freedom to enjoy and a vocation to steward, but through our anxiety we pervert that into license to consume and pleasure ourselves any way we want. We want what we want when we want it, and we call that good. But it never satisfies.

We seek mastery over self, other, and nature, never understanding that such mastery always comes at the price of isolation. So, we find ourselves with neither control nor belonging. Sitting crying among our broken toys all alone, we have the temerity to ask where is God in all this, having asked the Creator to go away long, long ago.

It is a Promethean (or perhaps Faustian) bargain. Defiance of God’s embrace constitutes the indispensable precondition for full human freedom and autonomy. I am just not sure it is worth it. As aptly sung by the latter-day prophet Don Henley of the Eagles, “Freedom, oh freedom, well that’s just some people talking. Your prison is walking in the world all alone.”

This sorry state is where today’s reading ends, and our existential angst begins, in a permanent condition of anxiety and alienation. And that is where most of our lives tend to get stuck. It is simply a part of being human. But that is not where the story ends.

Keep reading the story. This is only Genesis 3 after all! Trust. Open your embrace. While we may walk away from this God in our stubborn, proud, anxious, autonomy over and over again, this God will never ever let us go.
–Brian

January 5, 2021

“Beginning Again”

Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. -Isaiah 43:19

More than ever this year we have a deep, deep longing for something new. Something better. Something nostalgic. Something hopeful. Two years of anxiety, uncertainty, and angst wrought by a global pandemic and subsequent viral variants have worn us down and carved us out like centuries of rivers flowing over ancient rocks. We are tired and impatient and want to “move on” with living. And yet the normalcy evades us and we struggle to find the new normal in this ever shifting landscape. Who would have believed in March 2020 that in January 2022 we would still be finding our way through a virulent virus and its variants?

Isaiah the prophet spoke words of hope to God’s people in a time when they too longed for something new, something better, something hopeful. “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” We are not the first of God’s people longing for relief from suffering and we will not be the last.

As anxious and angry and fearful as we are in this new year we can still hear God’s steady and faithful voice through the prophet Isaiah promising us that God is doing a new thing in us and in spite of us. Just like the beautiful carvings of ancient rocks pummeled by thousands of years of rivers and streams, we too are becoming something beautiful through God’s grace. The one consistency throughout these days of uncertainty is God. God is faithful, ever present, and full of grace.

With the new year comes a new beginning: a chance to start over, to begin again. The old is gone and the new is springing forth! All our failures and regrets and lost dreams find new hope in the new year. And like the ancient rocks carved by the ever flowing rivers of time, God is doing a new thing in us as God’s people. God is making a way in the wilderness even when we cannot see it.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing! Do you perceive it?”

Blessings and love to you Fairmont Family in this new year. May we journey together and see what new thing God is doing in us!

Peace,

Kelley

December 30, 2021

Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the Earth. And God created the human in his image, in the image of God, male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26-27

Throughout 2022 we will be reflecting with our friends from Hilliard United Methodist Church on the great story arc of the Hebrew Bible beginning with the creation account in Genesis and ending with the vision of that creation restored and reconciled in Daniel. Instead of preaching and teaching on discrete narrative episodes we will be focusing on the great themes of the Old Testament. In 2023 we will then examine how those same themes are extended and expanded in the revelation of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament.

The very first theme of scripture is also its most important running from Old Testament to New like a golden thread of hope. The very first theme of God’s revelation recorded as Holy Scripture is God’s faith in us. We often think about the Bible as the story of human faith or the lack thereof. And there will be time enough to consider the life and commitments of patriarchs, prophets, priests, and apostles. But all of that pales in comparison to the overriding emphasis on the faith of God.

The story of creation in Genesis describes effortless creative activity by God, separating the chaos into ever more interconnected and complex realities. God wills and it is so. “Let there be . . . and there was . . . and God saw that it was good . . .” There is no hesitation, no deliberation just pure unbounded creativity. Until we come to the creation of humanity when everything changes. For the first time, God pauses, God hesitates, God ponders. There is no predetermined outcome. God, and God is always plural in Genesis 1, so properly “They” consider what to do next. Incidentally, the “They” for most Christians would be the Trinity and for Jews the heavenly court of angels.

The problem is that if God creates human beings in God’s own image and likeness, they too will have autonomy, will, self-consciousness, and at least some creative agency. That makes human beings potentially very dangerous for the rest of creation. Setting something like that loose in creation could result in disaster, or at least some measure of chaos and unpredictable vandalism. Alternatively, if God did not create such a being, then creation is simply a beautiful garden filled with wonderful pets. There would be no possibility of genuine relationship, no friendship, no community, no family. For the first time in creating God now faces an irreducible risk and an irreversible choice. No wonder God pauses to mull it over.

God takes the risk. God takes a leap of faith. God privileges relationship over perfection and predictability. God creates the human being. And God’s faith in this often wayward, cantankerous, ungrateful, self-centered, easily distracted, occasionally inspiring, always searching, too-clever-for-their-own-good, sporadically homicidal, never satisfied, and yet always reaching out to God bunch of hybrid dirt/Spirit creatures (“Adam” in Hebrew literally means a lump of dirt) will propel the plot and promise of the Bible and our lives. Despite it all, God has faith in us.

My faith does not amount to much. I have even less in the saving potential of politics, art, media, money, pleasure, accomplishment, beauty, celebrity, or even religion. Sometimes I despair and lose faith in myself altogether. What sustains me, what sustains all God’s people, is nothing within me or within creation. What sustains me, what sustains all God’s people, is God’s faith in us. The great story, recorded as scripture as well as in the experiences of your and my life, is simply the narrative of how that stubborn divine faith unfolds over time changing everything.

The faith of God in us is what human beings simply call hope.

–Brian

December 22, 2021

The challenge of Christmas is its imperative to pay attention. Attention is not a normal human quality. We spend most of our waking lives tied up inside our endless internal chatter of wants, hurts, hopes, daydreams, fears, shames, and plans. We do not live in the world so much as live inside our constant internal commentary on and interpretation of the world. It gets much worse each December as we burden ourselves with all our culture’s presumptions about how this holiday should look, feel, smell, taste, and most importantly feel. And then because our internal reality does not match what we see on Facebook, the Hallmark, Channel, Norman Rockwell paintings, or Martha Stewart’s well styled kitchen, we feel like utter failures. This year the unwelcome Grinch of Omicron further widens the gap between our wants and our world.

The unsettling reality behind this holiday is that it is no holiday at all. It is not meant to be a party. It is instead a provocation, a transgressive historical invasion of all our wants, plans, hurts, hopes, daydreams, fears, shames and plans. But you will not notice any of this if you fail to pay attention.

The world pays attention to the powerful and the pretty, the people and events that feature prominently in the media of any generation. The Gospel of Luke is well aware of this. Luke begins the account of Jesus’ birth with a nod to glitterati. People are supposed to know and indeed presumed to know all about Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus and Publius Sulpicius Quirinius two of the most powerful, wealthy, and influential men of the first century. Luke’s readers certainly would have known them well and Augustus’ ironic self-styled title, divi filius, “the Son of God” (specifically the adopted son of the Senate deified Julius Caesar). Although they should and in their time did occupy center stage, Luke shifts our gaze and uses them not as the subject of his story, but merely the fixed reigns upon which to pin his drama to concrete human history.

What matters is not the powerful and the pretty. What matters is paying attention. Mary pays attention to the voice in the silence. Elizabeth pays attention to the Spirits murmurings. Joseph pays attention to his own decency that overcomes his sense of honor and shame. But then Luke focuses our attention on the shepherds, those rascally, unhygienic, fringe dwellers. For Luke, the shepherds stand in for us, at least if we are honest about ourselves, how we fit in, and how well we belong.

Shepherds do not belong. They still do not belong. They were only allowed into town on market days. The rest of the time they wandered the hills with their flocks eking out an existence beyond polite society. They still do. I have seen their little nomad encampments on the arid, scrubby hills of Israel and Jordan. In order to survive in such a harsh environment, they learned to pay attention. Those hills north of Bethlehem grow more rocks than grass. One wrong step at night and you have a broken ankle. One wrong move to a poorly watered pasture and you lose your flock. One wrong interaction with the city folks and you might lose your life. The shepherds were the precise and polar opposite of Augustus and Quirinius. They counted for nothing and so had to pay attention to everything.

These outsiders of no distinction were the only ones who noticed what was happening. The pious and the powerful slept soundly in Jerusalem that night. They already knew they knew all the answers. Instead, it is precisely those who claimed to know nothing who are invited to behold everything. And all because they simply paid attention. Attention spurs their curiosity. Curiosity leads to wonder and amazement resolving into celebration, praise, worship, and gratitude as these shabbiest of choristers join their hearts and voices with legions of angels.
God has entered space and time and nothing can or will be the same again. But you will only notice, and consequently participate in it, if you pay attention.

I hope and pray that you have a merry and joy filled Christmas. Between the satisfaction of our wants, and nostalgia for Christmas past, between the ache for something we cannot name and the griefs for who is not at our table, among the endless “shoulds” we impose upon ourselves, tucked behind our worries for the future and the vicarious joy of beholding children’s exultations, I hope you also pay attention to the quiet mystery and unheralded wonder that lies behind all our cultural and sentimental encrustations of not this holiday, but this simple fact that the world would rather ignore. God is here.
–Brian

December 14, 2021

The challenge of Christmas is its imperative to pay attention. Attention is not a normal human quality. We spend most of our waking lives tied up inside our endless internal chatter of wants, hurts, hopes, daydreams, fears, shames, and plans. We do not live in the world so much as live inside our constant internal commentary on and interpretation of the world. It gets much worse each December as we burden ourselves with all our culture’s presumptions about how this holiday should look, feel, smell, taste, and most importantly feel. And then because our internal reality does not match what we see on Facebook, the Hallmark, Channel, Norman Rockwell paintings, or Martha Stewart’s well styled kitchen, we feel like utter failures. This year the unwelcome Grinch of Omicron further widens the gap between our wants and our world.

The unsettling reality behind this holiday is that it is no holiday at all. It is not meant to be a party. It is instead a provocation, a transgressive historical invasion of all our wants, plans, hurts, hopes, daydreams, fears, shames and plans. But you will not notice any of this if you fail to pay attention.

The world pays attention to the powerful and the pretty, the people and events that feature prominently in the media of any generation. The Gospel of Luke is well aware of this. Luke begins the account of Jesus’ birth with a nod to glitterati. People are supposed to know and indeed presumed to know all about Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus and Publius Sulpicius Quirinius two of the most powerful, wealthy, and influential men of the first century. Luke’s readers certainly would have known them well and Augustus’ ironic self-styled title, divi filius, “the Son of God” (specifically the adopted son of the Senate deified Julius Caesar). Although they should and in their time did occupy center stage, Luke shifts our gaze and uses them not as the subject of his story, but merely the fixed reigns upon which to pin his drama to concrete human history.

What matters is not the powerful and the pretty. What matters is paying attention. Mary pays attention to the voice in the silence. Elizabeth pays attention to the Spirits murmurings. Joseph pays attention to his own decency that overcomes his sense of honor and shame. But then Luke focuses our attention on the shepherds, those rascally, unhygienic, fringe dwellers. For Luke, the shepherds stand in for us, at least if we are honest about ourselves, how we fit in, and how well we belong.

Shepherds do not belong. They still do not belong. They were only allowed into town on market days. The rest of the time they wandered the hills with their flocks eking out an existence beyond polite society. They still do. I have seen their little nomad encampments on the arid, scrubby hills of Israel and Jordan. In order to survive in such a harsh environment, they learned to pay attention. Those hills north of Bethlehem grow more rocks than grass. One wrong step at night and you have a broken ankle. One wrong move to a poorly watered pasture and you lose your flock. One wrong interaction with the city folks and you might lose your life. The shepherds were the precise and polar opposite of Augustus and Quirinius. They counted for nothing and so had to pay attention to everything.

These outsiders of no distinction were the only ones who noticed what was happening. The pious and the powerful slept soundly in Jerusalem that night. They already knew they knew all the answers. Instead, it is precisely those who claimed to know nothing who are invited to behold everything. And all because they simply paid attention. Attention spurs their curiosity. Curiosity leads to wonder and amazement resolving into celebration, praise, worship, and gratitude as these shabbiest of choristers join their hearts and voices with legions of angels.
God has entered space and time and nothing can or will be the same again. But you will only notice, and consequently participate in it, if you pay attention.

I hope and pray that you have a merry and joy filled Christmas. Between the satisfaction of our wants, and nostalgia for Christmas past, between the ache for something we cannot name and the griefs for who is not at our table, among the endless “shoulds” we impose upon ourselves, tucked behind our worries for the future and the vicarious joy of beholding children’s exultations, I hope you also pay attention to the quiet mystery and unheralded wonder that lies behind all our cultural and sentimental encrustations of not this holiday, but this simple fact that the world would rather ignore. God is here.
–Brian

December 14, 2021

One of the professional hazards of ministry is being asked to provide meaning where there is none. Modern folks prefer neat and tidy answers. Sometimes the answer is not so much an explanation but an experience, feeling, or sensation. Nowhere is this more obvious than Christmas. What is the meaning of Christmas? If you are looking for a tidy solution, no mortal can answer that question until Christ comes again and we learn what the incarnation is all about. Until that time, if we are honest with ourselves, we are left with not so much a meaning that can be reduced to a declarative sentence as a feeling and that feeling is one of wistful longing, of promised but not yet, of what could be and what is not.

For the modern world, Christmas is all about desire and its fulfillment. Think of the modern carol, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” every Hallmark Christmas movie ever made, or innumerable car commercials with bow-wrapped automobiles on Christmas morning. The meaning of Christmas is quite clear. Christmas is about the fulfillment of our desires, whether they be for toys, a new Lexus, or a romantic partner. Joy is fulfilled by acquisition and possession.

This is the first year since 1965 in which the Charlie Brown Christmas Special will not be shown on network TV (Apple having acquired the rights in 2020). It will however be broadcast on PBS on Sunday night at 7:30 on Sunday night. Unlike almost every other made for TV offering, the Charlie Brown Special does not purport to offer the meaning of Christmas as possession or fulfillment. And that makes it interesting.

Growing up with this 1965 TV special, I forgot how radical it was: the first children’s TV special with actual children’s voice acting, a cutting-edge jazz soundtrack, no laugh track to tell you when to be amused, a dry sense of irony appealing to adults and children, and at its center the Gospel of Luke as the climax of the story, so central no editor could remove it.

The show begins with the unstated presumptions of all network TV specials—Christmas is all about desire and its fulfillment. Lucy wants real estate and celebrity, wryly sharing with the audience that Christmas is actually the work of an East Coast syndicate. Sally, who would feel at home in a Hallmark Christmas movie, wants money and a boyfriend. Schroeder wants artistic recognition. And even Snoopy wants “money, money, money!” Bill Melendez’s “artistic blandishments” makes it all look so innocent, but the Charlie Brown Special is a radical critique of consumerist individualism and materialistic nihilism. The vacuum of meaning results in a genuine existential crisis for Charlie Brown who knows he is depressed because he cannot surrender to self-deception and cannot make sense of any of it. His depression is amplified by his general anxiety. He is “afraid of everything” by his own acknowledgement. Finally, all of this is made vastly worse by the honestly depicted cruelty of other children who will not invite him to their parties and do not share their Christmas greeting with him. Confusion, shame, anxiety, social isolation, and bullying beat him down.

Charlie Brown’s answer is the solution of the modern world—endless productivity. If only he can get involved, if only his industry can remain one step ahead of his pondering melancholy, then perhaps he can escape his questions and reside happily ever after in self-important busyness and achievement that is readily rewarded by his peers in the Christmas pageant. But it does not work. First, he cannot achieve enough. The rehearsal crashes down in a managerial disaster. Second, he cannot let go and give himself over to pleasure seeking as the sum total of meaning. The rest of the children are lost in a musical reverie, courtesy of Vince Guaraldi’s perfect soundtrack, but their exuberant joy only sharpens the contrast with his own plaintive longing. Exiled from the theater company and its unstated but powerful norms, he heads out alone in exile into the wilderness.

One of the ironies of the children’s quest to fulfill their desires is of course it does not work. Lucy receives no real estate. Sally obtains neither cash nor a boyfriend. Schroeder is reduced to playing showtunes. With no small measure of irony, the only one who fulfills his desire is a dog. Snoopy receives the first-place cash prize for Christmas decorations.

Trudging into the empty auditorium, Charlie Brown asks the universe, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” To which the ever-faithful Linus responds, “sure Charlie Brown,” and proceeds to quote the Gospel of Luke 2: 8-14. The interesting thing about Linus’ choice of scripture is that it is not the account of the birth of Jesus. Rather it is about the shepherd’s reaction to the announcement of the birth of Jesus. The meaning Linus shares is not the dogmatic fact of Jesus birth but rather humanity’s response to Jesus’ birth. And that reaction is one of overwhelming gratitude, joy, and curiosity about the scope and nature of what God has done, a curiosity that will lead them up into Bethlehem. The meaning is not a fact, not something that can be reduced to a declarative sentence. The meaning is a movement of the heart, a quickening of the pulse, a sense of wonder, joy, gratitude, and utter surprise.

Finally, with all the children, Charlie Brown goes out into the snow and does not answer the meaning of Christmas because he finally realizes it has no declarative meaning, which would be just another fact we can control. Instead, Charlie Brown along with all the children give the only honest answer possible. They live it. They enact and participate in the shepherds’ response. They let go of their desires, wants, and attachments and instead give themselves over to the witness of praise, gratitude, and exuberant joy. It is no coincidence that the sing Hark the Herald Angels’ Sing, because in the final frame, they join with the angels in a chorus of praise.

The most humble, downright shabby of real Christmas trees was dwarfed by the towering artificial aluminum monstrosities. But in the end that humblest of trees is revealed for what it truly is, the most perfect of all. It is perfect not simply in its form and appearance. It is perfect in its genuine authenticity as opposed to our shallow artificiality. It is perfect in its authentic completeness. And it all gets expressed in the world in the most outwardly humble of forms. Through the joy, gratitude, and exuberant love expressed by the children, the tree is perfected. And so is Charlie Brown. The children together become a community bound not by shared desire, but shared gratitude. And so, if we are willing to join the chorus, can we.

The truth of Christmas is not a meaning or a fact, let alone an event. The truth of Christmas is a poignant feeling perched between already and not yet. It is the sensation of a dull ache of something missing inside, but that could be. It is the desire for something deeper than our wants that we cannot quite imagine or name. We are born with this sense of longing. It is part of what makes us human.

I hope you have a merry Christmas. But more importantly I hope you touch and feel that longing that lies somewhere beneath all our desires because that longing leads not to the satisfaction of our desires but to God. Charlie Brown, in his anxious seeking and dissatisfaction with all the world’s answers, was on the right path to what he sought all along.

Perhaps we should follow.

December 7, 2021

Like many Western people, I tend to forget that I am a body. I experience life more as the adventures of a disembodied mind transported around by a very useful vehicle. But sometimes, my body reminds me of its importance.

Yesterday I received my Covid booster shot. Things were fine for several hours, but then in the middle of the night I found myself shivering uncontrollably. I heaped several comforters over me, which simply resulted in me sweating while shivering uncontrollably. It is a curious experience, having no control over your temperature or even involuntary muscle movements. Moments like that remind one how truly embodied, physical, visceral, even animal we truly are. Since I was obviously not going to sleep it seemed a perfect moment to reflect on the incarnation.

If you are rarely sick, it is so easy to forget the body as it fulfills every wish without protest. Those who suffer from sickness, disability, and infirmity, know better human weakness and fragility. Among the animals we are far from the most impressive in form. We are slightly less hairy hominids, good with our hands, quick to solve problems, and able to form lasting patterns of behavior as culture. But we are all quite fragile and finite.

Around this time of year, we talk about the gift of Christmas as the incarnation of God in Jesus. And it certainly is a gift for us. A divinity that knows us from the inside is far more likely to be a bit compassionate with our failings. But I wonder if the incarnation is deeper than that. Some kinds of knowledge can only be obtained from the inside. There is a profound difference between knowing about something and knowing as something. It is the difference between subject and object.

I presume as an article of faith that God could know all about human beings, but could not know as a human being without being one. And so, the creator accommodates us in our mundane form, condescending to a fleshy bag of meat and bone. It seems a bit preposterous, perhaps a bit unseemly, the ground of all being slumming with the bipedal primates, even in night sweats and tremors. But how else could God know us?

We tend to focus all our attention in Advent and Christmas on infant Jesus, but have you considered that the person of Jesus is God’s own intrepid exploration into embodied, material, and mortal flesh? This event, this life we call Jesus, is a moment of discovery for God of what it means to be not God. And if as we confess Jesus’ incarnation does not end with his resurrection (which is the whole point of Ascension) then that enfleshed, exposed, fragile, corporeality is now and is forever a part of who God is and what God does.

The boundary between up there and down here gets blurred. The line between God as subject and our world as objects gets all jumbled. God is as much down here and in us as out there, wherever there might be. We are now and will always be together.

Lying in bed shivering at three in the morning is as good a place as any to imagine the incarnation because God too did that at some point in Jesus’ 33 years. Wherever we go, whatever becomes of us, despite the ravages of time and illness and even death, we are all literally icons of the incarnate God made so by the one who refused to be God without us.
–Brian

November 30, 2021

Last week I spent a few days on the North Shore of Lake Superior far away from the city lights. Ever since I was a child, I have felt a special draw to its shores of solid rock and the endless icy cold waters. Without light pollution, I could see hundreds, perhaps thousands more stars than are visible to me here in Dayton. So, I stood out in the cold (it was 7 degrees) and simply beheld.

The Earth and all the other planets revolve around the sun in a fixed plane called the ecliptic. The constellations follow around it and the zodiac marks its circumference as seen from earth. The ecliptic crosses the Earth at a funny angle of 23 ½ degrees, which is how crooked the Earth is from solar up and down. From my perch I could make out Polaris, the North Star, to orient myself at least with regard to the solar system and visualize myself on this blue marble revolving around the sun while it rotates around its axis heading up towards Polaris. But then I noticed something far more dramatic. A shimmering band of light arched over my left shoulder. The Milky Way is simply the plane of our galaxy as seen from out here in the relative suburbs of the Orion arm. I tried to orient my mind to the galaxy as a whole, standing on a rock rotating at about 1000 miles and hour while revolving (crookedly) around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour about two thirds of the way down the Orion galactic arm slowly pinwheeling around some supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy at about 500,000 miles an hour as we all wander off in the general direction of Andromeda. Andromeda is the only galaxy we can see in the Northern Hemisphere without a telescope, and there it was before me just to the left of Pegasus’s diamond and just beneath Cassiopeia’s seat rising over the black waters of the big lake.

Spending any time in nature has a way of reorienting our perception. Spending any time in astronomy with its vast distances and deep time has a way of shredding those perceptions altogether. We are a little people on a small rocky planet revolving around an ordinary main sequence star in the outer precincts of a rather average spiral galaxy. There is nothing about us or our world that merits much attention at all from the cosmic perspective.

Except one thing.

We have been visited.

Of all the seasons of the church year, Advent is the most humbling. Here? For Us? Surely not. Certainly, the Almighty had better things to do and better places to do it. The ancients asked why Bethlehem, a shabby little camel stop on the edge of the desert? Why Mary an unmarried teenage peasant? We could just as well ask why this planet? Why this solar system? The question, in all of its contexts, is formally called the scandal of the incarnation. And I do not have an answer for it. God is under no obligation to disclose divine rationale to me even if creation’s mechanics are on beautiful display across the night sky. I do not quite let go of my questions, but I content myself with something better. I may still wonder as I wander out under the sky. There will always be mysteries abounding, but I know that I am home. I belong the visited people on the visited planet. God with us.

If you want to experience Advent, you won’t find it around a Christmas tree. Of all the seasons of the church year, Advent is the one that is best experienced in darkness. Go on a long drive out in the countryside away from all the city lights. Look up, wonder, imagine, and remember you are not alone.
–Brian

November 23, 2021

Winter is Coming!

I am not fond of cold weather. I do love the beauty of the changing seasons and the blanketed comfort of newly fallen snow but I definitely do not like the cold! Winter has been hinting of its coming the last few days. The birdbath in our yard is frozen, my car windows were frosted over with intricate star-like patterns, and the wind chill is nippy.

Winter is coming! Cold is coming! The season of shortened daylight and longer nights is coming. The bleak winter is coming.

One of the most beloved Christmas carols is the beautiful “In the Bleak Midwinter” with the haunting lyrics written in 1872 by Christina Rossetti. The tune composed by Gustav Theodore Holst in the early 1900’s is steady and somber in its flow. One can feel the cold, dark of winter as the carol moves from despair to hope:

Snow had fallen,
snow on snow,
snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter,
long ago

But the cold of winter cannot stop the glorious incarnation of God, as Rossetti’s words proclaim:

Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign
In the bleak midwinter
A stable place sufficed
The Lord God incarnate
Jesus Christ

This Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent. We enter into this winter season with a call to prepare our hearts for the coming of the Christ Child. God is coming to dwell with us in the cold, the dark, the bleak winter. Incarnate in the form of a babe born in Bethlehem, God is with us. Not cold, nor snow, nor darkness can hold back the God of love born to us this season.

May you feel the warmth of the One to come this cold winter.

Kelley

November 16, 2021

I am tired of politics. Merely saying that will be construed by some to be a partisan statement. The rancor and division in our society corrode every relationship and infect every community that seek to build bridges across human differences. And now we approach Thanksgiving with its compulsory small talk with Aunt Vivian and Cousin Edgar. May mutual forbearing dwell upon your Thanksgiving Feast.

Over the past week, I have had two conversations with two very different friends who both suggested essentially the same solution to our problem of political polarization. When you get the same advice from one of your most conservative and one of your most liberal friends, pay attention. God is trying to tell you something. Their advice, although expressed differently, came down to this. Instead of using up all your energy arguing with a system, practice, or policy with which you disagree, perhaps vehemently, stop. Stop fighting against. Instead, redirect your energy, imagination, intelligence, and love towards making a better alternative. Instead of banging your head on the gates of that community that will not listen, just start creating a new one, a different one, a better one.

Creativity, even when it fails to create the outcome we desire, is vastly healthier for our hearts and our souls than endless opposition. How we use language has a habit of becoming how we relate to people. Do we use our words to argue, criticize, or belittle, or do we use them to discover, support, encourage and build? When I was still in private legal practice, I loved the precision of words and argument, but I recognized the trap that I was slowly using all language as a means to get what I wanted. It is an insidious trap. We presume that our hearts define our behaviors, but often it is the other way round. So, if you have to choose tearing down or building up, understand that even if they are otherwise equally valid strategies for change, you will pay a price for choosing opposition.

At Thanksgiving this was ultimately the pilgrim’s option. Other puritans in England were embroiled in endless conflict with the crown that would only end in chaos and destruction of the English Civil War. The pilgrims followed an altogether different strategy seeking only to withdraw and create a new community first in the Netherlands and then in Massachusetts.

One of my friends pointed out that creating a new social reality rather than opposition to the old reality was the characteristic that defined the early church. In Jesus’ and Paul’s time, there were lots of angry people trying to change the system. And in the Roman Empire there was a lot that needed changing. But neither Jesus, nor Paul, nor anyone in the early church sought direct confrontation with Rome or any of its minions. Certainly, they had ample grounds to criticize. But outside of Revelation, that is not where they invested their energy. They ignored the dominant system and instead invested their time, labor, and love in creating new systems, new communities, that we would eventually call the church. And people came flocking to them.

If Jesus could persuade Matthew the former tax farmer for the Romans and Simon the former Zealot to work together, then maybe we can persuade liberals and conservatives, not to agree, but to help build a better community. So, instead of asking people their opinions at Thanksgiving, what might happen if we asked people how they might be willing to make a better world?
–Brian

November 9, 2021

I am a hypocrite. It is a common human condition. I practice deep breathing, centering prayer, and the Jesus prayer. I get to bed early, eat my fiber, and floss. I urge everyone to follow the 46th Psalm, “Be Still and Know that I am God.” I try to follow it and live by its comforting assurance, except when I don’t.

Unbeknownst to me, our dishwasher broke sometime on Friday. Specifically, the water line started leaking where it connected to the unit. Because our dishwasher sits an inch below tile of our kitchen, gravity carried the water elsewhere. There was no telling puddle in the kitchen. Instead, a few days later, there was an ambiguous puddle in the basement and our main closet carpet developed a unique bouquet. We now share our home with nine industrial air handler units and two gargantuan dehumidifiers with probe tubes inserted into every joist and cranny. Parts of our home look like they have been assimilated by the Borg. But that is not the real problem. The entire home now sounds in both frequency and volume like the inside of a jetliner’s turbofan. They assure me that everything will be dry in four or five days of continuous operation.

Some distractions in life are impossible to ignore. Some stressors, like wondering if your floor will collapse, should not be disregarded. We are material creatures living in a material world, not idealized spirits traversing an ethereal realm. That means matter matters. This discomforting, intrusive, and annoyingly humbling lesson has been repeated over and over again for us in the past 21 months.

Sometimes the world just happens to us. Trying to maintain quiet calm in a silent room is easy. Trying to maintain equanimity inside cacophony is impossible. There is enormous benefit to be gained by learning how to hold stress at a distance from your inner self. But sometimes, what you really need is physical distance.

I have always been impressed at the times and ways Jesus separates himself from all the conflicting demands and expectations projected onto him—at the beginning of his ministry, before turning towards Jerusalem, and of course during that final night in the garden. Mary and Joseph, politically astute observers of Israelite politics, knew when to hightail it down to Egypt avoiding the wave of violence that swept over Egypt upon the death of Herod the Great. Jeremiah, David, Moses, Amos, and the entire host of the Exodus among others, all had the good sense to get out of where they were when things got too hairy. Sometimes, when facing duress, the best thing we can do is go somewhere else.

I pause. I breathe. I recite the 46th Psalm. It does not work. The blank white WORD page stares back eagerly expectant, but disappointed. There is too much noise. What is that smell? Too many worries and way too much sensation demand may attention. And I suspect that is where many of us have been for far too long.

Just remember, God is with us wherever we go. Maybe we flee to another country. Maybe like me you flee to Dairy Queen. God is there too. The test of faith is not one’s ability to endure stress. Sometimes the real test of faith is whether you are willing to move and change. God does not want us to be miserable. God wants us to flourish. Sometimes, in order to do that you need to be willing to leave the familiar and strike out for a new place or maybe just a different place.

There are still quiet places out there where you can hear yourself think and perhaps a still soft voice still whispering. You may need hiking boots, GPS, and a water bottle to find them, but they still exist. You will always need the courage to value yourself highly enough to go at all. That is all self-care is: the courage to honor God’s creation and God’s creature.
–Brian

November 2, 2021

Monday, November 1, was All Saints’ Day. We often treat it as a time to remember those who have died in the past year sort of like a communal Christian Yahrzeit. And every family that has experienced loss this year will remember, give thanks, and grieve in their own way. For me, it is a day to remember the body of Christ expressed in millions of messed up, ordinary women and men down through the past twenty centuries. They are not all saints because they were especially holy or virtuous, let alone sinless. They were saints because of the hope they held in common that oriented their lives in ways big and small. They were saints because God was at work in them, even when others, even when they themselves could not perceive it.

Saints are too often imagined as impossibly good women and men who did amazingly selfless things all the time. That caricature has done far more harm than good by separating them from us. All Saints’ Day is not limited to ascetic virtuosos and spiritual prodigies. Instead, it is about us. All of us. All Saints’ is the one day in the Christian calendar that is not about the life of Jesus. It is about all the days of all of us who try–often failingly, provisionally, and reluctantly–to follow Jesus. All Saints’ is a celebration of the beautiful, confusing messiness of being human and the quiet steady urge to become something more.

The saints were not saints. They were up to their halos in moral contradictions, oppressive systems, abuses of power, gross inequalities, and sometimes astonishing evil. My beloved posse of Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, John Cassian, Origen, Dionysius the Areopagite, Teresa of Avilla, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Gregory of Palamas, Symeon the New Theologian, Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil, were all highly opinionated, occasionally misanthropic, often misogynistic, prejudiced, and proud. But they all taught me across the centuries. I could feel their hearts’ yearnings align with mine. They are a sharp-tongued, argumentative lot, but I love them because I felt their love for me through the little notes they left behind for all who might follow after.

The often shabby parade of saints is all around us. Consider who has changed your life and your faith? Who has given you hope? Who has given you courage? Who brought you a pizza on that darkest night? Who offered to stay late and hear you out that time you just needed someone to listen? Who saw in you a possibility that you could never have seen yourself? That person is a saint. I hope you can name lots of them. They were not perfect. Nothing in this creation is perfect. But everything and everyone in this creation can become a part of God’s perfection of all things. Everything and everyone can participate in the healing of creation, one life at a time.

Martin Luther coined a phrase, “simul justus et peccator,” which means “simultaneously a sinner and a saint.” It captures the profoundly odd paradox of simultaneously being of God and the world at the same time. We are the redeemed and those in need of redemption. We are the patients and the healers. We are the living crucibles of sin and grace in which Spirit encounters flesh. There are no prizes for perfection that we will never attain, only the compassion that comes from empathy and mutual understanding of how much we try and how badly we often fail.

God meets us as us and in us not in some perfected angelic world, but in this messed up one. The whole creation thing suggests that God got rather bored with the angelic world and decided instead to go slumming with us. So, we struggle, slouch, and strive together on the pilgrim’s way, saints with slightly dented halos and robes stained with the blood and mud of creaturely life. We do not celebrate our perfection that is so obviously lacking. We celebrate the shared impulse that calls us out, calls us together, and nudges us forward. We do not celebrate saintliness. We celebrate grace.
–Brian

October 26, 2021

Since the beginning of Covid in March, 2020, I have spent a lot of time in my home office. If you have participated in any of our online classes or meetings over the past 20 months you have seen it. The walls around my desk, just outside of the camera angle, are covered with swords. Admittedly, it is not the most common collector’s item. When I write Beside Still Waters, as I am doing now, just above the computer monitor hang a shamshir, arming sword, hand and half sword, and a Victorian saber. To my right hang a spatha, spadroon, and mortuary sword. To my left hang a rapier, basket hilted broadsword, Hungarian saber, gladius, and a shirasaya. The only sword I have ever actually used on human beings, my old fencing epee, lies on a shelf behind me. I keep them around not as weapons, but as symbols. Starting in late antiquity, the sword became identified in Christendom with the protection of the community, justice, as well as both clarity and purity of purpose.

While I share all those chivalrous associations, swords’ symbolic meaning is a bit more utilitarian for me. My swords are all made out of high carbon steel. High carbon steel will bend without breaking. If it is spring tempered, by repeatedly heating and hammering it, the steel becomes elastic—always resuming its original shape after bending. Some can literally be bent 45 degrees and snap right back into shape. Most knives in your home are made out of stainless steel. It is very practical requiring no special care. And since most kitchen knives rarely encounter anything harder than a spaghetti squash, their elasticity does not really matter. But if a high carbon blade ever made full contact with a stainless steel blade, the stainless one would shatter. Stainless steel is very pretty, very low maintenance, but very brittle. High carbon blades on the other hand require care and attention. They are prone to rust without proper care. You need to oil or wax them regularly. With proper care, they will last for centuries.

After 20 months of pandemic, epidemic, endemic, or whatever you call this, we all expected things would be easier. We all wanted and anticipated a return to normalcy to our lives and our world that never seems to come. It is so easy to get lost in the anxiety and the grief. It is so easy to despair. Then I look around at my swords. They were created for conflict and adversity. They were made to bend, but not break. Flexibility is their greatest strength always returning to their original form no matter the duress. They remind me that is how we all were made, not for a perfect world but this adverse one, built to bend but not break. And then I remember that this rare quality is hard won. Spring tempered carbon steel is made by pounding, pounding, pounding. It is the adversity over time that makes us flexible. No one is simply born with it. After all that, it still requires attentive care. You need to scour away the rusty bits before they spread and regularly apply protective coatings just like I need to keep an eye on my anxieties and grief and prevent its spread through those things that protect my spirit: rest, prayer, learning, friends, good food, and most of all love. It may not look all that impressive on Facebook, not shiny like stainless steel or silver, but such a life is strong.

The days grow shorter. The leaves fall. We approach the second winter of our discontent unbowed, unbent, and unbroken. Take care of yourself. Be gentle with yourself and other people. The world will take care of the pounding on its own. You are already stronger than you realize. You will bend back.
–Brian

October 26, 2021

Since the beginning of Covid in March, 2020, I have spent a lot of time in my home office. If you have participated in any of our online classes or meetings over the past 20 months you have seen it. The walls around my desk, just outside of the camera angle, are covered with swords. Admittedly, it is not the most common collector’s item. When I write Beside Still Waters, as I am doing now, just above the computer monitor hang a shamshir, arming sword, hand and half sword, and a Victorian saber. To my right hang a spatha, spadroon, and mortuary sword. To my left hang a rapier, basket hilted broadsword, Hungarian saber, gladius, and a shirasaya. The only sword I have ever actually used on human beings, my old fencing epee, lies on a shelf behind me. I keep them around not as weapons, but as symbols. Starting in late antiquity, the sword became identified in Christendom with the protection of the community, justice, as well as both clarity and purity of purpose.

While I share all those chivalrous associations, swords’ symbolic meaning is a bit more utilitarian for me. My swords are all made out of high carbon steel. High carbon steel will bend without breaking. If it is spring tempered, by repeatedly heating and hammering it, the steel becomes elastic—always resuming its original shape after bending. Some can literally be bent 45 degrees and snap right back into shape. Most knives in your home are made out of stainless steel. It is very practical requiring no special care. And since most kitchen knives rarely encounter anything harder than a spaghetti squash, their elasticity does not really matter. But if a high carbon blade ever made full contact with a stainless steel blade, the stainless one would shatter. Stainless steel is very pretty, very low maintenance, but very brittle. High carbon blades on the other hand require care and attention. They are prone to rust without proper care. You need to oil or wax them regularly. With proper care, they will last for centuries.

After 20 months of pandemic, epidemic, endemic, or whatever you call this, we all expected things would be easier. We all wanted and anticipated a return to normalcy to our lives and our world that never seems to come. It is so easy to get lost in the anxiety and the grief. It is so easy to despair. Then I look around at my swords. They were created for conflict and adversity. They were made to bend, but not break. Flexibility is their greatest strength always returning to their original form no matter the duress. They remind me that is how we all were made, not for a perfect world but this adverse one, built to bend but not break. And then I remember that this rare quality is hard won. Spring tempered carbon steel is made by pounding, pounding, pounding. It is the adversity over time that makes us flexible. No one is simply born with it. After all that, it still requires attentive care. You need to scour away the rusty bits before they spread and regularly apply protective coatings just like I need to keep an eye on my anxieties and grief and prevent its spread through those things that protect my spirit: rest, prayer, learning, friends, good food, and most of all love. It may not look all that impressive on Facebook, not shiny like stainless steel or silver, but such a life is strong.

The days grow shorter. The leaves fall. We approach the second winter of our discontent unbowed, unbent, and unbroken. Take care of yourself. Be gentle with yourself and other people. The world will take care of the pounding on its own. You are already stronger than you realize. You will bend back.
–Brian

October 19, 2021

Many human beings are not at their very best right now. People are tired, frustrated, and anxious. Many are grieving the loss of important moments over the past year and hopes for the next. Many are grieving the loss of important people in their lives. Lurking among all the griefs is the ever-present companion of anxiety, the inchoate fear that something, anything could go wrong. Another virus outbreak is always just a single virus mutation away. So, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Anxiety and grief rarely make us better people. Sometimes they cripple us. At other times they deform us into something less than we could be. Far too often, we utterly fail to recognize or address these powerful, insidious feelings welling deep within us. Unaddressed, unconsidered, and unprocessed they fester somewhere beneath conscious thought slowly metastasizing into paralyzing fear and anger. It does not take a gifted sociologist to notice the anxiety and anger swirling all around us right now. Unsolicited criticism, impatience, passive aggressive digs, less than charitable judgments, shame, and occasional outbursts of rage all abound. Today I saw it at a checkout line. The absence of a single order of French fries is a disappointment that can be easily rectified. It does not justify an explosion of anger, invective, and cruelty. French fries are simply not that significant. Only deep unaddressed hurt can propel that kind of fury.

For most otherwise mentally stable people, anger is always a symptom of hurt. And anxiety is a symptom of our own fears. We rarely go down to the subbasements of our hearts to consider those hurts and fears. They are too tender. We do not like to share them with others, afraid of further pain or shame. And we often fail to consider them in ourselves. That kind of self-examination takes too much courage. So, we prefer denial, rationalizations, and blame, anything except dealing with our own pain. But pain that is not transformed will be transmitted and anxiety that is not transmuted will be transferred. So instead of doing something about their cause, we take these darker feelings and throw them at others hoping that somehow something will stick and bring us relief. But have you noticed that getting angry at others rarely takes away one’s own pain? Spreading anxiety with friends and family rarely makes us feel safer although it can make us lonelier. At best, we now suffer in the company of others.

So how do you deal with pain? As Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, “Knowing where the trap is—that’s the first step in evading it.” Ask yourself, where is it, what is it connected to, who is it connected to, when did it begin, how does it feel, and what does it lead me to do or not do? Tenderly probing its shape and dimension, our pain takes concrete form in our minds. And once pain becomes a clear idea, then it both loses some of its insidious power over us and permits us to begin little healing mind experiments. What brings some relief? What do we need to do to avoid provoking it? And most importantly, what actual events (not thoughts) ease the pain? This requires careful attention to notice as pain goes up and down during the day, but observation will show you what works for you.

Similarly, the key to transmuting fear is attention. What is it precisely that I am afraid of? Is that fear rational or just an illusion? Do I know this to be a threat for certain? What triggers my fear? Did someone else infect me with it? Does this fear belong to someone else? What is the worst that can happen and what is this fear preventing me from doing or not doing? Again, through attention, fear takes on form that can be acted upon, moderated, and eventually brought back to its proper dimensions of a health sense of self preservation. Again, I quote from Herbert (can you tell I am excited about the new Dune movie?): “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

What we call sin is simply alienation from God, others, and our selves. Sin is a problem of separation and denial of our true selves more than an issue of morality. Sin gets expressed most commonly in the human experiences of pain and fear. Fear and pain are universal human experiences because that underlying separation is a universal human condition. Sin is an alien force that corrupts us in our most hidden and vulnerable depths. Naughty things we may have done and good things we fail to do are not sin, they may however be the consequences or symptoms of sin. The tool that the church has provided us for dealing with sin, at least from the human side of things, is the practice of confession that simply unearths it all and brings what longs to remain hidden out into the light.

When we say we confess our sin, we do not mean that we recite a long list of naughty things we have done (although depending on your industry you may want to do that as well). When we say we confess sin to God, what we really mean is paying this careful, particular attention to the pain and fear that keep us separate and apart. Confession literally means speaking your truth, not contrition or regret. When we acknowledge and address our pain, it is a sort of creed, an assertion of who we really are in our messed-up lives, and a declaration of hope that in speaking or perhaps whispering our truth someone is listening and will begin the process of healing. Confession robs sin of its pernicious power. Confession is simply attention and often the first step to healing. And all it requires, indeed the essence of all prayer, is simply sincere attention.

The cure for sin, pain, and fear from our end of creation is simply honest, unblinking truth. Confession only hurts sin, not you. So speak your truth. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John 8:32.
–Brian

October 12, 2021

One thing I miss about Fall in Minnesota are Birch forests. Along the North Shore of Lake Superior, whole forests of Paper Birch carpet the stony basalt hillsides jutting down to the icy clear water. In the Autumn, the leaves turn a pale golden color. Midway through the seasonal change, the ground is completely covered by a pale golden canopy above held up by great white tree trunks and a golden canopy beneath. For a few days every Fall, the light in a northern birch forest takes on an ethereal quality of pure gold. Everything shimmers with golden iridescence. It is what I imagine the light of heaven looks like.

Nature does two important things for our spirits that may at first seem contradictory, but if you can hold them together at the same time, you are well on your way to true perception and wisdom. First, nature reminds us that we are not so very important. Before a mountain, an ocean, or even an old growth forest, we are nothing. Our plans, ambitions, hopes, fears, pains, and memories, fade before their vastness, complexity, gravity, and depth. In the power of weather, wind, rock, and wave, our own agency disappears into the limit of nothingness. The ocean pulses to its own tidal rhythms regardless of all out intentions. Nature is the ultimate reminder that in the vast scheme of things, our precious egos around which we construct lives, cultures, and civilizations count for precisely nothing.

Downgrading our fondest ambitions is never comfortable but is of the essence for spiritual growth. The central tenet of all monotheism is that there is a God, and He/She/It is not me or you. Sadly, too many people get this confused, which leads to all sorts of pain. Nature is the ready antidote always willing to remind and reframe that you are nothing. Curiously, this lesson is not painful or insulting, but somehow comforting because of nature’s second lesson.

You and I are nothing. And we belong to everything. The spirituality of nature offers a deeper lesson beyond our egos and their constant obsession with control. If you let go of control, if you simply behold, you will discover a curious perception that while we may be nothing, we belong to everything. Most people experience this as a pronounced emotional feeling of awe, a need to drop to one’s knees, and an overwhelming feeling of gratitude and joy. You look to your own hands and cannot quite tell where they end and the mountains or the waves begin. You begin to empathically perceive the interconnectedness of all things. The clear lines of definition and separation begin to blur as the boundary between me and the world gets fuzzy and all suffused by an ethereal golden light.

I do not believe that nature offers us definitive answers to our spiritual seeking, but it can provide a doorway into deeper mysteries. Nature can realign our perception away from all our attachments towards the tendrils of belonging that provide the ground of our being and becoming. Holding these twin revelations—I am nothing and I belong to everything—not as logical deductions, but simply lived experiences of embodied truth, we are offered an entry point into the deeps where even the nonreligious may encounter God.

I am not a nature mystic. I do not think that nature is a church or can reveal all we need to know. Nature is profoundly amoral. But it can teach us the first and perhaps most important lesson that on our own we do not count for so very much, but in our belonging and connection, we are a part of everything.

When I walk among the ghostly white birch trees and their golden tresses and flaxen carpets, I am reminded that I too will let go one day. I too will die. But I am not afraid. I belong. When the leaf realizes it is actually the forest, it loses all fear.

–Brian

October 5, 2021

Psalms: Prayers of the Heart

This autumn we will fall into the comfort and familiarity of the songs of God’s people – the Psalms. For the months of October and November we will be preaching from the Psalms. Our canon – our Bible – contains 150 psalms but there were other songs and prayers of the Hebrew people in the form of the psalms.

We know the beloved psalms such as Psalm 23 (The Lord is my Shepherd) and Psalm 100 (Make a joyful noise to the Lord) but do we know the “heart of the sea” in Psalm 46 or the “hope of the ends of the earth” in Psalm 65 or God our “hiding place” in Psalm 32 or the great “Leviathan” in Psalm 104?

Through the sung prayers and poetry of the Psalms, we find our deepest yearnings voiced and our silent sufferings healed. The Psalms give us permission to be angry, to be sorrowful, to be joyful, to be humble, and to be thankful.

Together with these ancient writings of poetry and praise, we will see how the Psalms of God’s people speak truth to God’s saving work in Jesus Christ.

What is your favorite psalm? Why does it speak to your heart? How does that psalm inform your daily life? Do you sing the psalms or read them silently?

As a young adult I was drawn to Psalm 51, a psalm we usually read as part of our Lenten practice. I found comfort in the confessional nature of Psalm 51, a psalm attributed to King David when Nathan the Prophet called out David’s sin when he stole Bathsheba and had her husband, Uriah, killed in battle.

I promise I have not stolen anyone’s spouse nor had anyone killed but I do find Psalm 51 to be a healing and cleansing psalm for me when I am in need of a new beginning or a second chance. Psalm 51 speaks magnificently to me of God’s grace and redemption.

Join us in embracing the words and the prayers of the Psalms as we hear the laments and joys of God’s people.

Peace,
Pastor Kelley

September 28, 2021

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

An uncomfortable truth that we prefer to ignore is that very little we do in this life remains very long. Our friends and families will remember us for a generation or two. If you make some extraordinary contribution people will remember you for a few centuries. If you hurt a lot of people, you may be remembered for a few centuries more. If you really want to be remembered, giant monuments help (King Zoser still has his pyramid). The most ancient known individual we can name is a Mesopotamian from Uruk named Kushim who appears to have been involved in barley distribution around 3400 BC, but an accounting ledger is not exactly a rich biography. For the vast majority of all the human beings who have ever lived, we are forgotten by history.

One of the hardest lessons that time teaches us is the vanity of our pride and ambitions. Ecclesiastes asks us, “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.” 1 Peter answers the question, “All flesh is as grass, And all the glory of man is the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls away.” Or as Shakespeare put it at the end of Cymbeline, “The scepter, learning, physic, must all follow this, and come to dust.”

What we do matters a great deal proximately to our selves and those closest to us. But as we recede in time and space, all our deeds matter less and less. And all our anxieties and shames, especially that we have not done enough, worked enough, loved enough, and achieved enough disappear in the scale of eternity.

Existentialists have grappled with these cold facts for a century. Indeed, if you gaze too deeply it will drive one to despair (witness the lifestyles of existentialists if you do not believe me). But there is an alternative foundation for our identity and destiny. Instead of centering ourselves on doing we can center ourselves on being.

Being is not the opposite of doing. Being is the firm foundation for all right action. Being is rooted not in desire and will (that usually get us into trouble), but rather in belonging. We are who are in connection with others, and we experience and develop a sense of self in relationship with others. We are who we are in the thick web of belonging, both with other people, the world around us, and other far more durable foundations.

Blaise Pascal once observed that, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” By that he meant that human beings have a hard time centering ourselves on being rather than doing. But being seems to be exactly what God had in mind in a garden a very long time ago. God seems at best mildly amused with all our doings (consider Babel).
One would think that being would be a far more attractive option for human identity. The problem is that our egos get in the way. Being is a gift, not an accomplishment. We derive no egoic satisfaction from being. So, we go off looking for things to control and achieve.

Being is so much simpler. Genesis describes us as being made in the image and likeness of God, not accomplishing tasks similar to God’s. Our true identity is not something we earn, achieve, or build. It is a gift. It is all a gift. And a gift does not require accomplishment, it simply requires acceptance.

Sitting quietly, knowing in your deepest essence who you are and whose you are and accepting that as the greatest gift is the foundation from which all right action, all right doing emerges. What we do must be the expression of who we are, not the other way around or we are all in deep trouble. The gift of being, infinite love giving itself away in and as this moment is both the ultimate expression of reality and the only durable foundation for our identities. We are who we truly are only in God not in our accomplishments.

As I have gotten older, I have discarded many desires and let go of many ambitions that did not belong to me. Each one was a beautiful trap for the unwary and the proud. Life disabused me of my pride, but then something else from somewhere else invited me into something so much better. Beyond all our proud strivings is a still point of being that cannot be moved. It is the strong fortress that the psalmist spoke of, the warm place where being emerges from belonging sheltered beneath the mother eagle’s wing. We do not need to worry about eternity because we rest in one who is eternity.

It is all so simple.

Be still and know that I am God
Be still and know that I am
Be still and know
Be still
Be

–Brian

September 21, 2021

Last week I shared a bit about how participation seems to be the central idea holding most Christian doctrine and spirituality together. The early Christians called this Methexis, borrowing the term from Greek theater for when the audience participated in the action on stage or the music. That can all sound rather abstract. A reasonable question is how exactly does one participate in or with God. The answer is simple: imitation.

In order to explain the shape of Christian life, the early church borrowed another idea from Greek art: mimesis. Mimesis literally means imitation (actually it is the root of our word imitation and mimic). More specifically it refers to the inner beauty, pattern, and order of something that human beings try to imitate in our artistic representations. So, a marble statue of a discus thrower tries to imitate (mimesis) something of the original athlete’s balance, strength, and striving. The early church fathers borrowed this idea to explain the nature of Christian life. We are all called to participate in and through God by imitation, specifically imitating the expression of God in human life we call Jesus the Christ.

It is hard to think about, let alone understand, God in God’s own self, but we do not have to. We know God in and through God in the flesh as one of us. Imitating Jesus is imitating God as much as any human being can. This suggests’ that Jesus whole life, not just his oral teachings, was meant as a lesson for humanity on how to be a human being. Some in the church focus on what Jesus said. Others focus on what Jesus did. The ancient church taught they were inseparable and the whole of Jesus’ life, everything he did and said, is a guide for us in how to be what we are meant to be.

Imitation of course is not duplication. In music, imitation is one way a musician learns to play. But she or he will never play exactly the saw way as the original performer. Instead, tiny little differences creep in. These differences are why all imitation is a form of improvisation. We make the imitation our own. Imitation without improvisation is called a recording.

Think of Jesus like a jazz band leader. He lays out his rhythm for us to follow and a few key phrases for the melody. Then it is up to us to develop the themes on our own instruments in our own time. A piano, a saxophone, and a trumpet will all imitate in different ways, each contributing something to the whole. We are all imitating the bandleader, but we are all necessarily doing so in our own way. When it works, improvisational music is richer and deeper than it could have been in the beginning. Even when mistakes are made and dissonant notes played, they can all be skillfully worked into the theme with even deeper harmonies.

There are lots of discordant notes in our lives and in our world. Pain, suffering, cruelty, and death seem to get the last word. But what if all those dissonances were merely the material out of which a deeper harmony is woven? What if our calling is simply to imitate the band leader and make something beautiful out of all the notes, even those we never wanted? No one can tell until the end of the song.

I do not know what God wants of me. But I can try to imitate Jesus (with the emphasis on try not can). And that imitation may not only be the key to a good life, it may actually be the objective way to encounter God. When Jesus said in John 14, “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the father except through me,” maybe he was not talking about how we should be thinking about him. Maybe Jesus was telling us to imitate him.

–Brian

September 14, 2021

Concerning Participation

The one idea that holds my faith and spirituality together is participation in, by, through, and with God and others. Participation makes sense of everything else in my theology. Creation, in the image of God, is the original stamp of and invitation to that participation. Love and grace are our experiences of the bond that fuses us into that participation. Sin is the separation that rejects participation. Redemption is the loosening of other bonds as we lose ourselves in that participation. Atonement is God’s sweeping invitation pulling us into the vast dance of participation in Trinity through Christ. Election is our standing invitation and nudging instinct that we were made for participation. Salvation is losing oneself in that ecstatic (literally being beyond yourself) participation through Christ. The church is the social expression of that shared participation in community. And Trinity is simply the title we give to God to acknowledge that God in God’s own self is participation, belonging, and communion.

In spirituality, participation makes sense of prayer where prayer rightly understood is direct communion with God’s love giving itself away in and as this moment. Participation in God is what gives us that uncanny sense of wonder and awe because it is always and necessarily beyond every human understanding. Participation is always experienced as losing oneself in bigger and bigger realms of wonder and being. Participation is what grounds human life in hope knowing that our life in and through God cannot be shaken or undone by anything in this creation because its foundations are far deeper than creation itself. Participation explains why we have such an affinity for creativity, beauty, and the arts striving to participate in our own way in God’s creative work as subcreators. Finally, participation suggests that human life and growth do not end at death, but continue into an eternal progression of greater intimacy, connection, awareness, and sharing with God. What we do today to participate in God, no matter how mundane, resounds unto eternity.

Participation is not some flaky notion that we become God. Humans are creatures (created beings) and some days, I do not even do that so well. Creatures do not become God. Instead, we are invited to participate in divinity. This is how Paul and the very earliest Christians understood Christ’s work in our lives and in our world. Growing up I was told that what mattered was having “faith in Jesus” citing Galatians 2:16 and other texts. It was only when I started reading the Greek text that I realized that same phrase could be better translated as “faith of Jesus.” In other words, what matters are not the assertions and assumptions that I make about who Jesus is, but rather Jesus’ own trust and intimacy with God. We are justified and we are ultimately saved not because of what we believe (which is probably wrong anyway), but rather because of how Jesus trusts and who he is as son. So, when we participate in him, we are of necessity participating in God. This also explains all the convoluted transitive grammar about Jesus being in God and us being in Jesus. Jesus both came to show us how to do this in his teaching and then made it possible through his death and resurrection for even gentiles like us to now belong and participate.

Through participation, faith is not assenting to a bunch of assertions. Faith is trusting relationship and giving oneself over to the divine dance. One of my favorite ancient thinkers, Gregory of Nyssa introduced the notion of methexis into Christian life. Methexis is a term from ancient Greek theater for when the entire audience would join in with the players on stage and improvise a scene or a song together. We are like that audience invited to join in with what God is doing. Jesus taught us the themes of how to be truly human. Now God is inviting us to join in the cosmic participatory jam session. Centuries later, another of my favorite thinkers Owen Barfield (J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s longtime friend and drinking buddy, Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was written for Barfield’s daughter Lucy), picked up this notion in describing human life as the wilderness between original and final participation. For Barfield, as for Gregory and for Paul, the destiny of human life is full, final, conscious, participative belonging in God.

“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27). “[Y]ou belong to Christ; and Christ belongs to God.” (1 Corinthians 3:23). “[A]ll things that are Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine; and I have been glorified in them. (John 17:10). “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1). “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14:20). Too often we treat these and other verses like them as metaphors. But what if they are actual descriptions of who we are, and who we may yet be in Christ?

All we have to lose is our bondage. All we have to gain is . . . everything.

—Brian

September 7, 2021

I returned late last night from a wonderful family visit to Oregon with every intention of writing about participation as the organizing theme of Christian spirituality.

And then I came into the office this morning.

In the past fortnight, four beloved members of our congregation died. It made all too real the ubiquitous sense of grief that seems to hang like a dank pall over our world right now. So tonight, I think of them and their smiles. I think on my own memories of conversations with them and their kindnesses, humor, wisdom, and curiosities. And then I hold up all those who loved them in their pain and grief hoping that somehow, in holding them before the light of God’s radiant love, their pain would be diminished and grief lessened. But I know too well that grief will not be ignored or denied. Our God has an annoying habit of not relieving us from pain, but rather companioning us through it. Saint Teresa of Avila is attributed to have quipped in prayer, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, perhaps it explains why you have so few.”

Grief is everywhere and infecting everyone. For some, like the family members of those who have died, grief takes on the sharp, tearing sensation of trauma. For others, it is like a chronic ache. Time does not heal all wounds. Some we just learn to live with. For still others, grief is diffused, not anchored to one particular loss, rather omnipresent as it slowly saps life of its color and flavor. After the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis observed, “Grief … gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.” (A Grief Observed)

Grief manifests itself in the infinite diversity of human beings and forms of loss. Unfortunately, too often we tend to evaluate, measure, or judge grief, both our own and others’. There is no “right” measure of grief. It is at best futile and more likely hurtful to even compare. No good has ever come from trying to comfort another person with any sentence beginning, “Well, at least . . . “

Our society’s preferred response to grief is denial. Get over it. Get on with it. Buck up. The problem is that grief is not a personal emotion to be controlled so much as an outside force that refuses our bidding. It can overtake us in an instant like a tsunami that thrusts aside every other sensation, thought, or feeling, sometimes literally taking our breath away. At the least convenient of times, it intrudes unbidden making a mess of our well laid plans. And more ominously, grief denied tends to metastasize into boundless anger at others and ourselves. We can see symptoms of this anger/rage all too clearly in our society.

I would like to offer a simple panacea for our pains. I cannot. Loss comes for the just and the unjust. God does not relieve, rescue, or extract us from the pain. Lewis remarked, “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.” A cursory reading of scripture reveals that the most devoted of God’s servants avoided none of the slings and arrow of outrageous fortune. Instead, they went through it. The only thing to do with suffering is suffer through it. But we do not do so alone.

Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, I know you are hurting right now. Our community, nation, and world are hurting. The causes may seem petty to others or titanic. It does not matter. You are not imagining it. There is no deserving or undeserving. Your pain is your pain. And it is all too real, but not really a thing that can be measured and mapped, let alone quantified or controlled. It is more of a process or a journey that must be undergone not according to a calendar or preordained route, but simply followed.

Of all the world’s religions, none save Christianity equate the full revelation of God with pain, humiliation, suffering, and death. The honest truth is I have not even begun to penetrate the depths of that mystery. But one thing I do know for certain. In the depths of loss and grief, we are not alone. When we lose everything, we are found. Sometimes in grief it feels like we are walking in circles, and perhaps we are. But we may also be walking up or down a great spiral that leads to somewhere, something, someone I could not find on my own.

I do not close with a blessing to be delivered from all pain, which I know would be not merely a lie, but quite likely blasphemy. Instead, I can only offer this which may be far more. May Jesus companion you along your way until you find your rest in him.
–Brian

August 31, 2021

Solvitur Ambulando

Solvitur Ambulando is a Latin phrase that in its simplest form means “It is solved by walking.” On a practical level this phrase refers to anything that is solved by a practical demonstration or experiment. On a deeper level the phrase has taken on a more spiritual meaning, referring to the practice of walking as prayer or spiritual discipline in order to clear one’s mind or spirit.

In my early years of ordained ministry, I struggled to identify a practice of spiritual discipline that felt like “home” to me. The common practices of journaling or writing or fasting or meditative prayer were more difficult for me.
Of course, all spiritual practices are difficult and require a commitment of heart, mind, and soul; and even more importantly, a commitment of time.

But the desire and the time were not the stumbling block for me. It was the form of the spiritual practice that was a struggle. Silent, meditative prayer in a dark space does not speak “peace” to me! I do not like to close my eyes when I pray. I am much more deeply drawn to open-eyed prayer than closed-eye prayer. And, “silent” and “still” are not words with which any of my closest friends would describe me. I am a verbal processor and not very “silent.” And I rarely hold my hands or feet still even when I am sitting. I prefer all things visual and verbal and tangible and kinetic!

And so, even in my younger years, I began to be drawn to movement as spiritual practice, and specifically the practice of walking. I vastly preferred walking to biking or walking to driving if time and distance allowed. And on those long neighborhood walks to school or back home or just for the joy of taking a walk, I began to find my voice in prayer. I found something deeply grounding in the practice of walking. I felt a wholeness of body, mind, and spirit that I rarely found anywhere else.

My spiritual practice of walking and hiking continues today. Visually, the unmatched beauty of creation centers me for prayer and draws me to my Creator. Kinetically, I feel God’s presence in the miracle of my body; muscles, bones, skin, and organs all moving together to remind me that I am human. Verbally, I find a freedom outdoors to lift my voice in prayer or song, even with the occasional glance of a passerby. And tangibly, I can touch the leaves and trees and ground with my hands and feet, and feel the wind and sun upon my skin. Prayer has become for me an act of place and movement. With all of my senses, I am in prayer with God.

I recently applied to a hiking challenge called Over 50 Outdoors for women fifty years old and over that is sponsored by an outdoor program called the 52 Hike Challenge (www.52hikechallenge.com). I was delighted to be chosen as one of 150 women from across the United States who have covenanted to hike once a week for a year and stay connected with each other through monthly meetings and online apps and social media. There is such a spiritual bond already among the women despite our distance apart and our different life stories.

Will you join me this year in hiking as a spiritual practice or a community act? Maybe you already walk in your neighborhood or in a local indoor mall. Maybe you walk alone or with friends or family. Maybe you hike in some of the amazing metro parks in the Dayton area. Or maybe you take a short stroll around your yard or up and down your driveway. All of these are wonderful ways to “solvitur ambulando.”

I will be leading quarterly church hikes this year – autumn, winter, spring, and summer – for all ages and paces of our church family. I hope you will consider joining me in walking as a spiritual practice as we grow together as God’s people. Watch the newsletter, bulletin, and weekly emails for upcoming details on our church hikes.

Peace to you,

Kelley

August 24, 2021

How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity…
It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore.
Psalm 133:1-2

Kindred. A beautiful word. A soul word.

I just returned from a trip to Oklahoma visiting my beloved kindred – my mom, my dad, and my brothers – for the first time since the pandemic! I had not seen my family in-person for a very long time. Many tears of joy were shed!

It was so comforting and natural to be “home” again. Mom fixed our favorite meals, dad and I walked each morning, and my brothers and I laughed to the point of tears. There is healing in being with our kindred, our beloved people. No matter the distance or the passage of time, kindred connect in deeper, unspoken ways. Our belonging almost feels eternal. As the psalmist proclaims in Psalm 133, “How good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.”

We are kindred, dear Fairmont folk! We are family and we belong to one another. It is easy to forget in the midst of a still unknown and unfamiliar “post pandemic” way of being the Body of Christ that we are kindred. It may be more difficult to feel our deeper connections when we are divided among three different worship venues – 8:30 a.m. service, 10:30 a.m. service, and live-streaming – but we are kindred! We belong to God and we belong to one another. Our belonging is eternal and neither pandemic nor social distancing nor online programming can keep us from being beloved kindred of God!

Our summer days are soon coming to a close and we will celebrate the beginning of a new church year. Many of us have been scattered across the country this summer reconnecting with beloved kindred and finding a much needed sabbath break from work and responsibilities at home. And yet as summer moves into fall, we find a natural gravitation once again to be with those who are kindred, who are our beloved family. The family of God.

How very good and pleasant it is indeed when kindred dwell together in unity! I am grateful for you, beloved kindred, for the community and covenant we share as God’s people. Our time together – in worship, in bible study, in fellowship, in mission – is healing for me. May it be so for you.

Love and peace,

Kelley

August 17, 2021

My Last Word (at least for a while) on Spirituality and Religion

We often get confused about what we are talking about whenever we talk about God. Much of the time, when we think we are talking about God, we are merely talking or thinking about ourselves. In the church much of what passes for “religion” is simply the sum total of propositions to which one is supposed to assent. Throughout this summer I have been trying to draw some distinctions and point our attention away from ourselves and away from all the assertions of religion towards spirituality.

“Spirituality” is one of our most overused and underconsidered words. While “religion” refers collectively to all the content of our belief systems as well as the practices and institutions associated with those beliefs. In other words, religion is all about content. Spirituality refers to process or method, the process or method of encountering God. Specifically, spirituality is simply the way we seek God, the experience of encounter with God, and how we reflect upon that experience. In other words, spirituality is all about verbs and we are often the object and not the subject of those verbs. While religion is anchored in assertions that are external to our lives, like the events outside of Jerusalem around 33 AD, spirituality is anchored in our own subjective, personal experience how we seek God and how God encounters us.

For me, spirituality necessarily precedes religion. My encounters with this supernatural other I summarily label “God” led me to explore the content of how generations came to make sense of their encounters. For me, religion is simply the content making sense of my spirituality. Experience, not faith, provides my bedrock and starting point. Christianity is the explanatory model that best fit those experiences and made compelling sense and so I am a Christian, at least as the community defines that term. As Jesus seems to define that term as one who picks up their cross and follows him, I am at best a catechumen.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing that we can do to get to God. What we can do is make ourselves as accessible as possible to God who is always and everywhere seeking connection and relationship. We can provide God the path of least resistance simply by lowering our egos’ resistances to anything and anyone other than our own control. This is the way of detachment or self-emptying that Jesus demonstrated in his own life, most completely in the cross, that the Bible calls Kenosis. My own method of spirituality is simply applied Kenotics, learning to let go little by little of all the attachments and desires to which my ego so likes to cling. The easiest way for me to do this is silence, not merely acoustical, but mental, and emotional silence, gently letting go of everything that my mind throws up knowing that in letting go of everything else what will necessarily be left is God. To be honest I am not that good at it, and I can only intentionally practice it for about 20 minutes each day, but whenever I am attentive to the practice, I experience an uncanny feeling of being found and held. Suffering can accomplish the same thing, but I am a bit of a wimp and do not like to suffer.

God is everywhere and everywhen accessible to everyone. But we spend our lifetimes filling our lives with every imaginable distraction so that God can rarely get a word in edgewise. Spirituality is simply what we do to remove all our barriers and fortifications designed to keep God out. And the fancy theological name for all those barriers and obstructions that keep us apart from God is sin. When we say that Jesus came to take away our sin, we do not simply mean that Jesus offers us a pardon for naughty things we may have done. We are making the far grander claim that Jesus is God coming to us in and as a human being and in and as a human being removes all barriers between us. We now have full access to God and God has full access to us. That is the true work of Christ’s atonement, not merely forgiveness, but transformation unto connection. So, when Jesus says” I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he was not speaking symbolically or allegorically. He was simply stating the fact that he is the connection between us and God.

In this final installment and summary of my vague ramblings about spirituality and religion I simply want you to know this. God is closer to you than your breath, closer than your thoughts, closer that we can imagine. God is not somewhere other than right where you are. And all you need to do to encounter God’s presence is the intention to seek God combined with a little careful attention, attention that focuses not on ourselves like we usually do but on what is coming into being at precisely this moment precisely where and when you are. In my experience, and that of thousands of other people across the centuries, that moment of encounter is the taproot of life, joy, belonging, hope, and love. It is, insofar as we creatures can ever experience the transcendent through our finite and flawed faculties, God.

Religion is my day job. My true vocation is God seeking. My true identity is God haunted. I hope that at my journey’s end, my true destiny is God belonging. And I hope the same for you.

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” Augustine of Hippo

August 10, 2021

Throughout the summer I have been sharing some of my musings about spirituality. By way of review, spirituality is simply that dimension of human life that connects us to the presence of God. Specifically, spirituality is: (1.) the quest to encounter the presence of God; (2.) the actual lived experience of that presence; and (3.) reflections on that experience. While I am convinced that God is accessible everywhere and at every moment, we are not. We tend to get caught up inside our own thoughts.

One well established way around our constant mental chatter is the way of silence. This is the contemplative path taught by the church for centuries and practiced by millions of Christians as a discipline that makes us as accessible to God as possible by letting go of the ego’s attachments. You let go of everything that is not God and what you are left with is necessarily, God. The path of spiritual calculatus eliminatus (to steal from The Cat in the Hat) is the gradual process of unclenching our ego’s grasp on idea, experience, feeling, and perception. Silence slowly slides the “I” from the center of our own personal universes leaving only boundless perception in which we discover presence.

There is another way, just as ancient and perhaps more commonly practiced, albeit never as popular.

You are not going to like it.

I don’t like it.

Suffering is the other well-worn path that leads to God. Very few intentionally choose it but suffering forces us to let go of all our ego’s attachments, desires, and identifications. Suffering lowers the barriers of resistance that keep God at bay from our lives. Sickness, whether mental or physical, infirmity, disability, grief, loss, all have the capacity to teach us as they deprive us of things we hold dear. Suffering exposes us to vulnerability and our own limitations, which can open us to a greater, deeper intimacy with God. Suffering is the vastly capable teacher of human truth and access to the divine that no one seeks after.

The problem of course is that suffering can also simply destroy. For suffering to be transformative, it must open our lives to a world of meaning, purposes, identity, and belonging. The suffering itself has no intrinsic meaning. Our reflection and response to it is what generates meaning and purpose. But there are pains too deep to survive. There are losses that simply crush us utterly. Suffering is therefore a fickle teacher whose lessons offer wisdom with one hand and destruction in the other. No wonder then we seek to avoid its lessons.

We have gotten very good at avoiding suffering and hiding it away. But in our avoidance, we sometimes forget to see through to suffering’s transformative effects. We deny or disguise our wounds or more often seek to transmit them to others rather than embracing them as sacred wounds that teach and transform. God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, and even death itself, not to simply wound or punish, but to bring us to a larger Identity and belonging. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain.” (John 12:24). Sometimes what brings new and abundant life is precisely the cracking open of one’s shell. And that can hurt.

We worship a God who walked this earth and suffered, was tortured, crucified, and died. God redeems and transforms suffering as disclosive of who God is and who we can be in God. God does not observe suffering at a distance. God is in it. If we are in it, we may encounter God.

Jesus never asked us to worship him. He asked us to follow him. And his path heads straight through the pain of this world. But the great mystery of Easter is that this same path comes out somewhere else leading us to grow to become someone else.

Resurrection is not relief from suffering. Resurrection is the infinite becoming that is reached only through the suffering.

August 3, 2021

One of the most overused concerns in contemporary pseudo-spirituality is the quest to be an authentic self. How one could fail to be an authentic self? Can a human being be counterfeit? Even if one lies, prevaricates, pretends, feigns, fakes, dissembles, bluffs, poses, postures, or dissimulates, it is still you doing it. Admittedly, the self we encounter may not be our ideal, but it is still very much us.

To push a bit deeper, I am not certain there really is a static entity called a self. Who I am seems to be the meeting place where a rather unreliably edited library of memories collides with the variable circumstances of the present moment. This protean me changes in not only its outer expression, but in my internal experience, perception, and cognition in each new moment and in each new encounter. We are social creatures that adapt who and how we are depending on those around us and the demands of the current environment. Moreover, those external circumstances can change my mood, temperament, values, hopes, dreams, behaviors, and preferences in an instant. Eight hours after meal time without food, I can be a very unpleasant person to be with, but it is still me.

So many of the things that we presume constitute who we are (relationships, work, achievements, talents, education, and status) as well as the things that we pretend we are not but really are (dependencies, shame, addictions, jealousy, envy, anxiety, and fear) are simply ego attachments and identifications. Ego attachments are any self-definition that is not us. Our misdirected desires point us outward looking for something, anything to provide a sense of self and relieve the existential pressure to look inward. We go, in the words of Johnny Lee’s classic country western song, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. It is no surprise then that we tend to end up alienated, lonely, ashamed, uncertain, frustrated, cynical, anxious, and despairing.

There is another way. There is a better foundation upon which to ground a self, an identity, and a life. And it does not involve prolonged naval gazing. Actually, you are going to have to gaze a lot deeper than that.

You can root yourself in presence.

Underneath the subcellar of prayer, below the places where the ego wanders and well below the cavorting flocks of random thoughts, lies something else. The way is always open, but it requires us to set aside the tempting distractions of our ego assumptions. It requires careful attention, a special kind of focused attention that Christians call prayer. Beneath everything we know or think we know, beneath desires and fears, beneath all the little lies we tell ourselves and even our nagging suspicion that we are lying to ourselves, beneath the polarities of thought, in the pure unbounded perception of gracious attention one can experience an odd updraft coming from even deeper. When you get rid of everything else, you are not nothing and you are not alone. When you get rid of everything else you find yourself in the realm of gracious presence, the true foundation of the true you. The world will try to tell you who you are at every moment. But who you really are is who you are being given away as into becoming. This process of being itself giving itself away in and as this moment, in and as us, is what we colloquially call the Love of God. This is the ground of our true being. We are, underneath all the encrusted illusions and distortions we collectively call sin, not static sovereign entities but the relational expression of God loving us and all creation into being. And were God not to do so, for even a moment, our lives, this world, and this creation, would cease to be and collapse into nothingness.

Creation and everything in it, including you and me, is the eruption of the outpouring of God’s overabundant love in Trinity taking form and expression overflowing God’s own self. Like the frozen mists from an outdoor fountain on a cold winter day, our lives take concrete form for a season, only to wait the thaw and the return to the overflowing fountain that is both our source and destiny. This is the secret of presence. Who you are is a manifestation of who God is and what God does and that foundation of self cannot be defaced, vandalized, or corrupted, let alone destroyed by anything within this creation. And that means you do not need to be afraid. Of anything. A wave loses all fear the moment it realizes it is the ocean.

I believe that Jesus came to both teach and demonstrate this new way of being rooted in presence. It explains how he effortlessly passed through such strong systems of ego attachments as power, wealth, purity, revenge, despair, and grief. It explains why he renewed his strength for the journey by escaping to quiet places by himself where he could recenter himself in God’s presence despite all the distractions. And lastly, it explains how he could walk straight through death into life, or at least a kind of life perfected and transformed we now glimpse as though through a mirror darkly.

Jesus did not come to share with us an escape route out of the world. Jesus came to show us how we could finally be who we truly are and where we are. And that way, his way, is open to every human being if only we care to try.

When Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” he was not making a religious claim about his identity. He was stopping to give us directions to our destination.

July 27, 2021

Christian spirituality is quite mundane. By that I mean that it gets lived out in the daily, ordinary, decidedly undramatic practices of prayer, awareness, study, and service. It is also mundane in the original sense of that word. Mundane, from the Latin mundi, literally means from or of the Earth. Our spirituality is grounded in our creaturely life here and now. There are of course those extraordinary moments when the veil is lifted for a moment and we catch a glimpse beyond our being and time, but those moments are exceedingly rare, exceptions that prove the rule. For the vast majority of human beings for the vast majority of our lives, spirituality is an ordinary, daily routine.

God will come and go as God pleases, interceding through theophanies, dreams, angelic interruptions, natural events, providence, or whatever other means God so chooses to utilize. That is God’s concern, not mine. My concern is simply trying over the course of my life to offer up the path of least resistance to God. I have no control over God. At my best, I have some marginal control over me. So I work where I can. I work on me.

Christian spirituality has two central components: intention and attention. Intention is simply desire. What do you want? It is a surprisingly difficult question for many people. Often we deceive ourselves as to our true desires and intentions. Our society, media, and markets do not help us here. To know what you want, what you really want, requires a level of self awareness and perception that most people avoid. Sometimes we claim to want generic conclusions like I want to be happy, healthy, and live a meaningful life. Those sorts of answer just beg the question, why? What do you mean by health or happiness and what do you want to do with it? What is meaning and what difference would its presence make in your life? Self examination and honesty are hard earned but important. Honest answers can make us reconsider our paths in ways that may challenge those who are dear to us. But honesty about what our true desires are is the only way to truth.

Saint Augustine first recognized that faith begins with desire, the feeling or experience of a lack that we want to fill. That absence or void will be satisfied or filled by nothing less than God, though most of try all sorts of inadequate substitutes. We of course cannot fill the hole on our own, but we can be honest about it. Thomas Merton prayed that he believed that the desire to please God does in fact please God even when we fail again and again in the actual accomplishment. Instead, it is the honesty and clarity of the desire that matters, what the mystics called “purity of heart.” And it all begins by the careful process of examination and consideration of our own desire.

The other central component of Christian spirituality is attention. Most of us spend most of our waking hours bombarded by a cacophony of thoughts, feelings, impression, and anxieties, over which we have little control, agency, or interest that we collectively call our life. We tend to ground our sense of meaning, worth, and purpose in lots of things outside us like the estimation of others, work, family, markets, and society which produces a constant anxious feedback loop of often erroneous data. We experience feelings that are often complex and subtle forms of self deception that have no basis in reality. We get sidetracked into distractions that purport to offer pleasure or security, when in fact they tend to be traps for our own egos. And we lose ourselves in an infinite variety of ego attachments that seduce us away from our true selves.

Attention is the cure for all those things, a cure to the maddening anxiety that plagues modern life. There is no mystical magic here. It is quite mundane (in both senses), humble, and profoundly undramatic. All it requires is to take time and focus. Really focus. There are no magic words. As a matter of fact, words will just get in the way. Start to gently dismiss and release the thousand thoughts that demand attention. When they rear up gently let them go. Bit by bit, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, you will be graciously setting aside all the distractions that demand our attention and will be there waiting for you when you are done. Do not worry about failing and being distracted a thousand or a million times. And then, bit by bit, moment by moment, you will start entering the spacious emptiness of real attention, where the Real begins to make itself obvious and apparent. Because underneath all our thoughts and feelings, when you push everything else away, I know what you will find. I know who you will find. Beneath all being itself is the core experience of belonging, presence, and connection, that is our true home and destiny rising up to meet us.

Attention and intention may not look like much. It all unfolds in your own heart, mind, and body. Christian spirituality is decidedly lacking in special effects. But it changes us from within along a slow steady pathway of transformation that Jesus simply called, “The Way.” It brings us into every closer connection, communion, and mutual indwelling with God, and not coincidentally with each other. When Jesus commissioned his disciples to go forth and teach everyone everything he commanded, I think that this is what he had in mind, a new kind of humanity that he came to both demonstrate and then form. This new life is what Jesus was trying to explain to old Nicodemus, life that is now finally and truly free from all fear and even free from death itself.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? So goes the old joke. Practice, practice, practice! The same can be said of how to get to God, at least from the human side of things. Practice intention and attention every day and then you will start to lose track of the boundary between the mundane and the divine. After all, if the incarnation means anything, it means that boundary is far more porous than we ever imagined.

Pax Vobiscum, Brian

July 20, 2021

The words mystical and mysticism have gotten a bum rap. Somewhere between the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment they have been slandered as some sort of esoteric mumbo jumbo practiced by either charlatans or the gullible to no appreciable end and for no worldly good. I would like to suggest a modest project of reclamation.

The Greek root mystikos simply means hidden or concealed, that which is not patently obvious. Mystics are simply those religious believers who seek to uncover that which is not obvious, specifically the presence of God. Every major world religious tradition (Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Taoist, etc.) has a mystical impulse just as every major religious tradition has an ethical impulse. The yearning for mystical connection is not a religious thing, let alone a uniquely Christian thing. Mystical longing is a human thing.
Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “our hearts are restless, until they find rest in thee.” Human life is tinged with the perception of an absence, like a void we cannot fill, an itch we cannot scratch. Many have tried to fill that void with things that do not fit: fame, money, power, knowledge, success, celebrity, beauty, art, sex, drugs, duty, and even religion, love, and family. None quite fit the hole. The hole is shaped like God and nothing else can fill it. So, we ache, we yearn, and we seek.

Faith begins with desire, the desire for God. Religion can then coopt that desire and direct it towards human institutions, answers, and cultures. Those habitations of heart and mind, that Christians collectively call church, can be quite satisfying and many are content with them. But there is a clear danger. The church can become an end in itself. We call proximate, contingent human creations to which we attribute infinite value and importance, idols. The church is instead called to be iconic, that is that it is meant to be a human construct that helps us enter into encounter with God. The church is not God any more than the Bible is. They are instead like lenses to help us see or auditory aids to help us hear God. If church does not point beyond itself, and indeed beyond this world and every human experience, it is has ceased to be the church.

A mystical church is simply a church that points beyond itself towards encounter with God. It would be more like a school or a training facility, helping people reach out beyond their own lives towards moments or even states of encounter with the divine. Such a church does not depend so much on faith as trust, let alone dogma. Such a church relies on the experience of its members, living and dead, in encounter and participation with God. And the amazing thing is those experiences appear to be remarkably consistent over the centuries as attested to in countless generations of spiritual writers who have gone before us. A mystical church gives witness to a living God actually seeking encounter, relationship, and participation with human beings. A mystical church is therefore necessarily an incarnational church in which God is not an idea to be explored, but a person with who we grow in relationship and through that relationship develop into a rather new sort of human being, no longer rooted to fear.

Have you ever considered that “forgiveness of sin” and “salvation,” whatever we might mean by those things, may not be the end of God’s agency or interest in our lives, but simply a necessary prologue, a beginning and not and end? Mystical Christianity is simply the quest to experience, and hopefully, eventually inhabit, the actual presence of God, even beyond the bookends of this mortal existence. But that quest does not need to wait until after you are dead. God is closer than we can possibly imagine, inside the beingness of this moment, inside the youness of your thought, inside the yearning that you feel.

I look forward to life after life after death not for its pleasures, but for its participation in and with the one I have been seeking all along. But for today, as a creature (i.e., one who is created), I will content myself with the quest and such moments of stepping outside myself as I may be granted. It is perhaps no coincidence then that Jesus never called the approach to God that he shared with the disciples a religion, school, method, lifestyle, philosophy, or sect. He simply called it, “the way.” All it really requires of us is the desire to depart from the familiar and seek out a new place, that and the steady perseverance to simply follow. Religion will tell you all about the road, its dimensions, and various stops on the way. Mysticism is the experience of actually walking the path.

The very first paving stone, the first step on that road is right under your feet this very moment. . . Brian

July 13, 2021

Thinking and Not Thinking About God

A quirk of human psychology is that we tend to think in terms of opposites. Up/down, left/right, good/bad, love/hate, God/Satan, male/female, light/dark, Republican/Democrat, inside/outside, subject/object, life/death our lists of polar dualities go on and on. The problem is that while our minds like to organize perception and memory into this tidy dualistic filing system, our actual lived experience as embodied creatures is rarely so simple. In our rush towards “critical thinking” we tend to put things into categories not so much because they necessarily belong there, but rather because of the needs of our own cognition. And when things do not fit, we tend to experience stress or anxiety. Human beings generally do not do so well with ambiguity and paradox.

At the heart of the Christian revelation lies paradox and ambiguity. Jesus is both divine and human, which is a paradox. In the Nicene Creed we confess that Jesus is, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same being as the Father.” The Creed does not exactly clarify things at all, it simply rules out any attempt to separate Jesus from God. In the end we are left holding on to a paradox, Jesus is God and human at the same time. And since God and human beings are categorically different sorts of things, that is like saying that Jesus is both X and not X at the same time. Good luck with that logical riddle. And if the dual natures of Christ does not keep you up at night, then try on the dynamic paradox of the Holy Trinity.

The problem lies less with God and more with our way of thinking. Critical dualistic thinking can do wonderful things, like orchestrating a symphony, solving differential equations, and unfolding proteins to cure a disease. Dualistic thinking is a beautiful tool for translating the world into symbolic models that permit us to experiment and solve problems. But it has limits. Dualistic thinking runs into trouble at the quantum scale. It also fails to comprehend the subtle mysterious experience of the ineffable. Dualistic thinking does not handle awe so very well, or ecstasy, or love.

Christianity, by the fifth century, rejected strict dualistic thinking as heresy. Manicheanism, the idea that God and Satan were essentially fighting it out for human souls on a more or less level playing ground of earth, was excluded as an acceptable Christian view of the world starting with Augustine. Instead, a much bigger view of God, in which God transcends all dualities, even the duality of subject and object, and even the duality of existence and non-existence, became the dominant view of Christian theology and spirituality starting in the Middle Ages with spiritual thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart. Unfortunately, we rarely mention it in church, nervous that some folks could not handle the paradox.

Nondual thinking is not a so much a way of thinking as it is a way of perceiving, taking in the undifferentiated whole of experience without the need to reduce it to a series of evaluative judgments and classifications. Nondual thinking then is a form of objectless awareness that is sensitive to everything, but gets snagged on nothing. It is a circle of attention whose focal center is everywhere and whose bounding circumference is nowhere. It is all about clarity of attention, which is so hard for us because we immediately jump to all our evaluations. What if we just attended with open, alert, but unthinking perception, like a quivering drop of quicksilver responding to everything in its environment but caught by nothing?

If you want to think about God, think again. Every thought we could ever possibly have is grossly inadequate at best, and likely idolatrous. God is not an object that can be considered like other objects of human thought. God can only be experienced through nondual perception, quiet, attentive perception unpolluted by human reason or will.

Do you want to perceive God? Or, differently asked, do you want to pray? The first step is to let go of every judgment, thought, consideration, analogy, memory, classification, analysis, opinion, and conclusion. Then, and only then, from a quiet and attentive mind, Truth may come looking for you.

Brian

July 6, 2021

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Thessalonians 5: 16-18

Prayer has always confused me. For a very long time, I thought it was simply dignified speech towards God. I presumed there must be a certain code to it. If you used the right words in the right order something would happen. Then I concluded that the words did not matter, what mattered was the ardor or intensity of the one praying. Honesty, integrity, and most of all passion were essential.

Later on, I served as a hospital chaplain intern for a summer. I gravitated towards the ICU and the emergency room at a Level One Trauma Center. Human pain and loss are on stark display in such places. I observed, shared in, and led prayers of searing intensity. Sometimes ardently desired results happened. Sometimes not. I have seen felons make full recoveries and saints pass from this life, and vice versa. If prayer is defined as our willful petition to supernaturally change material circumstances, I have little faith in it. I do believe that prayer can evoke supernatural changes. But those changes are simply too random and unpredictable for me to have much faith in them. Pray for a miracle and sometimes you get a miracle, but often you do not.

Later still I found a more dependable expression of prayer. Instead of trying to persuade God to make exceptions to the laws of physics or biochemistry on my behalf, I started to view prayer less as something I do at all and instead something that God does in, or perhaps more accurately through, me. I began to realize that in all my confessions, petitions, intercessions, and supplications, God could not squeeze in a single word let alone do more substantial work. My prayers were essentially anxiety-fueled soliloquies. What I needed to do was stop. Just stop. All my words, my desires, and my guilt, were the product of my own ego and its endless wants and insecurities. Somehow, I needed to get my ego out of the conversation and that is more easily said than done.

It is hard for me to get away from the myself, or at least that restless, grasping, attaching aspect of myself that neurotically seeks to alternatively assert itself or hide away that is the human ego. Ego is of course developmentally necessary. Without it one could not function in the world. But seeking after God is not another function in the world. Seeking after God reaches quite beyond it requiring a rather different approach.

The earliest Christian prayer, or maybe it is a hymn, that we know of is the famous Christ Hymn in Philippians. Paul quotes it at length, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” Philippians 2: 5-8. At the very earliest stage of Christianity, the community held onto this notion of self-emptying as the way towards God, not just for Jesus, but for us. The fancy theological name for this kind of self-emptying is kenosis, which literally means to empty oneself or pour oneself out. So, if self-emptying was identified by the earliest Christians as essential to Jesus’ own work and purpose and commended to their community as the mindset of authentic prayer, perhaps self-emptying may provide the model for our prayer as well.

Self-emptying is hard. The inside of my mind is normally a bit like a convention of drunken monkeys jumping from one thought or feeling to another without much pattern or purpose. I am sure that some saints and spiritual teachers can just sit down and quiet their minds without much fuss, but I am not one of them. I need help.

One of the most ancient expressions of Christian prayer is called Hesychasm, which simply means stillness or quiet. It was described first by Evagrius Ponticus in the Fourth Century and then by Maximus the Confessor in the Seventh and provides the centerpiece of the spiritual writings of Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas. All these saints and teachers tried to provide a simple technique to quiet the mind and let go of ego. The process goes through three stages. First, purification disentangles us from all our mental and emotional distractions striving for a state of quiet but watchful attention. Second, illumination is the process of moving that purification inward discarding attachments and constructions so that we can enter prayer freed from images. Finally, deification or theosis is the final stage when, having been freed of everything that is not God, we can enter into the actual presence of God rising up to meet us. There and then, we catch a glimpse of the uncreated light. This final stage is more accurately a transitory state. It is a gift from God through the Spirit that we messed up mortals can glimpse but never fully move into, at least in this life.

As an aid to the process, they proposed a simple prayer, the Jesus Prayer. While it has many variations, the original version is: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, a sinner.” The actual words are of secondary importance. What matters is the way that they focus the mind through their repeated use slowly beginning to shape the patterns of breath. Then slowly, you repeat.

And repeat.

And repeat.

In the spiritual classic, The Way of the Pilgrim, a seeker is told by a wise old teacher to go off and pray the Jesus prayer 5,000 times. He comes back and says he had not found God. He is told to go and pray the Jesus prayer 50,000 times. He comes back and says he had not found God. He is told to go and pray the Jesus prayer 500,000 times. Finally, after many days he returns to his teacher. He tells his teacher that although he did not find God, he noticed that at some point in the 500,000 prayers he stopped praying the prayer and the prayer started praying him. The teacher observed, perhaps you have not found God, but maybe now God has found you.

Prayer, rightly understood, is not us doing anything. Prayer, rightly understood, is God being God in and through us.

Brian

June 29, 2021

Knowledge of Stuff and Knowledge of God
. . . and why we cannot see God . . . and what we can do about it

There is more than one way to know something. By far the most common is to know about something, to observe, analyze, catalog, and contextualize. We know all about things we can see and touch and feel (like apples, viruses, and the wind). We can also know about otherwise invisible things we can learn about through how they interact with other things (like extra solar planets or someone’s emotions). And we know things because they make necessary logical sense (like the circumference of a circle is equal to twice its radius multiplied by a funny number that falls between our normal numbers 3.1 and 3.2 that we call pi). Using this kind of knowing, we assemble our lives, build civilizations, cure diseases, and generally function in the world. And all of it depends on us, the observer(s), making observations or deductions about the object of our observation (whatever that may be).

The central claim of all the monotheistic religions is that there is a divine, supernatural reality to all things transcending all our categories and consciousness that we summarily call God. God, who is the creator and sustainer of all, is by definition not an object, not something we can observe, analyze, catalog, and contextualize. God is not just another “thing” in creation. Instead, God is always and everywhere the subject, never the object. As the subject, it is actually God who is the ground of being giving itself away as the quality of being enjoyed by everything that is. In other words, God is not just another thing that is, God makes being. Anything less than this does not really deserve the title God.

If God is not an object, literally not a thing, no-thing, then God necessarily transcends all our language and attributions. We can be moved by the beauty of creation, but that is merely God’s arts and crafts, not God. Direct observation and attribution are impossible. All our speech about God is at best metaphorical, never indicative. You cannot state facts about God because God necessarily goes far beyond any fact our or any mind could ever imagine. For example, God is not powerful, because whatever we may think of God’s power is insufficient and we cannot observe the scope of God’s power. God is more than that. The problem is not merely one of our insufficient knowledge or language. The problem is our insufficient ways of knowing. Anything that we can know as an object of our thought is necessarily not God.

There is another kind of knowing. You can know from the inside. You can slip beneath the separation of the observer and the observed object to a deeper kind of knowing. Generally, the only form of this sort of knowing most people experience is the knowledge of ourselves. You cannot really step out of yourself to observe yourself because no matter how hard you try, you are always you. The self cannot observe the self because there is no difference from the one doing the observing and the one observed. Even if I carefully reflect on my own behaviors, motives, thoughts, and feelings, it is always me who is doing it and in doing so participating in the behaviors, motive, thoughts, and feelings. At best we can observe images of ourselves, like the image in a mirror, but the image is never really us. Most people try to avoid reflecting too deeply on themselves and run back to the realm of objects.

You can however go deeper. There is a hidden way of knowing (if you prefer the Greek, mystical knowing). We call it hidden not because it is camouflaged, but because so few try it. If God is being itself, giving itself away in and as this moment not as an object but as the subject, then the one place we can reliably find God is in us. The only kind of knowing we can share that breaks the barrier of subject and object is our knowledge of ourselves, but beneath any awareness of ourselves is something far deeper and older. Beneath our knowledge of “I” is the foundation of that “I”, the foundation of uncreated being giving itself away to us in what we perceive as our own quality of being. That uncreated being giving itself away in self emptying love in and as this moment is what we rather banally call God.

The problem is that we tend to resist the deeps. We get stuck on ourselves, our egos, and all their passing attachments. The process of learning to let go of ego and its attachments is what we call prayer or meditation. I simply think of it as sinking down and letting go knowing that when I let go of everything, even the self, I will always be met by the eternal subject which is God. Prayer is simply the technique we use to enter into communion with God inside our own experience of being.

This can all sound rather confusing because we are so accustomed to our patterns of thought separating the subject from object, separating the observer from the observed. True knowledge of God is much simpler than all that. The differences fall away and there is no longer any difference between the observer and the observed. There is stillness and a solitude to this kind of knowing because there is no longer an observer there to make observations or take notes. This point of zero variance and zero separation is precisely the communion that Jesus points and pushes us towards: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.” John 17:21-23.

One of my spiritual teachers, James Finley, observed that knowing God is really the process of overcoming otherness. And in overcoming otherness we necessarily disappear to the world and its separations collapsing into communion. There is no “outside” anymore from which to make an observation. There is only trans-subjective communion in which we and God and we and others and we and the world start disappearing from observation as otherness is overcome and true union entered.

Finley’s mentor, the great spiritual teacher Thomas Merton wrote, “Where do candles go when they go out? If the question fills me with an alien chill, it gives witness to my heart that I have not begun to understand the resurrection.” I am slowly learning to trust the compass of my heart’s desire more than the unreliable GPS of my own understanding and knowledge.

I am not all that interested in heaven with all its pleasures.

What I really desire is to be lost in God.

Brian

June 22, 2021

The Foundations of Spirituality, at least mine

All our experiences of God, faith, religion, and spirituality are grounded in three sources: experience, tradition, and scripture/revelation. Learning how to pedal this tricycle is the life of faith.

Protestants, going back to Martin Luther, like to boast that they follow scripture alone, but I do not believe that is how people work. Every impression, every thought, every sensation, every decision we ever seek or make is filtered through our own unique lens of experience. How I perceive the world, other people, and God is fundamentally shaped by, among other things, my culture, family, values, education, health (both mental and physical), life circumstances, relationships, and age. I cannot get around or behind this experience because my experience is, to a large extent, me. The only place where I could ever encounter God is therefore through me, my life, and my experience.

Other people’s experiences, collected, preserved, and validated over time, are what we call tradition. Not the way we have always done things, but rather what has been worth preserving from the past, constitutes tradition. That means that tradition is always dynamic. Tradition is constantly evolving as the point where the past and the present collaborate. Specifically for Christian spirituality, tradition is the accumulated wisdom, ideas, hopes, yearnings, methods, rituals, and frustrations of generations long past. In other words, tradition is simply the preserved experience of the dead, tested and refined by all the interceding generations. Tradition is the antidote to the arrogance of the living, thinking that we alone must be the measure of all things. Tradition is instead a gift of a map, our inheritance from our ancestors that points us forward.

Finally, scripture is not merely the record of divine revelation in ages past, although it surely is that as well. Scripture is the written record of God acting in history with human beings and the texts in and through which generations have encountered the presence of God. That means that scripture is more than history. Scripture is a lens through which we can see God and, far more uncomfortably, God can be felt peering into us. The careful, open hearted, vulnerable reading of scripture is therefore not primarily about learning information about God, but rather entering into encounter with God. This sort of attentive, prayerful reading is called lectio divina and leads us not to information about God, but encounter with God.

Religion has traditionally leaned more heavily on scripture and tradition. Protestants purport to rely exclusively on the authority of scripture, but tend to get apprehensive when you point out that those interpretations are themselves a form of tradition. Conversely, Roman Catholics tend to lean more heavily on tradition, but grow upset when you point out that their tradition seems to change every century or so. Religion often presents both these sources, scripture and tradition, as objective and external to our lives. How or what we may in fact experience is beside the point.

Spirituality tries to restore balance by bringing experience into the mix. We necessarily encounter God either in the infinitely fleeting moment of now, or in the realm of memory of past experiences. And in memory, we make sense of that experience through all the raw material, images, metaphors, constructs, and criteria of scripture and tradition. Or not. Sometimes, our experience is so alien not only to every prior moment of life, but everything we know from scripture and tradition. When that happens, things get interesting. We need a bigger map.

When I was in High School, I felt like I no longer fit into the church where I grew up. It was a lovely church, with well organized programs, but everything had a simple rational answer. The sermons were all three points and poem with a tidy moral takeaway. There was no room for mystery. And mystery was all I was experiencing. So, I went looking to broaden my tradition to find someone, anyone who seemed to speak to my experience. At first the Tao Te Ching seemed promising, which led me to the Dhammapada, which in turn took me back to the Upanishads. They sang of the vast whirl of God inviting us all into the grand dance and the emergence of God both in and around me. They spoke of those experiences that I never had words for, those moments when the “I” seemed to drop away. And most of all they told me that I was not alone in those experiences, but in the deep currents of humanity’s ongoing encounter with God. But the problem was that I was still a nominal Swedish Lutheran in Minnesota, and I would never be a Taoist monk, Buddhist sage, or Hindu sadhu. Thankfully, I never had to.

There is a sub-basement to the Christian tradition to which few people are ever introduced, a vast treasure trove of poets, thinkers, dreamers, and painfully honest memoirists who have shared their experiences of encounter with the presence of God. Collectively, they provide a repository and resources of spiritual knowledge, methods, and yearnings at least as deep as any Eastern tradition. They too rely on scripture and tradition, but they boldly insist on incorporating their own powerful experiences of and with the divine. They testify to a living God of the present who still reaches out and embraces human beings. They share a roadmap of how to know through experience and how to put one’s mind into the heart. These spiritual writers participate in a shared conversation across the centuries less concerned with information about God, what we would call theology, and far more concerned with the kind of knowledge of God that comes from direct encounter even though such experience may be hidden from direct observation, which is precisely what you would expect from a God of incarnation. They called this special theology “hidden theology,” except they used the Greek word for “hidden.” They called this golden thread running through Christian history, Mystical Theology.

I am called into ministry for a simple reason. I want to share that treasure with you. Brian

June 14, 2021

I want to continue sharing a bit more with you about spirituality and religion, their importance to me, and how they dance together within a human life. Since the only life I know well is my own, they are necessarily personal reflections, but I hope that you too may find something familiar within them.

Every major religious tradition in the world addresses certain fundamental questions: who am I, what is the nature of this life and reality, how should I live my life, what is the purpose or intention of life or this world, and what is our destiny. These are not questions that can be answered with empirical observation or deduction. They are instead questions of value, meaning, and purpose. Religion, functionally understood, are the ways we approach, address, and then organize our myriad partial and incomplete answers. Spirituality is the experience of first desiring, then seeking, then discovering, and finally integrating those answers as a dynamic process that unfolds inside our lives.

Because experience and consciousness precede memory and thought, spirituality precedes religion and provides its wellspring. But religion gives spirituality an outward expression that can be shared, transmitted, and even relied upon. Religion allows one to share in the spiritual experiences of others and flattens time and space so that we can share the wisdom of other across the globe and across centuries. In sacred writings and rituals, we convey the deepest spiritual truth with each other and with generations yet unborn. Religion gives spirituality persistent and transmissible form.

This whole understanding and process mirrors who God is for us and in turn who we are for God. God is the summary name for that wellspring of creativity and love that pours itself out in and as this and every moment. God’s self-giving love is the motive and impulse that drives creation and every moment into being. That means that creation and everything in it (including you and me) is an expression of that same love. That love takes tangible form reaching out first to create and then connect with us. Imagine a giant volcano in the middle of the ocean spitting off clouds and flows of lava. Creation is the island that it forms and we are like little tiny bits of white-hot magma now blown some distance away, cooled, hardened, but still very much connected to the volcano. And one day, as the great volcano rumbles and grows, we will return to it.

Our understanding of God is based in the foundational mystery of the Trinity which means that for Christians, God is more of a verb than a noun. Some people grow frustrated because they cannot observe God like we observe other things in creation. But God is not another thing in creation. By definition, God is not a thing, not an object that can be observed or measured. If God is not simply another object in creation but rather the ground of all being itself, then one cannot remove oneself from any moment to make an independent observation of God. Wherever you go, God is there, not merely with but in and through you. And the moment you fully step into that reality (which I can glibly restate but spend a lifetime seeking) is the moment you fully enter into a new realm, experience, and form of being and consciousness that Jesus called the Kingdom of God. Spirituality, as a tangible theological tradition, tends to take form as the shared momentary glimpses of that vast realm in which we mortals can catch glimpses of this life. Some may even begin to stabilize the experience of that perception in their lives, but this is far rarer.

Trinity can be thought of as God’s dance steps towards us in this process. First God creates, like that volcano flinging us off into creation, into God’s beingness. But the process of creation is necessarily also the process of separation. For God to create is necessarily for God to create something differentially other than God. Paradoxically, that means we are of God and not God at the same time. We experience that paradox throughout our lives in alternating moments of deepest communion and connection and painful moments of alienation and separation. But God does not leave us where we are. God comes to us to connect, or more precisely reconnect. And finally, God provides both the means and the method of return, drawing us back into communion with and in God’s own self. The persons of the Holy Trinity correspond not so much to three actions of God, but rather the three relational moves by God towards us. Trinity, which is the language of religion, provides the map to describe not so much who God is but rather our experience of who God is for us in our separation, embrace, and return, which is the essence of spirituality.

I realize this is all too abstract. To paraphrase Saint Augustine, of course I don’t really know what I am talking about. If I really knew what I was talking about it wouldn’t be God I was talking about! But I know from my own experience, scripture, and conversations with hundreds of people (both living and long dead thanks to their writings) that separation, embrace, and return are hard coded into human experience and this creation. We were made to long to return. And our longings will only be satisfied when we rest in the love and embrace of the one who made us so.
Brian

June 8, 2021

This past year, for the first time in American history, a majority of Americans (53%) reported not belonging to a religious community according to Gallup. While in person attendance is rebounding as Covid-19 restrictions lift, the church faces the more chronic challenge of the “spiritual but not religious.” Atheism remains steady at only 3-5%. What has changed are the increasing numbers of “spiritual but not religious” or “spiritual but unaffiliated” people who, while not atheists, do not identify with any particularly religious tradition. This trend cuts across generations and political affiliations.
I would like to spend a little time over the next few weeks reflecting on this shift and what it means.

“Religion” and “spirituality” are terms we use that we rarely consider. Often, we use them synonymously, and sometimes as antonyms, which can be confusing. By “religion” I mean the sum total of human responses to and understandings of the supernatural divine, which in my tradition I label “God.” By “spirituality” I mean my actual first-hand experiences of that divine, the ways I experience it, and its various consequences in my life. Religion is shared and trans-historical. Spirituality is rooted in individual experience and practice. Religion tells you all about what God is like and various well-established methods of encountering God. Spirituality is the experience itself and how it impacts one’s life. Religion provides structure and a container for experience. Spirituality is the content of the experience.

I like to think of the relationship between spirituality and religion as akin to the rigging of a sailboat. Sailing ships have two kinds of ropes: standing rigging and running rigging. Standing rigging are all the ropes that don’t move (hopefully). Standing rigging keeps the mast upright and rigid balancing other forces and keeping the whole system taut so that it can move. The running ropes raise and lower sails to capture the wind, maneuver the boat, and hopefully keep it on course. Both are necessary. Without standing rigging the mast would rip off with the first gust of wind and you would be left motionless. Without the running rigging sails would just flap in the wind and you would be left motionless. What you need is both the structure of the standing rigging, which is like religion, and the running rigging, which is like spirituality. Together they can take us places we never dreamt of.

Religion has gotten a bad name in recent years becoming synonymous with dogmatism, judgment, wearing uncomfortable clothes to church, and moralizing prudishness. Spirituality on the other hand is ascendant suggesting one has depth, but without religion’s judgmentalism or institutions. The problem is that you really cannot have either religion or spirituality without the other. Without spirituality, religion is simply desiccated dogmatics. Without religion, spirituality is simply a self-indulgent mind trip. We need them both, but perhaps not as they are often presented to us.
I remember feeling vaguely cheated by the church sometime in High School when I began to discover the great contemplative and wisdom traditions that run through Christian history like a golden thread. There has always been an experientially based form of Christianity populated by mystics, seers, visionaries, prophets, and sages, operating within the established forms of religion we call church. The problem was nobody ever told me about them in church. I needed to go outside the church to discover my most important guides and companions (like Meister Eckhart, Maximus the Confessor, John Cassian, Gregory of Palamas, Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Bonaventure, Pseudo Dionysius, Jacob Boehme, Madame Guyon, Julian of Norwich, Edith Stein, John Ruysbreock, Thomas Merton, Eriugena, Simeon the New Theologian, Simone Weil, Blaise Pascal, and Simone Weil). A big part of my calling in ministry is to help you, if you are willing, to find your guides too.

The alternative danger is the potential for spirituality to collapse into narcissistic idolatry in which we simply worship ourselves. We are not the first people to experience spiritual hunger or inexplicable pain. Nor will we be the last. Hundreds of generations may have something useful to offer us about prayer. And some answers about God lead to very bad consequences. These resources are all the domain of religion that always transcends the personal subjective experiences and puts us in correspondences with other generations long past. For example, we use the ancient Nicene Creed not out of dogmatic devotion to the past, but because in the past they explored all the other formulations of the relationship between the divine and human in the person of Jesus and uncovered potentially dangerous consequences. They settled on this understanding that has been tested by a hundred generations. It would be the height of arrogance to throw away such field-tested wisdom simply for novelty or “authenticity” whatever that might be.

Fundamentally, I am spiritual and religious because I am human. I am spiritual because I keep having these odd moments of encounter with a mysterious something. I am also spiritual because the longing ache that I feel inside my being does not seem to be able to be filled by anything or anyone other than God. I am religious because I cannot trust myself to avoid self-deception, aggrandizement, misperception, and confusion. I need the accumulated treasure of wisdom to make sense of my experience. And I am religious because the story of the God and humanity shared in the Jewish and Christian holy books, especially the story of God becoming one of us in Jesus of Nazareth, helps me make sense of my experience, my life, and those odd moments of encounter. I also live in a culture that, however far it may have drifted and may be drifting, emerges from a distinctly Christian culture, theology, anthropology, and worldview. I cannot remove myself from Christian religious imagination any more than a fish can remove itself from the water. It shapes and has shaped not only who I am, but how I perceive and think.

My goals are simple. I want to know who I am and who I am supposed to be. I want to participate in the meaningfulness of creation itself and through that participation find meaning in my life. And finally, I want to find belonging in something more secure than anything in this world. I want to get lost in God. These are my hungers, my desires that drive my quest. Spirituality and religion are my tools that help me along the way.

Whether you know it or not, you are hungry too. Shall we go explore?
Brian

June 1, 2021

On Memorial Day, Americans remember the sacrifices of fallen members of the armed services by grilling assorted meats outdoors. It is a strange custom, and its strangeness reflected my own confusions. It is not Veterans’ Day, remembering those who have served. It is not Armed Forces Day, remembering those who are currently serving. It is not Independence Day, celebrating our nation. Originally known as Decoration Day, a day to clean and ornament the graves of those who died in the Civil War, it only became a national holiday and moved to the final Monday in May in 1971. But as fewer and fewer Americans serve in the armed forces and conflicts around the globe claim fewer and fewer service people, the day and its origins have seemed oddly removed from the experiences of so many. Memorial Day now functionally celebrates the unofficial beginning of summer, not the sacrifices of the dead.

On Memorial Day I tend to think about the dead. Not those who died after long life, but those whose lives and possibilities were cut short, those who never had time to become who they might have been haunt my imagination. Nothing interrupts God’s plans for human growth and transformation quite like war, humanity’s occasional tantrums of violence and destruction concealed under a veneer of policy, systematic violence to compel another to submit to our will. My curiosity lies less with war’s politics and its self-justification and more with the humanity of its victims.

My Great Great Great Grandfather John Maguire emigrated from Ireland during the Great Famine. Like many Irish immigrants, he labored on the Erie Canal. During the Civil War, he was drafted as the oldest member of the 65th New York Infantry Regiment. Eight months into his service, he died on the first day of the Battle of Chancellorsville, a battle that the United States Army lost. He left a widow and five young children. Beyond this, I know nothing about him. But I keep thinking about him. I wondered if he understood what the war was about. Did he give his “last full measure of devotion”? Or was he simply a statistic, another private remembered only in the casualty lists? After more than a century and a half, heroics, cowardice, and simple accident all fade out of view. I am left with merely a name and unanswerable questions.

My grandfather Earl did not storm the beaches of Okinawa during World War Two. He did not help raise the flag on Iwo Jima. A week or so before shipping out to the South Pacific, he fell from a repelling wall during exercises and broke his back. The medical science at the time could not heal him, only dull the pain. So, they gave him a lifetime supply of Demerol and a discharge. But the pain never went away. He was haunted by dreams of his friends who went and did not come back. He felt the weight of guilt that he did not join them as the pain of shame and the broken vertebrae fused together in his heart. He was a gentle man, harsh only towards himself. But the pain wore him down despite his efforts to numb it. At age 44 he succumbed to opiates and Bourbon, but he really died of a broken heart. I never met him, but on Memorial Day I think about Earl. He did not die fighting for his country, but he too lost something irretrievable in that war. He too paid a price beyond measure. He died long before I was born, but something in me so wants to tell him, its not your fault.

There are countless stories and countless people just like John and Earl. The vast majority have long been forgotten and even more never known at all. National cemeteries bear solemn but silent witness testifying only to names and dates. And even the grandest memorial will one day reduce to dust. My worry is not that those countless legions shall be forgotten, but (to steal a notion from Ellie Weisel) that the one will be forgotten in all his or her unique particularity, possibility, promise, and pain.

My hope in the resurrection is my hope for John and Earl and countless others, not that their sacrifice may be made meaningful, but rather be unmade, unnecessary, healed, and restored. We can honor and remember the dead, and that is good. But only God can make them live again, and that is better. On that day we will remember and grow beyond our memories, made all the more beautiful by our wounds. And perhaps on that day, I will finally embrace my grandfather for the first time. Brian

And God shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Isaiah 2:4

May 25, 2021

Church on Fire

I served as a transitional pastor in Northern Virginia in a vibrant, faithful congregation in a suburb of Washington D.C. The church was set in a heavily wooded area and the architecture of the church reflected the earthy, woodsy feeling surrounding the church. The interior of the church was designed with massive windows and skylights to allow the beauty of nature to flood into the church, especially the sanctuary. Beautifully sculptured rock walls, wooden beams, circular seating, and high ceilings created an open – almost retreat like – atmosphere as we worshiped together.

At the center of this inviting sanctuary was the communion table; a massive, round, handcrafted wooden table. Beautiful beyond description. Worshipers sat in half circles around the communion table and the pastors preached from the center of the worship space. It was a stunning place of worship.

Even more stunning were the paraments and banners which draped the sanctuary. Liturgically appropriate textures and colors and symbols were woven together by gifted artists from the community of faith, bringing splashes of color and textured art to the woodsy, earth tone sanctuary.

Pentecost, in particular, was one of the more visually stunning Sundays. The entire sanctuary was draped in flowing cloths of red, orange and yellow. And the communion table was covered with bright red silk cloths with red, orange, and yellow candles covering the entire wooden communion table. That sacred table looked like Pentecost morning with flames alight and the Holy Spirit rushing in like a roaring wind.

It was breathtaking…until it was not!

Halfway through the sermon on that Pentecost Sunday, one of the candles on the silk covering of the communion table flickered just a little too much and the silk material caught on fire! Few people noticed initially but soon the smell of smoke from the burning silk and the sight of tongues of fire quickly spreading on the communion table caught everyone’s attention.

In a matter of seconds, the Associate Pastor (who was not preaching) jumped up from her seat, ran to the back entrance of the sanctuary where the baptismal font stood filled with water, picked up the large, glass baptismal bowl, ran back to the flaming communion table, and dumped the water on the now glowing table, easily dousing the growing flames!

It was a Pentecost moment indeed! We were all so thankful that the beautiful wooden communion table did not catch on fire, and grateful for a quick thinking Associate Pastor! I wish I could say that there is a spiritual message behind this shocking moment in worship but the idea of the waters of baptism extinguishing the flames of the Holy Spirit doesn’t really preach!

We just celebrated a meaningful Pentecost Sunday together both in-person and live-streamed. I believe that the Holy Spirit is working in powerful and sometimes surprising ways in and through our Fairmont family as we navigate this new world of hybrid worship. We are grateful to each of you who are participating in such joyful and faithful ways as we greet each Sunday with anticipation and greet each other from afar!

I feel God’s Spirit with us in these days of trial and error. It is not easy to understand the mystery of the Holy Spirit but when I look back on the last fourteen months I have a clear and humbling sense of God’s Spirit that led us through one of the hardest years in the life of our church.

The Holy Spirit is often the least understood personality of the Trinity. We forget to listen for and be attentive to the voice of the Spirit. And yet, like our very own breathing, God’s Spirit is near us and within us and surrounding us. We have life and breath because of God’s Spirit. As we continue our faith journey together in these slowly changing days of pandemic, may we hear and see God’s Spirit with us, individually and especially as a church. May we be a church on fire.

Peace,

Pastor Kelley

May 18, 2021

What holds a people together—culture, politics, fear, hope, law, love? Phrased differently, what makes a crowd a community? What is its special sauce? In the past two hundred years or so, at least since 1848, the most common answers have been some combination of shared national origin, common history, language, and culture that we call nationalism. But there are other older answers.

The ancient Hebrews were special in that they knew they were not special. Their self-understanding was that they descended not from demigods, but slaves in bondage in Egypt. What made them “special” was nothing in their pedigree or resume, but simply being chosen by a rather curious deity that one of them bumped into in the deserts of Midian. In time, that quality of “chosenness” took theological form in the covenant and social form in the law, the Torah, that informed their relationship with their God and with each other. To this day, Jews celebrate that relationship fifty days after Passover with the festival of Shavuot, celebrating Moses receiving the law on Sinai.

Focusing on whose you are as opposed to who you are was a novel turn in human history. But there were still more surprises. Sometimes I think God must be a jazz musician, taking old themes and reworking them in endless new variations, improvising them into something altogether new and surprising. Fifty days after one particular Passover in they year 30 or 33 something very odd happened. The pilgrimage crowds gathered together in Jerusalem for Shavuot like they did every year, but something had changed. God had taken that notion of chosenness and bumped it up to a whole new level. God had moved in and spent several years showing us, not just telling us, how to be human and be alive in ways we could not have imagined. Humans really have a hard time with that kind of intimacy with the divine, so we killed him. But he would not stay dead. And after that quantum fluctuation in creation things started changing. The crowd in Jerusalem perhaps had heard the rumors, but they now found themselves as full participants. You can tell that Luke is at the limits of his vocabulary as he describes something like a powerful wind followed by energy sort of like fire dancing among the people. This crowd drawn from the far corners of the ancient world, speaking a dozen or so languages, all began to understand each other as they experienced the gift of mutual comprehension. God was making a new community all over again.

This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit, which sounds awfully churchy until you consider it functionally. The Holy Spirit is that power, potentiality, and potency that connects, relates, translates, informs, and binds together. The Spirit is not just the connector, but the connection itself between you and me and all of us and God. And right now, we are in rather urgent need of that mutual comprehension and connection. Emerging from our Covid lairs we are a rather prickly people right now. Feelings are raw and opinions abound with fury. Such an environment is not conducive to participating in the Spirit. So, I would like to make a modest proposal that may both heal some of our connections and be the means through which the Holy Spirit may come into our lives.

First, listen. Always listen first with ears directed outward in compassion rather than judgment or even thinking of what we want to say next. Let us set aside the complexities of politics and public health policy for the time. Instead, when you talk to someone ask them about something that brought them joy this week, what was something beautiful they beheld, what is one dream that they have, ask about their family, what is one question that they would so want answered, what is one thing that they would like to be known for, how do they show love to other people, how do they want to be loved, and that is just the warm up. Where have they felt pain in the past year? What have they lost? How, if at all, have they been able to honor their grief? What are they afraid of? How does that fear impact their life? What wounds do they carry that have never healed, just become a part of them? And then, what do they hope for the future? What might fulfill them? What would give them a sense of purpose, meaning, and value? These are just some of the questions that actually permit us to connect, to understand, to hold each other in mutual compassion, and, according to Jesus, begin to heal our wounds.

The Holy Spirit is not a neutral mindless force to be channeled. It/He/She is a person (technically speaking a hypostasis, don’t worry about it) who comes like all persons when invited, sneaking in where least resisted. And it settles whenever and wherever people connect, relate, and bond together just as it did in Jerusalem long ago. Invoking and inviting the Holy Spirit is not an esoteric mystery; it is the disciplined practice of love. And love is special sauce that God uses to hold us together with God and each other

May 11, 2021

The least recognized, most forgotten annual celebration in the church calendar is Ascension. In case you were not paying attention, it falls on this Thursday. On Easter Jesus rose from the dead and on Ascension he left. It comes as something of an anticlimax. Objectively, the only thing that Ascension tells us is that Jesus is not here. But we knew that already. So, let’s move on to Pentecost next week.

Except the thing that keeps niggling at me is what if Ascension, while it may not seem very important to us, might be important to God? We always assume that Jesus’ life and work is about us, but maybe we’re not the center of it all. What if Ascension is not about us, but about God? What if Ascension points to a deep change that we tend to ignore: a change in God.

Scripture and our creeds make a scandalous claim that Jesus rose bodily from the dead and then ascended bodily to God. We have a nasty habit of forgetting about bodies, both Jesus’ and ours. We much prefer a purely and conveniently divine Jesus. We like to imagine Jesus as radiant spirit emanating love. We tend to forget about his dandruff, wrinkles, BO, receding hairline, bad breath, and probably a fair number of parasites (which gives life in Christ a whole new meaning). No First Century Palestinian peasant reaching the then advanced age of 33 or so would have avoided those things. We tend to leave those things in the tomb like a forgotten husk of Jesus’ rather embarrassing humanity, something to be disposed of in the resurrection.

As Protestants we also tend to forget that we don’t merely have bodies, we are bodies. Even worse, we begin to eagerly anticipate disposing of our bodies, hoping for a day to come when God will free us from all their inconvenient messiness. We forget that God created us as embodied creatures not just disembodied spirits living inside of sophisticated bio-mechanical suits. We forget that God promises to resurrect us as, not merely in, new and improved bodies, a new humanity in a new creation. A human being without a body is simply not a human being, not now, not ever.

Every week we recite the ancient words: “He ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God the father almighty.” That’s not just pretty language, it is making a central claim about God. Whatever was human about Jesus, his messy, complex, conflicted, humanness, warts and neuroses, corns on his toe, a funny laugh, wrinkled hands, a love of wood-working and words, stubbed toes, a wee bit of impatience, bad breath, BO, and a fondness for wandering off by himself from time to time, all of that, the whole untidy package of really truly being a embodied human being not as an abstraction but in the flesh with all its faults and problems is now lifted up, embraced, and made an integrated part of the very life and character of God. The Ascension shouts down the centuries that Jesus’ incarnation does not end in the resurrection nor does it end in the Ascension. Jesus’ humanity does not end, period. It is who Jesus is today and for all eternity. From Ascension and for eternity being human is now a part of God’s own life in Trinity.

We affirm that God is all knowing, omniscient. That means that God knows all the facts of creation, God’s handiwork. God knows space and time and dimension and what you may be thinking at this very moment, but that is all God’s knowledge of facts and things and events like a divinely upgraded Wikipedia. I have no doubt that God knows the precise location of every electron in an upper atmospheric electromagnetic disturbance, God sees the quantum fluctuations giving rise to a plasma cascade as currents of positive and negative electrons reach out and dance with each other, a stunning phenomenon of subtle complexity we call lightning. But what God did not know, indeed what God the all-powerful and all-knowing could not know is what it feels like to be a little boy at home pulling his security blanket over his ears because he does not understand any of this and the thunder and the lightning terrify him. Knowing what that feels like is an altogether different kind of knowing, you can only get from the inside. You can only get that kind of knowing in the flesh.

Our flesh and our bones, our muscles and tendons have memory and understanding deeper than words. If it were not so anyone could simply read a book and become a major league pitcher. Our whole lives are experienced in and through bodies so in order to really understand what it is like for a human to be a human the only way to do it is in the flesh. The incarnation in Bethlehem means that God now knows us as we truly are. The Ascension means that knowledge is now forever a part of who God is.

In Ascension God knows us as one of us, not who we say we are, not who we wish we could be, but the messy and hopeful reality we truly are. The Good news of Ascension is that not despite, but because of this, God loves you in the flesh, and perhaps loves us all the more.
Brian

May 4, 2021

You know that your day is too busy when what you most look forward to is the opportunity for a bathroom break. Busyness, the relentless density of attention, lacks any moment for consideration, evaluation, or context. And yet the responsibilities of duty and performance require that one somehow undertake or at least simulate all those functions for prudent decision making. Right now, we live in a dual minded fuzz where we are endlessly active, but never fully and completely engaged. This static state of anxious attention is often celebrated as the fugue state of multitasking, attending to somehow everything and nothing at the same moment. At least the long-delayed bathroom break provided a moment of focused attention.

What struck me today was what happens when the busyness ends. As I drove home, mission critical tasks completed, I wanted to feel relaxation, satisfaction, perhaps a certain relief. Instead, I felt nothing. Not nothing like I cannot tell what I am feeling, rather nothing as the affirmative absence of all emotion, interest, and intention. A few months ago, I wrote about acedia that missing deadly sin, the noonday demon, the dreary lack of interest in life and everything in it. Medieval monks knew that it was perhaps the most insidious of all the spiritual dangers. French existentialists coined the marvelous term ennui to capture its essence: a weary feeling of listlessness and vague dissatisfaction lacking any particular absence. Today I heard a far less exotic term to describe the same notion: languishing. Languishing is not depression. Depression incapacitates. Languishing permits one to splendidly perform all our necessary daily functions, albeit without much flourish, but deprives one of meaning, satisfaction, or delight in them. Languishing is neither a mental illness nor characteristic of mental health. It is instead an all-to-common stagnation lying along the frontier between flourishing and failure where we simply get by.

I have a vague sense that I should not feel this way. “Should” and “feel” are two words best widely distanced from each other. We feel what we feel and right now a lot of people are feeling languishing. I somehow expected that receiving a vaccine would transform my emotional landscape from “meh” to “whee”, but it did not (the onion rings helped). After my arm reverted from crimson to its normal pinkish pale, I felt nothing. And so report many of you. The initial panic of the pandemic crisis is over and most of us avoided the poignant pangs of grief. I finally threw away the frozen ground beef I hoarded in March 2020. But things still do not feel quite right, or at least I do not feel quite right.

Languishing is one spiritual condition for which the contemplative practices of prayer seem ill suited. What I need is not more time rummaging around inside my consciousness, but a way out of it. When it strikes, my first response is to reset my brain. I sleep, perchance to dream. But when that does not work, which is often, then I seek out direct sensory stimulation. I go somewhere. I do something. Whether walking around the forest or the home furnishings at Target, any new stimulus helps to get me out of my head. The hard part is motivating myself to seek it. The best solution of all is to simply lose oneself in pleasure, where time begins to get lost. Many extol the joys of creating art in all its forms. Being rather more banal, I sing the praises of Netflix binge watching or marathon PS4 sessions where I emotionally bond with the characters (I particularly recommend the Queen’s Gambit and Mass Effect Legendary Edition respectively). They are not themselves joy, but they feel like an indulgent retaliation against the malaise.

I know that we were not made for languishing, but for flow. At the very center of our faith is the notion that God is flow that we call Trinity. And the trick to participate in flow is to get unstuck from our attachments, attachments that this pandemic has made very sticky indeed. Just remember, it is not you. It is the moment we are in. This too will pass. “Whee” is still out there and will take you out onto the dance floor again.

Brian

April 27, 2021

Failure. The mere utterance of the term causes one to instinctively assume a defensive emotional crouch. Failure is often deceptively subjective. As the absence or lack of success, it requires us to clearly understand success. But sometimes failure is clear, convincing, and decidedly public. On Sunday we had a failure in worship. Our internet upload speed started gyrating wildly and then began sinking from 1000 megabytes per second to 100 and then to ten as Lorelai watched helplessly and I watched Lorelai while trying to focus on my sermon, which in that moment may or may not have been livestreamed. And then it hit zero. We were off the internet and for a livestreamed worship service, off the internet is sort of the definition of failure.

Failure goes through a progression of moods much like grief. First there is curiosity about what is, or more precisely is not, happening. Then comes denial–certainly this cannot be correct, the speed test must be wrong. Then comes anger—what the &%*#G@$%! But eventually, and this the least pleasant part, that anger turns inward as a clammy cold feeling begins to creep across your awareness that this is indeed happening and that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do to stop it. Failure is usually served with a chaser of shame that tastes vaguely of cold iron and vomit.

Of course, failure can be the great teacher. In the past 48 hours we have learned more about network topology than we ever wanted to know. We have locked down, metered, restricted, and unencumbered devices and IP addresses like never before and all before May 16 and a live congregation in the sanctuary. Failure does not merely provoke us to learn, it can teach us the right questions to ask.

But what interests me is not so much the adaptive problem-solving benefits of failure but its subjective feelings and what they say about us. And the first thing they say is that I would desperately prefer any other instructor to failure. I nod along with Otto Von Bismarck, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” That view presumes an encyclopedic knowledge of analogous circumstances and solutions. Moreover, it presumes that I understand the precise nature of the problem or predicament when usually my awareness is limited to, hunh this is not working.

Humility then is failure’s first gift. If it keeps on giving it can become shame, but humility itself is just the regular reminder of our limitations, which is no bad thing. Humility and shame diverge at the emotional fork separating “this thing just happened and went really wrong,” from, “this thing just happened and I am wrong.” Failure then forces us to decide if we want to descend into self-recrimination and despair or simply acknowledge our humanness. The ultimate failure in failing is to misidentify or mischaracterize our selves.

Failure’s second gift is to force us to examine ourselves and our worth. The ancient Greeks, as well as Facebook, Linked In, and every ferociously meritocratic society that has ever existed, grounds human value, worth, and identity in excellence. The Greeks called it Areté/excellence and expounded upon it in their literature, illustrated it in their art, incarnated it in their athletics, and personified it in their Gods. Failure is the opposite of excellence. But it can lead us to seek out other foundations of human identity and worth. The ancient Israelites and then the early church, who themselves were often misfit drop-outs from Greek culture, grounded their identity not in achievement, but in relationships with God and one another. Prepositions matter a great deal to theology because they define relationships. Christianity is all about belonging in, to, and through, never over, against, or above. Failure scours away all our proud pretenses to excellence and forces us to confront the simple but often destabilizing truth that my ego, my identity, and my worth are really nothing apart from how, with, and in whom I belong.

Failure then can be like the little bottle that Alice found labelled, “drink me.” She was concerned that it might be poison, but it did not say poison or smell like poison. Instead, it tasted of “cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,” at least so described by Lewis Carrol. Drinking it did not hurt her, it allowed her to discover a whole new world, Wonderland, and in doing so discover her own hidden strengths and the depths of her own character.

Failure, if we do not hide from it or corrupt it into shame can not only teach us new things about the world, it can teach us new things about ourselves. And if along the way it justifies an upgrade to your internet router, all to the better.
Brian

April 20, 2021

Endings are messy. It is hard to say precisely when something ends, doubly so if the endings involve human beings. Many are asking when, if ever the Covid-19 pandemic will end. The answer of course is, it depends. It depends on what you mean by “end.”

Very few epidemics have ever ended in the biological sense. The 1919 influenza epidemic simply mutated, partly through chance and partly through natural selection, into a virus much less likely to kill its host. The descendants of those viruses are still contentedly residing in our sinus cavities us every flu season still infecting and sometimes killing thousands of people every year. Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that causes Bubonic Plague (aka the Black Death) is still endemic among prairie dogs in the American Southwest (please do not pet prairie dogs) and kills a few people every year. Indeed, the only pandemic that ever really ended in the biological sense is smallpox, which is believed to be extinct in human beings. But that feat took a concerted worldwide vaccination effort that started in 1796 and is still ongoing. Polio is getting close to extinction, but still shows disturbing flareups in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The other way epidemics end is socially. We simply reach some critical number of people who agree that the crisis is over and any risks or threats are now sustainable. This is the far more usual way epidemics end. How that gets decided, who bears the risks, and who incurs the costs is all left rather fuzzy. But at some point, people’s desires to live without restrictions exceed some combination of concerns for their own health and that of others. Often some politician wishing to sound victorious will declare victory. Unfortunately, society growing bored with a disease does not mean that a disease has grown bored with human beings. So, we slowly accumulate problems we are simply resigned to endure.

Human beings are not known for our diligence. We much prefer quick fixes and fulfilling our short-term desires over long-term needs, especially those of future generations. So, our problems tend to stick around. Influenza is still contentedly with us, and so too are a far vaster scope of social maladies—racism, patriarchy, anti-Semitism, classicism, violence, environmental degradation, poverty, et cetera. They slowly devolve from being problems to be solved into the annoying background buzz of life together. It is simply presumed that they have always been with us and will always be with us as we shrug and mumble something about human nature.

But what if getting “back to normal” was not the goal? What if fulfilling our desires as much as we can as quickly as we can was not the measure of human life, societal progress, and ultimate value? What if there was a more excellent way?

It all rather depends on what you mean by “end.” If your frame of reference is only the solitary, material, individual human life, perhaps your own, then muddling through while maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain may be the optimal strategy, but try zooming out. What if what matters is not so much me, but we and not simply those of us privileged to be alive at this moment, but everyone who has ever or will ever live? Over the vast scale of centuries, small incremental improvements make a huge difference. Over the widest of scopes, what matters is the overall pattern of adaptation, growth, and transformation.

One thing that proper religion does for human beings is reset the focal length of our perception. We are all little people in a big world, incurably overestimating our own importance and agency. We have very little opportunity to change the world, let alone the cosmos. In a few years or a few centuries, we are forgotten and our works turn to dust. The only thing we have any real agency over are ourselves and our relationships. If we are ever going to do anything of lasting utility or merit it will happen there and there alone. And curiously, if the old hope is true, then our work on and through ourselves endures in ways that our craft and cunning cannot. If the “I” does not end, but somehow becomes interwoven into “Thou,” then the transformation of the human heart and mind is the most enduring, efficacious, and productive work of all.

I really do not want to “get back to normal” if that means simply returning to the pattern of life circa February 2020. We have all been given the rare gift of immediately feeling our mutual vulnerability and the silent time to fully consider it. That gift is the necessary precursor to an epidemic of empathy that could change the world and humanity forever. I suspect we will opt for the easy social solution, shrug our shoulders, mutter something about the way the world is, and simply declare it all over as a matter of convenience.

But if time and this world do have an end and a purpose, flying like an arrow towards a destination and not simply revolving in a repetitive circle, then what we do next matters. What we say matters. How we care for each other matters. How we love matters. How we grow matters. And I rather suspect that God, disappointed a million times over, is still watching expectantly with the most irrational of hopes to see what we do next.
Brian

April 13, 2021

It was the most ordinary of epiphanies: a stack of onion rings. After 12 months, three weeks and four days of eating our own cooking, I found myself oddly moved and perhaps a bit uneasy, as if engaged in something slightly illicit or unfamiliar, eating dinner inside a restaurant on Easter night with Lisa beginning with a glorious tower of onion rings. Having recently received my second vaccination shot, I knew that that dining inside a restaurant was safe, but I had not done it in a long time. What I felt was not so much fear as it was uncertainty borne of novelty. They were, without doubt, the finest onion rings I have ever or probably will ever taste. Spiritual signs of renewal and hope seldom come with more calories of saturated fat. They tasted new.

What was once instinctive and familiar in February 2020 has now sunk deep into the realm of fading memory. As once forbidden places and experiences are opening to larger numbers, I am a newcomer again. How exactly does one act in a restaurant and how do we handle salt shakers? As we move back together as a community in various ways over the coming weeks, we need to recognize that we will all be newcomers again. How did we pray together here? How do we communicate? How do we work together? This realization that we are all newcomers again sparked my curiosity about how the next weeks and months will unfold. What will it mean if “our pew” is roped off to maintain separation between worshippers? How will I feel receiving the body of Christ in a tidy, individually sealed wrapper resembling a eucharistic Oscar Myer Lunchable? Some old patterns and habits of sharing space together will quickly return. Some will not be possible, advisable, or prudent. Some will be modified. And as we navigate being newcomers together, we will collectively redefine who we are as a community.

Over the course of a year there have been a million joys, griefs, stories, and questions that went unspoken and unshared. We are all, to varying degrees, partial strangers again. While this is a challenge and will be the source of awkward moments (if ever there was a time to wear nametags it is now!) it is also a source for potential renewal and transformation. Newcomers are the ones who cross-pollinate congregations bringing life sustaining energies of possibility, vision, and leadership unchained from the drowsy dogmas of, “we’ve never done it that way before.” Newcomers are the ones who ask the important questions that no one else is brave enough to ask. Newcomers somehow sense our foundations in faith, mutual love, service, and openness, which is what attracted them in the first place, but seek to be seen and appreciated for their own unique identities and contributions to the whole. And when we return, we will all be newcomers.

So, to the new congregation of Fairmont, because although your names may not have changed your lives have, please ponder with me, your newly called pastor, some of the novel questions given to us in this season of rebirth. What have we done in response to the pandemic that is powerfully impactful in people’s lives and why? How can we do that and maybe more of it? What were we doing in February 2020 that we have not done in the past year that has not been missed? What may be required to let those things lie fallow? What new strengths have we discovered this year? What new joys have we discovered? How can we sustain those things? Finally, what new opportunities and challenges have we recognized that we need to address? All these questions are important to every congregation, business, organization, family, and individual right now. And please notice what I am not asking. Do not ask what is next because the short term abounds in more uncertainty than ever before. A wise person does not have answers to the unknowable.

Somewhere out there, some of you have been pondering these things too. The answers will unfold in a thousand casual and formal ways over the coming weeks and months. Collectively they will provide the pattern for our ministry and our lives for years to come. What I need for you to do most of all is share. Share with me. Share with others. Ponder together who we are becoming and how we are changing because this work is rarely done well alone. And if the Spirit plants a truly outrageous, disruptive, beautiful idea in your imagination, please give me a call and let’s meet to talk about it. I will buy the onion rings. Brian

April 6, 2021

“And when the all shall cease to be,
in dread lone splendor He shall reign.
He was, He is, He shall remain in glorious eternity.”

I come often to this beautiful verse from the Jewish Union Prayer Book. Wars and rumors of wars, death and darkness, the pandemic, evil embodied in hateful acts and speech, the slow corroding of our precious earth – all these things weigh heavily upon us, and we understand our deep longing for Easter in a very visceral way.

Easter morning felt especially joyful this past Sunday as we gathered for our outdoor, in-person sunrise service in the church parking lot. Almost seventy people attended our sunrise service and I do believe that over half of them were in tears, so happy were they to finally worship together in-person after this long pandemic year. Joy has a way of surprising us and seeping into our world-weary bodies, often through unexpected tears. It truly was a “sunrise” service even at the late hour of 8:30 a.m. as the sun slowly rose over the eastern side of the church building and flooded the eyes of those gathered in the church parking lot. It was a glorious morning in so many ways, and the glimpse of hope that we needed as we slowly and mindfully prepare to reopen our indoor, in-person worship services in the coming weeks.

Together we proclaim that “Christ is risen” and we are no longer without hope. The One who “was and is and shall remain in glorious eternity” is here with us, always. Easter has come just when we thought we could endure death no more. Hope has come just when we thought we could endure despair no more.

In one of the churches I served in Virginia, church members greeted the Easter morning with two things in hand: flowers for decorating the large wooden cross in the church courtyard and bells for worship. During Easter morning worship, parishioners would ring their bells whenever the pastor or worship leaders proclaimed the words, “Christ is risen!” It was a glorious morning of smells and bells!

As we make our way through this rather convoluted fog of how we reopen, all the while keeping everyone safe and not contributing to the ongoing spread of COVID-19, I wonder if we could find an Easter tradition or a simple Easter practice like ringing a bell or picking a flower or singing a song or saying a prayer that will help us keep our focus on resurrection hope? Even with the increased number of vaccinations and fewer cases of COVID-19, anxiety seems to be getting the best of us!

We are Easter People! We must hold on to the hope we have in the resurrected Christ, especially during difficult times such as these. May this season of Easter bring a renewed sense of joy and patience and strength as we journey on through these strange days.

Peace,

Pastor Kelley

March 30, 2021

It was fear that killed Him.

Fear is the problem. Fear is always the problem. That is why Jesus’ most common instruction is, “Don’t be afraid.” Fear is not an emotion so much as it is an alien force that seeks admittance into our emotions, will, and reason and, when implanted, begins to replicate itself like a virus displacing values, wisdom, logic, and love. Fear is ubiquitous touching every human life with its insidious intrusion corrupting our egos, relationships, politics, religion, and culture. Frustratingly, it evades all our direct efforts to contain it. All we seem able to do, and then only sometimes, is face it and pass through it.

The crowd in Jerusalem was afraid that He had betrayed them. He was not the Messiah they expected or wanted. They were afraid of having their hopes denied and their yearning for liberation mocked by anyone who claimed to be Messiah who would not throw out the Romans and restore Judah to its once, imagined, glorious past. So they abandoned Him and sided with the zealots who, if not promising freedom, at least honored their grief and grievances.

The scribes and the priests were afraid that He either might be right or someone might believe He was right. He turned on the Temple and its officials, calling them a brood of vipers. He made a ruckus in the court of the gentiles and disturbed their lucrative business operations calling them something worse than robbers. He compared them to bandits who plundered the pilgrims on their sacred journey. And to make matters worse, He himself seemed to have no interest in the work of the temple. He seemed to have something altogether different in mind to reconcile the people with their God.

The High Priest was afraid of politics and who might get killed by it. Caiaphas feared the potential disintegration of law and order and the respect for institutions that He insinuated. Caiaphas’ position was never particularly secure, always one wrongly priced bribe away from exile, or worse. More charitably, he feared from what might happen if this carpenter and his message caught on. Those crowds on Sunday holding up palm branches knew exactly what He was doing. And so did the Romans. Kings of the Jews, claimed, feigned, or otherwise tended to get a lot of people killed. Perhaps it is best to take care of the problem sooner rather than later.

Pilate was afraid because of the inherent weakness in his position. A mid-level colonial bureaucrat, he kept one eye on his patrons and their dangerous game of thrones in Rome and another on his boss, the demanding and avaricious Governor of Syria. In theory, he had almost unlimited power over Judea. In practice it rarely extended far beyond his court. With only about 3000 half-trained auxiliary troops of dubious loyalty to govern the entire nation, he did what he could to keep order. But if things got out of hand, inquiries from the Senate would soon follow and shortly thereafter a new Prefect. So every year he dutifully marched up to Jerusalem with reinforcements during the Passover hoping things would not get out of hand. Messiahs were the last thing he wanted.

I should not judge any of them too harshly. They were all just being very . . . human. We want what we can see and touch and control. Even if it is not very much, letting go of control is even scarier. So we create all our systems, rituals, and habits of thought to maintain that predictability and control. Among those systems is religion to regulate divine/human relations on our terms. But what if some day God actually did show up, in person? Would I be able to let go of everything, absolutely everything I ever knew or thought I knew?

The hard, unsettling question of Holy Week for me is not how could those people back then do what they did. The hard, unsettling question of Holy Week is facing my own fear and in its bitter reflection asking myself whether I too would to seek to escape it or walk through it to find Him on the other side?

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee!
‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.

Johann Heerman, Ah Holy Jesus

March 23, 2021

In the spring of 1993, a seminary friend and I hiked the San Juan Mountains out of Durango, Colorado to the Continental Divide, an elevation of 14,000 feet. I had hiked many mountain trails in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Northern New Mexico and the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California but had never hiked a backpacking trip of this degree before. It was both challenging and rewarding to hike this beautiful trail with the spring rains, muddy paths, and the steady elevation gain, so I felt most proud when we finally reached the Wolf Creek Pass of the Continental Divide.

There were many wonderful surprises on this backpacking trip – the sheer beauty of the mountains, the aspen trees, the clear water of the mountain streams and lakes – but one of the biggest surprises was the return trip back down the mountain. I naively thought that the climb up the mountain was the most difficult part of the trip and that the hike back down the mountain would be easy as pie. I clearly was wrong! It takes an entirely different set of muscles and immense physical strength to carry a weighted backpack down many curvy, steep miles of rocky paths strewn with tree roots and mud puddles. By the time we reached the bottom of the trail we were exhausted! But there was one more surprise in store for us before we reached the end.

The small mountain stream we had easily crossed on our way up the mountain had become a raging river with the spring rains that had accompanied our trip. As exhausted as we were, we now had to safely cross a swiftly moving river with water up to our waists and backpacks on our back. It was one of the most exhilarating and frightening moments of my life!

The majority of injuries and deaths which occur during climbing expeditions and backpacking trips happen the second half of the trip during the descent of the mountain when hikers and climbers are most tired and believe that the hardest part is over. Even the most experienced hikers and climbers get caught off guard by the sheer strength and concentration it takes to descend a mountain.

We, by the grace of God, are on the return trip – the descent – of the mountain; a mountain called Pandemic. Our ascent up this Pandemic Mountain this past year was very difficult but we, hopefully, have reached the top now with the widespread availability of the COVID-19 vaccinations and we are finally on our descent back down the mountain to home.

But we must remember that the descent is just as difficult as the ascent, only a different kind of difficult. In order to safely reach the end of this pandemic we must use the muscles of patience, persistence, and compassion even when we think we are almost to the bottom of the mountain. We must be wise in our steps and intentional in our journey as we come to the stream at the bottom of the mountain which now looks very different than it did when we went up the mountain.

As the Fairmont session and staff are mindfully making plans for when we will be together again in-person for worship and ministry, my prayer is that we will stay strong for this last part of this journey and safely cross that river.

Blessings and love,

Pastor Kelley

March 16, 2021

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July 7, 2020

Consider Grumpiness

Everywhere I seem to turn, whether it be at Kroger’s, watching TV, at the gas station, the General Assembly of the PCUSA, or even at church, I encounter our present golden age of grumpiness. Allow me to define my terms. By grumpiness I mean the interconnected behaviors and assumptions of a general dissatisfaction that the world is not the way we wish it to be combined with assumption that this unfortunate state of affairs is the fault of others, others whom we assume to be either negligent or bearing malign purpose. It is not simply sadness about how things are. It is sadness redirected outward into prickly madness.

Everyone seems grumpy now. Since early March we have been living under the shadow of fear which cannot be contained, mitigated, or predicted. Moreover, our sense of control over our “normal” lives has been pulled from under our feet with social distancing and all the normal pleasures of life cancelled. Compounding all of this is our collective incomprehension decoding the emotional cues behind our masks. Is that person smiling or smirking at us? Without our near constant flow of non-verbal emotional cues, we revert to our feral instincts assuming ill will behind every face mask. And what is the result? Lack of trust, the break down of relationships, institutions, and cooperation, and, of course, ever increasing grumpiness feeding its own growth.

Grumpiness is not all bad. As I mentioned, it is comprised of two components. First, we are disappointed, unsettled, anxious, and saddened by the way things are. That sadness is an honest and authentic response to pain. Normally, all by itself, we call that form of sadness, grief. Grief is the necessary experience of every mortal creature who loves life, beauty, and other creatures. Grief always arises because this world is touched by a pall of darkness from the very beginning that tinges every joy with the melancholy of inevitable loss. That is what this life and this world are like. Things do not always work out. We lose those we love. Everything mortal ends.

Given this reality of loss, the ancient answer of the church is not to deny or ignore the pain, but to sit with it and ultimately step through it. The pain is the embodied experience of letting go, letting go of our dreams, letting go of our loves, and even letting go of life. The curious thing is that in letting go, we finally find ourselves held. In letting go (a great metaphysical maneuver to bypass mortality that Jesus demonstrated on the cross) we finally liberate ourselves from all those attachments that kept us bound for so long. In letting go we finally find ourselves to be not only free, but in a reality more beautiful, loving, and rooted than anything our frustrated desires could dream of.

The problem is that this process of letting go or self-emptying can get misdirected. Grief is the greatest teacher of wisdom, but only if it does not get distracted towards others and transform into grumpiness and anger. We are afraid of looking inward and asking the hard questions, so we start hurling our grief outward onto others hoping that it will somehow stick. The shortest and most dangerous separation in the human heart is between grief and anger. Grief always wants to conceal itself as anger so it can go unnoticed, unprocessed, and unhealed. So, we ascribe fault to others. We push them away. We blame, accuse, and judge. And then we find ourselves ever sadder and more alone.

I look around our nation and often into my own heart to see the vast seas of unprocessed grief in which we paddle our lives. Time does not heal all wounds, it only conceals them as they sink down and become a part of us and for too many, become us. This danger befalls not just individuals, but entire nations.

There is another way, but it is hard. Job posed this same challenge and Jesus supplied the answer. We can face our pain. We can befriend it. We can walk through it. My pain is my pain and belongs to no one else. Blame will not remove it. Accusation will not lessen it.  The pain is simply a part of being mortal. But if I listen to it and loosen my need for control and predictability, I find myself upheld from somewhere else, from someone else.

The present crisis is not fundamentally a question of virology, public health, cancelled vacation plans, deferred gatherings, personal freedoms, collective responsibilities, civil rights legislation, family expectations, or even national character. The present crisis is simply asking us whether we can face our own feelings and grow up. -Brian

June 30, 2020

June 23, 2020