Love Letters of Christmastide

Very recently I presided over a lovely wedding here at St. James.  The sermon title was, Love is Love, which I stole from the email of an acquaintance. When I confessed to him that I had stolen his line for a sermon title, he said, well here’s another one: “All you need is love. Steal that one too.”  The next day I went to meet someone over at the Wired Rooster in Wellsboro and what should I see on the tent sign outside of the café? Chalked up in blue and white were the words: All you need is love, of course followed by, and a good cup of coffee.  I took out my smart phone and I stole it.  

Earlier this week while wandering around TJ Max fixated on a gift finding mission, I rounded a corner and found myself face to face with a large framed picture of some familiar words:  All you need is love.  I laughed and thought, how remarkable. Then I looked all around me and was astounded to see that I was in an entire section of framed words, all variations of the same line: All you need is Love.  All you need is Love in white cursive letters on blue pastels, All you need is Love in large block print letters on a black background, All you need is Love in larger than life gold sans serif letters floating against a light blue background. And then there were variations on the theme:  the single word, “LOVE.” (note the period), black letters on a white background, framed boldly; then there was the single word love, written in script, repeated many times taking the shape of a heart. Two walls and several shelves of All you need is Love. I would have laughed again, but I was truly astounded at the bold audacity of the universe.  I just stood there literally surrounded by Love. I wondered, What is the Holy Spirit trying to tell me? What is she, not so subtly, putting out there for me to grasp or perhaps just for me to see?

But there is another question that begs an answer. If marketing efforts were so keen on selling love, then there must be a market for it. Clearly the world is hungry for love.  By the millions we are buying printed images of words about Love, some tattoo it on their bodies, and others wear t-shirts to proclaim our beliefs about it.  And yet it seems just beyond our reach. Were it so easy to grasp, so easy to claim, so easy to give, so easy to receive, so easy to see, so easy to understand then Love art would no longer have any buyers.  We do not need to buy what we have in abundance.  It would seem that the culture we live in is asking all manner of questions about Love.  The question for the Christian community is, do we have anything to say about Love?

Well it’s Christmas and that has something to do with Love or at least it’s supposed to.  I’m not sure Love is the first thing that comes to mind when we think of Christmas though, if we’re honest.  Every year my first thoughts of Christmas occurs in October when the stores begin to put out their Christmas decorations; right next to the Halloween displays. It’s blatantly about the bottom line; end of the year consumer spending making up a goodly part of many business’ profit/loss statements.  This is in keeping with American culture in general, of course: if you want something then it’s simply a matter of saving up the money and buying it.  But what you and I know, really, is that Love can’t be bought. We can buy a framed picture of the word Love, but that is not Love. At some level I think we’re in Love with the idea of Love; of the picture of Love that has been shaped in our common imaginations by culture itself.  

Just think, where did you learn about Love?  I learned a lot of what I know about Love from books and movies.  I must be honest and tell you that did not learn about Love in the church. Or perhaps more correctly: for a very long time, I did not realize that what I was learning about was Love. I thought I was learning stories that portrayed the state and struggles of humanity throughout the ages.  I thought I was learning theological ideals about God. I thought I was learning about discipleship and how to act in the world; how to be a better person; how to find purpose in my life.  I thought I was learning doctrines and dogma that was instructive for living a life meant to emulate Christ himself.  I thought I was learning how to be kind.

Last month someone I care about moved far away. The last thing you really want to give a person who is moving is something else to pack so I decided just to give a blessing. But I’ve never given a blessing to a single person before in that way and I didn’t want to look completely stupid and suddenly forget the words. So I practiced saying the words which I have been known to stumble upon in front of an entire congregation; which is as embarrassing as suddenly forgetting the order of the words at communion when I put bread into open hands: The body of Christ, the bread of heaven – how many ways can you screw that up? Ask me, I can tell you. So here are the words I repeated over and over again:

Be swift to love and make haste to be kind.

Be swift to love and make haste to be kind.

Be swift to love and make haste to be kind.

Be swift to love and make haste to be kind.

Be swift to love and make haste to be kind.

Be swift to love and make haste to be kind.

It occurred to me that over the eleven years I’ve been saying this blessing, that I’ve never actually heard the words. They’ve been words for someone else to hear. But this time, they were meant for me. I heard, that is I internalized, “be swift to love.” 

If you think about it, really ponder it, you might come to the conclusion that have I reached. It’s really hard to be swift to love.  When we are small children we are hard-wired for love. Undamaged, unbroken, untrained, not yet tempered by hurts and disappointments and disillusions; not yet devastated by heart break and loss, we are all about love.  It pours out of us.  It’s easily read in our eyes and we hold it our small little hands with such ease. We do not think about it, because one does not need to consider one’s own nature; it simply is.

For those of us who have great difficulty understanding Love as it portrayed in the violence of the cross, then Love as portrayed as an infant child can be our way in. When we hear the nativity story we can connect with it because it is still so innocent, so pure, it is the time before – and all of us have a before and after story. It’s the before part of our stories that can once again connect with this Love. It is the window through which we might be able to see and understand the very nature of God. If you have not heard me say it recently, then hear it now: God is Love.  There really isn’t anything else you need to know about God, or religion, or spiritually, or even Jesus, beyond this. God is love. And what I realize now, what is so clear to me in this moment, is that everything I learned in Sunday school, or in the Bible, or in seminary, or in all the sermons I’ve ever heard, or written or preached, or by anything I’ve ever read by any theological author is that these expressions are all different forms of love letters. Letters written to tell me that I am loved.

I’m an avid fan of letter writing. I’ve been writing letters to the people in my life for as long as I can remember. Letter writing puts words on a page that have flow directly from your heart through your body into your wrists, hands and fingers, finding expression through a pen or a keyboard.  There are letters that were hard to write but needed to written; letters for truth-telling that once received will have consequences for both parties; there are unexpected letters we receive that fill us with complete joy and knowledge that we have been remembered; letters that tell us news that will forever change our lives; letters that are filled with happy news and the deepest desire to be appreciated; there are letters that beg in desperation for us to be seen and heard, letters that tell stories that make us laugh, or cry, or perhaps just think more deeply about things; there are final letters, final words; there are letters that are not meant ever to be sent, and letter we’ve written that we deeply regret sending; letters to lovers (the Song of Solomon is such a letter), letters with ill intent written in the blood our deepest wounds; there are letters we frame and letters we burn.  All these letters we write and receive, each in their own way, are love letters. 

In that same way, the story we have heard this night is a love letter written by someone who went long before us. It was written for the generations to follow. It was written for you. It is a love letter that tells a story about the Love of God, who is Love, who was born just like you were. But unlike you and I this love will not be corrupted over time and through the years of living.  This Love will do that for which we can only strive. It will grow instead of fade. It will intensify with the passing of years. It will embrace all things, accept all things, forgive all things, know all things. It will embrace you, accept you, forgive you and know you completely.  This Love we can only see in small glimpses. The most intense love we have known is but a shadow of this Love. In life we can see only part, but in death we will know it fully.  It is our life force. It grows in us as we learn to accept things and people and situations for what they are, as we do the work of forgiveness, and as we seek to know, to deeply know another human being. 

As a priest and as a health coach I refer to the work of love as healing. Healing is to me, is the final manifestation of love accomplishing its purpose. Healing is love in action.  Healers then are required, first and foremost to love those who come to them in pain and suffering. Healers begin their work from a place of acceptance, forgiveness and a willingness to identify with their own humanity as it is mirrored back to them through the ones who stand before them. All Christians are called to the work of healing. You are called to the work of healing. It is what the world requires: an army of healers.  Our only tool, our only weapon is Love.

Twenty years ago I was most fortunate to spend several years in the care of an excellent therapist while I traversed the landscape of life experiences known to many if not all of us: death, divorce, loss, more death, more loss, remarriage, rebirth, recovery and a birth.  As part of my personal spiritual journey a few months ago I wrote a letter to my dearest friend with whom I had not spoken in all these years.  It occurred to me she would not remember me and I was at peace with that because the work of love she had begun in me can never be undone. But within days of sending my letter, complete with a lovely stamp, she sent back to me her reply.  There I was standing in my kitchen holding her letter in my hand. I didn’t even need to open it to feel that measure of healing.  But I did.  It’s been 20 years and I am loved still. 

That’s what the nativity story has to teach us: Love that is truly Love doesn’t die, it cannot.  We are surrounded this night by flowers that signify the remembrance of those we love, many of whom have passed from this world into the next. The love we have for them and they for us does not die. Death cannot destroy love; not any longer. Not since Love was born into the world; not since God became Love incarnate. Love itself has insured that love cannot be destroyed or even diminished.

Someone recently told me about the death of one of their parents: regardless of what came before, what remained in the end was love. Love is unaffected by death, or by any separation. Love is both the substance and the residue. It’s all we really have to offer anyone that is of any value whatsoever. When people see us, what they are really looking at, what they are really sizing up about us, is our capacity for love.  Love for self, love to give, love to express through our lives’ work and our acts of kindness, hospitality and generosity; but also in the lines we draw and the boundaries we enforce, and in what we chose to give away and in what we chose to keep. That’s what we see in that little baby who we have come to know as the person of Jesus. We see in that child a vast and wide, all encompassing capacity for love. It is his greatest gift. Actually it is his only gift.

Christmas Eve Homily, 2014

Love is love

Marriage Homily for Lynn Johnson and Joel Costello, Dec. 13, 2014, St. James

I begin with a little ditty from the last time Joel and Lynn and I met for pre-marital counseling.  Lynn was telling me that the wording on the marriage application has not yet changed to match the law; so the clerk asked the two men which of them would like to be “the wife.”  Lynn said he’d do it because, after all, he has the girlie name. Joel pushed back a little and said, Yeah, but I’m the one who carries a purse.

This is such a good day and a blessed event and I am honored beyond measure to have been asked to preside over this celebration of marriage.  This nation and its protestant churches have come such a long way in such a short time – its really breathtaking.  When I attended seminary from 2000 to 2003 the topic of gay marriage was front and center.  The national Episcopal Church was struggling with discernment on the issue and a national vote was set for the summer of 2003; anxiety was high church-wide. One day during a systematic theology class in 2001 one of my female heterosexual colleagues complained to the professor that she was tired of talking about this issue – it was all we ever talked about and she just wanted a break.  I though Professor Joe Monti was going to come completely unglued – he got right in her face and said:  You’re tired of it?  We’ll you better think again – ‘cause this is YOUR issue. You’re going to be on the front lines. This is your fight. Your church is positioned and ready to vote Yes at General Convention in 2003.  And you better figure out right now how you are going to live that out. And don’t ever tell me you’re tired of fighting for human dignity. This is what you signed up for.  

The irony of this is, of course, that she, and I, are only ordained to the priesthood because of the years of struggle that came from the women who we followed. We stand on the shoulders of thousands of men and women did not tire in their pursuit of the end of oppression, many of whom have lived to see the changes they fought for put into place and thriving. I am a beneficiary of social struggle. I try not to take that for granted.

I confess that even still, sitting in that classroom in 2001 I never thought I’d actually ever preside over a same sex marriage. Things at that time were so hostile, people were so staunchly set in their positions.  I never thought this massive church would actually be able to come to a resolution, much less put it into action. And yet, here were are, just over a decade later and today I am presiding over my second same gender marriage in three years – legal in both New York and PA as well as in the dioceses in which they were/are being performed.  As required by canon law I spoke with my bishop recently to seek approval for this union and I am required to do prior to all weddings and he gave his heartfelt and enthusiastic blessing.  And in preparing the liturgy for this service, in the space of five minutes I changed the language of the traditional Episcopal marriage rite from wife and husband to the wording we are using today. Imagine that, five minutes and a few strokes of the keyboard to change centuries of hatred, oppression, and exclusion.

What is important for our purposes today however is to understand what lies at the heart of this transformation.  The Episcopal Church has only seven doctrines. Just to compare, our Roman brothers and sisters have over one hundred and fifty. The over-riding doctrine for us, the one on which everything else rest is this: God is Love.  That’s it; three words. God is Love.  This doctrine, taken to its natural conclusion forces us to conclude without question that exclusion cannot be a part of our common life because it is not a holy expression of love, therefore it cannot be of God.  God is love – exclusion falls outside of that parameter. Likewise, oppression cannot be part of our common life because it is not a healthy or holy expression of love therefore is not of God. Christians must reject both exclusion and oppression and anything else that divides us from one another and from God based on a doctrine of three words. God is Love.

Of course this very simplistic understanding of the doctrine of Love turns on our personal perception of God.  If we think of God as judgmental and punishing then we are given license to mediate this to every person who does not meet our expectation of the way things are supposed to be. For some of us, love and its expression is a complicated issue; often tied to fear.  Human love invariable involves some level of pain out of which fear finds a sure home. 

I find the writing of Sri Chinmoy helpful on this score. Chinmoy is an internationally renowned spiritual leader and tireless emissary for peace.  He describes God as “the Love.” He writes: Where there is love, real love, there can be no fear.  Why do we fear? We fear because we have separated ourselves from God’s Love and we are apt to think of God the Omnipotent, not God the All-Love.  But even the Omnipotent God is not a God that threatens or strikes us with an iron rod every time we make a mistake. There is no such being as God the tyrant. There is only one God, and that God is God the Love. This God does not punish us. This God is constantly shaping us in His own way. ….. [We sometimes] feel that if we do something wrong God will punish us mercilessly. This is not so.  It is God’s Dream that each individual embodies. It is God’s Reality that each individual has to manifest here on earth.  It is in each human being that God’s Reality lives.”

Christians understand this concept of the God who is Love in the writings of the apostle Paul. The love of which Paul speaks in his first letter to the Corinthians is not love the verb. Paul is actually describing the very person of God.  God is patient; God is kind, God is not envious or boastful or rude. God does not insist on God’s own way, God is not irritable or resentful; God does not rejoice in wrongdoing, God rejoices in the truth. God bears all things, believes all things, God hopes all things, God endures all things. God never ends. Love never ends.

You might think theological discussion is boring and irrelevant but I assure you that were it not for such discussions you and I would not be here today celebrating the love that exists between these two lovely men; making legal and binding that love.  That love, the love that exists between two people, that love is why we are all here.

Have you ever wondered where love comes from?  You know, ...the kind of love that knocks you off your feet.  ….the kind of love that shows up when you least expect it or even want it.  …the kind of love that keeps that other person on your mind hour after hour.  …the kind of love that acknowledges that even the air you breath is made thinner by their absence.  

In his song, Sideways, Citizen Cope sings:

You know it ain't easy for these thoughts here to leave me
There are no words to describe it in French or in English

Well, diamonds they fade and flowers they bloom,

and I'm telling you these feelings won't go away
They've been knockin' me sideways
They've been knockin' me out lately whenever you come around me
I keep thinking in a moment that time will take them away
But these feelings won't go away, they won’t go away.

So are we born with it? Or do we learn it, like we learn to walk or ride a bike? From the Christian perspective, Love is God that resides in you. But we do not generally connect romantic love with God, as if there is something profoundly wrong with associating the two.  But Christianity has a long history of doing just that. The mystics have for centuries understood their feelings and yearnings to find union with God in terms of human love and longing. The two are very much one in the same. It does not benefit us to try to separate them, thereby rendering one lesser than the other.

At the end of the day, there are some things that are indisputable in regards to love: You do not possess it, nor can you harness or control it. It is life-giving and ever-growing and expanding. Ultimately it is a force for good; seeking to bring about peace and wholeness both internally and externally.  No matter how hard you try to beat it down or dismiss it, it will prevail.  To deny love is to do violence to yourself.  It will not be denied.  Given half a chance, love will consume you, motivate you and compel you like no other force on earth.  Unbridled it has the power to bring you back to your truest self.  If you wonder, Who am I? Ask instead, Who do I love? 

So let this marriage be for you a model of what love looks like when it is righteous and true and holy; two men who are winding their way back to God through their authentic expression of love. It is undeniably God’s own doing.

The necessity that changes a course

In the Benedictine spirituality reading this week, Joan Chittister quotes an old Sanskrit saying: “necessity changes a course but never a goal.”  In Matthew’s miraculous account of the loaves and the fishes we can see this old adage in play. Necessity changed the course, but did not alter the goal. The story of the feeding of the 5000 was so important to the early church that is was reproduced in all four gospels. Jesus and the disciples have just learned that John the Baptist has been beheaded. And Jesus for his part, is at the height of popularity - the crowds can't get enough of him, but all he wants is to find somewhere to be alone.  Some days are like that.  Some days everybody wants a piece of us and there doesn't seem to be a single moment of the day to just sit down.  And there's nothing to do but take a deep breath and get to the next thing on the list, or go to the next committee meeting, or teach the next class, or fix the next meal or drive to the next appointment. Some days there's hardly a moment to catch a bite to eat. That's the kind of day Jesus was having.  His teaching was winding down and it was getting dark and the crowd was hungry but there was no food. Equally exhausted and short tempered the disciples wanted to just send the people away, especially since there was barely enough food for them. But Jesus is mindful of the expectation of hospitality and the centrality of a shared meal that was foundational to Judaism, then and now.

Mindful that Jesus himself was not a charismatic leader of Christianity but in fact a devout and practicing Jew, a rabbi and preacher of the Torah, it might be useful to look at the way in which Judaism understands the sacredness of the meal. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about meals as an expression of piety, saying, “Piety is an important word in Judaism, because all of life is a reflection of God, the infinite source of holiness.  The entire world, all the good things in life, belong to God, so when you enjoy something, you think of God and enjoy it in his presence. … When you wake up, you are aware God created the world.  When you see rays of sunshine streaming through your window, you recognize the presence of God. When you stand up and your feet touch the ground, you know the earth belongs to God.  When you wash your face, you know that the water is God.  [You cook, set the table, and eat in the presence of God.] Piety is the recognition that everything is linked to the presence of God in every moment.  The Passover Seder, for example, is a ritual meal to celebrate freedom of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and their journey home.  During the meal, certain vegetables and herbs, salt and other condiments help us touch what happened in the past – what was our suffering and what was our hope.” 

This is the perspective we must understand as we come to study this event.  For Jesus this was a matter of piety; to deny the meal would have undermined the teaching. Necessity was pressing them to change course, but they were ill-prepared.  They had been looking for a moment of quiet in the countryside, but the crowds had followed them.  Nonetheless, Jesus confidently blessed the meager five loaves of bread and two fish and gave it to his disciples. They in turn broke the food into pieces and put it into baskets, lots of baskets in fact. So much so that after all have had their fill there are 12 baskets left over.  Let us understand that Jesus did not add anything to the food that was not already there.  The food was good and sufficient in its own right.  Wholesome, simply, basic food is in itself a sufficient expression of God’s generous nature. Jesus simply lifted it up to God so that that attribute, God’s generous nature, might be made manifest.  And it was. God then multiplied the pieces with a greater abundance that was even required.  Necessity required a change of course, but the goal was not altered.  The goal was always the revelation of God.

There is another way to look at this story.  I remind you once again that the gospels are, if nothing else, political documents.  The Roman coin had on one side the picture of Nero and on the other, Cere, the goddess of agriculture. The coin also had a phrase translated to: "The annual harvest of the emperor." So by extension, it is the king who provides the basic necessity of food for all of inhabitants of the Roman kingdom. Jesus’ act is not just a simple act of kindness, random grace, but a bold political statement about the reign of God in direct contradiction to the Roman establishment delivered in the authentic cloth of piety. It is God who feds the people in their hour of need; providing what is needed both physically as well as spiritually. We must also consider that the gathered crowd may have understood the significant of the feeding more than we give them credit if word of John’s death had arrived to them. John was a well-known figure, regularly drawing large crowds of his own, and word of his death would have spread quickly throughout the Judean countryside.  They too would have been deeply grieved and worried about the abruptly shifting and dangerous winds threatening Jesus’ safety and those associated with him.  If it could happen to John it could happen to Jesus just as easily.  The sudden provision of an unexpected and abundant meal reassured Jesus’ followers that God would provide for their needs, even in the face of John’s death and Jesus’ own threats from the Roman and Jewish establishment.

In addition to the use of this story to reveal God’s generous nature as well as to contrast the worldly kingdom of Rome against the spiritual realm of God kingdom, there is yet another way to understand this event.   Because it’s such a large crowd, it’s easy to miss the human factor.  We do this as a matter of course in our world today. In a crowd individual identity is lost.  But we might ask, who are these people who are in this crowd?  Well, they were mothers and fathers, who undoubtedly had their children with them, and probably quite a number of them, together with aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and all the cousins.  This was a crowd of whole, large families in addition to widows and outcasts, and a goodly number of sick, carried for miles by relatives in hopes of a miraculous cure. And each one of them had a story, a life, a history, a present and a future, hopes and dreams and all the things they planned for and all the things they wanted to forget.

In one of my lectures this week from my health coaching coursework was on the mind-body connection; the way in which all the events of our lives are expressed in some physical manifestation by our bodies.  In fact most all of the healing arts throughout the centuries all around the world have this precept and foundational for healing. It is only Western medicine that focuses completely on the body’s ailments to the almost total exclusion of the person themselves.  All ancient modalities of healing still widely practiced around the world consider this quite inadequate – like trying to feed 5000 with five loaves of bread and two fish.  Our bodies do not forget the events of lives.  And we all have a story.  Like every person in that crowd on the shores of Galilee, 5000 different stories.  There is one type of doctor practicing widely in the US that does not exclude the person from their illness and those are naturopaths.  When you see a naturopathic doctor, after the symptoms have been described, the first question is, What’s your story?  What has happened to you? And there’s quite a lot of talking and quite a lot of listening, deep listening – to all that is being said, and all that is being left unsaid. In my personal experience, there’s a reverence to this exchange that is also quite sacred.  The world we live in is all about being fixed as quickly as possible, as if we were machines.  But we are not machines; we are, each one of us, holy expressions of God’s greatest hopes for us. And we all have a story. And we each have our own pain and have made sacrifices, and incurred great losses. Sometimes necessity required not a single change of course, but a whole new map. Along the way we get wounded and scarred and our emotional and spiritual lives become neglected if not altogether abandoned.  The healing that most of us require cannot be found in a bottle and is not available at any shelf at any pharmacy.  The healing we require takes far more effort than most of us are willing to give.  Deep and complete healing requires not a simple change of course but a new goal altogether; a new paradigm for understanding that we beautiful, complicated expressions of everything that has ever happened to us.  God knows this because it is God who made us this way.  To fight against this is to fight against God.  I like the way this truth was expressed in a song called, Mystify. For all you hard rock fans, the band is Saving Abel. The lyrics go like this:

Consuming moments just like these,
I'm being broken down on my knees.
It's getting clear, what do I see?
I feel your love reaching out for me.
Oh, mirror, it's so clear,
That I'll run and disappear.
Why am I running from the past,
With all the memories that couldn't last?
So when you peek into my soul,
Why do I run, when you make me whole?
Mirror, mirror on the wall:
Who's the biggest fool of all?
With no light, no sight, no eyes I see,
I can't help, I feel you reaching out for me.
You know you mystify me.
You bring a light to the life, I'm breathing.
You bring a light to the life, I'm living.

We all think we’re so individual, but that not how the world sees us. To the government, we just the people who make up the crowd, the voters, the constituents, the lobbyists, the special interest groups. To the corporate world, we’re a crowd of consumers; we buy the products and services and do our part to keep the economy ticking along. There’s nothing individual about it.  There’s a certain irony here if you think about it in terms of the image of rugged American individualism.  But to God and in God’s kingdom crowds are not crowds, but people in close proximity to one another, each retaining their own uniqueness; each loved and treasured not for what we have or have to offer, but simply for who we are. We are the necessity that changes a course.  Our hunger is the priority; our pain, our suffering that matters to God.

So what is your story?  What has happened to you? For what do your hunger?  

Tell your story. Claim your story. Then ask for what you need and it will be given to you.

Parables as Instruments of Mindfulness

Heard, spoken, or enacted, parables confront us with a different picture of God and a more inclusive social vision.  What follows are three little vignettes about Gandhi. But because Gandhi is now himself an iconic metaphor, these stories can be heard as parables and not just amusing antidotes.  

When Gandhi was studying law at the University College of London, a white professor, whose last name was Peters, disliked him intensely and always displayed prejudice and animosity towards him. Also, because Gandhi never lowered his head when addressing him, as he expected.... there were always "arguments" and confrontations. One day, Mr. Peters was having lunch at the dining room of the University, and Gandhi came along with his tray and sat next to the professor.  The professor said, "Mr. Gandhi, you do not understand. A pig and a bird do not sit together to eat." Gandhi looked at him as a parent would a rude child and calmly replied, "You do not worry professor. I'll fly away," and he went and sat at another table. Mr. Peters, reddened with rage, decided to take revenge on the next test paper, but Gandhi responded brilliantly to all questions. Mr. Peters, unhappy and frustrated, asked him the following question. "Mr. Gandhi, if you were walking down the street and found a package, and within was a bag of wisdom and another bag with a lot of money, which one would you take?" Without hesitating, Gandhi responded, "The one with the money, of course." Mr. Peters, smiling sarcastically said, "I, in your place, would have taken the wisdom, don't you think?" Gandhi shrugged indifferently and responded, "Each one takes what he doesn't have." Mr. Peters, by this time was fit to be tied. So great was his anger that he wrote on Gandhi's exam sheet the word "idiot" and gave it to Gandhi.  Gandhi took the exam sheet and sat down at his desk…. A few minutes later, he got up, went to the professor and said to him in a dignified… polite tone, "Mr. Peters, you signed the sheet, but you did not give me the grade." 

In the New Testament Jesus’ parables attempt to convey the true nature of a loving and benevolent God.  For Jesus’ followers throughout the ages parables expose evidence for hope, delivering the assurance that God’s kingdom is inevitable, and at the same time, already here.  There are both stories that we understand as parables, but there are also parabolic expressions, like Jesus as the shepherd, or the door, or the vine, or the bread.  Such expressions are not necessarily exclusive to Christianity or found in the Bible.  For instance, the Buddha commanded his followers to “love your brother as the apple of  your eye.”  Here’s another example: In midwinter, St. Francis called out to an almond tree, “Speak to me of God!” and the tree burst into bloom.  Parables call us to life, sometimes new life, but more often, just awaken to the life that is in us.  Parables instruct us to look at the world around us as expressions, if not the very being of God.  But it is more than developing new sight, it is the redevelopment of our inner life; the transformation of our eyes that enable us to see what is clearly present but hidden from those who are still blind. 

A gnostic gospel, the Gospel of Thomas speaks parabolically about the kingdom in this way: Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there first.  If they say, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will get there first.  Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.” 

Elaine Pagels, the foremost Christian expert on the gnostic gospels, says of these texts, “The ancient gospels tend to point beyond faith toward a path of solitary searching to find understanding.”  Parables do this. They foster a kind of solitary searching to find understanding. Here’s another parabolic example from Thomas:  “Knock upon yourself as upon a door, and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on that path, you cannot go astray; and when you knock on that door, what you open for yourself shall open.”   And another one:  “Jesus said, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” 

In Matthew’s gospel we hear Jesus teaching a series of parables; different stories, but the essence of the messages are not that dissimilar.  “He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”  How much more significant this tale becomes when we understand that mustard seeds do not usually produce trees but are simply shrubs.  But they were not just any shrub, rather the most invasive and unwanted of all weeds in the ancient world.  Sometimes, it is helpful to get at the meaning of a particular parable by way of another parable, even from faith traditions that are not our own, like this one.  “One day when he was thirty-eight years old, the Buddha met [a king, who] said, ‘Reverend, you are young, yet people call you ‘The Highest Enlightened One.’  There are holy men in our country eighty and ninety years old, venerated by many people, yet none of them claims to be the highest enlightened one. How can a young man like you make such a claim?’ The Buddha replied, ‘You majesty, enlightenment is not a matter of age.  A tiny spark of fire has the power to burn down a whole city. A small poisonous snake can kill you in an instant.  A baby prince has the potentiality of a king.  And a young monk has the capacity of becoming enlightened and changing the world.”  So what do a mustard seed, a tiny spark of fire, a small poisonous snake, a baby prince and a young monk all have in common?  Some truths are simply universal. 

One of the most well-know Buddhist monks of all time, Thich Nhat Hanh, examines this particular parable in his book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, saying, “Matthew described the Kingdom of God as being like a tiny mustard seed.  It means that the seed of the Kingdom of God is within us.  If we know how to plant that seed in the moist soil of our daily lives, it will grow and become a large bush on which many birds can take refuge.  We do not have to die to arrive at the gates of Heaven.  In fact, we have to be truly alive.  The practice is to touch life deeply so that Kingdom of God becomes a reality.  This is not a matter of devotion.  It is a matter of practice.”  But how do we practice this? 

Which brings us back to parables. Parables teach us to see the world through God’s own eyes. In other words, parables teach us mindfulness.  And the only way to be mindful is to practice being mindful; to practice paying careful attention to the world around us and the people and events in it. Mindfulness helps us to see what is right before us in ways we had not seen it before.  You know that you are truly practicing mindfulness when you begin to interpret what you see and experience around you in terms of parables. A Zen monk spoke of the practice of mindfulness in this way, "Before I began to practice, mountains were mountains, and rivers were rivers. During many years of practice, mountains stopped being mountains, and rivers stopped being rivers.  Now as I understand things properly, mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers.” 

A discipline of mindfulness trains us to pay attention to the seemingly most mundane things in our lives.  A warm bowl of soup, filled with vegetables from your neighbor’s garden or perhaps your own is not simply something to be devoured before moving on to more important things.   I am particularly drawn to the Five Contemplations Buddhist monks and nuns recite before each meal as an excellent tool for developing a Christian sense of mindfulness about God’s kingdom. They are as follows:  This food is the gift of the whole universe, the earth, the sky, and much hard work.  May we live in a way that is worthy of this food.  May we transform our unskilled states of mind, especially that of greed.  May we eat only foods that nourish us and prevent illness.  May we accept this food for the realization of the way of understanding and love.”  In this way each meal becomes an opportunity to realize how fortunate we are when each week some forty thousand children die from starvation. Each meal becomes an opportunity to empathize with those who are profoundly lonely, those without family or friends to share even the occasional meal. Each meal becomes an opportunity to develop a deep sense of gratitude for our many blessings, the love of God, and the way in which our love of neighbor is in turn a blessing to us.

As you wake up, you awaken to the awareness that God created the world and that the Holy Spirit is at work all around us, unceasing and undeterred in her greater purpose.  When you see steam rising from the grass after a summer rain, you recognize the presence of God. When you wash your hands, you know that water is not an element for waste and misuse, but the water itself is an integral part of the kingdom of God and it is precious. As we share with our neighbors the bread and wine, partaking of the body and blood of Christ, we do it in the same spirit of mindfulness, aware that we are alive, breathing and moving, and content to dwell briefly in the present moment. Hanh describes the Eucharist as "a strong bell of mindfulness."  To take in the body and blood of Christ is to take in the sun, the clouds, the trees, the wild beasts of the plains as well as the tiniest forms of life, the wind and the rain, and everything that is good and orderly and made by God. To be aware of this is to have a growing awareness of the kingdom of God.  The holy meal we share is in itself a parabolic expression of a greater truth; reenacted each week so that we might practice seeing it for what it is; and for seeing the one who kneels next to us for who they are. He goes on to say that the bread and wine are not symbols.  They contain the reality, just as we do.  

Can you see this?

Of Monks and Mystics

The following is a sermon preached on the Day of Pentecost.

Thanks to Netflix, my kids have discovered the X-Files, the longest running science fiction horror drama on television. The show’s success rested largely on the tension that existed between the two main characters, FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully; and the tension that always exists between belief and unbelief.  The show is based on the experiences of two agents who work in a highly classified sector of the agency. They investigate the unexplainable: UFO sightings, suspicious deaths, reports of alien abductions and 97 other unsolved cases of involving paranormal phenomena that presses us to ponder the limits of our reality and the seemingly silent borders of our universe. Agent Mulder works from a position of complete belief in extraterrestrial life claiming that his own sister was a victim of alien abduction. His life’s work is to discover a greater truth; hence, the show’s motto:  The truth is out there.  Agent Scully however is a trained forensic scientist. For her there is no truth that cannot be gleaned by scientific deduction, reason and logic. Her role is, at best, to explain all the things Mulder believes to be inexplicable, and at worst, to undermine and debunk his work.  Their tension pulls in people like you and I who are fascinated by the idea of a life force outside our perceptions and who self-identify as either Mulder or Scully.  The stories themselves are merely a backdrop upon which we watch the two agents struggle against their own biases.  So strong is the magnetic bond that sometimes draws them closer together and sometimes caused them to repel one another, that after the show was finally cancelled after nine seasons – 202 shows, two full length movies were made to satisfy fans.

I totally self-identify as Mulder. I’m an ordained Christian minister after all.  The supernatural is the world I inhabit: a world in which the God we pray to and depend on reveals it’s self and purposes in ways that are not exactly straight forward. In fact, everything we know about God is shrouded in mystery and otherworldliness, including angels and archangels, clouds ascending and descending to earth, the otherworldly strength of Samson, a plague that turns rivers to blood, manna falling from heaven, the existence of a dark force of evil, the expulsion of demons, the blind see, the crippled walk, the dead live, Jesus walking on water and passing through locked doors; and this just scratches the surface.  In today’s lessons from Acts Christians around the world recall the sound of rushing wind, fire, and gift of tongues: the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that envelope the disciples who have gathered together on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. The author of Acts, Luke, describes the scene:  “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filed the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, and the Spirit gave them ability.”  The crowds were bewildered, of course, because each of those gathered there could hear of God’s deeds of power in their native tongues, about 15 different languages by my count.

And so I’m amused when I’m asked if I believed in the supernatural.  It seems somehow surprising when I express my openness to such phenomenon.  And yet, how could it be otherwise, for me or for you?  God calls us to gradually move closer to Mulder’s understanding of life as complete mystery, to be open to possibilities far beyond our understanding, working ourselves free from Scully’s earthbound securities and limitations.  Commentator, David Gushee  notes that “the semi-collapse of Enlightment orthodoxy, with its elevation of reason and science as the only paths to true knowledge of the world, has opened the door to a recovery of a kind of pre/post Enlightenment religiosity in which once again people are open to, and therefore experience, “signs and wonders.”  This being the case, it should be no surprise to us that the fastest growing expression of Christianity in the global church is Pentecostalism.  I saw this for myself on my two trips to Brazil, where Pentecostal churches set up in busy shopping districts are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Worship services run all day and late into the night: ecstatic preaching, praying in tongues, the slaying of the spirit, teaching and healing without ceasing, and crowds whose songs of praise pour out ino the streets.  It bears no comparison to the tranquil, cerebral, ordered worship we understand in the Anglican Church.  And yet my personal understanding of the events recorded in Acts are made all the more real having witnessed the Pentecostal expression of our common faith in a place very far from here. 

This week I had the opportunity to hear one of my colleagues speak of her former life in a charismatic church.  While now an Episcopal priest she said that she continues to speak and to pray in tongues.  And I learned that there is a difference between praying and speaking in tongues; apparently they serve two different purposes, though I admit I could not follow the explanation for this.  Regardless, for them and for us, it all comes down to that one, singular question raised from the bewildered crowd in Jerusalem: What does this mean?

To get at the answer, we must understand the Christian life as a journey. And as we move through this journey, at any given time we can locate ourselves on certain points of the Mulder/Scully spectrum.  While as religious people we are, by definition, open to the mysteries of faith, that is, the work of the divine broadly, or the work of the Spirit in particular, how we engage this belief is where the rubber hits the road, as it were. 

The Feast of Pentecost, with its emphasis on the supernatural aspects of the divine invite believers to understand that a sustainable relationship with God requires a certain degree of withdrawal from things worldly.  For example, when Jesus speaks against the rich, I do not believe it is money in itself he finds objectionable, but the way in which money and all that can be bought with it tend to keep people strongly attached to those things. 

In Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics, author Marsha Sinetar examines the lives of hundreds of people in our own time who have responded to their spiritual experiences in two distinct expressions.  Explaining how she identifies the many people she has interviewed as either monk or mystic, she writes: "... I call the monk one who had detached emotionally from a known, familiar and comfortable way of life in order to embark on an uncharted inner journey. The monk responds to an inner call, reinterprets his/her basic way of being in the world - which might include reinterpreting the way s/he relates to others, work, marriage, Church or other organizational status, and even includes a renewed definition of self and his/her basic place in the scheme of things….

Of those who tend to identify as monks she says:  “In the silence and simplicity of their lives, monks learn to learn to their persistent, interior voice of discontent.  By abandoning worldly distractions, by assuming a conversion of manners, their newly structured life forces them into intimate and growing relationship with their inner ‘voice.’ Their absorption with this voice, their heightened listening powers, is not usually possible in the distracting environment of the world.  Thus various vows cultivate and strengthen a deep posture of inner awareness….[But] anyone who develops this critical, objective and conceptual sense in relation to society can, in the broadest sense, be called a monk.” 

Likewise, Sinetare identifies a life that tends toward the mystic in this way:  The mystic’s life-altering path always results in a radical dropping away of the former self and a restructuring of self in the discernment of God.  Gradually or suddenly the mystic relates differently to others, abandons social and material interests in favor of another realm, the Transcendent…. Alteration might range from the seemingly minor ego-bruising choices to the complete surrender of key comforts, securities or even life itself.  Consider Gandhi, who time and again put himself into harm’s way in order to express the Truth or Julian of Norwich, a Christian contemplative who lived and wrote in a tiny cell over the course of her adult life. … Mystics are the ones who hunger and thirst after righteousness, as the Bible puts it, the ones who yearn for continued or increased union with the Divine they themselves feel is real -- the Reality that heals and makes all things new again.... Unlike those I call monks, who wouldn't call themselves that, the mystics always knows that's what they are." 

Sinetar’s work provides ordinary people like you and I a venue in which to identify our tendencies toward monk or mystic in our own very personal spiritual journeys.  This is the work of the Holy Spirit within us, evermore calling us deeper into the mystery of the divine and pulling us farther away from the things of this world that are fleeting and temporary, dull and ultimately meaningless.  Do you feel that in your own life you are moving to one of these places?  Does silence and contemplation appeal far more than even the best of companionship?  Do you feel yourself increasingly longing to know God fully and completely and have contemplated sacrifices of material security in order to pursue this persistent calling?  Have you found that for all you have achieved or gain or earned that all is meaningless without God to give it purpose?  Do you secretly dream of the simplicity of the monk’s life and consciously work to claim a piece of that for yourself?  Are you like a sponge that perpetually drinks in all things spiritual and recognize that you are moving farther and farther into an understanding of life that no longer allows you to see even the minutest aspects apart from the divine?  Do you find yourself often asking, “What does this mean?”

I believe that regardless of how we experience it, the spirit of God is alive and at work both in us and in the world around us, in ways seen and unseen.  And I believe that it is the Holy Spirit that speaks wisdom to us as we navigate a world of foolishness.  I believe that on that Pentecost Day the world, in all its languages, heard that Jesus is Lord, and that God is Love.  I believe that we are called into a life that is more mysterious than obvious; that our various gifts and vocations call us deeper into that mystery; that prayer and contemplation, and degrees of sacrifice and separation are the ways and means by which we get to that place we are going.  And I am certain that at the end of our journey we will finally know what all this means.

High Expectations: Ascension and Angelou

Today the church celebrates the feast of the Ascension. As the disciples gathered around Jesus that final time, as recorded in the book of Acts, they placed at his feet their expectation:  Aren't you now going to restore the kingdom to Israel? They were thinking of things temporal of course, things based on ages of traditional religious teaching, but it was a narrow and limited expectation.  

Jesus points them and us to a larger picture of how things will be restored and directs them and us as to the part we will play:  "You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."  Peter, and John, James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, Judas, son of James, and the women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and you and I and the millions set between them us proclaim our witness still.

Through this powerful witness we proclaim that all things earthly ultimately belong to heaven; that God so earthbound in Jesus was on the fortieth day of the resurrection returned to the heavenly realm.  It is on this collective body of testimony that we have laid our faith and based all our expectations, present and future. 

Christian faith is nothing if not an expectant faith. That is to say, we do not merely hope for things but see the world through eyes of hopeful expectation.  We expect that God's promises to us will be realized.  We expect that God is now and will be ever present to us, never more so then in our own hour of need.  We expect that our prayers will be and in fact are being answered. We expect that when we die that life will not be ended, but merely changed. We expect to be reunited one day with the ones we love who have gone on before us.  We expect miracles: the healing of the sick, the raising of the death, the life everlasting.  We expect that God is acting for good.  We expect to know God just as God has been revealed in Jesus.  We expect to share with other Christians in the sacredness of life and its preservation.  We expect to share with one another our common commitment to promote peace over war. We expect to share with one another in the building up of the body of Christ. We expect to share with one another in our love of neighbor.  We expect that our shared faith can change the world. And those expectations bind us together into one people despite our individual differences.  These expectations promote action and the breaking of silence, they make the unseen seen - justice and injustice alike, they shed light in the darkness and assure us that the light has had victory over the darkness, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Some might say these are high expectations and lofty ideals.  But for Christians they are foundational; they are the place from which we begin when we say, "I believe," and are at the same time the place where we end up. Our expectations give us eyes to see the world as it really is, and eyes to see how it could be, should be. Our expectations lend to us a vision of a path that cuts straight through injustice and leads right into the heart of God's own hope for the world. It is our expectations that make us a prophetic people. It is the prophets, ancient and recent, who have and continue to articulate the realization of our collective expectations.

Maya Angelou is one of our prophets.  She died this week and was preceded in death by another prophetic agent, Vincent Harding, who passed on earlier this month.  Coincidentally, both were influential acquaintances of Martin Luther King, Jr. whose prophetic voice cannot be overstated. Harding was a close adviser to King and wrote his anti-war speech, Beyond Vietnam: A time to break silence.  In this speech, which was delivered in April 1967, King said the following as he explained each of his reasons for opposition to the war: 

"My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."  

In the same way, Maya Angelou's poetry stands as a living and timely testament to the power of the prophetic witness of Christian expectation. Let us now pause for a moment from our busy lives on this first day of June, as we observe the feast of the Ascension, in the quiet of this house of God of which Jesus Christ himself is the head and hear words of great expectation delivered in Angelou’s poem, A Brave and Startling Truth.

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it. 

I ask myself:  How did these people come to do what they did? What moved them to what they wrote? What formed them, influenced them, spoke to them, inspired them?  How did they get from ordinary like me, to the extraordinary people they became?  But I know the answer. They were possessed. They were possessed by the expectations they held for God and for us.  They expected God to act. They expected us to act. They expected hardened hearts to change.  They expected justice.  They expected righteousness.  They expected peace to reign over war.  They were possessed by their love for Jesus. They were possessed by the Holy Spirit, and molded, formed and shaped by an expectant faith.  

What do you expect?

Finding God in Interruptions

The following is the Easter sermon preached at St. James Episcopal Church:

The sermon has already been preached.  If you paid close attention to the Gospel reading from John then you’ve already heard the message.  It was short and sweet and all that really needed be said.  It was so short that maybe you missed it.  So I’ll give it to you again, just to be sure you don’t leave the church today without hearing the Easter proclamation.  Here it is: “Mary Magdalene went and announced to his disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord.’”  There is no stronger or more powerful sermon then the one preached by Mary Magdalene some 2000 years ago in a record five simple words: "I have seen the Lord."

It isn’t clear at all that the disciples believe Mary.  Perhaps they thought her hysterical or overly dramatic, or just a bit high strung.  So just to make sure they should believe her, the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples in the upper room while they were hiding from the authorities.  He passed right through the locked door and spoke to them. They were apparently speechless, but John tells us they rejoiced when they saw the Lord. They, in turn, preached to Thomas but he did not believe either them, or Mary, apparently.  So a week later, Jesus came to them again and invited Thomas puts his hand in the wound. Thomas proclaimed: “My Lord and my God!” Which, I’m sure earned him at least one, “Amen, Brother!”  Shortly thereafter, Jesus appeared again to the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias and there they shared a breakfast of fish and bread. And no one dared to ask, Who are you? because they knew who it was. There they received the Holy Spirit from which hundreds of sermons would be preached. And for thousands upon thousands, then millions upon millions of people through these 2000 years, again and again and again joy would interrupt sorrow and lives would be changes in ways no one could have foreseen. Perhaps even for you?      Who could have imagined it?

For Mary and the other women, and for the disciples, things were turning out quite differently than any of them had imagined. The resurrection had upset all expectations.  Mary Magdalene and the other women expected to continue in their roles, to care for the body, and to mourn and to pick up the pieces of their lives. But joy interrupted sorrow and everything changed.  The disciples had expected to return to the lives they had before they abandoned them to follow Jesus all around the Judean countryside.  It didn’t take long for Peter to say, “I’m going fishing.”  There was nothing left to do.  But even the fishing was off.  Or at least until Jesus showed up on the beach that morning. From the shore he yelled, “…you don’t have any fish do you?” They yelled back, “No.” So he told them to throw the net to the right side of the boat and there they would find some.  Peter recognized who it was and unable to contain himself, and jumped into the water and swam to shore.  Joy interrupted sorrow and now nothing would be the same. 

This isn’t the usual ordering of things. It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?:  Isn’t is usually that sorrow interrupts joy and everything changes?  But that isn’t God ordering of things. The Easter proclamation is that God delivers unexpected joy that interrupts everything else.  It was this kind of unexpected joy that made it impossible for anyone who saw the risen Jesus to return to the life they had before and the same is true for us. Louis L’Amour captured this paradoxical truth of the gospel when he wrote, “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” 

Everybody hopes for a happy ending; that unexpected twist that turns a plot of his head. It’s why we love classic stories that satisfy our longing for things to turn out differently than one expects; stories like Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, and Mansfield Park. Last week I watched for the second time another favorite, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.  It’s the story about Margaret Hale, a young women who has moved with her parents to an industrial town in Northern England, far in every way, from the lovely, picturesque southern countryside. From a great house with lovely lawns and rose gardens she must adjust to a modest urban home in the mill district of the dark and dirty little town of Milton.  The family have had to relocate because Margaret’s father, an Anglican priest, has chosen not to sign a declaration of allegiance to the Book of Common Prayer, saying that he could not, because he could not in good conscious swear to a belief in doctrines to which he did subscribe. His wife is inconsolable, believing that he has left the priesthood based on a mere formality.  She simply can’t fathom why he would not just sign the document and go on with his life as it was before. Having left behind everything she holds dear for reasons that are beyond her understanding, she dies brokenhearted.  Though Ms. Margaret longs for the life and friends she knew in the south, she tries to make the best of her new circumstances.  Even so, she rejects much of what she encounters including the gruff, but very handsome mill owner, John Thornton, as she compares her new life with what she knew before.  After losing her father as well, Margaret returns to the South where she finds that it is not quite as she remembered.  Things have changed and there is no longer a role for her to play there.  We, of course, know what she has learned: Try as we might, we can never go home again.  Even with an unexpected windfall following the death of her father, Ms. Margaret finds herself feeling alone and quite displaced.  As the story concludes Mr. Thornton also finds himself feeling alone and displaced, facing financial ruin and the loss his cotton mill.

But this is a period romance after all, so rest assured, things will turn out well for Ms. Margaret and for Mr Thornton.  In the final scene, he is on a train returning to the north, and she is on an opposite train heading south.  The trains have both reached a station somewhere in the middle, and from their coaches they see one another across the platform.  Quite unexpectedly, in a single moment, joy interrupts sorrow, and everything changes.

We love these kinds of stories! even though we tend to dismiss them as fairytales that bear no resemblance to real life. But in truth, these stories would not work if there was not some possibility that life can turn out for the better in ways we could not have planned through our manipulations.  The possibility can only exists if this was not, at least some of the time, the way life really does turn out.   Sometimes people who long for love find it, despite the fact they are convinced they will not.  Sometimes, the events of life, as difficult as they might truly be, present us with opportunities that would not have otherwise been afforded.  Yes, sometimes, sorrow interrupts joy. But many times, in a thousand different ways, joy interrupts sorrow, and our lives are altered.

In either case is the interruption that changes everything.  Sometimes, perhaps even often, we wonder, Where is God in this?  God is in the interruptions. Interruptions make it so we can’t go home again.  They makes us grow beyond our edges, adapt to our ever changing lives, prompt us to change the things we can, and to accept the things we can’t. Interruptions press us to think about how we want to live and the decisions we make. They make it impossible to predict what to expect when even our expectations may be met with unexpected joy. Most importantly, they make us less dependent on our own abilities and far more dependent on God’s mysterious workings.  The stories we tell about our lives are nearly always based on some interruption; some place in time where sorrow interrupted joy or joy interrupted sorrow.  The stories we tell about our God are these kinds of stories too. Mary went to tomb and Jesus was not there. He appeared to her and she proclaimed the impossible: I have seen the Lord.  Joy interrupts sorrow. This is our story, our Easter story. This is the way we see the world, through resurrection eyes.  These are the kinds of stories we tell and this is the truth we preach.