A Fool in Love

5-30-12

Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug, sometimes it all comes together, sometimes you're just a fool in love.

I'm feeling like the fool in love. Because sometimes it all comes together, and that's what happened here last week.

On Friday about ten parishioners, most of whom volunteer as mentors at Menchaca Elementary School, gathered at the library while the first and second graders came to choose their book fair books. Actually, their teachers had already picked out their first six books. Think about it. 174 children ages 6-8 having to choose among 1266 books. It would be chaos. Those teachers know what they are doing, I'm telling you.

So the children came in two classes at a time, and the books were stacked on four tables according to reading level. And every child went home with nine new books to keep him/her reading over the summer. The kids were happy. The teachers were happy. The librarian and the principal and the assistant principal were happy. I'm assuming that the parents were happy. But the happiest of all were the people who had bought the books. That's enough to make you high as a kite.

Yes, the people of St. Alban's bought all those books for the children. We did it so they won't lose their reading skills over the summer. So they won't get behind. So they won't drop out of school. So they won't join gangs and go to jail. We raised all the money for those books by dropping spare change in jars and channeling our Amazon purchases through the website and buying scrip cards that return cash to the church. and honoring birthdays and graduations with donations. And next year we are committed to first, second, and third grades. There will be fundraisers. If a kid is reading on grade level at the end of third grade her chances of success in life are much higher than if she isn't.


That's why we were so excited to see them pick out their books. And put them in their canvas book bags, the ones with their names embroidered on them by Susan. 174 bags. She is something else.

And then there was Sunday. We were having a big party after church to celebrate the fulfillment of the Capital Campaign that began on Easter, but how on earth would we know how many to provide lunch for? A typical Sunday is about 150. But it was Memorial Day weekend and lots of people were going out of town. Or to the lake. But it was Pentecost, too, which would predict a bigger attendance. Would there be fewer than usual or more than usual? Asking for reservations had predictable results...practically none.

So not knowing any better we ordered chicken enchiladas and black beans and sauteed zucchini and squash and corn for 15o, and I figured we'd have a lot left over. Better than to run out.

And then people started coming to church. And they kept coming. And they kept coming. 178 people squished together in a space that holds maybe 165. It was good that some of them were little.

And lunch? Hey, it's church. It's all about Jesus, and we know what he can do. He does it ALL THE TIME! It was loaves and fishes all over the place. Everybody ate and ate and visited and laughed and clapped and shouted when we announced pledges of over $190,000. These are not rich people, but they are generous people. And that is why I'm a fool in love.

The Writing (or Living!) Life

From Annie Dillard's The Writing Life:

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

What wise words. Erma Bombeck always said to use your good china every day because the second wife is going to. I think of all the things I've held back for a more special occasion. It's taken me a lot of years to get to the point that I can't really think of a more special occasion than this one precious moment. So maybe I'll pull out the good china for dinner tonight...but it doesn't go in the dishwasher, and Dillard didn't mention that. 

Camping

So we are sitting out on the patio last week, a bunch of us waiting while JB cooks our dinner on the Big Green Egg, and the topic of camping comes up. It seems that most of us have fond memories of camping with our parents when we were small and our families once we were adults. I've seen pictures of people sitting around campfires and know people who have it down to a science and can't wait for the opportunity to pack everybody into the SUV and head to the nearest state park or farther afield. Most of us. Not all of us.

Not so much with me. I don't recall ever hearing my sister say anything about taking her kids camping either. This is not the terrible, awful story of the time my ex and I (reluctantly on my part) took our sons on a camp-out that involved pack horses. Maybe another day.

This is true. I could not have made it up because my imagination is much too limited.

I was probably about eleven when my parents, who should never have married each other in the first place and who subjected us to the hell of it for thirty years, decided that we should go on the Great American Camping Trip. I will treat you to day one. You can pretty much imagine that the other twenty-five or six days were more of the same.


My parents did not grow up camping out. In fact, neither of them had ever pitched a tent in their lives. But they got the bee in their bonnet, or maybe it was just my dad and my mom went along with it. He got some plans from Good Housekeeping or someplace for this plywood box to go in the back of the station wagon. It would have compartments for everything we would need on our camping trip. It soon gained the name 'the knuckle buster.' I will also never be able to smell the distinct fragrance of Joy detergent without being trans-ported back to those days.

So they put the knucklebuster, the Joy detergent, the sleeping bags and tent and cast iron skillet and God only knows what else in the back of the sta-wag and off we went. Without air-conditioning, because it didn't exist. Three kids in the back seat. And, incidentally, no iPad or little video player or even WalkMan. Three kids who were bored before we got out of the driveway. And who would sit in that back seat from Ohio to Colorado, up through the Dakotas, over the Great Lakes into Canada to New York state and back home. Not a day too soon.

Here is the first thing my parents didn't know: that lots of people go camping and that the ones who know how make reservations for campsites at the campgrounds. I.e., that if you drive from Cleveland, Ohio for, let's just say ten or eleven hours, you can't just drive up to the next Campground of America in your AAA trip-tych and pitch your tent. Because it's full. So you keep driving, and driving.

And it's getting dark, and the sky is kind of cloudy, and the wind is blowing, and by now you are in Joliet, Illinois, and -- you are in luck! -- there is one campsite left at the campground. You can't take time to feed the kids because you've got to pitch the tent. Besides there is something freeze-dried that will do just fine.

The thing about the campsite, however, is that it is up against the fence of Joliet State Prison. The really high fence with the concertina wire on top. And all you can see are the guard towers with the searchlights that are scanning the grounds. Did I mention that it is getting dark? And that the parents have never pitched a tent in their lives? And that the kids are hungry? And that it is beginning to rain...and thunder...and that the wind has whipped up? And that the tent, which they couldn't have pitched in dead calm, is flying out of their hands, and that everybody is wet, and crying.
 

And so it went. Day after day of my brother acting up so often that he got left on the side of the road on at least eleven of the states we traversed. And picked up only to be put out again. Sometimes more than once in a day. That my most vivid memory is seeing a wax replica of the severed head of an outlaw named Joaquin Murietta (sp?). That my father made me eat the too-small fish I caught and kept reminding me that it was just a baby. And I cried so hard I threw it up and felt even guiltier but also furious because my parents thought it was too funny for words as they downed their martinis. Oh, yes, there was the gin.

So, in case you wanted to know, that's one reason I don't go camping.

A Very Cool Story

I read this story a year or so ago. I don't remember all the details, but the gist of the story is faithful to what I read.

It happened at the graduation ceremony at a small college last year.

After all the seniors had received their diplomas the college president said that he had one more announcement to make, and he called three seniors to please come forward. They had no idea why they were being called.

It turned out that the three of them had excelled in their studies and could have pursued any number of lucrative careers, but instead each of them had taken a very low-paying job in the non-profit sector. I don't remember exactly what they were -- maybe Peace Corps, or teaching in inner city schools, or working in health care in a poverty stricken remote rural area. You get the idea. They were taking their smarts and their very expensive educations to serve people who were on the fringes and at risk and who did not usually get the attention or the care of such gifted people as these young graduates.

The president announced that an alum of this college had gotten wind of their plans and was impressed by their genuine altruism. Imagine you were one of these three young people when you heard these words,
"Susan Smith, your entire student loan of $97,000 has been paid for you."
"John Jones, your entire student loan of $106,000 has been paid for you."
"Sally Wilson, your entire student loan of $123,000 has been paid for you."

Imagine what these young people will be able to do with their lives because someone took their blessings and paid them forward. Imagine what heights they will be able to reach and how many more people they will be able to serve because they are unencumbered by their debts.

But what I really want you to imagine is what it must have felt like for that benefactor. This truly is how to make this a better world.

And this is exactly what God did for us in the Incarnation. I don't buy the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. But I can absolutely accept the idea of God paying it forward for us. Infinitely forward. Any debt we might incur has already been paid -- not by the death of Jesus but by the love of God. And this gives us the freedom to move forward in our faith, to step out into wonder, to take the gifts that God has given us and use them profligately for the good of all creation. And to become ever more Christlike as we do.

An Open Letter to Joel Osteen

From my friend Greg Garrett

Dear Joel Osteen,

For some years now I've stood back and looked the other way as you preached your message of optimism and faith rewarded to tens of thousands of worshipers and to the millions of people who have bought your best-selling books, as you've become perhaps America's best-known preacher or inspirational speaker. Earlier this year The Guardian actually called you "America's Pastor," which forced me to sit up and take notice.

My attention during that time has been focused largely on those preachers and traditions obsessing with sin and suffering, on the death of Jesus on the cross as the only salvation for a wicked race. And so I kind of lost sight of you, a couple of hours down the road from me in Houston.

You have said that you don't like to talk about sin—who does, really?—and that you want to dwell on the positive messages of God's love. Those are nice antidotes to the mainstream American evangelical focus I abhor, and they may have given you a free pass until now. But I've come to believe that your nicey-nicey message and your God of infinite promises is as antithetical to genuine Christian faith as the always-dying and ever-angry Christ of conservative evangelicals.

Mr. Osteen, here's the thing. I've realized that I've been writing, speaking, and preaching about you as well. I've realized that The Other Jesus was also written in response to your Jesus of handouts and new cars—I can't hang with that Banker Jesus any more than with the Spiteful Jesus. I've realized that I'm also tired of cleaning up your messes, of trying to constantly reorient Christian faith back to something real and true to scripture, tradition, and reason.

You and other Prosperity Gospel preachers advance a vision of God that is transactional: if you do this, then God will do that. He has to, in fact. Because a verse here or there in the Bible says so, however little it reflects God's actual redemptive work in the world.

And I'm here to tell you, Sir, in the same language I use with anyone who imagines we can be in a transactional relationship with God, that this isn't what Christian faith is. Praying the right prayer often enough to get what you want, believing really hard in Jesus to get what you want are not true to the Christian story, or to logic. To imagine that you, or your followers, or the person out in the bookstore or TV land who is exposed to your message somehow influences the God of the Universe, the Creator of All That Is, by his or her personal actions is not belief in God.

It's belief in magic. Put your hands together, say a few faithful words, and the Universe will give you what you ask.

Your life is lifted up as a shining example of God's blessing, and well it might be. But Sir, I suspect that the money to buy a former NBA arena for your mammoth Lakewood Church didn't just flow into your hands because God blesses you for your teachings. I suspect that you got that money because you draw a crowd, because you sell a product that is always more enticing than the hard and lifelong work of genuine Christian spirituality and authentic belief.

I know Christians who feel uplifted by your focus on God's love, and non-Christians who love your sermons because they make them feel better about themselves. And both of those things are lovely. Telling people that God will give them whatever they faithfully ask for, assuring them that God will deliver them from their financial difficulties, that they can live their best life ever is tremendously appealing. If you were my financial adviser, I could sleep soundly at night.

But this assurance of the good life is also a tremendous theological falsehood. It's not true to the experience of lots of Christians, who believe yet still suffer. Many people of faith suffer from poverty that will never ease, from sickness that will not be healed, from losses that cannot be made right in this life.

Even during some of my times of greatest faith, I faced horrible emotional, physical, financial, and spiritual suffering. My Assembly of God grandmother, the most devout Christian I have ever known, has lived her entire life in poverty, and has only the streets of gold she imagines as her heavenly reward to look forward to. Students at Baylor show up in my office every semester after they have heard from their pastors that if they only had enough faith, their problems—that depression or anorexia, that unplanned pregnancy, the financial disaster befalling their parents—would be taken care of. And when they aren't taken care of—when, in fact, as problems do when they're ignored, they get bigger and more complicated—my students have been left in a genuine crisis of faith, or with no faith at all.

But I'm not just upset about the bad theology of a God who works like an ATM, I'm also upset about the way that you and others preaching "your best life now" have defined that life almost exclusively in the terms our secular society suggests for success. Instead of making Christianity a counter-cultural religion pushing back against society's mania for wealth and acquisitions and individualism, you've allowed faith to be co-opted by the powers and principalities.

You want a house? Pray for it.

You want more money? Be faithful and God will give it to you.

This focus on money and temporal things is also bad theology—and perhaps even more pernicious, because it gives religious sanction for people to buy into the most un-Christian aspects of our culture. Jesus didn't preach wealth, possessions, or prestige; his teachings, and his life, suggested the precise opposite. In fact, this person most faithful, most in tune with God's will, lived in poverty and died in pain, so why on earth should we imagine that God will give us what we want when we have only a fraction of Jesus' faith?

No. It doesn't compute. As the late comic Sam Kinison—himself once a charismatic pastor—might say if he were still around (and don't watch this if you're easily offended), if Jesus were to show up at the door of Lakewood Church, I think you'd have reason to be very, very nervous, Mr. Osteen.

I know that your church helps people in the community, and that you have given hope and encouragement to a lot of people, and I respect that.

But I feel a whole lot more comfortable when you're identified as the nation's most prominent inspirational speaker rather than when you're tagged as a preacher, Christian leader, or theological expert. What you preach Sunday after Sunday about how God works may make people feel good, but it doesn't reflect the reality of many faithful people's lives, and it certainly doesn't reflect what I learned in seminary and in the Church about the reality of Jesus' life and message.

So spread your message of hope and optimism as widely as you like. Nothing I could say, write, or do would slow the Osteen juggernaut anyway.

But please, please, don't tell people that your spiritual message of hope and financial reward is God's holy word for their lives. God is in the business of love, joy, and hope, but that actually has very little to do with cars, houses, or bank accounts. As Matthew 6 reminds us, we're called not to invest in treasures of this world, but in those things that are everlasting and eternal, the things of God.

And anyway, as Don Henley sang, You don't see no hearses with luggage racks.

Here is a poem by Denise Levertov, an offering and a prayer for peace in all the headlines and courtrooms and battlefields and homes and churches and schoolyards and nooks and crannies of the world, where it is needed. Levertov was born in the UK, the daughter of a Russian Hasidic Jewish university professor. She writes of him: "My father's Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervour and eloquence as a preacher, were factors built into my cells". She knew she was a 'writer-person' as a young child and sent poems to T.S. Eliot when she was twelve. He replied with encouragement. She emigrated to the United States, and in her sixties converted to Christianity.

Making Peace

A voice from the dark called out,
"The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war."

But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can't be imagined before it is made,
can't be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light--facets
of the forming crystal.

Seminary Graduation Sermon by Dr. Stanley Hauerwas

Dr. Hauerwas is like the Einstein of theology today, but in his sermon he was able to bring to us the beauty and the power of the truth in words that are at once comforting, challenging, and accessible.

http://www.ssw.edu/blogs/office-communications/dr-stanley-hauerwas-sermon-2012-commencement

The Stories We Tell

(This was written for our parish newsletter as part of our capital campaign, but I hope it speaks to a more essential element of our humanness and our blessedness and our call to be who we are created to be. If it inspires you to be more generous with what you have to give, no matter what it is or whom you give it to, good. If it inspires you to make a gift to our capital campaign, well, thank you, but that's not the only thing it is about. )

When you stop to think about it, the stories we tell say more about us than they do about the characters, plots, and conflicts (every story contains conflict or it isn’t a story) they relate. It’s not a stretch – especially when we’re talking about church – to say that the stories we tell define who we are. We choose the stories and then we choose how we tell the stories. We embellish or omit certain elements. We embrace one character’s point of view over another’s. We hurry the crescendo or delay it. We do have a lot of choices. 

The story I want to tell is about a smallish church on a hill with an amazing view and delightfully quirky people and etherial music and bright children and generous workers and nearly always yummy food somewhere to be found.

It’s a story that has been in the telling for about thirty years now, and we are nowhere near the Happily Ever After where stories tend to stop. In fact, I think we are just now really gathering momentum.

How did this congregation get to be here? What were the resources that fueled and fed us to the point where we are seeing all this energy, all this hospitality, all this glad and gleeful service to the world? Let’s get all gimmicky and say it’s all about the I’s.

v  Imagination: In my book one cannot have too much imagination. Imagination is always looking, not contentedly or wistfully toward the past, but faithfully and expectantly toward the future. It is driven by joy, not fear. Imagination says, “I think I can,” and we all know what happened to the Little Engine that Could.

v  Innovation: While we revere our traditions, they do not have a stranglehold on us. Actually our traditions are like cherished heirlooms that resist gathering dust in the museum of the past but rather add beauty and depth to everything we do that is new and different. Sometimes those new things need to be traded in. Sometimes they need to be repaired. Sometimes they become new traditions, but we never get rid of what has true value.

v  Inspiration: Inspiration is nothing less than the indwelling of the spirit. It is literally what happened to the apostles on the Day of Pentecost. They became aware that the Holy Spirit had taken up habitation in their own bodies and had empowered them to do what they could never have done on their own. Even though we may not feel our own Upper Room filled with wind or see flames dancing over each other’s heads, the Holy Spirit is very much resident within each of us and can give us power to fulfill God’s dreams for us as individuals and a parish family.

v  Incarnation: This is why any of this is important in the first place. God’s love exploded into creation out of need for something to love. And God’s love entered into the body of a little baby boy who grew up to show us – and the motto of every great storyteller is ‘show, don’t tell’ – what God’s love looks like and what God intends for each and every one of us to be. When we look at Jesus, we are looking at how God sees us. Incarnation means ‘in the flesh’, and the flesh was Jesus way back once upon a time and is us now and is going to be somebody else in the future, and we need to give them the best we can.

v  I: Yes, I. Each of us is an “I,” the subject of the sentences of which our story is comprised. Each of us has gifts to share – gifts of our talents and our resources. And each of us grows into our likeness to Christ as we share from those gifts, as we stretch ourselves by giving a little more than feels absolutely safe. It’s a pretty good guideline that if we don’t flinch just a little, it’s less than our best gift. The gift that not only provides for the future of our parish, but the gift that grows our souls.

So I want to tell you a story about a smallish church up on a hill, where the hawks soar and the bluebonnets bloom and the moon,when it is full, rises brightly over the labyrinth .

Once upon a time the people of this church declared that they were so filled with gratitude to the people who gave them their church that they wanted to give as they had been given. They were having such a good time letting their imaginations go wild – let’s build a Parish Life Center and fill it with curious people coming to small groups, children learning about Jesus, youth flipping pancakes and staying up all night, babies being rocked in the nursery, people eating yummy food; let’s invite the world to come up here and listen to Handel’s Messiah with an orchestra and soloists an wine at the reception; let’s give away 1740 storybooks to children; let’s bless everybody’s pet; let’s shred people’s papers and take food to the food bank, let’s furnish a whole apartment for a family from Burundi (where’s Burundi?) whom we’ve never met – they were having such a good time that they wanted to give that good time to the people who would come after them.

But they looked around and said, “Where will the children play?” so they built a playscape. And they said, “Who will pay our debts?” so they paid off their debts. And they said, “Who will repair our buildings?” So they repaired their buildings. Each and every “I” said, “I can. I will. I want the next generation to be able to follow their imagination because imagination is holy and a gift from God." Don’t you wish we could look in the crystal ball and see what they will do with the resources God will give them?

It’s not for us to dictate to them what we would have them do. It is for us to equip them with what we have to share. And it is for us to give them the freedom from our debt. And the well-maintained buildings they will need for the sake of their ministries. And their playground, because many of them are children now, and play is how they become their happiest and healthiest and most creative selves. So that they can tell their own stories.

A Story for Tomorrow

This video is stunningly beautiful and good for your soul. 

http://vimeo.com/36519586

The Parable of the Christmas Tomatoes

The last thing I did on Christmas night a couple of years ago was pick tomatoes. 

Real tomatoes. Outside tomatoes. Yes, they were green, but they were growing against all odds on a vine outside our bedroom window, and we were expecting a hard freeze, so JB and I put on our heavy coats and grabbed baskets and headed out into the dimming daylight and dropping temperatures to pick the tomatoes. As if it were June. That’s when you pick tomatoes around here.

I've shared with many of you that I was baptized in an Episcopal church at six weeks old and grew up reciting the prayers of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, raised my four sons in this tradition as choristers and acolytes. I dearly love this church and all its traditions. I cherish Easter Sunday and Christmas Eve, the two times when I truly believe that ‘because we’ve always done it that way’ is a valid excuse for doing what we’ve always done. I love the familiar collects written in the 16^th century by Thomas Cranmer and even older prayers, some going back to the third century. I love the structure and predictability of our liturgy and have found comfort in this familiarity when I’ve worshiped in Hong Kong and Rome and London.

But as much as I’ve experienced God’s presence in the familiar, I know that it is when God has jumped out from behind bushes at me, when God has plopped unexpected coincidences in my path, and when God has appeared before me in the most un-God-like guises that God has grown my heart and soul and drawn me closest to God’s thumping heart of infinite love. All the Glorias in Excelsis have not done for my spiritual growth what a grocery store valentine tucked in the pages of an old paperback book once did. (Ask me.)

I didn’t even know the plant was there until sometime in October when I spied it on a hunt for scattered dog toys. It had taken up residence in a spot where a gardenia had died a number of years ago. I hadn’t planted a tomato seed. Credit a visiting bird for that. I hadn’t fertilized it or watered it. From time to time I checked it out, merely curious, and it was growing like the flesh-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors. It was covered first with yellow blossoms – did it not know that it was autumn? I showed it off to friends who knew way more about growing tomatoes than I did, having never planted a tomato in my life. (They are standing in line for seeds!) The yellow blossoms became baby green tomatoes, and the plant now stretched fifteen feet in diameter, covering old flower pots and wrought iron furniture. The December days were short and the nights were cool, but the tomatoes grew. They grew in spite of me.

We filled the first basket and called in reinforcements. We filled a second basket and a third. The smallest tomatoes were the size of gumballs. The largest were the size of tennis balls. And every time we lifted a tentacle, there were nests of more tomatoes. It got dark and very cold, and we came inside. I didn’t wash and count them for a couple of days, but when I did, there were 468 tomatoes from that single seed. And Jesus thought a mustard seed was impressive?

The only parable I remember Jesus interpreting for the disciples was the one about the sower and the seeds, and, frankly, I think there are more challenging interpretations than the one in the gospel. So what about this freaky tomato? How do we confront it theologically? I simply offer some of my own musings.

I didn’t plant it. I didn’t fertilize it. I didn’t water it. I discovered it accidentally, but once I did, I understood it was a gift and a responsibility. We did cover it with sheets during a number of light frosts. I visited it and honored it and wondered at its fecundity. I showed it off to dinner guests.

I didn’t let the baby tomatoes freeze when I knew they wouldn’t survive. I harvested them for what they were, ripe and not, brought them inside and let them be the centerpiece of our Christmas table between Santa and an angel. As I said, I washed them and counted them. I turned them into fried green tomatoes for New Year’s and green tomato chutney in glass jars, which I’ve given to special friends. But I brought most of them to church to share with my beloved parishioners. I didn’t ask what they were going to do with them. Real gifts don’t have strings attached. If you ask me what is gospel, I think that’s it.