Prayer Life

In seminary you hear a lot, “make sure to develop a prayer life now, because you won’t have time in the parish.” While I will acknowledge there is a lot of wisdom in that statement, I would also push back on it. Four months into internship, it is true that I am busy. I also don’t have the community I had in seminary to nurture spiritual growth. I don’t have daily chapel, or an organized centering prayer group, or a multitude of Growth in Faith opportunities. But despite that, or perhaps because of that, I find that my prayer life is growing in the parish. Not in organized, planned ways, but out of need.

Prayer on internship has for me proven not to be about wanting to try it on, but about needing to know I am not alone. Whether I’m sitting in my car in a hospital parking lot, trying to write a sermon to speak to people’s lives, struggling to hold my own grief and concern for an ill elderly member so I can minister to her friends, or frightened by footsteps in the snow behind my house, sometimes there is nowhere to go but God. Nothing to do but to fall back into the arms of a loving God. So my wisdom would be, yes, try to develop a prayer life in seminary. But if you fail, know that God will still be waiting to catch you when no one else will.

Advent 3 Sermon - Isaiah 35:1-10

Below is the sermon I preached last Wednesday night. This is what happens when the Californian tries to preach hope after five and a half feet of snow. You get a sermon where the good news statement is: "Someday spring will come."

So I brought something to share with you today. This is my Christmas cactus. I know he looks sort of sickly; this is actually really good for him. I got this little fellow from a cutting off my grandmother’s Christmas cactus, who got hers off a cutting from her mother, so this guy’s been in the family for a while. On the front of your bulletin you’ll see a picture that looks very much like my grandmother’s. Her’s is huge, overflowing its pot. And every Christmas it produces so many flowers that it turns purple. My little guy, I’m delighted that for Christmas he has created this new little shoot…

It is not my cactus’s fault that he is so spindly; he has had a pretty rough life. My dad cut him from my grandmother’s in California and carefully grew him roots. Then he had to fly from California to Chicago in dad’s suitcase, where his roots fell off. So I had to grow him new roots in a cup over the summer. Then I planted him and stuck him in the window in my apartment, where the breeze frequently knocked him to the ground, so I had to scoop him off the floor and replant him several times. I forgot him when I went home for a month, so he suffered alone without water. And then, to get him here I had to drive him a thousand miles in the back of the Jeep, smashed between the window and a suitcase to keep him upright. I’m not sure on the laws about transporting plants over international lines, so to get him across the Canadian border and then back into the states, I hid him under a sweater for two days, which he did not like at all. And now he sits here in Syracuse, stable for the first time in his young life, trying to recover from a life of travel and upheaval, so far from my grandmother’s warm living room.

In today’s text, Isaiah paints a picture of a desert in bloom. And not just in bloom, but abundantly green and lush. We are talking radical climate change. Streams of water rush through the arid dry lands. It will be so rich and fertile that it will become a swamp.

Let’s take this in context. Judea is a desert country. On the front cover of your bulletin there is also a picture of the Judean wilderness. It is a hot, dry, dust-bowl of a place, parched by the middle eastern sun. The Jordan River is the only water to snake through the region, and it meets its end in the Dead Sea. Because there is no outlet, the water of the Dead Sea is thick with minerals. Nothing can grow there; nothing can be sustained by its water. Hot, dry, the only water too thick to provide life, it is a wasteland.

In the middle of this, Isaiah says, crocuses will bloom. Streams of fresh, cool, water will rush until the desert is alive with life. This is not just a few blossoms on my little cactus; this is a radical reversal of how things are. And not just will the desert become a jungle, but the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will not just walk again, but they will leap like deer. This is new life on a grand scale. When God comes, things are different, radically different. God dreams big.

Last week it snowed for ninety-seven hours straight. Ninety-seven solid hours without so much as a slowing in the fluttering whiteness. Even the heartiest snow-lover can get a little bit weary at a storm that dumps four feet in four days. Every day I sat at the front window of my house and watched the snow piled on the bushes rise to meet the icicles growing down from the roof. I wondered, and maybe you did too, if this storm would ever stop. Or if Lake Ontario would just continue to dump its entire contents on my front lawn, until nothing is left but a vast dry lake bed and my poor, buried little house.

And then, Wednesday morning, something surprising happened. I was driving to work, slipping and sliding down Valley Drive on the way to Seneca Turnpike, when a flash of light caught my eye. I blinked, squinting as the light became brighter. It was the sun. I looked up into the brilliant blue winter sky, blinking at the sunlight reflecting off the snowbanks. The sun lasted for maybe five minutes, before the clouds rolled back in and the snow started again. But in that moment, I heard the faint sound of crocuses blooming, of streams rushing wild through the desert, of new life, of hope, of spring. This bright blue sky reminded me that God is still working in the world. Even in the depth of winter, even when I cannot see it, God is still bringing about the restoration of everything, bringing water into deserts of desperation and despair. Living water, abundant water, water like we cannot imagine.

I have huge hopes for my sad little Christmas cactus. Hopes that it will one day blossom and grow like the one at my grandmother’s house. That its yellowish leaves will turn to deep rich green and it will burst forth from its pot. That someday it too will turn magenta and grow heavy with the weight of its blossoms. It may seem impossible now, but this little Christmas cactus has that potential inside of it. And I believe that it someday could be as big and lush and flowering as my grandmother’s cactus. But the hope I have for my little cactus dwarf in comparison to the hope God has for the world. Hope that life-giving water will rush through deserts of pain and despair, nourishing and refreshing us.

Pastor Gaetz has taken to walking into the office every morning and announcing, “isn’t today a lovely spring day.” As the snow whips and billows outside, my cheeks pink and my hands chapped from shoveling, his pronouncement about spring seems far away. But Pastor Gaetz is right, as far away and as foreign as spring may now seem amidst this world of white, spring is coming. The days are coming again where sun will beat down as fiercely and overwhelmingly as snow currently blankets the world. Like streams in the desert, this abundance of white will transform into a lush, green wilderness.

In today’s reading from Isaiah, God promises new life. And not just new life, but new life abundantly, from the most desolate and unexpected of places. God’s advent into the world is not of small change, but of total renewal, of complete reversal. God’s promises are extravagant, abundant, unimaginable. God comes to bring sight to the blind, sound to the deaf, joy in the midst of sorry, sunlight in the depth of winter. God’s visions for our lives are bigger than we could ever imagine. In the dark places and times, do not be afraid to dream big. Because the promise we have is that God dreams even bigger. Amen.

Becoming

On top of my TV stand sits a little Christmas cactus in a terra cotta pot. I grew it from a cutting off my grandmother’s Christmas cactus. Grandma’s is huge; thick with deep green branches that turn a rich magenta in the winter from its overabundance of blossoms. Mine is a few sickly, little, yellowish sprouts poking up from the dry soil. It’s not my Christmas cactus’s fault that it is so sickly looking; it has had a rough life. It started out as a cutting that my dad carefully grew roots on, which subsequently fell off in dad’s suitcase on a flight from California to Chicago. In Chicago I re-rooted it, planted it, and placed it on a ledge in my apartment, where I promptly forgot about it a lot, leaving it for long periods without water. Then, just a few months ago it drove from Chicago to Syracuse in the back of my Jeep, smashed between the window and a suitcase to keep it upright. Crossing the Canadian border it even spent two days hidden under a sweater. Yet still it soldiers on. A little bit yellower, sure, but every bit as determined to grow as when it was still attached to my grandmother’s plant. While it has not flowered this year, it has recently sent off a new little green shoot. In the midst of winter, in the midst of adversity, far from the tropical climates it prefers, my determined little Christmas cactus is stubbornly growing.

Martin Luther wrote: “This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.” So become little Christmas cactus, become. Grow and change and flower. This is just a step in the process, there are bigger things ahead.

Blue Skies

It has been snowing for four straight days. The “lake-effect snow machine” is churning off Lake Ontario and dumping directly on Syracuse. 36” already, another 12”-15” anticipated for today, and no break expected until Friday. This weather is hard for me. I grew up in southern California, and even though I’ve since lived in more wintery places snow is still a foreign concept to me. My house is becoming increasingly cave-like as the snow pile on the bushes grows to meet the icicles coming down from the roof. And most of my adult life I have not owned a car, so I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve driven in the snow. Living alone, the snow feels claustrophobic and isolating, despite its beauty.

And then today while I was driving to work the clouds parted and the sun came out. It wasn’t even out for five minutes, but that little break was like balm to my weary soul. In that little flash of blue sky and sunshine I felt like Noah must have felt when the rainbow arched across the sky after the flood. Beyond the snow, beyond the clouds, the sky is still blue. The sun is still shining, even though I cannot see it. In the cold, dark, loneliness of winter, God is still here.

Great Escapes

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s newest book, The Lacuna. The book is an autobiography of the fictional William Harrison Shepherd, a Mexican-American cook turned writer. The book is masterfully done. I was pulled in immediately by Kingsolver’s sharp prose, engaging characters, and a storyline that twists and dances its way through the history of two countries and leaves you guessing until the very end.

But what captured me most about the book was the title. Though it sounds Spanish, fitting with the setting of the book, lacuna is actually an English word, meaning a gap, an empty space, or a missing part. The lacuna in the story is an underwater cave Shepherd discovers as a boy. When the tide is right, Shepherd can swim all the way through the cave, emerging in a totally new place. This imagery of a secret passageway through time and space becomes the metaphor on which the entire plot turns.

I didn’t do a lot of pleasure reading in seminary, but right around the last couple weeks of the semester, I always found myself picking up a book. Usually Harry Potter or something else light, familiar, and well worn; I am the sort of person who reads books over and over again, delighting at the familiarity. Books were my lacuna, secret passageways out of the end-of-semester stress and into a new world. On internship when everything is so unfamiliar, books offer the same gift, a way to disappear from this life and spend some time with old friends. And so I offer a prayer of thanksgiving for books and the people who write them. Entire worlds that fit in the space of my bookshelf, offering no end of escapes and adventures if only for a few hours.