Mud

The snow is pretty much gone now. It doesn’t seem possible, but a couple of warm days and five and a half feet of snow is just gone. It its place is not the bright, fresh grass I remember from the fall. No, in its place is mud, dirty, sticky, slimy, gray mud. The upstaters, ever the weather optimists, are fine with this change.

“All we need now,” they tell me, “is a couple of inches of fresh snow to cover up all this mud. Make everything look clean again.”

Snow is this great disguise of the winter grays. It blankets the cold dead of winter, making everything look bright. And here in upstate New York, where an inch of new snow a day is normal, it continually refreshes itself. Snow hides the winter mud until the new growths of spring are ready to burst forth from the earth.

On internship I have adopted a policy of “fake it ‘til you make it.” On any given day, at any given task, I have no idea what I am doing. Even if I know what I’m doing, I frequently lack the confidence I need to do what is asked of me. So I fake it. I walk through the doors of the hospital like I’ve been there a million times, not like I just got lost in the parking lot. I plan worship like I wrote the ELW. I preach like I have something to say. And somehow, in the mud below all of the bravado, the Holy Spirit shows up. Shows up and grows a pastor out of this seminary intern. I hide behind a mask of self-confidence, trusting that it is not my confidence that matters, but God’s confidence. That God is doing a new thing in the winter of this strange experience. And I just need to keep showing up, and bring enough mud for something to take root.

The Word Became Flesh

Wordle image from this weekend's sermon on John 1:1-18.

Last weekend I skyped Christmas morning with my family back in California. Skype is a computer program that offers free computer-to-computer video conferencing. All you have to do is download the free software to your computer and you can see and talk in real time to anyone with skype and a web cam. My parents discovered skype while my brother was living in England last year, and my mom loved it. She likes being able to see us when we talk, to see our faces, to see where we are. It makes her feel much more connected to us, that we are less far away.

So this year for Christmas I sat in my living room in Syracuse with a cup of coffee, and my family sat in my parents’ living room in California with their cups of coffee, and we opened presents together, just like we do every year. 3,000 miles and three time zones away I still got to be part of the festivities. Granted, they frequently forgot about the computer and would leave me staring at the tree for long periods of time, but given the circumstances, pretty good.

Modern communication technology is amazing. You may not be familiar with skype, but I think email and even the telephone is pretty equally amazing. Pick up the phone and you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, instantly. With cell phones, you can even talk to someone now in the middle of the woods, or the grocery store, or from your car.

We have cousins in Sweden that my great grandmother used to communicate with by mail. She would write a letter in California, and it would travel by train across the United States to the east coast, and then take a boat to Stockholm, and then a truck to their apartment in the north part of the city. Now my cousin and I communicate instantaneously over email, sharing pictures, jokes, and quips in real time. A relationship that was built over a hundred years ago through bi-annual letters continues at a speed that my great-grandmother could not have even dreamed about.

The relationship continues, but it is not deep. My great-grandmother wrote careful, pages long letters, to send to this family. My cousin and I shoot back jokes, pictures, not insights into one another’s lives, we don’t really know one another. When I was a kid, we traveled to Sweden to meet these relatives. We sat on their sofa and looked at old family photos. We discussed just how it was that we were related, their plans for the future, our plans for the future, our respective lives. We drank thick Scandinavian coffee and ate ham sandwiches on rye bread and got to know one another. It was in seeing one another, in being in one another’s presence and sharing in one another’s stories that our relationship was formed, not so much in a series of emails with funny pictures of cats.

Skype, whose virtues I was extolling earlier, is really similarly limited. Skype is nice, email is nice, the phone is nice, but it does not replace being in the presence of another person. Technology is not a substitute for face-to-face community. I want more than a glimpse into someone's life. I want to sit and linger over a cup of coffee, or share a meal. I want to see them when they talk about challenges, hear the intonation in their voice, watch their facial expressions, and I want to be seen. I want to be a presence, not a voice or a phrase or an email address. We are social beings, we are relational beings, we were created to be in relationship with one another.

Today’s text from John is one of the earliest and most complete theological treatises of the Christian faith. In it we can hear Christology, theology, creationism, eschatology, ecclesiology, and a whole host of other theological doctrine. But holding together all of these various –ologies, is one of the central tenants of the Christian faith, the incarnation. The Word became flesh and lived among us. God loved us so much and wanted to be in relationship with us so much that God sent Jesus Christ to become one of us. To walk among us as fully human, to hear our stories, to know our lives, to experience our joys and our struggles. Jesus Christ did not come as a virtual human, a skyped God, looking real but not really being real. No, Jesus Christ came in the flesh, to be with us.

John’s Gospel first introduces us to Jesus Christ as “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Entire theological libraries have been written trying to explain precisely what is meant by those little words “with” and “was.” But even after two millenniums, numerous theologians, and countless pages, our language always falls short.

Instead of trying to understand or explain what exactly this means, I think it is enough to marvel in the relationship between God and the Word. A relationship that is intimate, mutual, co-creational. One being is not greater or more powerful than the other, rather they exist together, supporting and explaining one another. The whole of creation is born out of this relationship of love and trust.

And then the Word, who was with God at creation, through whom all creation came into being, left God to take on human flesh and live among us. This word “lived” dates back to a time and culture where people were nomadic and moved from place to place, setting up tents as they traveled. Rather than simply “lived” it really means “set up a tent among us.” This isn’t a “Christ is born in our hearts” idea; it has more flesh to it than that. It is a communal experience. In the middle of our human community, Christ came to dwell with us. Not in some ethereal, spiritual, way, but in the flesh. Jesus Christ, who was in intimate relationship with God, came down to be in intimate relationship with us. Jesus Christ came to sit and share a meal at table with us. To see us when we talk about our challenges and be seen. To be in relationship with us, just as he is in relationship with God. And through that, to bring us into relationship with one another, with creation, and with the creator.

The Christ event, the incarnation, that time that we celebrate in this season of Christmas, has been described as being like dropping a stone into the pond of the timeline of history. We know it is true today not because we can see and touch Christ in the flesh, but because the event that was the Word became flesh created ripples back and forth in the pond of time, and those ripples wash up upon us still today. We see the ripples backwards in our reading from Jeremiah this morning, where God promised to gather God’s people as a shepherd gathers his flock. A people who once were scattered, will be brought together into relationship under the watchful care of a God who knows them intimately. And we see the ripples forward in the promises of baptism and in the faces of one another as we gather around the table to share the meal that is Christ’s body broken and blood shed for us.

The one who was with God at the very creation of the universe came to this earth in the flesh, still comes today in the promises of the sacraments, and promises to come once again to bring the whole creation into fulfillment. This is the promise of the incarnation, this is the miracle of Christmas, this is the dance of relationship which Christ invites us into. A relationship which John describes as the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. A relationship through which we are promised grace upon grace. Amen.

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.