Heading Out

“I just don’t want to do that,” I tell God persistently. I am sitting on the floor cross-legged, knees tucked to my chest, the very picture of childhood obstinance except that I am an adult. I am pouting, I know it, I do not care. “It looks hard, and I am tired. And besides, look at all the things I am still carrying.” I gesture to the bags behind me, bags filled with hurt feelings and broken relationships. “I am already carrying all of that around, you cannot possibly expect me to have the strength to face this new challenge, not with all of that. It’s too heavy, and I am just one person.”

“What makes you think you are going out alone?” God settles herself down on the floor in front of me. She reaches out her hand and touches my forehead. Her fingers trace the outline of the place where through the waters of baptism she marked me as her child. “I am coming with you.”

“Oh,” I sigh. “Well, I still have to carry all this stuff. And it’s still heavy.”

“And about that stuff, why are you bringing all that with you anyway?” Her voice is soft, calm and concerned. I look over my shoulder at the pile of bags containing all my old grudges and anger standing behind me.

“Well, what else am I going to do with them? I can’t leave them here. And besides, I learned things from those problems. It’s just that they’re so heavy, and I’m bound to get more of them. I don’t know that I can handle anymore quite yet.”

“Since I’m coming with you, how about I carry them for a while?”

“They’re pretty heavy,” I caution, “I don’t know if you will be able to lift them all.” God looks at me, a slight frown creasing her brow, behind which her eyes twinkle with amusement.

“I am God, I think I can probably handle them,” she comments drily. She reaches around her back and pulls out her bag. It is one of those black sack-bags. You know the type, black leather, looks professional and can carry anything but the kitchen sink. God’s is sleek and sophisticated, the very picture of hip elegance. I smile. Those bags can carry a lot of stuff, but even God’s bag is dwarfed in comparison to my collection of mismatched luggage. There is no way all of my bags are going in there. God does not seem to notice the vast size difference.

“Hand me one,” she says calmly. I reach over and drag a bag towards me. At this awkward angle even I, so familiar with its weight, have trouble maneuvering it. God reaches past me, lifts it from my grasp, and without a thought, slides it easily into her bag. And then the next, and the next. She keeps going until, to my surprise, all of my bags are inside hers. Her bag does not even look full. I lean over to peer inside, but God pulls her bag back towards herself and closes the latch.

“Yours are not the only bags I have in there,” she says, smiling, “best to leave other people’s problems to themselves.” Rising to her feet, she swings the now-loaded handbag over her shoulder as if it still weighed nothing.

“Ready to go?” she asks, offering her hand as I struggle to my feet. I take her outstretched hand. I feel lighter but oddly clumsy without the bags' familiar weight

“Not really,” I sigh, as she pulls me to my feet. Even without the bags, I am still apprehensive. The memory of their weight on my shoulders is hard to forget. But God gives my hand a comforting squeeze, and smiles warmly at my hesitation. At last I turn, squaring my shoulders towards this new direction.

“If you promise to come with me,” I say softly, “I suppose I can.”

"Of course," she smiles warmly, reaching out to brush my forehead one last time. "Of course, always."

New Life and Fish Puke

I’ve found myself sitting with the story of Jonah a lot recently. Specifically chapter 2; where Jonah is swallowed—and subsequently vomited up on the beach—by a rather large fish. Prior to his unpleasant trip the wrong way through a fish throat, Jonah spends three—I would imagine fairly long and miserable—days in the belly of the aforementioned fish. Imagine what it must be like in the belly of a fish. Dark, I think, and dank. It probably smells horrible. The inside of the stomach, partially digested pieces of other things the fish had eaten recently, and stomach acids probably pressed down on Jonah from all sides, making it difficult to move. At the mercy of the fish, unsure if he would live or die, swimming through the murky insides of a stomach, Jonah must have felt very alone, very afraid, and very miserable. Jonah’s three days in the fish correspond to the length of time in which ancient Israelite tradition said it took to travel to the land of the dead. Thus it seems like Jonah went through a metaphorical death in the belly of the fish. And then on the third day, the unexpected happened. Jonah prays to God and finds himself vomited (the NRSV translates it as “spewed,” but the Hebrew yaque is much more closely translated as “vomited”) onto the beach. For Jonah this, with all its stench and unpleasantness, was resurrection and new life. Free from the belly of the fish, he set out to Nineveh.

As I mentioned in my last post, this past semester, past year really, has been a difficult one. As thing after thing piled up around me; the weight of expectations pulled on me in an almost physical manner. I mucked around, feeling like I caused more trouble than I helped. I couldn’t see my way out of a year where crises fell one after another; some major, an unexpected family emergency and the loss of a serious relationship, and some not so major. As I struggled to make it through the day, I felt dragged down, like someone was pressing on my shoulders, like slogging through mud, like swimming through the belly of a giant fish. Problems with friends, masses of paperwork, half-finished school assignments, and my own mistakes floated around me like partially digested hunks of fish food. In this year of my own fish belly I did the only thing I knew to do. I pulled inside myself. I tucked into a ball, hunkered down, and did what I needed to do. I was not thriving by any means, but I survived.

And then, unexpectedly, a few weeks ago, I felt the rumblings of change. It started with a change in the weather, the gradual shift from winter to spring, the first few brave buds poking out of the frozen soil. Then it was the shift in my course schedule, as daily work fell to the side in the focus of final projects. The end was in sight, the year could not last forever, the fish was about to release its victim. The semester came to an end, spewing me out onto the beach of summer (I joked with a friend that being vomited out by a fish is not a pleasant experience, but at least there’s light at the end of the fish throat), and I hopped a plane to anywhere but here to recover, to count my losses, and to figure out how to go forward.

Sitting on the beach, God speaks to Jonah again and sends him to Nineveh. Jonah still does not want to go to Nineveh but grudgingly, slime oozing from his body and squishing between his toes with every step, he does. And then, to Jonah’s disgust, God forgives the people of Nineveh, just as Jonah had suspected God would. Jonah laments in 4:2, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning.” I don’t benefit from this, God, Jonah laments, this is the same mess we were in when I started! I spent three days in the belly of a fish for this! God comforts Jonah, maybe this is bigger than you. More is going on here than you can see, trust me. I know you are miserable, but if I love Nineveh this much, how much must I also love you.

Like Jonah, I am learning that new life is rarely clean or orderly. I think we expect that of new life; we expect it to be, well, new. Pop Christianity says that if we only accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior everything will be all right. Pray to God and all our prayers will be answered, we will get everything we have ever desired, life will be easy. Jesus suffered and died for our sins, and now we live as post-resurrection people free to live forever with Christ, shouldn’t that mean something? And yet, here I sit, stranded in an airport from my own stupidity, angrily picking hunks of partially digested fish vomit out of my hair, tired and frustrated and sore. Don’t I deserve a break, God? I want to yell. Hasn’t this year been long enough?

But new life is just that, life. And life is messy and complicated and sometimes smells like the inside of a fish. Jesus promised that we might “have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10), not that abundant life wouldn’t be hard. But this hard and abundant life is good. So I struggle to my feet on this beach called life, blinking in the bright sunlight, brushing seaweed and fish innards and muck off my arms and shoulders as best I can. I wish I could tell you that in the sunlight I dance and rejoice and praise the God who rescued me from the depths, but realistically it is all I can do to grit my teeth and set out doggedly again in the direction God pointed into this new life. Jesus came out of the tomb, Jonah went to Nineveh, and I too will keep on walking. And I know in front of me there are more Ninevehs, more tombs, more fish bellies. I know this post-resurrection life will not be easy. There are ahead of me more days, weeks, months, even years, where the weight of the world will drag on me so much that it will be enough to get out of bed and brush my teeth in the morning. In those dark days, as in these ones, I am grateful for good friends, friends who are willing to sit in the belly of the fish with me. Who do not try to lessen the pain, but who instead make me laugh as they assure me that yes, it really does smell that bad in here, and lean over to wipe away the hot, salty tears that leave trails through the fish ooze on my cheeks. And mostly I am grateful for a God who is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Jonah 4:2). Thanks be to God, who is with us in life and death, on beaches and in fish bellies. Amen.

Springtime Resurrections

It’s a hard day not to feel optimistic about the world. One of those days where there’s enough of a cool breeze in the air to remind you it’s still March, but in the breaks of the breeze the sun beats down strong enough to be almost hot in its focus. The snow is completely gone and the world seems to be waking up from its slumber. You can almost hear the plants groaning as they push through the earth, stretching their tiny green shoots like a cat after a long nap. Out of the long, dark winter comes proof that God is once again doing a new thing with the world in Springtime, that the world is once again being reborn.

I think it is safe to say that this has been a long, dark year for me. The growth that has been required of me this year as I stretch and grow myself to figure out who I will be as a pastor has been hard and painful at times, and it has felt like the winter of this year would never end. Yet in days like today I remember that God is doing a new thing with me too. That through the darkness of Lent comes the bright morning dawn of Easter. That the grave is not the end, but that grace and love and resurrection are in the air. That the tiny blades of grass poking from the earth, the grave-clothes in the tomb, who I am today, is just the beginning of the story. A story that God is continuing to unfold. Thanks be to God, who works though winter, through a tomb, through us, and brings new life into the world.

Reflections on a cell phone

My cell phone is turned off. Seriously turned off. Not like on vibrate or silent in my bag or off for a flight to be turned on as soon as the flight attendants give the comforting “it is now safe to use portable communication devices” announcement, but completely and totally off. For the next two weeks. I am supposed to be reflecting on Iceland’s culture and stark beauty and experiencing a “profound experience of darkness,” or so said the course description. Above all, I am supposed to be saving myself the outlandish out-of-country charges I would face for using my cell phone in Iceland. All these things I’m sure are happening. But what I find myself most noticing the most is that my cell phone is turned off.

It is not like I am without communication. The house I am staying at in fact is some sort of a model technology house and literally has wireless internet streaming from the outlets in the wall, so my connection to gmail, to Facebook, to blogs, to Skype, is actually better and faster than my $10 ATT wireless in Chicago. But still, I find myself feeling a little bit lost without my cell phone. Being cut off from it, I’m realizing my phone has become a bit of a security blanket. I can think of rough times in my life where I have sat on the couch with my cell phone in my hand looking at all the people I could call if whatever it was got bad enough. Oftentimes knowing that in my hand was a list of people I could call at any time was enough to not need to call anyone. Just that realization that people who loved me were out there was enough.

The people who love me are still out there, even with my cell phone off. For the next two weeks they are not just a phone call away, or a street away, or a quick train trip. They are an ocean away, but they are still out there. So this trip becomes, for me, about more than just experiencing a new culture in this land of beauty and harsh extremes. Being on this beautiful island in the middle of the north Atlantic, with great internet and no cell phone is also about discovering new ways of connectedness, new ways of remembering my community and my support system. There will be times in ministry where, for one reason or another, there will be no one I can call. There will be things I will have to deal with in life that will be difficult and painful and I will feel alone and that phone will have to sit unopened in my lap. And in those times, maybe I will remember Iceland. I will remember the experience of finding new community in the place where I am. Of learning to eat cheese on cookies, playing Bananagrams with someone who beat me despite playing in his second language and ending up with all the Q’s and X’s, and waking up to a five-alarm sunrise at 10 am. But I will also remember the people across the ocean who remind me that my home and my welcome are still in that place. And I will be glad to remember that the world is small. Thanks be to God, whose arms can reach across as vast a space as the ocean and across as small a space as a cell phone.

The Bethlehem Star

For as long as I can remember my parents’ church has owned a large metallic star. This star plays a central role in the annual Christmas pageant as the Bethlehem star. For years it hung from an eight-foot-long stick, which could then be moved to lead the Wise Men to the Baby Jesus. However, after a nervous moment in last year’s Christmas pageant where the star proved too heavy for the kid assigned the part of holding it and came dangerously close to impaling Joseph, this year the decision was made to hang the star from the rafters in the front of the church. There was some discussion as to whether it was theologically appropriate to hang the star above the cross that sits in the front of the sanctuary, but it was decided that the survival of the characters of the Christmas pageant was more important than theological appropriateness.

So on Christmas Eve, there the star hung, twelve feet in the air, centered over the table, just slightly off-center from the cross. As the pastor led us through the familiar Words of Institution, I pondered the location of the star in our sanctuary that evening, and the line its sharp point formed through the cross to the table. That star in our midst served, as its namesake had so many centuries ago, to direct us to the one whom we celebrated that night.

The Bethlehem star reminds us that we celebrate the birth of a child who is God with us. And that in itself, that the virgin should conceive and bear a son, and that son would be God, is a miracle. But had Jesus just been born, it would not have been enough. The Bethlehem star also points to the cross. As we celebrate Christ’s birth, we remember that soon we will also celebrate his death. That the tiny baby whose birth we have awaited, will die on a cross.

But again, had Jesus just died on a cross, that would still not have been enough. Thousands of people died on crosses at the hands of the Romans. Had Jesus just died on the cross, he would still have been a great moral teacher, but great teachings are not what we celebrate. We celebrate a man, who was God, who died without sin and rose again, so that we might have eternal life. We celebrate a God who loved us so much that death could not separate God from us, a God who is still coming to us today. And so our Bethlehem star must also point to the table where we meet Jesus in the bread and the wine. So it is fitting that on Christmas Eve night, the same thing that led the Wise Men to the Christ-child so many centuries ago still leads us to the Christ in our midst. Thanks be to God who came as a child in Bethlehem, who died on a cross at Golgotha, and who still comes in the bread and wine, in the water and the Word, into our lives today. Amen.

Wordle of Sermon on Matthew 14:22-33

I borrowed this idea from a classmate and think it is a pretty neat one. I uploaded my sermon text from the sermon I preached in preaching lab today into Wordle (http://www.wordle.net/, hope this is an appropriate attribution), and this is the image that I got. I like that Jesus, step, and storm received such prominent placing. Kind of a neat idea, I will probably try this again.

The Holy Spirit lives in Andersonville

I met the Holy Spirit Sunday morning. I had twenty minutes between services, was exhausted from traveling all weekend, and my MIC congregation only serves decaf coffee; so I decided to run across the street to the panaderia on the corner and get a cup of coffee and a danish. I walked through the door of the small store, and there she was standing behind the counter, a 5’1” Guatemalan woman in her mid 50s, the Holy Spirit.

“Coffee?” she asked before I could say anything, compassion in her warm, soft voice. Maybe she asked because it was her job to sell me coffee, but something about the tone of her voice told me there was more to it than that. Something in the tone of her voice told me she saw the edge of my clergy collar under my coat and recognized a cold, tired, and overwhelmed seminarian who so desperately wants to be a pastor, but right now just drinks a lot of coffee and dresses like one sometimes. Without waiting for a response, she turned to fill up a cup.

“Yes,” I responded, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “You read my mind!”

“Room for cream?” She turned back towards me, eyes warm and compassionate. “Two or three?”

“Oh, oh, oh,” I stuttered, startled. I only like a very little bit of cream if any, just enough to take the edge off, too much makes my teeth feel thick. She opened the container and before I could stop her, dumped the entire packet in my coffee.

“You take sweet!” she said firmly, pushing the cup towards me and gesturing to the sugar bowl, and then to the stirring sticks and stack of lids. “Stirrer, lid.” I’m not usually a big sugar person, but she was so insistent that I busied myself with putting sugar and a lid on my coffee while she got my danish. Two minutes and $2.35 later, I was out the door with a cup of very hot coffee and a really delicious cream cheese danish that was just the perfect amount of sweet.

That cup of coffee was life-giving this morning, and not because it was very good. It was very hot with a bitter edge, and had too much cream for my taste (the danish, on the other hand, was possibly the best I’ve ever eaten, definitely worth the drive to Andersonville if you are ever in the Chicagoland area). But there was something sacramental about that cup of coffee. Something about our very brief interaction, her knowing eyes, her softness in dealing with me, left me feeling that more had gone on than her selling me coffee. For a fleeting moment, I felt something bigger than the two of us look at me from behind her eyes and see past the collar and the confidence I’m trying to grow into, to the cold, overwhelmed, and scared wanna-be pastor who is really me. I felt someone see all the fear and confusion I hold close to my bones, but also all the desire and passion and hope entwined around it, and love that whole mess of emotion and possibility, and feed that with the best she had to offer—hot coffee, a lot of cream, and a few minutes of compassion. And my pneumatology is not that great, but that feels a whole lot like the Holy Spirit. Jesus said after him there would be another advocate, a comforter, a friend who would walk beside us, flow within us, and sustain us in this life. One who will see us for the complicated beings that we are, love us as perfect creatures made in the image of God, and nourish us as we seek to follow in the path of Christ. Thanks be to God who shows up in the most unexpected places, in bread and wine, in water, in the Word, and sometimes even in bad coffee and simple interactions in crowded bakeries on chilly Sunday mornings.