The icy blast that lives in winter’s house
announces beginning and end
freezing solid the moving
crystallizing, drying, coating
striking with its steel edge, but
without knowing its brief tenure
shorter than it hopes, because
brother sun broke the seal of clouds
and said let there be light
heat, balance in this house where
winter has its day, but no more than a day
Tim Carson, 2013
We have just introduced a class on ancient prayer practices in our congregation. How does one begin to talk about quietude, listening, practicing the presence of God, and contemplation? Mostly by trying it, along with mentors who help. But also by listening to descriptions.
When the rabbi of Lentshno’s son was a boy he once saw Rabbi Yitzhak of Vorki praying. Full of amazement he came running to his father and asked how it was possible for such a zaddik to pray quietly and simply, without giving any sign of ecstasy.
“A poor swimmer,” answered his father, “has to thrash around in order to stay up in the water. The perfect swimmer rests on the tide and it carries him.”
from Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber
In our congregation, Broadway Christian Church, February has become “retreat” month; each weekend is occupied by yet another retreat – women, men, girls, boys. The second of these, the Men’s Retreat, will be held on Saturday morning, February 9. Over the past few years we have followed a sports theme and borrowed liberally from its metaphors. Our mornings have included presentations on the themes along with relevant movie clips and a “clinic” in the sport being considered. Fly fishing brought us A River Runs Through It and Baseball was, of course, Field of Dreams.
This year the sport is Golf and our theme is Finding Your Swing. In addition to the fun golf clinic led by our guest golf pros, our presentations will include sections of the great film, The Legend of Bagger Vance. The question we will be asking, in one way or another, is, “Who’s your caddie?”
As a devotional preparation leading up to the retreat, we have designed a month-long series of daily electronic devotions based on the theme, Finding Your Swing. You don’t have to be a golfer to enjoy them, but it could help. If you subscribe you will receive one devotion crafted by yours truly dropped into your email box each morning at 7am from January 9 – February 9.
Of course, the idea is for men to subscribe leading up to their retreat. But don’t let that keep you from subscribing if you can’t attend or if you are are a woman! The women golfers I know have asked for a special dispensation to receive these, and so they shall …
To subscribe, simply send an email in which “Finding Your Swing” is in the subject line and make your request: “Please subscribe me to the month of daily devotions.” To do so, send your request to iluckenbill24@tranquility.net
Four!
(The following meditation was given at the Bluegrass worship in Rocheport, Missouri, January 5, 2013)
I know, I know, every Christmas pageant you’ve ever seen has a cadre of wise men parading around, joining the shepherds around the manger to adore baby Jesus. The reason such scenes fill our churches and adorn Christmas greeting cards is this: They need to condense a much longer three-act play down to a one-act play, a snapshot. The only problem is that it really didn’t happen that way.
What happened was a wondrous birth that was followed a couple of years later by Magi – astrologers from what is today Iran or Iraq – following a stellar phenomenon toward the place where the now toddler Jesus was learning to say No. When they found him they paid homage with the familiar gifts: Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh. The gifts are highly symbolic.
Gold is tribute worthy of a King. Frankincense is used to incense a holy altar, the divine locale. And myrrh is used, well, to embalm bodies. From the very beginning the shadow of the cross falls across the page.
Already in the Gospel story the twin dynamics of attraction and resistance walk onto the stage, and there they shall stay to the very end. On the one hand the light of God’s working in the world rises and draws people from a far and they come like moths to the flame. But at the same time, in rival measure, the forces of resistance attempt to snuff out this light. Both are presented in a cameo appearance, the Magi and King Herod, face-to-face.
The Magi naively seek the council of the local sovereign in whose territory they are traveling. That’s standard operating procedure, of course, and smart, too. You want permission from those in authority even as you provide assurance that your motive is honorable and your visit full of good will. You do not, in any way, seek to do harm.
But the sovereign before whom they appear is not nearly so principled. To the contrary, he is a paranoid ball of hostility. Playing the pretender, Herod poses as one just as interested in the new king who has just arrived on the scene. And by the way, where is he and when did the star arise? I’d like to show just how much I care, don’t you know.
What Herod really wanted was to plan a surgical op, swoop in under the cover of night, and take out the target. The magi, becoming suspicious in a dream, return by another way, cutting a wide swath around crazy king. Incensed by the cunning of the magi, Herod decides to cast a wide net over everything to snag the prey. He carpet bombs the area hoping that by killing everything – every male two years and younger – he’ll hit his target. Never mind the collateral damage. You can hear Rachel weeping still.
And that is exactly the world into which Jesus is born, no more and no less. A baby cries and angels sing. Children play and the swords slash.
Wise people make daunting journeys to catch just a glimpse of the true, beautiful and holy, while monarchs plot its demise in the back room. Just as wisdom makes its appearance, treachery mounts it campaign. It’s all there, the good, the bad and the terribly ugly.
The shocking part, for anyone who has lived more than a few years, is not that these opposites fill the world. The jarring truth is that the battlefield exists in each of our hearts, hotly contested ground sought by Herod and Magi alike. If it were only a matter of an epic battle between good and evil on the outside, we could leave the tale told by the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. But it neither begins nor ends outside of ourselves; the epic battle always begins and ends as a part of our inner landscape.
If it is true that Christ may be born into our hearts it is equally true that such a birth is constantly tested and contested. The magi live. And so does Herod.
And that is exactly why it is so important for us to separate the story of Jesus’ birth from what comes next.
We might go to Bethlehem one way, that is go to Christ one way, but the way we travel home after that is different, full of danger, risks, and unfamiliar territory. We have been warned in a dream not to travel the same way, but the new way.
Just think for a minute about how your life got you to where you are right now. You may not even be able to piece together all the paths and connections that made it possible. In fact, you may not have been making conscious choices that got you from there to here, almost navigating on auto pilot, following some master script someone else thought you should follow.
Or your path has been fairly deliberate. You chose this way and not that way. But now you come to a turning point because all our roads have them and you suddenly realize that the ways you used to travel aren’t necessarily going to be the same ones that get you to your next place. As James Taylor sings, “It’s a long, long way from anywhere …”
I can tell you that Herod did not return by a different road. He returned by the same road he always took – force, ego, domination, power, superiority. None of that changed, not even in regard to the light of the world. It seems that the presence of the light simply doubled down his resolve to stay the same, to act the same way with the same motives, more of the same.
And if there is a part of us that kills the spirit it is exactly this, the wild impulse to insist on our own way and liquidate any rival to the one we think is in control.
If there is wisdom in our Magi, our little trio of sojourners, it is that they read the lay of the land as they go, listen to their dreams, discern the difference between what is true and false, and chart a new course.
I often think about that in regard to the life story we are co-writing with God. Garrison Keillor once said, “Give up your good Christian life and follow Christ.”
Of course, that is offered tongue-in-cheek, but it also tells a truth. The road that got us here, even the one that seemed the right and proper Christian one, must sometimes be abandoned in order to follow a new path with Christ.
Once upon a time there was a young boy who was always drawn to wandering in the woods. When his father asked him about it, why he did, the boy answered, “I go there to find God.”
“Well, that’s a fine thing,” said the father, “but can’t you find God everywhere?”
“Yes,” said the boy, “but I’m not.”
Our search for the God that is everywhere changes as we find ourselves in different places in the world and different places along our life story. What seemed clear yesterday isn’t so clear today. The challenges of life have changed. The way we need to be in the world has shifted, even if the eternal God is the same. Isn’t God everywhere? Well, yes, but we’re not.
Like the Magi, we have learned a lot about where we have been. We can tell you the story of the twists and turns along the way. We even can provide cautions based on that experience. The Magi know not to return by the way they came, and we know something about the way not to return. If someone asked us we might have a lot to say about the way not to go – from experience.
What is not so clear is where we are heading now, or how, returning home by another road, because it is a way that is not charted on any map. It is the long way home, the unfamiliar way home, but the way we need to take at this point in our life. How do we navigate?
I remember hearing James King tell about an African church he pastored. One of the faithful women who attended each and every Sunday was always accompanied by her dog. She had a terribly abusive husband, and when she died he wouldn’t even allow the funeral to be in the church.
That left this man alone, except for the dog. He began to notice that the dog quietly disappeared every Sunday morning and didn’t return until noon. One day his curiosity got the best of him and he followed the dog on Sunday morning. The dog entered the open-air building, walked to the front where his beloved once sat in her pew, and laid down in the aisle. The man followed, took a seat beside the dog and listened. And what he heard was something wondrous, a story about the God of the universe who leads us where we need to go. His heart was so touched that he gave himself to Christ. And now the dog goes to church with a new master.
We never know what leads us home by a different road. A star may have led us to the cradle and something else will guide us from there on. God may be everywhere but we aren’t, and we will be led from this new place into the new chapter, the next chapter co-written with Christ.
Beneath the madness of King Herod there abides the wisdom from within, our Magi, the dog that takes us where we need to go. Follow, good pilgrim, and trust that the way will lead you where you must go, step by step, prayer by prayer, until you find your peace.
In the coldest months of the year we shelter the homeless here in Columbia. Many cities do the same – differently according to size and need. The Room in the Inn program is one way and this year the doors of Wilkes Blvd. United Methodist Church are open, staffed by volunteers by our many different church communities. Broadway’s week was this one and we will have another later in the winter.
I was familiar with Room in the Inn from two previous churches, one in St. Louis and one in Ft. Worth, Texas. The idea is always the same: screened applicants are given lodging for the night and a humane and safe place to sleep. And volunteers are present during different times for the sake of supervision.
Like many others, I have stayed the night before. This tour of duty is often the hardest to fill because people feel anxious about being there alone. Mostly the night shift is about occupying yourself while the dead tired are snoring away in the next room. Because of that it’s very quiet in the depths of the night. People with no place to call home are usually exhausted. They are just scrambling for survival. And the colder it gets generally the more urgent it gets. Humane communities figure out affordable and humane housing solutions for long-term and critical/short-term needs.
The causes of homelessness are many, but the typical ones include poverty, job loss, mental illness and drug addiction, a financial crisis, and chronic homelessness – which is actually a relatively small percentage of the entirety. We have lots of students in our public schools who are homeless, often doubling up with relatives or friends, couch surfing with friends. People who lost their jobs, homes and cars in this most recent economic meltdown were shocked to find themselves in a shelter looking for help.
As I beheld our population of those seeking shelter last night I recognized some from the previous year. For some this is a way of life. But there are those for whom this is an episode, a chapter of desperation out of which they will climb – with a little help from their friends.
I’ll never forget staying the night one time in my former church in St. Louis. I struck up a conversation with a young woman who didn’t fit the norm of a typical person seeking shelter. She was a college student who shared an apartment off campus with two roomies. When they bailed on her she was left holding the proverbial bag of the lease and monthly rent. It was over her head. She had no family in town. And there she was in a church basement, going to college and wondering how in the world she ended up in a homeless shelter. How indeed.
A lot of myths have to be dispelled, too. I remember one church that was struggling with beginning an initiative for sheltering the homeless. Every irrational fear surfaced. What might happen? How about security? Will we need a fleet of crisis counselors on hand if a volunteer is traumatized? Shall we disinfect the areas the homeless may have touched? (Because we know it’s catching). In retrospect such concerns are exposed for what they are – laced with irrational fears and deep biases. But at the time they seem real to people – especially those who have been isolated from poverty, both domestic and international. They panic. They have no emotional tool kit at their disposal. It takes cool heads who have been around to return sanity to the room.
When I sit in the shelter late at night I occupy myself with a variety of mindless things, reading, games. But sometimes I pray and I pray for everyone in the shelter. I pray that they will be kept safe, that their future may be hopeful. I lift them up as a group like you would fly a kite. I hope it catches a breeze and sails.
I also remember that Jesus was an itinerant, homeless, depending on the hospitality of others. It was he who said that foxes have holes, the birds have their nests, but the son of man has no where to lay his head. The homeless God. And the homeless God is always sleeping with the homeless wherever they are because, well, that’s just the way he is.
Most people develop some mid-winter ritual or pursuit. One of mine happens to be finding the right book or books to ride the solstice. This year the winter read is combination, both related to the aftermath of yet another presidential election.
Four years ago, following that election, I read in Lincoln and Roosevelt, incredibly notable presidents from both parties. The picks this time also represent both sides of the aisle, though the parties they represented seem barely recognizable today.
The first is Chris Matthews’ new biography, Jack Kennedy. The second is Ike’s Bluff by Evan Thomas. My plan is to read them side by side, alternating my readings. I’ll send smoke signals once I figure out where I am. I may need help. If so, please send out the St. Bernards, casks bearing libation beneath their ample chins.
The famed story by Dr. Seuss, The Grinch that Stole Christmas, was first made into a movie in 1966. Later, in 2000, its remake hit the cinematic streets. And that one, with Jim Carrey in the role of the miserable Grinch, is the one that appears every Christmas season as a part of our permanent movie menu.
I just watched it, last night, in fact. Dr. Seuss may have written children’s books, and of course he did, but like any good spinner of tales his craft carried deep into adult concerns as well. The older we get, the more we get them. The Grinch is no exception. As a parallel to Dickens’ Scrooge, the Grinch – isolated, damaged, pathetic – is envious of those who have joy. And Christmas is the ultimate salt in his wound. If he can undo Christmas he may be able to strike a fatal blow to those who are not isolated, damaged and pathetic. He tries, and comes very near to doing so, but the resiliency of the human spirit resists and transcends anything he might do to scuttle Christmas. That, and the love of a child for him as he is, breaks his self-destructive shell, and his heart is warmed.
Again, as an adult, I engage with such allegories and parables differently than I did as a child. Why? Because of life experience. Now I know the story of the human heart and history that led to creation of the story itself. Like many of you, I nod in understanding, laugh at myself and the way we are right along with every observation of the plot.
One of the most remarkable examples in my own life took place in church. If you want to find a place where the very best and very worst often coexist it might be there. With the passing of years I am able to look back and look at this episode like I might a chapter in the Grinch. Time graces us with an objectivity we might not have at the moment.
Once upon a time and long way away, there was a church that had its annual stewardship campaign. The whole village of church people were excited about the future and what was happening, all except a very sad and hurtful Grinch who gathered as many other sad and hurtful people around him. Just as the rest of the village was singing and making merry, he made the rounds by personal visits and phone calls to conduct an anti-campaign. If only we can steal their success we can undermine the future, said he.
Slowly, people in the village started sharing that the Grinch had contacted them and asked them not to give, not to pledge. They were surprised that he would try to hurt the church as a way to achieve his Grinch-like ways. Because many people are impressionable and easily manipulated, he convinced a number of people to join him. It was not many, but at least one for each of the Twelve Days of Christmas. But something strange happened.
That year the pledge campaign was stronger than ever, even without the support of the Grinch and those who had attempted to scuttle it. The people in the village looked at one another and said, “I guess if God wants it done God wants it done.” And they went about making merry. The Grinch and his band were very angry that their scheming came to such an end and made other plans to undermine the village because they were so sad and damaged. They would continue to damage because they were so damaged themselves. And so the story went on. Some continued to hurt and others were redeemed by the joy of the village and love that crept back into their brittle souls.
Thank you Dr. Seuss, Charles Dickens, The Gospel of Luke and … you, Mr. Grinch!
I always find it interesting how specific Luke is about his historic context when telling the story of the birth of Jesus. He goes into some detail and says this guy was the king and this other guy was the governor. The government was doing that. The people had to respond by doing this. And by the way, Joseph needed to go to that city because he was of this blood line going back to a particular person, David.
What Luke does is to locate the story for us. By putting everything in its historical context he says something important. He insists that when you say something about God you also have to say something about where God is going. It’s not beside the point.
If we were the Gospel writers telling the birth of Jesus today we would include all the coordinates that mark our own time.
We just had an election and these people are in office. People have been wondering if they are going to fall off the fiscal cliff or, according to the Mayan calendar, there won’t be a cliff to fall off of. There has been another slaughter of the innocents by a madman and Rachel is still weeping for her children. There are wars and rumors of wars.
In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus. Polarization was stronger than ever in the U.S. congress. This was the first enrollment when Quirinius was governor of Syria. The troops were drawing down from Afghanistan.
When Luke says Jesus was born into the world it was into the actual world, not an imaginary one with a pretend stage. When God showed up in the flesh it was real flesh rubbing our flesh. And that’s the only way, really, to catch the flavor of this radical story.
Jesus was born into the middle of the mess, not alongside it, not into a Christmas program or a carol or a crèche.
Jesus was born into an actual world were people suffer and have great triumphs, where tyrants rule and the conflict du jour lines up to take the place of the one that preceded it yesterday. Christ is born here, not somewhere else, in a place that often has little room for him.
By coming to the real world, all the way down in the muck, it becomes possible for the world not only to contemplate a creator but connect with one. And it’s that connection that is the thing. Without connection, things are just things, lives are lumps of clay.
One time John Oliver (Giver of Life, Paraclete, 2011, 83) asked his readers to imagine receiving a huge box that has been delivered to your house. Inside of the box is an appliance that either you or Santa ordered. As you feverishly remove the appliance and pore over the owner’s manual, you discover all the nifty things your new appliance can do. You’ve educated yourself on all its features.
Then you just sit and look at it because you are so proud: It’s so shiny, powerful and just perfect for what you’ve needed.
Now, Oliver continues, just imagine that you never plug your new appliance into the wall socket. There it sits, disconnected from the source of power that can make all those features and directions mean something. So it just sits there, taking up space, unable to perform a thing it was designed to do. And why is that? Because it’s not connected. That’s the first question that the IT support people ask you on the phone when you can’t get your devise to work, right? “Is it plugged in?”
Jesus is about making sure the appliance is plugged into the power source. And he does that by being becoming the appliance and power at the same time and connecting the two in his life. You’d never imagine it by looking at a little birth coming into the real, big, bad world. But that’s exactly what we say happened and happens.
Christians have always understood ourselves to be something like those appliances. Authentic Christian life is not possible unless we are connected, plugged into the God who created us. Without that we just take up space on the counter. This connection doesn’t happen automatically any more than the plug of an appliance finds its own way to an outlet. Somewhere in the mystery of Christ, God with us, a hidden hand of grace draws together the two, appliance and source, so that we might become what we were created to be in the first place.
The thing about that particular connection is that it only happens heart-to-heart according to the invisible cords of love. God comes in such a way that our hearts are broken, the armored plating falls away, and we fall in love. We fall in love through a veil of tears, or laughter, or silence, through the incredible discovery that the beating of this little child’s heart in the manger causes ours to come to life until we sing like angels.
All of that takes place in the year of Caesar Augustus or when predictions of the Mayan Calendar proved false or tragedy came to an elementary school. It always comes into the real world where life is underway and has been, and when it arrives it always finds the same need on parade, the need for the beloved to return to the Divine Lover.
You can second guess God if you like, question the efficiency of such a move, or try to devise a better plan yourself. But when it comes down to it the things of God that last and change the world are like the proverbial butterfly wings: they beat in one corner of the universe and cause storms to rage thousands of miles away. God majors in the incredibly small things, like an atom, for instance. It’s small, like a baby’s cry, but when released, its potential lights up the sky with a thousand suns.
Jesus is born in Bethlehem and wherever the mess of life is happening, and love is let out to prowl around and do its work. And when it finally finds your heart you don’t have a chance. He’s plugged in the toaster and nothing will ever be the same again.
I sat at a cafe having a bowl of soup, the snow having fallen through the grey skies for the first time this winter, just in time for the world-ending-according-to-Mayan-Calendar that didn’t come. I left my scarf on because my body was just not yet accustomed to the temperature change.
As I slurped my Tomato Bisque I gazed across the street toward another restaurant, one that has an open-air porch for outdoor seating when the weather is right. I have seen it filled with college students many a time. But not that day. It was lonely and dejected, remembering the good old days when young people spilled beer on its floors. One element remained the same, however.
A lone ceiling fan whirled in its courses. I could see it through the nearly horizontal blowing snow flakes. Thank goodness we are keeping the air circulated on this sultry, balmy, close afternoon. I just stared at its incongruity.
Something like it happens in the summer when an automatic sprinkler system turns on during a rain storm. Thank goodness we’re watering the lawn right now.
And it caused me to ponder all our automatic responses that are so ingrained in our little heads and hearts, how they keep on going and showing up, long after they are called for, their relevance spent. It’s just as silly, of course. I have this emotion or that, repeat this behavior or that, a ceiling fan on the porch in winter, a sprinkler in the rain storm.
Solvo nos O Deus.
Free us, O God.
Here are three stories. I should say, three stories about one story.
This time of year when I visit shut-ins I often read the nativity story from the Gospel of Luke. Three stories about that one story.
Story one: She is in a care center and pushing 100 she finds it is an effort to rise, to eat, to navigate her days. When I read the Christmas story she sits very still with her eyes closed. Is she napping or listening, or both? When I finish we share a moment of silence. And then she says, without opening her eyes, “It is such a familiar story, and yet it is always surprisingly new.”
Story two: After listening to the birth narrative I ask her what portion spoke to her today. She says the part about finding no lodging. And then she tells me a story. She says that once when she was reading this to children and got to the “no room in the inn” part, a little boy, all concern, raised his hand and said, “He can come over to my house. We won’t mind.”
Story three: The professional always-in-motion pauses to chat me up. And how is this time of year for you, pastor? Of course, busy. But I always remind people busy and beautiful. As long as we find deep meaning in what we do busy never is just busy. Bad busy is occupied without purpose. My friend says, “Every time this year I just throw the white glove down to God with a little challenge: ‘Look, Lord, I’ve heard this over and over. I’ve got it by memory. I dare you to surprise me with something I’ve missed.’ Darned if that doesn’t always happen.”
So familiar, yet so new. He can come over to my house. Go ahead, God, surprise me.
vitalwholeness 