Tag: Frederick Buechner

Beware of Mustard Seeds

Background: this is the text of the sermon I gave on July 29 and 30 in response to the reading in Matthew’s Gospel of the parable of the mustard seed and other parables that are grouped together and more so in response to Fr. Bill Ortt, the rector/priest at Christ Church Easton for the last 24 years announcing that he will be retiring later this year. He then left for an already-scheduled vacation.

“Beware of Mustard Seeds”

Looking at a mustard seed, there is nothing that tells you or hints at the growth it is capable of. The tiniest of seeds, it can grow to a height of eight to ten feet. But you wouldn’t know it at first sight.

I came to Christ Church in August 2016, looking for a church home. I walked in to the 9:15am contemporary service, sat about halfway up the pews (on the left side when entering the church) on the window side. The greeters that day were Matt and Kelsey Spiker, who I’d never met. I came here because I was going through a kind of spiritual awakening, I had been attending Real Life Chapel across town for a year, had started studying and writing about the Bible—I was getting stirred up and I wasn’t sure what to do with it all. I knew A.K. and Susie Leight were members here, and I had always thought highly of them, so I gave it a try.

I could tell from that first service that I had found my home. Then I went over to Rise Up Coffee afterwards and got in line right behind Kelsey and Matt and got talking to them.

I think I can speak for the Spikers when I say that none of us came to Christ Church thinking this was going to be somewhere we were going to work or that both Kelsey and I would discern calls to the priesthood.

Those things came from a combination of Fr. Bill Ortt and the Holy Spirit, both waking up something we had that was latent inside us. Something probably about the size of a mustard seed.

Beware of mustard seeds.

Neither of us felt a call to work at “a” church or for “the” church, we felt called to work for THIS church, and at the chance to work for Fr. Bill. We weren’t the first or the last to feel that. Carol Callaghan became a deacon while working here; Barbara Coleman was ordained a deacon here in 2020 after being a part of our congregation; Susie Leight discerned her call to the priesthood during her 20 years here; along with Kelsey and I—Joanne Fisher and Jessica Stehle are fellow postulants and seminarians working toward the priesthood who have come through Christ Church and Fr. Bill; and Kimberly Cox leaves for Virginia Theological Seminary four days after she gets back from the Peru Mission Trip.


That’s more than a notion. That’s the Holy Spirit coming through this place in waves, and Fr. Bill has been casually handing out surfboards, with a smile.

And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the music ministries or the lay ministries that have sprung up and the people along the way who have blossomed in their callings and become instrumental to the life and community of this church and the broader community. We could be here for a couple hours if we started listing names.

Beware of mustard seeds.

This is not a church for the casual observer. If you open yourself to it, you are likely to get caught up in a call. And for 24 years, Fr. Bill has helped create those opportunities and encouraged people on their paths.

There is a common thread to the parables in today’s reading:

  • The mustard seed that someone took and sowed in a field
  • The yeast that a woman took and mixed in
  • A treasure hidden in a field that someone found and hid and sold everything he owned and went and bought the field
  • A merchant finds a pearl of great value, sold everything he had and bought it
  • A net that was thrown into the sea, drawn ashore full of fish and sorted.

Every one of these things involves taking action. It asks the person in the story to do something. God doesn’t just do it for us, He wants us to be active participants in His work. In another well-known Gospel story, when it comes to feeding the 5,000, Jesus doesn’t do it all by himself, he uses the disciples to help.

If you’ve been around Fr. Bill, you know he likes things to be done to a certain high standard. He jokes around that that standard is mediocrity. We all know better. The thing about it though, if you look at the different ministries that have grown during his time here—Stephen Ministry, Food Ministry, Outreach ministries, Youth Ministry, Adult Education, Contemporary Music, the list goes on—none of them have his fingerprints heavily on them. In those ministries you will find the hands, and the sweat, and the tears, and the joy of those who have done the work, with his encouragement.

You’ll hear him say that life, and faith, are about the questions we ask—and that we should try to ask the right questions. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a meeting with Fr. Bill, thinking I have a good idea, and he’ll ask a few questions, that will send me back to the drawing board, to either scrap something, or to help it go from being a good idea, to a great idea.

His questions can serve as both sunshine and rain to seeds looking to grow.

Beware of mustard seeds.

I think about the phrase, “going to church.” Do you go to church?—someone may ask us or we might ask someone else. That sounds very nice. Something you do for an hour a week and it sounds like a fine thing to tell other people. “Yes, I go to church.”

One of the reasons I was drawn further and further into Christ Church is that there are so many opportunities to do so much more than “going to church.” Anyone who wants to can jump in with two feet—Bible studies, small groups, bands, choirs, youth ministry, hospitality. All it takes is the willingness to try. But like in our parables today, it may change everything.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer distinguishes between cheap grace and costly grace. He says:

“Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price for which the merchant will sell all his goods… it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.”

“Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a person must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a [person] their life, and it is grace because it gives a [person] the only true life.”

For 24 years, Fr. Bill has talked about and tried to model costly grace for Christ Church. The kind of grace that changes lives. That can change our lives. What a gift that is.

Last week when he told the staff he was retiring, after the stun-gun effect wore off, we all asked how we could walk beside him through these next few months, how we could support him. I think as a congregation, we have an opportunity to make these next few months an incredibly special time in the life of the congregation, and in the life of the Ortt family.


This is part of the gift that Fr. Bill has given us, and it is in character and in keeping with how he has always done things. We are entering into a process that this church hasn’t gone through in a quarter century. The majority of the congregation who are here now have only known Fr. Bill as the rector.

The process of sending him off with our gratitude, of finding an interim clergyperson or people to come in for the next year, of putting together a search committee, and finding the next rector of St. Peter’s Parish is something that can bring us together and connect us in ways we can’t even imagine yet.

We’ve had a number of small groups read Fr. Gregory Boyle’s book, “Tattoos on the Heart.” It’s an incredible story about a Jesuit priest’s calling to help love and rehabilitate Los Angeles gang members and it has changed the world there. And it has grown into a community that will continue after Fr. Greg is gone.

That’s a bit of the gift Fr. Bill is giving us. Now it’s our turn. Now it’s our time.

We are a community who puts our trust in God. I am going to drop a couple of Frederick Buechner quotes on you here. Buechner wrote:

“Wherever people love each other and are true to each other and take risks for each other, God is with them and they are doing God’s will.”

I believe that describes who we are as a community and how God has been and continues to be with us.

We are entering into a time of prayer and of gratitude, which really is an amazing way to spend all our time. In this case, it is gratitude for the gifts, the time, the friendship, and the leadership that we’ve been given. And for what is to come. And the hope is that prayer and gratitude will lead us into discernment for the way forward.

Today, and every day is unique. This time we find ourselves in, “for the time that we have,”—as Fr. Bill likes to quote Tolkien’s Gandalf—is a time we can bring special attention to relationships; to who and what we are grateful for; and who and how we want to be both individually and collectively.

As we walk forward together, I’ll let Buechner touch on how special this is:

“In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.”

Today is precious. This time–these next few months are precious. And we get to live it and be grateful for it, together.

Believe

Lead in: I am in my second year of seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are going to school. April 15-16, with a last minute switch, was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.

The Gospel reading for April 16 was John 20:19-31, which most people know for “Doubting Thomas,” the disciple who won’t believe that Jesus has been resurrected until he touches Jesus’s wounds for himself. We are all a bit like Thomas. The reading is where Jesus appears to the disciples for the first time after his death.

“Do Not Doubt, But Believe”

I’m a big fan of John’s Gospel. On the one hand, he’s a bit like the Rodney Dangerfield of the gospels—not enough respect to get his own lectionary year like the synoptic Gospels; on the other hand, every lectionary year is made better because we have John peppered throughout them.

For John, “believing” is a big deal. He uses the word “believe” 98 times in his Gospel, always as a verb, as something active and dynamic. He tells us at the end of today’s reading that these stories are written that we might believe that Jesus is the Messiah and through believing have life in his name.

Today’s reading is John’s version of Jesus giving the Holy Spirit to the disciples. Remember, John didn’t write Acts, that was Luke, so we don’t get the Pentecost telling of the story here.

There are scholars who say that John’s Gospel is the one most likely to have originated with an eyewitness account. We read the author describing himself as being there at the crucifixion and later, on the beach with Peter and the others. There are details in John that we don’t find in the others.

Let’s look at two stories of the giving of the Holy Spirit. At the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, he says that after investigating everything he wants to write an orderly account of all that went on, talking to everyone he can. Each Gospel sets out its witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, and I love Luke (he gives us the prodigal son, the Road to Emmaus, etc). But when I think humorously about the way stories get passed down over time, there is some part of me that thinks about Luke asking everyone for their recollection of Pentecost:

“And there was FIRE! Fire? Yeah, FIRE! It was intense! And then people were speaking in tongues, remember that? And people thought we were drunk, and Peter was like, noooo waaaayy, it’s only 9:00 in the morning…”

In Luke’s telling of the story in Acts, it is a public event, a spectacle.

In contrast, listen to John’s account:

“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’”

Maybe it’s because I tend prefer being understated, but I love the simple, straightforward, intimate and understated way John gives us the Holy Spirit. No crowds, no fire, no speaking in tongues. Jesus breathed on them and gave them a new Spirit. A new life in Him. A life that has overcome death.

Does that sound familiar? This is from Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 7:

“then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

I love that John sees what Jesus is doing and connects it back to the beginning (remember he starts his whole Gospel account with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”) John wants to make sure we don’t miss what’s happening. This is new life, that comes through Jesus, which is giving us a direct connection to God.

I get excited about the Holy Spirit.

But let’s backtrack to where the disciples are in the reading and what’s going on.

Jesus has been arrested, crucified, and was buried in a tomb. The disciples scattered, afraid for their lives. Just before today’s reading, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away, she ran and got Peter and the one whom Jesus loved (who we think of as John, the author) and they went in and found the tomb empty. And then the men left and went home. All Peter and John saw was the empty tomb.

Mary Magdalene stuck around, talked to angels, then encountered Jesus, who told her to go and tell the disciples, which she did. But none of them have seen Jesus for themselves yet. They might dismiss her story as being unbelievable story, saying she was overly excited at finding the tomb empty—she could have been hallucinating.

Now, they were hiding out together in a locked room, hoping not to be found or found out. As writer and pastor Frederick Buechner describes it:

“They had bolted the door and were listening for the dreaded sound of footsteps on the stair when suddenly Jesus was among them. He stood in their midst—always in their midst, this man, turning up when they least expected him—and told them to breathe his breath, his holy breath and spirit, so that they could go out into the world again and perform his holy work.”

6th century mosaic in the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna

Knowing that they are going to be scared out of their wits, Jesus’s first words to them are “Peace be with you.”

He reassures them. He shows them his hands and his side, so that they know it’s him and that this is real. And the disciples rejoiced. Of course they did. If there are scenes out of Scripture that you would want to be there for—this has to be one of them! This is massive. It’s transformative. It’s life changing. It’s death conquering.

Jesus gives the disciples what they need to believe. And then he gives them his Spirit and gives them work to do.

But Thomas isn’t there. The other disciples tell him what happened, but he isn’t having it. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hand and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

On the one hand, we can say, sure, everyone talks a big game when Jesus isn’t standing there, just you wait… But I think this is true to life. How many of us, when hearing friends tell us an unbelievable story, decide, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Even if it comes from people we trust, we still want proof. Thomas wants the same experience the others had.

So what does Jesus do? He comes back. He shows up again, just for Thomas. He gives Thomas what he needs to believe. Jesus doesn’t scold him, he is there for him and tells Thomas, “Do not doubt, but believe.”

Notice, Thomas doesn’t get kicked out of the club for doubting. That is one of the wonderful aspects of this reading—there is room in our faith for doubt. It is okay to want to see for ourselves. It’s okay not to believe just because everyone else tells you to. Jesus works with Thomas.

And Thomas believes; seeing is believing as they say. Jesus then delivers the showstopper of lines, a line so important to faith: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

That’s us. I don’t know about you—I haven’t encountered the bodily resurrected Jesus in the flesh. But I have come to believe. How?

Think of the work Jesus is asking the disciples to take on. To help people believe, when they haven’t seen him for themselves.

Here is Frederick Buechner again:

“The risen Christ is risen in his glory, but he is also Christ risen in the hearts of those, who although they have never touched the mark of the nails, have been themselves so touched by him, that they believe anyway. However faded and threadbare, what they have seen of him is at least enough to get their bearings by.”

Believe. What does that mean here? Is that an intellectual affirmation? Is it convincing ourselves and never doubting? Is this just a box we have to check off? I don’t think so.

For the disciples, their belief was foundational to the mission Jesus gave them. If they didn’t believe, what kind of witnesses would they be? If they don’t believe, why would anyone they meet want to believe?

Jesus’s life and love and good news are dependent on the disciples to continue to spread it out into the world. He was inviting them into an intimate, dynamic relationship with him.

And the same thing is true of us now. If people are going to come to believe in Jesus, it probably won’t be because they have had a bodily encounter with the resurrected Christ; it will be through the Holy Spirit, which is carried and passed on by the NEW body of Christ, the church, US.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his book, “Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief,” talks about a young Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum. She was in her 20s when the Germans occupied Holland. She watched her world turn into an utter nightmare. She was sent to a concentration camp at Westerbork before being shipped to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

She wrote in her diary: “There must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times. And why should I not be that witness?”

Williams describes her attitude and commitment like this:

“She decided to occupy a certain place in the world, a place where others could somehow connect with God through her. She took responsibility for making God credible in the world. She took responsibility for God’s believability.”

What if THAT is what believing in God, believing in Jesus, means. That with and through our lives, we take responsibility for God’s believability. How many of us would say that we believe if that were the standard?

That’s what Jesus is asking of his disciples. But he doesn’t leave them on their own to do it, he doesn’t abandon them. He shows up. He brings them peace. He breathes his Holy Spirit into them.

The fact that we are gathered here in a church worshipping and loving Jesus, trying to understand his life and example, and bearing witness to the good news of his Resurrection says that the early disciples, with God’s help and the Holy Spirit, were up for the task.

I wonder: are we?

Let me give a brief witness. Over the past month, my daughter Ava has been in and out of A.I. DuPont Hospital, three times, first for surgery, then with multiple ambulance rides for seizures she couldn’t come out of. She’s home now and we’re hopeful she’ll be back in school this week and going to her senior prom next weekend. But epilepsy is challenging at times, and it’s been a rough, slow, frustrating go of things.

Not once going through it, have we, or I felt alone. Through so many text messages, phone calls, people checking in before or after classes, the school systems offering help, prayers, hugs, you name it–I have felt the Holy Spirit and God’s love at work through friends, through this congregation, through family, sometimes through strangers–volunteers at the Ronald McDonald House or, nurses, doctors, and people working at the Einstein Brother’s Bagels at the hospital, who can tell you are beyond tired this morning.

My experience is not unique. One of the things that touches my heart the most is to hear how people have shown up, how people have been there, how people have been LOVE in the lives of others. The way we love one another, even as Jesus loves us, can help make God believable for others.

We can see the Holy Spirit being God’s love in the world. We can be the Holy Spirit being God’s love in the world.

In the dark and confusing times that we are in the middle of in the world right now, can our belief, can our lives, can our love, be a witness for God’s believability in the world?

Yes, we can be that witness. Yes, God’s love, moving through us, through our belief, and our lives, can be credible in the world. That’s how the Holy Spirit works. No fire required.

Amen.

Our Iona Eastern Shore seminary class with professor, Fr. Dan Dunlap and guest presenter, Dr. Tom Long, one of the United States foremost preachers. That is how we started Saturday.

What we do with our lives

Let’s begin with intention. This is a blessing/prayer shared by Rev. Susie Leight:

Been praying this on repeat for the last few weeks…trying to utter it before my feet hit the floor (if I’m awake enough) …thought it would be a good one to share again…

May I…may you…may we…❤️

May I live this day
Compassionate of heart,
Clear in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.

–from Matins, by John O’Donohue

What we do with our time, how we spend our days, months, years, lives is who we are to those we encounter. Our inward lives of thoughts, dreams, desires, may be infinite, but our worldly lives are the result of our time and actions.

Part Four of John O’Donohue’s book “Anam Cara,” looks at “Work as a Poetics of Growth.” The work that we do in the world helps shape us, helps us grow.

Thinking about this chapter, two quotes that come up a lot for me came to mind. The first is by writer Annie Dillard, who said:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

And the second is by poet Mary Oliver, who wrote:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one precious life?”

How we use our time matters. It is so easy to let one day run into the next without thinking about it, but when these days string together, they can become large stretches of our lives if we don’t pay attention.

O’Donohue writes:

“Everything alive is in movement. This movement we call growth. The most exciting form of growth is not mere physical growth but the inner growth of one’s soul and life. It is here that the holy longing within the heart brings one’s life into motion. The deepest wish of the heart is that this motion does not remain broken or jagged but develops sufficient fluency to become the rhythm of one’s life.”

In the preceding chapters, he has taken us through our senses, our interior lives, our solitude, and now he is pointing out that these interior lives, our thoughts, dreams, and gifts, want to be brought into motion in our outward lives. It’s not enough to have them swirling around within us, we have to find a way to give them expression.

This is our work.

But in our society, there is a bit of a rub. Let’s think about what happens when we meet someone. We say ‘Hello, how are you?’, we make some small talk, and often the next question is ‘What do you do?’ Generally speaking we mean, what do you do for a living, what is your job?

If you feel like your job is a good reflection of your life, or points in the direction of who you are, then that is great. But if you don’t, how much better do we know someone, or do they know us by knowing what job we do?

Maybe you work construction, but your passion is being on the water fishing. Maybe you work an office job, but the thing you most look forward to is tutoring or coaching kids. Maybe you are a server, but you get home and paint or write or garden or have some way to express your creativity.

Our work is bigger than our day or night jobs. O’Donohue writes about a gravestone in London:

“Here lies Jeremy Brown born a man and died a grocer.” Often people’s identities, that wild inner complexity of soul and color of spirit, become shrunken to their work identities.”

This takes nothing away from our work identities, which can be life affirming. If people think of your kindness, your smile, your creativity and talent and know you as a teacher, a landscaper, a bartender, a boat builder, a painter, then that is a wonderful thing. But we are more than our professions–we are also sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, friends, partners, etc.

Part of the problem, O’Donohue poses, is that we get stuck looking at life, jobs, the world around us in one particular way and that can become limiting. He suggests that we visualize the mind as a tower of windows that we are looking out.

“Sadly, many people remain trapped at the one window, looking out every day at the same scene in the same way. Real growth is experienced when you draw back from that one window, turn, and walk around the inner tower of the soul and see all the different windows that greet your gaze. Through these different windows, you see new vistas of possibility, presence, and creativity.”

In the last chapter we discussed that how we look at things determines what we see, what we find. In that same way, looking at things, including our work and our lives, in different ways can be so important.

Each day brings us new opportunities.

I recently got to be the grunt labor, branch-hauler for a tree expert friend who helped me cut up a downed branch that reached over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Listening to him talk about his love for trees and hearing his knowledge, then watching him work chainsaws and pole-saws like an artist, I knew I was watching someone do the thing they were created to do. It was a joyful and awe-inspiring experience. I’ve felt the same thing when I was a line cook watching an incredible chef do what they do. I’ve seen it in gardeners, teachers, preachers, and watermen. I’ve experienced it being around parents and grandparents, around birdwatchers, and skateboarders. I’ve seen it in a friend listening intently to someone sharing something that was big for them.

When we witness or experience those moments of calling, meaning, and connection, time moves differently.

Do we make time to do the things we love? Do we find ways to express our inner-longings in our daily lives? If we don’t, what will our lives become?

“In order to feel real. we need to bring that inner invisible world to expression.”

We want to seen, known, valued for who we are. In order for people to know us in that way, we have to find a way to express who we are in our lives. If we aren’t doing that, people can’t know us and we can feel frustrated that we aren’t finding a way to express ourselves. It can’t stay inside us. O’Donohue points out that if we want to change our lives, until it enters the practices of our days, it is all talk.

Work is maybe a misleading word here. O’Donohue also talks about the danger of productivity becoming God, which reduces each individual to a function. He talks about needing to think less about competition and more about working together. And he talks about the danger of reducing time to an achievement, when time should also be for wonder and creativity.

On Monday (August 15), the same day our class met, Frederick Buechner died at 96 years old. Buechner has been one of the most influential writers, thinkers, and theologians in my own spiritual growth. And he has written a lot about vocation. Vocation might be a more complete word to use here instead of work. Buechner has called vocation, “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

That says so much, but Buechner explained a bit more. He points out that vocation as a word comes from:

“Vocare, to call, of course, and a person’s vocation is a person’s calling. It is the work that they are called to in this world, the thing they are summoned to spend their life doing. We can speak of a person choosing their vocation, but perhaps it is at least as accurate to speak of a vocation’s choosing a person, of a call’s being given and a person hearing it, or not hearing it. And maybe that is the place to start: the business of listening and hearing. A person’s life is full of all sorts of voices calling them in all sorts of directions. Some of them are voices from inside and some of them are voices from outside. The more alive and alert we are, the more clamorous our lives are. Which do we listen to? What kind of voice do we listen for?

Vocation. Listening and hearing. Where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.

Our friend and brother Bruce Richards recently died. He spent his professional career as a pilot–in the Air Force during Vietnam, then as a commercial pilot. He was retired when he moved to Easton; he came to Christ Church Easton to buy a crab cake during the Waterfowl Festival and for the next 18 years helped create a new caregiving ministry, took Communion to nursing homes, and was an inspiration and loving friend to everyone he encountered. He was living out a vocation.

Bruce worked closely with Carol Callaghan, who was a mentor to him and to so many people. Carol was a school teacher who found and felt a calling to ordination later in her life and became the first woman ordained as a Deacon at Christ Church Easton. Carol paved the way for Rev. Barbara Coleman, Rev. Susie Leight, and those of us who are now discerning and following a path that may lead to that same place.

Like Bruce and Carol, may we all find a calling, a vocation that speaks to our inner longing; that connects us to God; and that inspires and encourages others to live lives of love, creativity, and service.

Let’s close with O’Donohue’s blessing at the end of the chapter:

May the light of your soul guide you.
May the light of your soul bless the work you do with the secret love and warmth of your heart.
May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.
May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work.
May your work never weary you.
May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration, and excitement.
May you be present in what you do.
May you never become lost in the bland absences.
May the day never burden.
May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises.
May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.
May you go into the night blessed, sheltered, and protected.
May your soul calm, console, and renew you.

Amen.

Spring and hope are tight

Spring and hope are tight. I think they go hiking together, kayaking, catch sunrises and sunsets, listen to the birds, share dreams at happy hour. And they reunite this time of year.

If you have any doubt about that, take a walk and look for the first flowers coming through. Look at color coming into the world after a dark winter. Throw on a short-sleeve t-shirt and sit outside in the sun on the first days that break 60 degrees. There is a shift going on. Even if we dive back into a cold snap, the hope is there. It reminds us. And if we make a point to look for it, to notice it, to share it with others, it might even pull us along to show us more of what it has coming up.

I think God is a fan of spring days as well. They are a chance for us to notice purple–hello to Alice Walker–they are a chance to reach us where we are, in the details of our lives and whatever we have going on. We have a Lent small group going right now, reading Frederick Buechner’s “The Magnificent Defeat.” In an essay called “Message in the Stars,” Buechner writes:

“…there is a God right here in the thick of our day-t0-day lives… trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of his presence…

“His message is not written out in starlight… rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day…

“Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or in the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery.”

In the winter of the year, or in the winter of our souls, it can be tough to remember to look. Spring gives us a taste of warmth, first glimpses of color, a ray of hope.

If I want to see it, I have to look. I have to open my eyes. I have to look at my life and the world around me.

I like that Buechner uses muck, misery, and marvel together. We each get all those things wrapped up and included in this thing called life. Sometimes the marvel comes out of the other two. It’s not always in the places or the times when we expect it.

But that’s the thing about hope–it’s not something we know for sure, it’s something ahead; something we look forward to. And maybe we think, well, sure, sounds nice, but there is no guarantee. And that’s why spring and hope are tight. We don’t have to live for long to know that spring is coming. It’s going to happen. It’s on the way. We’ve lived through winters, we recognize spring, we know what it looks and feels like. We look for the signs.

And so we have color. And so we have warmth. And so we have spring. And so we have hope.

Making Space for Hope

“In the beginning…” seems like a solid place to start. It’s how both Genesis and the Gospel According to John get going. Genesis opens with “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and John with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

That’s not an accident or coincidence–John knew Genesis and sends the reader back to it in our minds, at the same time revealing something new to us.

A number of churches use a common lectionary, a common set of readings, so that the readings are prescribed and the same for a given day, and they change each year, rotating through a three-year cycle. This year, on Christmas Eve, we read/heard the birth story from Luke, the one that Linus used when explaining the meaning of Christmas to Charlie Brown. And on Sunday, Dec. 28, the first Sunday following Christmas, we read/heard the “In the beginning” prologue of John’s Gospel. If you are curious, here are the readings laid out for the Christmas season.

A number of years ago, I sat down to read the New Testament on my own, to see what the fuss was about. It was all fascinating (it must have done something, I work for a church now) but it was the beginning of John’s Gospel that gave me goose bumps–it sent me somewhere in the way that poetry and Scripture is designed to do. And as timing would have it, at Christ Church Easton, we currently have three classes in the middle of a chapter-by-chapter study of John’s Gospel. As we listened to yesterday’s reading, I found myself wishing everybody there had the perspective of a slow read and discussion of the Gospels, making them relevant, making them personal, giving you more to reflect on, and opening you up.

Scripture is one thing, inspired words meant to point us to something bigger–to God, to community, to each other. What we do with Scripture, how we relate it and relate to it is equally as important. In his sermons and discussions, Fr. Bill Ortt has been pointing us toward hope.

Earlier this month, Fr. Bill talked about how it getting dark so early in the evenings affects him, throws him into a funk, and that a slight, almost imperceptible turning point, the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year,is a game-changer for him. That after that day, he knew that each day after it was light out for just a little bit longer. The change is “imperceptible, but real,” he said.

“Learning to find the signs of hope is my spiritual discipline during this season. As long as there is any light in the world, there is hope.”

Fr. Bill Ortt

The Christmas season is a thin place, a place where the Holy Spirit is close and also a place where memories, heartache, pain, family, stress–you name it, are all right there. For me, it’s a time where my emotions and my psyche are on a roller coaster–from high highs to low lows and back again.

Yesterday, Fr. Bill walked us through connections from Genesis to John. He walked us through the creation narrative:

“…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light;” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness…” (Genesis 1:2-4)

The biblical Hebrew word for chaos, the formless void is “Tohu wa-bohu,” which is a word that has stuck with me since first hearing it a few years ago. So when dealing with this chaos, this formless void, this tohu wa-bohu, the first thing God does is shine light on it. The second thing He does is create space, separates light from darkness, day from night. This is key.

And it’s something we can do as well, when faced with chaos–we can shine a light on it, and create space around it. Fr. Bill points out that “chaos is the condition for new creation.” Shine a light, make space, create/start something new. God can help us use the chaos in our lives to begin something new.

“Allowing for this new creation that He will make in our hearts and our lives. It’s the same truth, the same love, the same hope for us today in our lives as it was then. It’s something we can see, feel, and know; that we might become what God intends us to be: just children on earth.”

Fr. Bill

This isn’t always easy. I saw friends on Christmas Eve who are going through their first holidays without a family member who was a huge light in their lives, and in the life of our community. Yesterday a friend was found dead in his car, who leaves behind a young son. There is pain and heartbreak everywhere we look. And sometimes it’s too much.

And at the same time, there are weddings, births, people in communities reaching out to help others. There are days getting longer. There are chances. There is light. There is hope. This morning, as I sat down to write about hope, there was an e-mail in my inbox with the subject, “The Wild Hope,” from the Frederick Buechner Center. As often happens with me, Buechner’s words give voice to my mind and my heart. So we will finish with him:

“TO LOOK AT THE last great self-portraits of Rembrandt or to read Pascal or hear Bach’s B-minor Mass is to know beyond the need for further evidence that if God is anywhere, he is with them, as he is also with the man behind the meat counter, the woman who scrubs floors at Roosevelt Memorial, the high-school math teacher who explains fractions to the bewildered child. And the step from “God with them” to Emmanuel, “God with us,” may not be as great as it seems. What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us and our own snowbound, snowblind longing for him.” – From “A Room Called Remember.”

Signs, Spirit, Connections

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Who wouldn’t want more of each of those in their lives? Those are the fruits of the Spirit as Paul describes them in his letter to the Galatians.

April 13-15, Christ Church Easton went to Camp Arrowhead in Lewes, Delaware, for an Alpha Weekend retreat. More than 40 people headed for the woods, the beach, cabins, bonfires, camaraderie, laughter, and discussions in small groups about our own journeys, struggles, questions, and where we are.

This is our third Alpha Retreat in the past year, running the Alpha Course in the spring and the fall, and I have been blown away each time with amazing and honest people and generous spirits. And the deep laughter that comes with spending a weekend with people in cool places, talking about stuff that matters.

When you ask questions like “How does God guide us?” and “How can I make the most out of the rest of my life?” and people get real with their stories and experiences, profound and unexpected things can happen.

It’s often the unscripted time that makes the weekend. Try showing up at a camp with cabins on the water on Friday the 13th and get ready for the Jason stories. Give people a beach, bonfire, marshmallows, hot dogs, and guitars, and you have an instant party. Break bread together on the beach and in the dining hall, gathered to talk and learn about faith, and in my experience, the Holy Spirit is present in those moments, with these people.

Some people think of worship as what happens at a church service. And it is. But worship is also much more than that. The entire weekend was a celebration, worship. Worship can connect us to God, to people, and to nature, creation. And Camp Arrowhead is a setting to allow all those things to happen. On Sunday morning, before breakfast, I wandered the camp, finding Egrets, Great Blue Herons, Cardinals, Blue Jays. I sat down to read and think about Galatians again after Saturday and read in Gary Snyder’s “Turtle Island,” which is a book I almost always carry.

the path is whatever passes–no
end in itself.

the end is,
grace–ease–

healing,
not saving.

singing
the proof

the proof of the power within.

Joining Snyder’s words, the path, the weekend was grace, ease, healing, singing–the proof of the power within.

After breakfast, and our last small group gathering for the weekend, we gather for a worship service proper, a celebration and culmination of the our time together. Jerrett Hansen, our interim pastor who joined us for the weekend points out, “When the church is in its proper place, we don’t have to go through this thing called life alone.”

He talks about the power of simple signs that we can see throughout our lives if we aren’t too busy looking for the big signs.

“We have been given the great gift in our community to be signs to each other.”

This morning (Monday), I woke up thinking about the Saturday night bonfire on the beach; of everyone coming up with the best way to roast marshmallows or hot dogs; the laughter and conversations. And I got this in a daily e-mail of Frederick Buechner’s  writing:

“In the pages of Scripture, fire is holiness, and perhaps never more hauntingly than in the little charcoal fire that Jesus of Nazareth, newly risen from the dead, kindles for cooking his friends’ breakfast on the beach at daybreak.”

And that’s maybe what a weekend like this is about, what a faith community, a church, is all about. During the Easter season, post-Resurrection: being signs to each other; helping one another along the way; staying connected to God, to the Holy Spirit, to each other, through Jesus Christ.

On Being Born

The last five years have been off the map. If you’d sat down with me on this day in 2013 and told me what the view in 2018 would look like, I’d have backed away slowly. And yet, they are some of the most important and beautiful years in shaping who I am, for better or worse.

One thing I remember clearly, when summer came and the Coast Guard contract we were working on ended, I was out of a job and searching for a direction. And I remember reading Frederick Buechner and having this overwhelming feeling that I should go to seminary; that there was something about a journey of faith that was key. I look back at Buechner’s words that I found again recently:

“Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks… It’s in language that’s not always easy to decipher, but it’s there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.”

I talked to a long-time friend and mentor who is an Episcopal priest and looked into things and sat and prayed on it, and then let it go when another Washington, DC, job working for the Coast Guard presented itself. I simply couldn’t imagine what life would look like or what would have to happen to end up working for a church.

There is no way I can do justice to the events that have taken place or the unexpected cast of characters who have been a part of what has happened since. There have been so many unexpected and undeserved blessings, even while there has been confusion, frustration, and letting go. Looking with hindsight doesn’t show the heartbreak, missteps and mistakes, letting people down, the questions, or being lost in the woods for stretches. We each have to own our scars and those we cause others. And we each have to get up each day and ask and answer, “Now what?”

In his book, “The Heart of Christianity,” Marcus Borg talks about being what resurrection means in our lives:

“…the process of personal transformation at the center of the Christian life: to be born again involves death and resurrection. It means dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being, dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity–a way of being and an identity centered in the sacred, in spirit, in Christ, in God.”

There is so much there. So much to live into, live up to, and I don’t always to the best job of it. But trying to focus and center and find each day, something of a new life, centered in God and the sacred. That feels like what I have been trying to get to since I was a teenager and started uncovering pieces of life and the world that I love.

There is something new and at the same time, there are the parts and passions and wonders and curiosities that abide and make us who we are, each of us a piece of a larger puzzle. And how we see things and how we see ourselves, they are and we are. I have been reading John O’Donohue’s “Anam Cara,” which goes on my very short list of books I’d take with me anywhere.

“There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find… Each of us needs to learn the unique language of our own soul. In that distinctive language, we will discover a lens of thought to brighten and illuminate our inner world.”

“Anam Cara” shows how creatively and actively our inner world, our bodies, and the landscapes around us are all sacred and interconnected.

Each of the last five or six years, I have picked myself up a pair of shoes and a book for my birthday. Sometimes they have been trail running shoes, sometimes running shoes, Sanuks, or Vans. The books are more varied and tangential than I could even account for. The purpose is to invite in new adventures for the year: physical adventures on foot as well as intellectual adventures. Both make for adventures of the soul. This year it is trail shoes and Huston Smith’s autobiography, “Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine.”

Who knows what adventures year number 46 holds? I’ve learned I don’t know much. But I’m trying to get better as I go on about listening to my life and to hearing God speak. I am trying to use life up to this point, scars and all, to invite transformation and embrace new life ahead, centered in the sacred, centered in Christ, centered in God.

And I find life is generally better when I remember to get outside, with the dog 🙂

 

 

 

Buechner on Eternity

I spent late Sunday on a bike and under a tree. The morning and afternoon had been music, prayer and fellowship of worship services, then blessing of pets (several dogs, a hedgehog, two guinea pigs, and a horse) at Christ Church Easton.

On a beautiful fall evening, I hopped on my bike and eased around Boone Creek and then found a tree on the shoreline of the Oxford Cemetery. I stretched my legs out and listened to geese in the cove, the breeze through the trees, conversations of boaters in Town Creek, and watched the sun dance on the water. I read David Bailey, Richard Rohr, and N.T. Wright. Mostly I sat, watched, listened, imbibed.

I was completely full. I didn’t try to give it words, just breath and feeling.

Yesterday I came across this passage from Frederick Buechner’s “Wishful Thinking,” and I realized Buechner had the words I was looking for:

ETERNITY IS NOT endless time or the opposite of time. It is the essence of time. 

If you spin a pinwheel fast enough, then all its colors blend into a single color—white—which is the essence of all the colors of the spectrum combined. 

If you spin time fast enough, then time-past, time-present, and time-to-come all blend into a single timelessness or eternity, which is the essence of all times combined. 

As human beings we know time as a passing of unrepeatable events in the course of which everything passes away including ourselves. As human beings, we also know occasions when we stand outside the passing of events and glimpse their meaning. Sometimes an event occurs in our lives (a birth, a death, a marriage—some event of unusual beauty, pain, joy) through which we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about and maybe even what life itself is all about, and this glimpse of what “it’s all about” involves not just the present but the past and future too. 

Inhabitants of time that we are, we stand on such occasions with one foot in eternity. God, as Isaiah says (57:15) “inhabiteth eternity” but stands with one foot in time. The part of time where he stands most particularly is Christ, and thus in Christ we catch a glimpse of what eternity is all about, what God is all about, and what we ourselves are all about too. 

Mountaintop Experiences

Sometimes hospitals can be mountaintops. Mountaintop experiences are those moments or experiences in our lives that rearrange things, change our hearts, bring us closer to God.

Two years ago today, while visiting her mom’s family in Pennsylvania, Ava had a seizure that led her to be flown by helicopter to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was sitting in my sun room at home at 9pm, and got a phone call, and was on the road within a few minutes.

She spent 10 days in pediatric intensive care and all told about a month in the hospital between neurology and the rehab unit. After EKGs and MRIs and who knows what other acronyms, the likely diagnosis was that Epstein-Barr Virus had gotten into her spine, and caused her brain to swell and provoked that and subsequent and ongoing seizures. The doctors, nurses, and technicians at Children’s were rock stars, stayed the course and sent Ava home to conquer 5th grade. Since then, she has been on medication to manage her seizures and we have learned a bit about the world of provoked epilepsy. Ava’s has been a good story, with her making honor roll at school, playing sports, and living a mostly normal life, albeit mornings and evenings feeling like a pharmacy.

Mountaintops are what you make of them. The main thing I remember is the amazing support, prayers, good vibes and good deeds from so many people. It redefined what community meant to me. What Ava went through, and her attitude, and watching her come back to herself gave me a sense of gratitude I wouldn’t have come to any other way. It showed me first-hand, the way a community of people praying can change the heart(s) of the people being prayed for. I have been in a constant and growing conversation with God since (not that I always listen the first time or catch what He’s saying).

Yesterday’s Gospel reading and sermon at Christ Church Easton were about a mountaintop experience–Luke’s story of Peter, John, and James witnessing Jesus’s transfiguration, “And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.”(Luke 9:29). You can’t get much more mountaintop than that. I like how Frederick Buechner brings transfiguration back to everyday life:

“Even with us something like that happens once in a while. The face of a man walking his child in the park, of a woman picking peas in the garden, of sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, say, or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just having a beer at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it’s almost beyond bearing.”

When I think back to two years ago in the hospital and getting home, I have seen that look on a face. It was there in Anna caring for her sister; it was there in Ava getting home, excited to see her friends and start the school year. And because of that mountaintop experience, when I remember to look with the eyes of my heart, I see it now.

 

Scripture, Small Groups & Ephesians

This week at Christ Church Easton, we kick off a small group study of The Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians. The build up, the study, the reflection, and prayer has led me to think about the nature of Scripture and how we read it and relate to it. And why. I doubt it’s a coincidence that one of my go-to thinkers, Richard Rohr, is spending this week talking about Scripture:

Serious reading of Scripture will allow you to find an ever-new spiritual meaning for the liberation of history and your own soul as you discover that the text holds truth on many levels… Sacred texts will always maximize your possibilities for life, love, and inclusion, which is precisely why we call them sacred.

The liberation of our own soul and maximizing possibilities for life, love, and inclusion–not a bad way to spend our time. I also love Frederick Buechner’s thoughts on reading the Bible:

If you look AT a window, you see flyspecks, dust, the crack where Junior’s Frisbee hit it. If you look THROUGH a window, you see the world beyond. Something like this is the difference between those who see the Bible as a holy bore and those who see it as the Word of God, which speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past and into the depths of ourselves. 

There is so much to be gained by a thoughtful, in depth reading and study of the Bible. But it’s not easy going it alone. It’s a communal document, passed down by multiple people, for multiple people. It’s a living document, a living Word, that can open us up to more when looked at and wrestled and reckoned with together.

At a worship service, we can hear the Word. We can listen and reflect on it. But we don’t have a chance to discuss it. That’s what small groups are for. In looking at the reason for small group study, Carolyn Taketa writes:

When we take the risk of being authentic with a small group of people, we can experience God’s grace and love coming through others, which leads to freedom and transformation

John Ortberg writes: “God uses people to form people. That is why what happens between you and another person is never merely human-to-human interaction–the Spirit longs to be powerfully at work in every encounter.” So the goal of small groups is to create the environments where Spirit-driven, life-giving experiences can flourish.

The need for these kind of life-giving experiences, that kind of interaction and helping foster that kind of community is part of what compelled me to follow a calling to lead small groups.

What better place to start than Ephesians?

Bob Deffinbaugh calls Ephesians “the Rolls Royce of the epistles.” And he cites William Hendricksen’s “Exposition of Ephesians,” which calls the letter:

“the divinest composition of man,” “the distilled essence of the Christian religion,” “the most authoritative and most consummate compendium of the Christian faith,” that is “full to the brim with thoughts and doctrines sublime and momentous.”

If someone had to write a movie trailer for Ephesians, I would sign Hendricksen up on the spot.

Life has a funny way of working itself out. Twenty years ago, I would have told you that the texts I would be wrestling with in my 40s would be Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and the heavy hitters of continental philosophy and phenomenology. Looking back, it is clear to me that that would have been an academic exercise. I have lived and watched over that time as my head and my heart have become synchronized and moved into alignment with one another. I want to put that same spirit of inquiry into not just words, but the Word, and not just for study, but for living.

And so maybe it comes back to Ephesians, which seems the perfect place to start, when it is time to “live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”

This is just the beginning.