sunday sonnet #8

The sermon today was on the ten lepers whom Jesus healed and the one of them who returned to say, “Thanks.” As I thought about the story, I was struck by how much time we who are accustomed to comfort and privilege spend trying to explain pain and suffering, as though they were things other than life. It seems to me When Bad Things Happen to Good People would not be a best seller in Darfur. Ginger quoted Nouwen today: “Wounds are openings for new vision.”

I guess we should remember Jesus healed them from afar –
they became “clean” as they walked along the way.
After years of being told that they weren’t worth one thin dinar,
perhaps they felt there was nothing left to say.

But one came back to Jesus and sort of shattered the illusion
that the down and out somehow deserve their lot,
and shot down, of course, our own sort of logical conclusion
that the privileged deserve all that we’ve got.

We talk about the nine as if we’d have been the one
aware enough to relish a return;
that’s you and me however, sinking with the setting sun –
that grace is gift is hard for us to learn.

The greatest miracle of attitude
is being healed of our ingratitude.

Peace,
Milton

close enough

I just got home from a great weekend in Jackson, where I got to preach this morning at Calvary Baptist Church. Here is the sermon.
__________________________

You have to wonder how soon it started.

I’m guessing, even in the early church, where two or three were gathered there were two or three differing opinions. Though we have grouped the epistles in the back half of our New Testaments, they were some of the earliest writings we have and they show that from almost the very beginning of the church people were struggling with what it meant to live out our faith together. Paul, John, and anyone else who wrote one of these letters spends some time basically saying the biblical equivalent of, “Don’t make me come over there” or “If I have to pull this car over there is going to be some serious trouble.” And they all spend a good deal of time entreating their charges to love one another; they also do what they can to draw a picture of what looks like. Listen to Eugene Peterson’s translation of the first part of our passage for this morning:

This is how we've come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God's love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.

He could not have painted the picture any clearer: when we don’t care for one another, God’s love disappears. Disappears. And – not but, and -- when we do respond and meet the need we incarnate the love of God as God created us to do. God’s love appears.

Yesterday at the Writer’s Conference, Justin shared a story with us that led him to write the song he sang a few moments ago called “Driving by the Accident.” As he talked about how the song came together, he spoke of Jesus’ encounter with the woman who lived with a hemorrhage and knew she just needed to touch the hem of his garment to be healed. Justin said we have to understand “the healing touch of intentional proximity.”

I love that phrase.

By choosing to be church together, we are choosing intentional proximity: we mean to be close. We are also putting ourselves near enough to one another to create the opportunity to incarnate love to one another. Or – not. The truth is we are also close enough to do damage. When we decide to explode, we send chards and shrapnel into everyone around us. Not only must we choose to be in close proximity, we must also choose, day after day after day, to love one another as Christ loves us. We must choose the responsibility that comes with connectedness – knowing that choosing to be together in a world full of suffering and chaos is choosing to enter voluntarily into one another’s pain, even as we choose, perhaps first, to do no harm.

In his book The Will to Power, philosopher Frederich Nietzsche challenged the Christian call to love all humanity, saying love was weakness that denied such values as pride, war, conquest, and anger. As harsh as it may sound to think of pride and anger as values, remember we live in a nation that lives out Vince Lombardi’s notion that, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Our culture says get what you can and leave everyone else to fight for themselves.

Our faith tells us differently: we are one in the Spirit, as the song says, and we have a responsibility for and to one another.

Since we’ve been a part of the writer’s conference this weekend, let’s play with words for a minute and break down the word responsibility. It’s made of two words: response and ability: the ability to respond. Being close to one another in Christ means we have the ability to respond to one another’s needs, incarnating God’s love in the most practical and meaningful ways.

Gary Chapman has a book Ginger, my wife, uses in marriage counseling called The Five Love Languages, which he defines as the ways we best give and receive love. They are:

• words of affirmation – saying words that encourage and support
• acts of service – doing the “little things” that show we are paying attention
• physical touch – hugs, and supportive touch
• quality time – making time to care for one another
• gifts – again, things that make a person feel known

Though we are all able to speak more than one of these languages, each of us has a favorite we speak when we receive love and a favorite we speak when it comes to giving love. Sometimes they match up well: Ginger’s best receiving language is acts of service and mine is words of affirmation. So when I do something nice for her and she says thank you we both come out pretty well. Sometimes, in the context of community, we operate on the principle of speaking the language we wish would be spoken to us and we miss each other. Incarnating the love of Christ to one another means being multilingual, if you will. It also means being forthright about what we need and what we have to offer one another as we live in close proximity.

One of the other songs Justin sang a few minutes ago was Patty Griffin’s “When It Don’t Come Easy.” I asked him to sing the song because the chorus articulates the kind of hands on love we’re talking about. The lyrics are

If you break down, I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love, I’ll try to remind you
And stay by you when it don’t come easy

Here’s what love looks like: if you break down, I’ll drive out and find you.

There’s a couple in our church in Durham. He is a firefighter; she is a social worker. They were driving down a street in Miami, where they were visiting family, when he noticed smoke coming out of a house as a woman was running out the door. They stopped the car and got out. He ran into the house, turned off the gas, and did what he could to stay the fire; she called 911 and then sat and comforted the woman in the midst of the turmoil. Both of them did what they were trained to do in a moment where they happened to be close enough to help.

When the brought the woman to Jesus who had been caught in the act of adultery, which is a euphemistic way of saying they pulled her out of bed and dragged her down the street naked, Jesus knelt down and wrote in the sand when they asked what they should do to her. In that moment, their attention shifted from the woman to trying to figure out what Jesus was doodling in the dirt. He was close enough to offer her grace and, as the scene played out, forgiveness.

After Peter denied Jesus three times, Jesus met him on the shore of the sea of Galilee with breakfast. He was close enough to offer food and, again, forgiveness.

Then Peter, along with John, encountered the beggar at the gate and said, “We don’t have any money, but we will give you what we have. In Jesus’ name, get up and walk.” They were close enough to be healers.

I have a friend who grew up in a family of abuse and violence. She says she remembers as a little girl being in a store with her mother and her mother was yelling and screaming at her. She said there was another woman at the counter who leaned down in the midst of the violence and said, “Remember this is not your fault. It’s going to be OK.”

We are all wounded and hurting. We are all capable of being healers. And we are close enough to one another to make the love of God appear in our midst.

If you break down, I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love, I’m here to remind you
And stay by you when it don’t come easy

May we respond to one another in a way that makes God’s love appear at every turn. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

tune my heart

“Sometimes a light surprises the Christian when he sings,” wrote William Cowper. And sometimes the surprise is in the listening. I sat down in church this morning, feeling renewed after a wonderful weekend (Friday and Saturday are my weekend), one day in Chicago with our nephew and the other wandering through downtown Durham for the Art Walk with Ginger and Cherry, our old friend and new housemate. Both days were filled with sunshine and laughter and food and, well, all good things and I brought them all to church with me this morning. And then the choir began the prelude:

come, thou fount of every blessing
tune my heart to sing thy praise

If I were picking a list of favorite hymns, this one would be at the top, so any Sunday anyone sings it is a good day to me, but this morning I was lightly surprised, to go along with Mr. Cowper, by words and melody I know by heart, and I’ve spent the day thinking about how a heart gets tuned.

You see, I’ve been a guitar player since high school, so I know about tuning something – making sure the strings are tuned to their assigned notes and also to one another. But where my mind went today is something I know more about as metaphor than actually being able to do it with my guitar and that is what is called open tuning. Many guitar players (Joni Mitchell would be the queen) tune the strings so they play a chord without putting any fingers down – open G, open D, open C – so that the solo guitar player can do more with the instrument than just play the chords. One could play the basic rhythm, for example, and add a lead part without needing more than one guitar. (I can’t, but one could.) Emmylou Harris even has a song called Prayer in Open D.

How then do I tune my heart to be open to God?

We celebrated Earth Day in our worship today, so as I was thinking about tunings we were talking about our stewardship of our planet. Ginger and Carla had several quotes printed in the worship guide to help us along. One of them in particular helped me in my tuning.

My profession is always to be alert, to find God in nature, to know God’s lurking places, to attend all the oratorios and the operas in nature. (Henry David Thoreau)

When we lived in Boston we used to go and walk around Walden Pond and we saw some of the remnants of Thoreau’s cabin. When I read the book in high school, I remember thinking he was out in the wilderness, but the pond is not that far from the town of Concord. It was, however, far enough for him to tune his heart to both play and hear new things. And, though, I have never cultivated an appreciation for or understanding of opera, his point is very clear: I begin to tune my heart when I pay attention to what is going on around me, or, should I say, who is going on around me.

I love the idea of knowing God’s “lurking places.” It makes Thoreau’s walks in the woods sound like a friendly game of hide and seek. What little reading I’ve done about open tunings talks about how it opens up the instrument to new things and teaches the guitar player how to think of chords in new shapes since the strings are now set on different notes. How a D chord looks and feels on the fret board is, well, nothing like the D I’ve always played. To learn to play in that tuning means learning to teach myself how to see and move differently and opens the door for me to learn another tuning, or come up with one on my own.

As I was walking home from a busy night at the restaurant, it struck me that I tune my heart everyday to play something. I have a kitchen tuning, a home tuning, a Schnauzer tuning, a church tuning, a Ginger tuning. Most are so familiar I don’t even realize when I retune my heart to move from one song to another. In my best moments, I am intentional about the tuning I have chosen and the intentionality with which I tweak the strings. The melody of today requires of me to go back and fill in the lyric a bit more, I think. Here is the complete first verse of Cowper’s hymn:

sometimes a light surprises the christian while he sings;
it is the Lord, who rises with healing in his wings:
when comforts are declining, he grants the soul again
a season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain

and the first of Robert Robinson’s hymn

come thou fount of every blessing
tune my heart to sing thy praise
streams of mercy never ceasing
call for songs of loudest praise
teach me some melodious sonnet
sung by flaming tounges above
praise the mount I’m fixed upon it
mount of thy redeeming love

Tune my heart to hope and healing, to shine and surprise, to grace and gratitude. Please. Amen.



Peace,
Milton

advent journal: healing in his wings

Over most of my adult life in faith, I’ve been fortunate to go to churches small enough to still take one of the Sundays in Advent for the Christmas Pageant, though the word pageant always brings a smile to my face. I can’t help but wonder which of the magi will win the gown competition and if any of the shepherds will do something other than shear a sheep for their talent. Vocabulary aside, something about the parade of bath-robed shepherds helps Jesus to be born anew year after year.

The first year Ginger was in Winchester, she had a number of the young people taking part. One of the girls, who had not grown up in church, asked to be King Herod. As the rehearsal continued and came to her scene, she broke character in the middle of her speech and said, “Wait a minute! Herod’s a bad guy.”

My favorite moment in Marshfield each year came when the angels appeared to the shepherds. The pulpit at the church was a wall of wood across the front, creating a ministerial fortress of solitude behind it. The angels, always some of our youngest and most enthusiastic participants, would jump up from behind the wall holding stars above their heads, their faces beaming, as we all sang, “Joy to the World.”

The pageant here in Durham is an Advent one, which, I’ve learned, means everyone shows up except Jesus. We had shepherds and angels and the star and the wise men who all gathered around Joseph and Mary, but she was still pregnant when we headed out for coffee hour. The days have not yet been accomplished; we still have to wait for Jesus.

I thought about our pageant several times yesterday and today as I have been with my father-in-law who has Alzheimer’s. I thought about it because I feel like one of those little towel-headed kids, all dressed up for the big event and all I’m doing is waiting. Ginger and my mother-in-law spent a couple of days together and I was with Reuben, who is to the core of his being one of the most gentle and hopeful people I know. In other years, we would have spent the drive talking about what he saw on the news, which he watched voraciously, or he would have asked me questions about my job and about Durham. Instead, he wondered if it was going to snow (because he thinks we still live in Boston) and asked about every thirty minutes what time Ginger and Rachel were going to come home. Today, I looked in his face as he sat across from me at lunch and his eyes looked vacant, as though he were fading like a face in an old photograph, except it was happening right in front of me.

As we drove yesterday, I was also waiting for word on my brother’s surgery to remove a tumor from his spinal cord. About ten o’clock last night I got news that was about as good as it could get: they were able to repair the disc, remove the tumor, and all indications were the tumor was benign (we’ll have to wait a couple of days for the official pathology report). More than one person said it was “an answer to prayer. God is good.”

It was and God is. I prayed the tumor would not be cancer, and that it would be as uncomplicated at surgery on one’s spinal cord can be. And I also prayed that Reuben wouldn’t get Alzheimer’s and that he wouldn’t disappear as quickly as he is. My brother is going to get to go on with life relatively unscathed – at least from this and my father-in-law is going to continue to lose his life incrementally. Holding both of them in my heart, I’m hesitant to say God showed up somehow and healed Miller because then I’m left with Reuben not being so fortunate.

When we finally do put a baby in the manger, we will sing

Christ, the highest heaven adored
Christ the everlasting Lord
Light and life to all he brings
Risen with healing in his wings

The last phrase always gets me: with healing in his wings. Both the beauty and mystery stir my heart. I love those words and I’m not sure what they mean; I only know they touch me at a place of deep yearning and hope. Run a Google search for the phrase and you’ll find it means a lot of different things to different people. When I look at the person the baby grew to be, the healing wings he sprouted have as much or more to do with the grace and forgiveness he showed people like Zacchaeus or the adulterous woman as they do with those who were physically healed.

God is good and would still be if Miller had gotten bad news about the tumor or had been left paralyzed by the surgery. God is still good even though Reuben is disappearing before our eyes. It was after Horatio Spafford saw all of his daughters die in a shipwreck that he wrote

When peace like a river attendeth my way
and sorrow like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul

George Matheson was rejected by his fiancée when he told her he was going blind because she didn’t want to spend her life taking care of him. And he wrote

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be

What these hymn writers know is healing is something more profound than the absence of disease or the release of pain. I’m not talking metaphorically here. My mother-in-law needs healing for her heart learning to live with the husband she is losing. My brother’s healing will go beyond the surgery to include learning how to live in a way other than his gazillion hour-a-week schedule that was killing him long before they found the tumor. Whatever our circumstances, we all need healing.

And together, we wait.

Peace,
Milton