practice resurrection

Many Many Footprints in the Sand

I would guess that many of you know the religious poem, “Footprints in the Sand.”   A person observes along the journey of life two sets of footprints in the sand, their own and those of Jesus walking side-by-side with them.   They notice that at times there is only one sets of footprints.   They ask Jesus why and he says, “Those were the times I carried you.”

Nice poem.

Recently I came across an updated version.   There were the two tracks, then the one, and then a sporadic array of footprints in random circles.   The person says to Christ, "I understand the two sets, and I’ve learned about the times you carried me, but what is this array of footprints?"   And Jesus said, “Those were the times we danced.”

Un huh.  Hmm.

When I first heard this I almost certainly rolled my eyes and snickered.  Cheesy, I thought.   Sweet, I suppose.  But maybe I’m too jaded. Isn’t the initial poem heartfelt enough?   Do we really need the bit about dancing with Jesus on the beach?  Really?

You hear the language often enough, people have a relationship with Jesus.   What that likely means in real time is that each of us has a collective on-going imagination about who Jesus is, what he cares about, and how he interacts with our own set of values.   It’s based on how the scripture was presented to us in our formative years. It’s shaped by the culture’s view of Jesus, life events, and hopefully clarified by the work of the Holy Spirit as interpreter.   It is an ever-growing exchange of intellect, emotions, and how we imagine Jesus.  And if it does what I think it is supposed to do, it informs every aspect of our lives.   Spiritual formation for each of us is important.  It’s hurtful when we get it wrong.  Helpful when we get it right.

Which takes me back to the footprints in the sand.  The two sets belong to Jesus and me.   The one set is Jesus carrying me.  And the sporadic circles?   In my case it was likely Jesus chasing me down to smack me in the back of the head for saying something sarcastic.

Taking a Vow of Stability

Today was my first day as a full-time minster at the Episcopal Church.

This is the third time I've made this transition.  When Karen was finishing up graduate school in Texas I was a part-time associate at Royal Lane Baptist.  Then a church in Austin TX asked me to submit my name to a search they were doing for a full-time Youth Minister.  Royal Lane made a counter offer (I actually never got an offer from the Austin Church, but it was useful moving things along at home).  It was the first time they had ever taken the risk to hire a full-time associate.  Then in 1999, when we left that church for Karen to take her post at OBU, I accepted a part-time youth ministry job at First Baptist in Shawnee. After a few months that job evolved into a full time post.

Karen and I have had numerous arguments along the way about who has the "primary vocation."  Both of us don't do the kind of work, at least in its ideal form, where you choose a location, put down some roots, and then look for work in your field.  For both of us, the work pulls you to a location.  And when we moved to Shawnee ten years ago this was Karen's first job right out of the chute.    We never gave thought to all that would mean:  our child would be an Oklahoman by birth, we would own our first house in Shawnee, and we would develop friends that at this point would be extremely painful to leave.  We are Okies because we followed Karen along her natural vocational estuary.  And the last ten years, though my opportunities have been wonderful and nothing short of an adventure, I haven't been unleashed to climb any ecclesiatical ladders, so-to-speak.  For me, there has been no place but here.

In the monastic tradition, those who wish to commit to a religious life take serious vows.  Each order has a slightly different twist on a similar set of vows.  Following the Rule of Saint Benedict, the most practiced of the different strains of monastic life, one professes life-long commitments to:

• obedience (placing oneself under the direction of the abbot/abbess)
• stability (committing onself to a particular monastery), and
• conversion of manners (which includes forgoing private ownership and chastity)

A vow of stability.  There have been repeated moments these past ten years when I have felt stuck.  Tenured positions on creative, collegial English Faculties at liberal arts colleges do not come easy, and my wife loves her peers and students at OBU.  So I have periodically done the interior work of what it means to stay put and invest in a place.  Without intending it, I have found myself asking the question of a Benedictine postulant--can I commit to this place and be present with these people?  Is this my home?

 Garret Keizer is a wonderful but relatively unknown writer, a high school English teacher and lay Episcopal Priest.  He has a wonderful book called No Place But Here: A Teacher's Vocation in a Rural Community that explores these issues as he works out his vocation in a small town in Vermont.  I recently tracked down a used copy to give to a friend who is wrestling with the same issues, a friend who "ain't from around here" and is trying to understand what it means to invest yourself in a small Oklahoma town.  At one point he compares being a teacher and having a classroom full of people to being a country parson with parishoners.

"Four years after I began teaching, I was formally installed as the Lay Vicar of Christ Episcopal Church in Island Pond.  Several conversions both in myself and in my church enabled that to happen; some are ongoing.  But this new work in my life led to a kind of conversion in my teaching.  I began to think of my students  as a parish and of myself as its parson.  My "parish" there is a cure of minds, not a cure of souls.  But I am no less a curate for all of that."

I get the easy way out.  I've got friends and church members who do some of the more difficult work of the Kingdom of God, from property owners who regularly show grace to low-income renters, to Child Protective Service workers, to teachers at the Vo-Tech, workers at the Teen Shelter, and on down the line, each curates in their own rite, members of this community, skin on the line.  I like to say I "dabble" in the work of God.  These folks do the nitty gritty of it.

When there are difficult days in ministry, I often will sprinkle fairy dust that comes from some of the more romantic, idealized images of the parish minister.  The gift I can give to the teachers, inventory clerks, DMV workers and insurance salesmen I do "church" with is to perhaps remind them that together we all have our parishes to which we are called, to tend and care for.  

I love being an Episcopalian.  It feels finally like I am an Oklahoman.  It's one of the gifts Emmanuel Episcopal Church has given me, a means to put down some roots, all monk-like.  Vow #2.  It's good to be home.

Poets & Theologians Can Barely Name Its Name

Oh man, can I make me some resolutions!  

There are a multitude of stops along the ebb and flow of my year where I do what many are doing today.  My Christian faith sets up some of these watering holes:

• the beginning of Advent (the Christian new year and inward reflection on readying oneself for God's arrival, both then and now)
• the beginning of Lent (the night after carnival)
• Easter Sunday (new life)
• and Pentecost (a little help from above).

And there are some non-religous stopping points.  My birthday in mid-July being the main one.  But if I stumble after that occasion, I crawl on over toward the beginning of the school year a few weeks later to try again.  My wife's being a professor and my being a youth minister means our household is shaped by semesters.  It's one of the things Karen had said she likes about being a teacher.  There are new beginnings every five months.

I count these up and it comes to about seven different times in any given year when I think about starting over.  I want to be a better person, more disciplined, to spend more time on things that are valuable and have meaning, spend less time wasting psychic energy on things that stunt my growth.  So to this end I resolve:

• Open and close my day in prayerful meditation.
• Understanding the helping of my wife keep an orderly house as a spiritual act.
• Spend enough time running that I enjoy it again.
• Significantly increase my speed on the five string banjo.
• Build a bench in the workshop where my son and I can build things.
• Begin teaching Noah about money.
• Spend less time on the internet (specifically the Huffington Post) and more time reading books.
• Stop eating after 7 PM (God help me). 
• Learn more about wine.
• Be a better friend.

Open, close, understand, help, spend, increase, build, teach, spend less, read, stop, learn, be--these are the verbs of my pending growth, the verbs of becoming human.  I dare say that other living creatures don't reflect consciously on the meaning of existence.  In the words of Hebrew poetry, it is what makes us 'a little lower than the angels.'

The 1st of January in our Spiritual calendar is called "The Feast of the Holy Name."  Infant Jesus was taken to the temple to be circumcised (by the way, if you are interested, there is a fascinating celebration of the relic of Christ's foreskin in a small village of Italy that David Farley of the Daily Beast has written about).  I've come more to embrace the significance of this naming as I've increasingly understood salvation in a holistic way.  The name "Jesus" was the aramaic pronunciation of Joshua, which meant "salvation."  The name was spoken to both Mary and Joseph from the angel Gabriel.  It was important that he be given the name "salvation."  

Strike from your mind the idea that this only means salvation after death.  It means much more than that.  Jesus cared deeply for what was happening to people now.  His life's work was as a healer and teacher, teaching that love of God was love of neighbor, and in that exchange we are saving each each other from all kinds of maladies.  His name pointed to the theme of his life, and to what might become our own theme--saving one another from destruction.

Isn't that the crux of resolutions?  Being rescued from all that destroys us?  Naming what isn't helping by naming what helps?  If you can name it, you can begin to focus on it in practical ways.

My old friend Bill Mallonee, a song-writer from Athens, has a recent tune called "Name, Its Name" that captures some of this on-going struggle.  Below is a link to hear the song (which if you like click on over to Bill's website to buy it,  from the "Cabin Songs" album).

 

 Name Its Name 

Ah, but on to something better, kid!
Past those places you should flee
past all those prisons we fashioned
and those chains for jewelry

On to something so elusive still
and plainly hard to tame
so much so that poets and theologians
can barely name it’s name

Now hating yourself and all you are
it don’t get much sadder than that
And I say you break God’s own heart
when you fall into that trap

On to something so elusive still
and plainly hard to tame
so much so that poets and theologians
can barely name it’s name

Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart the love of him who is the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

i and love and you

That's Not All I will Do... (a Christmas Song)

by Tim Sean Youmans

(Listen Here)

I have decided to celebrate this year
By sitting in a big expensive comfy leather chair
And nod off while the radio plays a Christmas tune
But that’s not all I will do

I have decided I’ll go shopping for some toys
A baseball glove, a superman and something that makes noise
I will sip on eggnog, with just a splash of rum
But that’s not all I will do

I will…
Make some noise for children who work ten hours days
Bitch and moan for those who work a lot for little pay
Be a drop in the bucket to stop a war (pick any war)
Shape my life by more than what I own or am shopping for

I’ll go to church and sing carols with my friends
We’ll read again the story we ignore to suit our end
We smile and ask “How are you.” I know that it’s a lie
But that’s not all I will do

Consider the discrepancies, shrug and wonder why
I pray to break the silence; I pray to show I care
But that’s not all I will do
No that’s not all I will do

Subdue the Earth Have Dominion Over It?

The Episcopal Cafe points to some valuable reflections done by the British website Ekklesia, on the relationship between faith and science, particularly in relationship to the climate discussion in Copenhagen.

the Story of Confirmation

Here's how it goes...

Some 2000 years ago, a gifted Jewish teacher and healer named Jesus was killed by political and religious leaders.  He had made a claim to be the Jewish Messiah, a promised leader who would set the Israelites free from personal sin and political oppression.  Before his death, he told his closest followers to wait for a gift that he would send them much later.  Three days after his death he rose mysteriously from death and ascended to God.  

They waited.

50 days later it arrived--the gift of the Holy Spirit.  It sounded like wind, it looked like fire.  It gave them ability to think and speak in ways that brought clarity to people about their lives in relationship to God.  Followers of Jesus began to develop small communities of people who shared resources and cared for the hurting.  It was remarkable.

A pattern began to develop in Christian circles regarding this gift of Spirit--a person would develop a belief in the saving power of the resurrected Jesus and then, later, leaders who had received the Holy Spirit before them, would lay their hands on their head and pray they would receive it.  They would then be empowered to do God's work.

And so it goes.  

Last Sunday a group of folks at Emmanuel Episcopal became a part of this story.  37 people took time to consider the teachings of Jesus and the meaning of the Baptism that happened to them as children.  Then they waited.  Our Bishop, Ed, coming as one who had been consecrated in a long line of Bishops all the way back to those early believers, laid his hands on our folks and prayed they would receive the Holy Spirit.

So, did they receive the Spirit?

One of the men being confirmed joked, "I was worried I was going to burst into flames!"  A young teenage girl remarked during our study leading up to Confirmation that it was unlikely that we received this "special dose" of the Holy Spirit when Bishop Ed came, that we already had access to all the Holy Spirit we needed.  Fair enough.

Me?  I'm still a dreamer, hoping against hope that when we gathered Sunday for these people to receive a gift that they indeed received God's Spirit to invigorate their work for God.  We all need help in such things.  Help, well, it helps.  

All those confirmed, from ages twelve to sixty-three, will need every last bit of Spirit that God is willing to give.  By gathering around that Bishop we were all demonstrating a mustard seed of faith.  And Jesus said it only takes a small bit to move mountains.  

Who knows when.  Maybe now, maybe the day after tomorrow, maybe in moments strung out all along the journey, but at some point along the way these folks will need power to love, forgive, redeem, inspire, heal, and show the smallest of kindnesses.  That stuff doesn't come easily in our world.  It never has.  It often requires a special something from somewhere outside of ourselves to carry it out.

And we will, with God's help.

Looking Toward All Saints Day

John 11:32-44

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."  When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.  He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see."

Jesus began to weep.

So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!"  But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"  Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it.  Jesus said, "Take away the stone." 

Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days."  Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"

So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me.  I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me."

When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus come out!"

The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him and let him go."

Prayer that Never Ends

(as first published in "The Minister's Corner" October 10 edition of the Shawnee News-Star, OK.)

Saint Paul wrote a curious thing about prayer. He said we ought to pray without ceasing. I’ve heard different thoughts about what such a peculiar phrase might mean. Was the Apostle exaggerating? Was he talking about keeping a constant awareness of God’s presence in such a way that even our thoughts can be considered like prayers?

Each of our traditions approach prayer differently. The Episcopal tradition uses written prayers and I know quite a few people who think such a thing absurd. “It doesn’t have any spontaneity!” they say. “How can you pray the words that someone else has written? Don’t you want to pray from your heart?”

Fair enough. I admit that it is easy to read through a prayer without considering its meaning. But I also have heard many spontaneous prayers that were essentially a series of memorized phrases, every single one of them true, but spoken without much thought. And there have been times I’ve sat and listened to someone pray and wondered silently to myself, “Is this person praying to God, or preaching to me?” I suspect in those instances it may be a little bit of both.

Again, to be fair, praying out loud is a terrifying proposition. Consider that pubic speaking typically registers as most folk’s greatest fear. Add to that the weight of talking to the Creator of the Universe, and you’ve got yourself a real conundrum! If this is easy for you, then maybe you’re not doing it in the right frame of mind.

Taking God seriously ought to make us a little apprehensive. The scriptures say that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. So when praying in public on behalf of others, you might give some thought to what you’re going to say.

As I’ve grown older I’ve found that my private prayer life opens up when I get outside and go for a walk. Speaking out loud to God helps as well (I try to take my dog with me so people will think I’m talking to him and not muttering to myself, right?). But it helps to be out in God’s creation, to feel the breeze that so often describes the Spirit of God, to look upon the heavens, to understand that I am not the center of the Universe.

The real question isn’t whose way of praying is more correct than the other, it is rather, “Will you open yourself to God?” Share yourself with him--your worries, your hurts, your failures--and His Spirit will make a home in your mind, and you might discover that your prayers take on an endless quality.

What's a Guy Gotta Do to Get Saved?

A few years ago I met weekly with a group of men for what most might consider an unusual Bible Study. We didn’t follow a curriculum that presented a central lesson, which you were to take with you after it was over. This was simpler. We read the scripture and responded to it, usually a chapter or two at a time. Read and respond.

Now there were a couple of us who did some background reading for some of the more difficult things we might come across. But for the most part this was an attempt to simply read these ancient texts and react to them, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and see how we might be affected.

We read all over the Bible, from the ancient law of Leviticus, to the Gospels, and Revelation. So you can imagine that it might bring up a wide range of topics to discuss. But a curious pattern began to emerge. No matter the subject of the scripture we were reading, our reactions seem to turn again and again to a common theme; what must I do to be saved?

Though most folks don’t know it, there are a variety of ways to understand the concept of being saved (or “atonement” to use the fancy church word). The one most folks around our parts know is called Penal Substitution, the idea that Jesus served as a substitute in paying for the sins of humanity. It suggests that you and I ought to pay for our own mistakes, but out of Jesus’ love for us, he took that punishment in our stead.

But there are other ways of understanding this difficult concept, and they are worth looking into: The Ransom Theory, Moral Influence Theory, Christ the Victor. Do an Internet search on these ideas and I think you’ll be surprised at the nuance they bring. In fact, the understanding of salvation that was most prominent in the early years of the Christian church was the Ransom Theory, not the one we are more familiar with today.,

Most of the folks in that little reading group were from a Baptist background (can you throw a rock in Oklahoma and not graze a Baptist Church?), and that tradition teaches that once you are saved, that God will hold onto you for eternity. There is nothing you can do jeopardize the kindness of God. So it was a curiosity to me that we kept returning to that question over and over again.

Maybe it is because we are so in touch with our own frailty that we can’t help but wonder what it truly takes to be made whole again. The mystery of God’s kindness eludes us, even as we place our entire hope in it. May you never stop asking the question, “What must I do to be saved?” even as you come to know the radical love that God had for you on that cross.