and the pearl is Christ (sermon on the 6th Sunday after Pentecost)

1 Kings 3:5-12
Psalm 119:129-136

Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

The Kingdom of heaven is like this.

Like a mustard seed, like a sower, a farmer, like a pearl and the merchant who wants it, sells all he has in order to own it, like a net full of fish, like a bird on a branch, like yeast mixed with flour, like finally arriving at a far, strange shore that nobody has to tell you is home after a long, dark night spent at sea.

Like angels sorting baskets.

The Kingdom of heaven is like these.

I wonder if we wonder enough about what the Kingdom of God is like.

I don’t mean that as a put-down. I wonder, can we ever wonder enough about what the Kingdom of God is like? The Kingdom which is that kingdom for which you were made.

The Kingdom is like... What is it like? How do you describe it? When have you seen it? What was it like the last time you encountered it?

The Kingdom of heaven is like an old, weathered woman, her name was Teresa, she lived with the poor, because she saw the pearl of Christ in them. The Kingdom is like the pre-med student who disappointed his parents when he abruptly stopped his schooling and became a monk, moved to the country in France, because, he said, he had found the pearl worth selling all for. The Kingdom is like the young woman student who likewise disappointed her parents, but this time when she enrolled in pre-med, because, as a doctor, she would be able to tend the fish in the net, she said. Especially the fish, the people, she explained, in the poorest corners of rural Africa. Like the teacher whose name you don’t even remember – only that she loved you with a smile that made you believe that you were God’s pearl. Planting the seed of the Kingdom of God. Sprinkling the yeast of love on which God’s Kingdom stands.

The Kingdom of heaven is like these. Like treasure. Like selling.

Like a woman, come in early on Saturday’s morning to set the altar, fill the cruets, trim the candles, saying prayers as she does so for the congregation that will meet the next day, praying by name, as she looks out on their customary spots in the pews. Like a man who bravely picks up the strange book before the Sunday Assembly and at the end of the reading calls out, “The Word of the Lord,” hiding a slight tremble stemming from the mystery that these words have touched his lips. He remembers the first time, as a youth, he was invited to read; he felt a joy as if the Lord himself had called him; like Peter. The Kingdom is like the youth who is not ashamed of her age but stands before the children and leads them in songs of raucous praise for a week at church camp. Like the anonymous one whose action is unseen to the church and the world, as she sits in quiet at the bedside of the home-bound, praying, holding hands, holding the silence over which the Spirit alone presides.

The Kingdom of heaven is like these. Like sharing. Like leading. Like self-giving.

Like a wedding banquet and no one came, so the host opened the doors to the streets. Like a movie shown in evening light, strangers collected under a bell tower, neighbors from the streets stopping to drink in the occasion. Like a tiny group of holy friends meeting every week, midweek; over breakfast, sharing stories of God at work in their lives. Like the accidental meeting of friends between aisles nine and ten, just before the produce section. Like two or three gathered in His Name.

The Kingdom of heaven is like breaking bread. Like drinking peace. Like forgiveness. Like new life. Like challenge. Like rest. The Kingdom of heaven is like these.

The Kingdom of heaven is like the small gift that no one thought mattered. But it did matter. Like stories we remember as children: like the boy David, made King. Too small to be noticed. Like Mary, still a girl. Not married. Small things don’t always stay small. But they almost always start small.

Like the first light that speaks dawn in the darkness.

The Kingdom of heaven is like life we did not expect.

A boy once marveled to his mother on his way home from church, in the car, he marveled to his mother his amazement that his God was big enough to become small enough to live inside of him.

For all of these reasons, the Kingdom resists being measured in numbers; the Kingdom’s only visible measure is love lived in motion. Small things with great love. The Jews in Jesus’s day wanted a military of thousands. Large numbers and power. Instead, they got Mary. But Mary said, “yes,” with love, and the powers of this world were unmasked with a baby’s birth. Because big things without love are like no things at all in this Kingdom, but no thing is too small with the love of this Kingdom.

The Kingdom of heaven is like saying ‘Yes’ to God, with love. Like love with arms in motion.

The Kingdom of heaven is like pursuit of the pearl. Like giving up wealth and becoming truly rich. Like buying the pearl. And the pearl is Christ.

And Christ is not glamorous. Christ is not pretty. But this is not the story of things glamorous and pretty things, is it? This is the story of small, unnoticed things, but small things filled with unspeakable love. Not big, pretty things, but the truly beautiful things. And should you look around you in the course of a day, in an unhurried way, you will notice that we are surrounded by truly beautiful things.

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: “Earth’s crammed with heaven,/ And every common bush afire with God,/ But only he who sees, takes off his shoes; / The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

(Had Browning lived to see them, she might have added iPhones and smart phones to Blackberries on the list of things we use to distract ourselves from the truly beautiful.)

The Kingdom of heaven has a well-established habit of speaking in the silence, inhabiting the poor, appearing in the unlikely places. And all places become unlikely when we grow too big for love.

“Love is patient; love is kind,” writes St Paul. “Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”


We know these things about love, because we have seen these things in Christ.

The Kingdom of heaven is like God’s Son on a cross. The King of kings on a tree. “Greater love has no man than this,” Jesus says, “than that he lay down his life for his friends.”
And elsewhere, “...unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

And so Christ Jesus,
6 ...though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

The Kingdom of heaven is like this.

Amen.

weeds, wheat, and willie mays (a sermon for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost)

Isaiah 44:6-8
Psalm 86:11-17
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

It starts out simple: Jesus asks his disciples to let God be the judge of the bad seed in the field. Never mind those rough seeds, he says, I’ve got ‘em. I’ll take care of ‘em. Like an All-Star center fielder calling for the ball with confidence, “I got it,” he says. He says it in a way you believe him. “You just rest easy. You just watch me. You just keep going. You just never mind ‘em.”

Let the weeds go. Leave ‘em alone. Like a simple word that changes everything - everything you thought you knew about weeds. Because up until now, weeds were considered very bad things, which is why your grandma paid you a penny a plant to pull them - or more, if you were lucky. Used to be that weeds spelled the end of the crop. Doomsday for the flowers. Death for the daffodils. Common sense, not just for farmers, but for ordinary men and women, too: everyone knows that you can’t grow things with weeds.

Like the battles my grandfather waged with the squirrels and the rabbits. Building moats around the garden (not really). Setting traps late at night. Because one bad apple can spoil the bunch the thinking went, and that meant get on yours knees in the heat of the day and earn your pennies one weed at a time. Keep the field clean.

That was the old way. Today, Jesus says God has another way in mind, and it’s simple: Don’t pull ‘em. I got ‘em. As cool as Willie Mays.

But if it’s as simple as that - if it’s all just that cool - why is leaving weeds alone also so very darn hard?

At least, the characters in the story, they think it is.

For starters, there’s the problem of where the weeds come from. Like the mystery of mosquitoes. Seemingly unnecessary evil, say the help. Why these obstacles to a happy life? they ask. Why these thorns in the flesh. How can a good farmer (or a good God, for that matter) permit the growth of bad seed? Seed that chokes growth in others. And we’ve heard this problem before. And we’ve more than heard it. When we lost the loved one to the unnecessary tragedy, the drunken driver or the abusive parent, the recurring cancer, we felt that problem like a knife to the heart.

The farmer’s answer is short, but true: an enemy did this. The field isn’t lost, but these things were not the design. The plan was good, and the plan is still on, but the farmer didn’t plant these seeds of suffering. They are the work of an another.

For the characters in the story, this answer makes the next problem worse: Well...
If the bad seed is the work of an enemy, why not undo it? Pull ‘em all out. Heck, we’ll help you do it. We won’t even charge pennies, they say. We just want to see the crop do well. Tell you what farmer, it’s nearly the end of the day anyway, it’ll just take us an hour, maybe two, a few beers, and a half a can of gasoline.

Yikes. The farmer cringes.

“Why don’t you boys have a seat for a second. Pull up a tree stump.”

Number one, yes, the field has bad seed in it, but number two, the plants look very much alike - and what if you hack down some good seed along the way, what then? - and number three, trust me, he says, leave it to me to sort out the field -not now - but when the harvest comes.

“But Lord,” they say, “just to clarify, just so we’re on the same page - won’t they get in the way--the weeds?” “Yes, they will.”

“But Lord, wouldn’t the wheat have an easier go overall if they weren’t fighting the weeds for their lives?” “Yes,” says the farmer, “they would.”

The help stares back, perplexed.
“So really, you’re not going to fix this?”

“No,” sighs the farmer. “And I don’t want you fixing it, either - destroying on my behalf the weeds that destroy the good plants. After all, and to put it blunt, you, Joe, you can’t tell a tulip from a turnip; you go around burning up wheat in my name, well that would be just altogether weed-like, wouldn’t it? And God knows that evil doesn’t need that kind of help.”

“But boss,” they say, “an enemy did this--it’s a declaration of war! How can you ask us to just stand idly by and watch the whole thing go down like this? What kind of farmer works like that anyway?”

A long pause follows.



The farmer finally clears his throat. “The field is mine. The field belong to me. The field will be fine. I won’t lose one of them. But we’ll wait. We’ll wait. My death will be your patience; my life will be your glory.”

Confusion. Awkwardness. And you can imagine the disappointment of the first disciples at a story that ends like this.

All of this is what makes this simple story hard. The farmer is talking weeds, seeds, and wheat, and Jesus is talking suffering, patience, and forgiveness - all against the backdrop of the cross. And these are not easy things.

And because we’ve been talking in pictures this morning, let me give you a real life example. Up until the 1990s, apartheid in South Africa was a political program of systemic racism by which an elite white minority relegated black South Africans to the margins of power. Apartheid left blacks in poverty, cyclical illiteracy, chronic voicelessness, and facing unjust laws and frequent imprisonment, torture, and sometimes murder. Because the perpetrators of these crimes worked for the government, they almost always got away with it, like the weeds in the farmer’s field.

While many black South Africans resisted peacefully, others resisted violently. With car bombs, kidnappings. Terrorist-like activities. Years later, Methodist Bishop Peter Storey of South Africa was able to remark about the irony of these things:

“The primary cancer may be, and was, and will always be, the apartheid oppression, but secondary infections have touched many of apartheid’s opponents and eroded their knowledge of good and evil. One of the tragedies of life, sir, is it is possible to become like that which we hate most, and I have a feeling that this drama is an example of that.”

Seeing the evil will not keep us from aiding - even becoming - the evil. That’s what the farmer is on to when he asks them to sit. Be still. When he says, “I’ve got it.”

As it turns out, when God says, “I’ve got it,” God also means “you don’t.” We don’t. It’s not just that Jesus says “wait,” it is also that by asking the disciples to wait, he commands them to put down the pitchforks and extinguish the torches. No bounty hunter justice or lingering embers of resentment kept here. To each her due process, and the process belongs to God. Thank God.

As it turns out, to let God be the judge means that the disciples will have to learn patience for those plants (and those people) that they don’t understand. The ones who don’t look exactly like them. The ones who look too much like them. You know, like an unflattering mirror that highlights the zits, they hit a nerve for some reason.

What a bummer. When the judgment of God means fire for others, it’s easier to get excited about it. When the judgment of God means deferring the act of judgment to God, there’s a lot less to talk about. The plots and schemes and secret conversations and sleepless nights give way to what? If you don’t have other things to do, the judgment of God can leave you all dressed up on a Saturday night empty, with cancelled party plans.

Quick aside that’s worth saying: the disappointment, the impatience, that the disciples feel when Jesus asks them to be patient with others shows just how much they stand to gain if they can ever learn to be patient with themselves. Because to be patient with yourself solely because God says you’re worth being patient with is the beginning of grace.

Weeds and wheat. Together. One field. (For the time being.) One Lord. (Always.) One hope. And this hope has the power to transform.

So here’s the dime store recap, plus one more story.

The judgment of God means patience for us. Even suffering patience. Even patience when it hurts. A prayerful patience that looks at the weeds and slowly learns to pray that maybe she’s wrong. Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe there’s wheat there I don’t see. A person told me once that her spiritual director had suggested that she pray for a particular weed in her life, ask God to bless this weed with the best God had for the weed. “But I won’t mean it,” she said. “Why should I pray it?” The spiritual director smiled. “Then say that. Start your prayer that way: ‘Lord, you know I don’t mean it, but bless this weed in my life with the best you have for her.’ And Lord, help me to mean it.” The woman reported that she prayed this way for two and a half weeks until one day she forgot to tell God she didn’t mean it. Pray for the weeds.

It may not be good farming practice, but it’s the heart of Good Gospel practice: if the best you can say about him is that he’s an enemy, you know for sure what to do with him: love him. Love your enemies, Jesus says. Pray for those who persecute you. In so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with everyone, says St. Paul.

Let the weeds go. Forgive them. Leave ‘em alone. But keep growing. Like a simple word that changes everything - everything you ever knew about weeds. Because up until now, weeds were considered very bad things, which is why your grandma paid you a penny a plant to pull them - a penny a plant, or more, if you were lucky. Used to be that weeds spelled the end of the crop. Doomsday for the flowers. Death for the daffodils.

But, look! Death has been defeated, sing the angels. The risen Lord smiles with wounded, healing hands. It seems that weeds don’t hold the future hostage quite like they used to.

No, that was the old way. Today, Jesus says God has another way in mind, and it’s simple: Don’t pull ‘em. Forgive them. Pray for them. “I got ‘em,” he says, “I got ‘em!” As cool as Willie Mays.

Amen.

the summer of lovingkindness

So I've been reflecting this summer on that compound-ular word found all throughout the Scriptures (or at least after Myles Coverdale coined the word in 1535): lovingkindness. And not just because the player formerly known as Ron Artest is now Metta World Peace. Love and kindness are two words whose marriage is not obvious, and that the fact that they can be married has everything to do with the Gospel, that's been the thought. Love, which is assumed to be an inward disposition, such that one person can assure another of her love, even while they're far apart and love has nothing to "show for it"; kindness, which in practice is an explicitly outward behavior, such that one can be accused of being kind "even when you didn't mean it." But put the words together and you have a meeting of the inward disposition and the outward expression. Love that acts, and acts that love. Faith, that is, belief with intention, and action. Jesus, being and living out of his being God's Love for the world. And how can it be otherwise? On second thought, maybe it is obvious, this marriage of love and kindness. The confusion would be how we came to imagine one without the other in the first place.

Pentecost t-shirt follow-up

Group pics didn't happen, but the shirts came in and added a uniquely uplifting element to our Pentecost worship. What a generous and creative gift!

Follow-up to 'Witness'

The day after the Witness sermon was preached, a parishioner stepped forward with an anonymous $500 gift to provide 80 Pentecost-red t-shirts for the following Sunday (this coming June 12th). What an amazing act of creativity and generosity. Pics will follow. Grateful for your prayers in the meanwhile: Come, Holy Spirit!

Can I Get a Witness? (sermon June 5, 2011)

Let us pray.

Gracious God, heavenly Father, we thank you for this good, new day, and for gathering us together around your Word. Pour your Spirit on us that we have may ears to hear and eyes to see when Jesus says to us, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." We ask this in His Name.

Amen.

In game 7 of the NBA’s Western Conference semi-finals, the Oklahoma City Thunder staged a promotion called a ‘blue-out’, the goal of which was to put the sellout crowd - all 18,203 fans - in new, blue Thunder t-shirts, thereby creating a sense of camaraderie among the fans and also, the thinking went, an overwhelming home-team advantage for the Oklahoma City Thunder. It worked.

Promotions like these are relatively new to professional basketball - the last few years or so - but not to other sports. The Aggies of Aggieland, for example, have been staging maroon-outs for years, only they haven’t had to coordinate it. The youthful exuberance of college athletics somehow results in 80,000 fans spontaneously showing up on game day, one place, one time, wearing just the one color. I’d be remiss not to also mention here Duke’s all-blue Cameron Crazies. The greatest fans on earth.

The pros want the same effect, and, the thinking goes, if they have to give the t-shirts out free, you know, to grease the wheels a bit, in order to tap into the hidden college madness within, they will. The professionals are eager for ways to engage the fans with all the enthusiasm of college, and it’s working.

This got me thinking. If it can work for college, and for the NBA, why not for the church? I mean, what church couldn’t use an infusion of university gumption, get-go, and excitement?

The only question: what to put on the shirt?

Now, when you see a promotional t-shirt, you see the best summary of what the group thinks it is about. Get to the point. Nobody wants to have to read your shirt like a book. They’re not getting too close to you or staring you down. Print it big and keep it short. When Christians think of the ‘get to the point’ of the Christian faith, we frequently remember the Great Commission of Matthew’s gospel: go and make disciples of all people. But today’s reading from the book of Acts, Jesus’s last words before his ascension, is no less a good summary or ‘get to the point’ of the Christian faith. Jesus said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

I know, I know, still too long for a short, but something we could work with?

Hmm.

We are all witnesses. That Nike slogan resulted in this abbreviated version on a t-shirt.

And at least in Cleveland, it remains as popular now for burning as it was once upon a time for wearing.

We are witnesses. If you wonder what you are, what we’re about, that’s it. I like that. Now, good news and bad news. Good News, just like the NBA arenas, you’ve got a little something waiting for you under your seat. Bad news, we can’t afford t-shirts.

Pull it out. Fish around if you have to. Hold it up.

[For those reading this online, printed pages reading "We are witnesses" with a cross had been taped under the pews - over 100 of them, with the generous help of the youth.]


Take a look at it. You will receive power, the Holy Spirit, says the Lord, and you will be my witnesses to all people.

What do you think? What does that mean? Witness as bystander? Witness as passive observer? Witness as one with a story to tell? Lots of good questions to ask.

We are witnesses.

For the next couple of minutes, I want to explore these three words as clues to what it means to be the church.

Let’s take the first two words first: we are.

This is the heart of why they give out the shirts: to form a we. You and I form a we every time we gather around the Gospel to share the bread and the wine, as we receive and become the Body of Christ.

The words we are are the answer to the question: what is church?
We are.

Not the priest, or the ones with robes, or the highest giver, or whomever else: all of us, together. The people is the church of God.
Who is the church: we are!
We are witnesses.

This is why we don’t talk about going to church. You are the church. It’s not semantics, it’s the truth! Church is the People. And the People is Church. It’s why when someone asks you to share a prayer request with the church, they already have! You might choose to share it with the church office, or the church’s prayer team, but there is no more real a representative for the whole church together than you. You matter. You count. You stand for us. And we are God’s witness. You are the real Church. And all of us who are Church are partners with God.
There is a story told about what happened in heaven when Jesus returned from his earthly ministry. Jesus returns in glory to heaven. All the angels gather round to give the Son of God a high five and a pat on the back. Everyone is pretty fired up at first. As the excitement dies down a bit, the archangel Gabriel, who was so involved in announcing Jesus’ birth, speaks up.

“So what happens next?” Gabriel asks. "What's the plan?"

Jesus explains, “My disciples take over now. They’ll spread the Good News to the whole earth so that everyone will come to know that God loves them and wants a relationship with them.”

“You mean those fisherman, that tax collector, and the scruffy bunch at St. Christopher’s that you’ve been walking around with?” Gabriel asked with more than a little concern creeping into his voice.

“Yeah, those guys,” Jesus answered. “They’ll take over now. The Holy Spirit is with them. They’ll do great.”
There was a long pause. Then Gabriel asked tentatively, “What’s the backup plan?”
Jesus looked Gabriel in the eye with compassion and confidence and said, “There is no backup plan.”

So one of you shared with me the other day your joy in your deeper understanding that this is your church. Not just where you go, but really yours. Belonging to you. Absolutely true, and a great joy to know. And I told you that my next prayer for you and, here, I mean all of us, will be for you to hear God as he points to you, to us, and say with just as much joy, “And that is my church.” You are God’s church. Together, we are witnesses to the Good News of salvation in Christ Jesus.

So the first two words call us all to the action, and the action is this: to be Jesus’ witnesses.

Let me ask you: what does that mean? How and when do you do it? When are you witnesses?

You are witnesses when you gather on the Lord’s Day, in holy worship, the breaking of bread and the prayers, not neglecting to meet, but by your presence and practice encouraging one another.

You are witnesses when you notice and speak to the ones that most folks don’t notice or speak to, whether it’s someone absent from our assembly or the waitress at the restaurant or the clerk who checks your groceries.

You are witnesses when you say “I’ll pray for you,” and then, because most Christians know that that is really code for “we’re done talking,” ask if you might pray for them then, there, now.

You are witnesses when you work together, even with Presbyterians.

You are witnesses when you stand with those who suffer, the poor and friendless, even when you can’t do anything to change the suffering. When all the cozy words have left.

You are witnesses when you forgive one another, and ask for forgiveness. You are witnesses when you celebrate one another’s gifts, ask for each other’s help, and thank God out loud for the gift of this fellowship.

You are God’s witnesses in all of these things, and you are doing all of these things. We are witnesses. (How I wish I had t-shirts.) We are God’s witnesses. Do not forget this, and do not be discouraged. It’s the greatest job on earth, and, what’s more, you have help, even the Holy Spirit of God. And the Spirit, the power, of God is God’s Love given to you, working in and through you.

Amen.

Partners in Love: a homily/conversation with Debra Dean Murphy

“Any idiot can face a crisis - it’s day to day living that wears you out.” Anton Chekov

One of those statements that you don’t think much about until you hear it. When you hear it, it rings true. So true, you don’t hear it so much as you feel it.

Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s day to day living that wears you out.

The saying is true of all life, and the Christian life is no exception.

When we were children, maybe, we had dreams of a singular cataclysmic moment that would put us to the test, when we would be pushed against the ropes, a clear moment in time when we’d know that all of life was meant for ‘now’. This moment. And after that moment, if we survived it, we’d go back to life as usual. The moment of a super-boost of sorts, like when the hero finds her loved one trapped under the car and summons an other worldly strength to free him. Or when the soldier enters the climactic fight for which all his other days have been mere training and draws the sword.

No doubting that God meets heroes in these moments, but then, the moment’s gone: the battle passes, the car is lifted, a new day dawns. The foxhole may be a good place to find faith, but where do you keep it when the foxhole clears? After the war? What need for God now? And there’s laundry left unfolded on the couch. And you’re there, all alone in the room. Or a baby pulling urgently at your pant leg.

Crises will happen, but what of the life lived day to day? Can the Gospel equip us, equip you, with the strength to persevere in those times when it doesn’t look like anything much is going on? And if there isn’t much going on, in what are we to persevere? And behind all these questions, I suppose, this one: does God keep a real, living, interest in our ordinary days? These are the questions of our readings this morning. They’re my questions, too.

As is our custom from time to time, I’m inviting a guest into the pulpit this morning, a fresh set of eyes with which to approach the gospel and these questions. Debra Dean Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Christian Education at West Virginia Wesleyan College. She likes books, movies, music, art, and politics, and she likes to think and write about how religion intersects all of these arenas - thus her interest in speaking just now. Her work is a contemporary one, written in the shadow of the moment that didn’t happen - the end of the world that was prophesied a week ago Saturday. She writes today about how we are to understand and respond to the closeness of God on days the world doesn’t end.

Her reflection is on this Sunday’s readings and is entitled: The Close-at-Hand God.

[You can read Debra Dean Murphy's excellent piece here.]

Some summary thoughts:

God is close at hand, the Kingdom of God is at hand; that’s the Gospel of Jesus; and the task of the followers of Jesus is to bear witness to the love that has been in their midst. We bear witness to God's love, staying near to the world in love, because the Spirit stays close to us.

We started with questions, I end with just a few more:

What does it mean to be a partner in love?

How does God's love shape how you know what love is?

How does God's love, the presence of the Spirit, strengthen your love for others?

We are called not to withdrawal from the world, but to be an active love for the world. What is the world in which you live? Who are the main players? Your family? Your coworkers? The folks you don't know well but you usually run into? Is there one place in your world that you can imagine expanding in love this week?