Music, Theology, and the Holy Spirit (Theology on Tap S.3, E.1)

We had a great start to the Theology on Tap Fall Season last night! For those who wanted a second look and those who couldn't be with us, here is the video, with table questions, we explored. We're expected another packed house October 2 and would love for you to come be a part of the evening!

Ain't No Children's Table in the Kingdom of God

This sermon was preached August 24 and 25 at Holy Trinity by the Lake. Here are the weekend's readings.

I wonder if you grew up, like me, in a family where at large family gatherings, especially dinners, generous use was made of The Children’s Table. Capital T. Capital C. Capital T. The Children’s Table was occupied mostly by, well, children, although the youngest adults were fair game and might find themselves there, too, if The Main Table ever ran out of room. Youngest adults, of course, was a relative phrase but if you made it to forty you were more or less safe. Probably. The situation was mostly practical. More bodies than seats means something has to give. Split ‘em up! Divide and conquer. Banish them to … The Children’s Table.

Of course it was more well-meaning than that. And of course nobody who made the table assignments would have thought about it as banishing. But of course, also, to divide the tables by age over against some other arbitrary qualification, feature, or interest (like musical tastes, biggest ears, or most memorized lines from The Princess Bride) was to make silent assumptions about who was interesting to whom and from whom you might expect to hear either entertaining or edifying things. 

The silent assumptions often made things more predictable, people knew where they stood in advance, even as the assumptions made in silence silently shrank the family’s imagination for what was possible. And this is a longstanding pattern with precedent: think Jesus’s disciples when they tried to keep the kids away, lest the kiddos interrupt what Jesus was about to show the “true followers” in a space protected from noisy, smelly, inquisitive children. Think the feeding of the five-thousand, when the disciples shrugged their shoulders, unconvinced that the gifts of a child could be of serious use or constitute a genuine blessing for the life of the community. “All we’ve got is this child. And his lunch box. How can what he brings to the table possibly be enough?”

I’ve been thinking about this dynamic for a while, the assumptions we make about age and who is worth listening to. Different generations of people have been thinking about it recently, too. I’m sure you’ve seen or read the mostly unhelpful articles. Millennials wonder when Boomers will hand over the reigns. Boomers for their part are understandably in no hurry to be written off by Millenials. Meanwhile, Generation X invisibly wonders why the Millennials and Boomers are fighting as if they don’t exist and aren’t also standing in line. Did you know that, astoundingly, three of the previous four presidents, including our current one, were born in the same month of the same year, 1946?

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this, a zero sum game, one generation, winner take all, guarding against the others. But choosing to witness the alternative, a community that collaborates, listens, honors, and shares real and vulnerable space in common life, one that fosters relationships of mutual blessing - mutual gratitude, amazement, and wonder - in the midst of our differences, well these spaces take intention and effort. More than that, these spaces require the belief that each of us has been given true gifts that would truly bless and build up the others; it requires the belief that being in community opens us to the possibility that God might change us from the people we were before we opened our hearts to each other. If we are lucky, we come to more than make room for this possibility; we come to pray for and delight in it.

These sorts of spaces take work. Never finished work. But it’s good work, holy work, and work worthy of the time and energy it takes. Especially for Christians. After all, Jesus refuses the disciples’s refusal of the children, and he even blesses the lunchbox of the boy, to feed a hillside of people. A friend said to me one time, “I want to give a talk about friendships and significant others. But then I realize that that was absurd. For Christians, there are no insignificant others.” One of the things being a Christian is to discover is that we belong to each other, because we belong to God; that my life and death is with my neighbor. We who are many are one body, says St. Paul, because we all share the one bread.

But each of us, I suspect, has days when we do wonder if we belong to each other or what kind of place we can have in the body. After all, love and belonging, in a world as determined by humiliation and competition as this one, are hard things to trust.

In the first lesson today, we find the prophet Jeremiah evidently in need of some convincing he belongs to the body. Specifically, he needs some coaxing to speak up. He’s been at The Children’s Table for so long he has come to believe it’s his true place. Why should The Main Table listen to him? What would he have to say to Israel that anyone in Israel should take seriously coming from his mouth?

As I listen to my own very vocal toddler at home, it occurs to me that of course Jeremiah’s doubt about his voice and its place in the body is not a doubt with which he was born. He learned it when he was young. From others who taught it to him. Even others who cared deeply for him. But then one day Jeremiah hears a voice that gives him voice. The voice belongs to God.

But the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord."

Like Moses before him, like just about every other character in the whole daggum book, young, old, and in between, the ones who wonder out loud if they’re cut out for the call and the invitation God gives them, God insists to Jeremiah that the most important thing about him, the assurance he should have that he is enough, so that he can speak without fear, is that God is coming with him.

Trivia time! Did you know, by your baptism, this is true of you, too? That the most important thing about you - more important that you’re greatest failure, more important than your biggest win - is God’s love for you and presence with you? You, beloveds, children of God. Sealed by the Spirit, marked as Christ’s own. Just like Jeremiah, called out of fear. 

I pray we can all receive this reminder today and each new day remember the good news that God’s love is our belonging and that we have a full place at the table, and that we are called to lift up this Good News to one another and others, but Jeremiah’s call asks us to particularly notice and consider the young ones among us and the ways we as Christ’s body visibly communicate the fullness of their belonging, or not. In other words, Jeremiah is, yes, a general reminder to see, encourage, and make room for each other, but Jeremiah is also the very specific reminder that children are very often among the marginalized and invisible, even if we don’t always think of them this way. Like the man Jesus found covered in chains that other people had put on him, whom, like the woman in today’s gospel, Jesus nonetheless healed, when children are found on the margins it is very often because we put them there.

That’s why I don’t think it’s too much to call Jeremiah’s story a healing. So many healings in the Bible have to do with people set free from the rule and rules of those in power. Of course, it takes help sometimes to see in the first place that we possess the kind of power a person might do well to be freed from. A person at The Main Table might not think much about The Children’s Table. But Jeremiah did. Thank God, Jeremiah trusted the voice that gave him voice. Jeremiah spoke up. Thank God, Israel listened. Thank God, the Word bridged a void. Praise God redemption took root. 

So we who follow Jesus and seek to take him at his word go out of our way to listen to our children. Children like Greta Thunberg, fifteen years old when she spoke of climate justice at a conference organized by the U.N. last year. We listen to the students of Stoneman Douglas High School who became voices in their community, locally and nationally, in the days after a gunman wreaked hellish havoc on their lives and on their school. It is one thing of course to say we disagree about the strategies or proposals that speak to the concerns to which our children give voice. It is quite another to dismiss their voices as naive or unseasoned or anything else. Dismissing the voices of children is the one thing, it turns out, our Savior expressly forbids.  

On the Day of Pentecost, when fire fell on the first disciples, the Holy Spirit, on what we’ve come to call the Birthday of the Church, scripture tells us that these words from the book of Joel were coming true:  the Lord said, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit” (Joel 2:28-29).

Yes, even on the ones who don’t drive the local economy, the retired and those at recess, both alike, that’s where the Spirit is painting new pictures, showing salvation, revealing the new things of God in this world, bestowing blessings with the power to give life to the whole church, to all of us. That’s why a friend likes to tell me it’s smart to get yourself at least two mentors, 30 years in both directions, one older and one younger. Because, look. You and I worship a God who emptied the grave - who are we to pretend to know where or in whom God won’t show up?

So we come to this table today. And we notice there’s just one table to share. There is no children’s table. Or maybe there’s just one children’s table. Because we only come to the table at all as God’s children. Either way, as God calls us to this meal together, around one shared table, God calls us to become a dinner party unlike any other in town. Where there are no insignificant friends. Where the host invites the young and old alike to speak out loud the visions and dreams God gives them.

Because it doesn’t have to be the way the world imagines, a zero sum game, one generation, winner take all, guarding against the others. Baloney. But here we commit - and already in two short weeks I have been so inspired by the breadth and depth of our particular church family’s commitment - here, we commit, we choose to witness an alternative life together, a community that collaborates, listens, honors, and shares real and vulnerable space in common life, one that fosters relationships of mutual blessing. Because one of the things it is to be a Christian is to discover is that we belong to each other, because we belong to God. 

Thank God, and amen.

What Did Baptism Get Us Into?

Sermon preached at Holy Trinity by the Lake, August 18, 2019. Here are the readings appointed for the day.

Good morning! My name is Fr. Jonathan, and - speaking for my wife and kids, as well as for myself - it is so wonderful to be with you. I have been carrying a heart full of gratitude these last several weeks for Holy Trinity, for the process by which God has called us to walk the life of faith with you, for the many of you who tended to that discernment, and for the even more of you who have extended a welcome whose warmth is more than worthy of the outdoor temperatures. Thank you, and I thank God for you. I look forward to our getting to know one another, and I thank God that as people like you and me seek to draw near to God, we are not left on our own; God gives us the good gift of one another; the good gift of holy friends with which to break bread and share the cup. What a gift that God in Christ has made us friends of God and each other.

I’ll be honest, Fr. Keith and I are still working together on the particulars of my position’s responsibilities, but Christian formation is at the top of the list, especially formation of children, youth, and young families. So you can imagine my delight when I spotted the Spirit-inspired gospel lesson appointed for today. Did you catch it?

Jesus, in Luke’s gospel, asking the disciples a question he’ll answer himself:

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

A good beginning.

Now, stop. Can we be real for a second? You and I need Jesus for lots of reasons, but most of us don’t need Jesus to have conflict with in-laws. Most of us can manage that on our own. Amirite?

Same with the other family dynamics. Sometimes, the father/son and mother/daughter stuff clears up with age, but not always. Any therapist worth their salt will eventually want to talk to you about what they call your family of origin because, even in the best of circumstances, that’s where the deepest wounds lie. We all have them, followers of Jesus or not.

Jesus knows this, but apparently Jesus is unwilling to promise that following him will not add to the challenge. After all, Jesus’s first followers left their families to become his disciples. Jesus’s own relationship with his family was not without its difficulties. By contrast, many - though not all - of us were introduced to Jesus through our families, but even if that was the case for you, this does not mean you aren’t familiar with the waters the first disciples navigated. In seven years of campus ministry, I shared space with countless young adults going or not going to church for the very first time as a decision independent of their families. No one looking over their shoulders. In fact, if a parent endorsed me to their college student child, it was very often the kiss of death for our relationship. Because families are complicated. In six years of parish ministry, too, I’ve met a lot of folks for whom the words “grow my church” really meant “please help my family members want to be here, too.”

Jesus doesn’t promise that following Jesus won’t add to the challenge. But neither does Jesus ask us to add to the challenge for its own sake. The main character in today’s gospel is not division; the main character in today’s gospel is the God who comes to ordinary, mostly boring folks like you and me and shouts the life-changing invitation: “Follow me!”, giving us far more interesting lives than the ones most of us would have managed on our own, left to our own devices, had we not been found and called by the God who delivered Israel out of Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead. So we follow, not just once, not just a couple of times, but each day, every day, every hour, filled with new wonder and expectation, ready to be called out and surprised. The Methodist pastor Will Willimon says, “The (whole) Christian life is spent figuring out what baptism got us into.”

Will Willimon knows something about what baptism got us into. Willimon comes from the deep South. South Carolina. His family had been a family of considerable wealth until it was destroyed near the end of the Civil War. He describes the way the day salvation found him in the person of an African-American roommate who one day began a conversation he would later call a conversion by asking, “Does it bother you that there are laws to keep us separate?” (1)

Can I ask you, when was the last time God called you in a way that invited you to leave the space of what you’d known before God called you into something new? Can you think of a time when God invited you to leave the familiar, to cross an unknown threshold or enter a brand new metaphorical land?

In the 12th century, a young man named Francis was busy minding his own business, coming of age in a wealthy family, when God called him to repair God’s church. He showed up to the church the next day with a hammer and a bucket of nails, ready to do his part, but God had a good laugh and said, “That’s not what I mean.” Instead, God called Francis to give up his wealth. Francis stripped naked in the middle of town, and an embarrassed bishop covered him up with his coat. Francis left the family inheritance behind and went on to start what we now know as the Franciscan order. He lived on the kindness of others, preached to birds and wolves alike and, less well known - while the rest of Christendom went off to war, to fight the Fifth Crusade, Francis crossed the battle lines; he traveled to Egypt to befriend the Muslim sultan there, to seek and proclaim the peace of Christ.

Look out, you’ve been warned. God only knows what absurdity God might call us to next. So we Christians stay ready, we continue to grow, to move, to expect God in strange things, unknown people and unlikely places, because God continues to call us. Not once or even a couple of times, but each day, every day, across a lifetime, so we get up, we go out, filled with that wonder, trust, and expectation. Made alive to the resurrection truth that more is possible. Made alive to the Good News that God is doing a new thing, a new thing that, with childlike eagerness, God really wants to show us.

I remember the day I met Phil Stevenson in West Texas. Phil was a former JAG officer turned small town mayor turned priest. Now he was coming up on 40 years in the priesthood. Because his path struck me as a strange one, I asked him about his journey, what led him to his change of vocation, his present calling.

He told me about another man, a cattle rancher, he met while serving as a JAG officer, post-WW II, overseas in Japan. The man raised cattle and gave away nearly all of the cattle he raised, to peasants mostly, asking nothing in return, with the lone stipulation that they also give any offspring cattle they raised to others. He’d left his family, his county, all he knew to become a wellspring of life for strangers, and to become poor alongside them. Philip asked the man why he did this. What had led him to this change? The man filled and broke my good friend’s heart with his answer; he’d seen another’s life transformed by the Gospel and God’s call, he began to believe God’s Good News might call him, too, and he found himself one day willing to be made open. He spoke about having found a great treasure; he talked about abundant life.

You can almost hear the author of Hebrews wanting to break in at this point… And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, Rahab, David, Samuel, and the prophets, Mary, Sarah, Rebekah, and Elizabeth, the heavenly hosts with all the saints, all those with whom we keep the feast; those who wait to eat until we join them, all those of the great family of faith, the cloud of witnesses we know and to which we belong through the wonder and waters of baptism.

No life, it seems, is beyond God’s imagination for holiness, beyond God’s capacity to transform, redeem and, even God help us, be made interesting.

We leave our old lives behind, true. We lay down our tired swords of self-righteousness, self-preservation, and fears that our gifts aren’t enough, that we can’t be enough. But with those swords laid down, our hands free and empty, God gives new and unexpected life. We lift up our hearts. We are fed at this table. We are met here by Christ. Christ Jesus "who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross" (Phil. 2:6-8).

As surely as the risen Jesus bears his wounds, we will bear wounds, too, by our following. The Good News about our wounds is that God knows them. Your pain is not hidden to God. The God who calls you, sees you, knows you, and loves you. And as we continue to know ourselves more truly in the light of this love, we know we cannot help but continue to turn toward the one who calls us his own, lest we betray the burning God has placed upon our hearts for God.

Question: what has this turning looked like in your life? What might it look like still? What visions, dreams, and holy words has God shown to you? How has God surprised you? They’re rhetorical questions right now, but I’d love to hear about it, if you’d be willing to share it. It’ll be the best coffee or other beverage of my week. Question: who else knows the story of your turning, of your seeing? Of God’s speaking, and your response, with God’s good help? Of considerations and hesitations and half-grasped decisions that maybe didn’t make sense to others - or even to you - apart from their pointing to Jesus, crucified and risen.

My wife pulled me from the bedtime routine some nights ago to share the magazine story of Katie Davis, twenty-two, living in Uganda, founder of a child sponsorship program, local feeding program, and self-sustaining vocational program - empowering local women to make and sell bead necklaces. Oh, and she is mother to thirteen of the children, whom she’s adopted. Says Katie, "People tell me I am brave. People tell me I am strong. People tell me good job. Well here is the truth of it. I am really not that brave, I am not really that strong, and I am not doing anything spectacular. I am just doing what God called me to do…”

Let us pray.

Almighty God, whose Mary-like beauty compels our attention, give us hearts that jump within us with the good news of your salvation. We confess that amid the tedium of the everyday our worship of you sometimes feels like a job - just “one more thing.” Thank you for the unsettling of our lives, wherein we discover the splendor of the kingdom made possible by your Son, Jesus Christ. We pray that you will ever be here, unsettling our attempts to domesticate the wildness of your Spirit. (2)

Amen.

______

(1) In Accidental Preacher: A Memoir.

(2) From Prayers Plainly Spoken, by Stanley Hauerwas.

Leave the Shiny Things at Home (my final sermon in Madison)

The readings for Sunday, July 7, 2019. My final sermon in Madison, preached at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, at the invitation of my colleague and friend, the Rev. Don Fleischman.

Good morning! My name is Jonathan Melton, chaplain at St. Francis House, the Episcopal Student Center at UW-Madison, go Badgers! For those keeping count at home, SFH is the 104 year old mission and ministry of the Diocese of Milwaukee. It’s always wonderful to be at St. Luke’s and to see so many familiar faces. If we haven’t met yet, I hope you’ll introduce yourself after the service. I say this every time I’m here, because it’s true: I’m deeply grateful for the friendship that St. Luke’s and St. Francis House have historically shared through the years - hopefully not one-sided, but on the SFH side highlighted by scores of delicious meals (I'm look at you, Diane Brown!) - and for personal friendships across seven years, with Fr. Don and others, gifts of God in this season. (I think you'll like my successor a lot.)* It is likewise a gift to be invited to preach and preside this morning, to be with you as we worship the living God together.

This is probably my last sermon in Madison, at least before my family moves to Texas, where I have accepted a call to serve at a church near the neighborhood in which I grew up. Which for our practical purposes this morning means I tried really hard all week to think of a flashy, catchy intro to make this The Very Best One, to assure you from the outset that you are in trustworthy homily hands, and to assure me from the get go that I can count on the illusion of your fixed attention for the remainder of twelve minutes. 

But then I read the readings. And especially the gospel, where Jesus sends seventy disciples to proclaim the Good News this way: Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. It’s a shorter version of what he told the trial-run twelve just a chapter before: “Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt.” 

Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals. Take nothing with you. Travel light. But not just travel light, travel empty. Leave the shiny things at home. Don’t worry about credentials. Bring nothing to compete with, distract from, get in the way of, the message you’ll proclaim. So much for an entertaining introduction. But, wait, it gets worse. Travel vulnerably. Rely on the hospitality of strangers for your shelter, for your food. It all feels eerily connected to what Jesus will tell them later, in the garden, as the soldiers are closing in: put the swords away. Travel without violence or defense.

Clearly, Jesus was not a Boy Scout, compass attached to his belt loop or pack strap. You know, “Be prepared.” Or a gear guy. Most folks where I’m from are raised such that they count it a personal failing to be found without a pocket knife. Not Jesus. I wonder, is he Marie Kondo before his time? A worthy question. Maybe. But the instruction to leave the purse, bag, and sandals behind doesn’t seem to depend on whether these things bring the disciples joy. Why, then? To what end does Jesus send his disciples out this way?

Bring nothing to compete with, distract from, get in the way of, the message you’ll proclaim. And what is the message, do you remember? The kingdom of God has come near. Put the rest down. It's the same logic that leads Paul to write in Galatians, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” And again in 2nd Corinthians: 

It is not ourselves that we proclaim; we proclaim Christ

Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants, for Jesus' sake.

For the same God who said, "Out of darkness let light

shine," has caused his light to shine within us, to give the

light of revelation--the revelation of the glory of God in the

face of Jesus Christ.     

It’s weird, I think, how Jesus and the first followers of Jesus saw some things as distracting from their witness to Jesus that most of us don’t think that much about. Take for example the feast of Pentecost. Peter, preaching the church’s first sermon as tongues of fire spread everywhere and the whole thing comes unhinged, is chaos, so many languages; the people understand the words, if not at all what’s happening. And Peter begins that first sermon with those three stirring and immortal words, “We’re not drunk.” It’s only nine o’clock in the morning. Evidently, one reason to value temperance is that it might protect you from alcoholism, but another - and seemingly equally important - reason is that avoiding drunkenness insures that alcohol will not obstruct your witness, your ability to see and tell others about the work of the Spirit in the common life of God’s People.

Similarly, the first Christians took literally Jesus’ instruction to put away the sword. What gain of the sword could be worth the price of the witness they stood to give for the reign of the Prince of Peace?

Most obviously, and frequently, Jesus talked about wealth. Not only is wealth an apparently poor indicator of righteousness, except perhaps inversely (though not always), but it seems to warp a person’s ability to grow one’s trust in God.

The kingdom of God has come near. Put the rest down. Trust nothing else. How can a person make this proclamation with pockets full of shiny things that so clearly don’t believe it?

If you are like me, you are not even completely aware of all of the things you trust in place of trust in God. Bank accounts, privileges, knowing it all, having reading all the books, fancy clothes, nationalities - like Texan - true and false beliefs about myself. Which is to say, if Jesus is going to send us out taking nothing, if I am going to need to empty my pockets of all that I’m carrying before I go, and let’s say we imagine the line for emptying pockets like some better version of TSA, well, you don’t want to be stuck behind me in that line. It’s gonna take a while. I got full pockets. Some shiny things I’m partial to, others I’m oblivious of. That is, I don’t even know about some of the junk that's in there. At least not by myself.

I wonder, is this why Jesus sends them out two by two? Or what does that accomplish? Put everything down, but pick up a friend? Maybe friendship is a source of strength and courage for the journey ahead, and surely it is, but what if friendship is also actually the one thing you pick up that empties your pockets of everything else you forgot - or neglected - to leave at home?

Here’s what I mean. Henri Nouwen, prolific Christian writer and member of the L’Arche community, was highly sought after as a speaker and teacher. Maybe you’ve heard of him. We could all stand to read more of him. Everywhere he went, Nouwen brought another member of the L’Arche community with him. The idea was partly pragmatic: L’Arche is a community in which folks with physical and intellectual exceptionalities live on equal footing with able-bodied folks. It’s the kind of beautiful and challenging reality that one can only talk about so much. The presence of a friend made the community present in a way Nouwen couldn’t accomplish alone, no matter how well he spoke about it. But the idea to bring a friend along, according to Nouwen, also had everything to do with making sure his pockets were empty, so that he didn’t try even subconsciously to exaggerate, impress, or misrepresent reality.

Nouwen knew the deep truth that you can’t know yourself by yourself. True being and belonging only happen in community, in holy friendships of vulnerability and trust. Nouwen brought a friend along in his travels because he believed that the presence of someone who knew the truth about him and the community would make him more truthful and keep his identity grounded in the community of faith through which God had shown him more of himself than he would have ever known alone, most especially the certainty of God's love for him. Consequently, Nouwen would be less likely to idealize either himself or the community as people who did not regularly depend on mercy, forgiveness, and grace not their own for the good work of being present to one another. He would look for the way of God's making, not his own. His proclamation would be less obstructed. It is not ourselves that we proclaim, we proclaim Christ Jesus... Carry nothing, Jesus said. But travel together, and together proclaim that the kingdom of God has come near.

Who could have guessed that the intimate work of knowing another person and being known by other people in the community of faith has everything to do with being able to proclaim the truth that the kingdom of God has come near? That is to say, the hard work of community here, your perseverance in love with one another, ripples out, it overflows and goes out from here into the world. Which is another way of saying that our friendships are not our own. Even our most intimate friendships are gifts for the making known of God’s love in this world. 

Finally, then, if you were going to speak in front of others, like Nouwen, or visit a strange land, or make some other risk of proclamation, convinced of Nouwen’s insight about the gift of bring a holy friend, which friends would make your shortlist of those you’d want to bring along? Whose presence would communicate the life of the community and ground your being in the truth of God’s love? No more shiny things. All that put away. Trusting and delighting in God. Can I ask you, do these friends, who are gifts to you, know this about themselves, that by their friendship you know yourself more clearly in the light of God’s love, such that you can more nearly proclaim God’s love without distraction, self-deception, or fear? If you could share this news with your friends and then venture to ask them where they thought God might send you both next, to proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of God, what do you think they might say? Vulnerable, empty, and traveling light, proclaiming our Lord, hand in hand with each other, to whom might God send you next?

________

It was really moving to be surrounded by the saints and sent off with prayer today at St. Luke's, and to receive this icon of Luke, which is traditionally given to their graduates. I *guess* seven years is like a PhD in campus ministry! ;) In addition to occasional supply visits, I spent 3 months with St. Luke's during a time of transition in 2016, the first of 3 extended supply tenures to different Madison churches during my time at St. Francis House. I will cherish this gift, and God knows I carry the people of St. Luke's in my heart in the season ahead.

* Funny because my successor is their current priest. haha Get it?? 

Your Love is Like Yogurt (a wedding homily for Kate & Kevin)

Wedding homily for Kate Schneider and Kevin Sampson. The readings they selected were Ruth, 1:6-18, 1 John 4:7-16, and Mark 12:28-34. Additionally, they had read the following meditation from Madeleine L'Engle (from the Irrational Season):

But ultimately there comes a moment when a decision must be made. Ultimately two people who love each other must ask themselves how much they hope for as their love grows and deepens, and how much risk they are willing to take…It is indeed a fearful gamble…Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation…It takes a lifetime to learn another person…When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

Dearly beloved, friends, Kevin and Kate,

To name the obvious, the watchword of the day, the watchword of this moment, is love.

Kate and Kevin, go ahead and look behind you, at these people. They’re here to witness love, but they’re also here because they love you.

People looking at Kevin and Kate looking at you, you came to witness love, but the truth about today is that your love for Kate and Kevin has shaped their imaginations for what love is and what it is to love. Each of you is a real part of the love they are about to promise to one another.

Weddings are unusual as church services go, because the readings aren’t predetermined. If they want to, the couple picks them. I have seldom encountered a couple who picked the readings as thoughtfully and conscientiously as Kate and Kevin have. The scriptures and meditation we just heard, read so beautifully, reveal something of the love the rest of you have shown them, to which you have opened them. You are the reason some texts jumped out at them and others didn’t. And the world of love reflected in what we just heard is pretty amazing. You get some credit for that.

But lest you get big heads about yourselves, you didn’t make it up, either. Someone else showed you, too. Sometimes they showed you in hurtful ways and you learned love by doing the opposite of what was done to you. But more often, I bet, something about the word someone spoke to you or the hand they extended to you or the silence someone shared with you communicated something of love that you received as a revelation of love. And it’s all being collected just now in a particular way, as the fire that burns in the hearts of the two pretty people at the center of this day. Their receiving love that you received and that was received before you by the people who made love known to you, in every generation, in each iteration, made new.

So Kevin and Kate come here today, as Madeleine L’Engle hinted, as participants in and not possessors of love. Love is active, comes to people, moves through them, too. We touch, receive, and share in love; we are always holding love that comes to us from somewhere else. Love has a source.

In this way, Kate and Kevin, your love is like yogurt. The two of you know as well as I do that it is not uncommon on the UW campus to come across students who make their own yogurt, and who want to see you do it too. It’s sweet, the determined enthusiasm of the yogurt enthusiasts. To make your own yogurt, you need milk and jars and, well, yogurt. This is where they always lose me. You need yogurt to make yogurt? If I had yogurt why would I need to make yogurt? But the yogurt you need is the starter, not the whole thing. In his letter, John celebrates the Divine as the yogurt that needs no starter, the source of the love to which all other loves belong, from which all other yogurt comes: “Beloved,” he writes, “let us love one another, because love is from God...God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.” That love, like a starter yogurt strain, claims all the love that ever after comes from it. And so your love is a victory not its own.

In a commencement speech, that great theologian of the church Stephen Colbert said to a lawnful of college graduates, “You cannot win your life.” It’s the kind of thing that sounds true and sensible enough until some jerk cuts you off in traffic. Or you find yourself making a sacrifice that you know no one else will see. You cannot win your life. Not one of us gets out alive. If love is a victory not its own, then what is true of life is also true of love. You cannot win your love. There’s no doing love best, and certainly no doing love better than your partner or your parents or the privileged or the poor. Every victory of your love is a victory for all the loves that came before it and every love that follows it. Every victory of love is for the others. It’s true that love wins, but the victory of love comes not from vanquishing enemies, even on some days your spouse, but in celebration and remembrance of the source; in connection to and thanksgiving for the source.

Kevin and Kate, about that promise to love one another, the one you are both about to make, in the sacrament of marriage. My experience of you both is as people of the highest character and tremendous integrity. So - I’ll be honest - it is a little surprising that you would make a promise as risky, to use Madeleine L’Engle’s word, and as reckless as marriage. To promise love is to make a promise for which you cannot know beforehand what you’re promising. Except you do know you have promised to love. So you are committing yourselves, as far as I can tell, in the same way that improv comics commit themselves. They don’t know the lines or scenes ahead of time, but they promise to be generous players with each other and those around them. They know the only way to lose is to try to win the scenes. As stewards of a love you have received, give generously to one another and those around, forgive generously each other and those around you. Thank you for committing yourselves to love even what you don’t control, namely each other, and so becoming beacons for us all of the Love that is our home.

Amen.

Love, the Bible, and Other Things We Pretend are Easy to Understand

Back in the day, hanging on a wall just inside the doors on the way to the college post office at the school I attended, was a theological disagreement board. On it, students and faculty would post thoughtful and sometimes less thoughtful theological positions, but the exciting thing about the board is that responses were invited and encouraged. In a given week, if you were lucky, you could watch two or three really interesting discussions unfold, on day at a time, as red ink filled the margins of the original post or, if we were really lucky, someone channeled their inner Martin Luther and thumb-tacked amendments or official disputations to the end of the preceding post. 

The theology board had so much potential, but sadly most of it went unrealized. That is because the most common response scribbled in the margins was a three word kiss-of-death that would shame most posters into silence:

"That's not biblical."

(I know, I know. Four words, if you count the apostrophe.)

At an evangelical college, one of the worst things to be accused of was departure from scripture. For all we knew, the recipient of such an admonition might soon find herself on the slippery side of the slope that led to reading the notoriously liberal Karl Barth. I hope my intended sarcasm/humor comes across, but it was also our situation.

Even as an undergraduate student much intimidated by the theology board, I found the suggestion that one's theological opponents, because they did not read the Bible the way you did, did not read or value the Bible, absurd. Of course, there are violent and inaccurate ways to read/twist scripture. But it's also true that the Bible is not self-interpreting. Much is plain, much is not, and within its pages are myriad disagreements and tensions of scriptural interpretation. It is a heavy and cruel burden to be saddled with an outside directive to encounter the Bible and not find it wondrous, mysterious, and strange. Moreover, such a directive wreaks of misused power dynamics and the desire to intimidate, limit, bully, and/or control another person's faithful imagination, which might have become a gift even to the one so directing. So the directive usually comes from those heavily weighted by fear.

I share the story of the theology board and the assumption that my understanding of the Bible is the understanding of the Bible, and should be obvious to everyone, because I have noticed a tendency to apply the same dynamic to the exhortation to love one another. Before I go on, let me say clearly that I believe in the exhortation to love one another! What makes me nervous, however, is the frequent assumption that what it is to love in a given situation is everywhere obvious. In such a moment, love is presented as the one thing we can all agree to do. But agreeing to love has never been my problem with love. 

Some days I want to love, but I don't know what to love well would look like. It's the lesson of ally-ship, for a white, straight, cisgender, male, that pretending to know how to love apart from vulnerable relationship and difficult conversations and similarly difficult feedback is but another way of insulating myself from discomfort while reinforcing the status quo. It's the impotence we feel when we enter the hospital room with a dear friend who is dying. It's a compassionate reading of the foolish things Job's friends say to Job, which we sometimes mock, even as we thank God we weren't put in their shoes. To borrow from a Sam Wells sermon I can no longer locate, quoting the 80s band Foreigner, some days 

I wanna know what love is.

Dismissing other details while appealing to the obvious baseline of love is little different from appealing to one's own "biblical" reading of scripture, with all of its attending dynamics of power and coercion. Both love and sacred texts are not always easy to know. Both are regularly wondrous, mysterious, and strange. Both, I would argue, are projects enhanced by, and which require, the company of holy friends, for surely if, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others have shown us, we cannot know ourselves by ourselves, we cannot by ourselves learn to love our neighbors as ourselves. Such a community of holy friends, if they were Christian, would remember Jesus' commandment to love as Christ has loved us, that challenging transformation of the Golden Rule, and so turn to the scriptures in the expectation of being shown more and more about the nature of the love of God made known to us in Christ Jesus, most chiefly on the cross. Such a turning and expectation, with much prayer, might protect us from claiming as love that which is merely sentimentality. 

But all in its time. To begin, I would be much relieved to find consensus in the modest contention that there are times and situations in which what it is to love is not obvious. I imagine a circle of friends, meeting semi-regularly, each bringing to the circle one occasion in their life for which love's expression is not clear. Each would speak and be received in turn. The ones who receive would have previously foresworn offering solutions or "should." Instead, they would be invited to offer images of scripture which the Spirit calls to mind, or verses from hymns of the community, or wisdom of the saints. No debates or formal conversation, just offerings until they're done, received as gifts to pick up or put down, but locating the difficulty in the resources of faith, of which the circle, the gathered Body of Christ, is not least. 

Wendell Berry on Climate Change

Wendell Berry, wreaking havoc again in his brilliant essay 'Leaving the Future Behind: A Letter to a Scientific Friend,' from his collection, The Art of Loading Brush. Hoping this provocative teaser inspires folks to read the full thing, which is about as profound an exploration of the relationship between presence, character, and activism as I have yet come across.

I feel no discomfort in saying that to require people to 'believe in climate change' as a test of their human worth is both a pointless snobbery and a meaningless distraction....Our time's great wrongs of waste and pollution are wrong in themselves. They would be wrong whether or note they cause climate change. They are wrong according to the economic measure of thrift. They are wrong according to the measure of the sanctity of the living world, and because of their immediate practical harms to nature and to human nature. Their first damage is to the character of the perpetrators (emphasis mine).

A case very much in point is that of a large coal-fired power plant that was planned not long ago for western Kansas. Its construction was successfully opposed by appealing to people's intuitive and inherited disapproval of waste and pollution. The plant's potential contribution to climate change was intentionally never mentioned, because there was no reason to do so and a very good reason not to do so: To do so would have divided the otherwise undivided opposition to the plant. For those aware of the local particulars, the problem declared itself this way: Both the believers and the disbelievers in climate change believed in conservation, in doing 'the right thing.' Their agreement on conservation defeated the power plant. Their disagreement on climate change was irrelevant. 

In other words, if we are only concerned about our relationship to the environment when the stakes are existential, we are completely lost already. Ironically, lowering the moral bar so low requires a consensus whose absence makes room for greater environmental injury. Note: Wendell Berry is no denier of climate change - his argument is wholly practical. Nurturing and sustaining local communities capable of having character to damage in the first place is another question, which he alludes to elsewhere. Predictably, the examples to which he points are local ones, specific ones, which maybe at least occasions for us reflection on the nature of the character to which our own local communities aspire.