Etch A Sketch Church in an iPad World

Sitting in a deli working on a sermon over lunch recently, I noticed an eight or nine year old boy looking for a seat. Carefully cradled under his arm was a half-inch thick red-framed rectangular screen a little smaller than a sheet of paper. “Cool,” I thought. “He’s got an Etch A Sketch to keep him busy while he waits for lunch to arrive.” As he neared, I realized there were no telltale white knobs and the red frame was just rubberized protection for his iPad.

Of course, my initial interpretation of what the boy carried betrayed my own generational habitat and reminded me of the hours I spent turning those beloved white knobs when I was his age. Glancing at the iPad next to my lunch plate I was caught up in a swirl of nostalgia and wonder at how things have changed.

Then, rising from the reflective eddy came a question: Are we an Etch A Sketch church in an iPad world?

It is easy to hear this as an either/or question laden with value judgments resulting in a division of the household of faith into something like “Etchers” and “Padders.” That’s not how I hear it. Etch A Sketch and iPad are very different means of creative expression and engagement with the world. Placing them alongside one another they become metaphors for the contemporary church’s creative expression of the gospel and its engagement with the world for the sake of that gospel. Such metaphors can lead us into fruitful discernment and effective engagement with God’s mission of healing and hope in the world today and into the future. In fact, this sort of playful reflection and conversation might assist us in living into this new day like the early apostles did in their new day. (Now would be a good time to read Acts 10-15 if you haven’t lately.)

For example, I am struck with the self-contained nature of the Etch A Sketch in comparison to the iPad. A person can create beautiful images by twisting those white knobs with care and precision guided by his or her creative vision. But the Etch A Sketch has no built-in interaction with or input from outside the etcher’s immediate local context. An iPad, by nature, penetrates boundaries to provide multi-directional engagement with the world. It is, by default, connected to and welcoming of interaction, resources, insight and input from an almost infinite number of sources far beyond the user’s immediate context. While we can come up with some pretty creative mission and ministry by turning the knobs of the self-contained resources right at hand, might the church, including your congregation, benefit from more immediate, intuitive and multi-directional connection with people, resources, and perspectives from well-beyond the usual red-rimmed boundaries we tend to work within?

Are we an Etch A Sketch church in an iPad world?

Let’s talk about this. Post a comment here. You can also email me, send me a note by mail, chat with me when I visit your congregation or you catch me at Starbucks. Let’s use this metaphor to help each other find faithful and effective ways to follow Jesus into this 21^st century world. In mid-September I will share more of my thoughts about this and respond to some of yours as well.

Vocational Conflict

Our son, Nathan, graduates high school this June. In fact, his graduation ceremony is the morning of Saturday, June 9 in Indianapolis…when I am supposed to be leading the last day of the 2012 Indiana-Kentucky Synod Assembly in Covington, KY.

Do you ever find yourself in this sort of vocational conflict?

Interpreting scripture, Martin Luther spilled a good deal of ink on the concept of vocation. As baptized people, marked with the cross of Christ and sealed with the Holy Spirit, our central and primary vocation – or calling – is to shine the light of Christ in the world: “Let your light so shine before others that they see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Other vocations, or “callings,” spring from and are means by which we express this central calling: parent, child, student, spouse, sibling, worker, friend, steward, activist, caregiver, diaconal minister, bishop…

In fact, one theologian has said that, “Seen through the lens of vocation, all human work becomes a means to participate in God’s creating and sustaining activity on earth…Luther is fond of saying that one’s own roles and relationships surely give one more than enough God-pleasing work to do without having to look for more.”[1]

Yes, indeed, there is more than enough work to do! We know that well. We are sometimes overwhelmed at our more than enough “callings” to shine the light of Christ. And, sometimes those more than enough callings conflict with one another, forcing us to make a decision about which one to give priority at any given moment. In some ways that is the dilemma of our often over-busy lives. How do we balance all these vocations, these callings?

We pray. We weigh the various aspects of each situation and related consequences. We seek the counsel of others. We tend to the primary relationships God has entrusted to us. And then we take a leap. We “sin boldly” by following the leading of God’s Spirit to privilege, at least for the moment, one vocation over another in service to the one overarching calling, and we entrust ourselves and our decisions to God’s amazing, forgiving, transforming grace.

So this year, leadership of the last few hours of the Synod Assembly will be in the very capable and generous hands of our Synod Vice President and others. That Saturday morning, I will rise early to drive back to Indianapolis just in time to sidle up next to my wife, Janet, and daughter, Kira, to beam with parental pride while Nathan strides across the dais into his future.

May God grant us all continued grace with ourselves and with one another as we tend all of our more than enough vocations.

Bishop Bill Gafkjen

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[1] Kathryn Kleinhaus, “The Work of a Christian: Vocation in Lutheran Perspective,” Word and World, Volume 25, Number 4, Fall 2005 (download at http://www.elca.org/Growing-In-Faith/Vocation/Word-and-Service.aspx)

Think Creatively

[The mission territory that I serve as bishop is about to embark on a re-visioning process called "New Vision for a New Day: Listen deeply. Think creatively. Act boldly." This piece is a brief reflection on the second aspect of that process.]

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen

[Ephesians 3:14-21, NRSV]

From the very beginning of scripture to its ending, God engages in the sometimes irritating habit of calling people to think creatively. Over and over again, God’s people seem to limit their vision and, consequently, their creative energies, to the borderline where their own limitations, frailties and failings meet the threats, challenges, and impositions of life.

To weary people on the edge of a promised land fraught with well-armed giants, God says, “Go ahead; take it.”

      To people languishing in exile, God entreats, “Do not remember the things of old…I am about to do a new thing!”

      God in Christ, no longer bound by doors locked tight by fear, appears to dispirited disciples whispering peace and proclaiming, “Fling wide the doors! I am sending you just like the Father sent me.”

      In a multitude of languages, God’s Spirit permeates the people on Pentecost, calling them to dream new dreams.

      God calls to Peter, bound as he is by careful adherence to tradition, to stretch beyond the boundaries and borders at the very outer edge of his vision.

      The truth is, fear binds and faith frees. Or, more accurately, when all we see are the immense challenges in the light of our own frailties and failings we often become fearful, paralyzed, and held captive to our own imagination and to what we already know. On the other hand, trust in God’s redeeming activity in the world, combined with trust in God’s unfailing love and care for us and for the world, offers freedom to let go of what we already know and to reach beyond our own limited vision, well-worn pathways, and daunting challenges to receive with open hands God’s creative, life-giving future.

       Next time you are in a planning session at church, or trying to imagine your way through a difficult time at home, or working with a community committee on some new project, take a moment to consider the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s amazing grace and then let your imagination run wild and free into God’s imaginative future.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen

Using Lent? Using God?

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news. [Jesus; Mark 1:15]

Sometimes, I wonder if the season of Lent has become yet another wonderful gift that we tend to grab hold of with our grubby little hands and curve in on ourselves to make it all about us.  And by pulling it so tightly to ourselves, I wonder if we squeeze the very life out of it.

Think about it: we tend to focus on what we give up (like chocolate or some other thing in which we usually take delight) or what we take up (like more worship services or more time at the soup kitchen or more prayer). We talk about our sin, our repentance. We take these forty days to focus on my purpose, the state of my spiritual life, breaking my bad habits and disciplining myself into new and better habits.

 Borrowing from St. Augustine, Martin Luther called this “incurvatus in se,” curved in on oneself.  In his lectures on the biblical book of Romans he says that our nature is so deeply curved in upon itself that we turn the finest gifts of God into something just for ourselves and hoard them. Indeed, Luther says, we use God to achieve our aims. [Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, Kindle location 6745]

It’s no wonder an old friend of mine often ends his emails during this season with “Have a miserable Lent!”

The truth is, if Lent is only about us, our sin, our struggles, our habits, then we are – and will be – miserable people. There is no hope in that, nothing to pull us out of our inward, downward spiral, no power within us to set us free. Left to ourselves these forty days, we may find ourselves crawling into Easter laden with despair rather than lifted with resurrection joy.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Notice that here, at the very beginning of his public ministry, Jesus does not say something like:

Thank goodness you all have finally disciplined yourselves enough, given up enough, added enough devotion and service to your days, turned away from enough sin that God is finally convinced that you are ready for God’s reign.

No! Jesus just shows up as God’s son, in the power of God’s Spirit, at God’s appointed time to announce the nearness of God’s kingdom and to invite folks to simply pay attention and trust that God is up to something new and good.

Repent, and believe the good news!

Repentance is, first and foremost, less about turning our own lives around and more about being opened to the newness God brings near in Jesus. It’s about welcoming the reign of God, trusting it and letting it shape us and our days. To repent is to let go of our white-knuckled grip on trying to be good, to get it right, to be what we’re afraid we are not.

In that letting go and trusting the good news of God’s nearness, we are set free from that inward curve and are turned outward to true and abundant life. And we are moved to share it as freely as we have received it.

The disciplines of Lent are not bad or wrongheaded in and of themselves. They can be ways in which God works in us to open our hearts and hands to welcome and share God’s reign. But the good news, the best news, is that Lent begins and ends not with us, but with God.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.

So Jesus says at the beginning of these forty days. And then he walks the talk all the way to Jerusalem, through the cross and out of an empty tomb, for us and for the world.

Repent and believe this good news!

May your Lenten way be scattered with the wonder of the God who draws near long before you take the first step!

[You may listen to Bill's recording of this piece through the Indiana-Kentucky Synod website: http://www.iksynod.org. Click here: IN-KY Synod Lenten Podcast]

Lent Again?!

The movie, “Groundhog Day” stars Bill Murray as an ill-tempered TV weatherman unhappy about having to cover, yet again, the annual emergence of the renowned groundhog, Punxatawney Phil from his den. While in Punxatawney, Murray’s character (also named Phil) gets caught in a time loop in which he repeats February 2 over and over and over again. Every duplication of the day is announced by his alarm going off at 6:00 a.m. with Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You, Babe.” Throughout the movie Phil travels from shock and dismay, into self-centered manipulation of the experience (and of others), through bored endurance, and, finally, into embrace of the transformation offered by seemingly endless reprisals of the day.

Sometimes moving through the church year (even weekly liturgies) over and over and over again can be something like Phil’s experience with Groundhog Day: Shock and dismay…self-centered manipulation…bored endurance…

Yet again, the alarm plays “I Got You, Babe” and Ash Wednesday approaches with its annual ashen imposition of mortality’s shadow. Yet again, we’re invited to engage six weeks worth of Lenten discipline (how many times do I have to give up chocolate, anyway?). Over and over and over we sing those dreary hymns, wonder whether Sundays are included in the fast, hear the stories of suffering and loss, worry that our congregation will do a foot washing…

It’s pretty natural for repetition to trigger everything from dismay to self-centeredness to boredom, even with something like the church year. Yet, repetition also carries promise when it’s rooted in the presence and promises of God. Hearing the stories again and again, engaging the ritualized behaviors over and over, walking the same path with Jesus and other members of his body time after time…all these and more can draw us through repetitious rehearsal into new life, transformation, and deeper engagement in God’s mission of healing and hope in the world.

Wartburg Seminary professor Craig Nessan puts it this way: What each of these ritual occasions provides is the opportunity to...articulate and rehearse what we ordinarily neglect...What we ritualize by means of the historic Christian liturgy is nothing other than the kingdom of God proclaimed and embodied in the person of Jesus…Worship affords the occasion to rehearse the role of one’s true self, a citizen of God’s kingdom [Beyond Maintenance to Mission, p. 37].

Blessed (and transforming) repetition be yours this holy season and always!

Bishop Bill Gafkjen

Even God Waits

[Click on this link to listen to this reflection as a podcast by the author: http://www.iksynod.org/Resources/Podcasts/2011adventweekone.html] 

Listen to this startling Advent assertion from Isaiah 30:18:

The Lord waits to be gracious to you. Therefore God will rise up to show mercy to you.

When we think of Advent waiting, we usually think of our waiting…or the waiting of our loved ones…or the waiting of the world. It’s the waiting expressed in so many psalms.

For example, Psalm 60: “I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.”

This is the waiting at the hospital bedside of a parent or child.

It’s the waiting for a job, for resolution to a breaking relationship, for freedom from addiction.

This is the waiting for peace in war-torn lands, for the economy to turn around, for those without food to be fed.

Our waiting is deep. It’s often painful, confusing and lonely. We wait for God, often impatiently, even desperately.

That may be why it is startling to hear that even God waits. This ancient promise to people waiting in exile is a startling reminder that God gets there first. Before the exiles’ waiting for deliverance, before our waiting for joy, hope or peace, is God’s waiting to bring it.

As we journey with Joseph and Mary toward the birth Bethlehem, we are reminded that God’s waiting is gestational. While we don’t see much happening, God is working on fulfilling promises. In “due” time God will rise up to show mercy to us, as Isaiah promises. This is, after all, who God is:

…delivering from slavery in Egypt…restoring from exile in Babylon… birthing Jesus in the quiet of a Bethlehem night…raising this same Jesus from the dead in the early dawn of a Sunday morning…

At the right time, in God’s time, God’s waiting will come to an end and God will rise up to bring us home.

So, we wait, wrapping gifts, singing carols, drinking nog, sustained by bread and wine and Word and the company of others who wait.

And we wait under the canopy of God’s promises. There, right there in our uncertainty, alongside our pain, and in our impatient desperation, the very God who crafted the canopy of promise waits underneath it with us.

Hear it again:

The Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore God will rise up to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. [Isaiah 30:18]

You are blessed.

May your Advent journey be sustained and led toward Christmas by this promising light! 

Christmas Imposition

On the 16^th of November, waiting in my favorite coffee shop for the arrival of my venti bold with a little room, I found myself humming along with the music wafting from the speakers in the ceiling. Before I even realized what I was doing my mind caught up with the words of the song:

Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains…

Yikes! Mid-November and the Christmas season was imposing itself on me, sneaking up so stealthily and unexpectedly that I didn’t realize it until the angels reached the refrain to sing their glo-o-o-orias o’er the espresso.

I know that this early advent of Christmas carols in a coffee store is, in some ways, not much more than crass commercialism working to get me in the mood to rescue the economy by spending more than I should this Christmas. It’s as if the mermaid on my coffee cup was singing a siren song sweetly and subliminally underneath the angelic refrain: “Gloria! Buy early and often!” (Believe it or not, that actually works with the rhythm of the refrain; try it.)

Yet, I wondered as I wandered across the city sipping the hot java: Might this also be a sign of the impatience and persistence of Christmas?

The world and I yearn, we ache, for signs of God’s nearness, of God’s steadfast love and transforming presence. We cry out for rescue, relief and redemption, sometimes with sighs too deep for words. And this healing, this relief, this new life is precisely what God promises to bring through the babe born in Bethlehem. So urgent is our need and so sure is this, God’s promise, that the promise imposes itself impatiently and persistently on our days. It sneaks in where it can, rises up from unexpected places, swoops down from unimagined heights to draw near and sweetly sing God’s steadfast love to our aching hearts: Come to Bethlehem and see!

This is the gladsome tiding that inspires the heavenly song that imposes itself on our days. God is near in the One wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger, stripped and strung on a cross, and who left the swaddling clothes behind on the floor of the empty tomb for us, for the world, right now, today.

Look for this Emmanuel, listen for the angel song announcing his nearness, this holy season and always.

Gloria in excelsis Deo!

Passing Peace

A funny thing happened on the way to the altar...

Not many moments after I had preached on a Sunday morning in one of our synod’s congregations, as invited by the liturgy, I was moving down the center aisle of the worship space sharing the peace. As I turned this way and that offering and receiving that amazing gift among the good people of the congregation, I eventually noticed a gentle but persistent tug on the cincture (rope) hanging from my be-robed waist.

I looked around and, finally, down, to find the source: a 4 or 5 year old tow-headed bespectacled boy looking up with deep intention, his hand (the one not still holding the cincture) extended. I folded my 6 ½ foot frame to look him in the eyes. “Peace be with you,” he whispered. “And also with you,” I said, grateful for the mutual gifting his tugging evoked.

On the long drive home this experience brought biblically storied people tumbling to mind: priests hustling by a man who lies moaning in the ditch on their way to temple, a fragile woman grabbing at the fringe of a messianic cloak on the move, an alms-asker beckoning to pray-ers on their way to pray, a small boy standing among 5000 offering his boxed lunch to sate their hunger. I wonder how often I overlook either gift or need on my way somewhere else? As I look toward the horizon, the altar, the next task, whose need tugs for my attention just out of sight? Who waits patiently, persistently at my feet, by my side, to offer gift?

Turn our gaze, O Lord, to those nearby whose need or gift we will miss if we look only toward what’s ahead.

Seeking Emmanuel

I love the promises of Emmanuel -- God-with-us -- that permeate this Advent/Christmas time of year. My correspondence for some weeks now has closed with various versions of this prayer for those who read what I write: "May these holy days draw you deep into the mystery and joy of Emmanuel."

In the baby born in Bethlehem God draws near. God comes in humble, unexpected, even scandalous ways to be with us, to be one of us, to bear our burdens and to bear us forward, leading us through darkness into light. God with us, Emmanuel: Is there a greater promise than this?

But this year, for some reason, for me, this grand promise has an edge. It's something not so peaceful, something challenging that keeps calling me to take a close look at the way I live my days and beckoning me beyond myself and my own little Christmas tree world. It goes something like this:

The texts and music of this great season do indeed beckon us to await, look for and welcome Emmanuel, God-with-us. But those same songs and scripture call us to also await, look for and welcome God-as-over-against-us (whatever that Hebrew word would be!), at least God-as-over-against our powers and principalities, our perspectives and practices that stand in the way of God-with-everyone, that prevent the wolf and the lamb from living in harmony with each other, that obstruct and resist God's reign of peace and justice among us and for all.

I hear it, for example, in the Magnificat, Mary's melodic magnification of Emmanuel that enables us to hear and see clearly both the joy of God-with-us and the challenge of God-as-over-against all that stands in the way of God's desire for the world:

...The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of the hearts.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted high the lowly;

God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty...

Emmanuel is good news for the humble, the lowly, the hungry -- and for me when I am any or all of these things. But for the proud, the powerful, the rich -- for me when I am any or all of these things in ways that obstruct Emmanuel for others -- there is an edge to the promise. Beneath the lilting melody I hear a counterpointed call to turn in a different direction, to fall on my knees at the manger in order to be raised up to walk in the new life offered by the cross and the empty tomb that await this baby Jesus...and which our world so desperately needs.

Thankfully, in the end -- and every day and always until then -- the grand promise of this season is indeed that God is every and always Emmanuel, God-with-us-with-the-world, forgiving, drawing us deep into the presence of the God swaddled in a manger, empowering each and every one of us to experience the deep and abiding mystery and joy of being God-with-others. This is the counterpointed carol that I find myself humming joyfully and mysteriously this Christmastide.

May your Christmas be merry, mysterious and magnificent!

Elephant in the Room

Is there a more indigestion-inducing imposition on teenaged siblings than for their parents to announce that no one can move from the dinner table until a poem has been read? When we did just that a week or so ago, I saw again how amazingly adept the teenage face is at the simultaneous display of a wide spectrum of human emotions: Disbelief. Repulsion. Horror. Volcanic commitment to some thing left undone for weeks that suddenly must be done, now. Frantic, silent conspiracy between siblings. An angry stare at Dad and a quick flick of the irises toward Mom to assess shared responsibility for this assault on the teenage psyche.

Grateful for their cooperation (at least they stayed in their chairs), I randomly opened my beloved copy of Best Loved Poems. (Well, it wasn't totally random; I figured that a poem from the “Poems of Love” section might cause the kids' heads to explode, so I went for “Poems that Tell a Story.”) I landed on John Godfrey Saxe's retelling of the ancient Indian fable “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”

You probably know the story, if not the poem. Six unsighted men each have a tactile encounter with a different part of the same elephant. The fellow who bumps into the side of the elephant proclaims an elephant to be like a wall. Touching the tusk moves number two to assert elephants to be spear-like. Four more make their confident declarations: An elephant is like a snake... a tree... a fan...a rope. Each, in turn, proclaims the reality of an elephant as a whole to be contained in their own particular and distinct experience of it.

The rhyming recitation concludes by stating the moral so clearly that we can't miss it:

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Quickly and with unusually efficient teamwork, the kids cleared the table and scurried out of the room. In that postpartum silence unique to a room just vacated by teenagers, my wife, Janet, and I were left to a few moments of reverie followed by brief conversation. We were both a bit stunned at how accurately this old story captures what transpires all too often in the “theologic wars” of the contemporary church.

Whether it's worship, sexuality, mission, or any of the many other hot topics among us, too often we shout at each other across chasms carved deep by indefatigable disagreement about what is true and good. We each claim that our reading of scripture, our experience, our understanding of tradition or current reality reflects the whole elephant. We “rail on” and seldom pause to really hear – with deep and profound hospitality – “what each other mean” or to prayerfully discern how it might enhance, enrich, or even challenge and change our own particular “ignorance.”

“For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part,” wrote the apostle Paul – no stranger to prating about elephants – to the debating community in Corinth. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.” Someday, he offers, in the fullness of time, the partial will come to an end and we will know fully. But for now, we are left with elephants in the room and our own limited ability to perceive and proclaim what is true and good about them.

Thankfully, moving in our midst is also the Holy Spirit who, as Jesus promised, teaches us everything and reminds us of all that Jesus has said to us (John 14:26). But that old Reformation saw simul justus et peccator (at the same time sinner and saint) suggests that our own sin fogs even that glass so that not one of us can ever see the teaching or get what Jesus is saying quite right, no matter how much or deeply we pray or study scripture or research tradition or analyze the context. Our vision is riddled with blind spots. Perhaps humility, rather than being “exceeding stiff and strong,” ought to lead us into our discussions of the elephants in the room.

Since reading that poem with my family, I have found myself reading and rereading chapters 12 through 14 of 1 Corinthians. And I have come to think that it's time to rescue 1 Corinthians 13 from its matrimonial exile and return it to its intended dwelling place: smack-dab in the center of our life together as the body of Christ. Maybe this chapter and the surrounding two ought to be read every time we sit down at the table (and certainly before we get up from it) to talk about what it means to be the body of Christ and how we are to address the many issues and challenges we are called to face together.

I can just about see the look on some of your faces, the look like the multifaceted one on my kids' faces at the dinner table. But for the sake of God's mission of healing and hope in the world, the regular confession that “if I understand all mysteries and all knowledge...but do not have love, I am nothing,” empowered by God's Spirit, just might assist us in embodying some other words purported to be from the pen of Paul:

Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. [Ephesians 4:29 – 5:2; NRSV]

You are Dust

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

I don’t really need to hear that reminder. And I sure don’t want to hear it.

I know it’s Ash Wednesday, the day on which many Christians impose a cruciform smudge of incinerated palm leaf on each other’s brow and proclaim, “This is you, buddy!” Truthfully, I am already quite aware of my own mortality, thank you. Every single day imposes its own reminders aplenty.

Within any given 24-hour span I am haunted by my shortcomings and confronted by my failures. I am frustrated by my inability to keep promises or establish commitments or keep up at work or be the sort of husband, dad, or friend that I really want to be. These and their siblings smudge me and mark me as mortal. Every gray hair, lost opportunity, impulsive bad decision, each aching knee, sniffle and cough and broken relationship cry out my dusty origins and dustier destiny in nagging, niggling, sing-songy unison.

No, I really don’t think I need the smudge and the words imposed, as if to hammer home something that I have somehow forgotten or to etch it indelibly like some permanent thumb and finger angled to an “L” on my forehead to proclaim: “LOSER!” I don’t need an unwelcome outward sign of the inward reality that confronts me – and with which I struggle – every single day.

Here’s what I do need, though, what I crave in the dusty depths of my soul, what I’d welcome as I try to lean into Lent and spring and lengthening days: the mark of someone who will embrace my stumbling humanity, won’t hold my mortality against me, will receive it as gift and help me welcome it and steward it better than I do.

Of course, I’m not looking for some sort of “I’m okay, you’re okay” overlook of what I am and do that is destructive or unhealthy or irresponsible or hurtful.

I am looking for some sign of forgiveness, a reminder that it’s okay not to be God, a marked assurance that, as for Adam and Eve before me, divine breath brings dirt to life. I guess, as it turns out, I really yearn to have Jesus etched on my furrowed brow – dead, entombed in dust, standing again in that earth-scented garden. I need, desperately, that cruciform smudge of ash, promise of life from death, hope enveloping despair, new beginnings following mortal mistakes. And I need to hear in the “remember…” the promise, the hope, the new beginning that draw me toward Easter.

Even as we live each day, death our life embraces.
Who is there to bring us help, rich, forgiving graces?
You only, Lord, you only!
Baptized in Christ’s life-giving flood;
Water and his precious blood.
Holy and righteous God, Holy and mighty God,
Holy and all-merciful Savior, Everlasting God,
By grace bring us safely through the flood of bitter death.
Lord, have mercy.

(hymn text: Martin Luther, as found in Lutheran Book of Worship © 1978)

Everyday Mystery

This morning it was a few degrees below zero in Indianapolis. We are supposed to hit fifty on Saturday.

Freeze. Thaw. Snow. Rain. Winter. Spring. Lent. Easter. Death. Resurrection.

We find ourselves caught up in and moving toward interesting rhythms this time of year, don’t we? Of course, most of our focus tends to be on the daily stuff, the little things that dominate our days. It can be challenging to lift or deepen our focus a bit and see the bigger, even cosmic, rhythms that throb like imperceptible bass lines beneath the quotidian.

Oops. How did that archaic word slip in? Quotidian? Dictionaries say that the word means “occurring every day” or “commonplace” or “ordinary.” Author and poet Kathleen Norris connects this word with another old one, “mystic,” behind which is another word that’s often absent from contemporary vocabulary, “mystery.”

Perhaps our most valuable mystics are those of the quotidian....They search for God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people, and duties that can submerge the self.

Norris enlists Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that feisty founder of an illegal seminary in Nazi Germany, to draw our attention to the profound reality lurking in, with and under the everyday stuff of our lives.

We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for the daily gifts….How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?

The ancient voice of the prophet Isaiah also echoes through the centuries to chime in on God’s behalf: I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Sometimes the details of the day are just that, details of the day. But most often, just beneath their surface a deeper reality moves, waiting to spring forth and use drudgery, demands and details to connect us to each other and to the cosmic rhythms of sustaining, life-giving grace.

Let those who have eyes to see, see!

[Quotations from Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (© 2008 Riverhead Books) and Isaiah 43:19, NRSV]

Call Me a Sap

Call me a sap, but I have to admit that on this morning’s drive from the polling place to grab a free cup of coffee at Starbucks, I got teary. Who would have thought that the simple act of voting could result in a free cup of joe?

Okay, so some of the tears were coffee anticipation, but most of the rest had to do with the act of voting. I’ve done it many times before, of course, but something about this time got to me.

I reflected on the conversations I've had with family, friends, and coworkers over the last six years – uh, I mean, year and a half – of this historic presidential campaign. Some people, including me, are actually pinning hopes on the outcome of this thing. Waiting in line for hours has heretofore been reserved for rock concert tickets or those wild day-after-Thanksgiving electronics sales. When people are willing to spend two, three, five hours waiting in line to vote, something is up. Perhaps they believe that change really is possible.

I thought about folks in Chile and Indonesia whom I count among my friends thanks to church-to-church relationships. When I visited Chile in early November 2002, four years ago next week, the first question asked by people I met, even those I was meeting for the first time, was, “Who did you vote for?” Church leaders in Indonesia pay close attention to how we talk about Muslims and the ways in which our nation relates to nations like theirs. Our sisters and brothers around the globe care deeply about what happens in our elections. Their daily lives will be changed by the results of our vote.

I rehearsed the promise and poop of the seemingly endless campaign process we endured to get here: The accusations, the mudslinging, the half-truths told about others, the cavalier crimping of truth in service to self-interest…and the hope, the vision of a world (local and global) in peace, hands joined to address poverty, feed children, care for the earth and for one another. In the midst of it all, the stark truth stands that by tomorrow morning, however this election turns out, standing on the shoulders of so many who gave so much before us, together and despite ourselves we will have whacked cracks in all sorts of ceilings, glass and otherwise.

And I thought about what lies ahead. I was teary-eyed, not starry-eyed. There is still so much work to do and so much to overcome. As the hobbit Frodo (and others before him) sang, “The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began.” Some other theologian somewhere some time said something about the call to rise from our knees to become the answer to our prayers. The mist in my eyes between the polling place and the Starbucks this morning also twinkled with the realization that the vote I cast today wasn’t the end of the campaign after all. The work is just beginning and the question is, “For the sake of the world in which I live, how am I going to be what I voted?”

The Reign of God is Like a Cat that Went Missing

My family and I recently returned home from four days away to discover no food eaten, water dishes full, and our home eerily bereft of the warm orange presence of our beloved feline, Nacho. We quickly looked through every room, every closet, every corner, flung open every door, calling her name and clucking. All we found was a growing communal collection of self-recrimination, fear, and despair. “She must have escaped when we were packing the car,” we finally concluded. She had already been gone, outside, on her own, exposed to the elements, for four days.

The search quickly moved outside. We called into the night, flickered light through thickets, and listened for that familiar meow on the wind. Each of us made our way around the house, scanning the bushes, calling her name. And then we did it again. We walked around the neighborhood, calling, searching, desperately hoping. And then we did it again. At one point, I heard rustling in the bushes along a pond when I clucked and cooed, “Nacho." I ran home for a flashlight, but whatever had rustled was gone, silent, unfound.

No Nacho.

We left the outside lights on that night. My wife held vigil downstairs, near the door to our deck where Nacho loves to lay in the sun and watch birds at our feeders. None of us slept well. And Nacho didn't come home.

Day after day, the search continued from inside the house and around the neighborhood. We wandered the streets again and again, day after day, looking, hoping. Every time one of us passed the front door or the back from inside the house our gaze lingered at a window in hope of seeing the familiar eyes begging for admission. We left the door lights on every night and, each in unspoken turn, rose in the middle of the night in hope of spotting those cat eyes in the night. Even our dogs, Koda and Karley, wandered through the house, scanning under sofas and sniffing open doors in hope of finding their oft harassed chasee.

But no Nacho appeared.

At dinner we told stories about the cute stuff Nacho did, recounting the more than nine years she had been a constant presence for us. Our daughter began to carry a crumpled photo of Nacho in her school backpack. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the photos of that beloved feline scrolling though the digital frame on my office desk. We even dragged some coworkers and friends into our grief. They listened empathetically, offered to pray (even to St. Anthony), and sat with us in sad silence. They shared our emotional burden, felt the loss, kept proclaiming hope. “You know cats! I just bet she’s going to show up soon.” There was comfort and not a little hope in the arms of this community, but I couldn’t keep my mind off coyotes and cold and pelting rain and the deep darkness of night.

Finally, on the eighth day of Nacho’s absence, a trip to the humane society, that great gatherer of lost pets and strays, did us in. So many cats looked like Nacho, but were not Nacho. Heavy finality wafted the silent car toward home.

That same eighth evening the telephone rang, an unknown caller interrupted a tearful dinner. “Are you missing an orange tabby cat named Nacho?” Stunned disbelief and wavering hope quivered from my wife: “Is she okay?” We stared at Janet's eyes, listened for some betraying tone in her voice. “She’s thin, but looks quite good,” she repeated for us. “They found her in their driveway when they opened their garage door just now. They live around the corner and are bringing her to us.”

Good news! Wild welcome! What was lost coming home in the loving arms of a stranger! Even the dogs seemed excited to have Nacho home, sniffing and looking at Nacho, nuzzling each other as if to say, "Do you see? Can you believe it?"

Of course, Nacho is a cat. Already, days after her unexpected return, she reminds us that her presence in our midst is on her terms, not ours. But we’re keeping a close eye on her. When she’s absent from the room, we go looking for her. Inevitably, we find her in favorite spots, resting, purring, greeting with a meow. And I, for my part, can’t keep my hands off her. In the evening I stretch my legs from a comfy chair to its ottoman in hope that Nacho will sense a welcome. Most of the time she obliges and settles in lengthwise like she used to, before she went missing. But now, I kid you not, her fur seems softer, her purr deeper, and those big orange eyes glimmer like gold.

The reign of God is, indeed, like a cat that went missing.