Talk With the Preacher

The people of Burma (Myanmar) cannot get a break! 

With so much suffering in Burma already news of this devastating cyclone seems like adding insult to injury.  Here at Calvary we are particularly concerned because so many of our fellow church members come from Burma.  They still cannot reach many family members and are frantic with worry. 

To help them try to “get up again,” we have made it possible to donate funds online, which will be made available to suffering people through denominational channels, not governmental agencies.  Further, to lend your presence and support to our Burmese community here, join us for a benefit concert Saturday, May 17 at 6:00 p.m. at Calvary.  

Do I need to draw you a picture?

Apparently.

It’s always curious how different strands of my life inevitably intersect. This morning I was chatting with my very good friend and Urban Artist Caroline Armijo about the courage it takes to be artistic. She’s exceptionally gifted, of course, so she doesn’t work so much at discovering her creativity as having the courage to rigorously practice it.

Me? I’m not creative at all . . . I don’t have those gifts . . . I can’t express myself this wa . . . . .. That was my internal soundtrack as we talked, but later I started to wonder if it’s not so much that I have a lack of creative artistic talent as maybe, possibly, potentially . . . a deep fear of summoning the courage it takes to be creative?

Hmmmmm.

This second thought emerged when I (grudgingly) sat down to read a book assigned for a required doctor of ministry class next week. In this book Envisioning the Word, Richard Jensen makes the strong case for using images in preaching and worship, not just words.

In the process of reading this book skeptics like me are liable to think the author is being paid a commission by Microsoft as we promise ourselves (again) we will never, EVER, preach with the glow of a PowerPoint outline shining behind us . . . .

That’s my reaction, anyway, until I reach page 71 and a section entitled: “Who Killed the Goddess?”

This seems suspiciously unrelated to PowerPoint and related to some theological issues I think are fascinating, so I decide read on. (I also decide to read on because it’s required.) 

Jensen talks in this section about the widely known dichotomy (which apparently is not widely known enough for me to know it) between images and words. He cites a book by Leonard Schlain called The Alphabet versus The Goddess in which the proposal is made that: “When a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifest as a decline in the status of images, women’s rights and goddess worship.”

In other words, through various social and historical trends we’ve all come to see words as superior ways to communicate, pushing images back to second (or fifth) place. All the “people of the book,” (Jews, Christians, Muslims) Schlain claims, have fallen into this trap and it happened just as soon as they took abstract ideas and codified them in words.

Words, he says, are exclusive. Images are more expansive.

And so, what I have concluded from all of this is that I have apparently been wasting my time writing blog entries and preaching sermons, an effort which has apparently unwittingly contributed to a patriarchal and male-dominated understanding of God. All this time I’ve spent in front of the computer subjecting the larger world to the scary inside of my mind thinking I was breaking the stained glass ceiling and I was really reinforcing it! Turns out I should have been sketching. Or painting. Or liturgically dancing!

Which makes me want to call Caroline and ask her to come back to my office to help me imagine how I might express ideas about God in a visual way that is not mistaken for a kindergarten craft project. Because while it’s getting more and more comfortable for me to post a written blog entry, it’s rather scary to think about taking an idea of God and depicting it in macramé. You know what I mean?

This very week we celebrate the Day of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit. How do you describe the Holy Spirit in words? I could try (and, in fact, I will . . . for about 20 minutes on Sunday). But, I wonder, given what I’ve learned today about courage and visual art, words and containment: maybe the Spirit is better explained with a gust of wind? Or a splash of color. Or some balloons . . . or a puddle of fabric on the altar . . . ?

I can see already that this adds a whole new dimension to sermon preparation, in fact. When you start to see exegesis in finger painting, well, your whole view of the world changes. And so, now that I’ve put all of this down in words I need to summon the courage to draw you a picture.

Where are my crayons? I think I’ll go decoupage something.

In the first place, if you know me even casually you will know my dismay, if not downright disdain, when I am in almost any circumstance that involves sappy praise songs. (I particularly become bitter when we have to stand, swaying and clapping, for 15 excruciating minutes, then sit down to sing the same song some more. But that’s a whole other blog entry, isn’t it?). 

This was certainly, if not the last place then pretty close to the last place I expected to receive a blessing, especially since “receiving a blessing” is a phrase that I would never be caught using in public under any circumstances that I can think of.

So I was already in a place of mild annoyance when the group of 30 or so African children filed onto the stage and began their performance with a dance and song in their native Ugandan tongue. The kids were great-really-but something about the whole situation felt vaguely uncomfortable. Here I was, sitting in a crowd of about 600 white Americans (really, there were perhaps one or two African Americans in the audience and no other minorities that I saw) watching 30 kids from very poor villages in Africa sing for my own personal enjoyment.

In the course of the performance we learned the African Children’s Choir was actually quite a big deal, touring all over the US and Great Britain to raise money to improve child welfare in Africa. The kids, ages 9-11 or so, travel with the choir for 15 months at a time performing all over the world. Through their music they are able to make significant differences in their communities back home.

Their story was heart-warming and they were amazing; but, the whole situation still felt wrong to me. And then they started singing praise songs. Little Ugandan children singing English language praise songs . . . “Lord I lift your name on high . . .”.

Oh, dear, get me to fresh air quick; I was feeling queasy.

But then the kids launched into their next song. It began with one little high, clear voice ringing out over the crowd: “You are the Shepherd, I belong to you. When I walk on rough ground, you will guide me through. You know my name, you know my voice. Before I was born I was your choice. Show me how to follow, Lord keep me close to you . . . you are the Shepherd, I belong to you.”

Unwittingly, without any warning, much to my utter surprise, tears started streaming down my face. As I listened to those words all the colors and accents, continents and cultures slid away until I felt like I could have been that little child with a high, clear voice singing to God: You are the Shepherd, I belong to you.

I do understand that singing those words probably means much more when affirming your value in the eyes of God means you have the right to clean water and healthy food. But right then I felt like a member of the choir, also in need of God in ways that were just as elemental.

And I wanted to get in line behind the little children so I could be blessed by this Shepherd, too.  And I was:

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

I’m surprised by my feelings, since I have years of experience dealing with this very thing.

My experience, of course, comes from growing up in the same family system as my sister, Maile, who was then very popular, captain of the cheerleading squad and homecoming queen and is now gorgeous, mother of 4 children whom she homeschools, and devoted wife who makes her husband’s lunch every morning. For years I have wanted to hate her, or at least live with some degree of self-righteous indignation, but the problem is that my sister is possibly the nicest person on the entire planet, totally and completely undeserving of my resentment.

It’s just so unfair.

Anyway, similar feelings emerged when I met Heather Entrekin. Heather is a former member of Calvary who is now pastor at Prairie Baptist Church in Kansas and is currently taking sabbatical time to read, reflect and think about the church from the outside in. In order to do that, Heather has found an apartment in DC’s Chinatown and is immersing herself in the life of the city and the rhythms of Calvary’s congregational life.

My initial response to hearing of Heather’s plans was to wonder aloud why on earth she’d want to spend time here at Calvary while on sabbatical. My secondary and more gut-wrenching response was a huge and overwhelming wave of envy, which has only gotten bigger as I’ve watched Heather take art classes at the Smithsonian, devour books I’ve been wanting to read, stroll through Eastern Market deciding on the fly what to cook for dinner, etc., etc., etc.

I just have to say: dealing with my envy would be so much easier if Heather were mean. Or stuck up. Or ugly or not too smart or clearly not very spiritual.

The problem is, when you meet Heather you can tell instantly she is the exact opposite of all these things. She’s nice and friendly. She’s a really good listener. She’s very calm and self-possessed. She has a soft and comforting voice that she uses to speak truth and also claim the work of God in the world. She’s not starry-eyed about ministry; she cries right along with you. And she has great ideas about text and faith and community and church.

I think I am going to have to put her in the lofty category my sister inhabits, in fact.  But I won’t stop being jealous.  The truth is: watching Heather soak up the joy of solitude and reflection is enough to make me drool (if only I had time).

Because I can’t hate her and I can’t join her, what I’ve decided is that I will become a sabbatical voyeur, peering into Heather’s experience and trying to remember to find little pockets of sabbatical wherever I can and taking moments to (if breathlessly) thank God (again) for bringing another wonderful colleague and friend to walk alongside for a little while.

Join me in peering over Heather’s shoulder as she experiences sabbatical!

You know, sometimes the best thing you can say is, “who cares?”

One of my nagging problems is that I seem to care too much, mostly about stupid things, like whether or not my children are eating enough vegetables or, alternatively, whether everyone is happy about everything all the time.

You know I have about as much control over the first issue as I do the second.

I know the world needs compulsive worrywarts like myself (at least that’s what I like to believe) but sometimes all the things that need my worrisome attention get to be a little too heavy for me to carry around. And also at least marginally function. When that happens all the concerns I’ve packed onto my shoulders, most of which I cannot control no matter how hard I try, push me down and hold me there until I feel like a fish who’s jumped too high and ended up flopping around on a pier.

My husband Mark, who some might say could care a little more about things, says that when I feel like a flopping fish I’ve got to let it go-release the responsibility for everything I can’t possibly ever control and let it float away. Say it as you exhale . . . “who cares?”

Who cares if that’s a decision I would not have made? Who cares if the science project is turned in late? Who cares if I can’t make the meeting? Who cares if she chooses to be unhappy? Who cares if the house isn’t clean?

Who cares?

Feels good, doesn’t it? Letting go as you breathe out and surrendering responsibility for everything you can’t possibly control no matter how hard you try? Yes, it does, actually. If feels freeing and light, it feels like flying, finally moving through life without carrying all that extra stuff.

Who cares?

The problem is that, no matter how hard I try, I care. I care a little more sometimes than others, and probably a lot about things that don’t matter in the end. I care way too much for things I can’t control and people who won’t be happy even if I stand on my head.

I am betting Jesus had some disciples with the very same problem I have. That might explain why he told them, “Therefore I tell you, don’t worry about your life . . . “, which, in my estimation, was Jesus’ way of saying “who cares?” Jesus’ admonition comes right on the heels of his parable about the rich man who didn’t have any place to store all his excess grain and who threw himself into the task of accumulating more and more and more . . . all the while missing the fact that his life was fast coming to an end-my Bible calls that one the parable of the Rich Fool. Ouch.

So I am going to work on saying, “who cares?” I’ll try not to say it to folks who find themselves in momentary crisis, but I will try to say it about science projects and messy closets and perpetually unhappy people and all the things I can’t control no matter how hard I try.

I just don’t know, though, if I’ll be successful at letting go like this.

But, then again, who cares?

I gave up the dream of my children bragging about me on the playground long ago.

When I decided to go to seminary I already knew what it felt like when your parent is the preacher because when I was in high school I was a friend of the pastor’s daughter. 

She would beg us to please NEVER mention in public what her Dad did for a living. 

Like, she cried about his job. 

I never could quite understand this, since I thought his job was the coolest job ever, but her vehement protestations stuck with me.

When I decided myself to become a pastor, I confronted and accepted the cold, hard truth: my children would never think what I did for a living was cool.  (Of course, now that I am the mother of a 14 year old I can clearly see that nothing in my sphere of influence, including my job, is in the remotest realm of coolness.)

I have already grieved this loss.  (Jesus matters more.)  Which explains why I was shocked . . . floored . . . flabbergasted! . . . to hear Samuel Butler, age 9, officially inviting me to be a speaker on June 9 at career day at Oak View Elementary School.  It would be very cool, he explained, if I could come to his class and explain what it’s like to be a pastor.

What joy!  Not only does my kid want me at school with him, he also must have some deep abiding well of spiritual maturity that I somehow happened to miss before now.  He’s proud of his church!  He thinks professional ministry is cool!  Maybe he’ll be a pastor, too . . . !

I expressed my pleasure and surprise and told him I’d be delighted to speak at career day.  And just because I wanted to hear that spiritual depth out loud I asked him why he invited me.

“Well,” he said, “I just thought it would be interesting for the class to learn something new.  The thing is, nobody in my class even knows what a preacher is.”

I can hardly bear to write about this, preferring, I suppose, to live in the delusion that if it doesn’t appear on the blog then it’s not real.  (Please–we all have our ways of coping.)

Alas, as the clock ticks toward June it’s becoming more and more real: the call of God is causing problems. 

 Again.

I admit that I have spent a large portion of my life following this elusive thing everybody has labeled “God’s call on your life.”  It has led me personally over oceans and into the strangest places you might imagine, exasperating people who love me and birthing muttered comments like, “There she goes again!,” among other things. 

And now, even though I would be the first to warn against ignoring its tug on your life, it seems I am being invited to stand aside and witness the movement that God’s call on a life again.

Two years ago I met Allyson Wisdom.  I totally and completely confess to being very worried–what were they thinking assigning this sweet, white, young, Georgia sorority girl to live in downtown DC, a gritty urban center with one of the highest crime rates in the country, to run a program

for inner city kids . . . most of whom were teenaged boys?  Yet the last two years of watching the call of God take hold of a life and propel it to unthinkable possibilities has been nothing short of astounding. 

In June Allyson (far right) will finish her two-year assignment as director of Calvary’s Horizons Club, an afterschool club for inner city kids.  She’ll wrap up an incredible two-year tenure of organizational mastery and relational miracles.  She’ll pack her boxes and leave us . . . to follow the call of God to what’s next for her. 

Of course, following the call of God is what got her here in the first place. 

And kids like Joy and Ferlando will never be the same after knowing her stable, faith-infused presence in their lives. 

And those of us who have been her colleagues will pause, again and again and again, to admire her faithfulness and to thank God for directing her journey of faith to intersect with ours, if only for a little while.

But all of us will also be wondering about where this call of God leaves us.  Who will plan the next Spring Break Horizons trip?  Who will be a faithful presence in the lives of these kids who need one so much?  Who on earth will be able to take Allyson’s place?

No one, really. 

But I’ve lived long enough with the call of God to know that someone else out there is also feelng the need to answer a call from God.  And that someone will be just the person that Joy and Ferlando and Calvary Baptist Church need next.

Such is the mystery of the call of God . . .  giving us just the right person . . . and then another right person . . . reminding us that we are never the creators of God’s work in the world, only faithful midwives who have the holy honor of standing by and watching, and sometimes pitching in a little.

Thank you, Allyson for having the courage to answer God’s call . . . every time.

It was poet/writer Wendell Berry who coined the phrase “practice resurrection.”

He used it, in fact, in his poem, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

Though I am not an expert in literature, especially poetry, it seems to me that Berry meant to say two things in this masterful poem: first, resurrection is not an event we remember once a year on Easter morning.  If it really means anything we’ve got to somehow learn to live it. And second, practicing resurrection in our lives flies in the face of everything our world considers logical, acceptable, reasonable . . . sometimes sane, even.

Listen to what Berry says:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Barbara Brown Taylor agrees with Wendell Berry.  She says that we spend too much time concentrating on the tomb and don’t recognize the powerful metaphor of all those people looking in the tomb for Jesus but coming up empty. Resurrection is too big, too powerful, too life-changing to be contained in a tomb, or even in one special Sunday a year.

You have to know that Mary and the women at the tomb, along with the disciples, didn’t wake up Monday morning and head back to the lives they’d known before resurrection. Can you imagine? Right back to life as they’d known it, as if resurrection was just a notable weekend event? They couldn’t live as if resurrection hadn’t happened . . . and we can’t either.

For the next few weeks in worship we’ll be studying the Acts texts offered by the lectionary and examining some “signposts of renewal,” as Diana Butler Bass calls them in her book Christianity for the Rest of Us. She proposes that there are qualities of living, both individually and corporately, that denote the practice of resurrection. Her list includes ten: hospitality, discernment, healing, contemplation, testimony, diversity, justice, worship, reflection and beauty. If you look closely you’ll recognize these qualities plastered all over the Acts story of what happened to Jesus’ disciples after the resurrection . . . these signposts of renewal marked their practice of living resurrection.

I don’t know about you, but church is part of my life because resurrection has to mean something. There’s too much pain in this world to go to church on Easter and go back to life the way it was before. It’s an audacious way to live, to be sure, but the alternative-going back to the tomb of life the way it was-is no way to live at all.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Practice Resurrection.

In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life,
there is a deafening alleluia
rising from the souls
of those who weep,
and of those who weep with those who weep.
If you watch, you will see
the hand of God
putting the stars back in their skies
one by one.

Ann Weems, Psalms of Lament

It has begun.

Holy Week, you see, never seems very holy to me. At least not holy in the “sit quietly and contemplate the presence of God” kind of holy.

What I mean is, while I usually do exclaim “Oh Holy God!” a lot this week of the year, it is (I’m sorry to say) usually not in the context of thoughtful worship.

There’s just too much going on this week. Services to plan, meals to prepare, meetings to attend, little details to remember (DON’T FORGET THE GRAPE JUICE!) . . . it’s only Wednesday and it already feels less like Holy Week and more like Holy Mayhem.

My greatest hope as a professional church person is that people, especially people who don’t usually come to church, would have a meaningful encounter with God-would find just a few moments here and there to think, really think, about God with us, and with us in the hardest moments of life.  I hope that happens for them.

And I hope it happens somehow for all of the rest of us, too, the busy ones who God calls to step out of the mayhem and remember why we do what we do in the first place.

May it be so, this week and the many other weeks of mayhem that fill our lives.