Talk With the Preacher

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.

My colleague Paul has been on my case more than usual lately because I’ve fallen down on the job of keeping everyone up to date on the progress of our new house.  In my defense, we just moved in three weeks ago, and when I say “moved in” I mean that we now sleep here.  There are many, many boxes still to be unpacked.

In the middle of all the chaos, however, our amazing architects wanted to take some professional photographs of the space for submission to some magazines and contests or whatever it is architects do.  I’ll admit, I was slightly dubious as our architects had not seen the space with our things in it.  Reassured, however, that there was nothing to worry about, we agreed and they showed up Saturday morning.  With a moving truck.

All of our furniture went out into the hallway and none of what you see here (except the cello, the rug and one piece of art) belongs to us.  Which is kind of insulting but mostly funny.  Most of the art you see in these was done by our upstairs neighbors Brian Hewitt and Steve Hanks, as our new home is in an artist live/work community.  So far my generous offer to house their art on my walls (out of the kindness of my heart, of course) has not been successful.

Alas, I now know exactly how Cinderella felt a midnight, because after it was all over the art went back, the furniture left and all of our boxes migrated back into our space.  I’m left now trying to recreate something like what you see here . . . but I do still have a bowl of really shiny green apples on the table.  Stylish, I know.

Come visit!

peace comes stealing slow
falls like silent snow
swings down sweet and low
peace comes stealing slow

Kate Campbell sings these words her album Blues and Lamentations. Kate has this amazing voice that articulates with such clarity the beauty of these words, which I heard somewhere were inspired by a poem of William Butler Yeats.

However, as my study of Yeats’ poetry has not been too, shall we say, extensive, I have no idea if this is true.

But I am interested by the idea of peace stealing slow. Every single Sunday in worship we throw around peace like a hot potato: the peace of the Lord be with you, be at peace, go in peace . . . as if peace is something we can manufacture. Or manually place on top of the life of another. Or forcefully will into our own lives.

Kate (or Bill) says, though, that peace steals up on you slowly.

In my experience, that’s usually too slow for my liking.

And it seems to me that peace, the kind of peace you just want to sink back into, though thoroughly unpredictable, comes only after a battering storm-when you’ve reached your absolute limit.

Peace whispers in your ear tenaciously until you can finally hear it; it settles over you when you had just steeled yourself for the next wave to hit; it sneaks up on you stealthily . . . until you all of the sudden feel the utter relief enveloping you completely.

Peace.

How I wish I could manufacture it instantaneously: apply a salve of peace to a raw hurt, or write a prescription for preventative peace-you know, to avoid the storm altogether. Not being sure that I’ve lived long enough to notice it sneaking up on me, I have lived long enough to know I’ve had very bad luck writing prescriptions for peace.

So I guess I’ll pray right along with Kate (or Bill):

peace come stealing slow
fall like silent snow
swing down sweet and low
peace come stealing slow

Today I took a Sunday off to travel to Richmond with my family to hear Jim Somerville preach his candidacy sermon and accept the pastorate of First Baptist Richmond.  The congregation of First Baptist Church of Richmond voted Jim in unanimously.  What a wonderful opportunity for Jim, Christy and family.  How sad for our city to be losing such an amazing pastoral presence.  It’s a happy sad day.

I love it when the perfect sermon illustration comes along just at the right time.

I love it when that happens.

However, that most certainly did not happen the third week of Lent, when I struggled and struggled to find a way to engage the congregation and the text in a way that had some sort of meaning.

Part of the problem, of course, was, honestly, the passage.

Jesus and the Samaritan woman have this amazing encounter, full of layers and layers of meaning, with potentially thousands of deep and meaningful sermons to be written.

 Right?

Well, that may be.  But, for the life of me, I couldn’t find an illustration to bring the point home: we confess that sometimes our hearts are hard.

After hearing my lament my friend Carol told me about a story that she’d heard once. It is a moving story from a painful time in American history. In 1957 Little Rock Central High School began the process of racial integration, and a picture taken by photographer Will Counts seemed to capture the hatred, fear and pain of the times. Carol told me that the two girls who were the focus of the photo: the angry white girl yelling at the young black woman, later reconciled, a little step toward healing a gaping wound.

It was an amazing story, surely illustrating our Lenten focus of confessing for the times our hearts are hard and resistant to the work of God’s Spirit.

It was, yeah, that is, until you read the rest of the story.

This Vanity Fair article tells the whole story-all the way to the end. Yes, there was hatred. Yes, there was reconciliation and a softening of hearts.  But the happy Disney ending didn’t last. The reconciliation didn’t lead to life-long friendship. It wasn’t all nice and pretty forever and ever and ever. After an initial reconciliation and attempt at forgiveness, these two lives that had intersected a second time again went their separate ways.

So, I wondered: is it okay to tell part of the story even though the rest of the story didn’t turn out how we all would have wished?

A good story is like gold to a preacher, but when you use a good story your people trust you to offer them something they can take their imaginations and wander around in.  If I told the first part of the story without the last part was I violating trust?

I decided in the end . . . not.  I decided it was worth telling the story anyway, even though the end wasn’t as pretty as, say, Cinderella’s.  The reasons I decided to tell it were: first, the softening of hard hearts was real.  There was repentance and forgiveness and a new way of seeing the world.  And that story is always worth telling. 

Second, it all didn’t work out in the end.  And . . . that’s probably the experience of most of us sitting in worship.  Good intentions with the reality of life mixed in–the very real experience of life, not easy or neat but messy and hard.

But . . . still worth working toward the promise of redemption. 

Because even if it happens just a little bit, it’s a story worth telling. 

And . . . messy resolution is not the end anyway.  God has a grand plan of reconciliation, and, really, that’s the rest of our story, isn’t it?