Discipleship in Small Bytes

Local Heroes

2012-01-29T14:30:00.002-06:00

[Sermon preached Jan. 29, 2012.]

Our reading this morning from First Corinthians is one of those moments in Paul’s letters when you know you’re hearing just one side of a conversation, as if he were sitting next to you, talking on the phone. You know there’s got to be a backstory to this discourse on eating food that’s been sacrificed to idols. So let me try to fill it in a little.

As you know, in the Roman world, people worshipped many gods. The Roman religious system itself was polytheistic; plus, the Romans didn’t insist that conquered peoples convert, as long as their local religions didn’t threaten Rome’s power. So in a city like Corinth, there were temples everywhere, and much of temple worship included sacrificing animals. After the sacrifices, some of the meat was eaten in common meals, where lots of people from the local community would attend; and some of the meat was sold in city markets.(1)

So the new Christians, in Corinth and elsewhere, had to sort out how to relate to all this. Was it OK for them to join in a civic meal where meat sacrificed to idols was being eaten? Was it OK for them to go to the market and buy meat that might have been offered in the worship of a rival god? Apparently, the Corinthians had written to Paul, asking for a judge’s ruling. And in today’s reading, Paul basically says: You have the right to do it, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. Sure, those who understand that idols are meaningless are free to eat any food that God has provided. But what happens when those who aren’t as sophisticated as you are see you at a temple feast and think you buy into what they’re preaching? What if people who aren’t secure in their faith see you eating in the shrine of an idol and think you’re hedging your bets on which god is the real one? Is it worth it to shake someone else’s faith in order to get a great steak? If your example doesn’t build the church community, Paul says, change your example.

Today, we don’t worry much about eating meat sacrificed to idols. So what does all this have to do with us, 2,000 years later? I think it has a lot to do with something most of us treasure deeply, one of our fundamental values as Americans. That value is freedom, in all aspects of our lives –- political, economic, social, religious. One of our primary self-definitions is that we’re free to do what we want to do, as long as no one gets hurt in the process.

But sometimes our values bump up against each other in uncomfortable ways. In this case, of course, freedom isn’t our only value. Right up there with it are the values of family and community. Sure, we’re free to do whatever we want as long as no one gets hurt; but we also know that we’re part of things bigger than ourselves -– our nuclear families, our extended families, our church family, even the neighborhoods and cities where we live. We know we’re responsible to those around us, even though those responsibilities aren’t cut and dried. Especially as Christians, we know we’re bound together with the people in this room, the people of the Episcopal Church, and all the believers who comprise the Body of Christ in the world.

There’s a great movie from about 20 years ago that’s all about this tension between individual freedom and the well-being of the communities we’re part of. The movie is Local Hero. It’s the story of Mac, a high-powered deal-maker with a Texas oil company, who’s sent to this incredibly beautiful, picturesque village on the coast of northern Scotland named Ferness. Mac’s mission is to buy the entire village so his oil company can level everything, dredge out the bay, and put in a massive refinery. So Mac comes to Ferness looking for someone who can act as the community’s representative in this delicate deal. He finds Gordon, the unofficial community leader who ends up being the real deal-maker. Mac’s trying to account for the people’s feelings, the destruction of the beautiful village, the end of the community’s lifestyle. But Gordon is working behind the scenes with the residents to maximize the cash they’ll each get out of the deal. As the story moves along, Mac ends up being the one who wants to preserve the village with its quaint lifestyle, and Gordon and the villagers can barely keep a lid on their excitement about becoming “filthy rich.”

The crux of the story comes with the one hold-out in the deal, the one villager who doesn’t want to take the money and run. He’s Ben, a deeply eccentric old man who literally owns the beach and lives there in a shack whose only entrance is a window. As Mac says at one point, “How do you do business with someone who doesn’t have a door?” Ben’s job is to “work the beach,” as he puts it –- gathering up all the bizarre stuff from around the world that the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift bring to the Scottish shore. Mac and Gordon try to explain to Ben that with his new millions, he could buy any beach he wants, and they show him pictures from Hawaii and Australia and the South Seas. Ben says he doesn’t want any of those beaches. He explains, “This beach has been in the family for 400 years.… The thing is, I’m still working the place myself. It’s my living.… [The beach] has to be worked; think of the state the place would get into.”

What Ben sees is that he’s there not just for himself but for the good of the community. In fact, what he sees, which the other residents don’t, is that each individual in Ferness is there for the good of the community. And, ironically, that’s precisely what gives each individual his or her own well-being, too. If they all pursue their own self-interest, the community ceases to exist -– and then what would they have? I won’t spoil the movie’s ending, but just know that things work out, and the community endures.

Running throughout Local Hero is this question: Who is the local hero? Is it Mac, who changes from a self-centered deal-maker to someone who wants to save the village? Is it Gordon, who’s leading his people to get the most they can from a heartless oil company? Is it Ben, who reminds the community that they are a community, dependent on each other for the life they’ve known for centuries?

Like the villagers of Ferness, we have the freedom to get what we want out of our lives and our communities. Like the people of Corinth, we can choose to take what we want because we know we have the right to take it. That was certainly my temptation related to church, at a different time in my life. As a young adult, I went to church completely on my own terms. I liked to sing in the choir, so I went to church in order to sing there. Later, when I moved out on my own, I didn’t join a church at all because I didn’t want to get sucked into relationships or connection or commitment. But I did show up every now and then, when I wanted to get my time with God, and receive my Communion, and scoot out before I had to talk to anybody at coffee hour. It left me recharged until the next time I felt my battery running low. I was completely within my rights to go to church, enjoy the community they had built, and slip out again without upsetting anything. I had every freedom to do that -– but I wasn’t being a good steward of that freedom. I was looking for what was in it for me. It didn’t occur to me that my being there might have had the potential to benefit someone else.

The truth is, we need each other. Whether we’re talking about families, or parishes, or neighborhoods, or any circle of relationship, communities don’t work as collections of autonomous individuals working to ensure they each get their needs met. We have every right to do that. But the family bleeds a little with the loss of each potential contribution we could have made.

Last week, down in the undercroft, we honored some of our own local heroes by giving them the Priest-in-Charge’s Cross. These four parishioners share a commitment to be more than individuals in this church family. One hero is Randy Bredar, who’s helped guide some of the most expensive elements of the building’s restoration and helped save us hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. Another hero is Howard Williams, who’s been one of the stalwarts of the BackSnack program and who singlehandedly created a ministry of ushers to serve people at funerals. Another hero is Pete Vogt, who mentors kids at Southwest High, manages funerals for us, serves on more committees than he doesn’t serve on, and offers his photographers’ eye for free. And another hero is Connie Smart, who’s been the St. Andrew’s “Church Lady” for decades, a presence of servant ministry, historical memory, and holy encouragement for everyone she meets.

Who are our local heroes? Not just these four parishioners; not just the 20 other people who could have received crosses last week; but also many, many, many of you. Our local heroes are all those who’ve learned the blessedness of putting the well-being of this faith family ahead of individual liberty. They use their freedom as Jesus used his: Though he was in the form of God -– though he had every right to do it -– he did not count equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. (Philippians 2:6-7) That is the ministry -– that is the glory -– of our local heroes.

1. For more information, see Garland, David E. “The Dispute Over Food Sacrificed to Idols (1 Cor 8:1-11:1).” Available at: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/religious_studies/SNTS2002/garland.htm. Accesed Jan. 26, 2012.

Are You Talking to Me?

2012-01-15T18:06:00.006-06:00

[Sermon from Sunday, Jan. 15, 2012]

Over the last few weeks at St. Andrew's, you may have noticed a theme emerging from the sermons you’ve heard –- a theme of discipleship, or following where you’re led. Two weeks ago, I talked about following the star of Bethlehem, with the magi, so that we, too, might follow Jesus and draw the world to him. Last week, Mtr. Anne preached about following Jesus into the waters of baptism and out into the world, as bearers of justice and peace. This morning, I want to tell you three stories about people who heard the voice of God and chose to follow where it led them -– and in so doing, helped change the world.

The first is about the prophet Samuel. As we meet him in the first reading today, Samuel is a boy who serves with the chief priest, Eli. One night, he’s awakened by a voice calling out, “Samuel, Samuel!” The boy runs into Eli’s room and says, “Here I am. What do you want?” And Eli, like many a tired parent, squints at the boy through the haze of sleep and says, “I didn’t call you; go back to bed.” Samuel obeys, but the voice returns; and Samuel and Eli go through this scene another time, with Eli (no doubt more than a little annoyed) firmly sending Samuel back to bed. When it happens a third time, Eli is awake enough to realize God’s up to something here, and he tells Samuel to stay in bed and pay attention if the voice comes again. It does, and Samuel dutifully offers the response God was looking for all along: “Speak, for your servant is listening” (1 Samuel 3:10).

I can only imagine what must have been going through Samuel’s mind. Who am I, that I hear the voice of the Almighty calling in the night? I’m just a boy, just an assistant at the altar. I’m not important enough to get a personal call from God. Why would the Lord of the universe waste precious, divine time on me?

Well, Samuel didn’t get just one personal call. This was the start of a career. Samuel became the last of the judges of Israel and the nation’s first major prophet, which means someone who speaks for God. As God’s spokesperson, Samuel was also God’s conduit for choosing Israel’s first two kings, Saul and David. From a boy who simply to listened to God calling in the night, Samuel became the political and spiritual leader of his people. Samuel listened, and he followed. And through him, God changed history.

The second story of people heeding God’s voice is the Gospel reading we just heard. Jesus has just begun calling his first disciples; and among them he finds Philip -– a normal, local guy. Philip then runs and finds his friend Nathanael, which is where the story gets interesting. Nathanael isn’t exactly one of the stars of the Gospels. In fact, he’s mentioned only in the Gospel of John, and he’s mentioned only twice in that book. But Nathanael makes a comment here that suddenly brings life to the story. Philip tells Nathanael that they’ve found the one “about whom Moses … and also the prophets wrote” (1:45), Jesus of Nazareth, who would bring to fulfillment the story of God’s relationship with humanity. But Nathanael isn’t impressed. Nazareth? “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (1:46). Nathanael sees himself as experienced and sophisticated; his fishing village of Bethsaida is much more impressive than Nazareth, that hill-country dump. But Philip isn’t taking the bait. “Come and see,” he says (1:46).

And then Nathanael finds himself face to face with the supposed hick from Nazareth. Jesus smiles and says, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” (1:47) –- which is a nice way to say Nathanael’s been caught. Somehow, the country bumpkin overheard Nathanael’s wisecrack about Jesus’ home town. But wait -– Nathanael has never met Jesus before. “Where did you get to know me?” he asks (1:48). And Jesus captures him with a single sentence: “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you” (1:48). With that, Nathanael is hooked. “Rabbi,” he says, suddenly deferential, “you are the Son of God! You are the king of Israel!” (1:49). Nathanael must be thinking, “Who am I, that the Son of God has been watching me? I’m just a guy from a fishing village. I’m not important enough to be on his mind. Why would God’s anointed king waste precious, divine time on me?

And Jesus’ answer is, basically, “Just wait -– you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Nathanael and Philip and Peter and Andrew and the rest will follow Jesus as disciples for the next three years. And in the process, they’ll see him turn water into wine, and make blind people see, and heal the sick, and feed thousands with a few loaves and fishes, and offer himself up to death, and destroy death with an empty tomb. Filled with the wonder of that story, even a wise guy like Nathanael will take the Good News out to the world and help create a movement. Nathanael listened, and he followed. And through him, God changed history.

The third person I want to tell you about is the one whose birthday we’ll remember tomorrow, Martin Luther King Jr. You know King’s story. You know about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the “I Have a Dream” speech, and the march from Selma to Montgomery. You know about the Nobel Peace Prize and his refusal to embrace the violence that would eventually kill him. But like Samuel and Nathanael, Martin Luther King also had a moment of encounter with God when the Almighty spoke -– and the man of words listened.

It happened during the difficult days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956. It had been almost two months since Rosa Parks broke the law and sparked a movement by refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Her act of defiance galvanized local black leaders to organize a boycott. They came together in the basement of King’s church in Montgomery, and the young man found himself elected leader. The boycott dragged on; and in mid-January, King and the other leaders extended it indefinitely, refusing to be bullied back into the city’s racist policies.

Two weeks later, King was at home with his wife and two-month-old daughter.1 It was late, near midnight, when the phone rang. Late-night phone calls were nothing unusual, but this one put a chill in his heart. An evil voice on the other line called him the “N” word and said, “We’re tired of your mess. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow up your house and blow your brains out.”

It was more than he could take. Two months into the boycott, and two months into life with a new baby up at all hours of the night, King felt his resolve slipping away. Looking for a little extra strength, he made some coffee to get him through the long night, but he was at the end of his rope. He sat at his kitchen table, held his head in his hands, and offered the prayer of desperation. The gist of it was this: Lord, I’m trying to do what I know is right. I’m trying to lead these people. But now, I’m afraid. I’ve got nothing left, and I can’t do this on my own.

And in that moment, Martin Luther King experienced the presence and power of the living God. He felt a voice speaking within him, bearing him up and saying, “Martin: Stand up for truth. Stand up for justice. Stand up for righteousness. And I will be at your side.” King later described it as the most real and palpable experience of God’s presence he’d ever known -– enough to keep him following God through the boycott and throughout the next 12 years of the movement.

Now, Martin Luther King was not perfect, as history has clearly shown. Neither was Samuel or Nathanael; neither is any one of us. King was a broken man called to heal a broken situation; and he knew better than anyone else the poverty of his own power. I imagine him, in his kitchen that night, amazed that God had come to him so vividly. Who am I, that I hear the voice of the Almighty calling in the night? I’m just a young preacher at a small church in a small city. Why would the Lord of the universe waste precious, divine time on me?

Of course, filled with the power of that encounter, the broken young preacher would confront the racist powers of Montgomery, and the South, and the nation -– and defeat them without raising a hand in his own defense. God asked him to lead others to overcome evil through nonviolence –- and he created a movement. King listened, and he followed. And through him, God changed history.

So, who’s next? It could be any of us. It could be all of us. Jesus calls every last one of us to the path of discipleship. It’s sometimes a difficult path, hard to see, twisting in discomforting directions, full of stumbling blocks to trip us up. But the call is always to take a step and then trust that the next one will be revealed in God’s good time. For this path of discipleship, God doesn’t seek flawless people who have all the answers. Instead, God calls us -– even me, even you. We’ve all been given ears to hear that voice calling our names in the night. So, may we breathe deep and muster up the courage to say, “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” And then, may we receive the strength to follow God’s path where it leads and change the world God gives us to change.

1. This account of King’s epiphany during the Montgomery Bus Boycott is told in his memoir Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958). The book apparently is out of print, and I couldn’t obtain a copy in time for use with this sermon. Two blog posts recall the story of King’s midnight encounter with God: “Civil Rights Family Trip: Montgomery” (http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2010/08/civil-rights-family-trip-montgomery.html) and “Martin Luther King’s Defining Moment: A Kitchen, in Montgomery, Alabama, Past Midnight” (http://americandetours.com/2010/01/18/martin-luther-king%E2%80%99s-defining-moment-a-kitchen-in-montgomery-alabama-past-midnight).

Invite an Exile Home

2011-12-05T10:30:00.002-06:00

[Sermon from Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011]

Here’s today’s quiz: What’s the liturgical color for Advent? Is it purple, or is it blue? You’ve probably noticed that we’re not making it easy for you to get the answer right, given the way the four clergy are dressed this morning, with some of us in one color and some in the other.

If you’ve been in the Episcopal Church a long time, or if you’ve come here from Roman Catholicism, you’ll know that the “traditional” color for Advent is purple, though it’s a tradition that was only standardized in the 1800s. Purple is associated with penitence, which is why it’s also the traditional color for Lent, our penitential season leading up to Easter. And traditionally, Advent too has had a penitential flavor. Last week’s Gospel reading was about preparing ourselves for Jesus to return in power and judgment at the end of the age. This morning’s Gospel features John the Baptist calling the people to turn away from their sins and be forgiven. Sounds like a penitential time to me.

But there’s also a tradition of using blue as the liturgical color during Advent, especially in England, Sweden, and Spain. Blue is the color of hope and expectation –- the color of life-giving waters and the sky we look toward as we imagine heaven. It’s also the color associated with the Virgin Mary, the bearer of divine life and hope for all people. The Gospel on the last Sunday of Advent is always the angel’s astonishing news that Mary will conceive and bear the Son of God himself. So, with Mary, we count the days in watchful expectation, awaiting the coming of the one who will redeem us from sin and bring us eternal life. Sounds pretty hopeful to me.

So, purple or blue? Penitence or hope? Apparently, it depends on which week of Advent you’re talking about. And this week, you can make a case for either one. It all depends on which reading we want to focus on and how we hear the prophet’s message.

In both the readings from Isaiah and Mark, we hear about a voice crying in the wilderness. But what’s that prophetic voice actually saying? It’s not as straightforward as it might seem. In the Gospel, the voice belongs to John the Baptist. There he is, looking to us like a crazy person; but his attire would have reminded the people of his day of the prophet Elijah, who was also described as a shaggy guy with a leather belt around his waist (2 Kings 1:8). From Mark’s perspective, John the Baptist is fulfilling Isaiah’s prophetic words, serving as the messenger sent ahead of the messiah, preparing his way, getting the people ready for the salvation to come.

To get ready, John the Baptist tells us, we have some spiritual housecleaning to do, sweeping the dirt and cobwebs from the corners of our hearts. John the crazy prophet is here to look us in the eye and ask the question none of us really wants to hear: What do you need to turn away from in order to turn toward God? Very specifically, what’s keeping you from living in God’s image and accomplishing God’s purposes in your day-to-day life? We may find the question a little rude and intrusive, but John the Baptist asks us anyway: How are we separating ourselves from God and thereby falling short in our work of loving God and the people around us? All this may not sound very comforting, but it does seem straightforward enough. Apparently Advent is about penitence and preparation for the second coming of Jesus. So I guess we ought to be wearing purple and spending our time getting right with God.

Well, that may be true; but it’s also not the whole story we heard this morning. If we look back at our first reading, from Isaiah, we find that Mark is taking some interpretive liberties with the text he’s quoting. In fact, he’s reinterpreting God’s word for his own generation, just as theologians and preachers have been doing for centuries. If we really look at the Isaiah reading, we find it isn’t talking about the coming of the messiah. Instead, it’s an announcement of very practical good news to the people of Israel, who at that moment in history were sitting in exile. And the news is, they’re about to go home.

This part of Isaiah was written around 545 BC, when the Jewish people had been taken into captivity by invading armies and had been living as exiles in Babylon for about 60 years. The first generation of exiles had already died there, and their children didn’t have much reason to hope for a return to the homeland they had only heard about in the stories of their parents and grandparents. But here comes the prophet, inspired by God to proclaim an unexpected hope: Get ready, for God is about to act decisively and bring us home, back to Israel and Judah. So in that sense, when Isaiah wrote, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” it had a very practical meaning: that God would build a road so the people could return across the desert wilderness that separated Babylon and their homeland. The prophet says God is about the flatten out the mountains and raise up the valleys, like the state department of transportation preparing a highway’s roadbed.

And what’s the message the prophet wants his people to take away from all this? Rejoice, for your time in exile is about to end. You’ve paid your penalty. Here’s your “get out of jail free” card. Wait with holy hope and expectation, for God is about to rock your world. And, the prophet tells his people, take your joy one step beyond hopeful expectation: Shout it from the rooftops, too. Isaiah says, “Get you up on a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’” (Isaiah 40:9) Tell everybody you know the good news, that God is with us and soon will restore us. So, clearly, if we listen to the prophet Isaiah, the message of Advent is about hope and expectation.

Well, what do we do? Is it purple or blue? Penitence or expectation? And the answer is: Yes. Welcome to the Episcopal Church.

That may seem crazy, or at least like we can’t make up our minds. But I’d say this “both/and” approach to Advent is actually just what experience would teach us. We do need penitential self-examination to see where we’ve turned away from Jesus’ call. The reason John the Baptist feels like a Christmas party crasher is because he comes in and tells us the last thing we want to hear in the midst of our holiday revels: that we need to take stock and confess where we see that our lives are on fire. My guess is there’s not a soul here who could look in the mirror and say he or she doesn’t have anything to confess.

But we also need to live in the active hope and expectation that God saves us, even though we don’t exactly deserve it. When we open our eyes and our hearts, Jesus Christ enters decisively into our lives, and into the world around us, to deliver us from the exile of our own self-absorption. “See, the Lord God comes with might,” Isaiah says. “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms.” (40:10,11) The mystery of Advent is that those who find themselves on the edge of redemption, those who think they know better than God how they should live (and that’s pretty much all of us) –- they have done their time in the wilderness, God says, and their penalty is paid (Isaiah 40:2).

So, the prophet says to us who are being freed, lift up your voice with strength, and tell this story of repentance and salvation. God calls us to repentance not just for our own benefit but for the benefit of the world around us, that others might get the point that reconciliation is God’s bottom line. This period leading up to Christmas is the perfect time for the world to hear the real message of the season: that God wants to bring everyone home. And the repentant are precisely the right messengers of that hope, because the repentant are those who have good news in their hearts to proclaim.

So this Advent, invite an exile home. Show someone that God is waiting for them with open arms, ready to gather them up in the divine embrace of reconciliation. Proclaim to someone that life as they know it isn’t as good as it gets.

There’s even an easy way to do it. As you leave this morning, take a yard sign from the narthex [advertising the Christmas Eve services], put it in your car, and plant it in your front yard. Invite the people who pass by your home to join you for Christmas Eve here at St. Andrew’s. Invite them to see that the holiday season is more than parties, and presents, and watching A Christmas Story ten times on TV –- and feeling alone. Invite them to turn in a different direction: toward the promise that hearts can be unburdened, that the slate can be wiped clean, and that the Shepherd longs to gather them in his arms. Plant a sign in your yard, and invite an exile to come home.

Save Us From Pre-Christmas

2011-11-27T15:49:00.003-06:00

[Sermon from Sunday, Nov. 27, 2011]

That sound of the shofar is our wake-up call: Welcome to the first Sunday of Advent. This is the beginning of our four-week season of preparation for the miracle of the Incarnation, the unbelievable reality that God chose to take on our life, the experience of humanity in all its joy and all its hardship. This is the time when we take a breath, and stop, and try to comprehend the incomprehensible: that God loves us enough to enter directly into our broken reality and heal it, coming as the Christ both as a baby in a manger and as our ruler and judge at the end of time.

That’s a lot to get ready for. No wonder we need a season of preparation.

Of course, in our modern lives, we also need a season of preparation because the world around us is giving us very different messages, both about what season we’re in and how we should be preparing for what’s to come. Here in church, we’re lighting candles on the Advent wreath and learning just how slowly we can count to four. But in the stores and on TV, we’ve been charging into Christmastime from the moment we could get the Halloween candy put away.

Now, before we turn our attention to Advent, I’d like to reflect on the holiday we just experienced. And that holiday was…? Well, Black Friday, of course –- our No. 1 shopping day of the year. Actually, that’s not quite right, because now Black Friday has oozed beyond its temporal boundaries and spilled into the day before, a day we soon will know as Black Friday Eve. In a former time, we called this day before Black Friday by another name –- we called it “Thanksgiving,” and we kept it as the holiday. People stayed home with family and friends. They shared time and conversation as everyone worked to prepare the feast. They played football in the yard and watched football on TV. They ate too much and then did stacks and stacks and stacks of dishes together. Finally, blessedly, when all the work was done, they rested –- one of the few moments of Sabbath time left in the calendar of American culture. Well, now that Black Friday has become a two-day feast, we’ve cut to the chase and gone straight to the shopping without having to wait through that pesky time set aside for family, and giving thanks, and rest.

OK, so I’ve now officially become a grumpy old man.

It’s easy to rant about Black Friday, and door-buster sales, and our habit of charging from one disfigured holiday to the next. But I think this is a malady we need to take seriously as people of faith, and the treatment is one we can apply only in each individual heart –- including mine. Even as someone who spends an awful lot of time on churchy stuff, I find it really easy to pay lip service to Advent while I’m actually charging toward Christmas Day. The pre-Christmas season can become consuming, and I don’t mean just in terms of consumerism. There are the cards to send, and the parties to plan, and the events to attend, and the presents to buy, and the kids’ activities to show up for -– not to mention a few pretty big church services to plan. Better get ready, or we might not get everything done before we hit the Christmas finish line.

So I guess this morning I’m trying to convince you that the season of Advent is here to save us from the season of pre-Christmas. Advent is here to turn the rush of the holidays into the blessing of holy-days.

Now, listening to our Gospel reading this morning, you may not have heard a lot of blessing to take home with you. Jesus is talking with his inner circle of disciples, telling them what to expect about very difficult times that lie ahead. Just before this reading, he’s warned them of “wars and rumors of wars” (Mark 13:7), and persecutions of Jesus’ followers, and destruction coming to the holiest of places, even Jerusalem and the Temple itself. False prophets will arise, and Jesus has warned his disciples not to follow them. Most scholars feel these predictions relate to the Jewish revolution against Rome, which happened about 35 years after the Resurrection, when Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed and the Jewish people were scattered.

Well, there’s not a lot there to get us into the holiday spirit. But I think the point of hearing about this chaos is that, like all the trials of our lives, it sets the stage for God to act, which is where today’s reading comes in. When the times we live in seem to spin out of control, when we know our own lives are broken and derailed, when we invest every beat of our hearts just to make it through the craziness of one day to the next –- these are the times, Jesus says, when we need to pay closest attention to what God will do next. Ironically, when we feel like we’re on the edge, that’s when divine power is revealed most vividly –- when Jesus enters into our lives definitively, if we’ll pay close enough attention to see it and hear it.

In the broad scope of salvation history, what Jesus is talking about is the end time, when he will return in power and judgment, as we proclaim in the Nicene Creed each week. When the Son of Man comes on the clouds in glory, he will flick aside petty kings and ungrateful nations and hold each of us accountable for the lives we’ve chosen to live.

But that same revealing of divine power holds true in our own lives right now, too. In the private moments of our anxious hearts, as each of us works out our own salvation, the crazy chaos of our lives is the medium in which Christ works best. When the stars that once guided us seem to be falling and the powers of our heavens seem to be shaken, that’s when Jesus enters in. Remarkably enough, the sovereign Lord of the universe does have the wherewithal to rule even our unruly lives, despite how complicated we imagine them to be.

But here’s the thing: We -– and definitely I –- have to pay attention, especially when the chaos of our culture and the chaos of our hearts tell us we don’t have time to pay attention, even to one more thing. When we least expect it, when we’re focused on everything else, that’s when the Master decides to come home and set the household to rights. When life backs us up against the wall, Jesus comes to us and says, “So, how’s that working for you?” And I don’t think we’ll find it very helpful in that moment to tell him, “Hang on just a minute while I finish up one last thing on my list.”

There’s a better way to greet Christ when he comes to dwell within us and among us. As today’s Gospel reading says, “keep alert”; “keep awake”; for “he is near, at the very gates.” (Mark 13:29,33,37). To receive such a guest, we need to ready our hearts with at least a fraction of the time and attention we would devote to readying our homes for a Christmas party.

So here’s my Advent challenge to you, and to me: Stop. Say “no” to something you can’t imagine not doing. And instead of doing it, take some time -– however much you feel you need –- and do nothing productive in the eyes of the world. Drive into the country, and park by a lake, and watch the wind move on the water. Take the hymnal and read the lyrics to the hymns in the Advent section – they’re fantastic. Come to the Taizé Eucharist and don’t make a sound -– really enter into the silence and the sounds of others singing. Take home a copy of Forward Day by Day, and read a lesson each morning, and marvel at what God might have to say. Or, just sit in silence in your favorite chair, and stare out the window at the trees and the birds, and wait to hear what Jesus might whisper to you. Accomplish nothing. Let the brakes of Advent slow down the headlong rush toward Christmas. And then just see what holy days the holidays can be.

Unlikely People of Missionary Zeal

2011-11-23T21:43:00.009-06:00

[Sermon from Sunday, Nov. 20, 2011]

The room’s awash in red and plaid; the sound of bagpipes echoes through the church and out into the neighborhood. It can only mean one thing: It’s St. Andrew’s Sunday. It’s a feast we’ve been keeping here for as long as anyone remembers, one of our parish family’s very best traditions.

So why do we do it? What does St. Andrew have to do with Scotland and bagpipes? I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure St. Andrew never wore a plaid kilt. How did we get to this celebration from the life of a first-century Jewish fisherman?

Well, let’s look at what we know about Andrew from Scripture. The short answer is, not much. Andrew is mentioned a grand total of 12 times in the Bible, and four of those are just listings of the disciples’ names. As we heard in the Gospel reading, he and his brother, Peter, were among the very first who turned from the lives they knew to follow this teacher and “fish for people” (Matthew 4:19). In John’s Gospel, Andrew plays a slightly larger role. There, he’s the first disciple to follow Jesus, and he immediately takes on the role of evangelist simply by telling his brother that he’s found the messiah. Andrew has a small role in the feeding of the 5,000, telling Jesus there’s this little boy with some bread and a few fish, but so what? And Andrew helps bring outsiders to know Jesus by introducing some Greeks to him. But that’s about it – not exactly a starring role. And no kilts or bagpipes, either.

After these mentions in the Bible, Andrew’s biography gets pretty sketchy. The most reliable tradition says he journeyed to Greece after the Resurrection, telling people about Jesus and paying the ultimate price, being crucified by the sea. Later tradition puts Andrew in Constantinople, in the sense that some of his relics were brought there from Greece centuries after he died so Constantinople could claim an important patron saint. Andrew is also a patron saint of Russia based on a tradition that he visited tribes by the Black Sea and supposedly preached as far north as Kiev.1

And then there’s Scotland. Now, there’s not a snowball’s chance that Andrew ever went to Scotland. But the tradition there is that a Celtic saint in the 300s named Regulus took Andrew’s arm from its resting place in Greece to Scotland, to the site we now know as St. Andrews. St. Andrews became a center for teaching about the faith and sharing the Good News in Scotland … and I hear they play some golf there now, too. Anyway, the tradition about St. Regulus taking that holy arm to Scotland has made Andrew the patron saint of that land.2,3

And so, since Andrew is our patron saint, too, this parish has adopted a link with Scotland much as Scotland adopted a link with Andrew. Now, if you’re a cynic, you can see this as nothing more than creative history. Or you can see it as a holy thing, and here’s why: As Christians, we’re linked with the saints across time and space, bound together into the spiritual body of Christ, not limited by temporal boundaries like century or nationality.

But even the creative traditions about Andrew’s life tell us nothing about what kind of a person he was. We know he was Peter’s brother, and we know a fair amount about Peter from Scripture: that he was a man of action, bold to the point of being offensive, often speaking before he thought and putting his foot in his mouth more often than not. He was the kind of guy who would earn the nickname Jesus gave him: Peter, which means “Rocky.”

And Andrew? As I said, Scripture gives him a minor role. We don’t hear about him preaching to huge crowds or healing people, like Peter and John do in the Book of Acts. In fact, Andrew is a person of small acts. He tells one guy about Jesus. Faced with a hungry crowd of thousands, all he can find is a kid with five loaves and two fish. Now, the rest of this is complete conjecture on my part, but I imagine Andrew as sort of the anti-Peter, like siblings sometimes are. Peter is big and out-there; Andrew is quiet and more reserved. When he speaks, it’s analysis, not bold proclamation. When he acts, it’s through personal relationships, using connections he already has to share the great truth he’s witnessed. He’s a supporting character, literally: He’s there to support Jesus’ mission.

The other thing about Andrew that we never really hear about, but must have been true, is the effect that his second family had on him. Of course, Andrew had his first family, with Peter and their parents and siblings. But Andrew quickly left all that behind to follow Jesus. And the band of disciples Andrew joined became his second family – traveling across Israel for three years proclaiming the kingdom of God, learning from their master, and learning how to live together.

With those spiritual brothers and sisters, Andrew was formed into the person God needed him to be. Think about it: How could this reserved, quiet, analytical young man take that show on the road after the Resurrection and have any success? If the Andrew who first met Jesus had been the same Andrew who went to Greece as a missionary, we’d have never heard another word about him. But the stories that come down to us tell of an apostle who rescued another apostle, Matthias, from cannibals. They tell of an apostle who cast out demons, and converted pagans, and healed the sick, and raised the dead.4 Something happened to Andrew in his three years as part of that family of disciples. His faith community shaped him into an unlikely apostle – and remember, “apostle” means one who is sent. This quiet, reserved, hard-working, regular guy became a man with a mission.

We are the spiritual descendants of that missionary and the faith community that formed him. St. Andrew’s Church has been here for nearly 100 years. In some people’s eyes, we’ve been simply a very nice place made up of very nice people being very nice to each other – as I heard once, “the country club at prayer.” We are good at being nice, I have to say. But we are more than that. We’re a church that grew a community garden behind the youth center long before community gardens became trendy. We’re a church that, when we put in a parking lot, literally moved houses across town to provide homes for people in poverty. We’re a church that’s fed thousands and thousands of hungry people downtown over the years. We’re a church that’s invested more than 20 years’ work to create a school on a mountain in Haiti with the highest graduation rate in town. We’re a church that welcomes the stranger and really means it.

And we’ve done those things because of the formation we receive from being members of this family. As Brad Honnold said at the vestry meeting this past Tuesday, “We are constantly being chiseled and shaped in our faith.” It happens as we worship, when we’re stirred by a lector’s inspiring reading or served the blood of Christ by a friend. It happens when a minister of the Order of St. Luke prays for us in the chapel after Communion. It happens when we learn from each other in a class or a group or a Bible study. It happens when parishioners go through Cursillo and learn to live their faith “out loud.” It happens when you get to know people by being in choir, or the Altar Guild, or the quilting group, or at Men’s Breakfast, or at Holy Happy Hour – and you find yourself inspired or challenged by what you learn from them. Like Andrew with the other followers of Jesus, you are made into a disciple when the good and holy people sitting around you this morning help you become more than you could ever be on your own.

All that formation is a part of mission. All that we do together, as God’s family in this place, is forming and shaping us to become the people God longs for us to be – people who change the world one interaction and one relationship at a time. All that we do together as the family of St. Andrew’s is preparing us to be sent out beyond ourselves.

What I’m talking about is nothing new for this parish. It’s amazing what you can pick up by walking around this place and reading things on the walls. On the wall in the columbarium, just on the other side of the pulpit, there’s a plaque I’d encourage you to stop by and read sometime. Here’s what it says: “The grateful people of St. Peter’s Church [in Red Bridge], upon the occasion of becoming a parish church on January 1, 1969, give thanks to Almighty God for the missionary zeal of our mother church, St. Andrew’s, who established [St. Peter’s] chapel, Eastertide, 1958.” Missionary zeal, huh? In the country club at prayer? Who’d have thought it?

Well, you would. I would. We would, when we remember who we are. We are the adopted descendants of St. Andrew, an unassuming man who found his mission. This word, this commandment of being sent beyond ourselves – it is not too hard for you or too far away, that someone else should go and do it for you. No, this word is very near you, on your lips and in your heart for you to follow. It’s who we’ve been. It’s who we are. And it’s who this family will be: God’s unlikely people of missionary zeal.

1. MacDonald, Dennis R. “Andrew.” In: The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 1. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 243.

2. MacDonald, 243.

3. Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. 17.

4. MacDonald, 243.

Report from Haiti mission trip, day 1

2011-11-12T10:37:00.002-06:00

A group of missionaries from St. Andrew's is in Haiti now, presenting a workshop on early childhood education and visiting our partner school in Maniche. I've just received an update from the group about their first day in Haiti (dated Thursday but just arrived in my in-box). It's from Dr. Kathy Shaffer, the leader of our Haiti educational mission. She writes:

Nov. 10:

"The trip from Miami was without a hitch. Both the new terminal at MIA and the new jetway on our arrival in Port-au-Prince set the stage for a seamless journey. Zo [the driver] was at the airport. All 18 bags made it through customs. We were met by Pere Colbert [the priest at our partner church and school] as well; and he escorted us to the Christian bookstore, where were able to purchase a Bible for each grade (some very nicely illustrated ones for the little guys), as well as for our graduates from last spring.

"The rubble from the earthquake has been cleared to the point that traffic moves well (better than last year), but now the tents feel imbedded in the community. Where the tent people from the middle of the medians were put is a sad mystery.

"Now we are on are way to Les Cayes and 1 hour outside of Cayes, we encounter a 'manifestation' [a demonstration]. Someone was arrested, and a group of townsfolk have blocked the road in protest. We have been here over an hour, without a lot of change in the situation. Obviously, God wanted us to slow down and 'be' instead of 'do.' By chance, we were stopped at the driveway of the head of the Rotary Club of this village. Colbert is a member of Rotary in Cayes, so we were invited to wait this out in his drive.

"Chris Nazar [one of the other missionaries] says to tell you that we may still be barreling down the highway after dark, even after getting up a 4 a.m. The group is functioning well." -- Kathy

The Family of Insufficient Saints

2011-11-06T16:30:00.005-06:00

(I'm not sure why I haven't been posting sermons here, as well as on the St. Andrew's website, but better late than never.... Here's the sermon from All Saints' Sunday, Nov. 6.)

Over the past several weeks, different parishioners have shared how they hear God’s call as stewards and how that call is being answered in the life of this congregation. Steve Rock, our senior warden, spoke about the contrast between seeing this church as a club and seeing it as a family. Dan Spicer spoke about the value of kids and youth as full members of our parish family. Chris Nazar spoke about using our time, talent, and treasure to take this family’s love into the world through outreach ministry.

Today, our witnesses are a little young to get up and talk in church. In fact, they aren’t yet old enough to talk at all. They’re the six babies we’ll baptize in just a few minutes.

You may wonder what kind of witness these babies might have to offer, other than witnessing vigorously against strangers pouring water on their heads. Well, I think they have a lot to teach us about stewarding the blessings God gives us, especially in the light of this morning’s Gospel reading.

Today is All Saints’ Sunday; and in this year of the lectionary cycle, we hear the Beatitudes –- the opening of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel. “Beatitude” means ultimate blessing, and that’s what Jesus is describing here –- what it means to be one of the most fortunate, one of the truly blessed in God’s eyes –- what it means, in fact, to be one of the saints of God.

Now, if someone asked us, “What does it look like to be blessed?” –- our first answers probably wouldn’t sound much like what we just heard Jesus say. As we usually think about these things, we might say someone’s blessed if she has a spacious home in a gorgeous neighborhood. We might say someone’s blessed if her kids go to excellent schools, being shaped for successful lives. We might say someone’s blessed if she has a talent like art or music, something that clearly sets her apart from those of us who wish we could just draw or sing on pitch. Those are the kinds of blessings we usually think about –- blessings about what we possess, or what we’ve achieved, or what we can do.

When Jesus starts talking about blessedness, we can bet he’s going down a different path. For Jesus, the blessed are those who are poor and broken in spirit, those who mourn a deep emptiness in their hearts, those who’ve been humbled by what life dishes out, those who manage to show mercy despite their own injuries, those who are persecuted for their faithfulness to God’s ways. Blessed and fortunate are those who find themselves powerless in the world’s eyes, Jesus says.

What kind of blessing is that? Well, it’s the surprising blessing of having our expectations turned on their heads -– expectations about ourselves and expectations about those with whom we share our lives.

The culture around us says that what we have, or what we don’t have, is a function of our own capacity. We succeed in school –- or not -– based on the hard work and commitment we put into our studies. We succeed in our professional lives –- or not -- based on our insightful analysis, strong leadership, and excellent performance. We succeed in our marriages and child-rearing –- or not -– by reading books, learning from experts, and becoming skilled in managing our closest relationships. Viewed through the eyes of the culture, we are blessed –- or not -– largely by virtue of ... our own virtues. If we’re good enough, our lives will be good, too.

There’s a lot of truth in how the culture defines success. But success and blessedness aren’t necessarily the same thing. To see blessedness, we need look no farther than to the children in our front pews this morning. These babies have done nothing to earn their parents’ love. They’ve done nothing to earn the embrace of their blankets and the comfort of their cribs. They’ve done nothing to earn the welcome they’re receiving today into the fellowship of the saints; no heroic service for the kingdom of God places them in the same ranks as Mary and Peter and Andrew. But here they are anyway, loved by their families and welcomed into the family of God.

Those who aren’t “good enough,” those who haven’t proven themselves –- these are the inheritors of God’s richest blessing, Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven itself.

There’s a reason we proclaim, every All Saints’ Day, that all of us are saints of God. And the reason why isn’t because we’re all great. Frankly, it’s because we’re all not that great. And neither are the saints. True saints are those who come to situations of conflict looking not to be victors but peacemakers. True saints are those who come to the table not to put on a sumptuous feast themselves but with empty hands, eager for God to fill them. True saints are those who come to church on a Sunday morning admitting that life has left their spirits battered and bruised and that they need God’s healing love, freely given.

The babies in our front pews this morning are completely insufficient, as functional human beings go. They can’t take care of themselves or provide for themselves -– left on their own, they can’t even survive. They must have family, they must have community, simply to live from one day to the next.

So they may be our best example of the saints of God, models for us to emulate. Blessed are those, Jesus says, who can see their own insufficiency and who are humble enough to rely on God instead of relying solely on themselves. Blessed are these, Jesus says, for they shall be truly satisfied by knowing the kingdom of heaven –- and not just in the sense of eternal life in the sweet by and by. These insufficient saints will know the kingdom of heaven in the here and now.

You don’t have to look far to see it. In fact, just look around. The kingdom of heaven is among you.

This is the family of God, the nursery in which God’s children of all ages grow into spiritual adulthood. This is our parish family, the place where we can admit that we aren’t –- and can never be –- the autonomous overachievers the world tells us to be. When, like little kids, we try to carry burdens too heavy for us to bear on our own, our family is there, saying, “Wait, let me help you with that.” In this family, there is no shame in needing someone’s help. In this family, we find our connection with God made real and active in our connections with each other. When we come together for a meeting or a picnic or party or a dinner or a class, we see that we are truly not alone on this journey -– because our brothers and sisters are there.

In the relationships of this family, we live out the fundamental truth of stewardship, the real bottom line that relates to so much more than money. That fundamental truth is this: we are dependent on God for everything that comes to us, and ultimately we can’t make it on our own. We need a family of faith to feed our spirits, satisfy our hunger, heal our hearts, and wipe away the tears from our eyes.

If you understand that, then you’ve probably already noticed something I’m going to ask you to notice now: that some of the members of our family haven’t been here for one of our Sunday-morning reunions in quite some time. There are many reasons why, I’m sure –- probably a different reason for each missing brother or sister. But whatever the reason, their absence diminishes us as the family of God in this place. And it’s equally true that their absence diminishes them. Without this family bearing us up, we’re left to sink or swim on our own in the waters of this world. And you can’t swim on your own forever.

So as you’re here this morning, looking at all these familiar faces and welcoming new children into God’s family, think for a moment about the saints who aren’t here. At our parish meeting downstairs after this service, we’ll talk more about how we might reach out to these family members we’ve been missing. But for now, just do this: pray for them, and pray for us. Pray that God’s love might so move the saints in this room that we would reach out in that love to invite our brothers and sisters back to this table -– the banquet table of the kingdom of heaven, present among us right now.

Let’s Get Real

2011-08-04T17:13:00.002-05:00

At the bishop’s visit to St. Andrew’s last Sunday, we used “real” bread in celebrating the Eucharist. It reminded me of something my son, Dan, said when he was about 4. We went to church one Sunday and came to the altar to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. Dan put out his hands and received a wafer, as he always did. This time, the mental wheels were turning as he tried to understand how this tasteless little cracker could be what we said it was –- Jesus himself, given for us. So he turned to me at the rail and said, “Gee, Dad, Jesus sure is crunchy.”

Honestly, I’ve never been much of a fan of Communion wafers. They get high marks for convenience and shelf life, but for me they score fairly low on the “real” scale. It’s a bit of a challenge to imagine myself there with Jesus and the disciples at the Last Supper, or sharing in the banquet of the kingdom of heaven, when I eat that thin wafer.

This matters because “real” is exactly what we claim about Jesus’ presence with us in Holy Communion. Although the divine mechanics –- just how it happens –- will always be a mystery, we believe in the doctrine of Real Presence: the idea that Jesus is actually present to us in the consecrated bread and wine, which become for us his own Body and Blood.

Of course, that action is fully completed even when it’s a less-than-hearty wafer we hold in our hands. But in sacramental living, symbolism matters because the outward and visible signs of our sacraments point to a divine reality: the inward and spiritual reality of grace, which is God’s love freely given to us. To the degree we can make those outward and visible signs point more vividly to the real presence of God’s love around us and within us, it’s a good thing.

So, we’re going to use “real” bread on Sunday mornings at St. Andrew's, at least for a trial period. My hope is that if Communion seems a bit more like a real meal, that will help us feel the Real Presence of Christ in our own hearts all the more.

The Bishop Visits This Sunday – but Why?

2011-07-29T21:21:00.002-05:00

Sometimes it’s good to ask questions that seem to have obvious answers because the answers aren’t always as obvious as they seem.

This Sunday, July 31, Bishop Martin Field will make his first visitation to St. Andrew’s. For long-time Episcopalians, the annual visit from the bishop is a fact of church life. But if you’re newer to the Episcopal Church, you may be wondering –- why? Is it just a goodwill visit by the CEO to a regional office? No.

First, from a practical standpoint, the bishop visits congregations to administer the sacrament of confirmation, which is an opportunity for teens and adults to make a mature proclamation of their baptismal faith and to receive the empowerment of the Holy Spirit for their lives as members of the first order of ministry in the Church, the order of laypeople. (That means that as a member of the Church, you are a minister.) Confirming people in their faith is an act of ministry reserved to bishops, so the rite of confirmation can’t happen without one.

But the bishop’s visitation has meaning beyond making confirmation available. A bishop is one in a long line of people commissioned by their ordination to join in the ministry of the apostles, having been ordained by someone, who was ordained by someone, who was ordained by someone … who was ordained by one of the 12 listed in the Acts of the Apostles. That work to which a bishop is ordained is the ministry of sending and being sent on God’s mission in the world. The Greek word apostolos means one who is sent -– a messenger, a delegate, an ambassador of the one doing the sending, who is Jesus Christ himself. So each visitation a bishop makes is a stop along the way of his or her apostolic mission, an opportunity to bring the presence of the universal Church directly into our midst, remind us of God’s mission that we all share, and send each of us out as an apostolos, as well.

So if you're a St. Andrew's person, or (even better) if you're not, I urge you to come and join in this experience on Sunday. It will be a glorious day: Two infants will be baptized; eight young people and adults will be confirmed; you’ll have the opportunity to hear from the bishop about who he is and how he intends to lead our diocese. And you’ll get to hear from one of the apostles this surprising reality -– that you’re one of them, too.

God's Love in Soap and Sheets

2011-07-14T20:34:00.006-05:00

The news crews may have left Joplin, but the healing is only beginning. The destruction is unimaginable, and the scale of the work ahead remains enormous.

It may seem there’s little of value that any of us can do to be part of the healing process for the people of Joplin. Other than professionals with particular skills, individuals are being asked not to appear on the scene to help. Rebuilding is still a project for the future; recovery is still the order of the day.

In that environment, what can we do? What can you do?

First and foremost, you can pray. That’s always our best response in situations like this. No matter the scale of the need, prayer is always a right answer.

But you can also help Joplin heal in a more tangible way –- with the gift of a bottle of laundry soap, or a set of sheets, or a blender.

On Saturday, Aug. 6, at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Joplin, the Episcopal Diocese of West Missouri will offer a “Free Garage Sale” for the people of Joplin -– with the items donated by you and me. It's a small but significant way to let the people of Joplin know God loves them by meeting immediate needs in a time of crisis.

What do they need? Examples include school supplies and backpacks; all kinds of kids’ clothing, new or gently used, labeled by age and sex; small appliances (toasters, toaster-ovens, mixers, blenders, etc.); bed and bath linens, cleaning and laundry supplies; and very light furniture, such as folding chairs and tables, lawn chairs, small tables, and shelves.

If you're in the Kansas City area, you can take your donations to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 40th and Main, between July 25 and July 29, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Or, if you want to get your hands dirty, come to St. Paul’s at 9 a.m. Saturday, July 30, to get items ready for transport to Joplin. Or you can come to St. Paul’s from 8 to 10 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 2, to load up the delivery trucks. To sign up, please contact diocesan Archdeacon John McCann at JMcCann@ediowestmo.org.

If you're in Springfield, the drop-off site is Christ Episcopal Church, 601 E. Walnut. Items should be delivered by by Monday, Aug. 1.

Please give generously. This is an opportunity for the Church to proclaim Good News in as concrete a way as it can be proclaimed. As my favorite collect in the Book of Common Prayer puts it, may God use us to “let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen!

A Sermon as a Two-Way Street

2011-07-08T08:52:00.007-05:00

I've always felt a little awkward about the one-way nature of preaching. At least in most situations, I get up, say whatever I was going to say, and sit down again, shielded by the liturgy from whatever the people out there might have liked to say in response.

So this summer, we're trying to make the preaching process a little more interactive by offering "Sermon Sound-Off” between the services on Sunday mornings. It's an opportunity to reflect on what God might be trying to say to us though the readings, the sermon, and our life together, rather than me simply talking at everybody and then walking away.

The conversations are really interesting, and frankly I never know where they’ll go. Here’s a sampling of the ground we covered last Sunday, when we celebrated Independence Day:
• A quick overview of the sermon, for those coming to the second service;
• William White, the architect of the Episcopal Church’s governance, whose story I had told in the sermon;
• The Old Testament reading that day, from Deuteronomy, and God’s priority for the needs and concerns of the poor;
• Our political system and the way it often ignores the voices of those who aren’t powerful;
• Whether natural disasters are examples of God exercising judgment on nations that have turned away from a righteous path;
• From the Gospel reading that day, the seemingly impossible challenge of being “perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

What’s exciting about Sermon Sound-Off is that, although we never know what’s coming next, we never lack good conversation. And that’s a big part of the point: Our best formation as Christians comes not from simply listening to someone talk, no matter how interesting he or she may be. Our best formation as Christians comes when we enter into the conversation ourselves, making practical theology what I think God intends it to be: a dialogue, not a monologue.

So, if you're a St. Andrew's person, come to the undercroft at 9:15 a.m. on Sundays this summer and check it out. I think you’ll be amazed at what the Spirit can do among us.

A Christian Lens for bin Laden's Death

2011-05-02T17:10:00.003-05:00

I think Christians may find themselves struggling with how to react to the news that U.S. forces have killed Osama bin Laden. On the one hand, our nation’s primary enemy, the one who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and who has been waging war against this nation for more than a decade, has been eliminated. As at least one commentator has said, it’s as if Adolph Hitler had indeed been assassinated in 1944 – a huge victory that hastens the end of a larger conflict.

At the same time, bin Laden’s death reopens the not-so-well-healed wounds of 9/11, making us relive those awful moments. I imagine the families and friends of the victims going through their trauma all over again. There's been talk about those families finally having “closure” because the perpetrator has been executed. But I have my doubts about that. As a brother of one victim said in a radio interview on Monday, he lives with the pain of his loss every hour of every day, even 10 years later. Even if “justice has been done,” as the president said, legal justice doesn’t cause the dead to rise again.

For Easter people like us, celebrating someone’s killing seems somehow out of key. There are certainly elements of this story to celebrate: the memory of those who died in the 9/11 attacks, the service of those who have fought and suffered in this war against terrorism, the bravery of those who were called to carry out Sunday’s heart-stopping raid. But as we regard bin Laden’s death, maybe our best lens is a lens of healing – something much more in keeping with Christ’s priorities than celebrating a kill. May we see the death of bin Laden as the excision of a cancer that has been metastasizing and sapping the world’s strength for far too long.

And let us pray that our freedom from this cancer will allow our world to move more vigorously into the wholeness and well-being that God desires for all nations, indeed for all creation. Let us pray that bin Laden’s death will inspire not reprisal but renewal, not retaliation but transformation. As followers of Christ, let us take this moment not to beat our chests but to fold our hands and direct the energy of this day into prayer for the healing of God’s world.

Good Friday Grace

2011-04-22T13:55:00.001-05:00

At breakfast this morning with my kids, Kathryn and Dan, we were saying grace. Our habit is to pray pretty informally, with people adding whatever they want to offer God after the one leading the prayer has finished. Today, as we remembered various things related to Good Friday, Dan had this to offer: “Please help Jesus with the memory of his death.”

I stopped short, first at the paradoxical notion that the resurrected Son of God might need help with anything, and then at the depth of the theological insight. Without exactly realizing it, Dan was taking very seriously two important Christian doctrines that sometimes seem to conflict: incarnation and ascension. With the doctrine of incarnation, we make the scandalous claim that God became human in Jesus Christ -– not just pretending to be human, or adopting a few of our limitations, but becoming fully human, even to the point of suffering the worst death I can imagine (as we remember so vividly today). And with the doctrine of the ascension, we proclaim that the resurrected Jesus returned to the Godhead, bringing with him the experience of being fully human, complete with all our joys and all our sorrows. And, as Dan’s prayer extrapolated it, complete with traumatic memory, too -– memory that needs ongoing healing, as all our traumas do.

So this Good Friday, I join my son in praying for Christ’s tears. Through them, may the God who is Three in One bring to mind the mysterious connection with our humanity made deepest on this good and horrible day; and may Jesus indeed continue to find healing in the depth of our gratitude for his pain.

Question Time

2011-04-20T09:17:00.002-05:00

Here's a Holy Week poem (which I also posted last year but is revised below). Sometimes, the mysteries of the faith lend themselves less to exposition and more to poetry ... and the Cross certainly falls into that category. Blessings to you for this week.

Question Time

Imagine Christ comes by to sit with you,
To share a coffee, or a glass of wine;
And then, our sovereign Lord offers a gift:
“It’s question time,” Christ tells you. “Ask away.”

Without a chance for much deep thought, I’d say
The thing that seems forever on my mind:
“So just what do you want from us? It seems
I always strain to hear your voice. And when
The question’s hardest, all I get are soft
Whispers of love. Give me a key that I
Can turn inside confusing locks –- and live.”

Christ smiles and takes a sip and says, “Think back.
It took a flood to cleanse the world of sin.
It took a wilderness of death to bring
Israel into the Promised Land. It took
An exile, generations long, before
God’s own could turn their hearts again and live.
It took a cross to point the way of life.
Do not fear death, but give yourself away;
For sometimes choosing death is how we plant
The seed that springs into full bloom next day.”

I know you’re right, my Lord, but still I wait
And hope you’ll show another, smoother road.
Instead, you finish up your drink and slip
Away. The cross was not the thing I had
In mind when we sat down. But love requires
Us both to die so that the world might live.

April 10, 2011 – St. Andrew’s Saves the World

2011-04-12T21:12:00.002-05:00

I have to say, this past Sunday was one of my favorite days at St. Andrew’s, ever.

Why? Because we spent the day turned outward, toward this world Christ loves enough to have laid down his life for it.

First, here’s the headline from our Fools for Christ’s Sake fundraising dinner: The wonderfully generous people of St. Andrew’s dug deep to fund the lunch program at our partner school, St. Augustine’s, in Maniche, Haiti. We needed to raise $20,000 to ensure we could feed all 150 kids every day of the week during the next school year. That seemed like a tall order –- we’re still in a recession, after all. But when the pledges were tallied, the total stood at $25,000, enough to feed our kids and repair part of the school building damaged by last year's earthquake.

None of the kids of Maniche have ever been to St. Andrew’s, but they seem like part of the family anyway. At this point, we aren’t simply helping anonymous hungry people. When we saw the video clips Sunday night, we could recognize the faces of children from cards we bought at the Advent card sale. We could see their gratitude as we watched them pray before lunch. The missionaries’ videos and stories make this distant place come to life and show how hard it is to leave after spending a week there.

We don’t just have a partnership with a school. We have family in Haiti -– and on Sunday, our folks took a giant step toward helping to ensure that their brothers and sisters will have enough to eat next school year.

The fundraiser would have been enough on its own. But we began last Sunday with another joyful step into the mission God has given this congregation.

We Episcopalians are supposed to be standoffish and unsure of our connection with God and our church. Any visitor to St. Andrew’s will tell you otherwise. But on Sunday, we proved it to ourselves, too. People from 75 households took home yard signs after church on Sunday –- yard signs inviting neighbors and passersby to join us as we celebrate Easter at St. Andrew’s.

Demonstrating our faith “out loud” isn’t the easiest thing for many of us. It may not seem as polite as we usually like to be. But we’ve got a good story to tell about what’s going on in our congregation. And when you’ve got good news, it’s not so hard to share it after all.

This week, as we mark Palm Sunday and enter into the deep mystery of Holy Week, we’ll have more yard signs waiting for our folks to take home and proudly plant in their lawns. It's good not to be “the frozen chosen” after all.

So I’ll remember April 10 as a day when St. Andrew’s helped to save the world. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.

Haiti Trip, Day 6

2010-11-16T20:40:00.002-06:00

9:40 p.m.

“Could be worse. Could be raining.” [Cue thunder, lightning, and downpour.]
-- Igor, Young Frankenstein

There’s a saying among Haiti missionaries: “What do you do when it rains in Haiti? You get wet.” That was our early morning today in a nutshell. It rained all night in Cayes, and was still raining as we got ready to head out for the hour’s drive to Maniche. There were seven of us in a pickup, so some were bound to get wet. We put on rain ponchos and put our heads down as we acted as weights for the last load of lumber to go up the mountain for the school desks. Our real concern wasn’t getting wet; it was getting the truck through the swollen rivers along the way, especially the large one right by the school. Our driver today, Shumi the interpreter, was a master of aquatic driving, and he was wise enough to ask a child to wade into the river so he could sound the depth. It was “only” up to the thighs of a 10-year-old, so the truck plunged in. Shumi made it through without any drama at all. Just another day in Haiti.

At the school, we finished up projects in preparation for coming home. Bruce and a few parents completed five more desks for the fourth- and fifth-grade classes, as well as stabilizing both the teeter-totter and the swing set. Both are in good shape for the near future, at least. Chris taught a little cultural geography this time, telling the fifth and sixth graders about our world in the States and Canada (Chris’ homeland) and showing them photos on his laptop. You’ll be happy to know the kids in Maniche have now seen Kauffman and Arrowhead Stadiums. Kathy taught about hand-washing and cholera prevention, telling the kids they need to be models for their families and friends to help keep the disease from spreading. And Vanessa taught the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders about fractions using time signatures in music as the example. It was a brilliant way to instill some math principles and have a great time in the process. The kids in Maniche don’t often listen to iPods (through battery-powered speakers, in this case). Vanessa had found a Celine Dion song, in French, with a strong ¾ beat, and you could hear kids singing it on the schoolyard after class. And I finished some school-picture “retakes” and tried to shoot all the activity in the classrooms and the construction site.

Once the school day was over, we all found ourselves looking for one more small task or organizational detail to manage, just to delay actually leaving. It’s hard to go once you spend a few days there and renew relationships with the teachers and students. This is a great manifestation of the truth that we really aren’t in a partner relationship with a school in Haiti. We’re partners with people who teach and learn at Maniche. The relationship isn’t about improving buildings, or building libraries, or eventually adding computers –- as important as those things are. Instead, the relationship is about helping families and educators work with God to transform the lives of these 161 students.

And we were given a wonderful exclamation point on that message as we left the school and drove back into Maniche proper. We stopped at two of the three schools where our graduates from last year’s sixth grade are now enrolled in the next step in their schooling. These are larger schools, with more resources and about 30 kids in each class (compared with the 15 or so in our classes). We had worried –- with good reason, in the past –- that our students might not be adequately prepared to make the move to the “town” schools and succeed. So we asked the headmasters at these schools how our students were doing. The answer: Just fine. They were keeping up and even excelling compared with the other students.

This is a microscopic victory. For this year, it means a grand total of six kids are moving on in their schooling. So what, in the bigger picture? This doesn’t change anything about the problems of Haiti. It doesn’t even make any visible changes in this tiny, remote mountain village. But for these six kids, at this moment in their lives, it makes all the difference. It helps them take another step in the process of becoming the new creations God intends, able to transform life for themselves, their families, and the children they will rear. Most of all, it takes these kids seriously; and, in so doing, it takes Jesus Christ seriously. As you do to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you do it to me (Matthew 25:40).

Au revoir –- until next year.

Haiti Trip, Day 5

2010-11-15T19:44:00.002-06:00

Nov. 15, 2010, 8:36 p.m.

What sticks with me today are images more than narratives –- snapshots, literally, of lives we’re only beginning to know.

(By the way, as I write this, an impromptu choir has formed in the room of the innkeeper, Franchette. She had hernia surgery last week, a couple of days before we arrived; and she’s been in bed most of the time since we’ve been here. Now, a group of friends, probably from her church nearby, is gathered around her, praying and singing, in Kreyol, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Even if it weren’t a church group, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary in this country to hear people singing hymns in the hallway of a public building.)

I spent the day at Maniche with Vanessa taking photos of the students and interviewing them, through an interpreter, about some of the basics of their young lives: name, age, number of brothers and sisters, whether they live with their parents or someone else, how long it takes them to walk to school, and whether they’d come into the community recently, fallout from the January earthquake. We talked with all 147 kids at the school today (the enrollment is 161). Here are a few snapshots:
• Fabien Exantus is in the earliest preschool class. He’s 4 years old, and his grandmother brought him to Maniche from Port-au-Prince after his mom was killed in the earthquake. (We didn’t hear anything about his father.)
• Miguel Prospira is in 2nd grade. He’s 12 years old and lives with his sister after his parents died in the earthquake. He walks two hours each way to go to school.
• Vilant Adme is 16 years old and in 5th grade. He lives with his parents, who struggle to provide not only for him but for his six brothers, and four sisters, too. He walks an hour each way to go to school.

Of course, there are also many kids we talked with today whose lives are more “normal” than these three. But even “normal” is getting harder than it had been in Haiti. Kathy, the physician, is noticing signs of malnutrition more frequently than we saw last year, particularly in the orange tint to the children’s black hair, a sign of protein malnutrition. And this is despite the fact that we serve a high-protein lunch each day at our school. The supply of food in the country following the earthquake is even lower than usual, which drives the prices up and out of range for many of our school’s families.

So, part of our mission here is tending to the physical well-being of the kids. And toward that end, Kathy went out with Colbert networking with local health-care providers to arrange care for the kids at our school, charged to us. She found an office of the National Health Service about a mile away from the school (an easy walk for the kids here), which will serve as a referral facility for the “nurse” at our school. This is a good moment to remember that the root of salvation, in Greek and Latin, means “healing.” That’s what God is about, on every level we can imagine (and more).

While all this was going on, Chris the urban planner was teaching geography to the 5th and 6th grade students. His lesson was about aerial photography and mapping, and he brought the kids aerial maps of their school and community, as well as toy planes to illustrate what he meant by “airplane.” Then Chris took the classes on a walk to find points marked on the maps. The amazing thing to me wasn’t just that they understood what he was talking about (for the most part), but that they were not blown away by the concepts of airplanes or aerial photography. You never know what people here will already know about. After all, the entire country is connected by cell phones, which get reception even in a place as remote as Maniche....

We also had our parent meeting today, with about 100 parents showing up after we made the invitation at a grand total of 12 houses. Kathy talked about hygiene practices for cholera prevention, the need for parents to support their kids’ educations by encouraging them to do their homework, and the need for parents to volunteer as “disciplinarians” at Saturday study sessions offered by the headmaster. Several parents said they were interested, and she got one man to coordinate volunteers. It’s not exactly the PTA, but it’s an idea whose time may have come here.

In our theological reflection tonight, we talked about God’s mission in the world and the remarkable truth that we are participants in it when we allow ourselves to be sent on missional assignments (like going to work or the club, as well as going to Haiti). That’s a hard truth to accept because it can smack of arrogance: “Who am I to be doing God’s work in the world, and what if I’m imperfect in executing it?” And hearing that response, God smiles and says, “Perfection is never the goal. If I’d valued that most, I’d never have given you free will. The goal is faithfulness, and nothing more. The rest you can leave to me.”

Haiti Trip, Day 4

2010-11-14T20:01:00.003-06:00

Nov. 14, 2010, 9:01 p.m.

It’s the end of a long and wonderful Sunday, and it feels like it’s about midnight. That’s what we get from waking up at 4 a.m. thanks to the alarm-clock fan in the room Chris and I are sharing. Night before last, it decided to buzz loudly at 3 a.m.; last night, it waited an extra hour. Tonight, we have a new fan. We’ll see what it decides to do.

The morning began with church at St. Saveur parish in Cayes. Initially, there was a chance that Pere Colbert would ask me to do the liturgy in French (a frightening but nearly plausible thought), but instead he asked another priest to preside while I preached, with the other priest translating. What’s striking about church in Haiti (apart from a congregation actually filling the church at 7 a.m.) is the great joy in the midst of what seem to us such Spartan surroundings. To our eyes, the churches in both Cayes and Maniche would seem to be dingy, concrete caves with a few streamers here and there and literally no lighting other than what comes in through the open doors and windows. Yet the people manage to transform their worship spaces into the heavenly throne room, with full-voiced worshippers lustily praising God for salvation we can only begin to imagine. The liturgy follows the Book of Common Prayer just as ours does, complete with the same lectionary as we use; so our experience wasn’t so different from that of the congregation at St. Andrew’s this morning ... except that it was a world away.

The sermon seemed to be well-received, especially at Maniche, where the congregation offered its share of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” –- again, something a bit outside my experience in the Episcopal Church. The gospel reading was from Luke, where Jesus warns the disciples of immediate threats along the way toward the coming of the kingdom – wars and insurrections, famine, diseases, dreadful signs from heaven, and earthquakes. It sounds like an update on Haiti from CNN. I told them that we stand with them in their suffering and that we have great respect for their remarkable ability to look with faith toward the coming of the Kingdom even in such dire circumstances. I also used the Isaiah reading (65:17-25) to frame the work of our school in terms of taking part with God in bringing forth new creation, “new heavens and a new earth” even in the here and now. This is at least one reason why it matters for missionaries like us to show up here: It’s a wonderful thing to send money, but it’s so much more to accompany that support with the solidarity of presence.

After church, we came back to Hosanna House for lunch -– a Sunday feast including roast chicken in a wonderful spicy sauce, beans and rice, a hot potato and beet salad, avocados, bread, and a cold pasta salad with onions. From there, despite the temptation to take a nap, we took off for a trip to the beach at Port-Salut. Getting to the beach was a bit of a challenge because of the political rally in the streets of Port-Salut. It’s presidential-election time in Haiti, and there are 19 candidates, which results in an amazing collection of election posters plastered everywhere, including on road signs. In Port-Salut today, supporters of one candidate clogged the streets (and made us a bit nervous, especially with the presence of armed UN troops), but at least they didn’t overtake the beach. So we relaxed, enjoyed the water, and noted how the hurricane last week had changed the shape and texture of the beach from what we remembered from previous visits. Then we prayed Compline as the sun was setting and feasted on lobster cooked over a fire. It wasn’t Eucharist, but it certainly was eucharistic -– friends in Christ gathered around God’s table, offering a sacrifice of thanksgiving for the bounty we received.

We drive the 45 minutes or so back into Cayes in the dark –- just in case daytime driving on a highway with no regulations and many pedestrians and cyclists isn’t thrilling enough. Once we reached Cayes, we were traveling slowly in city traffic, with cyclists all around, only feet away from the truck; and Chris, Bruce, and I were in the back. As we moved along, I heard someone shouting out from a motorcycle just behind us. I began to get concerned. Here we were, three blans in the back of a pickup, almost certain to be carrying cash and unarmed. We all ignored the shouting, hoping the driver would put some distance between us and the cyclist, but it continued. Then I thought I heard the man saying, “Father, Father!” I figured there was no way he could be calling to me. Not only was I a stranger here, but I hardly looked clerical, dressed in a swimming suit and a t-shirt from Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But the shouting continued –- “Father, Father!” Then the man pulled up alongside us, looked over at me, and called out, “Good message today at the Episcopal Church!” I’ve never had a compliment on a sermon quite like that.

May we have eyes to see and ears to hear the potential blessings swirling around us in the chaos of our lives, and the strength to look past our fears to find them.

Haiti Trip, Day 3 -- Nov. 13, 2010

2010-11-13T20:05:00.003-06:00

8:22 p.m.

We’ve had a long and full day, and we have to be alert for a 7 a.m. service tomorrow (the first of two at which I’m preaching), so I’ll try to make this relatively short.

We arrived in Maniche this morning with considerably less trouble than yesterday, and without having to take the hour-long detour to find a river crossing. Our intrepid driver, Jean-Marie, took the Hosanna house truck underwater up to the door handles, but he pulled us through to the other side. Praise God, literally.

This being Saturday, there was no school in Maniche. So we used our time on things we couldn’t have done while the kids were in classes. One of the plans was to continue the “field day” activities from yesterday, to the degree we had any takers show up. When we got there, only a few kids were around. So Bruce continued with his second construction project, the swing set –- which he finished today, too. Kathy and Vanessa painted little girls’ fingernails, and Chris supervised a game of soccer, much more organized than the bedlam from yesterday. I shot photos and hung around with the kids.

Once the customers for the nail boutique ran dry and the kids had played quite a bit of soccer, we took off with a group of students to have them take us to their homes. We walked through the countryside around Maniche for about an hour and a half, stopping at the homes of maybe a dozen students. At each one, through our interpreters, we explained who we were, said thank-you for sending your child to the school, invited them to a parent-teacher meeting on Monday, and found out which kids lived in that home. (Chris also mapped each child’s home using a GPS and recorded which kids lived where.) Then I prayed with each family and blessed their homes. It’s a wonderful illustration of the thin place between heaven and earth that Haiti is. Here there’s very little sense of separation between the secular and the sacred, and the notion that a wandering stranger would stop and bless your home really isn’t odd at all here.

I need to share a story from this walkabout. Several of the kids who led us around adopted an adult as a special friend, and I ended up with two little girls who insisted on holding my hands the entire time we tromped around through the rocks and mud. They were darling, apart from the scabies; and they really seemed to enjoy the time with these strange blans who had come to call. Along the way, we crossed a creek on stepping stones, which the kids would have had absolutely no problem navigating. I was a little hesitant about this, not having crossed a creek in a long time. But one of my little companions, dressed in an enormously long Hannah Montana t-shirt acting as a dress, insisted on walking through the creek next to me, holding my hand. Along the way (surprise, surprise), I slipped on a wet rock and pitched toward her a bit. She held her ground in the mud, holding me up and righting me back on the rock so I could continue with dry feet. I was reminded of the story of Christ calling to Peter to walk on the sea to meet him. When Peter began to doubt and began slipping into the sea, it was Jesus’ hand that kept him up. And so it was with me today.

Once we got back to the school, Vanessa had done an incredible job of organizing the kids there (now probably 40 or so) into two groups in two classrooms, getting them ready to paint with watercolors. The kids at Maniche have no art whatsoever in their curriculum, so we wanted to give them an experience they wouldn’t normally get. Vanessa had all the materials out and was giving the kids instructions in French about how to do this activity they had never seen before. The results were incredible –- many simply beautiful paintings, as varied as the kids themselves. Then, to top off this experience, we have this story: Bruce was in the church, measuring the benches so he could build desks to fit with some of them in the classrooms. One of the students came into the church with his watercolor, which Bruce appropriately admired and praised. The boy then went to the back of the church, took the top off the baptismal font, and placed his painting in the empty font, an offering for God and for the church. We are all called to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God, and this boy completely gets it. Thanks be to God, and may we all offer ourselves so beautifully.

Haiti Trip, Days 1 and 2

2010-11-12T19:33:00.003-06:00

Just got internet access, so here are the first two days of St. Andrew's mission trip to Haiti, 2010.

Nov. 11, 9:33 p.m.

We were up at 4 a.m. for a 6:50 flight this morning. That gave most of us five to six hours of sleep, but not Kathy Shaffer, who came in on the 11 p.m. plane and didn’t get to the hotel until 12:30 a.m. All were in good spirits, though, and we had very little drama in making the flight or getting to Port-au-Prince.

My greatest shock initially was simply getting off the airplane –- on a jetway, which I’ve never seen in Haiti before. The jetway led to an air-conditioned hallway, which led to a shuttle bus to customs and baggage claim, all new since the earthquake. Meanwhile, behind the new walkway sits the original terminal building, clearly damaged by the earthquake. However, the building isn’t badly damaged enough to be abandoned. In fact, the government now is housed there. It’s a perfectly Haitian solution to the problem: Use what you have, and improvise.

After customs, we met Zo, our driver, but we had to wait an hour in the parking lot for his assistant to return with the van, which the assistant had “borrowed” to earn another fare while he was supposedly waiting for us. It wasn’t that bad an idea, except for the reality of extraordinary post-earthquake traffic jams. Hence our one-hour wait.

To get from the airport and on the way to Cayes, you have to drive through Port-au-Prince. It was fascinating, as always. Most noticeable was the fact that there was less visible destruction than I’d imagined (or been led to believe by the media). Much of the rubble has been cleared, and some rebuilding is underway. It’s not the case that the city is leveled, but the reports we’ve heard of tent cities are absolutely not exaggerated. In virtually every open space (and many not-very-open spaces), there are tents, which have obviously been up since the earthquake, given their condition at this point. Next to the tent cities are a smattering of port-a-potties, but they’re clearly insufficient for the demand.

They will be even more insufficient soon, as cholera makes its way particularly through the slums and tent cities. The fears are great that deaths could be at the same levels as the earthquake – a quarter million people or so, over a few years. Once cholera is present in a situation like this, it won’t be eradicated or even dealt with quickly. It’s a frightening thought, on several levels.

Although many buildings remain standing, the icons of Port-au-Prince are gone. The presidential palace looks just as it did the day it collapsed, like a fallen wedding cake. The Roman Catholic Cathedral stands with exterior walls only, roof and interior destroyed. And Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral looks like the ruins of abbeys in rural England from centuries ago – only a few pieces of wall here and there remain. I took a piece of the floor tile as a keepsake, and I nearly cried. This was an artistic treasure, as well as a physical proclamation of the presence of the Kingdom even in the midst of extreme poverty, overcrowding, and disease. That reality is still true, of course; for God, too, suffers with the people of Haiti in the destruction of His house.

As we left Port-au-Prince, we began the drive on the one highway connecting the capital with the southwest of the country. In spots, the road is gravel and rocks, as it detours through rivers now spanned by unsafe or visibly cracked bridges. But most of the road is well-paved. That sounds like a good thing, but ... when you combine it with a total absence of traffic regulations and a driver who was born to race, and you have what became both the highlight and the lowlight of the day. It was alternately described as “a five-hour LeMans race,” “driving as an extreme sport,” and “a ride at Disneyland that you can’t get off.” We laughed more than I’ve laughed in weeks, I think. Thankfully, and literally miraculously, we also didn’t hit any of the hundreds of people we flew by, a few inches away along the sides of the road.

Once we made it to Cayes, we went to Pere Colbert’s rectory for dinner and an extended conversation about how to improve student learning at the school in Maniche. Because of cultural norms that see rural “peasants” as uneducable and unworthy of the effort to teach them, our educational enterprise in the mountains has a lot working against it. It’s very hard to find good teachers willing to go up to Maniche five days a week, and it’s hard to incentivize them to improve student learning. But that’s the work: Increase the number of kids who matriculate and eventually pass national exams at the end of sixth grade –- exams that determine whether the child will be a candidate for further learning and, thereby, socioeconomic progress. It’s a tall order in the face of cultural expectations and the reality of nearly complete illiteracy among the parents.

Before turning in, I have one interesting note for the people of St. Andrew’s, who are in the midst of an effort to raise funds to rebuild, restore, and renew our church building. At St. Saveur parish in Cayes, Pere Colbert’s flagship congregation, they, too, are raising money -– their goal is to expand their worship space. On the first Sunday of the month, they are asked to give toward this effort. Last week, the congregation gave between 12,000 and 13,000 Haitian goudes -– the equivalent of about $300 –- toward that goal. This happened in a place where the average income is $1 to $2 per day. I think they have a pretty good handle on the notion of giving back to God in joy and thanksgiving for what they’ve received.

Nov. 12, 2010, 4:58 p.m.

We’re back from a very Haitian day, with all its positives and negatives.

We left Hosanna House at 7 a.m., after negotiating last night with the innkeeper, Franchette, to arrange for a lunch packed early in exchange for her not having to prepare a breakfast other than bananas, bread, and peanut butter. The lunch was very typical –- hot dogs and onions, which had been boiled this morning and then kept in a “cold” chest; buns; crackers; and incredibly sweet fruit drink. Augmented by a protein bar, it made for a filling lunch, at least. And it was absolutely the envy of the kids at the school, despite the fact they had had their own lunch of rice and beans, with a little ham thrown in. That’s a very nutritious lunch, but it’s also what they have basically every day. Hot dogs must have seemed like Kansas City strips.

Back to the travelogue. On the way out of Cayes, we stopped at a building supply store –- the Haitian equivalent of Home Depot –- to get lumber for Bruce Bower’s playground projects. We’re building a teeter-totter and a small swing set for the school (or, more accurately, Bruce is), and that implies taking the equipment to the worksite. We left “Home Depot” with 14 2x4’s in the only length they had, 16 feet. Securing these in a short-bed pick-up was interesting enough, but it was greatly complicated by the terrain we traversed up the mountain to Maniche. To say we took “roads” is a little deceptive. None of it is paved; very little of it is graded; much of it is at dramatic angles up and down; and nearly all of it is made up of large, loose stones which pass for pavement. It’s like driving at 45-degree angles on a rough riverbed. It also included several actual riverbeds, complete with rivers. One of these was expected –- we always cross a river just before arriving at the school. But with the recent hurricane, the rivers are swollen; so the local experts felt we should take a detour to find a more shallow crossing. This added an hour to what’s usually an hour-long drive – but it was even this time because of the numerous stops to re-secure the 16-foot lumber sliding off the back of the truck. Anyway, we got to Maniche about 11 a.m.

Once there, we spent much of the time reconnecting with the teachers, Jude the “disciplinarian,” and Samuel the headmaster, while Bruce did his construction project. Our conversations culminated in a meeting with the teachers, in which Kathy Shaffer and I talked with them about what they think the school and the students need. Not surprisingly, more funding for salaries was near the top of the list (the teachers make about $100 a month, which is at least twice the per-capita income). But they also were concerned about other issues that would resonate with a teacher in the States: the pressure to improve student achievement, the need for parents to be more involved in their children’s education, and the health and well-being of their students. For the teachers in Maniche, the immediate health-related issue is the need to prevent the spread of cholera. We will raise all these issues in a meeting of parents and teachers we’ll host on Monday. We’re fortunate to have Kathy (a physician) here to provide expert advice on limiting the spread of cholera. It takes clean water, which is difficult enough to come by; but it also takes cultural change -– paying attention to hand-washing, especially after toileting and before food preparation. Things probably will get very ugly in Haiti before they get better.

While our meeting and Bruce’s building project were going on, Chris Nazar and Vanessa Jefferson interacted with the kids after school let out. I would say they “played” with the kids, but I think (based on Chris’ story) it turned more into doing wardens’ work in crowd control. We brought soccer balls, volleyballs, and equipment for games like ring toss, bean-bag toss, etc. Taking turns wasn’t exactly on the kids’ minds, so our “field day” turned into trying not to lose the equipment in its first use. Ah, well. Nothing is exactly as one might expect, and everything is an education. Welcome to Haiti.

After dinner of pumpkin soup (a Haitian favorite) and bread, our group gathered for theological reflection and Compline. It’s just about my favorite part of the experience here. Everything you see here is fodder for considering where God might be in it or what God might have to say about it. Our conversation ranged from educational practice, to denominationalism, to Voodoo, to how Haitians understand the question of theodicy -– how God can allow bad things to happen to good people. The answer to the last is especially worth sharing. They seem to have the spiritual gift of patience, even to a fault. The good side of this is that extreme patience is mandatory to live in this context without either going mad or turning on God; the shadow side is that it fosters an attitude of complacency and fatalism. But the best element of Haitian theodicy is its embrace of deep mystery: The Haitians manage to see God as the absolute provider of all things, giving us everything we have and (at least nearly) enough of it; and they’re authentically thankful for what they receive, praising God often and out loud. At the same time, the see their suffering as somehow within the will of a good and loving God, a deity they perceive as being actively involved in every element of life and in all creation. They simply don’t have trouble reconciling a reality that we analytic, scientific-minded Northerners can’t begin to wrap our hearts and minds around.

Drive-Thru Blessings

2010-09-03T07:24:00.002-05:00

As we come to another Friday, maybe you’re feeling that you haven’t really made much of a difference this week. Get up, get to work, take care of things at home, rest a little … then get up and do it all over again.

A friend shared a story with me this week. It offers a little hope that, in the midst of the daily grind, we might suddenly find ourselves in the position of being an instrument of blessing. And in the most surprising places.

She had been a regular customer at a particular drive-thru for a while, and she frequently found herself being served by a man many people might have written off. He wasn’t terribly attractive, and he had difficulty making himself understood because of a speech impediment. Still, she would talk with him when she went through the drive-thru, and it seemed to brighten his day.

One day, she asked the usual, “How are you?”; and the man shared some trouble he was facing. She stayed at the window longer than normal, actually listening. And at the end, she offered, “I’m so sorry to hear all that. I’ll be sure to pray for you.”

“Really?” the man replied, taken aback. “You’d really pray for me?” He couldn’t imagine someone would have said such a thing to him.

The next time my friend went through the drive-thru, she greeted the man as usual, and they had their regular conversation. Then he asked, “Are you still … you know … I mean … for me?”

“Absolutely I’m still praying for you,” she said, with a smile. “And I’ll be happy to keep it up.” It made his day.

I have no idea what happened in that man’s life, as far as his difficult issue is concerned. I have no miraculous story to tell of healing that sprang from my friend’s prayer. But I can say, with certainty, that her willingness simply to say “I’ll pray for you” made all the difference for someone in pain.

And, by the way, it made her week really mean something.

Church Rocket Science

2010-08-24T06:31:00.002-05:00

Sunday was “Blast-Off Sunday” at St. Andrew’s –- the beginning of Sunday school, which the kids marked by going outside and firing little foam-rubber rockets into the air. This is always an important day, but it was something to celebrate this year because of the way Sunday school is changing for us.

For many years, we offered Sunday school during the first part of the 10:15 (“family”) service. Not anymore. Now Sunday school is happening between the two services, starting at 9:15 a.m. And the reason why is a great reminder of who we are as Episcopalians.

We made this change so our kids could experience worship regularly. As Episcopalians, liturgy using the Book of Common Prayer is a huge part of our identity. Other denominations may focus on reading the Bible, or channeling the activity of the Holy Spirit, or hearing long sermons, or singing praise music, or whatever. For us, the focus is liturgy – worshipping God through common prayer, as Anglicans have been doing for centuries. When we had Sunday school during the first part of the liturgy, it taught an unintentional but still unhealthy lesson: “Worship is for older people, not for kids.” In the moment on any given Sunday, I can imagine both kids and parents being happier with that arrangement (I certainly remember being dragged to church when I didn’t want to be there.) But the problem is, the kids eventually grow up without any place for worship in their heads or in their hearts. So, we discerned that we should be forming our kids to know and to love worship, rather than teaching them that worship is something older people do.

So, to make that a reality, we’re now giving kids their own worship time every Sunday. After Sunday school, they gather for Children’s Chapel, complete with Bible readings, and a kids’ sermon, and fun music, and their own prayers, and a little altar, and candles, and everything. Then they join their parents in the church before Communion, so families can receive the presence of Christ together.

Most churches have been doing this kind of thing for years, so we’re not exactly pushing the envelope here. But for St. Andrew’s to catch this wave (again) is a grand thing. And so, after the kids shot off their rockets in the churchyard, the clergy shot of rockets, too – in the church, during the announcements. The fact that Episcopal kids need to worship may not be ecclesiological rocket science, but it is a change to celebrate.

Moments of transfiguration

2010-08-07T10:08:00.002-05:00

August 7, 2010

I’m sorry for the long absence. I hope and pray to make the space consistently for this again. That’s certainly something easier hoped and prayed for than done, but I’ll give it my best.

Ann and I have been at a lake for the past couple of days, celebrating her birthday and our anniversary. One of the best things about that experience has been sitting on a screened porch overlooking a cove of the lake, shielded by the trees. It’s been a lovely opportunity simply to sit, without checking e-mail, and listen -– to the birds, to the breeze, to God. And every now and then, when one does such a countercultural thing, one is blessed with visions.

This morning, I was sitting there alone before Ann woke up, praying. At other moments in the past few days, depending on the sun and the wind, the water has appeared still and dark and flat, a quiet companion but, frankly, of little interest. This morning, everything changed. A breeze came up, moving the water in a gentle current; the sun was at just the right angle from my eyes. And the result was transfiguration. The water flashed and shimmered as if electrified, glittering with divine energy. It was the same cove, of course -– but it wasn’t.

Yesterday was the feast of the Transfiguration, which recalls Jesus’ appearance with Moses and Elijah on the mountaintop. The disciples with him reported that, for a brief moment, everything about him changed –- that he shone in dazzling light, revealing the fullness of divinity they had only glimpsed in words and signs before.

At least part of the message of that revelation is that God continues to share with us flashes of divinity. What usually looks to us still and flat and mundane can become transfigured before our eyes, even now. Take God’s good creation, and add incarnation, and mix it with the breath of the Holy Spirit, and you never know what you might be blessed to see -– or who you might be blessed to become.

Finally Back

2010-03-31T06:01:00.003-05:00

I apologize for being silent for so long. There's simply been too much to attend to, on all kinds of levels. Here's a Holy Week offering -- may your journey this week lead you into unexpected conversations with God.

Question Time

Imagine God comes down to sit with you,
To share a coffee, or a glass of wine;
And then, our sovereign Lord offers a gift:
“It’s question time,” God tells you. “Ask away.”

Without the time for much deep thought, I’d say
The thing that seems forever on my mind:
“So just what do you want from us? It seems
I always strain to hear your voice. And when
The question’s hardest, all I get are soft
Whispers of love. Give me a key that I
Can turn inside confusing locks – and live.”

God smiles and takes a sip and says, “Think back.
It took a flood to cleanse the world of sin.
It took a wilderness of death to bring
Israel into the promised land. It took
An exile, generations long, before
People could turn their hearts to me and live.
It took a cross to show the path of life.
Do not fear death, but give yourself away,
For sometimes choosing death is how you plant
The seed that springs into full bloom next day.”

I know you’re right, my Lord, but still I wait
And hope you’ll show another, softer road.
Instead, you finish up your drink and move
Along. A cross was not the thing I had
In mind when we sat down. But love requires
Us both to die so that we both may live.

A Blessedly Stressful Advent

2009-12-18T16:39:00.002-06:00

Very quickly, in the midst of the stress and anxiety that can curse this time of holy Advent expectation, let me share a moment in the life of my congregation.

A couple of days ago, I took a moment to stop and notice what was going on at St. Andrew’s in a single late morning and early afternoon. In the entryway, one man was gathering up containers others had brought for the lunch program at the Kansas City Community Kitchen. Down the hall, a group of women were gathering for Bible study. Downstairs, 14 people were loading packets of food into backpacks to help feed poor children from our partner school during Christmas break. Soon after, seven people were sitting around a table revamping the church’s website to make it easier to use for newcomers and members alike. And in the office, staff and volunteers were doing the mostly unseen and unsung work of caring for people in trouble, preparing worship booklets for Christmas Eve, tracking the money, distributing assistance to strangers in need, keeping the building in good shape, and responding to scores of e-mails and phone calls.

In addition to all the activity, and the love it embodies, what struck me was the fact that this was simply a day in the life. Granted, it’s late Advent; and that means everything is cranked up a few notches. But basically, this is just what we do here.

So maybe I need to see all that pre-Christmas stress and anxiety through a different lens. In this moment, and at all moments, we’re getting ready for the Savior to come among us –- next week, as a child in the cold; and finally, as the Lord of all. This kind of work is not exactly contemplative, but it’s certainly necessary preparation for God-With-Us.

So –- a blessedly stressful Advent to you.

Heading Home ... and Beyond

2009-11-20T13:26:00.001-06:00

Friday, Nov. 20, 1:27 p.m.

It's been a blessedly easy morning so far. Things got complicated last night when we were told the departure time from Cayes had been moved up a half hour (schedules are rather flexible here). So we dutifully asked Colbert to pick us up at 5:15 a.m. for a 6:30 flight. When we got to the airport, the gate was locked – we had beaten the employees, as well as the airline manager who held our tickets. So we stood around for (hmmm...) a half hour waiting to go inside. As it turned out, our flight left at the originally scheduled time after all, 7 a.m. At least we got to watch the sunrise.

The other small glitch this morning was the absence of running water at Hosanna House. I guess I didn't really need that shower after all.

For me, at least, a trip like this defies quick and clear conclusions. As we've each said more than once, it will take some time to process what we've done and seen and heard. But as far as themes go, it's probably worth paying attention to the Gospel reading for today from the Daily Office lectionary. Here's part of that passage:

“Take care that you do not despise any one of these little ones [children]; for I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father. What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the 99 that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that any of these little ones should be lost.” (Matthew 18:10-14)

Every child counts, even (especially) those most of us never see. God sees each of them, no matter how remote their village, no matter how desperate their circumstances, no matter how easily we might write them off. In God's eyes, no children are so lost that God's people should stop looking for ways to reach them. It may seem like a pipe dream to imagine the children of Maniche graduating from middle school and being prepared for a trade beyond sharecropping. But it's not. Such a transformational future is within the grasp of our two partner congregations. That which God purposes God also blesses. So if we're faithful to our calling, if we resist the temptation to deny the power of new creation God shares with us, then we can be the agents who bring such a miraculous future to life.

The Last Day

2009-11-19T21:47:00.001-06:00

Thursday, Nov. 19, 10:48 p.m.

I think we're all ready for it to be the last day. And yet, as we passed out of Maniche this afternoon for the last time, I think we all were leaving with some sadness because we've become, in some small way, a part of this community. As Chris and Kathy both said, we recognize individual kids by this point – some we'll miss and some we'll be just as happy to leave behind, frankly, as would be the case if any of us spent a week at any school in Kansas City. We've enfleshed the connection we remember every Sunday as we offer prayers for “our partner school in Maniche, Haiti.” Now, that connection has been lived out through time in the classroom, time playing volleyball, time walking home with students, time meeting with parents and teachers. So we'll miss our extended family once we're gone.

Today was relatively easy, as far as work goes – which was a good thing considering how tired all of us have become. We got there in time to watch the flag ceremony in front of the newly painted school, which was very satisfying given the pieces of our souls we left there scraping and painting and running down supplies. Then we worked with the students in each class to make Christmas cards for the people of St. Andrew's. As in past years, we'll offer parishioners the chance to sponsor kids in Maniche by purchasing Christmas cards during the four Sundays of Advent. The difference this year is that the cards will have been made by the child being sponsored, will feature his or her photo, and will include a little biographical information. So look for some seriously cute drawings in the Jewell Room this year.

We also gave each child a dose of de-worming medication. Among the challenges the kids face is intestinal parasites that consume many of the scarce calories the kids consume. These parasites come from infested water, contaminated hands, and through the sole of the feet from the dirt. We left additional pills for two more administrations later in the year.

Late in the morning, we facilitated a meeting between the parents and the teachers. We had notified the parents about the meeting during church on Sunday, and we'd mentioned it on our walkabouts to the kids' homes. But we had no idea how many parents might actually show up. Last time a team attempted a similar meeting here, a grand total of one parent came. Today, we had more than 50. The teachers got to voice their frustrations about kids not doing homework and coming to school out of uniform; the parents got to voice their frustrations with being unable to track homework (because the vast majority are illiterate!) and with their scarce resources for paying for uniforms, school lunches, and tuition (about half the parents pay at least something toward the cost of their kids' education). From the meeting came a pledge to work toward having a teacher stay after school for a study hall. More important, the parents wholeheartedly agree they want the school to offer middle-school classes, too. Even if they can't support the schoolwork like many American parents, they too want their kids to have a better life than they do. We ended by sharing a cake – and hearing a number of comments from the parents about how deeply they appreciate the education that St. Andrew's makes available to their kids. They also really appreciated the fact that the team of missionaries came to work for a week. Nothing says “I love you” quite like showing up to do the work.

Late this afternoon, the MN team and our group headed off to the beach for a final evening of relaxation. The water (and the lobster) was nearly as glorious as the sunset, and we prayed the Phos Hilaron again as the sun passed over the horizon. The only damper on the evening was the flat tire on the way home, but several of us pitched in and, praise God, the spare actually had air.

Tomorrow we head out at 5:15 a.m. for the long trip home. Please keep us in your prayers for safe travels and for something approximating timely departures.....

Painting the Future

2009-11-18T15:24:00.002-06:00

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 4:25 p.m.

We're back after a day of painting at the school in Maniche. Today is a national holiday in Haiti, celebrating (I think) the first raising of the Haitian national flag. The flag's design has a good story, by the way. It's half blue and half red, with the national seal in the center. The color choice came from independence itself. The story goes that, to create the first Haitian flag, the victorious blacks and mulattoes took a French tri-color and ripped the white out of it. Such was the history, as well.

Anyway, because it's a national holiday, school was not in session. However, given the number of kids at the school today, you'd never have known it was a vacation day. Many of the students (and a number of parents and teachers, too) took us up on the offer to come and help paint on their holiday. As a result, we “finished” just before lunch – which means we ran out of paint. But the job is done well enough, and the school certainly looks a thousand times better than it did before the paint. Again, the issue of quality standards arose, this time on the drive home. We asked Colbert if he had gone into the school building to see the paint job. He said, “Yes … but the job is not yet done, of course.” This cast a bit of a pall over our sense of accomplishment. Frankly, we'd felt we had a loaves-and-fishes moment with the paint, stretching the blue as far as we possibly could to reach at least a point of conclusion, if not professional standard. In any event, painting was a much more satisfying thing this time (at least we can learn from our mistakes). We organized the throngs of painters better, with one of us stationed in each of the remaining four classrooms and one of us (Sean) acting as quartermaster. This kept our helpers more on task and prevented paint and supplies from wandering all over the schoolyard.

After lunch, we set up the volleyball net we'd brought. I'm sure the students, teachers, and parents got several chuckles watching us try to assemble the net, following instructions that clearly had been translated into English from another language. Between this and our natural inabilities at engineering, we put on a pretty good show. But the net went up, and the kids loved learning how the game was supposed to work. In Haiti, boys play soccer and girls play volleyball – but the girls in Maniche had never seen a volleyball or a net. So Ann and Kathy showed the girls how to play and set the boundary for the boys. By the time we left, the girls were getting good at keeping the boys out of their game. The soccer balls and volleyballs are a huge hit, and we probably should bring a duffel bag full of them each time a group comes here.

This morning, before painting, we had a great conference with Colbert, Msr. Samuel the headmaster, and Msr. Jude the disciplinarian/assistant. We wanted to find out what options the students have for education beyond 6th grade, which is where our school stops. They said Maniche used to have a government-run middle school and high school, but after it failed to pay its teachers for three consecutive years(!), it was forced to close. There's also a Roman Catholic school for 7th through 9th grades, but it's available only to parishioners. So, the answer is, our students currently have nowhere to go for education beyond 6th grade. This gave us a clear sense of where St. Andrew's mission in Maniche needs to head for the future – offering middle-school classes in the afternoon, once the elementary classes have finished with the rooms. It's exciting to think we can be part of opening up the future for these kids. In Haiti, graduating from 6th grade is an important thing, but it won't open any doors to get you out of a sharecropping life (how most of our families support themselves). But if you graduate from 9th grade, you have the opportunity to get into vocational training, learning to be a carpenter, mechanic, mason, etc. That life is still hard but tremendously better than living off the land (or what seems more like living off the rocks). We have the chance to make this possible for our kids in Maniche. I think I hear a calling....

Tonight, Colbert has invited us to come to his home, the rectory in Cayes, for dinner with his wife and brand-new daughter. We'll also be joined by the group that's been working with MN's educational program here this week, which means Colbert and his wife will have about 20 blans descending on their house for dinner. We'll be cozy but certainly well-fed. Hospitality is huge here, so we will continue to feast on this mission to help Haitians overcome poverty and hunger. Whether it's dinner at Colbert's or lobster on the beach, our experience here has certainly been one of privilege and plenty. I'm not sure what to do with that other than to be grateful in all times and in all places, taking nothing for granted especially in our context of ubiquitous availability. Every stale cheeseburger at the drive-through is a rich gift from God.

Blessings Given and Received

2009-11-17T21:34:00.002-06:00

Tuesday, Nov. 17, 10:36 p.m.

We've had another successful and satisfying day at the school. For the most part, today was a continuation of yesterday's work. Sean and I finished interviewing the kids and taking photos for the Advent cards at church; Chris taught more geography, including an adapted version of the material for the third graders; Ann did her art appreciation and collage-making class for the students who didn't get it yesterday; and Kathy completed the hand-washing instruction with the remainder of the classes. We also had guests with us today –- the videographer who's creating a presentation about the school, and the representative from Engineers Without Borders.

The interviews and photos with the kids became more interesting as time went on (and as we realized the project wasn't taking as long as we'd thought and didn't have to be rushed). We started asking about what the kids do when they get home, how long they work on their homework each day, how many kids in the family go to school and why, etc. The answers are anecdotal, of course, but they're revealing. Many kids reported spending an hour or so on homework after school each day (perhaps some exaggeration there, but maybe not). This makes going to school an even more costly proposition for the parents than one might think. Not only do about half the parents pay at least something toward tuition, but they also lose their children's work at home while they're at school or doing homework. We also learned that the decision to send a child to school becomes a matter of maximizing the parents' return on investment. Some students with many siblings reported, for example, that three of six children might attend school. We asked how the parents decided whom to school and whom to keep home, and the reply was that often all the kids began school, but only the more talented ones were kept there once things got tight. It's a perfectly reasonable calculus, but very sad nonetheless.

There were a number of blessings given and received today. By way of example, let me tell you about a young boy and an older woman.

The boy is a student at the school whose home we visited today. We noticed him during school because he was limping badly and really only had use of one arm. Kathy, the physician, wasn't sure what his problem might be because he reported swelling in his foot (ankle, really) and elbow that happened every month or so –- very mysterious, even in terms of tropical medicine. At the boy's home, as with all the homes we visited, we spoke with his parents and invited them to join us to paint the school tomorrow, as well as to come to a meeting with the teachers on Thursday. We then prayed for the family and blessed their home. As we were leaving, Chris noticed the boy standing to the side. I went over to him and asked if he'd like prayer for his foot and elbow. I laid hands on his foot and elbow and prayed silently that I might have some standing in God's eyes to be doing what I was doing. Then I asked God to heal his joints and bring him wholeness, in his foot and elbow, as well as in his life.

Then, as we made our way toward the next house, I approached an older woman with a leaf on her head, held on by a bandana. I greeted her as I passed, but she held onto me saying, “Mal a tete” and holding her head. I stopped, laid hands on her head, and again prayed for relief of her pain and healing of whatever was ailing her. I was deeply humbled by her incredible display of faith. Following in the footsteps of the woman with the hemorrhage in the Gospels, this woman reached out to the nearest manifestation of God's presence she could find. With courage and determination I can only hope to emulate, she looked me –- and God –- in the eye and silently cried out, “I know you can bring me healing.”

I have no idea what the medical outcome will be for this woman, but I do know she is living in God's healing power. We never know how our feeble attempts to serve as divine conduits will play out, but this woman's faith reminded me that what I did or said mattered almost nothing. What mattered was that I showed up. Walking through mud and goat droppings, I happened to be led within a foot, literally, of this woman in pain, and she reached out to receive whatever share of God's healing power might come. I am tempted to belittle myself and assume that I merely spoke comfortable words. But I know God better than that. So tonight, I rest assured that I was blessed to serve as nothing less than a conduit of the Holy Spirit this afternoon. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

The Cross in Maniche

2009-11-16T20:24:00.002-06:00

Nov. 16, 8:35 p.m.

It's been a very good day. We began our work with the students and teachers today, and all the efforts felt very productive.

The day began with breakfast shared with the group from Maison de Naissance that's staying at Hosanna House. MN is putting on a continuing education event related to maternal-child health for local health care professionals. So about 15 of them are staying at Hosanna House, including Stan Shaffer, Cindy Obenhaus, and Tina Seeley (whom St. Andrew's people might know). Then, about 7 a.m., Pere Colbert picked us up for the trip up the mountain to Maniche. Thankfully, the river had receded enough (and Colbert knows the river bed well enough) that our journey through the water wasn't worrisome at all. By the way, we got great news tonight – that a representative of Engineers Without Borders (yes, that's a real organization) will be traveling to Maniche with us tomorrow to evaluate the possibility of putting in a pedestrian bridge from the city side to the school side of the river. It would be an incredible blessing.

That blessing would be immediately important for probably about a third or so of the students at the school, we discovered today. One of our activities was taking photos and briefly interviewing students for the Advent sponsorship program at St. Andrew's. People will be invited to sponsor a particular child, as we've done in years past, but with a twist: The Christmas cards will be decorated by the sponsored student, whose photo also will be in the card; and there will be some brief biographical information about the student. In doing the interviews, Sean Kim and I asked the children where they lived – close to the school or far away, on the school side of the river or across. About a third of the students interviewed so far live over the river – which means they wade through the water on good days and stay home when the water is high. A bridge would be a Godsend, literally.

The other activities today also came off very well. Ann Renne taught art appreciation using Gaugin and Matisse paintings, and she led students in creating collages –- activities they never experience. Chris Nazar taught older students about maps and local geography, showing them a map of their area and asking them to draw maps of the locations of their homes. Then, after school, Chris and Sean walked home with several students to see how their maps revealed the actual geography that the school serves. Kathy Shaffer taught several classes about germs and the importance of hand-washing by spraying a photosensitive substance on a toy and passing it among the students. The material was revealed by black light, showing how the “germs” had been spread from one student to another simply by handling the same thing. And, at the end of the day, Kathy, Ann, and I had a meeting with the teachers to get their input into what needed to be improved in the educational process, particularly in terms of the involvement of parents. Understandably, parents have little opportunity to be involved in homework or school projects. About 70 percent of parents are illiterate, which presents a huge hurdle -- to say nothing of the need to spend one's time coming up with enough to eat that day. It was a good meeting in preparation for a meeting between the parents and teachers to come on Thursday.

After dinner, we shared Compline and conversation (and drinks) with the people here for the MN conference – a great opportunity to hear stories about the history of MN and the school sponsorship network among Kansas City-area Episcopal congregations (HELP). In the midst of this came the observation that the church in Maniche has no cross. Some in our group were scandalized that, at the altar, the focus was an arrangement of artificial flowers. It does seem odd not to find a cross over the altar in an Episcopal church. But really, I haven't seen very many crosses at all in Haiti -– which is very odd, given the ubiquitous religious language on business signs, tap-taps, cars, and anything else that will hold still long enough. (Virtually every vehicle has a name like “Thank You, Jesus” or “Fruit of Perseverance” or “Glory of God,” and many business signs bear names like “Grace of God Hair Styling” or “Maranatha Auto Parts.”) Especially given the purported numbers in the Roman Catholic Church, you'd think there would be crucifixes everywhere -– and there aren't.

Perhaps the people of Maniche are onto something, whether they realize it on a conscious level or not. I'm not at all sure their church really needs a cross over the altar. Why? Because the people are the cross. The point of the cross is God's deep investment, to the point of death, in the lives of God's people, as well as the passionate extent to which God is willing to go in order to reveal ultimate love. The people of Maniche are the body of Christ in their world, the presence of the crucified and risen Lord we serve. They don't need to be reminded, at least not nearly so much as we do, that suffering and love go hand in hand. Given how clearly they understand that God's loving presence is always with them in the midst of their suffering, with them even to the end of the age, they are the cross in the world, reminding us that Christ still hangs in misery even as he promises new life for all who make the hard choice to follow him.

Several Days in Haiti

2009-11-16T15:48:00.002-06:00

Sorry for the delay in getting these trip reports started. We're all fine; Internet access has just been more of an issue than I'd hoped -- surprise, surprise. Here are logs from the first few days here. More later tonight, if I'm lucky.

Nov. 14, 6 a.m.

I didn't get to update the blog last night because I can't pick up the wireless signal at Hosanna House. And their internet service is fairly hit and miss, it seems, so I'm not sure when I'll get to post.

We arrived safely in Port au Prince about noon, and met Colbert at the airport without any trouble. Then we snaked through the streets of Port au Prince to see the Episcopal Cathedral before heading south on the highway to Les Cayes. Driving through the capital was fascinating – primarily the incredible numbers of people out and about, doing little bits of business – selling everything from tires to soap to ancient photocopiers to cooking oil to charcoal to computer components. It is amazing the effort and time it must take to eek out such a small living.

The drive was a bit cramped – six of us in a truck designed for five – but that's nothing by Haitian standards. On the highway, we passed one tap-tap that seemed like it wouldn't be able to climb the hill, or clear the rocks on the road, because its back end rode so low from the crush of bodies inside. But Colbert's truck is air conditioned, a tremendous blessing in the 95 degree heat, and one not enjoyed by the three of Colbert's assistants riding on our luggage in the bed of the truck.

After four hours or so of Haitian landscape and villages, mountains and ocean, we came to Cayes and Hosanna House. Franchette's dinner (stew of beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and possibly goat) was hearty and wonderful. Afterward, our group had our first of what I hope will be a nightly time of theological reflection on the day just spent.

From that, what sticks with me is the dilemma about how to imagine what it is that we, and any missionary in this kind of a setting, are here to do. It's tempting, for us and for the people who support this mission back home, to ask the question, “Is it better now?” That's especially poignant for Kathy Shaffer, who's been at this more than 20 years. Even after that kind of time, the answer seems to be, “Well, no, not really.” Work here and money from back home don't make much of a dent in a setting largely driven by forces beyond our control – government ineffectiveness, hurricanes, endemic poverty, etc. Of course, on the micro level, the work has a huge impact. The children of Maniche would not have a school without it; and because they do, they have at least the possibility of high school, further training, and some kind of life other than subsistence agriculture and reselling household goods.

But I also think, in a sense, the outcome isn't the point. We aren't doing or funding this work because it will change deep structural problems on a large scale. We're doing this work to enflesh the reign of God where we're given to do it, as well as to serve as a witness of that kingdom to whatever part of the world might care to look and be transformed. That's no small accomplishment on its own.

Nov. 14, 5:10 p.m.

We arrived back at Hosanna House after a long day at Maniche, doing some painting at the school. It's been instructive, to say the least.

The good news is that we, and probably 40 children, youth, and adults from Maniche, got the majority of the painting done today. Six classrooms look much cleaner than they did. With the addition of the concrete roof to the school last year, walls had to be reinforced, and plaster was ripped out and sort of replaced, etc. The result were walls in need of a lot more than simply painting. Had I realized this, I would have prepared differently, bringing many more metal scrapers. Colbert intended for us to smooth these walls with sandpaper, which resulted in a great deal of sound and fury in the small concrete rooms, but not a tremendous amount of smoothing. Also problematic was what seemed to us a highly variable standard of acceptable preparation, which at one point resulted in several painted walls being scraped to get down deeper through peeling plaster to concrete. This wasted a fair amount of applied paint (a scarce resource for this job) and resulted in a fair amount of frustration for those of us who didn't have a clear sense of just how professional a job was expected. In addition, I made a poor choice in buying lots of inexpensive foam paint “brushes,” not realizing just how rough the surface was likely to be. The brushes are now a thing of the past, so we'll have to buy more (real brushes) in Cayes before we finish painting on Wednesday. Finally, I was frustrated by the completely predictable failures of communication and leadership in getting the painting done. Being neither a painter nor an manager of work crews, I didn't plan the progress of the job well or direct firmly enough to keep the right work (i.e., painting the proper color in the proper place) flowing consistently. Probably par for the course, but frustrating, nonetheless.

On top of all that, it rained. This made the situation messier (and everyone much damper) than would have been convenient. It also swelled the river, which the 4WD pickup must cross to reach the school. This afternoon, it would be fair to say the truck swam the river, which was much higher after the rain than it had been earlier this morning. In retrospect, I should have taken pictures of the crossing, but honestly I was too busy praying to think about a photo. It's a great example of the need for a bridge across the river … a long-term desire among the Haiti Committee at St. Andrew's. It's a fitting symbol, too, as we seek to be a bridge from illiteracy to literacy, from poverty to sufficiency. The crossing is always difficult and often impossible – whether you're talking about getting across the river or crossing the divide between our their present and their future.

And finally, from the sublime to the incredibly mundane: Here's an example of a difference in Haitian and American definitions. There is one toilet at the school in Maniche, as well as three privies. As we looked around the school, someone asked Colbert, “Does the toilet work?” He said, “Oh yes.” Later, when the moment arrived, I discovered that everything in the empty tank was completely out of commission. In this case, “works” means that the toilet flushes if you get a bucket, fill it with water, and pour it into the toilet. Both perspectives are accurate – but each only in its own context....

Nov. 15, 8 p.m.

We've had a wonderful and exhausting day. It began at 7 a.m. with Eucharist at St. Saveur in Les Cayes, which is Pere Colbert's “big” church. It was a moving experience despite the heat (at least for the one in vestments), particularly the singing. Listening to it, and to the singing later at the service in Maniche, brought to mind the descriptions of the throngs standing before the throne of God in Revelation, so full of the presence of God that they can't help but burst into songs of praise at every turn. Worship in Haiti is like that. Perhaps it's an example of the fullness of less, the ultimate expression of the truth we fleetingly see as “less is more.” When you have as little as the people of Haiti have – especially in a fairly remote mountain location like Maniche – then what you have means everything. These folks have the presence of God, intertwined in their “secular” lives like the woven branches that create walls of houses here. In Haiti, there appears to be little separation of “sacred” and “secular”; instead, it's all of a piece. And even though that piece may seem ragged and tattered to us, it's theirs, permeated with the presence of God. And when they stand as part of that great congregation, singing praises to the One at the center of the throne and to the Lamb, they reveal a glimpse of the fullness of God's kingdom that John of Patmos would have envied.

Anyway, we worshiped at Cayes and then traveled up the mountain to Maniche for the second service. In both places, I served as deacon, proclaiming the Gospel and setting the altar; and at Maniche, I preached. It was good to be able to laugh with them at the fact that we at St. Andrew's, who had paid for them to replace the roof of their school, now find ourselves needing to replace our own roof. And it was even better to be able to remind them that our showing up was yet one more way God was saying to them, “I love you.”

We returned to our guesthouse about 1 p.m. for lunch and then to visit Maison de Naissance, the birthing center. Three women had given birth there yesterday, so we were blessed to see the place well in use.

After MN, we spent the late afternoon and evening at the beach at Port Salut, something of a resort town about an hour away from Cayes. The weather was perfect – none of yesterday's rain – and the water was warm. The location is simply beautiful, and the meal was heavenly: fresh lobster grilled on an open fire, fried plantains, and “pikli,” which is cole slaw so hot you have to wash it down with Haitian beer. Darn.

Just as dinner was about to arrive, we stood on the beach, looking at a glorious sunset, and we prayed the daily devotion for the evening from the Prayer Book, which includes this perfect narration of our moment: “O gracious light, pure brightness of the everliving Father in Heaven; O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed: Now as we come to the setting of the sun, and our eyes behold the vesper light, we sing your praises, O God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices, O Son of God, O giver of life, and to be glorified in all the worlds.”

And so it was as we dined at the banquet table of the Kingdom of Heaven, both this morning and at the setting of the sun. Blessed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb.

Nearly There

2009-11-12T21:05:00.002-06:00

Our group of missionaries has made it to Miami in fine shape. We'll stay here tonight and fly to Port-au-Prince in the morning. Because of differences in flight schedules, we've been only four rather than five today. Ann Renne has a schedule different from Kathy Shaffer, Chris Nazar, Sean Kim, and me. But we'll meet (God willing) at baggage claim in Port-au-Prince tomorrow. Then Pere Colbert, the priest in Les Cayes, will drive us down the highway from P-a-P to the south, which (again, God willing) should take us about four hours. In addition to saving us a little money by driving rather than flying, the trip with Colbert will give us a great first-hand experience of the Haitian landscape and the villages along the way.

Please keep the prayers coming for safe travels and comparatively few problems along the way.

A Prayer to Remember

2009-11-11T22:02:00.003-06:00

Tomorrow morning, I'm leaving for Haiti with four other missionaries from St. Andrew's. We're going to work with our partner school in Maniche, where we'll paint, teach, take photos, visit students' homes, and worship with the people there.

I've been spending a fair amount of time and effort recently working out the details of the trip and making sure I have everything in order. On top of what it takes to get out of the office for a week and a half, all this mission-trip work has been occupying a lot of mental space. Too much, as it turns out.

I didn't realize quite how distracted I'd become with the trip's details until a committee meeting today – a committee that, ostensibly, had nothing to do with the mission trip. We sat down to begin our meeting, and the convener – a parishioner who is much too humble to want to be recognized – said, “I'd like to begin today with a prayer for our missionaries about to leave for Haiti.” Then she offered a prayer that made me stop short. She commended us, and our mission, to God's care. She reminded the group that we would be bearing God's love to children living a world away from Kansas City. She asked God to bless us and protect us in our travels. And she gave thanks for our offering of ourselves to bear God's presence to the people of Maniche.

In the midst of my overscheduled last day in the office, in the midst of all the details of getting five of us to Haiti, I had forgotten why we were going. But as this parishioner prayed, I sat there in a committee meeting, crying.

Something tells me this will be a good trip. God willing, we'll have a wireless connection at our guesthouse in Les Cayes, and I should be able to post daily updates to this blog during the trip.

Tune in tomorrow.

The Best Birthday Present Ever: Deflated Soccer Balls

2009-10-29T11:21:00.002-05:00

I’d like to introduce you to St. Andrew’s youngest missionary (at least in spirit) – Emma Angilan, who just turned 6.

A month or so before her birthday, Emma came up with an idea that never would have crossed my mind at her age: For her birthday party, she wanted her friends to bring presents not for her but for “the kids in Haiti.” (Our congregation has a partnership with a school in Maniche, Haiti, which serves about 150 students.)

The challenge is how to get anything to the kids at our partner school. There is no parcel-delivery service in rural Haiti – not even mail (not even roads, in the sense we’d understand that word). But a group of missionaries from St. Andrew’s will be going to Haiti on Nov. 12; so Emma’s parents, Jason and Courtney, came to me to see what the students might need that we also could carry with us.

Finally, we found the answer: deflated soccer balls and an air pump.

Kids in rural Haiti don’t have toys other than what they make for themselves, usually from trash. And the school in Maniche certainly doesn’t have any athletic equipment. But they do have a yard. And now, thanks to Emma’s bountiful generosity, the kids at this school will have 12 new soccer balls to kick around.

It will likely be several years before Emma goes off on a mission trip. But in a sense, she’s already long gone. At 6 years old, Emma understands at a deep level that God is sending her somewhere – for now, in her heart – to “seek and serve Christ in all people.”

We don’t have to fly to a distant location like Haiti to be missionaries. Any of us – all of us – can be missionaries like Emma, being sent by God into relationships with people we’ve never even met. All it takes is a heart filled with love, a touch of creativity, and a willingness to follow where God leads.

Swimming Out of the Whirlpool

2009-10-22T07:16:00.001-05:00

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed this week. The specific reasons don’t matter much – they won’t be resolved anytime soon; and even if they were, new stresses would take their place.

A lot of this stress comes from my job. But working as an ordained person doesn’t necessarily mean I’m under any more stress than anybody else in this culture. The stresses are different, but their effects are not.

When I feel this way, my reaction is to look for ways to pull back emotionally from the sources of the stress. That’s not a bad idea, particularly if it helps me identify ways I’m using time or energy unproductively.

But I’ve also learned, finally, that feeling overwhelmed is a symptom of spiritual illness: too much reliance on oneself to cope with pressures and meet expectations. At times like this, I find myself asking God questions like, “Is this really how you want our lives to look?” or “Is this really how you intend the Kingdom to feel?” And I’m both blessed and stopped short by the answer: “No.”

I believe God does not intend us to work ourselves to the bone. I believe God does not intend for discipleship to feel like a burden. And when I stray into that territory, it’s a sign that I’ve forgotten where solutions to my problems really lie. I cannot rescue myself from the whirlpool du jour. I can only rise out of what brings me down “through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13) – “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

Avoiding the Sabbath

2009-10-15T08:59:00.002-05:00

It might seem strange to be writing about keeping the Sabbath (or not) on a Thursday. For most of us, Thursday is just another workday, a marker along the journey toward the end of the week. For me, at least most weeks, it’s a day off. Clergy can’t exactly take Sunday as a day of rest, so we’re supposed to find another day during the week to make up for it.

It’s tempting for me now to launch into all the reasons why I and my colleagues often don’t get a day off to make up for Sundays: Everybody else is at work on a weekday, and you fall behind if you don’t join in. Church events can’t be scheduled around clergy days off, so you often have meetings or gatherings to attend anyway (like this afternoon and tonight, for example). Pastoral issues don’t take a day off, so people often have needs (real or perceived) that lead them to expect relatively immediate attention. And then there’s the work itself, which will never be “done” until God sees fit to bring in the Kingdom in all its fullness.

All these things are true. But they aren’t the reason why I avoid taking Sabbath time.

Properly observed, Sabbath is about putting into practice God’s direction in Psalm 46: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Because of the way we’re wired, some of us just have trouble being still; and I’m not sure that’s anything needing forgiveness. It’s the second part of the verse that’s problematic: “Know that I am God.” If we actually took Sabbath time, if we really took a break from our obligations (and the hyper-scheduled “fun” that wears us out), we might hear something from God that challenges our independence and our self-importance. If we actually took Sabbath time, we might realize that God really is God, and we are not.

Hmmm. Probably time to move the laundry. And maybe check e-mail, just for a minute. Something important may have happened, and I wouldn’t want to miss it....

Dogs, Backpacks, and Mission

2009-09-29T09:29:00.001-05:00

It’s always good to understand your own job. On Saturday and Sunday, God gave me a couple of glimpses of divine purpose that helped me see what I do in a little clearer light.

Saturday morning, about 10 St. Andrew’s people came out to staff our booth at the annual Strutt With Your Mutt event in Brookside (our neighborhood). Along with the pet stores, dog trainers, and providers of alternative canine healing, there we were – a church. We weren’t “doing church” (at least not by traditional definitions), but we were offering to bless dogs as their owners came by. Fr. Fred, Mtr. Anne, and I conveyed God’s blessing to 100 or so canines that morning, and I think it’s safe to say that a similar number of owners felt blessed by the experience, too. To many passers-by, we church folk probably looked out of place – especially the three of us wearing clericals and stoles. But the symbolism was perfect: God cares deeply about every part of the good creation, human and nonhuman. I hope that was the message people took away from the crazy clerics getting their stoles dirty in the puddles on the parking lot.

Then, on Sunday morning, during our Adult Forum, we had a presentation about the BackSnack program featuring three people from our partner school, Benjamin Banneker Elementary in east Kansas City. St. Andrew’s is one of many churches and organizations here that fill backpacks with food for kids to take home from school on Friday afternoons so they have something nutritious to eat until Monday’s breakfast and lunch back at school. Then, after the 10:15 service, parishioners stuffed backpacks to be delivered this week. The message, I hope, was a different shade of what we also communicated on Saturday: God’s deep care for us and for all creation. As God’s people, we’re called to incarnate that care and bring it to the places that need to feel it most – in this case, an economically disadvantaged school in east KC. Every backpack a Banneker kid receives is divine love enfleshed.

And that’s what mission is all about. We’re called to take God’s love into the world. It’s not that God’s love isn’t already there – of course it is. It’s just that God needs us to put some flesh and bones on it.

Anniversary Roses

2009-08-12T07:55:00.002-05:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage recently.

First, we had a wedding at St. Andrew’s that was called off just weeks before the big day. The couple discerned that what had seemed like a right and good and joyful thing wasn’t right for them, at least not now. I can’t imagine how hard the decision must have been for them, but I have great respect for their maturity in putting the brakes on a process that, too often, seems to have the momentum of a train that can’t be stopped.

Then came yesterday, the 19th wedding anniversary for Ann and me. As we sat with the kids at the table last night (the two of us will celebrate another evening), they asked about the dozen roses in the vase in front of us. All the roses are red but one, which is white; and they asked why. I said it stood for the new life that’s created when two people come together and let God make them one at the deepest level of their being. For Ann and me, the details of our life together certainly haven’t turned out as we might have expected 19 years ago – a little bit of tragedy and a lot more unexpected blessing. But through it all, the new creation of the marriage grows and thrives.

And then I look at the calendar and remember that my parents’ anniversary will be this Sunday – 57 years of marriage. I can’t even begin to imagine how that feels. But I do know their white rose has incredibly deep roots.

“The bond and covenant of marriage” may not sound terribly attractive to many in our culture, given the premium we put on the Gospel of Me. Living for ourselves sounds like freedom, and we’re all about that. But, ironically, to give up this kind of freedom returns to us a much greater gift: being rooted in the soil of God’s love, with souls entwined, becoming so much more than we can be on our own.

It’s amazing the rose God can make of us when we give ourselves away.

Mission Trips Into the Reign of God

2009-08-07T20:38:00.004-05:00

I took a little trip to Haiti this afternoon.

Really, I only had coffee with Drs. Stan and Kathy Shaffer at the Roasterie, doing some planning for the mission trip I’m leading in November. But in a week of … well, a typical week at church, it was a wonderful foretaste of what our week in mid-November might feel like.

I don’t yet know precisely what we’ll be doing in Haiti, but I do know we’ll spend our time working with our partner school in Maniche – among other things, teaching about good hand-washing technique, visiting kids’ homes to teach the families, and doing some painting at the school.

Whatever we do, I also know this: We’ll be making a concrete difference in the lives of children of God whose place in life we can’t even begin to imagine. For the children of Maniche, simply progressing through school might make the difference between a life of hope or a life of subsistence. For the children of Maniche, the school lunch we provide might make the difference between adequate nutrition or wasting away. For the children of Maniche, learning to wash their hands after using the latrine and before eating might make the difference between living to adulthood or dying young.

So, for an hour or so this afternoon, sipping my coffee, I got to travel into the future – the immediate future of a November mission trip, and the longer-term future of the reign of God. Someday, no child will starve while others feast. For now, those of us who go to Haiti will do what we can do to help that day come a few moments sooner.

Want to go? Let me know: frjohn@standrewkc.org.

Burden or Blessing?

2009-08-05T07:01:00.002-05:00

A recent event and two recent conversations make me think God’s trying to tell me something.

The event came last week, when my wife’s step-grandmother died. It was a blessing, healing her of cancer that had progressed beyond the point of treatment. We traveled to Ft. Smith, Ark., to gather with that side of Ann’s family and celebrate her step-grandmother’s life. Near the end of the visit, we received a great gift – her car. It’s not exactly new, a 2002 Honda Civic; but it’s in great shape with very low mileage. Gifts like this have fallen into our laps a few times before, and they always make me stop short. They are moments when gratitude washes over you, when you get a window into just how richly you’re blessed and how often you miss it. We’re trying to discern now what to do with three cars; but with two kids nearing driving age, we may well keep them all and make one a gift for their use.

Then this week, I had a conversation with a parishioner about prayer. She is very wise in many ways, but one thing she said particularly stuck with me. She was talking about a truly difficult time, when she wasn’t sure how to pray or what to pray for. What carried her through was the intentional practice of thanksgiving. When she couldn’t pray anything else, she could take note of all that God had given her – children, work, relationships, plenty to eat, a lovely home, and so on. It was a bridge toward a place of deeper healing because it kept her orientation Godward in a time when the temptation was great to turn away.

And yesterday I had a conversation with another parishioner, this time about illness and recovery. He had endured heart surgery to correct problems that would have killed him, and he’s still dealing with the rigors of recovery and rehab. But what he was taking away from the experience was deep gratitude – not just for the gift of renewed health (which is significant enough) but for the gift of relationships with those who had supported him through the process, everyone from his spouse and children, to friends who showed up, to physicians and caregivers who were God’s agents of physical healing. For him, heart disease was an opportunity to see the blessing of relationship and say thank you.

I struggle with lots of things, but one of the more consistent wrestling matches God and I have is about orienting me toward gratitude. And when I’m feeling especially hard-pressed (or, perhaps, self-pitying), God seems to come through with examples of the contrast reality that the life of the kingdom is all about. The lines between our perception of burden and God’s reality of blessing can be terribly thin. But the choice is ours as to how we’ll chalk things up. Do we choose to see burden or blessing? The answer will tell us whether our primary residence is the kingdom of anxiety or the kingdom of heaven.

Kittens and Children of God

2009-07-20T08:03:00.002-05:00

As of a few weeks ago, we have a kitten in our house – Maisy. Of course, she’s the cutest thing in the world (at least when she isn’t attacking my ears in the middle of the night).

This morning, I’ve been watching Maisy hunting a fly in our dining room. She understands that her chances are better if she can attack from atop the dining room table (which I’m not wild about, but I realize trying to keep her off the table is a battle I won’t win). So she backs up away from the table to get up a good head of steam, charges, and launches herself at the tabletop. Sadly, her size and her judgment don’t yet allow her to perform such feats. Instead, she rams herself into the tabletop and crashes to the floor.

Part of me feels awful watching this. I want to show her how she can use the chair next to the table as a step up; I want to save her from crashing and tumbling to the floor. But then, as she picks herself up and tries again, I see that she has to crash and fall in order to learn just how tall the table really is. Failure is a learning opportunity – and an essential one, too.

As God’s children, we’re in the same situation. We have to fail in order to learn. We have to crash and fall to the floor in order to figure out how to succeed in the environment around us. We have to learn for ourselves how high we can jump.

This is no great insight. But it might be helpful to keep in mind the next time something happens to us – as individuals, as a church, as a nation, etc. – and we find ourselves asking, “God, why did you let this happen to me?” Although I’m sure it pains God as much as it pains any of us to watch our own children fail, the Heavenly Parent has to let us crash and fall so we can build our strengths and learn our limitations. I don’t much enjoy it when I’m the one tumbling to the ground. But I also give thanks that God loves me enough to let me figure it out for myself.

Being a Visitor

2009-07-05T18:11:00.002-05:00

I’ve been on vacation for the past two weeks, and I still have one more week of vacation to go (praise God). But I had an experience today that I wanted to share while it’s still fresh.

This morning, I put myself in a position I never get to experience: being an anonymous, first-time visitor at a church where I don’t feel comfortable. Part of it was simply professional curiosity – wanting to see how other folks do church. But mostly, I wanted to see what it was like to be one of those people to whom we’re supposed to be especially attentive on Sunday mornings: the people God brings through our doors for the first time.

I chose to go to a local megachurch, one of the congregations with a reputation for excellence both in worship and in ministry to newcomers. I arrived about 10 minutes before the service, and I was greeted with a “hello” and a handshake from the greeter stationed at the door. I came into the lobby (what we would call a narthex in my tradition) and marveled at the coffee bar, the large gift shop, the welcome counters staffed by volunteers, and the impressive children’s ministry desk (which had a helpful sign directing visiting families where they should go to get their kids off to children’s programming for the first time). The space was huge and open – although, to a person who works in a very traditional liturgical setting, it seemed much more like a convention center or an airport than a church.

I went into the worship space and received an order of service from an usher. I found a place to sit and looked over the day’s announcements. In this congregation’s tradition, the time to greet people sitting near you comes at the beginning of worship, and I shared a handshake with everyone immediately around me.

But – those five “good mornings” and the handshake from the greeter at the door were the only times anyone spoke to me. I even hung around the lobby for about 10 minutes after worship had ended, browsing the gift shop, checking out the literature on a rack, walking through the conversation spaces. Not a soul introduced him- or herself to me.

I say this not as a criticism of this church. It has thousands of members; it’s obviously doing many, many things very well. Instead, my point is that even in a church that prides itself on ministry to newcomers, it’s easy for a given individual on a given Sunday to feel completely alone in the crowd.

For those of us in congregations that are trying to play catch-up with churches like this one (at least in terms of welcome and incorporation of newcomers), this is a cautionary tale. If an evangelistically focused megachurch can fail to reach out to a stranger, how much more often do we fail to make a Sunday-morning visitor feel at home?

A church may offer an impressive building, incredibly tight worship, professional-quality music, huge video screens, and a solid sermon. But it also has to offer real, live voices and hands to the stranger who takes the huge risk to come in. May every single parishioner remember this next Sunday, when we’re tempted to think we’ve done enough simply by getting ourselves to church. Getting ourselves to church is indeed a good thing – but our own needs are only the beginning of why God has gotten us out of bed that morning.

Church in a Bar

2009-06-19T06:59:00.001-05:00

We had St. Andrew’s second Holy Happy Hour last night at Charlie Hooper’s – another great turnout (40 or so), with wonderful conversations all around the room.

As I’ve said before, part of the point of Holy Happy Hour is evangelistic. If we, as an incarnation of “church,” get out into the world having a good time, then the world might see that “church” is more than the self-righteous, judgmental, boring people we’re often presumed to be. Last night, there were signs posted on the wall marking the gathering as “St. Andrew’s Church.” For some, maybe that’s scandalous – “Church people shouldn’t be doing things like that.” But for the other folks there at Charlie Hooper’s, seeing church people gathering for happy hour might make them rethink their presumptions about what those Christians are like. Actually, I rather like the notion that “St. Andrew’s Church” isn’t just the beautiful building up the street but is the body of Christ in the world. After all, Jesus certainly spent his fair share of time in places like Charlie Hooper’s.

Of course, there’s also an internal “good” to these gatherings. As someone pointed out last night, “It doesn’t bother me that we’re getting together for happy hour. Hey, if we get together to do this tonight, we’ll be more likely to get together tomorrow for worship, or education, or outreach work, or whatever.”

She was right. Building community is huge for the congregation’s health. And a little fun never hurts, either – even among church people.

Hard Work and Self-Care

2009-06-16T06:51:00.003-05:00

I received word yesterday that a friend and seminary classmate, Bill Stroop, died on Sunday. Bill was somewhat older than me, in his late 50s. But only in his late 50s.

Bill was a scientist as well as an Episcopal priest. His first career was as a researcher and professor of microbiology, immunology, pathology, and ophthalmology. (Among all the other wonderful things implied by this rich integration of theology and science, it also meant that Bill kept otherwise illegal pathogens in the freezer of his seminary dorm room.) In teaching, preaching, and conversation, he could offer insights that none of the rest of us could bring. But he also had a gift for making those connections between God and science in a way that the rest of us could understand.

What I also remember about Bill in seminary is that he worked more than anyone I’d ever met. And from what I hear, this continued in his work as a priest. In fact, I imagine it only intensified, given the demands of ordained life and – even worse – the demands that ordained people often place on themselves. If you’re already wired to be an overachiever, then life in the Church will only encourage you to overachieve even more. There’s nothing quite like the combination of human need, divine calling, and people’s expectations to make you think you have to do it all.

Interestingly, on the day Bill suffered his fatal heart attack, I was traveling to rural southern Missouri to see my spiritual director. I say this mostly in the spirit of confession: It was the first time I'd seen her in several months. I find it a real challenge to carve out the time to do it; and once I do schedule the time, some emergency often seems to prevent me from keeping the date.

It is very difficult, for some of us at least, to make time for things like spiritual direction – or exercise, or healthy eating, or time with the family, or sleep, or…. But Bill’s passing makes me realize there is a price to be paid for always trying to do more. And, as my spiritual director might say (though much more eloquently than this), God probably has things pretty well in hand as it is, without me deciding I’m responsible for how everything works out.

I will miss my friend Bill. And I pray that now, as he enters into the fullness of life in the Kingdom of Heaven, he can enjoy some much-needed rest.

May You Hear the Calling

2009-05-31T18:33:00.000-05:00

(This post is for my daughter, Kathryn, who was confirmed today.)

Today, we had our annual visitation at St. Andrew’s from Bishop Howe, and a visit from the bishop means celebrating the rite of Confirmation. We are blessed at St. Andrew’s in that Bishop Howe always visits on Pentecost, which to me is the most appropriate of all days for Confirmation – the day we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit on Jesus’ followers, including us, empowering us for the incredible work Christ invites us to do in his name.

Confirmation has been called a sacrament in search of a theology, now that full membership in Christ’s Body comes with Baptism rather than Confirmation. But today, I saw again what its theology really is: empowerment by the Holy Spirit for ministry. The Spirit was certainly present in the room when those 18 young people, including my daughter, Kathryn, renewed the commitment to God made for them at Baptism.

But as I drove across the Flint Hills of Kansas this afternoon, after dropping off Kathryn for a week at Camp Wood, I heard the Spirit calling even more clearly – on my car stereo. I was listening to the most recent CD from Mark Cohn, Join the Parade; and I came across this song. I offer it for my daughter, and for all of today’s confirmands, that you might be open to experiencing something like this:

The Calling

Johnny took the 4:05 and he rode it
Rode it down the line
But he did not know that the ghost of Charlie Christian
Was riding too
That’s when he got the feeling
Felt his soul and spirit rise
Closed his eyes and saw a vision
And he was sanctified

He said “I have heard a calling
I can hear a calling
Like a priest or a missionary
I am only following a calling”

Somebody brushed him on the shoulder
And he felt a chill run right down his spine
‘Cause he did not know that the ghost of Charlie Christian
Was riding too
Riding too
But that’s when he got the feeling
And the music was coming up from the back
Heard the sound of fingers on steel
And a wheel upon a track

He said “I have heard a calling
I can hear a calling
I have heard it in the night
And I’ve stood under the light
Of the calling

Yeah I can hear a calling
I can hear a calling sometimes
I have heard it in the night
And I’ve stood under the light
Of the calling.”

To Kathryn, and all the confirmands: May you be blessed to feel a brush upon the shoulder and hear the Spirit whisper your calling – and may you have the courage to step out into its light.

Witnesses to the Ends of the Parking Lot

2009-05-26T17:07:00.000-05:00

Sunday afternoon, I made an interesting discovery about the ground just past the parking lot behind HJ’s (St. Andrew’s youth center across the street from the church). It’s very rocky – no doubt a residual effect of putting in the parking lot years ago.

I learned this the hard way: by trying to plant a series of “realtor signs” at the edge of the parking lot, running along the Trolley Track Trail, a jogging and biking path. Our Evangelism Commission came up with the great idea of posting “Burma Shave signs” visible from the trail, as a relatively inexpensive way of inviting people to check out St. Andrew’s. Like the old highway billboards advertising Burma Shave, this series of signs presents a short poem ending in the name of the “product” (in this case, the church). For example:

Searching to find…
… what life’s about?
We are, too …
… come and find out.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (http://www.standrewkc.org/)

Going the other direction, the signs read:

Think going to church…
… isn’t for the smart?
God wants your head…
… not just your heart.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (http://www.standrewkc.org/)

Will this have any discernable effect on our attendance or membership? I have no idea. But it’s a good object lesson in how to do that frightening “E” word – evangelism. As Jesus was about to ascend to the Father, which we remembered in our worship on Sunday, he told his friends he expected them to be his “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). That’s a tall order – and rather intimidating for many of us. Sadly, maybe, I don’t see myself traveling to the ends of the earth to win souls for Christ.

But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe what Jesus had in mind was simply that we would be his witnesses wherever we find ourselves. I think sharing the Good News of hope and new life really doesn’t have to be much more complicated or frightening than simply finding a way to bring God into your story when life presents the opportunity. We don’t have to go door to door or stand out on the street corners. When we talk with people in the course of day-to-day life, we just have to drop into the conversation the divine fingerprints we’ve seen on our lives, in whatever situations have been true for us.

For St. Andrew’s, a series of Burma Shave signs along a neighborhood jogging trail is a great example of taking an evangelistic step that’s authentic to us. We’re not accosting people or pushing flyers into their hands. We’re inviting them to see that we’re struggling with life and faith just as they probably are. It may not be the greatest evangelism program of all time. But hey – we’re serving as Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the parking lot, at least.

Holy Happy Hour and Real Presence

2009-05-15T15:26:00.000-05:00

Last night, we had our inaugural "Holy Happy Hour" at Charlie Hooper's in Brookside. About 40 of us came and enjoyed a wonderful time – great fellowship and conversation. We're planning to make this a monthly event on the third Thursday of the month. So mark your calendar for June 18, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Hooper's.

There's a good story about where this idea comes from. Janet Sheffey and I had been talking for a few months about organizing something like this – a way to get “church” out of the building and into the community. Then, one evening, we were part of a committee meeting at Panera Bread. After probably a little too much caffeine, the six or seven of us there were having an energetic conversation with a lot of laughter. Then a young man came up, having noticed my clerical collar, and asked, “What church are you from, anyway?” It was a great opportunity to tell him about St. Andrew’s and invite him to worship with us. After that, Janet and I shared our idea with the group about bringing church into the community, and Holy Happy Hour was born.

In addition to moving church out of the building, the other purpose of Holy Happy Hour is simply to give us a chance to share holy fellowship together. Just last night, I heard conversations about finding God in the workplace, about raising teens, about making the choice to retire, about the joys and challenges of being a parent with young kids, and several other topics I can’t recall now. The point is there are opportunities for theological reflection all around us, and some of the godliest conversations begin in the mundane stuff of day-to-day life ... even in a bar (maybe especially in a bar).

At Holy Happy Hour, we got the chance to share those conversations with people who are, or are becoming, like family members. As Janet Sheffey said that evening, “We worship together as a family, so why shouldn't we have a beer together as a family?”

Indeed. I like to think that might cause our Lord to grin. In fact, I think Holy Happy Hour is an opportunity for Christ to come into our midst. It might be a less-than-liturgical setting, but the parallels between this gathering and Eucharist are worth a moment of meditation. In both, the family gathers around a table for a celebration, enjoying holy gifts of food and drink, finding connection with each other and with God. It may not be “real presence” in a theological sense. We may have been sharing nachos and beer rather than bread and wine. But I can tell you with certainty that Christ was there last night, eating chips and lifting a glass among us.

A Sacrifice of Thanksgiving

2009-05-14T10:28:00.000-05:00

We had a great, unexpected discussion at Episcopal 101 on Sunday night about the kinds of sacrifice we make in celebrating Eucharist. I said the word eucharist means “thanksgiving” – that giving thanks is what the liturgy is all about, and that living in thanksgiving is what God really wants from us. This is phrased in an interesting way in Scripture and in one of the offertory sentences used in Eucharist: “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and make good your vows to the Most High” (Psalms 50:14).

In the psalm, the writer is thinking about what kind of worship God desires. Like the prophets, the writer of the psalm says we have to be careful to ensure that worship isn’t simply about going through the motions of divine appeasement or, worse, deluding ourselves into believing that our lives are sufficiently holy because we’ve shown up and “done church.” It’s not the sacrifice of bulls and goats (or hymns and sermons) that pleases God necessarily. What pleases God is the orientation of the one offering the sacrifice, making it a “sacrifice of thanksgiving” for the life of relationship, with God and neighbor, with which we’re blessed.

And, taking it one step further, I think the choice of the word “sacrifice” is important, too. At least for me, honoring God for our blessings begins as an act of discipline, an intentional practice intended to build a habit. Many of us, deep down, believe that we are what we are and have what we have fundamentally because of our own talents, hard work, intelligence, perseverance, etc. Especially in our culture, which values so highly the effort and character of the individual, it’s tempting to believe that we are our own sources of blessing. Realizing otherwise might hurt just a little – and at least for some of us, it probably should.

The idea of thanksgiving being a sacrifice struck at least one class member as rather odd. She said that, for her, being thankful didn’t feel like a sacrifice at all. Given the blessings of life and the wonder of God’s creation, being thankful seemed to her the most natural of responses.

I think she is blessed in a way maybe she didn’t even realize – blessed with eyes to see and a heart to know what is very difficult for many of us to get: that the lives we live are neither our entitlements nor the results of our own efforts, but gifts from God instead.

Audacious Promises

2009-05-08T09:35:00.000-05:00

Working with the readings for the noon Eucharist today (Acts 13:26-33; John 14:1-6), I’ve been thinking about the promise of resurrection. This is the Easter season, of course; so you’d expect that the readings for today would have to do with new life, new creation, bringing life out of death, that sort of thing. That they do seems almost a little “ho-hum” – this is the end of the fourth week of Easter, after all, so the newness of Christ’s victory over death has worn off a little by now. That’s especially true in this culture. We thrive on “new” and get bored pretty quickly with even the most amazing realities.

But what strikes me about these readings is the audacity of their promise of resurrection, especially given the contexts in which they come. In the reading from Acts, Paul comes before the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia, completely the outsider. He stands up and proceeds to inform the faithful Jews there that their centuries-old covenant with God has been replaced with a new covenant of forgiveness and resurrection – and that it’s been made possible by the fact that their religious leaders in Jerusalem made a mistake of unimaginable scale by condemning the messiah to death. No wonder Paul and Barnabas are run out of town on a rail. But the promise remains – God will raise us from the dead.

Then there’s the reading from John’s Gospel – one many people know well because of the hope and comfort it offers, particularly when read at funerals. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus tells the disciples. “In my Father’s house, there are many dwelling places…. I go [back to heaven] to prepare a place for you, [and] I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also.” This is quite a promise on its own, but it’s downright astounding given the context. Jesus is at the Last Supper, preparing the disciples for the fact that he’s about to be arrested, tried, tortured, and crucified. He hardly seems in a position to be promising the disciples survival over the next day or so, much less eternal life. The disciples are understandably clueless – “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” And then comes the most audacious claim of all from the leader of a movement that’s on the brink of being snuffed out: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

For us, resurrection is old news, and eternal life may sound like religious happy talk. But it’s actually the most radical claim ever made – that the limits imposed by tradition (even religious tradition) and by the powers of the world are not limits to God. God chooses to do new things in the most unlikely and unbelievable circumstances, precisely to proclaim sovereignty over those circumstances and remind the world who’s in charge. Resurrection may not make the front page for us, but it’s the biggest news there’s ever been – not to mention the best.

Jesus’ Prayer: “That they may all be one….”

2009-05-04T13:08:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, I had a meeting (not exactly my favorite way to spend a Saturday, but a good meeting) with Fr. Colbert Estil, the priest who oversees the church and school that St. Andrew’s supports in Maniche, Haiti (http://www.standrewkc.org/social_concerns.html#StAug). It was a rare visit to the States for Père Colbert and a wonderful opportunity to hear from him how the classes and the hot-lunch program are going. Also at this meeting were representatives from three other local parishes that work with Père Colbert to support churches and schools in southwest Haiti – Church of the Redeemer in North Kansas City, St. Paul’s in Kansas City, and Christ Church in Overland Park, which also hosted this meeting.

Now, if you know the insider politics of the Episcopal Church, particularly in the Kansas City area, then you know that “one of these things is not like the others.” A few years ago, Christ Church in Overland Park broke away from the Episcopal Church and declared itself to be an “Anglican” parish now under the oversight of a bishop in Uganda. That process of divorce was long and very hard, particularly for the members of that parish family who felt their church had left them. Anyway, suffice it to say that local Episcopal congregations haven’t had much interaction with Christ Church since it left the Episcopal Church. In fact, I had never even set foot in the building until this Saturday.

But I’m very glad I did because it was a baby step toward realizing Jesus' desire that all his disciples would be one (John 17:20-23). In those two and a half hours on Saturday, no one mentioned Episcopal Church politics. When I came through the door, no one asked me where I stood on issues of human sexuality. (They might have been dismayed to know that I had just come from another meeting, this one as part of the committee in the Diocese of West Missouri planning the process for listening to the experience of gay and lesbian people of faith.) Instead, I was welcomed just like everyone else there, included in good conversation about our schools in Haiti, and served brownies, warm out of the oven. We listened to Père Colbert and shared information about resources we all might tap to improve our efforts to feed and teach the children in these Haitian villages. For two and a half hours, at least, no one worried about homosexuality.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that the place of gay and lesbian people in the Church is not an important issue. It, too, is a facet of the diamond of God’s justice. And I have no delusions that simply by focusing on mission can we instantly put to rest our differences on sexuality. But I do believe that Jesus would like us to give that a try. To me, serving “the least” as agents of God’s reign is our best hope, in the long term, for overcoming the differences that divide believers. There’s nothing quite like serving Christ in the person of a hungry child to make you see where the Church’s focus should be.

The Blessings of Clarity

2009-04-30T08:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was Wednesday, so I got to do something I particularly enjoy – preparing backpacks of food for the BackSnack ministry. Every Wednesday, seven or eight parishioners gather in the undercroft at St. Andrew’s to fill backpacks with nonperishable food provided by Harvesters, a local hunger-relief agency. Parishioners then deliver these backpacks to the students at Blenheim Elementary School in Kansas City. Although the school is only about three miles away from the church, it’s light years distant in terms of socioeconomic status – basically all the 200 kids there receive free or reduced-cost school lunches. So, each Friday, every student receives a backpack of food to take home for the weekend, to provide extra nutrition for the days when they don’t have the assurance of getting lunch at school.

This coming Sunday, May 3, we’ll highlight the BackSnack ministry in our monthly children’s homily. Among the readings that morning will be these verses from the First Letter of John: “We know love by this, that [Jesus] laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” (3:16-17)

Sometimes Christianity baffles us with mystery and paradox; sometimes the Scriptures challenge us with circular reasoning or make claims that tax our capacity for belief. But other times, we get the clarity of Christ’s command to love, particularly in John’s gospel and letters. “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (1 John 3:18). It’s this kind of clarity that gets me through the confusions and frustrations of parish ministry. Sometimes, discipleship really isn’t a lot more complicated than feeding hungry children who live nearby your wealthy church.

Healing, Cure, and Calling

2009-04-28T05:35:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that I don’t read nearly as much as I should. But I did read something in a recent Christian Century that caught my attention – partly because of my own home situation and partly because of a conversation with a parishioner about something her daughter had said. In all three cases, the subject is healing – and specifically, where God is in it.

First, here’s my situation. Since 2001, my wife has been struggling with lupus. Hers is a particularly nasty case that attacks her cardiopulmonary system. It nearly killed her when she was first diagnosed; and now it’s causing pulmonary artery hypertension, a chronic, progressive condition from which one typically doesn’t recover. As you might guess, we’ve done a lot of praying in the last eight years, asking God for healing. Do we expect God to reach into our present situation, snap the divine fingers, and bring an end to her disease? Certainly I wouldn’t say God can’t do that. But I’ve also sat with too many people who’ve watched loved ones die to think that if they had only prayed harder, they would have gotten the outcome they wanted.

Second, here’s the conversation that a parishioner reported having with her daughter. The little girl, who’s four, has a chronically ill family member. She said to her mother that she thought God and Jesus were praying for her family member to get better – but that, by implication, she wasn’t expecting God actually to bring about a cure, and certainly not in some impressively miraculous way. Does that reveal inadequate four-year-old faith, or perhaps inadequate witness by her parents (and her priest)? Or is it a fairly astute, four-year-old way of coming to terms with the mystery that God heals us in the end, despite the fact that impressive miracles usually don’t come when we want them?

Third, here’s the article I mentioned – “Accidental lessons” by William H. Willimon (pp. 30-33 of the April 21, 2009, Christian Century; unfortunately, this article isn’t available on the magazine’s website). Willimon is one of the best writers and preachers anywhere, as well as a bishop in the United Methodist Church. I won’t give away his story except to say that he’s recently gone through his own time of healing after enduring a rather nasty accident. In his article, Willimon reflects on prayers for healing, God’s agency in healing, and our expectations about what healing means in our cure-obsessed culture. Ironically, Willimon argues, our expectations about God’s power to cure us are too small. Rather than simply wanting to cure us and put us back where we were, God desires healing for us … which most often doesn’t look like the cure we want. And, on top of that, it usually comes with something else we didn’t expect – some new shade of vocation to help heal a hurting world.

When the bishops and the four-year-olds agree, I tend to think they’re on to something. May God grant me the grace to be open to true healing, and may God grant me responsiveness to the holy calls that come along with it.

"Do this for the remembrance of me"

2009-04-25T21:11:00.000-05:00

Last night, at the Fools for Christ’s Sake dinner, I found myself in a role I’ve never played before: bartender. I’ve done several kinds of work in my life (busboy, dishwasher, sandwich chef, reporter, editor, writer, etc.), but bartending was a first for me. Steve Corey, Jeff Unger, and I worked the bar more or less in the middle of the undercroft, which gave me a great view of the room as I doled out glasses of rum punch and wine.

There were several surprised looks from parishioners as they came up to get their drinks: “What are you doing here – a priest as a bartender?” (I had taken off my collar but was still wearing the black shirt because it worked well with the server outfit.) I made some smart comment about how I had some professional experience in serving red wine, which brought a laugh or two.

But there was more to what I was saying than what I first thought. Looking out at the “congregation” there assembled for dinner, I imagined the view I get from behind the altar on Sunday mornings – not so different from the view last night. There we were, the people of God assembled for a meal that reminded us why we were there – to do our part in making Christ present in the world. There were no words of consecration, but there was certainly holiness embodied last night as we actively remembered Jesus and his command to care for the least among us. Standing there behind the bar, I might as well have been behind an altar – for Jesus was there, too.

Beans, Rice, and the Reign of God

2009-04-24T06:30:00.000-05:00

Tonight is our Fools for Christ’s Sake Dinner at St. Andrew’s (http://www.standrewkc.org/social_news.html#foolsforchrist) – a gourmet Haitian feast along with entertainment from parishioners. The event benefits the school we support in Maniche, Haiti, specifically the lunch program we began there earlier this year.

The school at Maniche and its hot-lunch program are worth a little theological reflection, particularly in this Easter season. Think back about the news reports from Haiti over the past year. What most of us probably remember are the four hurricanes that struck Haiti this fall, one after another in just a few weeks. More than 500 were killed; thousands saw their homes destroyed. And, as if Haitians didn’t have enough of a challenge finding adequate nutrition in the best of circumstances, the hurricanes wiped out many crops and livestock. And now, months later, the effects continue because, of course, seed for the future was destroyed, too.

In the midst of this darkness, light still breaks in. Led by Dr. Kathy Shaffer, St. Andrew’s began a hot-lunch program this fall for the 200 or so students at the school in Maniche. Initially, meals were served three days a week; this semester, it’s increased to five days a week. A bowl of beans and rice may not seem like much, but it’s huge for these students, both in terms of surviving today and in terms of learning for tomorrow.

Of course, Haiti is just one example of poverty and injustice in the world. Every day, we see and hear about darkness apparently gaining the upper hand. But especially in this season of resurrection, it’s good to see the kingdom of God springing up in the midst of devastation. Christ is alive, after all – not just 2,000 years ago on the first Easter morning, but right now. There in Maniche, in a small hot-lunch program, you can see Christ’s reign breaking into the darkness. And we get to be part of it.

Getting started

2009-04-23T09:33:00.000-05:00

This is the first of what I hope will be regular entries in this blog. I’ve hesitated in starting a blog because of the pressures I put on myself about writing. It’s the same kind of pressure that, ironically, has always kept me from being a good correspondent with family and friends. Somewhere down deep is this little voice saying, “If you’re going to write a ______ [letter, blog, whatever], it has to be good and complete” – as if my college composition instructor, Dr. Hennigan, might turn it back to me covered with red ink. So I don’t write letters much, and I’ve avoided blogging until now, because I’ve feared that what I had to say wouldn’t be “publication-worthy.”

Oh well. As God so often says to me (and all of us, if we have ears to hear), “Get over yourself, and do what I tell you.” So this little journal will, I hope, be at least an exercise in that kind of faithfulness, the kind I think God has in mind for most of us – discipleship in small bytes.