A Lenten Journey: The Dark Night

One of the oldest cedar trees on the peninsula blew over this
month in a storm. The remarkable thing is, in a few years,
this thousand year old tree will be fostering new life and
new growth. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy
comes in the morning!

I have been thinking a lot about journey this Lent, meditating on that journey through the wilderness with God that Lent invites us to. Each week, the lectionary invites us into one stage of the journey.

This first stage, represented by the story of Jesus tempted in the wilderness and by the story of our first parents’ fall in the garden, is one of a dark night of the soul.  Most of us have known times of deep loss and soul-searching, times when God seems to abandon us, times when we feel like we are lost in the wilderness, times when we are tempted to be anything less than our true and whole selves.

As I approach ordination, my practice has been to find my own story in this Lenten journey. And I think about how this journey began. Perhaps all journeys begin with restlessness or with pain or grief or loss.

I remember a time in my life where I confronted the dark night of the soul, full on, in all its terror. Precipitated by the loss of all that had seemed certain in my life, I grappled with God. I grappled with my history and, sometimes, the sheer longing for God and for meaning took my breath away.

And this experience ultimately led to this journey toward priesthood.

We think of times like these as times to avoid at all costs. But they are also deeply fertile times in our life, times when God comes to us in ways we could never have imagined.

It is said that the dark night is not only experienced by individuals, but it is experienced collectively as well. I have been deeply formed by witnessing the dark night of so many communities in this country; in Oaxaca as old ways of life are lost, in the U.S. as immigrant communities seek ways to survive, on the streets of our great cities as more and more people find themselves homeless. I have watched my hometown founder and struggle—as the timber industry crashed, as we became one of hundreds, thousands of rural towns forgotten by a world moving on to bigger and better things. I have watched as mills go silent, as tent cities go up, as shops and farms close.

This, the world's pain, has also formed me on this journey—called inexorably to me to seek for hope for my people.

Writing about the dark night of the soul is an odd thing to do on my birthday. But it is one stage on this remarkable journey—not the whole story. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for all I have learned and all I have become as I walk this strange and exhilarating journey.

Entering the wilderness on this journey is a dangerous thing, but it is also a thing of beauty. As I walk the great forests of my home, I hear the hemlock saplings and the new buds on the alder and the sweet, fresh rain whisper of hope and a future.

Sermon Epiphany 6: God with Us in Galilee--and Allyn!



St Hugh Allyn and their lovely Labyrinth

Text: Matthew 5:21-37

You know, whenever I read this passage that we read this morning, all I can seem to hear is Jesus saying; “If your hand offends you, cut your hands off. If your eyes offend you, pull them out.” And that’s it. I’m done. Jesus sounds perfectly crazy and it becomes hard for me to get to the point of Jesus’ message.

So, before we talk about this passage, I want to set some of the context.

Matthew has a very distinct flow, a very distinct message. The gospel introduces Jesus in the very first chapter as “God with us” as Emmanuel, as the Epiphany of God. God has come to us as a baby born in a barn, as a child fleeing from Herod. God has come to us as a wandering rabbi teaching in the Galilean hills.

Matthew introduces Jesus’ ministry with these words; “The way of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, by way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles; The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light; on those who dwell in the region of the shadow of death; on them the light has dawned.” Jesus both starts and spends the majority of his ministry in this region of Northern Palestine, called Galilee.

Now, its important to note that Galilee is considered a backwater region of the Roman Empire. It’s a bunch of small villages and two bit towns with peasants and fishermen. Some scholars wonder if the reason Matthew focuses so much on Jesus’ Galilean ministry is because the gospel itself was written in Galilee many years later, after the fall of Jerusalem. Matthew reminds us that God came to us, not in Rome, the political center of the day; not in Jerusalem, the religious center, but in Galilee, where he grew up and spent most of his ministry. The light has dawned on Galilee, first. Of all the places God could have revealed himself, God chooses Galilee.

There is one more thing to know about Galilee. It, like the rest of the region, is under the rule of Rome. It does not fare very well. It is said that the roads leading from Galilee south into Jerusalem were often lined with crosses—every time there was a rebellion, every time a Roman governor wanted to make a point. The Galileans suffered tremendously under Roman rule. God comes to us in a suffering people.

And on one of these backwater hillsides, Jesus draws a large crowd around him, and he gives what we call the Sermon on the Mount—the longest recorded sermon given by Jesus. Jesus looks at the men and women and children of Galilee—these peasants and these farmers and these fisherfolk—and he says; “You are blessed. You might be poor and mourning and landless now—but you are blessed in the kingdom of God.” “You—you who are told that you are worth nothing, who are told you are at the bottom of the social and economic heap—you are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.” You are the ones who are going to reveal the Epiphany of God to the world.

Can you imagine how important, how revolutionary those words must have been?

And, then, in our reading this morning, Jesus gets down to business. You blessed people, you people who are the light of the world, you who are called to be part of the kingdom of God—a better kingdom than Rome ever could be—let’s live in light of that.

Jesus is not laying down a bunch of rules so much as he is outlining a new way to live, in light of this kingdom of God. He says—it is not enough simply to not kill each other. You need to learn to love each other, to patch up your arguments. Don’t bring each other to Roman courts—learn to work out your disagreements. Learn to live in love. Learn to live in community.

Its not enough simply not to cheat on your partner. Don’t treat each other as objects, don’t give into lust that demeans and hurts other people. Don’t abandon the one that depends on you for support simply because you feel like it. Learn to live in love, in community.

And be honest and have integrity. Don’t swear oaths—and there were many in the ancient world. Oaths of loyalty to Rome, oaths of honesty in a courtroom, there were religious oaths and vows. Jesus said—be so honest and act with such integrity that you do not need to swear an oath. Learn to live in community.

In other words, treat each other—not like Rome treats you—but treat each other with dignity and respect. Have compassion—that is suffer with—each other. In other words, love one another. This is what love looks like in action.

Nice and easy, right? I know of so many ways I have failed to live in love and live in community. We struggle for the kingdom, we reach for the kingdom, and the kingdom is among us, but it is also not yet.

So, time for introductions. I did my discernment for ordination in a Total Common Ministry church, at St Marks Montesano. Then I decided to go off to seminary. Now, I’ve ended up back where I started, or very close, serving in Aberdeen, back in local ministry in a place I love so much.

Perhaps that is why I love Matthew so much, love the message of Matthew so much. The God who came to us in the tiny villages of Galilee comes to us in the small towns of the Olympic Peninsula. In all of these little towns that most people can’t find on the map, God comes.

And we know something about living in community, don’t we? Something about the importance of staying in relationship with each other when the going gets rough? Like the little towns in Galilee, in our small towns, we have to learn to be neighbors. We have to learn to take care of each other. Its something small towns can teach our larger world, I think. We live in a world that says—look out for #1. We live in a world that glorifies greed and materialism and getting ahead at the expense of other people. Here, in these little towns, we have the opportunity, just like Galilee to model a different way of being in the world.

And I’m working on the street most of the time, in Aberdeen, where there are hundreds of people homeless and the poverty rate is something like 25%. And, there, the message of Matthew is even more important. Every week, I sit down and have conversations with people who are struggling terribly, people who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. And what is amazing, is that I find God there. I find the church there. I find amazing gifts and I find that, indeed, the light comes in dark places. Elderly men who have lost everything teach me about grace; women who have experienced abuse teach me about courage; young people who were born into a devastated economy teach me about hope and survival. We are learning to live in community, to live in love.

So, to you, small towns of the Olympic Peninsula, the light has come, God has made Godself known. The Epiphany, the appearing of God, has come.

You, Allyn and Shelton and Montesano and Aberdeen and the people of God in these places, you are the light of the world.

You, all of you, all of us, are called to live in the light of that grace, to live in community, to live seeking love and relationship. To care for each other in a world that so often seems to have gone wrong.

Sermon Epiphany 5: Christ and Him Crucified

Text: Matthew 5:13-20 and 1 Corinthians 2:1-5

“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”

I have always been struck by the way St Andrew’s calls itself a “beacon of light on 1^st and G.”

Epiphany, this season following Christmas, is a time we talk about light. The word, epiphany, means appearing, specifically the appearing of God, of the divine into our midst. It speaks of the in-breaking of God into our world, the revelation of God to us.

We, as the people of God, are supposed to reflect that light. That is what Jesus tells us in our gospel passage this morning. “You are the light of the world.” We are a people so touched and so transformed by the presence of God among us that we reflect it to the world around us.

It sounds like a pretty glorious mission, doesn’t it? It sounds powerful. It sounds important. We are light of the world. Whole empires have been built based on the belief that they offer light to the world.

Is that what Jesus means? You are the light of the world? You have all the answers? You are powerful and everyone should look up to you?

Paul, in our reading from 1 Corinthians, doesn’t think so. We don’t always get around to Paul’s writing in the lectionary or spend as much time with it. But he is probably the greatest Christian theologian who ever lived. He writes this letter—a series of letters in fact-- to the churches he has founded in Corinth, that great Greek city sitting on the Mediterranean. And there is a problem in Corinth. There is all sorts of jostling for power. All sorts of infighting.

And Paul says, no, no, no. You want to know what my message, what the Christian message is all about? You want to know what is truly important to God?

Look to the cross. I have determined, Paul says, to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Look to the cross. Now, what do you think about when you think of a cross? Now, in our churches, the cross is revered. We have gold plated crosses all over the place. All well and good, but do you know that for the first three centuries of Christianity, the cross was never pictured or drawn in Christian art? Do you know why?

Because saying that the one you worshipped was crucified was saying that he was executed for treason in the worst way possible. It was like saying—yeah, we worship that guy that was sent to the electric chair. To Jesus’ own people in Palestine, the cross was a symbol of torture and despair, a reminder of the thousands of crosses that lined the roads at that time. To the urban and cultured Greeks of Corinth, the cross was a symbol of shame, of criminality, something that only happened to low lifes and criminals and ne'er do wells.

But Paul says I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified. He goes on and explains that what seems foolish to us, what seems foolish to the cultured and refined Greeks of Corinth is actually wisdom to God. What seems powerless and weak to us, to the world, is where God’s power lies.

God came to us in the person of Jesus Christ, not as a wealthy and wise ruler, but as a poor and crucified carpenter. What’s more, the Epiphany of God came in a barn, on a lonely hillside, on a cross to a lonely and forgotten people in a bunch of two bit towns. And finally, in a garden tomb. The Epiphany of God, the Light of God was revealed in weakness. On a cross. God died, in the person of Jesus Christ, at the hands of an executioner. Can you imagine the powerlessness and the shame of that?

Why? Why did God come to us, not in earthly power, but in weakness and shame? Why did God choose to come to us like that?

So that, every one of us who feels alone
who feels ashamed
 who confronts death
 who experiences death and loss
who is ignored
who feels lost or powerless
 who has lost everything…

 would know that God was with us. In solidarity with us.

So, what does that mean for us? What does this mean to be a beacon of light on first and G? It sounds a little less romantic now, doesn’t it? What does it mean for us to follow a crucified God? What does it mean for us?

It means we are a people, not great and good people so much, as people who have experienced the grace of God. We are, all of us, broken people called to follow a crucified master, and live in the light, in the revealing, in the Epiphany of the grace of God.

We are in a time of transition, a time that makes us feel powerless, that makes us feel uncomfortable, that sometimes makes us feel foolish. We are struggling to remember who we are.

If nothing else, let us remember this. We are a people marked by grace. The light we reflect is only the light of the Grace of God in our own lives. We don’t build God’s work. We only reflect God’s grace, we only live in the light of God’s grace.

I had a dear man teach me something about this. I went down under the bridge on Christmas Day—I was with Bonnie Campbell, the priest from Montesano, and there were only a few folks there. We sat down and talked, looking over the river. He said; “You know, Christmas is all about grace. God comes to us and we share with each other and we care for our neighbors and we find grace.” What is foolish to the world is the wisdom of God. In the places we believe are powerless, the power of God is found.

We don’t know what will come next for us here at St Andrews. But I invite you, just for a moment to lay aside your worries and your uncertainties. Trust in the one we follow, this Christ and him crucified. Learn from this wise man I met. Know that in our weakness, God’s power is made manifest. In our foolishness and our mistakes, God’s wisdom is made known.

Trust in grace. Live in the light of grace. Reflect the light of this grace. Because, you are the light of the world.

This is My Confession

Wendell Berry says that, especially now, to love a place is to open oneself up to immeasurable heartbreak.

Several years ago, I visited southern Mexico on a delegation committed to studying the roots of migration. I visited a tiny indigenous village in Oaxaca. The old men told me; “We have farmed this land since the time before Christ.” The young people, the few that were left, told me; “There is nothing left for us here. We want to stay, but there is no life left for us.” After thousands of years of farming, U.S. mega-agricultural policies and the effects of global trade like NAFTA had flooded the Mexican market with corn and beans, undercutting small farmers and destroying their way of life. The school had closed in the village—there were no children. And with no children, they had no future. I marked the traces of tears on the old women’s cheeks.  

One young man took us up the mountains to his favorite spot, a place that looked over the land beyond the village. It was beautiful. As I stood there, I felt the lump in my throat grow as I thought of the spot I had used to go to, back home, looking over the land I loved as much as the young man speaking now loved his. And I thought of how the little towns back in my hometown were also losing their young people and their future. I thought of how globalization and the global quest for cheap stuff and bigger profits had also destroyed those towns.

I have come back, back home with that favorite mountain view, to a wreck of an economy and often a general sense of despair. The dominant economy of this part of the world was, ever since the destruction and disappearance of Native villages, industrial. It was a boom and bust timber region, at the mercy of the timber market and the corporations who ran it. But, for a time at least, there was a hidden economy, one based on some sense of community and locality. Small farmers grew food and local craftspeople did their work.

Both economies are now gone. The timber industry crashed. The hidden economy faded away, as Wal Mart and other corporate chains put small “mom and pop” shops out of business and agricultural regulation and consolidation forced farmers to leave their fields fallow. Now, the migrants who fled NAFTA in southern Mexico pick brush or work in the few coastal canneries. Now, the descendants of our first peoples and old loggers alike camp out along the river. Now, farmers age and watch their children leave and their land returns to the forest from whence it came.

My homecoming is also a dirge, a deep sorrow for what might have been, for what has been lost. I grew up farming—canning, preserving, growing food, working in the soil, living off the land. I fumble to re-learn what I once knew. I strain to hear again the voices of the land and forest, the whispers of ancestors and of time before memory.

For now, I trudge into Wal Mart. I participate in an economy almost entirely based on the exploitation of the world’s people, including my own. I am surrounded with a wealth of natural resources, with the wealth of the forest and the streams, and I have forgotten how to live well with it, just as we all have forgotten how to live well with it. Nothing is more tragic than finding deep poverty in the middle of the abundance of the land.

This is my confession. Not only have I forgotten how to live and how to live well; I believed, for so long, the lie that this was the way things were—the way things have to be. That in order to succeed, I had to leave, to find success in the great cities and academies of the world, that everything back home was pedestrian and backwards.

This is my confession. My heart breaks with the stories of pain and loss I hear every day, stories that have touched and wrung my own life in deeply personal ways. My heart breaks when I stand with friends who are sleeping out in the rain and cannot get dry. My heart breaks to hear stories of hatred, when I watch people fighting each other for the limited resources available. My heart breaks to see the level of discouragement, the number of folks who turn to drugs to numb the pain. My heart breaks to see the land neglected and farms empty and Wal Mart a new central gathering space. My heart breaks to see us all swept up in a culture of consumerism in the midst of want, a poverty so terrifying in its implications and consequences as it makes the poor the willing participants of the forces that create poverty.   

This is my confession. To love this place is to open oneself up to heartbreak.

This is my confession. May God forgive me for the evil I have done and the evil done on my behalf.

This is my confession. May God give the grace to re-create and re-member the community of which I am a part.

These are My People

“These are my people; this is where I come from…” sings Rodney Atkins in his country twang. And it resonates deeply when I hear those words.

I have spent the better part of this last decade walking away from where I come from. I got myself educated. I lived in a few big cities. Like so many of my generation, I once thought I could leave behind my backwards town and become educated, sophisticated, and successful. All along the way, I was taught—subtly and not so subtly—to despise where I come from.

But I have never been able to escape the ghosts of my past. In my mind, I have never escaped from the girl who once rode at a full gallop across the field, my hair streaming in the wind. I still pride myself on being able to shoot straight and I still turn up the country music while driving down back roads. And, when I walked the streets of Boston one night and heard Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” blaring from some upscale bar, I danced. Right there in the middle of the street.

And now I’m back home. A lot of my people wear jeans and boots and they drive old trucks. They have gun racks and I would venture to guess most of them have a weapon on them somewhere. They are plain speaking and often hard living and they will fight you if you disrespect them. They love the land and they hate it too, a restless and discontented people who are tired and frustrated by a world that doesn't seem willing to give them a break. They love their neighbors—most of them, anyway, and those they don’t like they usually put up with. They are traditionalists and are irritated by political correctness, irritated by city slicker language, irritated most of all with an elitism that says they are of little worth or value. My people will stand up for their town with an almost unbelievable arrogance, but on closer look, you will find that this masks a thinly veiled sense of inferiority, a deep knowledge that late capitalism has left them far behind, and an even more profound sense of failure and hopelessness.

And l look around me and say; “These are my people.” For better or for worse, in spite of all the “edumication”, they are still my people and I am still theirs. For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, with our deepest failures and our best gifts, I love my people. I want them to know that they have worth and value in this world. I want to sit with the despondent man I meet on the street and the woman I sit down with in some crumbling apartment and I want them to know that God came to us in a tiny two bit town in the middle of nowhere and loved us.

And just as I embark on this crusade, they turn to me and they embrace me and I realize that my people offer me the greatest gift of all—the gift of belonging.

These are indeed my people and our futures are bound together—not because I have so much to offer, but because they have welcomed me home.  

 

For Love of One's People

 

There is so much that can be said on this day and I feel that no words of mine could possibly add much to the conversations swirling around Martin Luther King, Jr. As I now live far enough from major cities that I will not be able to join in the many marches ostensibly celebrating his message, I have time to reflect.

And one thing that has become clearer to me over the years, in my work and in activist circles, is that one of the core strengths of King’s work was that it was in great measure rooted and grounded in community and relationship. What I mean by this is that King was the powerful spokesperson that he was and touched to cord that he did because he was fighting and preaching and eventually dying for his people. Civil rights for Black Americans was not a cause or a crusade rooted in abstract ideals, but a living, breathing need coming out of the Black community. When white liberals and white clergy joined in solidarity, they were not core to the movement, but simply standing up with a living, breathing community fighting for their very survival.

My experience in activist circles in my generation has often been deeply disappointing. White liberal activism and liberal lobbies, whether fighting for “immigration reform” or “poverty alleviation” or “the environment,” are largely abstract movements spearheaded by people inspired by an idea, not by a community. They rarely have any relationship to the people they claim to stand with and, often, their pragmatic goals are at odds with the community itself (as in the case of immigration reform, with well-funded lobbies attempting to pass legislation that immigrant communities say is more hurtful than helpful).

We have come to view “activism” or “social justice” as a cause for which we can sign hundreds of random internet petitions. The danger with this is that such work is ungrounded. We fight for abstracts and causes we know little to nothing about. We get angry, not on behalf of those we love, but on behalf of a cause. We rail against a system or take out our angst on our designated enemies, without any sense of responsibility or community.

Martin Luther King has been well known for his words about love. What we have talked about less is that love can only be love if grounded in relationship and proximity (community). One can only truly love people one knows. Therefore, a struggle for justice grounded in love must be a struggle grounded in community.

King ultimately died, not only for an abstract cause of justice or freedom, but more specifically, on behalf of his people and community. That is what gave his life, and his death, such overwhelming power.   

A New Year's Practice....

I do not place too much faith in New Year's Resolutions, partly because I do not place a lot of faith in my ability to follow through with them. But, I still dutifully spend time at the end of one year and the beginning of a new year to look back and reflect. This year, I am so grateful to leave the last behind that I am not dwelling much on the looking back. Instead, most of my resolutions have to do with a commitment to become more fully myself, to enjoy more fully the things and people that I love, and to revel in being back home and back close to the land I love. Unlike previous years, I did not write a list of changes to make or a list of goals for ministry. Those things will come. Instead, I decided that I would find time to get on a fishing boat, that I would read with the kids, that I would get out hunting and target practicing with my lovely new traditional recurve bow. I resolved that I would indulge my own deepest loves and deepest spirituality this year.

One of my resolutions is more strictly religious, though. And that is to read the Bible through this year. As you all know, I grew up Baptist and one of the blessings that came with that was a deep love and knowledge of the Bible. Some of my earliest memories are of me falling in love with the Bible. I had it read through, and most of it many times, but the time I was 12. In my teens, I studied Hebrew and Greek so I could (attempt to) read it in its original. As much as I have wrestled with it and raged at it in the years since, I have never fallen out of love with it. I can still recite my favorite chapters and its language still permeates my own. But it has been a long time since I have read it through, just for myself and not for a seminary class or a sermon, and simply sat with it, verse by verse.

So, this year, I am reading it through again. And, as I do so, I will post my thoughts here. My thoughts on Abraham and Sarah and the Exodus, on the ancient law and on the prophets, on the stories of Jesus and the exhortations of Paul, on the visions of apocalypse. I will wrestle anew with the Bible--with its questions and its paradox, with its stories of love and of sin, with its joy and its terror.

It is truly said that the Bible is central to the faith of working class Americans--even those who are not religious. Somehow, the Bible haunts me, not only as an ancient text or a spiritual guide, but as read through the experiences and hopes and failures of my people, of my family, of myself. The Bible haunts me with my own collective history. As I read through the Bible this year, I want to remember and reflect on this haunting.