Sailing to Bombay

            In the early 1950s William Hutchison Murray, a Scottish mountain climber, was asked to join and then organize an expedition to the Himalayas.  In recounting the preparations for the expedition, Murray wrote of the moment when everything changed, when the epic journey moved from being just an idea towards being a reality.

“We had definitely committed ourselves and were half-way out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money – booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.” (W.H.Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951), quoted in Weavings Vol, XXV, Number 4 (2010))

            For many of us, being free from anxiety, the ability to stop worrying, is the impossible mountain to climb.  In what has to be the most memorable of sermons ever preached,  Jesus spoke about the way to scale these seemingly impossible heights. He does not command us not to worry, as if that would work. No, instead he says make the shift in priorities, change the focus, move off of yourself and your worries and think about and work towards the cause of God, and everything else will fall into place.   Jesus says, make that commitment to God, and the rest will follow. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all things will be given you as well.” (Matthew 6:33)

            It is what Murray says happened for him once they booked those tickets for Bombay. Once they made that commitment, everything else began to fall into place. “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.” Living without anxiety and worries is not the starting point, it is the result of committing yourself to God and to the kingdom of heaven. Make that commitment, and you will find that resources unlooked for will come your way, that help unexpected will be at hand.

            Climbing the mountain begins with making the commitment, by putting your trust not in yourself or your planning or your efforts, but in the God who holds you and loves and will give you everything you need.

            Now this is not to say, of course, that everything we wish for is what God will send our way!  Jesus promises that what we need we will receive, but that does not mean that everything we want is what we will receive; we know this when we pray, “thy will be done”, but of course it is one of the hardest thing to live.

            I sometimes wonder if Jesus planned to deliver that famous sermon of his on a mountain because he knew that we all have so many mountains to climb in our life, and that we fret and worry about whether or not we have the energy and the power and the ability to do this.  His good news for us is that no, we probably don’t have the energy and the power and the ability to climb all those mountains. We don’t,  but he does. And he will share that power with you, if only you book those tickets to Bombay, make that commitment, and strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

                    

Billions and Billions of Stars...

            Teddy Roosevelt, our 26^th president, was said to have sought escape from the pressures of the position by getting out into the wilderness. One crystal clear, starry night, as the story goes, he chose to unroll his sleeping bag out in the open.  Far from civilization, far from any sort of industrial light pollution, the vast expanse of the heavens lay before him, stretching from horizon to horizon. After some time, and with a sigh, TR rolled over and said, “At last I feel small enough to go to sleep.” And he did.

            The other day I read about discoveries concerning the universe. Einstein originally believed that the universe was static – it was his biggest mistake, he later admitted. Physicists now tell us that the universe is expanding, and, what is even more remarkable, at ever increasing speeds. We tend to think of objects slowing down after they are launched – think, for example, of how a thrown baseball slows and eventually comes to a halt. But the universe is getting bigger faster and faster. So much so that if we lived long enough the night sky would be empty – the stars – those “billions and billions of stars”, as Carl Sagan famously put it -- would have sped away faster than the speed of light.

            Roosevelt found the humility that came with being reminded of his right size comforting.  In a time when he was the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, when so many depended on him, but also reminded him on a daily basis of his vast importance, being confronted with evidence of his comparative insignificance in the grand scheme of things grounded him and gave him peace.

            Perhaps a walk on a clear winter’s evening might do us all some good, as well.

     When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

       the moon and the stars that you have established;

     what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

       mortals that you care for them?  -- Psalm 8

           

Plowing the Rain?

           The slow crawl into town this morning was caused, I eventually saw, by one of our huge New England snowplows, yellow warning lights flashing, huge wheels gripping the pavement, curved blade scraping all before it. In its wake, no snow, no slush, no ice. As I slowly made it by in the passing lane, I saw before it – no snow, no slush, no ice.  Just rain puddles. It was plowing the rain.

            In this week’s New Yorker there is a cartoon depicting two men sitting together at a bar or lunch counter, with one saying to the other, “I’m looking for an easier religion.”

            Plowing the rain may be easy for a snowplow, but no one would say that is what a snowplow is made for, or that in plowing the rain the snowplow is fulfilling its highest purpose.  No one hoping to get in shape goes to the gym for a workout and lifts one pound weights if they are capable of lifting far more, or trains for a marathon by taking leisurely walks around the neighborhood. We don’t tell our children that they can learn to play the piano if they practice a minute a day, or excel at school without doing homework. 

And yet how often are we at best half-hearted when it comes to our spiritual health, seeking only to plow the rain, and being too easily satisfied with its meager rewards.

Do We Have to be Anxious?

             Anxiety-producing stuff is all around us now.  Attempted political assassination and mass murder in Arizona, over-heated political rhetoric, over-heated political rhetoric over whether over-heated political rhetoric is a bad thing, global warming, melting polar ice caps, rampant deforestation in the Amazon, the Great Recession, wars without end in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, epidemics of cancer, ever-rising health care costs, job insecurity, failing schools, college applications, strained church budgets, Mayan prophecies of 2012, somebody please stop me!

            Anxiety is not unique to our day and age. Jesus and those to whom he ministered knew, in their own time, all about anxiety, anxiety that was personal, communal, political, economic, religious.  Health care was abysmal, child-mortality astronomical, foreign taxation oppressive, foreign military occupation relentless, religious bickering unending, the political world polarized, pensions, not invented yet, retirement planning limited to having lots of strong sons.

            So Jesus knows better than to tell the people, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Instead, he knows he needs to help them face their darkest fears and deepest dreads, he needs to go beyond offering the temporary band-aid of easy comfort and Pollyannaisms. And so he gives them a bracing does of reality, telling that there will be times, yes, when the very foundations will be shaken beneath their feet, times when it will seem that all moorings have been lost, times when it will feel like they have been “confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” (Luke 21:25) They likely would have understood that he was speaking not just about the end time of world history, but about what feels like the end times in their own lives – about those cataclysmic-feeling times that all too often are part and parcel of this earthly existence.

            But Jesus does not stop there, with sounding warnings that seem as if they might be coming from the Channel 7 Storm Center on the eve of a winter nor’easter. No, he takes them to another place, a new place, an unexpected place – a wondrous place. Not, “Don’t worry, be happy”, not, “Stick your head in the sand and just pretend that everything is all right”, but, instead, this: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

            As Flora Slosson Wuellner writes (Weavings, No. XXV, Number 4, 2010), “The moment of our greatest fear, that moment when the ground shakes beneath our feet, is the very moment of God’s deepest presence and power within us. It is the moment of our new beginning.”

            She goes on,

“This does not mean that our sun and moon will shine for us again in their old way, or that the sea will return to its former shores, or the cracked earth will become that old solid ground we used to walk upon. We will walk in new lights and on new foundations. The God of endings and new beginnings never returns us to the old life after profound change. We are offered a new creation.”

The times of our greatest anxieties, these are times not to dread the worse, but to anticipate the best, not to cower in our foxholes, but to stand tall with eyes eagerly scanning the horizon, ears stretching for the sound of the cavalry’s bugle call.

            This is my story, the story of my new life. Many of you know some of my story, about how Sue, the mother of Julia and Katie, my first wife, died of breast cancer at an all too young age, and how I later met Christie, and fell in love, and married. And you know that I believe I have been blessed to have lived two lives, and perhaps you assume that I date that second life from the moment I met Christie.

            But actually, that rise to new life began well before that. I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. I can feel the pajamas that I wore, the robe on my back, the slippers under my feet; I can see the back door, the view out its windows onto the driveway outside, the newspaper lying there. I knew that what I was about to do I had been doing every morning since we had moved into that house, had stripped off and then rehung the horrid wallpaper, had redone the kitchen, celebrated the pregnancies that resulted in Katie and Julia, and so much more. That I had started off each day by going outside and bringing in the newspaper. But this day was different, and even as I reached out to turn that doorknob, I knew that the world was a different place and might never be the same again. Because this was the first day after the cancer had come back, and now all bets were off, and now I knew that I could never trust life again. And I felt robbed, violated, completely overwhelmed by violent seas.

            And yet – and yet, that was the day I began, if slowly, to rise to new life. While my old trust in life had been destroyed, what was made room for was a new trust in the one who, as we sang earlier, has “the Whole World In his Hands”.  No, its not that the challenges and the pain and the suffering went away – cancer stinks, and losing a spouse and mother and friend to a debilitating disease is horrid – its that I discovered that we were never left alone, never abandoned, never left unloved, that help unlooked for always came, that when we ran out of our own resources new power miraculously came our way. Yes, something in me died that day – the faith that life was fair and just and would go on and on – but in that dying there was room for something new to be born, a trust in one whose trust is steadfast and sure.

            Minnie Louise Haskins wrote over a century ago,

“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”

The Bible tells us over and over about God’s hand, that symbol of comfort and care and protection, of endless love and strength and guidance. In Psalm 139, the psalmist sings “If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” And in John 10:28, Jesus says “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

            And so this is the good news for us today, and this is what Jesus means when he says to us, “Do not be anxious.” When we are faced with those times when it seems that the world is moving beneath our feet, when it seems that the stars are falling from the sky overhead – when the test results come back from the lab and the specialist tells us that it is bad news, when the boss calls us into the office and starts apologetically mumbling about reductions in force and how sorry he is, when a spouse packs their bag and walks out the door, when that thin envelope arrives from the admissions office of that college you longed to get into, when you realize that you just made the biggest mistake of your life – then is the time to stand tall; then is the time to raise up your head; and then is the time to put out your hand to the one in whom you can always trust, and who stands ready to open up for you a new life and a new day.

The King’s Speech

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

It was lie that no one believed back on the playground at recess, and no one believes today.

Words matter.

Words matter in “The King’s Speech”, a terrific film that will win all sorts of awards this year, a film that dramatizes the struggle of England’s King George VI to overcome, with the aid of a speech therapist, a debilitating stutter, enabling the king to be a voice of hope and courage for a nation that soon battled to fend off the Nazi threat.

Word mattered on the Mall back in 1963, as another king, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, stirred a nation to be true to its founding ideals:

“Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.”

Words mattered back when the King of Kings uttered these words some two millennia ago, words that are as true today as they were back then:

“Blessed are you who are poor,

   for yours is the kingdom of God.

     “Blessed are you who are hungry now,

   for you will be filled.

“Blessed are you who weep now,

   for you will laugh.

Words matter. It is not a matter of “rights”, not a matter of freedom of speech, not a matter of liberal versus conservative, not a matter of “censorship” or “political correctness.”  Words can be used to build up, or to tear down; to promote reconciliation, or to cause division; to heal, or to harm.

The choice, as always, is ours.

Are you . . . fallow ground?

            Suburban kid that I was, I had no experience equipping me to question the elementary school teacher who taught us that one way colonial farmers ensured good crops was to rotate their fields, and every few years allow a field to lie fallow – they would plow the field, but not plant it, and let it rest for a year.

            Yet biologists and agriculturalists today tell us that the field which lies fallow for a season is anything but at rest. That field is full of activity and life – insects and earthworms and bacteria are hard at work regenerating the soil, breaking down organic matter, releasing nutrients, loosening compacted ground.  That field only looks to be at rest, when in fact it is really hard at work, preparing itself for a new growing season.

            I wonder sometimes if this also might not be true in our spiritual lives.  That when those inevitable dark nights of the soul arrive unexpected and uninvited, when a spiritual lethargy seems to grab a hold and we can summon little enthusiasm for church or matters of the spirit, when we feel that we have been abandoned and God does not care, if there is a God at all - - in short, when we might compare ourselves to a fallow field, barren and without growth or evident sign of life – that in fact we might be in a state of ferment below the surface, in a time of preparation, in a necessary stage that is a prelude to something we might not be able to imagine, but which is all the more wonderful for that.

            Maybe, in our bleak spiritual midwinter, when we feel as if we are fallow ground, this should be a cause not of despair, but of expectant hope….

The Wise Men started out. . . with questions

     New Year's Eve Chinese dinner served up this fortune cookie nugget: "Wise men started out becoming that way by asking questions."

     January 6 is celebrated in the church as Epiphany or Dia De Reyes (Three Kings Day), the anniversary of the arrival in Bethlehem of the Magi, the Wise Men from the east,  who came to find and worship the newborn king, Jesus.

     The fortune cookie prompted me to look again at these Wise Men,  who I always assumed were called "wise" because that is how they were before they set out on their cross-desert voyage of discovery.  But looking at the text again, and wondering about their seeking, I cannot help but wonder whether their wisdom came on the way, and through their willingness to question.

     Questions like, "We have seen a new star in the east (when it rose), and we wonder what it might mean?"; and, when they arrive in Jerusalem at Herod's court, "Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?"; and after they find Jesus, "Although Herod has told us to report back to him the location of this child, ought we instead listen to that dream of warning we had, and so return home by another road?"; and after they return home, "What does this mean for how we live, for how we understand our world, for how we understand what our purpose in life may be?"

     For me, faith has always been more about the questions than the answers, more about honest inquiry and less about settled dogma, more about marveling at the glimpses of the divine that seem as fleeting and as beautiful as a child's lightly-blown soap bubble and less about unquestioned and unquestionable tablets of stone.

     The Wise Men remind me that perhaps wisdom is to be found on the journey of faith.

     What do you think?  If there is wisdom here, and if your safe harbor has become a little too safe, the cozy fireside a bit too cozy, can you imagine being open to following a star?