"What is It? -- God does not always come as we expect..."

The Hebrews knew God and God’s ways. They knew that God had come to them in their captivity, and that through mighty deeds of power – through all those plagues sent down on Egypt, through that miraculous passage through the Red Sea waters – they had been brought to freedom and new life. But now they are enslaved to a different master, to hunger, and of the God they think they have come to know they can see no sign. (Exodus 16:2-15)

            And then they wake up one morning and stagger out into the desert and find a layer of dew spread all over the ground, and when it had lifted, a sticky, flaky, whitish substance on the ground. They scratch their heads, look at one another, and say in Hebrew man-hu, which means “What is it?”

            And then, like in that old cereal commercial, one of them gets their younger brother Mikey to try it, and Mikey says “I like it”, and next thing you know they gather the manna up in baskets and bake it and find that once again they have been freed to new life.  They were not, as they had thought, alone and forgotten. God was with them, and God would provide.

            Their story is our story, a story that is often repeated in the lives of God’s people. It is a story that gives us hope when we find ourselves seemingly alone and feeling abandoned in our own personal wildernesses. A story that happens at those times when we must make the move from “What is it?” to “It is a sign that God is with us!”

            I was counseling a couple this past week in preparation for their wedding, and the bride-to-be related how she had lost her mother three years ago.  That must have been terrible, I said, and hard not just on you but on your relationship as well. It was hard, she said, but he was terrific through it all, and the hard times really brought us closer together.

            What is it?  The power of death to divide, or love to grow?

            I was listening to sports talk radio awhile back, and the hosts were commenting on a story that had just broken in the papers, about how on the eve of her wedding day the bride-to-be was accidently pushed into the shallow end of a swimming pool by a bridesmaid, breaking her neck and leaving her paralyzed from the neck down. What the hosts found incomprehensible was that the groom went through with the wedding. They were apparently unable to understand that loving another, through sickness and in health, might not be a duty, but a privilege, not a burden, but a calling.

            What is it? The end of promises made, or the beginning of living into new possibilities?

            Michael Piazza, writing in his blog this week, tells of Valerie.

     “Valerie was 34. She remembered that day last year like it was yesterday. She sat on the sofa stunned, unable to move. She had gone to the doctor to get the results of some tests. She assumed he would tell her she was anemic and needed to take vitamins or something. She wasn't remotely prepared to hear him speak of death, especially her death. She was 34. She had a good job, lots of friends. She did volunteer work for the crisis center and went to church. How could she be terminal?
     Now, a year later she sat on that same sofa amazed at all that had happened in that year. Her body clearly showed the wear of someone fighting to survive, but there was something inside of her that had never felt so alive. It was amazing the changes that had come over her since she learned that she might die sooner than later. Valerie wrote in her journal:

     I'd always been the cautious one, afraid of my own shadow. I wouldn't take risks or do unexpected things. Now, that I have had to face the fact that no one gets out of this life alive, I've been saying “boo” to all of those ghosts. It is amazing how easily all of the things you fear disappear when you are willing to confront them. If you are going to die anyway, why let them keep pushing you around? I just wish I had remembered sooner that I was going to die anyway.
     I've always been afraid of what people would think of me. As a result, I was cynical, condescending, and judgmental of others. It is funny how that works. But, today, when I went downstairs for lunch, I took a handful of quarters and walked up and down the street putting money in parking meters that were about to expire. The meter maid must have thought I was nuts, but today I wasn't afraid of what she might think of me. Now, my biggest fear is that I might waste a single moment of this precious life. Nothing makes me feel more alive than doing random acts of kindness.
     I wish I could tell everyone that if you have to be afraid of something, don't let it be what people might think. Be afraid that you might let a day slip by without really living it, without doing some good. That's the only thing worth fearing. The fear of wasting your life can make you more alive than you ever dreamed of being. I only wish I had some way to tell people before it is too late for them.”

      What is it? An unfairness that makes everything thereafter meaningless, or a wake-up call to an abundant life that is there for the taking each and every precious day?

Back in January, in response to declining worship attendance particularly among young families, we had an all-church off-site retreat to see if we might discern a new way forward. Once again the old adage “Watch what you pray for, you might get it” was proved true, because one of those young mothers we had taken pains to invite finally spoke up and said, “Why don’t we have a Saturday afternoon service?”

Now I had all sots of answers running through my mind, beginning with “But that’s something that Catholics do!”, continuing on with “And where will we find the money?”, and ending with “But Saturday is my day off and my wife will kill me!”

But she went on to explain how hard it is for young families to make it to church on Sunday mornings, what with sports games and practices, drama rehearsals, Chinese lessons and so on, never mind that they would like to have an occasional morning to just lounge around the house. So we put together a planning team, and the enthusiasm and ideas and participation have been over the top, and the word of mouth is spreading and all sorts of folk other than young families are telling us that they want to come, and now we are gearing up for a kick-off service on October 1.

What is it? More “stuff” that just has to get done, or a chance to experience the winds of the Spirit gusting through a three-hundred years young Meetinghouse?

Friends, the lesson for us all is clear. People with the gift of faith are as those with a new set of contact lessons, able to see that there is no wilderness in which we might travel that God is not with us, an abiding, empowering, healing, gifting, liberating presence. We can see that what others might view as a barren, inhospitable desert can be transformed by God into a fertile, nourishing garden.

God will come, but not always in the ways we expect, in the form we want, or on the timetable we would demand. But God hears, and God answers, and God comes.

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“When All Seems Lost”

In 1995 the Rev. Daniel Thiagarajah was president of the Seminary in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, where he lived in the president’s house with his wife, Thaya, and three year-old daughter, Lydia. Which is where they were when the word came that the Sri Lankan Army had broken through the lines and was advancing towards Jaffna, and that for their safety the population ought to evacuate. As they piled into their van, artillery shells began to explode all around them – in fact, two landed in the mud right in front of the car, but failed to detonate. Thankful for this narrow escape, they headed south down the only road to safety, but were brought up short as they ran straight into the mammoth traffic jam that results when 200,000 people flee an on-coming army. Fearful that the packed highway would be strafed or shelled, the family split up – Daniel stayed with the van, and Thaya took Lydia on foot. They agreed that they would try to meet up well to the south, across Elephant Pass, at a church where Daniel had once served as pastor. And so Thaya walked, first on the road, and then through the fields, and finally through the waters of the Jaffna lagoon; for twenty hours she walked, as the waters swirled around her legs, her hips, and then up to her neck; finally carrying Lydia over her head as the bombs fell behind and the water rose higher and higher.

Our reading for today draws on a vivid image to talk about the human condition. It uses the image of sinking beneath the waves, of being swamped on the seas, as a way to raise up the inescapable reality of our existence, the truth that there are times in our lives when we find ourselves overwhelmed by the seas of misfortune, when we wake up and realize that we are in the grip of forces and powers which vastly outstrip our puny capabilities and weakness, when we can be terrorized by our worst fear, that there will be no hand to reach out and save us. It speaks to us of those times when all seems lost.

In Matthew’s gospel the disciples find themselves in a small boat far out to sea when a squall strikes, when a microburst suddenly whips the seas into mountains, violently wrenches the tiny craft off course, and threatens to send them all to watery graves.

            We know what he is talking about; we know that he is speaking about us, about the ways in which disaster can reach out and threaten any one and all of us at any time. He is talking about the experience of grief, of despair, of hopelessness, of powerlessness, of crucifixion. He is talking about that devastating blow when after three rounds of chemotherapy and months of hoping and retching and positive outlook and arms that have come to resemble pin-cushions the oncologists say “We’re sorry, there’s nothing more we can do.” He is talking about the numbness that descends when the somber officers in dress uniform turn off the sidewalk and walk up to your front door. He is talking about being up to one’s ears in pain and loss, eyes bleary from weeping, stomach churning without relief. He is talking not about “Reality TV”, where all problems are wrapped up in one short hour, he is talking about REALITY. And yes, he is talking about the horror of refugees fleeing for their lives. But he is also talking about the more mundane type of feeling overwhelmed, the sort of thing that comes from the drip-drip-drip accumulation of smaller griefs and woes, when the job loss comes just as the marriage is falling apart and you are trying to deal with a child with special needs at the same time as your parent is slipping into dementia….

            You might not agree with me on this, at least not openly. You might not want to admit that you ever find yourself feeling as if you are ready to slip beneath the waves. We are, after all, stoic New Englanders. We come from hardy stock, we are tough, we can take it, and after all, we say, “we are not as bad off as so and so.”  That might work fine at the supermarket, or at the beach, or even when you greet me after worship, but it doesn’t work so well at 2:00 in the morning when you are alone in bed and can’t get to sleep and you’re not sure how you are going to get through the night never mind another day. The Titanic is going down and you know it and you know that there is no way you are going to prevent that from happening and the bluffing and the façade just don’t cut it anymore. And the question comes,  I am sinking beneath the waves, and does anyone care? More importantly, does God care?

            That was the question on the minds of those disciples. It had been a long day, filled with Jesus teaching them and the crowds about the kingdom of God, and oh by the way feeding five thousand as well, and come evening Jesus had commanded his disciples to set sail for the other side of the Sea of Galilee. They encounter a terrifying windstorm, and considering there were four professional fishermen among the disciples, it must have been a true gale. Waves threaten to swamp the frail craft.

            Does God care? It is a question which goes right to the heart of any relationship – do you care? It is a question many adult children still struggle with right through mid-life – do my parents care about me? Do they love my brothers and sisters more than me? And so we keep track of how many visits they make to see our siblings, we carefully listen to see whether they praise our children as much as they praise their other grandchildren, we even try to gauge their love for us by trying to figuring out how they plan to dispose of their estate. Worrying about whether someone cares has a corrosive effect on the relationship, and over time, can even destroy it. Because the deeper meaning of “Do you care?” is, “Am I alone?”. For if you don’t care about me, then I really don’t exist for you, and I cannot hope that you will be save me in time of need.

            Jesus, Matthew tells us, cares. The disciples act as if he is alone – but Jesus is with them, even walking over the seas to be with them. But Peter doubts, saying, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” And of course he sinks, but Jesus reaches out and catches him, and after climbing into the boat with Peter, stills the storm. 

            When we read Matthew’s account of the stilling of the storm, we are challenged to examine our own faith. The suspicion that God does not really care about us corrodes our religious life. But, Matthew tells us, Jesus is with us in those times when we feel like we might sink beneath the waves. We are not alone, and God in Jesus cares.

            I don’t know how it was for Thaya that terrifying night when she struggled through the rising waters of the Jaffna lagoon, the only light provided by exploding ordinance behind her, her arms aching from carrying her precious daughter, her heart breaking over the destruction to her people, and her mind consumed by worry over Daniel stuck on the highway. But I suspect, from conversation with her, that even as she cried out in prayer for deliverance, her legs were kept moving by the deep-seated belief that nothing, not water nor bombs nor fatigue nor anything else in all creation, could separate her from the love of God in Jesus Christ. It was that belief, that trust, that kept her going all the way to an eventual joyful reunion with her husband, Daniel.

            And it is that belief, that trust, that keeps me going, and will keep you going, when all seems lost.

Is Multiculturalism a Failure? Should it be?

    

When I was a child, my parents took me to the New York World Fair, way back in ’64, where there was an enchanting exhibit called “It’s a Small World”, a celebration of the variety of peoples and cultures of the world. But multiculturalism was more of a theory that a reality way back then, with the United States largely separated from the rest of the world, and primarily white and mainline Christian, albeit with a small but significant African-American population, much of which was segregated from the white majority.

     The United States, and the world for that matter, are far different today. The States have become far more diverse in every sense: ethnically, racially, religiously, culturally, and so on. Where once the United States was often thought of as a “melting pot”, we now more and more resemble a “salad bowl”. And no longer are the religious options here limited to Christian, Jewish, and none-of-the-above; now in addition to those we also have vibrant and visible Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Muslim, and Mormon communities of faith, plus a variety of others as well.

            A rise in multiculturalism has been happening in Europe as well, with large flows of immigrants, including Muslim immigrants, coming in from eastern Europe and Africa.

            While there are many who celebrate the rise of multiculturalism, there has been, particularly recently, vocal and even violent opposition. A week ago a Norwegian citizen, identified by police as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration, exploded a bomb in central Oslo, then went on a killing rampage at a youth camp on a nearby island. He simultaneously released on the internet at 1500-page “manifesto” detailing what he saw as the dangers of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration and the need to abandon dialogue and take up armed resistance.

            It would be dangerous to believe that this man’s horrific deeds are simply the work of a mad man, divorced from a wider cultural and religious context. In recent years leaders from across Europe have trumpeted the alleged failure of multiculturalism, particularly with respect to Islam and Muslim immigrants. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, said in October 2010 that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had "utterly failed", stating: "The concept that we are now living side by side and are happy about it does not work”, and that "we feel attached to the Christian concept of mankind, that is what defines us. Anyone who doesn't accept that is in the wrong place here."  The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister David Cameron has echoed her remarks, as has Australia’s ex-Prime Minister John Howard.

            And we in this country are no strangers to anti-multiculturalism sentiment, particularly with respect to religious bigotry. Herman Cain, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, told a reporter a few months ago that he would not be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet; he expanded upon that thought in a subsequent television interview saying that his discomfort was due to the intention of some Muslims, and I quote here, “to kill us.” Moving from this absurd generalization to advocating a blatant violation of the Constitution of the United States, he supported opposition to the construction of a mosque in Tennessee on the grounds that “Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Shariah laws”, which he claims is different from “traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes.”  Never mind that Judaism and Christianity, to name just two other world religions, are also structured around religious laws, beginning with those same 10 Commandments that conservative Christians keep wanting to have posted in classrooms and court houses.

            The Chancellor of Germany claims that the Christian concept of mankind, as she puts it, requires that those who don’t share the same heritage, culture, and religion of traditional Germans don’t belong in their country. A self-proclaimed Christian in Norway believes that multiculturalism and immigration by Muslims are such dangers to Norway and such abominations that they justify mass murder. An American presidential candidate, an associate minister in his Baptist church in Atlanta, openly advocates bigotry against Muslims. So well might the world ask, so might we ask, what does our Christian faith have to say about the challenge of multiculturalism?  What does Christianity have to say to us about how we ought to approach the religiously other?

            We could, of course, start with Scripture, which brings us back to Paul in Athens. For Paul, there is no note of religious superiority, no claim that God has favored any one set of the world’s peoples, privileged them or set them above all others. Listen again to what he says:

“The God who made the world and everything in it . . . made all the nations to inhabit the whole earth; and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each of us.” (Acts 17:24-28).

The effect, theologian and preacher Brian McLaren says, is to shatter the traditional us-them mind-set:

“People of every language, culture, and religion are given a place in God’s world, and no nation is given permission to crush, annihilate, dominate or assimilate others. In so doing, Paul unifies everyone in a singular “us” – people created by God, people who have a God-given right to life and land, people who are being invited to seek God right where they are, people to whom God is already near, people who are already living and moving and having their being in God, people who are already God’s children.” (A New Kind of Christianity, p.211)

            Paul is not saying anything new here, nothing that does not follow the trajectory of Scripture beginning with Abraham and running through the prophets and right through to Jesus.  Abraham was called by God to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth.  The prophets spoke of how while God loved the Hebrews, God’s love extended to the other nations as well – I think here of Amos, through whom God said, “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Captor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). Jesus made explicit that his message was not just for the house of Israel, but for the world, reaching out to a Samaritan woman, a Roman centurion, the Greek friends of Andrew and Philip. The early church, beginning with Peter and his message that God shows no partiality, continued that trajectory affirming that we all have a place in God’s world.

            The backlash against multiculturalism is driven, of course, by fear. By anxiety that immigrants will take our jobs, by worries that the increased presence of those unlike us will threaten the ways we have always done things, by concerns that “they” might lay claim to that larger portion of the pie which we by historic accident and luck of place of birth have enjoyed.

But it should not, and must not, be fueled or justified by claims that the Christian faith supports such bigotry. Angela Merkel has it completely wrong – the “Christian concept of mankind”, as she puts it, speaks of love of neighbor, not his exclusion and eviction. Herman Cain has it completely wrong – Jesus has no room for discrimination against those whose groping for God, as Paul put it, is done in the name of Islam. And the Norwegian domestic terrorist has it completely wrong – nothing in Christianity endorses the cold-blooded mass murder of innocent men, women and children, and certainly not in pursuit of keeping a country pure from immigration by those of another faith.

            This, instead, is what our Christian faith calls us to do:

To love, not hate, our neighbor – to feed, tend, and care for God’s children, recalling the risen Christ’s command to Peter: “feed my sheep.”

To repent of our tendency to divide the world into us versus them, to think of insider versus outsider, but instead to see that we are all our God’s children, and all have a place not in our world, but in God’s world.

And finally,  to trust so securely in our faith and in Jesus’ abiding love for us that we can both humbly offer that faith to the world as a gift, and at the same time receive as a gift from others their experiences of the one God who holds us all in the palms of his hands.

Nothing but a Daylily

“A daylily,” he said. “I am nothing but a daylily.”

Daylilies (Hemerocallis) are in bloom here on the Cape, blooming in glorious, profuse mounds along Old Kings Highway, in perennial gardens overlooking the bays and beaches, in borders fronting white picket fences. The name Hemerocallis comes from the Greek words ἡμέρα (hēmera) "day" and καλός (kalos) "beautiful". The blooms generally last but 24 hours, opening with the morning sun, closing as evening fades into night, and then are gone forever.

 A man of a certain age, his observation would have been unlikely for a younger man, for those who believe they are immortal and have yet to realize that this shall not last forever. He was in good health, he said, but the fact of his approaching annual physical, at which he would be told the results of what he hoped was just routine blood work, gave him great pause.

“You see,” he said, “I have plans, things to do. Important stuff at work that simply has to get done. Children at home who will need me for years, a spouse who would have such a hard time of it were I not around. And yet – if I get bad news today, it could just all crumble away overnight.”

I waited, resisting the temptation to rush in with baseless assurances and what he would know were simply platitudes.

“But you know,” he continued, “I’m okay with that, I think. With being a daylily. Because they are so beautiful, and their time, although limited, is such a gift. And I know my worrying about that check-up is not going to change whatever the news is, and I know as well that when all is said and done, that I, and my family, and all the rest of it, are in good hands. Come what may.”

Beautiful!

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you…. Luke 12

Paddling with Divine Abandon

Even as I knew with a big part of my mind that there really was no going back, that getting out and off was not really an option, and that it was probably going to be fun, a part of me still played with the fantasy that there might be a way to set the clock back an hour and so magically get off this seemingly rather flimsy rubber raft, a raft which was rapidly propelling me and seven others towards a large bend in the Snake River Canyon. The Rafting Company’s brochure had touted their extensive safety record, and had promised that “rafting adventurers,” as we were called, would get a thorough safety orientation. My confidence in the truth of the first claim was somewhat shaken by patent falsity of the second  --  the “thorough safety orientation” turned out to be only a thirty second river-side explanation of how to put on the faded life-jackets they had handed out, together with some brief remarks that if we fell out we were to point our legs downstream so that they would crash into the boulders before our skulls. I immediately resolved to stay in the raft at all costs.

            The river bend was drawing nearer, but it was not the bend itself that concerned me – indeed, for the past 30 minutes we had been drifting lazily down the Snake, admiring the gently rising canyon walls along both banks, getting glimpses of the Grand Tetons now and again off to the west, even spotting an occasional bald eagle. Our guide had insisted that we, novice “rafting adventurers” all, practice paddling, which mostly consisted of her yelling, Captain Bligh-like, a stream of orders: “paddle left”, “paddle right”, “full power, five strokes”, “reverse all”, and so on. We were not very good at this. We improved remarkably when she told us that our ability to paddle was going to get us through the rapids – or not.

            Which was my concern. As the bend got nearer and nearer, the canyon walls drew closer and closer together, a sound, a roaring, was getting louder and louder, and the raft steadily picked up speed. A quick look at the waterproof map they had handed out showed that just around that rapidly approaching bend was something called a “Category 3” rapid – how bad could that be, I thought? Looking over my shoulder, a fellow rafter said “Oh, look, they even name the rapids – I wonder why this one was named “the Widowmaker”?”

By now the river had got my attention. As had our guide, who ordered the right side to paddle to avoid a bolder, which flashed by to starboard, then called for three strokes from the left to line us up for the approach to what looked to be something you might see on the “Discovery Channel”, or in one of those big-screen Omni-Max theaters about kayaking the Himalayans, a steep stretch of river that boiled and churned over boulders the size of cars and towards which we were headed like a runaway freight train.

At it was at that point when I seriously wondered why I hadn’t had the presence of mind to object way back at the boarding area when the guide had placed me not on the left side of the raft, not on the right side of the raft, not way back on the stern, where she was safely ensconced – but on the blunt front of the raft!

“Full power, everyone!,” yelled our guide, and the sensible, logical part of me, that wisdom and intelligence that had seen me safely through some 43 years,  said to me, “Are you nuts?! Let’s hit the reverse thrusters and get out of Dodge!” But then, as our paddles furiously dug into the tossing waves, it became clear that the way out was the way forward, that it was only by aggressively working to move the raft forward through the water that we could have steerageway, and so avoid that bus-size boulder on the left, and that back eddy on the right, but what about – oh my God, that huge hole right in front of us?!  Down, down, down  we slammed into the hole, a sucking vortex in the rapids created in the lee of a submerged ledge, the raft buckling underneath my crouched legs. The front of the raft slammed into the wall of water at the bottom of the hole, a wave poured over my head, screaming with terror and joy I furiously dug my paddle into the water and pulled for life and then – and then we were up and out and spinning in lazy circles in the calm waters beneath the rapids.

            And so maybe you can see why Mary Oliver’s little prose poem speaks to me – it resonates with my experience on the Snake River – and it calls to mind Jesus’ conversation with those recalcitrant experts of religion close to the end of his ministry.

            First, the poet calls us to stop, to listen, to pay attention. Put aside those distractions; put aside that single-minded focus you have on rowing so diligently on a course that was set for you long ago, a course you might not even know why you are on right now. “Listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and listen to me.” Mary Oliver, West Wind, Poems and Prose Poems (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1997), p. 46.

            She goes on, here is the lesson you need to learn. This is what is ultimately important in life. Not success, not money, not the adulation of others, not some secret horde of brownie points you accumulate for pleasing others. This is what is important: love. For there is life without love, but “It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.”

            This is, of course, Jesus’ message.  What is the greatest commandment, what is the Divinely-given rule which, if followed, will be both pleasing to God as well as life-promoting for the individual and the community? “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ . . . [and} ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  Love. Its that easy. Its what I have been teaching you about all these past three years, it is what I have been modeling for you as we have healed the sick, restored to the community those who were marginalized and scorned, welcomed all to our table fellowship, urged justice for the oppressed, sharing by all. Simply this: love God, love yourself, and love one another.

But Jesus’ message, and that echoed by the poet, is not as easy at it first might sound. Love, the poet reminds us, is not simply warm and fuzzy and a feel-good emotion. Love is risky, love is dangerous, love can be costly. There really is nothing safe and secure about loving. Love, Mary Oliver tells us, is not a leisurely row on a placid lily-pad-strewn pond. Love is a heart-pounding, adrenaline-inducing roller-coaster ride where there are no visible safety rails, an accelerating journey of increasing speed as a river is narrowed by steeply rising canyon walls into a foaming, churning rapids, a boulder-littered watery obstacle course where standing waves conspire to overturn your raft, where Charbydis-like whirlpools threaten to pull you under. This is what love sounds like, this is how love tastes and feels in the pit of your stomach: “When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, -- when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming….”

Like Jesus speaking to the lawyers long ago, Mary Oliver tells you again what you already know. You know the risk and cost of loving. Why else did your stomach get all tied up in knots when she first agreed to go out with you on that date? Why did you hope and fear and hope some more that he would pop the question, would ask you if you would commit yourself to him for the rest of your life? Why else is it so hard to send your child away to school the first time, and the second time, and you wonder if it ever gets easier? Why else does it pain you so when a loved one suffers, or dies? Loving comes with risk and with costs. You know that when you volunteer at a the hospital and come face to face with pain and suffering; you know that when you commit your time and energy to the young of this church, through teaching in the church school or helping as a youth leader; you know that when you put yourself on the line for the homeless or struggling parents or people of different sexual orientation or our environment. Love is more than chocolates and flowers and mutual self-absorption – love, in all its wonder and life-affirmingness, can be risky and costly. See where love took Jesus.

The Good News, of course, is that we can risk love because God loves us first, because God loves us so fiercely that no matter the category of rapids we might face in our lives of loving each other and God, we have Jesus for our guide, we have the Holy Spirit to give us strength for the task at hand, and we have a God who is both in the raft with us and who promises us that at the last we shall be together, at peace besides the still waters.

So what to do? What difference does this make in your life? Shall you, when love comes knocking on your heart, do the sensible and safe and sane thing, and turn and run for your life? Or will you, learning the lesson we on that raft on the Snake River learned, for love and for life paddle with divine abandon?

Listen to me.

“When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, -- when you hear that unmistakable pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life toward it.”

Transitions -- Where LIFE is!

     The intertidal zone is the area where land and sea meetThis habitat is covered with water at high tide, and exposed to air at low tide. The land in this zone can be rocky, sandy or covered in mudflats. It is a perilous place for organisms to make a go of it – at times underwater, and times drying out, continually buffeted by wave and wind, ever-changing salinity, exposed to predators from above and below. And yet it is a place of amazing biological diversity and adaptation, where life if abundant and varied.

     Transitional zones are where life happens. The continental shelf has far more species, a much more vibrant habitat, than the deep ocean. The boundaries where different types of habitat meet are the places where life abounds, and where change happens.

     In the same way, it is in life’s transitional times that, for all the pain and struggle, life, real life, abounds. What we all want, we say, is life to just settle down, to be stable, predictable, routine. But then something happens, and everything changes --- the job is lost, the cancer diagnosis arrives, the relationship falls through.  And there is struggle, there is pain, at times it even seems like life itself is at stake.  And who would ever want to be in those shoes? And yet…

     And yet, the one facing cancer can actually say – yes, it does happen! – that they are thankful for what they are facing, because it is woken them up to appreciate the gift and joy of this day, this one special day, this gorgeous hydrangea which they really appreciated before, this sunrise that they actually stopped to watch, this love which they never fully appreciated before. That they have never felt so alive.

     And yet, the one grieving over the lost job at times wakes up and sees the blessing in it, the opportunity to start over and do what they had always wanted to do, or the chance to re-evaluate their priorities and what all that “stuff” really means to them.

     Fully one-half of the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Mark is concerned with only one week – the last week -- of the life of a man who we suspect lived maybe some thirty years.  It is a week of suffering, trial, and death – but it is also a week of life lived to the hilt, and beyond.

      Transitional times are hard. But they can also be times of life, and life abundant.

Slavery, Its Not Just History

            This weekend we celebrate the gift of human freedom as we have known it here in this country.  The Biblical account (Gen. 24) of how Abraham arranged for Rebekah, his kinsman Laban’s sister, to marry Isaac reminds us that many people, women especially, have not always enjoyed the freedoms we cherish.

            Theft of the gift of human freedom takes many forms, and human trafficking, slavery, is perhaps the most pernicious. Human trafficking is alive and thriving, and yet only recently has garnered even a modicum of publicity. It has been identified as the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. It takes the form of bonded labor, otherwise known as debt labor, where victims are required to labor to repay amounts owed, but find that the interest on the loan rises faster than they can ever hope to pay it off. It takes the form of  forced labor, where workers are imprisoned and forced to work under threat of physical coercion. And it takes the form of sexual exploitation.

This year, UNICEF estimates that 1.8 million children will be sold into the commercial sex trade. India is perhaps the world’s sex slave capital, and we know of Thailand’s and Cambodia’s reputations as havens for the commercial sex slave trade. But human trafficking thrives here in our own country as well, at times taking the forms of imported Russian and Mexican girls that are kept locked up in brothels, but more often in the form of the mini-skirted runaway on the streets of our cities.

Nicholas Kristoff writes, “Typically, she’s a 13-year-old girl of color from a troubled home who is on bad terms with her mother. Then her mom’s boyfriend hits on her, and she runs away to the bus station, where the only person on the lookout for girls like her is a pimp. He buys her dinner, gives her a place to stay and next thing she knows she’s earning him $1,500 a day.” (NY Times, 4/24/11).  And we respond by treating her as a criminal, not a victim, prosecuting her while the pimp goes free, the customers go unnamed.

So what to do, here in the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave? Here today, some 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and 235 years after the Declaration of Independence, we could do worse than listen, really listen, to the voice of Rebekah, calling to us, asking only for freedom for those deprived of this basic human right.

            Friends, here in our time, and at our doorstep, Rebekah calls. Will we listen?