"Transitional Zones (Lent!) are Where Life Happens"

The intertidal zone is the area where land and sea meet. This 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.

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. Maybe this is part of what we should be about in the season of Lent, a season that started yesterday, Ash Wednesday -- living life to the hilt, growing into our full humanity, using the love we have been blessed with to love ourselves, our neighbors near and far, our God....

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

Spinning My Wheels

            Lately I have been spending a good deal of time spinning my wheels.

            Literally. Perhaps it is because I have been sensing the approach of middle age (pause here for a chuckle at my expense), or because I have been taking more seriously the groans emitted from the bathroom scale of late, or because I have finally been convinced that it is a good thing to do, but, whatever the reason, I have started up a new exercise regime. And with the weather being so brutal out of doors, and thus keeping me off my bike, I have taken to the indoor world of “spinning.”

            “Spinning” has nothing to do with Sleeping Beauty and spindles – spinning is step aerobics on wheels, it is a bunch of folk chained to stationary bikes in an overheated room for an hour, pedaling away while a perky trainer with thighs like Lance Armstrong and a voice of a Marine yells out instructions like “Pedal harder!” and “60 seconds in the standing position”, and, “Move it, you maggots!” (well, maybe not that one).  We don’t get anywhere, being on a stationary bike….

            I sometimes think that’s why God gave us Easter. In a recent comic in the Globe, there is a picture of an angel standing on a cloud looking down at earth, with the caption being, “The world and the way it would be if the master of the universe was my mother”. And then there is a voice coming from the cloud saying, “Don’t make me come down there!”

            Well, that is actually what did happen. Because we were so busy spinning our wheels, trying like the dickens to get to God but for all our efforts getting only in our way, God did come down there. And while that made a lot us mad enough to run God out of town and hang God on a tree, God was not done, and God was not going to let human sin and death stand in the way.

           

            Hence, Easter, hence, resurrection, hence a chance to get off the stationary bike and saddle up a tandem where we are all in backseats and Jesus is in the driver’s seat and together there is no mountain we cannot climb, no task we cannot take on, no “thing” to fear.

            Onward, or, as they say in the Tour de France, “Allez!”

Easter and A Ministry of Hugging

     We were hot – working indoors and without air-conditioning on a warm spring day in New Orleans will do that to you. We were covered with dust – sanding dried plaster overhead for hours on end will do that to you. We had plaster caked on hands and shirts and shorts – being novices at spreading mud, a form of plaster, on wallboard will do that to you. So when a nicely dressed African-American woman pulled up in her car and with a “yoo-hoo y’all” summoned us out of doors, we were happy to take the break.

            She was there, she explained to us with a big smile and a twinkle in her eye, to thank us – some 15 members of this church and two other congregations here on the Cape – for coming down to New Orleans and spending a week helping renovate homes devastated by Hurricane Katrina over five years ago. She told us her name was Elizabeth, and that she worked for the St. Bernard’s Project – the organization for which we were volunteering – as their official hugger. And her job, she told us, was to go to all the volunteer work sites every week, thank all the volunteers, and give them each a big hug.

            Of course we asked Elizabeth how the hurricane had affected her – had she evacuated, or had she been there when the levees broke and water often fourteen feet deep had flooded the area? She was fortunate, she told us – had not been in New Orleans at the time, and unlike many people, she had flood insurance, and so was back in a rebuilt home in about 14 months.  But then, two years ago, someone broke into her home, and right in front of her eyes killed her 18 year-old daughter, and then shot her in the face.

            After she recovered physically, Elizabeth went to St. Bernard’s Project and asked if she could have access to the mental health services they provided for those traumatized by the flood experience.  And although her trauma was not directly related to the flooding, they took her in, and eventually she recovered from the almost unimaginable psychic injuries that she had sustained.

            And when she had healed, Elizabeth realized that she had a choice. She had every right in the world to be bitter, angry, despairing, full of hatred at a world and a God which could let such terrible things happen; she could have turned away from this cruel world and in on herself.  Like those fearful, angry, shame-filled, despairing disciples long ago, she could continue to live, if you can call such an existence living, in a Good Friday world.

            That is, after all, where those followers of Jesus were living on the evening of that first Easter – in a Good Friday world. Cowering in fear behind closed doors. Fearful of the authorities, the same ones that had arrested their leader, Jesus, had tortured him cruelly, had nailed him to a cross in the worst form of capital punishment the world knew.

But also fearful that Jesus himself had come back, that as Mary Magdalene had told them that morning, he had been raised from the dead. Given that they had abandoned him in his hour of need, had cut and run when the authorities had moved in, had not even shown up at the foot of the cross to be with him in his time of direst need, they had no reason to expect that a reunion, unlikely as though it might be, would be a happy one.

            And then suddenly, mysteriously, Jesus is among them. Here is the amazing thing: Jesus comes back, not to the perfect, not to those with straight As or 100% Sunday School attendance, but to this band of pitiful, despairing, fearful failures. And what does he say to them? “Peace be with you.” In other words, “Do not be afraid. I forgive you.”  And perhaps because they can’t believe their ears, he says it to them once again: “Peace be with you.”

            But Jesus does not leave it there, with allowing his followers to feel relieved that they have been forgiven. Jesus breathes on them, and gives them the gift of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of power, and a mission – to carry on the mission which had been entrusted to him by his father: to love, to heal, to reconcile, to seek justice, to promote peace. To live in the light of Easter.

            With all that had happened to Elizabeth, who could blame her for choosing to pitch her tent in a Good Friday world. But she chose Easter. She chose to live with the unfathomable mystery of why bad things happen to us, why hurricanes rage and violence invades homes, and she chose to embrace the call she had – the call each of us have – to partner with our Creator is bringing new life to this world.

Like Mary Magdalene, who because of her tears cannot see clearly until Jesus calls her name, Elizabeth heard the call to rise to new life, and everything changed.

Just as those wounded and fearful disciples had God’s restoring Spirit pouring into them, so too Elizabeth was filled with the empowering Spirit.

Just as the newly en-Spirited church was given Jesus’ mission, so too Elizabeth received her mission. And so this is her calling, to take that gratitude that just overflows out of her, and to share it with others, and to go around giving the world hugs every day.

            Easter is about God giving us what we need: Jesus risen from the dead, offering us forgiveness, healing, the breath of a new start, and a new calling.  It is a gift of new life, a gift graciously taken up by those early disciples, a gift gratefully taken up by Elizabeth in our time, a gift there for the taking by you.

            So maybe you, like Mary Magdalene in the garden, like Elizabeth knocking on the door at St. Bernard’s Project, come this morning with tears in your eyes, grief having its way with you.

            Or maybe you, like the disciples huddled in that upper room, come this morning with regret, with shame, cynical, scarred.

            Or maybe you, like those in Jerusalem who had somehow missed it all, come distracted, worrying about the kids and whether they are making too much noise, or thinking about how you might best navigate that difficult family gathering after.

            Or maybe you, like one of those followers of Jesus, the one we call Doubting Thomas, come with questions, doubts, uncertainty about how these matters of the spirit fit into your rational and scientific world-view.

            It doesn’t matter. The gift of Easter is there for you, a new world of forgiveness and healing and comfort and new purpose, all wrapped up and ready for you today, or whenever you are ready to accept it. 

And so I say to you, with all my heart and soul, Happy Easter! Amen.

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That Great Cloud of Witnesses

"Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses...." Hebrews 12:1

Their pictures decorate my study -- my wife, my children, those closest to my heart, all smiling out of their frames at me, not just reminders of my many blessings, but the embodiment of them. But there are others as well -- there are Roderick and Jane Thorpe, the rector of a small village in northern England and his spouse, and the Rev. I Rajkumar, pastor of a village church in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. And there is a picture of a sari-clad woman who lives in the fishing village Raj serves, proudly sitting in her tiny, two-room, open-air hut, excited that this visitor from an unimaginable distance has asked to take her picture.

Surely each picture bears witness to the miracle of love graciously bestowed upon this one person, upon me.

And there is one more, a picture of a young man, silhouetted by dawn's early light, carrying a cross over a dune to an Easter Sunday sunrise service. Rusty, Aune's only son, all of 18 years old.

Who took his own life a short time thereafter.

It was all of fifteen years later that Aune told me the story behind the photograph, and in thanksgiving for the ability to finally forgive -- to forgive Rusty, to forgive herself, to forgive this cruel world, to forgive even God -- she gave it to me.

November 1 the church celebrates All Saints Day, a day dedicated to remembering not just the giants of the faith, the ones who get official names like St. Mark and St. Theresa, but also all the saints, in all their varied degrees of faith and struggles to make their way.

On Monday, I hope to remember many of them, and especially Aune, and Rusty.

Who will you remember?