Where Do You Encounter God in Church?

Yes, I am genuinely interested in answers to this question.  (And don't worry - the next one will ask about outside of church.)  (And ~ perhaps this is a worry ~  I'm focused on churches here, and not on houses of worship across the board.)

I've spending a lot of time these days thinking and daydreaming and wondering about what church is.  There is, for example, church as my congregation remembers it: a 1950s full house, the multi-generational Sunday focus of everyone in town.  (It's a very small town.)  There's our church as it is right now: maybe one-third full on a Sunday, with most folks well over sixty.  There's our church as it might be ~ but I have no idea what that is.

For most of my congregants, the word church immediately conjures up a companion word: community.   And one of the things that I've been musing about is that, for me, it doesn't.  Not at first, anyway.

An odd acknowledgment for a pastor to make?  But I didn't grow up in a church community.  I found my way into the rich life of the church via theology, and architecture, and music, and communion, and a deep sense of mystery.  I eventually became part of a wonderfully energetic mainline church community, and then another, and now I lead a third, a group of loving, capable, and committed people who long for their church to blossom again.

But what will that entail, exactly?

Longtime readers may recall that after Josh died, I started attending church in a Catholic parish ~ where no one spoke to me, at all, ever.  It's a huge, vibrant parish, with lots going on, but I have no idea how one would become a participant.  I was looking for solitude, for God in music and ritual and prayer, and so the experience worked well for me, but had I been looking for God in community, I would have been lost.

And lest I be accused of singling out Catholics, let me add that when my husband and I, in our late twenties, first joined a large United Methodist church, it was at least a year before we had a conversation with anyone other than the senior pastor.  I had no idea what a church community was, so I was not dissatisifed but, looking back, I find it rather odd that no one at all approached us.  We were eager to become involved with the mission and justice activities of the church, but had no idea how to go about doing so.  And in the meantime, the ethereal music and the challenging preaching were enough.

At any rate, I'm wondering.  I think that if I were in a position to look for a new church for myself,  I would slip into a worship service and watch for mystery made manifest.  It would probably be some weeks before I paid attention to the bulletin and its lists of activities and groups.  But I have the feeling that I'm in a distinct minority.

What about you?  If you were to walk into a new church next Sunday, what would convince you that God was present there?

Image: Prince Edward Island, August 2005

Without Notes (Preaching)

When I took the required basic class in homiletics (preaching) at seminary, I ended up with a professor whose highest priority was that we memorize our sermons.  So much to talk about in homiletics:  choice of text, exegetical work, theology, congregational demographics and circumstances, delivery . . .  and what we talked about, endlessly, were techniques for memorization.  

For me, a person whose ability to memorize anything was almost completely depleted decades ago, that approach meant that I wrote my two assigned sermons as fast as I could so that I would have as many days as possible available in which to memorize them, and that my delivery was uninspired at best, heartily sick and tired as I was of what I'd come up with.

Unlike most of my classmates, I completed my field ed assignment during my third year of seminary, after my homiletics class was behind me.   My supervising pastor has a doctorate in homiletics and, while our styles differ considerably, he offered me some excellent advice.  He was generous in his compliments about my writing, but he said that it was more appropriate to the page or computer screen, and sought to convince me that a sermon is an oral rather than a written event.

I knew that he was right, but I didn't know what to do about it.  His style is energetic and exhortative; mine is quieter and more reflective.  How would I turn the latter into an occasion of oral communication?

I can't say that I've made much effort in that direction, but it's certainly come to my attention that many of my favorite preachers preach without notes ~ including at least one person who always writes out his more academic presentations and more or less reads those.

And, very gradually, I've found myself less and less entranced by my own sermon writing, and more interested in connecting on a deeper level of communication with the congregation.

The final nudge came when I talked to someone at the Presbyterian church my brother and his wife have been attending. It's grown dramatically in the past few years, and I asked the lady in question what she thought the reasons were.

 "Oh, it's Pastor K," she exclaimed.  "He's so charismatic, and he remembers every single name."  Well, that leaves me out, on both counts, I thought.  "And he preaches without notes; it's as if he's having a conversation with you," she said.  Hmmmmm, I thought.

So I'm giving it a try. It turns out to have nothing much to do with memorization, at which I am very bad, and quite a bit to do with conceptualization, at which I'm more or less ok.  

I used to research and think quite a bit about my weekly sermon in big chunks of time until Thursday, at which point I would sit down and write most, if not all, of it down.  I might tweak it a bit over the next couple of days, but on the whole it was a finished product by Thursday afternoon.  And while I certainly didn't read it from the pulpit, I placed a lot of reliance on that manuscript placed securely in front of me.

Now I'm trying a new approach.  I start to write in my head as soon as I start to read.  All week long, I re-think, re-read, re-study, re-illustrate, and re-organize in my head.  On Thursday I write an abbreviated version, and then I proceed with what's going on in  my head and heart.

There's nothing much to memorize, because it's more of an internal dialogue with myself, and I'm keeping track of the conversation all week.  I don't need any cool techniques oriented to brain-functioning; I'm using the same skills we all use to remember our conversations and ruminations in general.

Now . . .  I've only tried this for real a couple of times, and chickened out a couple of times more.  But the response is so gratifying that I'm feeling motivated to keep working at it.  I think that if I counted the hours, this approach probably takes a lot more time ~ but when Sunday rolls around, I feel as if I am immersed in an ongoing experience of the text rather than producing a frozen-in-time explication.  I have to let go of my attachment to the perfectly worded phrase wrung from hours of consideration  and revision.  But I feel much more free to make alterations as I go, whether based on things that have come up in the congregation during the week, or on thoughts that occur to me as I'm speaking.  And . . . when I speak without notes, I'm able to leave the pulpit behind!

I used to wonder what pastors meant when they referred to the Spirit at work in their preaching.  I'm thinking that this new engagement with the spoken word might be what they're talking about.

Check back in six months, and we'll see how it's going.      

Image: None of the above means that I am immune to the allure of a pulpit in the sky.  This one is from Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg.

A Journey Begins with a Name (Sermon)

For the second time in the past few weeks, I'm preaching tomorrow without notes.  The following constitutes the bits and pieces I've written down ~ the illustrations that flesh it out are mostly in my head.  I hope.

------------------------------------------

One verse in the Gospel of Luke tells us:  After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

Where did your name or names come from?  I have a project for you: I want you to get together with one or two other people and tell one another:  What are the stories of your names?  Where did they come from?  What do they mean?  Have they turned out to reflect the life you’ve lived?

**********

Anyone want to share a story or two with the rest of us?

**********

Names are important, aren’t they?  The process of naming is important.  Young parents-to-be pour over baby names books – the top names for 2011 were Sophie and Aiden.  (Comment)  The fashions change – my own kids grew up in a world of Matthews and Emilys.  In my generation, the names Brenda and Tom were popular.  Older generations include Harolds and Ednas.

Names represent, first of all, the love parents lavish upon their children.  Time – research – family histories – even family arguments.  

God told Joseph what Jesus’ name would be in a dream. 

They represent a child’s heritage – who and what matters to the parents.  Favorite relatives.  Best friends.  Characters in books.  (My stepsister Thea, named for a character in a Willa Cather novel.) Joshua: God saves.  Jesus's heritage as a Jew. 

Identity – who claims you, before you know who you are, or even that you are.

Jesus – Son of God, belonged to all. 

We like to imagine that we choose who we are.  We make a lot of important decisions in furtherance of our claim to self-identiy: who we marry, what work we undertake.  But long before we are able to make such decisions, God is at work, naming and claiming us.  In baptism: Our real last name = child of God.  Beloved child of God.

When Jesus is brought to the temple, Anna and Simeon recognize him.  They know he is the long-awaited Messiah.  They know that we can all claim him as our own. 

Something to live into. 

At the end of his life, Jesus lives into his name: He saves us all, by dying and rising again.  

How do you live into your name, the one your family gave you? 

How do you live into the name God gives you: God’s child?  God’s beloved child? 

Jesus’ journey, the one that ends not with death but with life, begins with a name.  The name the angel whispers to his earthly father in a dream.  The name he is called during the ceremony of circumcision.  The name that represents love,  that represents all that is important, that identifies him and that offers him something into which to live.  Love.  God saves.  Because God loves. 

What about your name?  As your journey begins anew this year, do you know that God claimed you as God’s own beloved son or daughter?  Do you know that God has invited you into the great journey toward ultimate love?  

Remember your name – your beginning.  Remember that it marks you as a pilgrim on a journey. 

Your name, God’s beloved, has been yours since you were born.  It’s the name which God whispers in your ear: You are my beloved. It’s the name into which you live, as you go forth to share the love of God.  Amen.

An Altar in the World (Book Review)

When I read books ~ or articles, or blogs, for that matter ~ these days, I am looking, with some urgency, for answers to questions about how to live.  The cumulative effect of the past three and one-half years is that I don't live at all the way I used to.  Well, any one of the things that have happened would have accomplished that result, but all together?

The suicidal death of a child, ordination, and breast cancer.  Seriously?  Am I a woman who longs for a child she will not see again, at least not in this life; or a woman who celebrates the Eucharist; or a woman whose body has been rather significantly deformed as a consequence of cancer?  Oh, wait ~ I'm all three.

No wonder I read with an eye toward how to live.  I'm looking for ways of leaning into that word I chose for the year: Patience.  And its friends:  Sight.  Hearing.  Waiting.  Watching.  Absorbing.

I like Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World because she offers some clues, without insisting that her clues are necessarily yours.  I've heard her preach during the summer "season" at the Chautauqua Institution countless times and so, as I read, I hear the gentle southern lilt of her voice flowing out of the Ampitheatre, over the trees and across the lake, under the blue summer sky and across the brick walk.  She sounds like the friend who might have an idea, a non-obtrusive idea, about those how-to-live questions, as you walk and talk across the Chautauqua grounds early in the morning en route to yoga class, or late at night after the orchestra concert.

If you're not familiar with the book already, it consists of a series of short chapters focusing on a number of spiritual practices.  But these are not spiritual practices as you may have come to know them if you are a Christian churchgoer.  These are not practices like "reading the Bible" or "fasting."  These are practices like "Walking on the Earth" or "Feeling Pain" or "Carrying Water."

I should probably admit that I had a practical reason for re-reading this book over the past couple of weeks: I am planning a Lenten sermon series on spiritual practices and I want to step away from the traditional ones on at least a couple of Sundays.  I haven't been feeling terribly original lately, though, and I thought that BBT might give me a jump start.

But in the end, it all comes back to:  How shall I then live?  A couple of suggestions:

"This is how faith looks sometimes:a blunt refusal to stop speaking into the divine silence" (from "The Practice of Feeling Pain"), and

"My hope is that if I can practice saying thank you now, when I still approve of most of what is happening to me, then perhaps that practice will have become habit by the time I do not like much of anything that is happening to me" (from "The Practice of Being Present to God"),

I think that if you are trying to revive or renew your spiritual life, it might be possible to travel a good long way by glancing at a sentence of two in this book each evening and letting those words become your prayer for the next day.

Time, Time, Time (Breast Cancer Recovery)

I've been a morning person for a long time, for my entire adult life, with the exception of the first many months after Josh died.

One of my frequent quandaries has been how to spend the best few hours of the day, those beginning at about 6:00 a.m.  If I have something major to accomplish, that's been the time for me to do it.  A lot of my writing and planning have taken place in those early hours, when my concentration and efficiency have been at their peak.  I can probably accomplish three or four times as much during the morning hours as I can during their evening counterpart, and so  I've often completed a sermon or a paper by 9:00, and only then gotten up for a shower and breakfast.

The dilemma has been that the early morning hours are also my favorite time to walk.  Gym or outdoors; it doesn't matter.  It would make more sense for me to walk late in the afternoon, to take a break and clear my head, but I've loved the sense of clarity and energy that those first hours bring.

Notice that I've been using the perfect present tense.  I have completed . . . I have loved . . .

There's been a change.

I know it's been only seven weeks, but that surgery has depleted me of my morning energy.  I am exhausted until 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 ~ a shadow of my previous self finally appears sometime late in the morning.  Those days on which I've been required to get up and get going much earlier have been a major challenge, as have my efforts to conceal my weariness from others. And, as a consequence of my late mornings, I am often up very late at night and into the next morning, which furthers the cycle.

I don't think it's entirely a matter of physical energy.  When I wake up these days, I am often discouraged before I am anything else.   Uncomfortable, knowing that the simple tasks of showering and dressing are going to demand a noticeable amount of energy, having to exert some imagination to dress ~ day after day after day.  It's hardly anything at all ~ nothing like having to endure chemo, or the loss of a child ~ but it takes its toll.

I dream of waking before sunrise, tossing on a t-shirt, and going for a long walk.  Still at least three months away.

In the meantime, as I write this, I realize that I need to begin to build a late afternoon walk into my schedule and start working up to my old three miles.  If physical pain or a snowstorm causes me to miss a day or two, so be it.  I know perfectly well that I need to expend some energy in order to develop some more of it.

I think that herein lies some advice I could have stood to hear before my surgery: To know that even as my physical healing continues, my life has been altered in ways that discourage and depress me, and that I need to plan ways of circumventing my inclination to lie down and wallow in self-pity.

Suicide Prevention Activism

I am so not an activist. Other than a few walks for peace and hunger in my high school years, I've been more focused on small arenas of activity: family, friends, church, the kids' schools.  

And yet, here I am: a volunteer advocate for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  It's not a big deal, and I have no illusions of grandeur.  Mostly it means that I introduce myself to our representatives and senators, which I've done via email, and keep in touch with them when issues warrant.  There's a local chapter forming, and perhaps I'll become more involved with education and public speaking as opportunities arise.  We'll see.

As I've already said, I haven't been much interested in suicide prevention activism.  I've seen suicide primarily as a personal and family tragedy and, even if there were more to it, I haven't had the inclination to do more about it than write in my little blogs, and make the occasional presentation on care for grieving parents.

But my breast cancer experience has changed my attitude.  I've experienced firsthand what the publicity and funding efforts of the past few decades have accomplished.   When I was a girl, furtively reading my grandmother's women's magazines, I understood that breast cancer was a matter of such embarrassment, and the usual surgical treatment so extreme, that many women ignored their symptoms until their survival was unlikely.  And if they were treated and survived, they seldom discussed what had been done to their bodies.

How times have changed!  The world as we know it in October is PINK.  No secrecy, no hesitation.  We are far from a cure, but the research has come a long way, and treatment is dramatically different than it was 30 years ago.  

And then there's suicide prevention.  Little money, little publicity.  Little knowledge. Great stigma. 

My great-grandmother Robin Anderson, the woman for whom both I and my son Josh were named ~ Josh's middle name is Anderson ~  suffered from bipolar disorder, and attempted suicide at least once.  (I learned the latter piece of information only recently, although it was no surprise to me.)  Her daughter and only child, the beloved grandmother who played a huge role in my life until her death a few years ago, almost never mentioned her mother, and never described her challenges except to refer on occasion to her frequent hospitalizations at Johns Hopkins, where she was cared for by a college classmate of my grandmother's who had become a psychiatrist.

I am certain that Josh suffered from what was, to us, completely disguised severe clinical depression.  And it killed him.

What if my grandmother had been more open?  What if bipolar disorder had been discussed as freely then as breast cancer is today?  What if mental health  self-examination cards had been available to hang in the shower?  What if colleges and clinics offered routine mental health screenings?

Would we have known what we were seeing?  Would Josh have known what he was experiencing?  Would someone among us all have known to seek help?  Would there have been effective help?

Those left behind after a suicide face a lifetime of "What ifs?"

Maybe we could eliminate some of them.

I don't think that breast cancer activism has much need of me.  And frankly, breast cancer has had little effect on our family, relatively speaking.  But suicide has left a deep and terrible gash across our lives, one that will persist and will affect my grandchildren and then their children. 

Maybe I could do my small part to stop it from doing worse.

New Year's Sermon: A Time to Seek

I don’t know whether any of you have seen the film The Way?—it’s mostly appeared in small theatres, but it was directed and produced by Martin Sheen’s son, Emilio Estavez and Martin Sheen has the starring role.  He plays a man named Tom – a successful doctor who works hard and plays a lot of golf.  He’s frustrated by his adult son’s lack of direction, and irritated by his son’s decision to take off for Spain to hike the Camino de Santiago.

The Camino de Santiago, which translates to The Road of St. James, is a route of about 500 miles that winds across Spain and ends at the Cathedral of St. James, which marks the place where, according to legend, the bones of St. James the Apostle rests.  In medieval times, the idea of a pilgrimage, a long journey toward a sacred spot, such as the final resting place of a saint, was a popular one, and it’s a concept that’s been resurrected in the last few decades.  A  pilgrim’s journey is not that of a tourist – it’s not about seeing the sights, about observing from a distance – it’s about some kind of personal engagement with the matter at hand.  The son in the movie is on a journey to figure out who he is and what he wants from life – a not uncommon situation for many of the thousands of pilgrims who walk the Camino these days.

Martin Sheen’s character Tom is on the golf course when he receives the telephone call with the voice on the other end telling him that his son has died, killed in a freak storm on his first day on the Camino.  Tom decides to cross the ocean to retrieve his son’s remains and then decides to walk the Camino himself, making the journey in memory of his son and scattering his son’s ashes along the way.  The movie tells the story of that pilgrimage – of the people Tom befriends, and who befriend him; of the deeper understanding of his son that comes to him as he travels; and, in a very subtle way, of his reconnection with his long lost sense of faith.  

It’s an age-old story, this narrative of journey, of pilgrimage.  The ancients of all cultures tell stories of pilgrimage in which someone seeks a sense of self, a knowledge of the world, an encounter with God.  When the wisdom writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that “there is a time to seek,” he is affirming the persistent longing found within human beings, the longing for something beyond ourselves, and the persistent determination of human beings to get up and get going in search of that ineffable something.  

Certainly we see it today – in the books of all kinds that line the “spirituality” shelves in the few big bookstores that are left, in the television talk show interviews with gurus of various kinds; people are out there, or in their living rooms on their computers – seeking.  As we go back through the centuries, we find the pilgrimage paths of old, many of them newly popular.  Not just the Camino de Santiago, but the roads to the great cathedrals in France.   In high school or college, you may have studied The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1200s and based on a then-common pilgrimage made to Canterbury Cathedral in England, where a great saint praying at the altar was murdered by a king.  The Holy Land itself – certainly a desirable destination for Christian travelers for nearly 2,000 years – and the missionary routes of the Apostle Paul.  What are all these people seeking?

Go back a little further and we come to St. Augustine, the great church father and bishop of the 4^th and 5^th centuries whose writings influence all that we believe.  Augustine is famous for having said, in addressing God, that “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”  We seek, don’t we, an encounter with the Living God?  We are made for that encounter; we are made by God to seek God’s presence.  Today, people often speak of a “God-shaped hole” in the human heart, another way in which many writers have reflected upon Augustine’s words.  

Go back even a little further, and we come to the magi.  “There is a time to seek,” and the magi were seekers.  There are a number of hypotheses about who they were.  Maybe they were Persian priests – which means, in present day geographical terms that they came from Iran.  Maybe they were Babylonian astrologers – which puts their origin in today’s Iraq. There is a Chinese belief that at least one of them was Chinese.  It is becoming something of a tradition today to portray them as coming from different continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. And a scholar has recently suggested that at least one of them may have been a woman – not because he’s trying to be politically correct, but because there are indeed other Scriptural references to feminine travelers and wisdom figures.

Whoever they were, the beloved figures of the three magi have come to personify the concept of seeker for us.   Pilgrims on a journey.   And not just pilgrims who set out because they had some kind of idea that they should take a trip – but pilgrims who were called.  Pilgrims who were responding to God’s initiation of relationship.  Pilgrims made restless by God – just as Augustine tells us, people whose hearts are restless until they rest in God – in their case made restless by a star. And they were not just any old pilgrims – but pilgrims who represent the world far beyond Bethlehem.  We may not know exactly who they were, but the story is clear that they were not Jews, they were not Romans, they were not locals.  God calls every kind of person; God reaches out to people the world over – including magi from afar.   

The journey of the magi, those who knew and responded to their time to seek, is something of a prototype for pilgrimage.  Theirs is not an easy tourist passage – just as the Baby Jesus’s parents found no Holiday Inn in which to stay, the magi found no resorts along the way.  All you have to do is take a look at a map to know that a winter’s journey across the Near East 2,000 years ago with nothing but a small company of people and a few camels would have been no picnic.  But the terrain was not the only challenge.

First, those travelers encountered turbulence – turbulence in the form of King Herod.  Herod was a king of Judea, the land of the Jews, put and kept in place by the Roman Empire.  He did not count as good news the word that a king had been born to the Jews – such a king, were he destined to be a political ruler, would have threatened Herod’s role, his power – his very life.  And so he creates a situation, cross-examining the travelers about the child they seek, lying to them about his own intentions, and trying to make them his allies in his quest to retain his power.  “Come back and tell me where this baby is,” he demands of them.  Suddenly their journey contains a new element of danger. And the reality is that when we set off on a journey, on a pilgrimage, things don’t always go as planned.  And sometimes our hopes, our longings, are threatened.  A pilgrimage is not a Caribbean cruise; it’s not all lolling by the pool and dining on exotic foods.  As Tom discovers in the movie The Way and as we discover in our own lives, the journey can be rough going. 

Secondly, though, that first bit of turbulence at least temporarily behind them, the magi encounter delight.  The Bible tells us that they were “overwhelmed with joy” at the sight of the newborn king.  Think about how surprising their response is!  They are usually depicted as kings themselves – kings with fine robes and dazzling jewels – even having traversed the desert, they are always portrayed as wealthy royalty.  And they were going to visit a newborn ruler – don’t you think that they were expecting something a bit different from a simple manger and simple, peasant parents?  At least a little palace and some ladies-and-knights-in-waiting, don’t you think?  And yet they were filled with – even overwhelmed by – joy and delight.  A pilgrimage should bring us into such moments.  No matter the difficulty of the journey, or the animosity of some of those encountered – a pilgrimage offers insight into the sacred, into an understanding of God’s kingdom, a kingdom far more expansive and loving than any earthly one. 

 

And finally, the magi return “home by another road.”  Even the end of their journey is unexpected: they are warned to avoid Herod, and so instead of retracing their steps, they find a new route.  Isn’t that the likely outcome of a true pilgrimage?  We are changed by the journey, and can no longer do things exactly as we did them before.  In The Way, Tom, the father, is changed by his 500-mile walk, by his experience of God through his companions, through the lands and villages he wanders, through his encounter with his son and his son’s dreams and questions.  We don’t see the consequences of his pilgrimage, but we can be fairly certain that he does not return to life as it was.  The magi are changed – by their encounter with the hostile Herod, by their experience of God through the infant Jesus, by their own dreams.  And while we don’t  know the specifics of their return, that their story has come down to us at all is a hint of the first big change in thinking and in hope: that Jesus, the long-awaited messiah, was for everyone.  For all people.  For people from far as well as near.  For wealthy as well as for poor.  For those in power and those with none at all.

How are we changed?  

When God beckons, when God invites us on pilgrimage, when God seeks relationship with us –

Do we in turn seek God?

Do we encounter turbulence?  Most likely.

Do we encounter delight? Overwhelming joy in the God who has come to rescue us? Most certainly!

A new road?  A new journey?  An invitation to share?  Surely we find those things as well.

This year, 2012, my hope is to weave the underlying themes of journey and pilgrimage throughout my Sunday sermons.  It’s a powerful metaphor, the idea of a journey.  It underlies the whole history of the people of God.  It’s a way of looking at all kinds of things:  who we are, what we learn from, what we give, what traditions we follow – and who our most important companion is.  So you may hear these words – journey, pilgrimage, traveler – from time to time, or even somewhat frequently.  If our hearts are restless until they rest in God, if God has created a space in us which only God can fill – then we are on a journey.  It doesn’t require a 2000-year-old 500 mile road in Spain; it simply requires a heart which God can enter.  It doesn’t require a star, or a literal journey at all.  What it requires is what we have already been given: a God who has created a time to seek.

Amen.


Image: Martin Sheen in The Way.