Being Good

The LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone;                                                                  I will make him a helper as his partner."   Genesis 2:18

                                        Study of Hands                       V. Van Gogh                       

During the creation of the world, God paused at the end of each day to assess what had been created and deemed it “good.”  What a shock, then, to hear God deeming man alone as “not good.”  Forget all the Adam and Eve jokes you’ve heard for a minute and consider this one line, for it epitomizes the wisdom of all biblical teachings.  This one short line in the very beginning of Genesis epitomizes, for me, the essence of the entire Bible. 

It is not good for us to be alone.  We need each other. 

This is far broader than a simple statement about marriage or coupling; it is an instruction for life. Ours is not a faith that is focused on our own spiritual growth; ours is a community that nurtures our growth. We need others – helpers – to accompany and assist us as we grow into the full stature of Christ.  

Two questions:  

Who are your helpers?

Who might be in need of your help? 

Complaining

The Israelites wept again, and said, "If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at."   Numbers 11:4-6

                                       Fruit                 Igor Bragin, 2010

The Israelites are at it again. They cried out to God in their misery, and God rescued them from slavery in Egypt. They cried out to Yahweh in their hunger, and God sent them manna. And in this week’s passage, they cry out because they are tired of manna, remembering only the lavish produce in Egypt. They had forgotten the beatings and the ridiculous quotas levied upon them by their Egyptian masters.

How is it with us? Is the grass always greener somewhere else? Do we fall into self-pity and forget the provisions God has bequeathed to us? The readings next week tell of a whiny, complaining people. They highlight humanity’s propensity for finding fault, for forgetting the beauty of the present moment.

This week, let us remember to pause. To consider not those things we lack, but all that we do have. To raise a loud shout to God in praise of God’s creation and in thanksgiving for our place in it.

Yes, now. Do it now.  

Gentleness and Mercy

For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.      James 3: 16-17

Most of us strive for peacful lives; we do not aspire to “disorder and wickedness of every kind.” Here, James offers Christians a dire warning against envy and selfish ambition.  

Given our Puritan forbears, the idea of God as “gentle and willing to yield” may surprise us. My grandparents, raised at the end of the Victorian era, preached strict obedience and proper solemnity when it came to life and work and worship.  They were unfeignedly comfortable with the metaphor of God as Rock: immutable, permanent, stalwart. A mighty bulwark.... Right?

James suggests another perspective.  Think of God’s wisdom as poured out among us like streams of living water. It is the antithesis of rigidity.  James calls it “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”  Think about it: God’s wisdom without a trace of partiality and hypocrisy? Oh, Lord, let it be so!  

How might our relationships with God and with each other change if we cast aside all the “thou shalt nots” and, instead approached life gently, kindly, willing to yield, and without partiality or hypocrisy? Oh Lord, let it be so!

The Mighty Member

So also the tongue is a small member; how great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.                James 3:5, 9-10

                                       The Tongue      Nadia Ayari c.2012

This week, James ruminates on the power of the tongue. He muses over the fact that such a small body part can both bless and curse. We are simultaneously saints and sinners.

    

Think back for a moment. What statements made to you do you remember from years past? Do you remember the hurtful ones or the encouraging ones? I think we tend to remember the former more viscerally. Was it a parent? A teacher? A school yard bully? A sibling? For me it was something an aunt said to me on my wedding day that made me feel “not okay.” The memory of it still stings.

  

We cannot un-ring the bell. We cannot take back words once they slide forth from our mouths.  We can use our speech to impale and to spread lies, or we can use our speech to bless, strengthen and encourage. 

This week, let us initiate a new conversation with God. Let us ask for forgiveness for those times we used our tongues as weapons and ask for the fortitude and discipline to use them now only for the greater good: for the building up of the body of Christ and for the realization of the Kingdom.       

Be Opened!

Jesus said, “Ephphatha! Be opened.”  Mark 7:34

When I was discerning for Holy Orders, I remember hoping God would just give me a sign or something – something to tell me I was walking down the right path. “Please just send me an e-mail,” I often whined. I never expected that I’d have some monumental religious experience like the appearance of a tower of flames and a voice saying, “Liz……? It’s God…….”  I knew better.  But discernment is such an ephemeral thing, and we rarely know specifically what God wants us to do or what paths to pursue. God just isn’t into e-mail yet, I guess.  

In this week’s Gospel, we will encounter the passage about Jesus healing a man who was deaf. “Ephphatha! Be opened,” Jesus says.  And that command got me to thinking.  What if our eyes and ears and hearts were really opened and not distracted by the white noise that surrounds us day after day? What would happen if we were really opened? Opened to differing opinions? Opened to different perspectives? Opened to new neighborhoods and cultures? I think we’d be astonished.                                                                                                                                             

What if your eyes and ears and hearts were really opened – for just one day?                                    
What would change?

Heart

Jesus said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;      Mark 7:6

Heart   by Myuran Sukumaran

The reason I most often hear from unchurched people as to why they don’t go to church is,  “Church-y people are such hypocrites.”

And that answer makes me sad because it can be so true. The Church has, over time, welcomed its share of “holier than thou” hypocrites.  And, often, within its walls, we witness murmuring, triangulation, gossip and just plain passive aggressiveness. I am a wounded disciple myself.

Jesus warns us time and again about looking to our own selves first. To clean up our own hearts rather than judging another’s intentions. As we look at those with unclean hands, have we taken time to look at our own? Before we start trying to shape up someone else’s affairs, have we looked at our own?

God knows us: our drippy places, our wounded places, our prideful places; and God knows how earth-shatteringly human we are. Transformation occurs only when we are finally able to look at our own brokenness.

What part of your heart is broken?

What part of your heart needs to be healed, cleansed, re-formed?

Who Will You Serve?

Jonah said to the people,  ..."if serving the Lord seems undesireable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve... But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.  Jonah 24: 15

This week, I am on a Clergy Refreshment Retreat with old friends in Galena.  And while this is a time of time of prayer and rest and reflection, it is also a time of joy and laughter and mutual mentoring. 

I was struck this morning by the differing ways we set apart our quiet time for God.  For example, one friend reads the Daily Office faithfully every day. Another sits in quiet contemplative prayer, and another is a yoga devotee. Different ministries, different ways of approaching God, and vastly different political stances. We are a motley crew. 

But I'm also struck by our similarities. We all enjoy sharing a kitchen together and preparing common meals. We all love a good joke. We all wonder why Donald Trump is so far ahead in the polls. But the greatest similarity of all? That is that we each made an intentional choice to spend our lives serving God. A deliberate, definable choice.  

In doing so we have discovered a wonderful gift.  In spite of our vastly different pieties, liturgical styles, theological underpinnings, and political inclinations, Jesus is our common denominator. Our differences don't divide us; they interest us. Instead of shutting down, we strive to understand. It is a beautiful thing. 

May it be so in all of our lives, in all of our churches, and in all of our nations that the peace of God, which passes all our understanding would guard our hearts and our minds forever. 

Live!

To those without sense Wisdom says,

"Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.

Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."  Proverbs 9: 5-6

  

Wisdom, the sacred feminine, proffers a holy invitation.  

“Come,” she says, “Eat of my bread, drink of my wine. Live!”

Ecclesiastes echoes this, “eat and drink and be merry, for this will go with us in our toil through the days of our life.” (Ecclesiastes 8:15)

We are invited to feast enthusiastically on life, to celebrate it!  The Puritans, Calvinists, and ascetics missed these verses, or avoided them all together. And, occasionally, in our desire to “worship God in the beauty of holiness,” some of us may have stumbled on the piety scale and concluded life must all bowed heads and gray clothes.

“Not so!” says Wisdom.  Yes, lay aside debauchery and licentiousness, for these numb our sensibilities and distort our perceptions. But for all else, Wisdom suggests, we celebrate life, and in so doing, offer our praises and thanksgivings to God for all the gifts that have been bestowed upon us. 

Do not simply endure..... LIVE! 

Despair

Elijah went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: "It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors."   1 Kings 19:4

Elijah is done.  He no longer has the energy to fight Jezebel. He admits defeat, flees into the desert, collapses under a broom tree, and asks God to take his life.  Ever been there?  Been just too tired to put any more effort into a relationship or a situation and just wanted to walk away from it?

Elijah is every one of us. We struggle to stay afloat, to do the right thing, to invest in good relationships to be productive members of society….  But every once in a while, we just want to cry out,  “What’s the point?  Why am I on this hamster wheel? What’s it all for?”  We are not strangers to bouts of despair.

What’s striking about this story is God’s action in it, not Elijah’s. Elijah has given up, laid everything down, and some might say “gotten out of his own way.”  But God?  God sends help. And God sends help again. And God redeems the situation until Elijah gathers his wits about him and has the strength and perspective to go on. Just like Hagar, who laid her dying son Ishmael under a tree in the desert to wait for him to die, God came.

That is the promise: that God comes to us in our despair, in our desert times.  

God will not give up on us --- even when we’ve given up ourselves.  

God is there. Waiting. Redeeming. Loving. 

Nourishment

Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.  John 6: 27

Is this not the heart of Jesus’ message to us?  John’s Gospel is one of mysticism and symbolism. In it, we know to look for the spiritual truths that lie beneath the obvious. In doing so, we discover God’s invitation to wholeness and holiness. 

In proclaiming himself to be The Bread of Life, Jesus reveals the essence of what he hops hopes we will come to understand: that in setting aside the anxieties and stressors that are part of daily life, we will encounter God. As we chafe at that which irritates us or cling to past hurts, we cannot change. We remain stubborn, simmering pots of dissatisfaction and victimization.

But Jesus offers us an alternative: The Bread of Life is not only a salve for our hurts and balm for our battered hearts and minds, it is Christ’s invitation to dwell enter into the very heart of God.  With it, we cannot remain the same. Through it, we are transformed into a new creation, infused with compassion, joy, hope and love. By it, we ingest the fuel necessary to love each other as Christ loves us.

The choice is ours. 

Fear? Fear not?

.....they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, "It is I; do not be afraid."    John 6: 10-20

                                           The Storm                            Andy Gonzales

How many times in scripture do we hear the words "fear not" or "do not be afraid?" I didn't actually do the counting, but apparently the scriptures contain 365 admonitions about fear: one for every day of the year.  Coincidence?  Probably. But the point is, God has something to say to us about fear. 

Why are so many of us besieged by fear? Fear of change, fear of ill health, fear of poverty, fear of foreigners?       Fear of disappointing others.  Oh my. That's a biggie.

 "Fear not," say the angels. "Do not be afraid," says our Lord. Fear paralyzes  Fear nibbles away at our faith. Fear distorts reality. The Lord wants more from us. The Lord wants us to live into our belovedness and to share it with the world. The Lord wants us to cast out our fears and our demons; to rest in God's mercy and grace. 

.                                                                              

This week, take a look at what's bugging you; what's eroding your own sense of belovedness. And if you find fear to be the culprit, cast it out. Name it. And walk in faith. .

Peace be with you.

Sabbath

The Apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, "Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while." For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. Mark 6: 30 - 31 

           

The Woman at the Window                  Salvador Dali, 1925

The Whispering:

Jesus knew.  Jesus knew how tiring it was to be so busy.  He knew what is was like to have people clamoring for his attention: needing money, needing healing, needing to touch him. No peace and quiet. No down time. No day off.

Jesus recognized the need for down time, and knew how hard it is to claim.  

Sabbath time is essential for good health and for perspective. Very often when we take time "off," it is for action packed trips with complicated itineraries - all well and good - but when is there time for this essential Godly rest? Without it, we get road weary. Resentments fester, job performance slips, and relationships suffer.

In the coming weeks, consider how you can carve out a small space of Sabbath time each week. Start by claiming 20 minutes - maybe an hour - for yourself.  

Do it. Dare to do nothing. And dare to dedicate it to God.