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lenten journal: friday night lights

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friday night lights

at the funeral home
on a friday evening

one of the speakers
quoted Mary Oliver

“four small stones
hugging each other”

an image of love
in a roomful of loss

the one who just
lost his husband

took the words in
with the rest of us

and then stood up
to say thank you

we walked out to
an embracing sunset

mary talked about
the sun as well

she was at the beach
I was in a parking lot

same sun same love
different stones

all in need of embrace
all ablaze in gratitude

at the funeral home
is it that simple?

Peace,
Milton

 

 

lenten journal: affirmation season

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affirmation season

the best part of
deacons’ meeting
on the night
after the Oscars
was when one said,

“how long has
it been since
we told the staff
they were doing
a good job?’

after a short
silence
another replied,
“it’s always
a good time
to say that”

someone else
volunteered to
send cards

none of us was
designer-dressed
neither did we
discuss who
was doing the
best work

true affirmation
doesn’t demand
competition
only celebration
and the intention
to say it out loud

skip the statue
the superlatives
and just say,
“thanks for
showing up
every damn day”

“I noticed”
is another way
of saying
“I love you”

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: before & after

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I know I was not the only preacher who mentioned that we are close to the four year anniversary of the beginning of the Big Lockdown. That, along with the scripture passage, got me thinking about befores and afters.

______________________

Before and after.

The two words are often used together to describe a change or a transformation:

before we met . . .
before my father died . . .
before our first child was born . . .
before I finished my degree . . .
before my knee replacement . . .
before the diagnosis . . .
before the promotion . . .
before we opened our business . . .
before we moved into our house . . .
before the war . . .
before 9/11 . . . .

How about this one? Before the pandemic began . . . .

Can you remember what life was like? This week marks four years since the lockdown began and the whole world had to deal with a reality none of us had experienced. There was life before March 2020 and life after. Even though COVID is no longer the threat it once was, life will never be the same for any of us, maybe for anyone.

Our lives are filled with before and after moments, some of them more profound than others, but we continue to evolve, to grow and change, in part because of what happens and how we choose to respond—both parts of the equation are crucial.

Though we talk about before and after, we live in the afters; we don’t know we are in the befores. Things happen and we go on living, trying to figure out what to do.

Life is full of chance encounters and uncertainties, things we can’t explain or control, AND we make choices about what we do, say, and feel in the middle of it all, and those choices shape our lives.

Cosmologist Brian Swimme writes about coming to a deeper understanding of that dynamic as he watched his son chase a frog by a creek one afternoon.

Yes, the existence of our son rested on uncountably many chance events. but that was not the whole story. In the moment I became aware of a fundamental branch point, I ran down the pathway that led to Denise. [his wife] Whatever would come forth after that had for its base that conscious decision that she was my life. Thomas Ian did not come from a purely random process. He came out of a decision that transformed all of the events of our past from chance to necessity. They became necessary in that they were just what they had to be in order for us to embrace it all and make it our destiny. (269)

The phrase that caught me most in that paragraph is “a decision that transformed all of the events of our past from chance to necessity.” That’s the language of before and after. It is also the language of faith, as we reflect on how we come into relationship with God.

Do you remember your life before you began a life of faith—however you would define that phrase? Perhaps it was, as they say, a “come to Jesus” moment; maybe it was a gradual series of events, a slow turning, that led you to a moment when you realized things had moved from chance to necessity. Faith is an ongoing relationship, a continuing act of creation, a contagion of befores and afters, but do you remember how it began? Can you point to other watershed moments along the way?

I wish we had time to tell all of those stories this morning. Let’s take the time to do so along the way in the days to come. For now, I’ll tell this one.

It was by chance that I was born to parents who decided to move to Africa. By that I mean I had no choice in the matter. The month of my first birthday, we sailed from New York Harbor, around the Cape of Good Hope, to the port of Beira, Mozambique—thirty-two days on a passenger freighter—because my parents wanted to be missionaries. We left Africa for good on my sixteenth birthday.

I came to faith as a child in Africa. I grew up in African churches filled with music and rhythm, with joyful people who lived hard lives and didn’t have much, but who shared most everything.

We came back to the States on leave three times before we came back for good. The third time I was in tenth grade and was a part of the youth group at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas—by chance. I had never been a part of a youth group centered around faith, nor had I been in an American high school. I experienced a different kind of diversity among the students at Paschal High School. All of it changed—expanded—the way I thought about God and about faith.

After Ginger and I married and moved to Boston, my faith went through another before and after as we found our way to become part of the UCC that began by chance: a colleague of Ginger’s called to say her church needed a youth minister.

Again, New England had a different vocabulary for faith and mine expanded to a wider definition of belonging that resonated with the way it felt when I was a kid in Africa, except it was even more expansive.

Those three highlights are far from the whole story, but I hope they communicate that faith is not something we possess; rather it is something we are part of, a creative process that is burgeoning and ongoing.

What is your version of that story? What is our version? How did the chance happenings of our lives bring us to choose for Mount Carmel to be a necessity in our lives? Remember we found each other because you asked Jake Joseph to preach—by chance—and he told you and me that we were a match.
Now we are necessary to each other.

How did we choose to let the fact that we met become a choice to love one another in Jesus’ name? Because that is what we are doing here; we are now necessary to each other’s lives, to each other’s stories. We are the story. The last sentence of our passage for this morning says, “God prepared for these good things to be the way that we live our lives,” or put another way, “God made us for this.”

We are built for befores and afters. We are created to grow and learn, to adapt and change, to imagine and belong, to love and be loved, just like everything else in the universe. We are made to make each other necessary. May our lives reflect our calling. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: making stock

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making stock

the air was as cold
as it was grey today
and the forecast of rain
sent me stacking the
stock pot on the stove
pulling poultry bones

from the freezer
as well as a couple of
bags of celery butts
and carrot ends
garlic fresh parsley
and a sliced lemon

its been simmering
through sermon prep
and basketball games
turning tap water
into the promise
of meals yet to come

the oldest meaning
of the word is the
trunk of a living tree
from which life spings
the rich reduction
is a soup nursery

new life will come from
the scraps and bones
of other meals
a good word as lent
boils down to its
magnificent defeat

scraps and bones
are the stuff of life
and death it seems
the rain both waters
and wearies us
come it’s time to eat

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: saving time

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I am writing on Friday night, but most of you will read this on Saturday or later, which means this wa the night to write about daylight savings.

saving time

some time in the night we will be
robbed of an hour of sleep in
order that we might save daylight

the thieves will leave nothing but the
promise that the hour saved will be
kept safely and returned in the fall

but no one adequately explains
the for this sleight of hand
this spring-loaded arrogance

the sunrise I saw this morning
through the giant airport windows
took all the time it needed

perhaps we should begin a
tradition of staying up until
we think the clock springs forward

and then laugh at ourselves
for thinking we could save time
or that our clocks are of consequence

precision and perspective
keep time to different rhythms
one of the matches a heartbeat

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: rain on me

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rain on me

today was a rainy day
to which the rain
never fully committed
the mist loitered
without purpose
the showers were
scattered unfocused
rather than pelting
me as i walked
the moisture wafted
like a parachutist
blown off course
putting the whether
in weather
in it all I found
companions
in the raindrops
knowing I was not
the only who felt
a little off my game
there’s more than
one way to fall
and to land
not all clouds
speak in storm

Peace.
Milton

lenten journal: spiritual practice

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spiritual practice

start with intent
make a promise
show up and then
miss the next day

live with failure
then deal with grace
you did not write
everyday this lent

easter will come
good friday too
the season does
not ride on you

faithfulness and
perfection are
not synonyms
saints miss the mark

write down a word
then another
remind yourself
that practice does

not make perfect
you will fail again
and love will keep
expecting you

believing you
how many times
do we need to
remind ourselves

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: foolishness

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On evening this week, I rewatched Serendipity, one of our favorite movies. At one point, Jeremy Piven’s character encourages John Cusack’s character to be a jackass—to be willing to be foolish for love. Today’s sermon centered around 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, a pasasage in which Paul admonishes the struggling church in a similar fashion: to embrace the foolishness of God’s love. Here’s how it went down.

_______________________

I learned something this week. Well, a couple of things.

The fact that February had an extra day this year sent me searching for information about how we mark time. The basis of our calendar comes from one that Julius Caesar put in place in 45 CE—named the Julian calendar—and it has the twelve months we know, but it lost time somehow. In the late 1500s Pope Gregory XIII implemented the Gregorian calendar, which is what we use now. (That’s what I learned: the Pope was powerful enough to set the calendar for the Western world.) Protestant countries were slower to implement it, since the Reformation had just happened, but, as you know, it became the way we number our days.

I tell you all of that to remind us that Christianity has not always been in a place of power. Gregory XIII might have been able to tell the world how to mark time, but Paul wrote to a small, struggling congregation in a city that either ignored it or disparaged it and under a government that oppressed it.

Our other lectionary passages for this morning carry the same tone of Paul’s letters. Lynn read about the handing down of the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew people who received them were nomads at the time, wandering the wilderness looking for home. The gospel passage we did not read this morning is the account of Jesus turning over the tables of those who had turned the Temple into a merchandising opportunity, but he had no real power to make them stop. It was a brave and courageous move that probably looked foolish to most, to use Paul’s word.

As he said, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are involved in a dying world, but for us it is the power of God.” Foolishness. Absurdity. Which begs the questions: Have we staked our lives on nonsense? and Is it so wrong to be foolish?

“The message of the cross” is one of those phrases that sounds as though everyone should know what it means, but the definition is not that clear—like home fries. Almost every breakfast place has their own version and they use the same name, so it’s hard to know what you’re going to get.

One of the loudest definitions of the message of the cross through church history is one soaked in shame: Jesus died and it’s our fault. The depth of our sin—of our “fallen” humanity–required the blood of Christ to be shed in sacrifice. Though it is a prominent explanation, it is not what Paul was saying. That theology had not yet come into play. For Paul, “the message of the cross” was another way of saying the life of Jesus because he saw Jesus’ death as an extension of the way Jesus lived—speaking truth to power, caring for those at the margins, calling people to justice and compassion.

Paul was writing to a divided congregation that had chosen sides in any number of power struggles. After Paul founded the church, a man named Apollos picked up the ministry and people separated over which minister they liked better. In our passage we read about a clash between Jews and Greeks. The earliest followers of Christ were all Jewish. As the church grew, people from other ethnic and religious backgrounds followed Jesus as well. In Corinth, they weren’t mixing well.

People dug in on their stances. They wanted to be right, or they wanted to be in charge, or they wanted things to be done the way they thought they should be done, and so they chose ideas or doctrine or background over relationship. Remember, this is the same congregation that had divided over whether a Christian could eat meat that had been offered to idols. If there was a way to disagree about something, they found it. They wanted to be in charge, to be in control, to be the Ones Who Decided Things.

Paul wrote to say, remember our origin story: remember the message of the cross, which is God poured God’s self into human form not to stage a blazing conquest but to show us who we were created to be. Jesus showed us the extraordinary power of a life lived in love, and the love he lived out was so extraordinary that it threatened those who fought for power to the point that they killed him.

This is the absurdity, the foolishness that draws us together down all the days since then: God is love and we are God’s people, loved by God and called to love one another. We trust that love can change the world. We trust that love can save us.

The Ten Commandments read like a don’t-do-that list, but they are fundamentally about how to live in loving and trusting relationships. Jesus flipped the tables to say worshipping is about belonging, not profit margins. In a world that is obsessed with power and wealth (I’m talking about our world now, not Corinth); in our world that has become accustomed to being constantly at war; in our world that categorizes people rather than understands them; we are called to trust the foolishness of God, the absurdity of the words Paul wrote later in this same letter:

Love is patient, love is kind, it isn’t jealous, it doesn’t brag, it isn’t arrogant, it isn’t rude, it doesn’t seek its own advantage, it isn’t irritable, it doesn’t keep a record of complaints, it isn’t happy with injustice, but it is happy with the truth. Love puts up with all things, trusts in all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

Epictetus was a Greek philosopher who lived around the same time as Paul. He wrote, ““If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” We might paraphrase his words to say, “If we want to be faithful to our calling to love God and others we must be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

It doesn’t make sense to say it is enough to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Living like that will not keep us safer, or make us richer, or put us in a place of power. It will give us courage to trust that to gather here each week to invest in one another’s lives actually matters.

And that is why we keep coming back to the Table—to feed one another and tell the story of the magnificent foolishness of God’s love—to trust, once more, that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: specifically, the time . . .

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specifically, the time . . .

you left a note
you drove me home
you called to check on me
you paid my bill
you dropped by to say hi
you answered the phone
and listened

you called me out
you came to Dad’s funeral
you laughed at my jokes
you said you loved me
you said it again and again
you sat with me
and said nothing

you left a gift in my mailbox
you put food in the fridge
you called and asked for help
you let me pick the movie
you brought ice cream
you forgave me when
I forgot what mattered

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: walking my blind dog

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We are two weeks into Lent and I am finally getting to my Lenten Journal, my spiritual practice for the season. If you follow my newsletter, you know part of the reason is our little Lizzy! had to have her eyes removed to alleviate the pain caused by the glaucoma that blinded her. We are all recovering from that, or trying to. Here is part of how it feels.

walking my blind dog

we are three days post-surgery
two lines of stitches where
her eyes used to be
a soft foam circle that
looks like a lifebuoy
saves her from scratching
none of us knows
what we are doing

we take her to the yard
beyond our fence
attach the leash so
we can lead her
she sniffs and steps
as I think about the
article sent by a friend
about walking a blind dog

and it sounds like a blues song
I mean the real blues
grief-filled guitar licks
a bass line from the bottom
of life and a back beat
that keeps the rhythm
of a broken heart
something we can all sing

walking my blind dog
walking my blind dog
walking my blind dog home

Peace,
Milton