don't eat alone

“The Imagination of Grace”
A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham
by Milton Brasher-Cunningham
Exodus 3:1-15; Romans 12:9-21

Perhaps one of the reasons I like stories about Moses is he was as rootless as I am.
He was born of a Hebrew mother while she was being held in exile with her people in Egypt, adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter and given an Egyptian name, and then ended up on the run because he killed an Egyptian guard trying to defend one of the Hebrew slaves. The reasons for my life of moving around are not quite so colorful, but I resonate with his struggle to find his place. We pick up his story this morning as he is herding his father-in-law’s flocks as a means of laying low – of taking care of himself – when God shows up in a bush that was burning, but was not burning up to call Moses out of his anonymity and self-absorption and back into community: “Go and bring my people out of Egypt.”

From the time I first heard this story as a child, I have been fascinated with Moses’ ability to talk back to God. After seeing the burning bush and hearing God’s call, Moses responds, “But why me?” The flames did not burn off either his self-absorption or his insecurity. He was wounded and hurt and alone and struggled to hear the pain of the Hebrew people over his own. Besides, what good had it done to stand up before? Why couldn’t God pick someone else?

Moses talked back to God, and God answered, calling Moses out of himself, to which Moses responded with a second question: “Whom shall I say sent me?” And – this was one of my favorite parts of the story as a kid – God replied, tell them my name is I AM WHO I AM. To the ears of a young boy, God sounded an awful lot like Popeye: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am . . . .” Though translating exactly how God was identifying God’s self presents some challenges in translating from Hebrew to English, one way to read it is God said, “Tell them the verb TO BE sent you.” Tell them you’ve been sent by the Present Tense. Somewhere in God’s answer, Moses moved the focus of his life from his pain and his past and found the courage to listen and respond to God’s call to solidarity in the present tense with the pain of the people in bondage. The story finished quite dramatically, as you know, with Moses leading the people out of Egypt and into freedom.

It’s easy, I suppose, to see the story as finished there, as though the pattern is God sees a problem and calls someone to come forth and fix it. But Moses led the people out of Egypt into the wilderness, into wandering around for forty years trying to figure out who they were together. Life, even in Bible stories, has never been simple.

And what of our present tense? As we are gathered here, Hurricane Irene is lashing her way up the East Coast leaving damage and despair in her wake. People in Japan are still hurting from the earthquake and tsunami from months ago. Over a year later, thousands of people in Haiti are still living outdoors. Birmingham will take years to recover from the tornadoes. New Orleans still bears the scars of Katrina. In Somalia and Kenya, people are dying in a famine that goes largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. The genocides in Darfur and Congo continue as well. Our congressional leaders act in a way that makes middle school playground fights seem mature and they offer policies that have little regard for the poor in our country even as they do what they can to protect the rich. Our schools suffer from a lack of funding and concern. Ginger came back from Israel with pictures of the forty-foot high concrete wall the Israelis built to isolate the Palestinians, while we build walls and fences with our rhetoric about immigration in our country. Our city struggles with crime and violence. Our own faith partner is homeless and unemployed. And we could go around the room and speak of enough pain and grief and struggle to keep us all wondering what to do next.

How should we then live? In the face of all that is a part of our lives, who is God calling us to be in a world we can’t fix?

When I was a hospital chaplain in Dallas many years ago, my supervisor was talking to us about who we were to be in that universe of grief and illness we could not fix and he quoted a line from Alice in Wonderland: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” Our call, he said, was to be present. To stay past the point of our comfort. To trust God could use us in ways we could not see.

To live in the present tense means, first, to stay present. Karl Barth suggested the best way we could live out our faith was to live with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. The passage Bob read from Romans offers more specifics on how we might do so. Listen again, this time from the translation called The Message:

Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle. Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality. Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down. Get along with each other; don’t be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody. Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.” Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.

Several of the commentators I read this week pointed out that there are over thirty imperatives in this passage, which might lead us to respond much like Moses did: “Who are we to live like that?” It makes me think of the words of G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The Christian faith has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.” I’m not sure I’m willing to go quite that far, but he’s on to something. God’s grace calls us to live beyond ourselves and into community, which calls us to a commitment to looking for new eyes and new ways of thinking. Listen to this story from Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist.

I was in Baghdad in March 2003, where I lived as a Christian and as a peacemaker during the “shock-and-awe” bombing. I spent time with families, volunteered in hospitals and learned to sing “Amazing Grace” in Arabic.

There is one image of the time in Baghdad that will never leave me. As the bombs fell from the sky and smoke filled the air, one of the doctors in the hospital held a little girl whose body was riddled with missile fragments. He threw his hands in the air and said, “This violence is for a world that has lost its imagination.” Then he looked square into my eyes, with tears pouring from his, and said, “Has your country lost its imagination?”

We, are who are created in the image of God, in the image of the verb TO BE, are called to live with the imagination of those who have been captured by the wondrous raging fury that we call the grace of God, trusting that the God who burns bushes and opens hearts can use our hands and feet and minds and hearts to bring healing in our world. What the commentators called imperatives are invitations to the imaginative.

Katherine Matthews Huey writes:

I’m the first to admit that I find Paul’s words hard to live by, but then that was the point about grace, wasn’t it? If we opened ourselves up to the Spirit of God at work in the world, through us, loving one another, listening to one another, hoping and sharing and forgiving and not being so proud and self-righteous, welcoming one another (and their perspectives), returning gentleness and kindness for every wrong, well, . . . it would be a new kind of triumph over evil: by civility and hospitality rather than by force. Of course, it would also be a whole new way of doings things, wouldn’t it? And wouldn’t it be a beautiful thing to behold?

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “and every common bush afire with God: but only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
the rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.” Let us pray, as we live in a world ablaze in need and pain, that we would see with the eyes of those doused in the imagination of grace, of those who know we are called to live life together in every circle of our lives from our families to our neighbors to the connections to those we don’t even know. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Last weekend, the big event in our neighborhood of Old North Durham was a birthday party. Fullsteam Brewery turned one. For those of you not fortunate enough to live close enough to know why the date matters so to those of here in Durham, let me explain why its presence matters and, in lieu of a birthday card, write my own little thank you note.

I didn’t make it to Fullsteam on opening day last year, but I got there within the first week. When Sean Lilly Wilson took over the old bottling plant and turned it into a brewery, he built a bar on one side of the big front room and called it The R&D Tavern. They put in some walls around the bar area, and then brought in some picnic tables and eventually built a stage in one corner. In the front part of the room, closest to the big sliding red door with the backwards “F” logo, are a ping pong table, and some old school pinball machines. Oh – and on the side wall closest to the glass partitions that separate the brewing equipment are a couple of dart boards. More than the furnishings or lack thereof, however, it’s what that room has become that matters most: it is, in the truest sense, a public house.

Stop by on most any afternoon, and around the tables will be people drinking and talking together. Some have their children. Some have their dogs. The room feels like it’s been The Place to Hangout in Durham for twenty years, rather than one and it has felt that way since the start. If there is a group that needs to meet, or friends that need to talk, or people who just want to get together, someone will say, “Why don’t we just meet at Fullsteam?” as though that’s where we’ve always met.

In that very room I have played for open mic night, celebrated a birthday with friends, comforted some of those same friends through various griefs and crises, seen a belly dancing conclave, played my share of pinball, sampled the wares of some of Durham’s finest food trucks, heard some pretty good bands, held our monthly church Bible study, and hung out for no apparent reason on any number of afternoons and evenings. Ginger and I moved into the neighborhood about a month before Sean opened his place; walking in there makes me feel like we’ve both been here a long time.

I’ve never had a chance to ask Sean if Fullsteam is what he imagined when the building was still big and vacant and his dream was still out in front of him. I know he works hard at what he does and excellence matters. I know being in that big brick room makes me feel welcomed and connected, two of the things I most like to feel. I am grateful to live in a town with a room like that.

And the great beer makes it even better.

Thanks, Fullsteam. Thanks, Sean. Happy birthday.

Peace,
Milton

The evening began with a conversation – long distance, back when that mattered, between Ginger and me. She was in Birmingham visiting her family; I was in Fort Worth. We had been dating about eight months and both knew we were on a crash course for each other. Somewhere in our words we decided to get married and I said, “OK, but I still want to surprise you with the ring.”

I had about a week and a half to plan the evening before she returned. My friend, Billy and I spent a couple of days visiting the places that were to be the stages for the romantic extravaganza. I was out to create an indelible memory. Ginger dreamed of owning a black Jeep Wrangler, so I borrowed the one David White, one of the kids in my youth group, had gotten for his birthday and drove it up into her front yard. She came out in an amazing read dress. I was wearing a red shirt and a black blazer (with the sleeves rolled up – it was 1989, after all). I put the specially crafted mix tape into the cassette player and we drove across the Turnpike to Dallas. Billy and Patty, our other co-conspirator, were ahead of us making sure the wheels of romance were well greased.

The first stop was the Hard Rock Café, which was still pretty new and incredibly popular. Billy and I had learned earlier in the week that they wouldn’t take a reservation, but the manager said if Billy and Patty would come early and hold the table he would get them out and get us in without Ginger knowing. We walked past a line of people that literally went around the block and I said to the host, “I’m Milton.” He turned and stealthily signaled and I saw them whisk Billy and Patty out through the kitchen, reset the table, and put a bottle of champagne down before we could get there. She had no idea what had happened.

One of the biggest challenges of the evening was I didn’t want to have to drive and hunt for parking all night and, dating a woman whose sense of social justice is in her marrow, I knew extravagance had some limits. I found a company that rented – wait for it – Honda Accord stretch limos and that was a happy compromise. We came out of the restaurant to our waiting chariot. I handed the driver the mix tape so the soundtrack could continue. Our next stop was the West End, Dallas’ newest hangout, where we went first to the fudge maker who had been primed to pick Ginger out of the crowd to be a special helper. When she was done, they awarded her with a big sack of chocolate-peanut butter fudge.

We walked outside for a bit to find a couple singing along the sidewalk (Billy and Patty in borrowed wigs and well disguised, except for Billy’s luggage tag, which Ginger didn’t see). We stopped to listen and Ginger said, “They’re good, but they’re not Boston.” I still get a good laugh thinking about that moment.

From there, we went into the dance club where once again I said, “I’m Milton” and the host signaled the deejay to play my requests, which began with “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul and also included some Anita Baker and Van Morrison. When the third song played, she stopped dancing and looked at me.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

I smiled and stayed silent. While we danced, Billy and Patty hid the ring in a designated spot in the car and left a box with a dozen peach roses (flowers I had sent to Ginger after we decided to get married) and two bottles of Clos du Bois Chardonnay, which we had shared at dinner at the York Harbor Inn when we had been in New England a few months earlier. One was to open that night; the other was to save for our anniversary. We came out of the club and got in the car. The driver cued the music perfectly, and as we began to move, Stephen Bishop began to sing.

time I’ve been passing time watching trains go by
all of my life lying on the sand watching sea birds fly
wishing there would be someone waiting home for me
something’s telling me it might be you
something’s telling me it might be you all of my life . . .

I reached down and offered her the little black box, followed by the roses. I leaned up to the window and told the driver just to drive around for awhile, closed the little door and opened the wine. We ended back at the Hard Rock, where we picked up the Jeep and drove back to Fort Worth and the rest of our lives together.

Life holds only so many moments that actually become what you dreamed they might be. That night was one for me. It was, as my friend Gordon has noted, a ridiculously romantic evening. Then again, I’m a pretty ridiculous romantic myself. Twenty-two years later, I’m still starry-eyed. Tonight comes after she has just returned from being gone for two weeks, much like it was that fair summer evening, now long ago.

My song hasn’t changed: Gigi, it’s still you I’ve been waiting for all of my life.

Peace,
Milton

“The presence of your absence bothers me,” begins an old Pierce Pettis song. I’ve sung the lyric both out loud and in my head for several days now as I go deeper into Ginger’s two week pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine that left me here to tend to Schnauzers and in-laws in Durham. The quotidian grace and hope I draw from waking up beside her along with the many ways she permeates my day make this a rather blessed kind of misery, even if it sounds corny. The good news for me is she comes home on Wednesday. I’m ready.

recreation

whether the rib came
from adam or eve
is of no real consequence

the story is not about
primacy or power
when you get down

to the bone – but
connectedness and
something missing

from one without
the other, I know
my joints ache

with your absence
I am missing marrow
and ready for reunion

a walk in the garden
and the way we fit
together side by side

Peace,
Milton

I know. I haven’t posted in a while. OK, almost a month.

I decided I would sing my way back in — that is, I would sing along. The tone for this collection was set by Eric Folkerth, who pointed me to Eric Schwartz. Listen and enjoy the soulfulness.

The next man that came to mind was Marc Broussard, who has soul of his own.

I found this Van Morrison cover by The Swell Season that seemed like a good addition.

Now that I’m on a roll, here’s Ray LaMontagne:

And I can’t pass over Mumford and Sons:

And I know this is getting long, but please listen to Josh Ritter:

And I bring this little concert to a close with Ray Charles.

Here’s to a soulful summer afternooon.

Peace,
Milton

for the beauty of the park
to not-so-wild geese
congregating in the grass
the walkers and joggers intent
on not making eye contact
flanked by smiling dogs
the cool summer air
of this mile-high morning
makes my grateful hymn
of praise for sidewalks
that know my name
for eyes that smile back and
the love which from our birth
remembers we are all
walking home

Peace,
Milton

Once upon a time, a guitar was a guitar. No qualifiers were needed. Then along came rock and roll and amplification and we needed more than one word to describe the stringed instrument because there was more than one kind. Thus, what had always been a guitar became an acoustic guitar to set it apart from its electrified cousin. The history of language is full of such stories. As I have sought to reflect on something I noticed in my reflections on the Wild Goose Festival, I found myself running into some of the same language – or at least that’s the way it feels to me.

I’ve kept thinking about the number of people I met at the festival who described themselves as being a part of an “intentional community,” which had several meanings but did not, at least for the folks I was talking to, have much to do with the historical faith community that is the church. Some had names for what they were doing; some even saw their gathering as the beginning of a new movement. All of them seemed earnest and committed and working hard to make faith matter. And most of them were younger than me, so I tried to look at the generational divide and the changing face of American Christianity and any other related issue I could think of and then I kept coming back to my acoustic guitar and the same haunting question: why didn’t they consider the local church to be an intentional community?

Yes, I know there are things about the church that need to change whether we’re talking about the church universal or the old stone building on the corner, and week in and week out for two millennia those who gather to gather to ask the Lord’s blessing are how our faith has gotten handed down. Intentionally. I think about our church here in Durham, about the two sets of parents – each with twins – who get to church more Sundays than not, about some of our elderly folks who face severe physical challenges just to get out of bed and hardly miss a Sunday, about those who are committed to choir and to our summer feeding program and our various ministries to the homeless and poor in our community, about those who take meals to others in need of food and fellowship, about those who just returned from a week of tornado relief work in Birmingham. For all of its faults and things that need to change, our community is shot through with intentionality, and we are not the only ones.

A quick survey of Christian history reveals a number of shortcomings and sins of the institutional church across the centuries, and it also shows how the Body of Christ has intentionally incarnated the love of God in some fairly amazing ways. Both the past and the future of our faith have thrived on new wine and new wineskins, so I glad to hear folks talking about their theological and ecclesiastical explorations. The church on any level has never had a corner on the truth. Those who are in the first generation of a new intentionality have yet to stare down what every faith community from the very first disciples on down have had to come to terms with: self-perpetuation.

In Acts, one of the first things the twelve disciples did was to vote on a replacement for Judas. They didn’t have much of a structure or any church by-laws with which to contend, but somehow they felt they had to have twelve to go on. So they voted. Those who had been asked to drop what they were doing and follow Jesus to a new thing brought in Judas’ replacement by institutional action. Then came the deacons to make sure the widows and orphans were taken care of. Then people began to realize the twelve weren’t going to live forever. You get the picture. Any institution, Christian or otherwise, that lives beyond its first generation of participants will see self-perpetuation become one of the primary values of the group. That, however, doesn’t automatically make it something other than intentional community.

Once again, the richness of what our faith can mean is in the creative tension between the community Christ intended that we illustrate every time we take Communion and the revolution he called us to foment within the very institution we call home. We are called to be intentional about being together and tearing down the house at the same time. Our faith and our community will not thrive without radical change any more than it will survive without a deep reverence and connection to those who came before us. I didn’t stay in the denomination in which I was raised and even ordained because I wanted to the primary emotion evoked by my faith to be something other than rage. So I found a home in the UCC. I also remain deeply grateful for my Baptist heritage and for the connections I still find there.

The question I want to take back to my church from all of this is, “In what ways have we allowed our community to become unintentional?” What have we taken for granted? How has our familiarity blinded us to what God would do in our midst? What do we hang on to for no reason other than we haven’t chosen to let it go? At the same time, I would like to go back to some of those to whom I spoke at the festival and ask, “What does intentionality mean to you?” Why does it need to be expressed at the expense of the church? How do you imagine what you are doing will look like in fifty or a hundred years?

If we are all serious about intentional community, we will listen to one another’s answers, make room for both change and history, and be deliberate in our love for one another most of all.

Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Peace,
Milton

the corn is growing
(all eight plants)
as are the squash sweet
potatoes cinnamon basil
bee balm figs and echinacea
tomatoes gooseberries
peppers and eggplant
(aubergine is a better name)
along with muscadines
peaches and asian pears
I’m circling the garden
along with schnauzers
butterflies and bees
aware that walking
around in my garden
is like walking around
the inside of my heart

Peace,
Milton

Sunday evening I sat down to dinner with friends from Durham after I had made my last run to the airport of the day to drop off folks heading home from the Wild Goose Festival, which was held at Shakori Hills near Durham. Saturday was my friend Terry’s birthday and I wanted to eat dinner with him. Around the table with us were Ginger, Lori (Terry’s wife and fellow driver for the festival), and other friends John and Sonya. I’m not sure how long I had been sitting at the table before I fell asleep – for the first of at least three short naps during dinner. After four days of driving and listening and talking and being a part of the inaugural event, I finally ran out of adrenaline.

Now, after a day to make the last two airport runs, sleep, and reflect on what I saw and heard, I am grateful to have been a part of an amazing weekend and I want to encourage anyone on the receiving end of this post to do what you can to be here next year. Some of the people who will help make my case can be found in the links that follow: Beth Nielsen Chapman, David LaMotte, Michelle Shocked, Tom Prasada-Rao, David Wilcox, Vince Anderson, Julie Lee, Derek Webb, Ashley Cleveland, Psalters – to mention some of the musicians; Rabbi Or Rose, Bowie Snodgrass and Samir Selmanovek from Faith House Manhattan, Darkwood Brew, People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, NC Peace Action, Lilly Lewin, Gabriel Salguero from Lamb’s Church in New York, Colin Richard from Plant with Purpose, Vincent Harding, James Forbes, Tim Tyson, the Void Collective, and Eliacin Rosario-Cruz. My list is far from exhaustive.

The wild goose is a metaphor for the Holy Spirit drawn from Celtic Christianity. The organizers brought everyone together to see what might happen more than force a specific design on the time, other than scheduling it full of folks with dreams and ideas to share. I kept thinking of the closing lines of Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese”:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Since I was the transportation coordinator, I had more conversations in the van going to and from either the airport or the hotels in the bustling metropolis of Siler City than I did in actual sessions, and I came away challenged and encouraged by what I saw and heard. Perhaps the strongest impression I had is that the Next Big Thing in Christianity is not going to be a big thing. By that I mean, I met a number of people who were doing great, small work. Yes, they wanted to change the world and they were doing it one song, or one conversation, or one tree planting at a time rather than seeking to fill stadium-sized sanctuaries or to bounce their ideas off of every satellite they could find. I met a number of people who described what they were doing as being a part of “an intentional community” and far fewer that talked about being a part of a church. (I’m not sure how to unpack that difference just yet, but I noticed it.) And, though there were a fair share of people with publishing deals and books to sell, I felt more folks were seeking to be faithful more than famous.

On Friday afternoon, someone put up a sign in the Fullsteam tent that said, “Beer and Hymns – 5 pm.” Todd started us off by saying, “We’re going to sing ‘How Great Thou Art’ but not like you’ve ever heard it before.” And he was right. We sang “Fairest Lord Jesus,” “It Is Well With My Soul,” “Jesus Loves Me,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “I’ll Fly Away,” and “Come, Thou Fount” with a racous reverence that felt like church and unlike church all at once. The next afternoon, there was a Bluegrass Liturgy and Communion Service in one of the other tents, and that night a tent set up as Sacred Space where everyone moved about in silence, each one was shot through with the same Spirit Oliver describes: harsh and exciting, announcing our place in the family of things.

It’s one big crazy family of which I am glad to be a part.

Peace,
Milton

One of my morning rituals is to see what musicians have birthdays. Today marks the birth of Kris Kristofferson (along with Don Henley and Cyndi Lauper). Seeing Kristofferson’s name reminded me of one of my favorite songs that feels like a good soundtrack for today, so I thought I would pass it along.

am I young enough to believe in revolution
am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray
am I high enough on the chain of evolution
to respect myself, and my brother and my sister
and perfect myself in my own peculiar way

I get lazy, and forget my obligations
I’d go crazy, if I paid attention all the time
and I want justice, but I’ll settle for some mercy
on this holy road through the universal mind

am I young enough to believe in revolution
am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray
am I high enough on the chain of evolution
to respect myself, and my brother and my sister
and perfect myself in my own peculiar way

I got lucky, I got everything I wanted
I got happy, there wasn’t nothing else to do
And I’d be crazy not to wonder if I’m worthy
Of the part I play in this dream that’s coming true

am I young enough to believe in revolution
am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray
am I high enough on the chain of evolution
to respect myself, and my brother and my sister
and perfect myself in my own peculiar way

 Amen.

Peace,
Milton