don't eat alone

One of the first scripture verses I learned was, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord.’” Actually, it was a song we sang in Sunday School or VBS – that detail I don’t recall. The verse came back to me as I sat down to write because today was one of those days when I was reminded – again – why I love being a part of the church and of my church.

Worship at North Community Church is always a bit of a whirlwind, with the congregation sitting in the eye of the Spirit Storm. Ginger and the rest of the team do a great job planning the services, making each detail matter. There are no discards. In the course of a service, there are often eight or nine people participating in everything from scripture readings to prayers to children’s sermons. All of our readers and participants are given clear direction as to what it means to lead worship. It shows in how they are able to lead us.

I got to church early to get things ready for Coffee Hour. I entered the Parish Hall to find a few members of the youth group who had had a sleep over and were eating breakfast. About nine o’clock, the fifth through eighth graders arrived because they have Sunday School before church. A couple of people came in to return dishes from meals delivered to them during the week. I turned on the coffee pot and went over to the sanctuary, which is across the street, and had time to greet a few folks before things began.

The announcements gave a quick snapshot of what makes up the whirlwind: the coming Church Fair, Coffee Hour, thanks for care during illness and recuperation, Community League – those were just the verbal ones; there was a page of printed announcements in the worship guide as well.

We make a clear distinction between “having gathered and preparing our hearts for worship.” Our call comes after the announcements, as the choral introit brings us to focus. Many of the elements stay the same: an opening hymn, a prayer of confession and words of assurance, the Psalm of the Day, the offering, the children’s sermon, another hymn, the prayers of the people, the scripture reading, the sermon, and the benediction. Today we had some added extras (as we often do): a baptism, a liturgical dance, and Communion (which happens every first Sunday). After church, the storm didn’t stop: Coffee Hour, Teaching Parish Committee, another youth group gathering, Confirmation, and a couple of other ad hoc meeitngs. Ginger and I drove out of the parking lot about one.

Ginger is a very gifted, dancer, choreographer, and worship leader. Though she has danced most of her life, today was the second time (I think) that she has danced here in Marshfield. She, along with Dana (one of our seminarians) and Heather (our CE Minister) danced to a song my friend Billy and I wrote called “Twenty-One Times.” We got the idea for the song from reading Paul Bowles’ wonderful novel, The Sheltering Sky, and this quote in particular:

Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply part of your being that you, that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

Our take on his sentiment, which resonated deeply with us came out this way:

she saw the sun go down twenty-one times
twenty-one times in thirty-five years
she saw the sun go down
she thought there’d be a million
and she thought that she would see them
but she saw the sun go down twenty-one times

she stayed and danced all night only one time
only one time in thirty-five years
she stayed and danced all night
the moonlight fell like laughter
on her happy ever after
but she stayed and danced all night only one time

and over new England
geese are flying south
a November night fall
settles round about
and a lighthouse calls another home

she walked away from love so many times
so many times times in thirty-five years
she walked away from love
and hearing lesser voices
she turned them into choices
but she walked away from love so many times

and over new England
geese are flying south
a November night fall
settles round about
and a lighthouse calls another home

The woman in the song was thirty-five because that’s how old Billy and I were when we wrote the song. Fifteen years and some 5,500 sunsets later, I still believe what we wrote. If, as they sang in RENT, life can be measured “in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee,” then it can be measured in coffee hours, children sermons, hymns, and prayer requests. I’ve been alive for almost 2,600 Sundays: 2,600 morning worships, 2,600 choral anthems, 2,600 invocations, 9,000 hymns, and about 25,000 announcements.

There are days I grow weary of the details that require attention in order to live in community. What matters to some does not matter as much to me, and vice versa. I always wish Church Council Meeting was shorter and I have no idea how to make sense of the Treasurer’s Report, even though he works hard to make it make sense. Our faith will not thrive because of political lobbying efforts, nor will it crash and burn because of public spectacles like the one we saw this past week. Our faith lives and thrives in the everyday motions of its people between every sunrise and sunset.

For two millennia, Christians have come to the Communion Table and fed one another as we did again today. As Ginger offered us the bread, in an unscripted moment, she said, “If you’ve ever felt alone, broken, hurt, isolated, judged based on your appearance or by your behaviors, this is the place of acceptance and grace where you are welcome, a place you can trust. You are loved. Take and eat.”

Over New England, the geese are flying south and I’m writing as another November nightfall settles around me. I’m grateful that part of the way I learned to mark time in my life is in counting how many sunsets must pass until I can say, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord.’”

Oh – I wish you could have seen the dance; it was amazing.

Peace,
Milton

One of the first churches I remember going to regularly was the Argyle Road Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia. We went there while my parents were in language school before we began going to the predominantly African churches. The church was a British Baptist Church, which was different from Southern Baptist life in several ways, mostly cultural. The services were in English. Two things stand out to me: one, the ushers did not pass offering plates, but velvet pouches that had short handles on either side. You took one handle, put your money in the pouch, and then held out the handle for the next person to take. (It was also quite fun to stick your arm all the way down to the bottom and jingle the change.)

The second thing was a hymn I never heard in Baptist life: “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” by Lesbia Scott. (Listen here.)

I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green;
they were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.

They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and his love made them strong;
and they followed the right for Jesus’ sake
the whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
and there’s not any reason, no, not the least,
why I shouldn’t be one too.

They lived not only in ages past;
there are hundreds of thousands still.
The world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
for the saints of God are just folk like me,
and I mean to be one too.

I have no doubt that I’m probably the millionth blogger to quote the hymn on this All Saints’ Day, but I’m still captured by its imagery. I had never thought about a “shepherdess on the green” until I sang this song. Living in Africa made the line about being “slain by a fierce wild beast” feel plausible. My favorite lines still make me smile:

You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea

Even though I didn’t think I had ever been down a lane and had only just learned from our British friends about afternoon tea, there was something so wonderfully ordinary about her list that made sainthood seem simple. Bill Reynolds, one of my seminary professors, wrote:

Lesbia Scott wrote hymns for her three children during the 1920s as expressions of their faith. Never intended for publication, many were written in response to the children’s own requests. They would ask, ‘Mum, make a hymn for a picnic,’ or ‘Mum, make a hymn for a foggy day.’

‘I sing a song of the saints of God’ was intended for use on saints’ days to reinforce the fact that saints not only lived in the distant past but may also live and work in everyday lives.

Three years ago, Ginger gave me Iconography classes for Christmas. Chris Gosey was my teacher. He still is when we can find time to get together. One of the first things I learned was icons were considered “windows into heaven”: ways to find God. The point was not to worship the icon as if it were a sacred relic, but to focus on it so that it pointed you to God. The spiritual practice of writing the icons has been crucial for me in dealing with my depression. In that practice, I also learned that the darkest colors are laid down first and then you “paint to the light.” I have held on to that image tightly.

The paint we use is almost translucent, so it takes painting each line over and over – about fifteen to twenty times – for the lighter colors to establish themselves against the darker background. After hours and hours, a face begins to emerge from the darkness and the icon takes shape.

Chet Raymo wrote a wonderful book called The Soul of the Night, in which he talks about standing underneath the night sky and wondering how there could be so many stars in the heavens and yet there was still darkness. There was enough light in the sky to chase the darkness away, but it was still dark. And then he said he realized what was happening: all the light has just not gotten here yet. The light of the stars, much like the light of the lines painted again and again, will come in time.

I sing a song of the saints of God because we, too, are light not fully arrived. In a world with so many who say they follow Jesus, why is there still poverty and injustice? Why do people live and die alone? Why are we at war? Why is love not our common currency? There is still more light yet to break forth.

And so we must keep singing.

Peace,
Milton