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sing to me

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
sing to me

Since I wrote my last post, I have been thinking about songs that would give melody to the symphony of emotions that accompany my decision to leave my job. As I said, I feel sad and hopeful and anxious and sad. I’ve gone through a lot of songs that have offered comfort and courage, but as I began to put the list together I began to realize that I had a song list of old guys writing, in one way or another, about making sense of life as it stretches out. Some of these are old favorites, even expected. All of them sound like hymns to me right now.

Our opening hymn is “Rewrite” by Paul Simon, mostly because of the overarching metaphor of the song and the lines that say, “Ohh, thank you–I had no idea that you were there.” Here are a few more of the words:

I’m workin’ on my rewrite, that’s right
Gonna change the ending
Gonna throw away my title
And toss it in the trash
Every minute after midnight
All the time I’m spending is just for
workin’ on my rewrite, that’s right
Gonna turn it into cash

I said
help me, help me
help me, help me
ohh thank you
I had no idea
that you were there

when I said
help me, help me
help me, help me
ohhh thank you
for listening to my prayer

Kris Kristofferson has written a lot of great songs, but this one is my favorite, in particular for the words of the opening verse and the gratitude to God “for the artist that you are and the man you made in me.

wide awake and feeling mortal
at this moment in the dream
that old man there in the mirror
and my shaky self-esteem

here today and gone tomorrow
that’s the way it’s got to be
with an empty blue horizon
for as far as I can see

God Almighty here I am
am I where I ought to be
I’ve begun to soon descend
like the sun into the sea
and I thank my lucky stars
from here to eternity
for the artist that you are
and the man you made of me

James Taylor was a much younger man when he wrote “Secret o’ Life,” but it takes on a new life to hear him sing it as he has aged so gracefully. And yes, it is a lovely ride.

the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
any fool can do it, there ain’t nothing to it.
nobody knows how we got to the top of the hill.
but since we’re on our way down,
we might as well enjoy the ride.

the secret of love is in opening up your heart.
it’s okay to feel afraid, but don’t let that stand in your way.
‘cause anyone knows that love is the only road.
and since we’re only here for a while,
might as well show some style.
give us a smile.

isn’t it a lovely ride? Sliding down, gliding down,
try not to try too hard, it’s just a lovely ride

“Some Dreams” is a song about dreams and baseball and the truth that not everything goes our way, but some things do. Steve Earle knows of what he sings.

when I was a little guy
my daddy told me “Mister,
don’t ever try to climb too high
‘cause it’s the fall that gets ya
and some dreams can never come true
they’ll never come true”

well, I heard every word he said
but I don’t guess I listened
but every time I banged my head
against the wall or system
yeah, some dreams don’t ever come true
don’t ever come true
but some dreams do

if you just hang on
and your heart is true
and your hope is strong

well, just because you’ve been around
and had your poor heart broken
that’s no excuse for lyin’ there
before the last word’s spoken
cause some dreams don’t ever come true
don’t ever come true
aw, but some dreams do

“Working Prayer” is one of Mac McAnally’s more recent songs. It is a prayer worth sharing.

I want to look back
and still keep on moving forward
whatever I lack
I want to make up for somehow
and when I get off track
I want to find a way back on it
I want to be smack
in the middle of here and now

when they lay me down
and put a marker on that ground
let some good things grow around me there
that’s my working prayer

The last two songs are the songs most of you would probably name if you were asked what songs I would choose. My favorite story about “Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine is about the time I was singing it and introduced the song by saying, “I think I identify with this song as much as any song I know.” Then I sang the first line: “I am an old woman named after my mother.”

there’s flies in the kitchen
I can hear ’em there buzzin’
and I ain’t done nothing
since I woke up today

how the hell can a person
go to work in the morning
then come home in the evening
and have nothing to say?

make me an angel that flies from Montgomery
make me a poster of an old rodeo
just give me one thing that I can hold on to
to believe in this livin’ is just a hard way to go

Our closing hymn is “The Cape” by Guy Clark. One of these days I’m going to get one.

he’s old and grey with a flour sack cape
tied all around his head
he’s still jumpin’ off the garage
will be till he’s dead
all these years the people said
he’s actin’ like a kid
he did not know he could not fly
so he did

he’s one of those who knows that life
is just a leap of faith
spread your arms and hold your breath
always trust your cape

Thanks for all of the words of kindness, compassion, and encouragement.

Peace,
Milton

choose to lose

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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14
choose to lose

“Choose your losses or lose your choices.”

About this time of the year in 1977 I was called to be the pastor of Pecan Grove Baptist Church, a small rural congregation west of Waco; between Oglesby and Mound, to be more exact. In early May of that year, I was ordained. The church celebrated its centennial soon after I started, and every pastor in their century of existence had been a rookie.

I pastored there for a little over four years. Soon after I started–it may have been after my ordination service–my dad said something that stuck with me in more situations than just church work. He said, “We both know you are not going to stay here the rest of your life, but if you want to have a meaningful ministry, you have to live like you are. Don’t start looking for what’s next. Be here like you are going to stay here.”

As someone who had moved his whole life, the idea of staying anywhere for long felt foreign. I was rootless in ways it would take years for me to understand. Still, I took his words to heart, not only at Pecan Grove, but in my time as a chaplain at Baylor Medical Center, as a teacher at Charlestown High and Winchester as well, in the various kitchens where I worked, and at the two Apple Stores.

Six years ago, when the opportunity came to work as an editor for Church Publishing, I settled in there as well. I felt like I had landed my dream job: playing with words, doing theology, and being an encourager for a living. I have had a chance to work with over fifty different authors, some on multiple books, that have offered the world important words about things that matter. I also got to hang around in midtown Manhattan once a week and go exploring at lunchtime to see what I could find within walking distance of Madison Avenue and E. 34th Street. My niece-in-law said, “It’s a movie job: you’re an editor in New York and you live in Connecticut.”

I started the job the summer before my sixtieth birthday and, as I had done in my other jobs, settled in to stay. I have imagined I would read and encourage well into my seventies, but, this time around, I am not going to get to stay as long as I thought. One June 30, about two weeks shy of my sixth anniversary, I will wrap up my time as an editor that works in New York.

Since I am now sixty-five, the verb that gets applied to my action is retire, but that word means something other than the choice I am making. I wrote a few weeks ago about words I had been offered from a friend that begin this post: “You either choose your losses or you lose your choices.” I am doing the former: choosing not to stay so I can see what might be.And it is a choice that brings mixed emotions–grief, hope, gratitude, sadness, and even as little anxiety.

The picture is one Ginger took as I was crossing the street after my interview. The publisher told me I had written the best cover letter he had ever read. I was full of hope about a new opportunity. That hope persists.

I have some ideas about what might come next. Writing more certainly tops the list, as well as hoping I can convince people to let me come speak about mixing the metaphors we use to define our lives, and then there’s always hoping I can cook for folks in some form or fashion. But for now, I am going to stay here on the edge of goodbye and make the best of these days and all that they hold.

Peace,
Milton

honest thomas

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
honest thomas

In some of my writing, I have talked about the ways I think Judas is treated unfairly in the gospels. None of the writers can mention him without reminding everyone that he betrayed Jesus. Thomas is the other disciple that gets misrepresented, I think, more by the generations that followed than by the gospel writers, perhaps, because he continues to be “Doubting Thomas,” and there’s so much more to the story.

Here’s what I found this week as I read about him again.

__________________________________________

When I was a kid, the family that lived next door to us had four boys. My brother and I fell in the middle of them age wise, so we spent a lot of time together. The youngest was name Richard, but everybody called him Chubbs. But he wasn’t fat. I think it had started when he was little. He grew tall and thin as a preteen, but he never lost the nickname.

He was always Chubbs.

I think about him whenever I read about Thomas because most all of my life I have heard him called “Doubting Thomas,” which I have never felt was a fair take on the guy. When it comes to gospel portrayals, Thomas and Judas are probably not treated fairly. Since the stories were written down years after Jesus had gone, none of the gospel writers can mention Judas without making sure we remember he was the one who betrayed Jesus. Truth is all the men around Jesus betrayed him in one way or another. The women were the ones who stayed true, but they got written out of the story for the most part. And then, the one story about Thomas is this one, and he ends up being called Doubting Thomas–a name that has outlived him by centuries.

This is the last story in John’s gospel. It immediately follows Mary’s encounter with Jesus that we talked about last week and then John signs off, hoping we will find faith in Christ. Because of that, I want to cut the gospel writer a little slack because I don’t think he meant to stick Thomas with the nickname anymore that Richard’s parents thought Chubbs would last for life. I say that because this is the closing scene of the book and not just another episode.

The first part takes place on the evening of the day they found the tomb empty–Easter night, if you will. Even though they knew Jesus was alive, they had not seen much of him. They were back in the upper room with the doors locked. They were still scared. They weren’t sure of anything. And Jesus came through the door–literally–and said, “Peace be with you,” and then blessed them with a calling to go and love others; actually, to forgive others.

For whatever reason, Thomas wasn’t there. When he came back, they told him they had seen Jesus and he said, “I need to see for myself to be able to trust the story.” Though John doesn’t give us details, it feels like they must have given him a hard time about not trusting what they had seen. But remember, these people had locked themselves in a room out of fear because they hadn’t trusted the story either. They didn’t have room to talk when it came to hassling Thomas about trust.

I hope you are picking up that I am using the word trust instead of believe because the distinction matters to me. The Greek word means more than what the word believe means to us. We have made belief an intellectual assent, a heady thing. I think trust is a better translation because trust is a risk. Something is at stake when we trust someone else.

Thomas wasn’t trying to make sure he was right in his belief; he wanted assurances that he could trust that Jesus was alive, so he said, “I want to see him and touch him.”

A week later–so, on this very day–all of them were back in the same room and this time Thomas was with them. Since Jesus came through the door without opening it, I am going to assume they were still locking themselves in. Nobody in the room was living into their trust quite yet. Jesus offered peace to them and then turned to Thomas. He didn’t admonish him or shame him or make a speech. He just said, “You wanted to touch me. Here I am. Trust instead of distrust.”

Thomas didn’t life a finger. He just said, “My Lord and my God.”

Jesus then said words that have taken on a life of their own, even outside the world of faith: “Blessed are those who have not seen and still believe.” I want to rephrase those words in terms of trust. Blessed are those who have not seen and are still willing to trust.”

Instead of Doubting Thomas, I think we would do better to call him Honest Thomas, if we want to give him a nickname, because trust is hard work.

If we are going to share in Thomas’ confession, “My Lord and my God,” then we have to learn how to live in trust, and the way Jesus us taught us to live teaches that to live out our trust in God means to learn to trust one another in Jesus’ name.

One of the things that strikes me about this story is that Jesus came looking for Thomas, which means Jesus had gotten word that Thomas was having a hard time. Instead of talking around Thomas, or telling someone else to tell him what he was doing wrong, Jesus showed up in the room, looked Thomas straight in the eye, and said, “Put your finger in my side. Look at my hands.”

He dealt directly with Thomas.

If we want to grow as a community of faith “passionately committed to Christ,” as we say in our mission statement, it starts right here: we commit to building trust with one another.

I want to say again that to follow Christ is not about intellectual belief in something, it’s about trusting God and one another. A faith that matters, that changes lives, is one lived out in relationships, which means one committed to building trust.

Thomas was open about what he was struggling with, and when he said he couldn’t trust without physical proof, he didn’t say, “But don’t tell Jesus I said that.” He was open and honest and he showed up in the room with the others so Jesus could find him. Jesus, as I said, didn’t send word to Thomas, he came and found him so they could talk face to face.

Perhaps you are thinking, “This is the second Sunday of Easter and he’s talking about direct communication?

Yes. Yes, I am.

If we are passionate about living out our faith, it will show in the way we relate to each other. If we don’t trust each other to speak the truth in love, then we will find it hard to trust God, too, because God is not off somewhere looking down, God is here among us. If we want to find new life in Christ, we will find it in building trust with one another. If you want to see this congregation grow spiritually and numerically as you get ready for a new pastor, then work on trusting each other. Speak directly. Don’t give or take anonymous feedback. Feedback that does not offer the possibility of conversation and understanding is sniper fire. It destroys trust, and thus destroys community.

To be a part of the Body of Christ together means to choose each other over the history of the way things have been done, over personal preferences, over opinions. To choose life together in Christ means asking questions rather than jumping to conclusions, listening first and then speaking, and assuming positive intent when we don’t understand what is happening.

The difficulty of the past couple of years has left us all tired. We are all exhausted. We are all hurting. We are all doing what we can. Locking ourselves in a room like the disciples did sounds like it might be an option worth considering. However, they hid in fear, not trust, and Jesus found them to say, “I called you to more than this.” Then he came back for Thomas so that he knew he belonged as well.

When Jesus said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and are still willing to trust,” he was talking about us. He is not going to come barging in the room while we are all here so we can be sure it’s him. If we want to see Jesus, we are going to have to trust each other. We are going to have to incarnate the love of Christ in what we do and say and think if we want to see Jesus.

“Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus said. And you remember what love looks like, don’t you? We read those words again two weeks ago:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Let us love one another in hope and trust. Let us speak the truth in love, but first, let us learn to listen in love, to ask compassionate questions, to do everything we can to let love burst in and chase out fear. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

it’s all in the name

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
it’s all in the name

Easter feels like it should be an easier Sunday to preach than it is. The magnitude of the day makes it feels like I should have something big to say, but the reality is the story is quite simple and, in its simplicity, profound. So here’s what I have to say this day.

______________________________

When it comes to what happened that morning, the three accounts share some details and differ on others.

The things they say in common are that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb at sunrise to find the grave opened and empty, and that she went to tell the men, who were hiding in the room where they had shared the Last Supper with Jesus.

In Luke’s gospel, Mary is accompanied by Mary the mother of James, Joanna (a woman Jesus had healed who had remained as a follower), and “the other women,” and they were greeted at the open tomb by an angel who told them that Jesus was not there and they went to tell the eleven disciples and “the others.”

In Matthew says that Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” which is a nickname she loved, got to the tomb and there was an earthquake and then an angel who rolled the stone back and sat on it to declare that Christ was risen. If Matthew were alive today, I have no doubt he would be a screenwriter.

John’s version, which we read this morning, is the least populated and the most personal. Only Mary Magdalene is at the tomb, which was already open when she arrived. No angel is mentioned. When she saw that tomb was open she ran back to Peter and the other unnamed disciple to tell them she thought the grave had been robbed. The three of them ran back to the tomb and the men ran in. Mary stood outside, weeping. Then she heard a voice ask why she was crying and she said because Jesus had been taken and she did not know where.

She did not go to the tomb expecting life; she went expecting death and its aftermath.

She turned to face the person who had spoken to her, but did not realize it was Jesus. She implored him to tell her what had happened. Then Jesus called her name–“Mary”–and she knew who he was.

No earthquake. No angels. In the middle of the cemetery and the confusion, she heard her name and she knew he was alive.

She had come to the tomb expecting death and she found life.

One of the things we know is that it was many years–sixty or seventy–after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection that the gospel stories were written down. In the mean time, the stories were passed down orally, as important stories were in that culture. I wonder if the various gospel traditions took hold because there were some years when it came time to celebrate the Resurrection that they needed an earthquake and a cinematic angel and the reminder that sometimes God shows up big and bold. Then there were other years when they needed the reminder that the story was about more than the small group of men and women who followed Jesus, so they told the story that included the other women at the tomb and the others in the upper room as well. Then came the years when, perhaps, life had been so heavy and hard that all they needed was the story about Mary weeping alone and hearing Jesus call her name.

He called her name–“Mary”–and she knew he was alive because he knew who she was, even when she didn’t recognize him.

And it’s a good version of the story for us this year, I think, after two years of pandemic life, the war in Ukraine, the continuing rancor in our country, and everything else that feels like an earthquake and a hurricane and a nor’easter all blown into one. We have come to expect death, or something like it, on a regular basis, even as we have tried to practice resurrection. it isn’t hard to identify with Mary: “They have taken my Lord and I don’t know where they have laid him.”

We are here this morning to hear God call our names, to offer life where we have expected death.

One hymn writer tried to imagine what it was like to be Mary in the story and wrote

I come to the garden alone
while the dew is still on the roses
and the voice I hear calling on my ear
the Son of God disposes

and he walks with me and he talks with me
and he tells me I am his own
and the joy we share as we tarry there
none other has ever known
(*in the service, I sang the hymn from the pulpit)

The only thing the hymnist got wrong is that the joy of resurrection wasn’t limited to Mary in that moment. On this resurrection morning, God is calling your name, my name, every name who will stop and listen to say love is stronger than death, to say nothing can separate us from the love of God. Absolutely nothing.

Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: chipping in

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
lenten journal: chipping in

I worked from home today because there wasn’t time to get back from New York and make it to the Maundy Thursday service in Westbrook, where I am interim pastor. I met a friend for coffee and as I was walking home I noticed a crew taking down a dead tree next to the coffee shop across the street. Then I noticed they were also working on two trees that stand between our house and our neighbors. They are–well, were–big trees, probably sixty feet tall. We’ve heard talk for a couple of years that they needed to come down, but nothing happened until today.

As I worked I could hear the hum of the chain saw and the grind of the wood chipper that made me want to quit work and watch Fargo again–except if the guys in Fargo had had this chipper they wouldn’t have been caught. The tree guy was loading limbs that were six or eight inches in diameter and the chipper ate them right up.

Though we are still a ways from really planting, our garden crew is getting things ready. Tom, the one who actually knows what we are doing, is growing seedlings at his house. We are making plans to put up a rabbit-proof fence so we can enjoy the green beans this year, and we have plans this weekend to mark the beds and begin to wake things up a bit. As I watched the chips fly into the back of the big truck, I thought I might as well ask if they would be willing to let us use them for the garden. And they were. By late afternoon, our side yard felt strangely expansive and I had a huge pile of wood chips next to the garden.

On Saturday, we will begin to line the paths between the beds in our garden with the wood chips, but more than that, they will, over time, turn back into soil. We also have plans the spread mushroom spore on the chips so we can harvest even from our pathways. The trees are gone and they live on, even though they will be forgotten, for the most part. We will miss them, and we will get used to the space between our houses, or we will plant new trees that will grow beyond our time here–because we will live on and be forgotten as well.

In the middle of his amazing poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Wendell Berry writes,

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

And then the poem closes with this line:

Practice resurrection

Perhaps to live and die and live again has more to do with wood chips than banking on eternal life. Resurrection isn’t our ticket out, it is a statement of solidarity with all that is, all of creation, all of life. We are stardust. We are compost. We are created in the image of God, resurrection practitioners.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: touch screen

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1
lenten journal: touch screen

Since I get on the train around 5:30 in the morning, most of us riding into New York use the time to sleep–until the train stops at 125th Street, and then we start to move about. Some get their stuff together but stay seated, and others (like me) stand up near the door just to stretch out legs for the last fifteen minutes of the ride, and to be able to leave the train quickly. As we stand there, almost everyone passes the time by staring at a screen.

No one makes eye contact or dares attempt a conversation.

It has not always been that way (the part about staring at a screen), but it’s hard to remember those days. I say that more as an observation than a criticism; it is hard to remember life before our handheld computers that we continue to call phones. I can remember always having a book in my bag when I rode the subway regularly in Boston. I looked around this morning and no one I could see had a book. Only a screen.

We are being changed by our technology, but that is not a new thing.

When I got to my desk, I pulled out the book I had with me and Ilia Delio had this to say:

Our addiction to technology is causing us to unmake the world at an alarming rate. Perhaps most important, we are losing the capacity to love by way of forgiveness and reconciliation; that is, we are losing the ability to transcend our partial lives by way of love in order to create a new future together. Political, economic, and social unrest continues to spiral, thanks to technology, and we cannot find a means to slow down or turn in a new direction.

Her words made a rather gruesome connection in my brain, taking me back to my classroom at Charlestown High School in Boston and a presentation by folks from Facing History and Ourselves, an amazing group that helps students understand what it means to be a compassionate participant in life. The presenter talked about the Battle of the Somme, a horrendous event in World War I that marked the first use of machine guns by the Germans–a change in technology.

In one day, almost 20,000 British soldiers were killed and 57,000 injured–the worst day in the history of the British Army. Part of the reason they died was they didn’t understand the implications of the technology they faced and they walked right into the bullets.

Since then, how we wage war has become more and more distanced so that now someone operates something akin to a video game somewhere and bombs the hell out of someplace else on the other side of the world and then goes home for dinner. The disconnect belies the impact of their actions.

The same is true, it seems to me, when it comes to hitting send or retweet.

I know that analogy is overstated, but when I think about the escalation in division and rancor in our country, about our struggle to listen with intention or to focus our attention, I wonder if our lack of ability to communicate is tied to the rapid changes in technology that have us living through our devices, or at least allowing the disconnect they bring to belie the impact of our words.

I have many reasons in my life to be thankful for social media, not the least of which is the chance to reconnect with people from all the different addresses of my life. It’s not all bad. It’s just too much too quickly for us to understand how it is changing us.

After the 2016 election, we were shocked that Trump chose to tweet rather than to make speeches. Now that is how world leaders make announcements, and reply to them. Are we starting to think that Twitter is actual communication?

The question is rhetorical.

What I wanted to get to in this post is more than a cautionary tale. As I continued reading Ilia Delio, she asked,

But if love is our truest nature, and technology is changing that nature, how can we renew our deepest reality of love? This is a question for our age and an important one to engage. For the type of love that mends broken hearts is not superficial; it cannot be controlled electronically by the touch of a button. It is a decision to love beyond what is beneficial or satisfying to one’s ego; it is to love by way of sacrifice. . . . It requires our utmost attention, our hearts and our wills; this type of love requires total self-gift.

One of the things I know about myself is I rarely do one things at a time when I am on a screen. Put me in a Zoom meeting and I am answering email and writing texts while I am watching those on camera. It is hard for me to give my utmost attention, which means I am not offering my best. I am not making my best self-gift.

Ilia says there is more riding on that than I thought.

God will not mend our broken hearts without us, but God will continue to be with us, challenging us with the question: What do you want? How we choose to love in a world of distrust will affect our future, a future that we will create together or not at all.

May our hearts break and heal together.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: paper cuts

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
lenten journal: paper cuts

Back when we were youth ministers, my friend Burt had a metaphor about relationships (talking to young people about relating to their parents and vice versa) that I have not forgotten. He said building trust was like a savings account: you have to build it up by making small deposits in the way you deal with everyday interactions. If there comes a time when that trust is tested–when you have to make a withdrawal, so to speak–you have something to withdraw from.

I thought about those days because I read this article from The Atlantic that caught me with its title:

“The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late”

and then the teaser:

The existence of love, trust, respect, and safety in a relationship is often dependent on moments you might write off as petty disagreements.

In the heart of the article, Matthew Fray says,

The reason my marriage fell apart seems absurd when I describe it: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink.

It makes her seem ridiculous and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations. But it wasn’t the dishes, not really—it was what they represented.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of times, my wife tried to communicate that something was wrong. That something hurt. But that doesn’t make sense, I thought. I’m not trying to hurt her; therefore, she shouldn’t feel hurt.

We didn’t go down in a fiery explosion. We bled out from 10,000 paper cuts. Quietly. Slowly.

His discussion of dishes reminds me of how my mother and father used to joke that what was going to split them up was one rolled the toothpaste up from the end and the other squeezed it out of the middle, but it really was a joke. They cared for each other well.

This post, however, is not about marriage; it’s about how the same principle of paper cuts applies to relationships in general, much like the trust bank wasn’t just about kids and parents.

Fray talks about the longterm impact of having the Same Fight, which I feel like I see happening a great deal in the relationships that make up life in families, marriages, congregations, work places. It’s when we keep doing the same thing, or not doing the same thing, even when we have been told it punches someone else’s buttons.

When we’re having The Same Fight, positive intent, or chalking up any harm caused as accidental, can be just as much of a trust killer as more overtly harmful actions. It doesn’t matter whether we are intentionally refusing to cooperate with our spouse or legitimately unable to understand what’s wrong—the math results are the same. The net result of The Same Fight is more pain. Less trust. Regardless of anyone’s intentions.

In the exhaustion of the ongoing pandemic (it ain’t over yet!), it too often feels like Groundhog Day, and we, in our grief and exhaustion, keep having the Same Fight, maybe because we feel too tired to listen well. Or maybe, pandemic or not pandemic, we too easily fall into mansplaining when someone tries to tell us how they feel and we decide to explain why they shouldn’t feel that way instead of taking them seriously.

But we have to learn to take each other seriously because the only way we survive is together. We have to avoid the paper cuts and make deposits in the trust bank instead–pay attention to the little things and, as Walt Whitman said (and Ted Lasso quoted), be curious and not judgmental.

In that spirit, the closing words of the article are ones I will keep close.

If I had to distill the problems in failed relationships down to one idea, it would be our colossal failure to make the invisible visible, our failure to invest time and effort into developing awareness of what we otherwise might not notice in the busyness of daily life.

If I had known that this drinking-glass situation and similar arguments would actually end my marriage—that the existence of love, trust, respect, and safety in our marriage was dependent on these moments I was writing off as petty disagreements, I would have made different choices.

I could have communicated my love and respect for her by not leaving tiny reminders for her each day that she wasn’t considered. That she wasn’t remembered. That she wasn’t respected. I could have carefully avoided leaving evidence that I would always choose my feelings and my preferences over hers.

Grief and exhaustion are inflationary, which means it costs more to live these days, which means those trust bank deposits–the pocket-change gestures that add up–are crucial to our survival together. Listen hard. Pay attention. Ask good questions. Let folks around you know you see them and it matters right now–not when it’s too late. No one wants to die by paper cuts.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: red floppy shoes

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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5
lenten journal: red floppy shoes

Some days I can deal with the world and some days I struggle.

Tonight is a struggle. Today I read stories about how many states are pushing legislation similar to Florida’s homophobic (in this case, I think we need to redefine homocidal) “don’t say gay” law and another story about Russian troops carrying mobile crematoria into eastern Ukraine to burn evidence of their war crimes before human rights activists can document anything. But the president of France made an angry phone call and most every other Western country keeps trying to figure out how to make sure standing up against Russia doesn’t derail their economies, which means we are doing nothing. Oh, sorry–the US said we would take 100,000 refugees.

And we said it with a straight face.

Years ago, David LaMotte wrote a children’s book called White Flour that told the true story of a group in Knoxville, Tennessee who were trying to figure out how to respond to a Klux Klux Klan march in the city. They dressed as clowns and when the marchers yelled, “White power,” the clowns said, “Oh, we get it! White flour!” and they pulled out bags of flour, ripped them open, and threw them in the air. The Seussian poem goes on with the marchers continuing to yell and the clowns responding with imagination: white flowers, tight showers, wife power until . . .

The men in robes were sullen, they knew they’d been defeated
They yelled a few more times and then they finally retreated
And when they’d gone a kind policeman turned to all the clowns
And offered them an escort through the center of the town

The day was bright and sunny as most May days tend to be
In the hills of Appalachia down in Knoxville, Tennessee
People joined the new parade, the crowd stretched out for miles
The clowns passed out more flowers and made everybody smile

David wrote the book as a way to teach children about ways to respond to violence other than to be violent in return. The last verse says,

And what would be the lesson of that shiny southern day?
Can we understand the message that the clowns sought to convey?
Seems that when you’re fighting hatred, hatred’s not the thing to use!
So here’s to those who march on in their big red floppy shoes

War destroys imagination. Well, first it shrinks our vocabulary and then it destroys our imagination, until we end up sitting in front of a computer, as I am, writing about feeling helpless. The next sentence that comes to mind as I read what I just wrote is:

HELL, NO.

Not necessarily expansive vocabulary, but you get my point. What will it take to think imaginatively about what is happening in our world? Perhaps a better way to ask that question is, who is thinking imaginatively about our world and how can I get in touch with them? How can we all connect?

Ilia Delio says, “If we want a different world, we must be different people.”

One way to read that sentence is to say we must change. The other is to decide to be odd-balls, as in the Southern understanding of the word: well, he’s different.”

I wondered aloud to Ginger tonight what would happen if, instead of refugees fleeing Ukraine, everyone in the bordering countries or whoever could get there would flood the place, inhabit the war zones, and make the Russians kill them too if they were so intent on genocide. I know it’s a long shot, but it seems like it would feel a lot like the clowns in Knoxville, doing something that was an invitation to humanization for everyone involved.

We can’t take the high road as a nation when it comes to war crimes. Pick a war and we have aimed our guns and bombs at civilians. We may not have carried crematoria, but to take a sanctimonious posture at this point is not imaginative. Neither are the sanctions, since too many of the countries involved are still buying Russian fuel. And the financial channels that run through banks and multinational corporations will make sure that the money gets to where it needs to be so everyone can still get richer. Greed doesn’t have much imagination either.

If we want a different world, we must be different people.

My ranting aside (since anger is easier than despair), this post is much less a manifesto than it is a question: How can we imagine a different world? How can we be different in a way that will matter to Ukraine? (Which is not the only place in the world where such atrocities are taking place.)

Seems that when you’re fighting hatred, hatred’s not the thing to use!
So here’s to those who march on in their big red floppy shoes

Where do we find our big red floppy shoes?

Leave your answers in the comments, he said with a smile.

Peace,
Milton

 

 

lenten journal: un-discovered

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1
lenten journal: un-discovered

One of the stories I have repeated often (and I have a lot of stories I have repeated) is that when my father died one of the first things that crossed my mind was to call those I knew whose fathers had died before mine and say, “I’m sorry. I meant well in what I said to you, but I had no idea how this really felt.” I began to make a distinction between learning and discovering that has stayed with me. This is part of what I wrote in The Color of Together:

Though what I was feeling was unfamiliar, the books I read and the conversations I had made me realize I was walking well-travelled roads, which was both comforting and disquieting. I had landed on populated shores. I had not discovered anything new.

Like many of us, as a kid I was told that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America. He may have made the voyage, and even found a land that was not on his map, but the verb is wrong. He did not find a place that no one else had seen; he landed on a populated shore. He landed in the middle of someone else’s story. He set foot where people had lived for generations, where cultures and kingdoms had already come and gone. He learned. He found, perhaps. He became aware of, he explored. He condescended. But he didn’t discover a thing.

Neither have I, other than to say in the course of my life I have discovered some things about myself, though most of those were already apparent to people around me, so even here my choice of verb is tenuous. More often than not, I feel like Mark, Ray Kinsella’s brother-in-law in the movie Field of Dreams, who was fiercely opposed to Ray’s plowing under his corn to build the baseball diamond on his farm until he saw Doc Graham step off the field to save his niece’s life. All of a sudden, where he had once seen nothing but an empty ball field, he saw a diamond teeming with players.

In researching the book, I even came across a song written by a teacher named Nancy Schimmel who rewrote the 1492 I learned in school to drive the point home:

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue,
He didn’t know what he thought he knew
And someone was already here.

Columbus knew the world was round
So he looked for the East while westward bound,
But he didn’t find what he thought he found
And someone was already here.

The Inuit and Cherokee,
The Aztec and Menominee,
The Onondaga and the Cree;
Columbus sailed across the sea,
But someone was already here.

It isn’t like it was empty space,
Tainos met him face to face.
Could anyone discover the place
When someone was already here?

So tell me, who discovered what?
He thought he was in a different spot.
Columbus was lost, the Tainos were not;
They were already here.

The word discover has been on my mind over the past few weeks as I have been reading books on the new cosmology and quantum theology, mostly because of how little it is used. Scientists talk more about what they have learned, rather than what they have discovered because they know they are finding things that have been there all along.

Tonight, I looked it up in the etymological dictionary and here’s what I learned:

discover (v.)
c. 1300, discoveren, “divulge, reveal, disclose, expose, lay open to view, betray (someone’s secrets),” senses now obsolete, from stem of Old French descovrir “uncover, unroof, unveil, reveal, betray,” from Medieval Latin discooperire, from Latin dis- “opposite of” (see dis-) + cooperire “to cover up, cover over, overwhelm, bury” (see cover (v.)).

At first with a sense of betrayal or malicious exposure (discoverer originally meant “informant”). Also in Middle English used in literal senses, such as “to remove” (one’s hat, the roof from a building). The meaning “to obtain the first knowledge or sight of what was before not known,” the main modern sense, is by 1550s.

The “main modern sense of the word” came about during the age of European colonization. Perhaps the etymological dictionary is wrong to say the sense of the word that is more nefarious is now obsolete. Columbus claim of discovering the Caribbean rests on his dehumanizing choice to not see the people who were standing right in front of him, just as other colonists did in Africa, India, and South America. Discover carried a sense of ownership: finders keepers. The losers were the ones who had been there all along.

I get that “to obtain the first knowledge or sight of what was before not known” does not necessarily mean the person doing it has an evil intent, but I do think it is an invitation to arrogance, which leads to a sense of ownership, and that heads down a damaging road.

To say it more simply, just because it is new to me does not mean it’s new.

On the other hand, to say I learned something implies relationship, because I had to be taught. Even an awareness that comes when I am sitting alone in my office or riding in my car or taking my morning shower (please–someone create a waterproof note board so I can write down the ideas that come when I have soap in my eyes) was planted by something I read or saw or heard.

I’m not sure why I landed on this when I sat down to write, other than–because of my reading–these have been days rich with connections and understandings that are new to me even though they are not new. And as scientists come to fresh understandings about the universe, they have learned that what they have been able to verify was already at the heart of indigenous spirituality going back for centuries.

Once again, someone was already there, but this time they are not invisible.

in twenty-two hundred and twenty two
when milty read physics and cosmology too
he learned from thinkers and questioners who
knew that someone was already there

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: jazz funeral

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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3
lenten journal: jazz funeral

Palm Sunday is a day full of contradictions to me, particularly in the way we observe it as Jesus’ triumphal entry, because I don’t think triumph was a central word in Jesus’ vocabulary. As I read the story again this year, preparing to preach, I saw something I had not seen before, and that was the connection of his ride into town with the parable he told just before he climbed on the colt. Here’s my sermon.

_________________________________

Did you notice the way our passage began this morning?

After he had said all this . . .

Once again, we are picking up in the middle of the story and trying to figure out what is going on. Let me give you a quick rundown.

For the better part of six chapters, Jesus has been telling parables to describe how God works in the world and, correspondingly, how God is calling us to do the same. Along the way, a couple of healing stories are thrown in. The beginning of the chapter we read this morning–Luke 19–starts with Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, the tax collector who climbed a tree to see Jesus and then Jesus not only talked to him but invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’ house. Then Luke moves to another parable about a rich man who was leaving to go take control of another country (that didn’t want him to take control, but he was going to anyway). He called three of his servants and put each of them in charge of some money: one got ten minas (one mina was about three months wages, so two and a half years of salary), one got five minas, and one got one. He didn’t give them the money as a gift; he wanted them to keep his business going while he tried to pull of his hostile takeover. He also didn’t give much in the way of instruction other than to continue doing business with what they had. When he returned–after successfully forcing himself into power in the other country–he called them in to give account for their work.

The one with ten made ten more, and the master rewarded him by giving him more responsibility, though I’m not sure it was much of a reward. The one with five made five, and was also rewarded in the same manner. The one who was given the least amount, a single mina, returned it telling his master that he was scared of losing the money so he just hid it so he could return in unscathed.  The rich man took his mina and gave it to the one who had ten and then said he wanted the people who had fought against him in the other country brought in and executed in front of him.

And after Jesus finished that uplifting parable—without explaining it–he told his disciples to go into town (which was Bethany where he had raised Lazarus from the dead and where Mary had poured perfume on his feet) and get the colt they would find tied to a tree, which they did. Then they put their cloaks on the back of the colt and helped Jesus up on its back and they began the trek down through the Kidron Valley to the gates of Jerusalem, about a mile and three quarters.

Did you get that? Jesus’ ride didn’t take place in the city of Jerusalem. I have missed that detail before now. He was still outside the walls.

The road from Bethany to Jerusalem winds down from the Mount of Olives past the Garden of Gethsemane and then winds through a cemetery–an ancient burial ground that predated Jesus, which means the people who lined the path to see him were standing in a graveyard waving branches throwing their cloaks in front of him. It was more akin to a New Orleans jazz funeral than a triumphant parade.

With that image in mind, Iet’s go back to the parable Jesus told before he got on the horse.

As Jesus was preparing to go into Jerusalem for what he was pretty sure was the last time because the unwanted oppressive Roman government had grown weary of his impact, he told a parable about an unwanted ruler who was only concerned with getting more for himself.

I know–to our American ears, so trained to listen for anything that supports the Protestant Work Ethic and the American Dream, it’s easy to hear this as a story about how hard work pays off. But it doesn’t. Not in this story. The rich man gave the servants money to invest for him, not for themselves. They were running his business, not profit sharing. He didn’t give the mina from the man who had hidden it to the one who had doubled his ten as a reward; he gave it to him because he was better at making money. And he didn’t punish the servant who just held on to the money, or at least not in the parable. He hears about his investments and then decides he wants to see the people who resisted his takeover executed right in front of him. This was a wicked, evil, mean, and nasty man.

He is not a symbol for God in the parable, and we are not the servants in this story. Everyone in the parable loses at the hands of the unwelcome and unjust ruler who found a way to crush everyone.

And after this parable about the damage of unbridled greed and power, Jesus got on a colt to ride to Jerusalem–but not because he thought he was going to be the conqueror.

The ride down through the cemetery and into Jerusalem was not triumphant. We have named it that because we, like many of those lining his path, keep hoping God is going to start making things go our way so we can be the ones in power, but Jesus knew better. He knew he was going to lose, just like everyone in the parable did, and he went anyway.

He knew that triumph and power would not have the last word. When some around him said he ought to tell his followers to keep it down with the hosannas, perhaps another way of saying, “Pipe down or you’re going to get in trouble,” Jesus said, if the people quit singing the rocks will cry out, which is another way of saying love is the last and strongest word–but not just in a “someday” sense.

One of the sayings I love is “Love wins in the end; if love hasn’t won yet, it’s not the end.” I trust that is true, but I also think love is not something we have to wait for. In the past few decades, we have learned a great deal about the universe that we are a part of. We’ve learned that trees talk to each other and feed and care for each other, sometimes over great distances. Scientists have found forests are best seen as one large organism rather than a bunch of individual trees. They share nutrients, support those who are sick; they take care of each other.

Instead of thinking matter is made of particles, scientists have learned that everything is made of energy–of spirit if you will. And again, they are finding that everything is connected. Relationship is the foundational building block of the universe at every level. Like the forests, we are one big organism built to take care of one another. Some scientists and theologians even say it this way: love is the fundamental force in the cosmos. Hold that thought for a moment and listen to the words of Paul:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

This morning as we gather, Russia is still mercilessly attacking Ukraine–and that is not the only spot in the world where people are being brutalized by power and wealth, its’ just the one we have chosen to notice. Our country is a war zone of its own. We have become incapable of most any kind of compassionate communication. We are broken, but we keep acting like we’re not, as though that will somehow make it okay. To say we have much in common with those waving branches in the graveyard is an understatement.

The trajectory of the week ahead as we follow Jesus into Jerusalem means this sermon doesn’t have a happy ending. Jesus is going to die. The men around him will all run away. The women will stay. And all of them will lose, just like the folks in the parable. As I have said a couple of times this Lenten season, resurrection requires death. We are not marking a triumphal entry today, we are a part of a funeral procession, and–not but–if we listen close, we can hear the rocks are singing and the trees talking and the cosmos humming because

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

One more time: Love never ends. Amen.

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