don't eat alone

As David Letterman was finishing up his years on late night television, one of his last guests was Tom Waits, who wrote a new song for Dave called “Take One Last Look.” I wept as I listened because Waits captured the mixture of feelings that flow as we move from one chapter of life to the next. Little did I know Ginger and I were about to make a move of our own. Here is the lyric:

let’s watch the sun come up in another town
try our luck a little further down
leave the cards on the table
leave the bread on the plate
put your hand on the gearshift
put your foot off the brake

and take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look
oh, take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look

I’ll bet we’re something that the wind can carry
the arrow points a way across the waiting prairie
this car looks like it could give us a good run
our choice to leave was a good one

and take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look
oh, take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look

let’s look forward to the lights that are new
the world is a ribbon of road for you
all towns have churches and tire shops
they put up speed limit signs and they hire cops
I love to see the wind in your hair
all we ever need we can get anywhere

and take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look
oh, take one last look
at the place that you are leaving
take one last look

When we decided to move to Guilford, Connecticut the song came back to my mind. I asked Phil Cook, a songwriter/musician and all around good guy, to help me record the song, which he did—and played guitar as well. My intention was to have this project completed before we left town, or at least soon after, but that was not to be. I finished tonight, and am very aware of how much I miss the friends and chosen family we left behind. I have said many times Durham is the most encouraging city I know. Tonight, I feel the ties that bind and am grateful we got to live there for eight years.

Peace,
Milton

Packing up a house is an archaeological expedition through the layers of a life in one place, not only because of the collections of things that have to be sorted and assigned a destination, but also because of the stories that get unearthed.

One that came to the surface is a favorite from my days as the youth minister at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth. One Wednesday evening I was walking down the hall of the building getting ready for the night’s activities when I passed Hazel, one of the young people, coming the other way. For no particular reason other than to greet her, I said, “Hey—I like you and I tell people that even when you’re not around,” and we smiled at each other and both kept going in our set directions.

A couple of days later, I received a card from her in which she took the time to tell me she had had a really bad day at school and my passing comment in the hall had reminded her she was loved. “You made my day,” she said. I can remember sitting at my desk with the card and thinking I needed to mark the moment. Incidental contact had lasting implications. I meant what I said to Hazel, but I wasn’t aiming for a life changing encounter, yet the things we set in motion with our words and actions—however small they might seem—are out of our control in some sense.

As Ginger was digging through the layers of life here on West Trinity, she found a letter my father had written to me in August 2006. We were still in Marshfield in those days, and my depression was still heavy. I had started writing about it on this blog in December of the previous year. The public nature of my disclosure was new to me and to my family. My dad was not one who easily spoke about his feelings; when he needed to get to something, he wrote it down. The letter is full of compassion and empathy. He was working hard to connect with me, telling me about times in his own life when he found the darkness visible. He reminded me that his best friend battled depression most of his life. And then in the last paragraphs he wrote:

What I pray you will get from this letter is the understanding that you are loved, accepted, and prayed for. To express to you how proud I am of you would be impossible. You are the most multi-gifted person I have ever known. My heart overflows with memories of joy and excitement in watching you grow and develop.

In reading some of your blogs it seems that I am the source of some of your heartache. If so, I am saying to you I am very sorry. I can say in all honesty that not in any way did I intend to create problems for you. You are the pride and joy of my life—I love you.

Sincerely, Dad

As I read and reread the letter through my tears, I thought about Hazel walking down the hall that night because I realized that, in some ways, my incidental contact with my father along the way had left him with the impression that it was his fault. That was not my intention. I am grateful to look back and be able to say that in the time between the letter and my father’s death I had the chance to let him know my depression was not his fault and we both got better at forgiving one another. Still, I keep looking at the letter . . .

. . . and what I see is how hard a time I had understanding how much he loved me. I read what I have quoted here and on some level I can’t describe I feel almost surprised, not because of Dad but because of the layer of my being that has to be reminded again and again that I, too, am wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. We have talked so much about random acts of kindness that it has become somewhat of a cliché, yet it matters that we look up and offer regard to those with whom we encounter in our billiard ball world. When I look at the letter and I think about Hazel there in the hallway, I pray my kindness is more than random. Incidental contact can be intentional, even in a passing moment. It’s worth remembering that, in the more consistent relationships in our lives, the layers of incidental contact stack up into patterns and rituals that either build pathways to our hearts or walls around them.

The archaeological dig here in our house in Durham is days away from completion and we will pack up the plans in the rented moving vans and head north. They don’t make a truck big enough to carry the memories of the incidental contact that reminds me of a love that will not let me go.

Peace
Milton

I found it a wonderful example of spiritual synchronicity to discover that the Gospel reading for World Communion Sunday was the story of Jesus’ encounter with the one we call “the rich young ruler.” For those who don’t know the story, a wealthy young man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to have eternal life. Jesus says, “You know the commandments,” and then proceeds to rattle off a few of the Thou Shalt Nots, which the young man quickly claims to have kept since he was a child. Jesus cuts to the chase: “Go sell everything you have and give it to the poor—that will do it.” The Gospel account says the man went away sad. He just couldn’t do it.

Jesus doesn’t call out to him or go after him. He turns to his disciples—whom, Mark says, were shocked—and tells them it was easier for a camel to get through one of the narrow gates in the city called the Needle’s Eye than it was for a rich person to walk away from his or her privilege. When they wondered out loud who could be saved if the rich and privileged could not, Jesus added, “With God, all things are possible.”

Say it with me: with God, all things are possible.

In a world that has more displaced people than at any time in our history, that knows more about war than anything else, and in a country addicted to violence and self-absorbed protectionism, the recklessly hopeful celebration of World Communion Sunday matters deeply. I look forward to this first Sunday in October when we are intentional about noticing the tether of grace that binds us together across boundaries and biases, theologies and denominations, personalities and politics. (And yes, I understand, as my wonderful Episcopalian editor once told me, for those who observe the Eucharist every week, every Sunday is World Communion Sunday.) Together at the Table we affirm that grace matters most, which is most difficult for those of us who are people of privilege—and that’s pretty much everyone who stumbles across this post.

As Ginger unpacked the passage in her sermon, she reminded us we were not free to regard the young man as someone unlike ourselves. “Everyone in this room would have somewhere to go if we lost everything; we could find a couch to sleep on for the night.” In my notes, I jotted down, “Grace is for rich people, too.” It’s not that our compassion is invalid. The problem lies in that when we see the homeless person on the corner, or the masses of refugees fleeing conflicts in their countries, or people in our own land being harassed, arrested, and even killed because of their skin color, ethnicity, or religion, we do not see ourselves. We don’t think they are one of us. We don’t understand how our sense of privilege separates us. As Jason Isbell sings:

you should know compared
to people on a global scale
our kind has had it relatively easy

When Jesus began the Beatitudes with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” I think he meant those who are hopeless, or downtrodden, or marginalized, or desperate have a better grasp of grace than those of us who, as Ann Richards once said of George W. Bush, were born on third base and think we hit a triple. The reason, for example, that the killings on our country are not going to stop is because the discussion begins with our rights to own guns rather than our calling to protect one another. Jesus’ call to the young man was to see himself as part of humanity rather than seeing everyone else as the cast in a movie about him.

Over the past few weeks, a couple of friends have posted a picture on my Facebook page of a long table full of people that looks a bit like our dinners on the porch the last few weeks with the caption, “When you have more than you need, you build a longer table not a higher fence.”

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The reality of my life is I have more than I need—even in the months when we have not been sure how all the bills would be paid. Beyond the economics, I am a straight white male. I am a person of profound privilege. For me to understand what it means to be hopeless and desperate—to be poor in spirit—means I must do way more listening and learning than preaching or pontificating. It means when I do speak, I need to speak up for someone other than myself. I need to give up being right, or in charge, or in control. I need to let go of assuming life will always allow me to be comfortable. I need to let go of what I have and trust that God’s grace covers me as well; I need to come to the Table to be fed, to feel connected, and to be reminded that grief, grace, and gratitude are inextricably bound to one another.

With God, all things are possible.

Peace,
Milton

Most any aspect of my life demands a soundtrack.

I’ve spent the afternoon getting cookie batter ready to bake tonight and the music played right along with me. As I came up to write, I procrastinated a bit by putting together a playlist full of rain songs for us to bake by this evening, since we are almost through our ninth or tenth day of precipitation and awaiting Joachin’s arrival. I also thumbed back through old blog posts from the fall of 2007 as we were preparing to move to Durham from Marshfield, Massachusetts and I came across some of the songs that scored those days. One of those was Cliff Eberhardt’s “The Long Road.”

I first found the song because David Wilcox covered it in a concert. On the album, Cliff sang it with Richie Havens, whom I knew, first, from listening to the Woodstock soundtrack as a ninth grade kid. A few years back, Cliff’s song came back into view because he rerecorded it when he did an album at Blue Rock Studios with my friend Billy Crockett.

The first verse always gets me:

there are the ones that you call friends.
there are the ones that you call late at night.
there are the ones who sweep away your past
with one wave of their hand.

We ate dinner on the porch again last night, as we have for the past few Thursdays, enjoying the cool breeze that was the prelude to the storm that arrived a bit later. Up and down the table were friends old and new, eating and drinking and talking and laughing. “Teach us to number our days,” the Psalmist prayed; I am far too conscious of the numbers these days: we drive out November 1, following the long road to New England. It is the right move for us, and it’s really hard to leave.

Later in the song, Eberhardt sings,

I can hear your voice in the wind.
are you calling to me, down the long road?
do you really think there’s an end?
I have lived my whole life
down the long road.

Those may be the lines that first attached me to the song: I have lived my whole life down the long road. Because I grew up moving all over the place, I have pictured myself as one who keeps moving, yet as an adult I have lived for long stretches in Charlestown, Marshfield, and now Durham. I have memories in these places, stories, friends, chosen family. I have roots. I am not just passing through.

Yesterday, I called my friend Burt in Texas. He and I are one year shy of it being forty years since we first met. He was beginning his first year at Baylor and I was in my third. In the fall of 1986 I called him to mark the fact that he was the first friend of mine whom I had known for ten years and known where they were all of those ten years. I was almost twenty-nine. Now we have shared almost four decades. As I look back down the long road that has led me from Waco to Dallas to Fort Worth to Boston to Marshfield to Durham and now to Guilford, I feel as I did walking the Camino de Santiago last year: I am not alone. This long road is filled with connections.

I gotta find you tonight.
are you waiting for me, down the long road?
do you really think there’s an end?
I have lived my whole life
down the long road.

I am pulled by the two questions he asks in the song:

do you really think there’s an end?
are you waiting for me?

Ginger and I have spoken often of the ways in which life is often like a Saturday Night Live skit: it starts with a good idea, but no one is sure how to end it. I hear the first question and wonder if he is asking about death, or about the travel, or about the road itself. I hear the second and wonder if the person is waiting to begin, or waiting for the other to arrive. And then I see there’s one more question:

I can hear your voice in the wind.
are you calling to me, down the long road?

Waiting and calling, like the call and response of a gospel song. You call me and I will call you in return as we move and stay up and down this long road we call life. I can hear the voices in the winds of my memory, in the breeze on the porch, in the hope that lies ahead. I have lived my whole life down the long road. And I am grateful for all the hearts that have made room.

Peace,
Milton

Two months. I know. That’s how long it’s been since I last wrote here. I have looked hard at why I have been absent. Some of it was finishing up my next book (which comes out in November); some has been schedule; I think the main reason is as I work to deal with the grief of leaving Durham in about four weeks staying silent has allowed me to keep some of the feelings at bay. To write down what is going on requires me to engage my life on a different level. And it is time to do so. I promise to show up here more regularly in the days ahead. There is much to say.

I want to start with a story I have intended to tell for some time.

In the early nineties I was teaching English at Charlestown High School in Boston and had the good fortune to be doing so when Bill Moyers did his first PBS poetry series, The Language of Life. I was mesmerized by the words and the wordsmiths he interviewed: Coleman Barks reading Rumi, Sekou Soundiata, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Robert Bly, and Naomi Shihab Nye. One of Nye’s poems stuck to me and has never really let go, becoming a personal scripture in a way, a text that has helped me remember who I am and who I want to be. The poem is called “Famous.” If you have read this blog over the years, then you have read it several times, but here it is once more.

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   
which knew it would inherit the earth   
before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   
watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   
is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   
more famous than the dress shoe,   
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   
who smile while crossing streets,   
sticky children in grocery lines,   
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   
but because it never forgot what it could do.

Leave the poem for a moment and come with me to a coffee shop — our coffee shop here in our neighborhood of Old North Durham, which I have also mentioned quite often in my writings here: Cocoa Cinnamon. The repurposed service station at the corner of Foster and West Geer streets is like a participatory art installation brought to life by our friends Areli and Leon who started with a Coffee Bike and worked and dreamed and gathered and invited until the shop came into being. I decided I would make a cookie for their opening day, so I created a Cocoa Cinnamon Cookie: a chocolate chip cookie with espresso powder in the dough and some Heath toffee bits that is then rolled in sugar mixed with coffee, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper. I took about four dozen cookies to them to help celebrate the new café and use them however they wished. A couple of days later, Leon asked if I would start baking them so they could sell them at the shop, which is how I became an intentional cookie baker rather than an occasional one. A couple of days later I stopped by the shop to sip and write and saw my cookies in the display case with the label, “Milton’s Famous Cookies.” I smiled and Leon said, “Well, they are famous here.”

And I thought of the poem: the cookie is famous to the hungry person in the coffee shop.

Over time I have worked on other recipes that I have boxed up and taken down to the shop — Milton’s Ginger (ginger-molasses), Double Chocolate Olive Oil and Sea Salt, Curry On (a curried sugar cookie with apricots and coconut), Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip and Sriracha — and then this past spring I made it official and started my own business. When it came time to name it, the choice felt obvious: Milton’s Famous. When you live in The Most Encouraging City In The World, how things come together is a communal act. Mark, one of our Thursday Night Dinner regulars who happens to be a graphic designer, created the logo and helped me learn about branding. Areli and Leon took the big box off the coffee bike and Andrew, another neighbor who happens to be a metal sculptor, built a table so I could be mobile and thus get a place alongside of the food trucks at the Hunt Street Art and Food Market every Saturday (which also happened because of Becky and Mike, who own the Pie Pushers truck). Lindsey and Rob, who own Monuts (our awesome donut shop), rented their kitchen space in off hours so we could do the volume we needed, Laura has baked and sold cookies with me all summer long, and Ginger has been unfailingly supportive and encouraging at every turn.

We were about three Saturdays in to our new adventure when I had to miss a week to with Ginger to Guilford, Connecticut where she was called to be one of the pastors there. Both things have felt like the right things to do. Even as we are packing up and preparing to head North, I’m still baking and riding the bike down to the Market on Saturdays, and I will continue to do so until we leave town. More and more frequently people ask me what is going to happen to the cookies when we leave. What we have figured out is Laura will keep baking and making sure there are cookies at Cocoa Cinnamon. We’re going to take a break from the market starting in November, which will give us time to plan how to be back there next Spring. And I will go to Guilford and find a place to bake there as well. What I love about it is how it makes me feel connected — to the people who have helped make it happen, to the people who buy the cookies — and the way it reminds me who I am and that I am loved.

The other night I had to stop at Whole Foods on my way home from work at the computer store. It was late and I was tired, so I meandered through the store, retracing my steps more than once as I remembered why I had gone in there in the first place. I passed a woman and her two daughters who looked like they were about ten and six. Th
e older one smiled at me, and then smiled again as I passed them on the next aisle, and the next. I wandered to the far end of the store and then came back to the produce section to get something I had forgotten and saw them again. This time, I could feel her tracking me. When our eyes caught each other, she grinned and said in a stage whisper, “I love your cookies.”

“Thank you,” I said, and smiled back.

Peace,
Milton

My father and I shared a love of hymns.

Actually, it would probably be truer to say I learned to love hymns in large part because of my father. Though he rarely sang outside of the house, he loved the songs of faith. One of his favorites in his later years was Gloria Gaither’s “I Then Shall Live,” which was written to the tune Finlandia. The tune is also a favorite of mine, but to other lyrics: first, “Be Still My Soul” and then “This is My Song.”

August 3 marks the second anniversary of my dad’s death. Today in church I began scribbling lyrics of my own to the tune and I finished them tonight. Here is my offering with gratitude for my father and how he taught me to love songs that speak to my heart.

so I shall sing

so I shall sing
although my heart is broken
a song of hope
informed by grief and pain
a song of love
that knows the path of losses
a song of joy
though sadness still remains
so I shall sing
this song as old as mountains
with all my heart
I’ll join the deep refrain

grief’s melody
has colored all creation
yet there is love
that lasts beyond the grave
both things are true
the hope and, yes, the heartache
their harmony
the music of our days
so I shall sing
and pray my heart stays open
to loss and love
and grace that can amaze

Peace,
Milton

Though it may come as a surprise to many who know me, I am an amazingly average athlete. I appreciate sports as metaphor as much as anything else, which is probably why I am such a big baseball fan: there is lots of room for stories in between pitches. Growing up in Africa, however, I first thought of a pitch as the place where we played football—soccer. I still love watching game played well, which means I have loved watching the US Women’s National Team over the last few weeks.

One of the soccer stories I carry with me has nothing to do with the game being played well. It goes back to the days when my nephews lived in Memphis. They played soccer as little boys, which means, of course, they played “herd ball”—all of the little guys moving up and down the field with the ball in the middle. My youngest nephew, Scott, was on a team that won their league because the coach taught them to do one thing: “Run to the open space,” he said, “and let the ball find you.” The words stuck with me: run to the open space. Look up. Look out. Create options for you and those around you. Don’t feel like you have to have the ball; be the one who gives options the one with the ball, who creates the chance to work together.

My nephew is in his mid-twenties now. A week ago, he became a father not long before the US Women’s Team began to hit their stride in the World Cup. The Final on Sunday gave me another soccer story to remember. (I should say here I watched the highlights; we were at a Durham Bulls game during the first half of the match.) Carli Lloyd and her teammates were amazing. I never imagined four goals in sixteen minutes, but that’s not what I remember most. The moment that has stayed with me was Lloyd’s third goal—you know, the long one. She was running with the ball right at midfield, pressed by a couple of defenders, when she shot just as she crossed the midfield line and the ball blew by the goaltender, who was playing too far up. GOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLL! It was beautiful, unexpected, and packed with metaphor.

The more I thought about the goal, the more I realized it was no accident. In the midst of everything happening at mid-field, Carli Lloyd had the wherewithal to look down field, even if for a split second, and see that the goalie was out of position. And she took the shot into the open space.

The danger of any metaphor is the temptation to take it to far. I could keep adding layers, but I think I’ll let it rest here. When life presses in it’s easy to keep looking at our feet and to overcome by all that surrounds us. The challenge of those moments is to look up, look out, and see what lies beyond our present circumstance, what shot we have to take, what waits in the open space.

NOTE: My friend Jeff said some things in a comment below that are worth adding here:

Let me add another layer (or just a dash of seasoning), something I told my players: you won’t always have the ball, and you don’t need to; you don’t have to run every second, but you do need to think all the time — think about being in the right place at the right time, and be ready when the moment to contribute arrives.

Yes.

Peace,
Milton

It’s been a while since I have posted here. Most of the reasons are personal: I was finishing a book manuscript and trying to get a cookie business off the ground. Over the past several weeks, there have been several times I thought about writing in response to tragedy around the country, but I didn’t either because I felt like someone else was saying what I wanted to contribute or I didn’t want to add to the noise, so I remained silent.

As I sat in church this morning and we prayed for the people at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, one of the phrases uttered, which I have heard often these past few days, is we need to “break the silence,” and I thought I need to speak up even if I am just preaching to the choir, or it has already been said.

Two things about Dylann Storm Roof struck me from the first, other than his middle name: one was the Rhodesian patch on his jacket and the other was his words about the blacks “taking over.” When I was one year old, my parents and I moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, which was a British colony at the time. As independence loomed, Ian Smith and his party of White Supremacists made it evident that racism would rule the day, so my parents moved to Northern Rhodesia, which became Zambia, a truly democratic and African state. There was nothing to emulate or respect about Ian Smith’s government. They turned their fear into power and, in turn, set the stage for Robert Mugabe to do the same in reverse. The kind of oppression the Rhodesian government pressed on the African majority, similar to that of South Africa’s apartheid regime is evil because it makes control an ultimate value and sets up a system that dehumanizes everyone and destroys the possibility of relationship. I turn to my friend, Tim Tyson’s comments in regards to Roof’s concern about losing control.

Dylann Roof told his victims that he came to kill black people because they are “raping our women and taking over our country.” Both claims date back to the white supremacy campaigns of the 1890s, one of which overthrew the government of North Carolina, by the way. These ideas did not just percolate up inside of his mind; this is not ordinary “bias” or suspicion of people different from him; someone had to teach him these elaborated historical traditions. (Watered down versions of them are ordinary enough in mainstream politics.) He gunned down nine people at a historic black church, historic enough that he might well have selected it intentionally; Emanuel AME has been at the center of the civil rights struggle since the early 19th century. The Denmark Vesey slave rebellion of 1822 was organized out of this church, and the slave revolt that it was designed to launch was planned to occur on June 16–the anniversary of Dylann Roof’s massacre; of course, there is no evidence that he knew this history, but no evidence that he didn’t, either.

Roof said he wanted to start a race war; this is a common theme among white supremacists and depicted in their favorite book, The Turner Diaries, which also helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to commit the Oklahoma City bombings. He is part of something, and something dangerous. America in general and South Carolina in particular are generously sprinkled with white supremacist groups. (In Shelby, where he was caught, the White Patriot Party committed a mass murder some years back; the man who ordered that murder committed mass murder at a synagogue in Kansas City only a few years ago. The road Dylann Roof was captured on, Thomas Dixon Blvd, was named after perhaps the most illustrious white supremacist in the history of the world, apart from Hitler, though there is no evidence he knew this, of course, nor that he didn’t.) Roof’s probable mental frailty most likely have made him susceptible such influences. It’s almost certainly both/and with respect to mental illness and white supremacy, but there is at least as much evidence for the latter as for the former.

What Dylann Storm Roof did was racist and evil. Though he acted alone, the fact that the South Carolina legislature both allows the Confederate flag to fly and did not even go so far as to lower it half-staff shows his racist attitudes are far from solitary. As Jon Stewart said, the roads in South Carolina are named after Confederate generals. In my state of North Carolina they just changed the name of Saunders Hall on the UNC campus because it was named for a nineteenth century KKK leader. Those however are the obvious connections. The predominantly white legislature in my state have torn apart the Voting Rights Act, requiring voter identification and shortening early voting availability because too many nonwhite voters were going to the polls. (They give other reasons, but the impact speaks for itself.) The gerrymandering of congressional districts is racist, pure and simple. Not just partisan. Racist. The point is to make sure whites stay in control.

The language of control and safety plays well because it is fear based, and fear has been the common currency of American politics since 9/11. The justification for the actions of police in Ferguson and Staten Island and Charleston and McKinney has been one of control: they were enforcing order. The other cop on the video in McKinney who actually talked and listened to the teenagers demonstrates another way. The point of life is not to be in control or to dominate; the point is to be together.

Evil is intentional. Those who would explain away what Dylann did are making a loud statement about their own worldview. Ginger says often we are called to choose relationship over doctrine. Let us also choose relationship over politics, over privilege, over control, over safety. Roof’s intentional act of terrorism reminds me that I am called to more than random acts of kindness. Love is a choice. Love is intention incarnate. If evil is real, then love is real-er.

The nine who were murdered in Charleston were just going to church, as were the four little girls killed at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in the sixties. Dylann Storm Roof was welcomed because the people at Emmanuel AME intentionally welcomed strangers into their midst. I heard their former pastor interviewed on NPR this week and the reporter asked if this would change the open door policy of the church. His response, as I remember it, was to say no: they keep the doors open because of who they are, not because of who comes in.

The church in Charleston bears my favorite name for Jesus: Emmanuel—God With Us. In the Incarnation, God identified with humanity and called us to do the same with one another with intention, speaking the truth in love, and choosing relationship over any other option. May we choose to be fully human all that we say and do with and to one another. May we choose to live beyond our fear and trust one another in love.

Peace
Milton

The good people at West Raleigh Presbyterian Church read my book for their church-wide Lenten study and asked me to come preach this evening to close things out. Here is my sermon.

______________________

“Passing the Peace”
A Sermon for West Raleigh Presbyterian Church
April 12, 2015
John 20:19-31

I have to say my favorite characters in the Gospel accounts are failures. Favorite may be a bit misleading. The characters I find most meaningful to my life are the failures: Peter, even Judas — and, from today’s passage, Thomas. The Twin. The Doubter. These folks are windows that allow us to see how grace shines through — or not. Judas didn’t know how to see beyond what he had done; he wasn’t able to trust the possibility of resurrection.

Our nickname for Thomas reveals our tendency to hang on to failure, to allow it be what defines us, or how we define one another. Last night I watched the NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey Final and the goalie for Boston University, a perennial champion, caught the puck in his glove with no one around and then dropped it and it rolled into the goal, allowing the team from Providence to tie the game and go on to win it. The highlight clips today will not show his other forty saves; we will only see his failure. Mention the name Bill Buckner to anyone connected with Red Sox baseball and they will tell you about one play—on October 26, 1986—when he let a routine ground ball go through his legs, allowing the New York Mets to win the Game Six of the World Series, and ultimately the championship. After Sox won the Series in 2004—for the first time in eighty-six years—they invited Buckner back to throw out the first pitch of the next season. Failure was not going to be the final word for either the team or for him.

Before Thomas appears in our passage for today, Jesus had appeared a couple of times to the disciples. On the evening of Resurrection Day he had come through the locked door into the room where they were gathered in fear—even though some of them had seen him. Thomas was not there that night; we don’t know why. We are told when he found out Jesus was alive he said he would need to see for himself. The reason this passage shows up most every Sunday after Easter is it was on this night that Thomas was in the room and Jesus entered once again. Even after a week there is no real indication that the disciples’ fear had abated or that life had gone back to some semblance of normal. When Jesus arrived, he said the same thing he had said before: “Peace be with you.”

That’s right: he passed the peace. All that is missing in the story is the disciples responding, “And also with you.” His turning to Thomas and offering the opportunity for him to touch the wounds is an extension of that peace offering: “don’t disbelieve; believe” is how it is often translated. In Greek, however, faith is a verb and our English translation is a weak substitute. Jesus is not inviting Thomas to an intellectual assent. He’s calling him to trust, to stake his life on what he sees, and Thomas responds, “My Lord and my God.”

Then Jesus said something that gets quoted often separate from the story: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” How do we read that sentence? What was Jesus saying? Was it Messianic Passive Aggressive Day? (Almost good enough, Thomas.) Was it an admonishment on the heals of the grace Jesus had offered his struggling disciple? Either one of those readings rings false for me. I don’t think Jesus was taking a shot at anyone. Instead, I think Jesus was leaning in to those who weren’t in the room, who had not been at the tomb or on the beach for breakfast or on the road to Emmaus; Jesus was speaking to those who would come after he was gone, to most everyone who would become a follower of Christ after that initial group. He was speaking to us, for we are those who have not seen and yet we trust the story, we trust our lives to the Risen Christ.

How can it be that we are sitting here over two thousand years later, still passing the peace and trusting the story? In my book I tell of an experience Ginger and I had at the Mother Church of Christian Science in Boston, which we have visited many times. One time we entered the sanctuary and it was much brighter. When I asked the docent about it, she told me they had been repairing the roof and found skylights that had been painted over during World War II out of fear of Hitler bombing cities on the East Coast. The church had been inhabited everyday, and yet they forgot they had painted the windows until fifty years later because they quit telling the story. We were in Winchester, Massachusetts this week for the ordination of a dear friend. A studio from Hollywood is filming a movie in the church and had pulled up the red carpet on the altar only to find an intricate and beautiful tile mosaic underneath that no one knew was there because somewhere along the way they quit telling the story. We have sat around the tables tonight listening and telling stories of the dishes we brought for the potluck; how long those dishes continue to mean something in our families will depend on how well we tell the story.

Jesus passed the peace to the disciples and they passed it on to us. We are the incarnation of God in our world. The companion passage for today in Acts shows the early church told the story by sharing everything in common. We are the physical manifestation of the risen Christ for our time—we who were not there, who did not see, and yet have come to trust Jesus with our lives. We are the ones who are called to offer our lives as invitations to trust the love and grace of God that we live out in our life together or the truth of the empty tomb will ring hollow and the story will fade away. And here’s how the story gets told in a way we can trust it without having been there: hand to hand, eye to eye, face to face—passing the peace the way we pass the potatoes: as family, as equals, as people who need for grace to be true and for love to have the last word.

The peace of Christ be with you.
Amen.

_____________

Peace,
Milton