​Beloved:

     I’ve been itching for a trip to The Container Store.  I haven’t been in ages because my Indy neurologist only wants to see me every six months now.  His office is close to the store on 82nd Street.  If you don’t know it, The Container Store is literally a store full of containers of every sort, size, and shape:  containers for the office, the bathroom, the kitchen, the closet, the garage, the car, and the suitcase.  They also have lots of handy little gadgets I never knew I needed, like the Hug-A-Plug, which allows four devices to charge from one outlet.  Only $9.99 for a package of two!  I’m a sucker for anything handy at a good price.

     It’s also possible I’m a sucker for comfort shopping.  The scary news that first took me to see the neurologist was a false alarm.  Back then more test results were always coming in, so my husband went too.  To take the edge off, we’d plan the whole day:  doctor, lunch and shopping.  Thank God my real condition is hardly anything.  Now I just run up for med checks and, if time allows, one quick jag through TCS, all by myself.  Truth be told, the experience falls a little short of the expectation and memory, I think because my going is more of an errand to be run instead of the best part of an otherwise bad day. 

     I see the doctor this Thursday afternoon, no doubt why TCS comes to mind.  Digging just a little deeper, I know full well what’s really scraping at my heart.  Like so many things, it turns out the journey and who I’m with, rather than the destination, is far more the point.  Not being alone on a scary day is what I’m itching for these days.  Not a pencil cup or Hug-A-Plug, handy as they are.  Thankfully, gracefully, joyfully, that is already in the bag!

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times.
But that is not for them to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R.  Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

​Beloved:

     The Tuesday before Thanksgiving – when I trim a week’s worth of work into what simply must be done, then do it all in one day.  I’ll cram for sermon on Saturday but since it’s only once a year I don’t feel badly for it. 

     My second favorite thing yesterday was listening to a customer explain Thanksgiving to the young Vietnamese woman doing her nails.  Nothing about Pilgrims and Indians, just family and cooking and the sweetness of being together.  My first favorite thing was talking with a Muslim family in a restaurant.  Such gentle interactions between strangers can bring me to tears these days.

     I enjoy sweet moments as much as anyone but I’m not normally a crier.  I confess it’s me who’s changed, who may just now be seeing the world as it’s always been for people without the privilege and security I take for granted.  But I can’t unsee what I now see, unknow what is now so clear to me.  As one writer said it, something isn’t right.  However many clues I’ve missed already, I now know that we are over waist deep in a strong, swift current of social change.  Martin Luther King Jr. called it the great arc of history.  He said, it always bends toward justice.  I’ve read him a dozen times and missed his mention of the slumps and swells along the way.  Welcome to the slump:  our slump.  By ours I mean Baby Boomers’, Gen X’s, Gen Y’s, and Millennials’.  Now is our time.  Now is the time we shall be unmasked and the truth of us be told.  Shall we be remembered for our humanity, our decency, our moral courage, and our absolute insistence on the dignity of every person in our midst?  Or something else?  For our narcissism and greed?  For our moral flexibility?  For our complacency with corruption so long as I get to keep what’s already mine?  For our fear?

     Ah, fear – my other new companion, tapping me on the shoulder now and then, reminding me that people of faith are set to a much different bar of conduct.  We shall be tested and exposed not for simple human morality, but for our obedience to Christ.  And however much I may wish it were not so, upon the stage of this time and place we shall take our test.  I suppose it’s why I’ve never been more grateful than now for the life I have and the people in it.  The people with whom I will walk this walk and share this journey.  From whom I will draw clarity, strength and courage.  Among whom I already find so much grace, joy, wisdom and hilarity.  So whatever tomorrow holds, bring it on.  Because as we know, in Christ and together, we can do all things! 

     I look forward to seeing you all Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent! 

Beloved:

     I once walked away from a car crash with only a bruised sternum.  It was nothing really and yet controlled my every breath for about three weeks.  I dreaded sneezing and I never laughed.  Things that fell on the floor stayed there and nobody was allowed to hug me.  I woke up and fell asleep accommodating my invisible bruise.  Before last week I didn’t know my spirit has a sternum too.  I’m sore from grief over the turn we’ve taken as a country.  I’m tender just knowing that my saying so upsets others.  I’ve begun to read the news again.  Bland bits in small bites is all I can keep down.  By next week I might be able to watch television or listen to the radio.  But not yet.  My knees are weak and my heart still hurts.

     At first I called it lost civility.  But I don’t think we lost it. I think it was tossed away  ~ unwanted by enough of us that it shall be the fate of all of us who resign ourselves to live as if the ones who won shall rule the climate and the content of our life together from now on.  Should such a fate become our history, we’ve no one to blame but ourselves.

     Slowly but already I am finding my feet, remembering what I’ve claimed for years.  Before I am American, before I am white, before I am female, before I was or am anything that others call me or I call myself, Jesus called me to follow him.  To be his disciple.  He is not interested in my good reasons regarding his bad timing (Luke 9:57-62).  He called me to follow. Not once in the gospels does anything important begin with the faith of human beings.  It begins with the call of Christ.  It continues with the obedience of disciples.  Faith flows from obedience.  From faith gained flows continued obedience.  Call. Obedience.  Faith.  Obedience.  Faith.  Obedience.  In maturity faith and obedience become indistinguishable.

​     Civility, as it turns out, has absolutely nothing in common with Christian discipleship.  Civility is nothing but the thinnest veneer of decency.  It burns like tissue when frustration and fears are flamed.  Shame on me for ever confusing them.  Shame on me for grieving what Jesus called me to give up long ago.  Yet, the greater shame is in delusion, in not owning our own weakness, in failing to offer it up and leave it behind to walk into this new day on stronger legs, with stouter hearts, hearing the call of Christ which hasn’t changed:  follow me.

Beloved:

    I know one pastor who calls her congregants pigeons instead of lambs.  She says she prefers the strutty way pigeons carry themselves to the docility of sheep.  I do love reading her blog, counting myself among them when she writes, “I’ve some news to share, my darling pigeons . . . .”  Both are metaphorical flocks anyway.  What matters is they’re precious; sheep to their shepherds, pigeons to their fanciers (yep, that’s what they are called), and people to their pastors.

    Our little flock will say good-bye to one of our own this week.  A sister whose long struggle finally turned to peace.  Her pain to joy.  I couldn’t be happier for her and I hope to miss her well.  By enjoying dogs and flowers and the outdoors.  By doing useful work. – She once reattached the headlight in my pickup truck with a paperclip.  It lasted 3 years. – By doing for others and being generous with my time.  By holding my tongue even when I feel strongly about something.  By forgiving people who didn’t ask me to.  By being brave.  By laughing at other people’s jokes.  By quietly adding beauty to the places to which I am invited.  She once thanked me in a way that still brings me to tears whenever I remember it.
 
    Her life was a great gift to mine.  I hope to be worthy of it.  And worthy of this vocation too.  Shepherd, fancier or pastor ~ I am so humbled and so grateful to spend my life at so high and so precious a vocation.

Beloved:

     Maybe it’s because I already voted, but I am heart-and-mind-weary-to-the-bone of this political campaign season.  Has it really only been fifteen months?  Do we really only get thirty-three months off before it begins all over again?  Yes, as it turns out.  My generation is finally incurring the costs of democracy familiar to previous American generations and democracies around the world.  It’s hard work getting along with people who experience the same culture, the same economy in profoundly different ways.  Understanding civics, studying issues, having conversations, making decisions and reaching consensus is difficult, time-consuming work for citizens.  Being authentic, speaking truthfully, debating respectfully, leading wisely, winning with humility and losing with grace require a depth of character rare among professional politicians.

     I’ve been preaching the prophets all fall – major and minor preachers pleading with citizens to wake up to the reality that their country is in pretty dire straits, mostly because they failed at being faithful in a way God deemed faithful.  Who’s to say what constitutes a faithful comparison between them and us, between then and now?  A braver preacher than me, for sure.  Even the prophets themselves don’t agree on the details of those failures.  Some focus on their foreign alliances, pointing out that God clearly said, no foreign alliances.  Others were especially intent on their neglect of the poor, reminding them of God’s multiple rules to take care of the poor, the widow and the stranger (read immigrant) among you.  But upon one point every prophet agrees, from 1st Isaiah to little Haggai, that no matter the people’s stubbornness or obedience, whether at home or in exile, even despite the punishment dealt them for their disobedience, God was going to stay with them. Beginning to end.  There and back again.

     Which comforts me too, here in the last days of one political season, looking toward an unknown new one.  Who’s to say what we’re in for?  Only one thing is for sure:  God is with us.