Does It Matter

April 4, 2020                 The Spring of our Discontent      Scripture: Hebrews 12: 2a

The Message Bible renders this little verse this way: “Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in. Study how he did it.”

It is easy sometimes to run out of words in prayer. On 9/11/2001, that happened to me. Maybe it did to you as well. It just seemed I ran out of any more to say to God about the situation, about my fears and hopes, about the people who died and their families, about the people who perpetrated the whole thing. No more words. What do you do when that happens?

One of the things I was taught by my mentors, especially the monks, is that it is perfectly normal to run out of words in prayer. When we believe that praying is about what we say to God, we have missed out on the other half of prayer: what God is saying to us.

I go to two places when this happens: first, to the Psalms; and second, to the Jesus Prayer, or Prayer of the Heart: Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. It is a prayer of repetition and comes from the Eastern Orthodox traditions of Christianity. The prayer is practiced by many in this way: as you inhale, think the words, “Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Exhaling, think, “Have mercy on me.”

The original prayer is more like this: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” An Episcopalian priest friend used to say, “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, one whom you love,” which I found to be a wonderful prayer and might just be the prayer for us at this moment in time.

What I love best about the Jesus Prayer is that as you repeat it over and over, slowly, following the rhythm of words and breath, it can actually begin to pray itself. I’m not kidding! I did a Jesus Prayer retreat many years ago and sure enough, I woke up in the middle of the night after two days of repeating the prayer and, yes indeed, it was still going even in my sleep.

There are differing opinions on this next thought, but I use the prayer when I pray for others: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on N., one whom you love.” It becomes a prayer of trust, knowing that God knows what each person needs so that I don’t have to remind God of God’s knowledge.

Today, I would recommend that you take three minutes to sit in God’s presence, follow your breathing, trust God completely, and pray, “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on our world.”

Prayer: Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us, this world which you love.

April 3, 2020       The Spring of our Discontent        Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4: 16

I love how things will jump out at you in the Bible.

Once long ago, I decided to take a four-month period and live in a small monastery near Oxford, NC (the monastery is no longer there, sorry to say). My reason: I wanted to go to the woods with my questions for God and see if living a life of prayer could help me be a better pastor. Sad to say, I managed to last about four days instead of four months. But I learned enough in those four days to give me lessons for a lifetime.

Twice a day, we gathered, the six of us, for common prayer: once at 3:30 in the morning, and once at 5:00 in the afternoon. And yes, 22-year-old Jamie DID get up every morning at 3:15 to make it to church by 3:30!!! The basic service was very much like the service we have done at Timberlake Christian Church for several Wednesdays during Lent: an opening statement, three to five Psalms, a scripture reading, prayers, and closing. Lots of silence was dispersed through the service.

I asked Brother Jim, my mentor and friend, how the Psalms were selected, and he said, “We just pick one and read it.” So, each evening before bed, I would select a Psalm to read, not actually paying attention to what I had chosen. After two days, Br. John, another mentor and friend, asked me if I were okay. When I asked him what he meant, he said, “Every Psalm you read is a lament! Think about it. What you are saying to all of us is that you are struggling with being here!”

That was the beginning of my realization that even though I was not consciously aware of it, the Bible was speaking for me. I thought I was just choosing meaningful Psalms; but what the Psalms were doing were actually praying for me the prayers that I needed to face!

As Paul says in the scripture today (and what jumped out at me this morning!), my outer nature was wasting away; but my inner nature was being renewed. I faced my true feelings, apologized to the monks, and went home.

On a brighter note, I returned to the monastery six months later, shortly after my father had died, to be received with open arms by my brother monks. And during that visit, God wrapped loving arms around me and allowed me to grieve and to receive a wonderful gift of healing, almost a love note signed by God.

That’s a story for another time!

Prayer: speak to us through scripture, our God, and show us your ways, your wisdom, your teachings, your presence, and your love, in Jesus’ name, amen.

April 2, 2020          The Spring of our Discontent               Scripture: Psalm 42

I love the Psalms. It has been said that every prayer that has ever been prayed can be found in the Psalms. The older I get, the more I find our lives of faith reflected in these wonderful songs of David and others.

Psalm 42 draws us toward a desire for God, for closeness to God. The setting, as we read further into it, is obviously a time when things were better, when the psalmist was going through an easier time in life, a time of no worries, of celebrations, of religious festivals uninterrupted by darker realities.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

“My tears have become my food night and day, and I hear it said all day long, ‘Where is your God?’”

I am sure that there are people – some of them Christians – saying this very thing: where is God? Yet over and over as I talk to people of faith – many of them are you! – I hear, “There are good things that are going to come out of this, even though the world is going to be changed by it.”

First, I just want to say, “That’s the spirit!”

Then, to myself, I have to ask, “But what?”

I pray for you that whatever is coming that will change so many things for us, that we will remember that we kept the faith, we remembered when we led the joyous religious processions into the house of God, we were faithful and hopeful and loving no matter what.

With Holy Week coming, it’s important to remember that we are the people of Jesus. We are the ones who follow the One who, knowing how bad things were getting ready to be for him personally, said, “Father, this is why I came in the first place. Father, put your glory on display.” (John 12: 28)

I love the Psalms because they are about the life we’re living right now. Full of humanity, they never forget that there is more: God’s ever-present love for all of us, no matter what, no matter who.

Prayer: Help us to see you, our God. Help us to long for you, to trust in you, to hope in you, our Savior and our God! We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.

During the next few weeks, this blog will be taken over by my daily devotions done at Timberlake Church (Disciples of Christ) during these weeks of pandemic and “sheltering at home.”

March 31, 2020         The Spring of our Discontent         Scripture: Psalm 23

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious by this sun of York.” William Shakespeare, Richard III

Years ago, a church was going through a rough time. The pastor refers to it now as “the winter of our discontent.” It sounds like a negative, but as the lines from Shakespeare mean, a bad time is over and now the sun (or “son,” Edward IV of England) of York has re-taken the throne. Richard (for whom the play is named) spends a good deal of the play getting rid of everyone so that he can eventually take the throne from his brother. I’m not going to give a synopsis here (bored? Read the play!), but in this particular case, the line seems fairly sarcastic.

I have always liked the line, “winter of our discontent;” so much so that I read a tedious novel of the same name by John Steinbeck years ago; to me, the best part of the book was its last page, meaning, I was glad it was over! Indeed, the “winter of our (my) discontent was made glorious” by the completion of the book!

I thought of Psalm 23 along with this today. Our spring will not be made glorious until this pandemic is complete. Yet, God is still with us, even right here in the middle of the whole thing. The Psalmist says that God prepares a table for us not in a safe place, but in the presence of our enemies. In other words, no matter how bad things may seem, look for the blessings, especially the blessing of the presence of God (you can’t get a blessing any better than that!).

So, here in the “spring of our discontent,” we are invited to remember that in the midst of every spring, a resurrection is waiting just around the corner. While our Lent of pandemic tells us that we all are vulnerable, scripture reminds us that God guides us through this, like a shepherd guiding sheep through dangerous territory.

May the spring of our discontent be made glorious summer by this Son of God!

Prayer: Kind Shepherd, guide our thoughts to You. Help us to keep You in our sights no matter where life takes us. Prepare for all Your children a feast, even in the midst of this darkness. Keep us safe, heal us, and make us always aware of You, in the name of the Christ we pray this, amen.

Monday, June 18, I received a call from Dick Reaves just after noon about the death of his mother, Marie Reaves Grant, or Gramma Reaves as so many of us knew her. It’s been a busy week or I would have written about her sooner.

I met “Dad and Mom” Reaves back  in 1972, when they were youth sponsors for the high school youth at First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Greensboro, NC. It’s quite possible they were my first “real” adult friends who were not related to me by blood or local church affiliation. I mostly remember them smiling, ever patient, welcoming, making all of us youth feel like we were real people.

My second weekend in college, a New Jersey friend talked me into going to Greensboro for the weekend. Greensboro was only about 45 minutes from my home, but I didn’t even think about going home – I had friends in Greensboro, I wanted to test my freedom, and besides, Rick said, “We can stay at Mom and Dad Reaves.” Enough said!

I don’t think Rick asked them ahead of time, but they had beds for us, and fed us, and acted like they had been expecting us for days. Other than being with them, it was a lousy weekend, but Mom Reaves and I began a friendship that grew over the years, especially when I returned from an almost-five-year pastorate in Georgia to my present ministry at Christmount.

There are lots of stories, and many of them will be told at her memorial service this Saturday. What I remember most is her unconditional love of high school kids, especially at camp.

She was everyone’s Gramma by the time I got back to North Carolina from Georgia in 1989, and that “gramma-ness” expanded from North Carolina to all over the country when she showed up at a General Assembly of the Christian Church in the US and Canada: she went to all the youth events, and suddenly, she was a celebrity among the kids! I saw her walking with about 20 youth, none of whom I knew, and just laughed and pointed her out to a friend who said, “That’s our Gramma: Gramma now to a whole generation!”

She loved my wife, Renae,  (a prerequisite for friendship with me) and always asked me about her, and when she heard us do music, her whole face lit up in a smile. She was, actually, a walking, talking smile.

Yet the times I treasured (and I’m sure this is true of all of us) were the times alone, sitting in the eating area of her farmhouse, looking out into her backyard toward the pasture (she and dad had some cattle that they slaughtered and ate, and I remember my shock when I asked Dad, “Where’s Stroganov?” and he answered, “On your fork!”), having a glass of wine or something stronger, talking about the state of youth ministry, or worrying about a particular youth, or just talking about faith in general. Sometimes we’d take a walk – for a woman in her ate 70’s, she was amazingly agile and kept herself fit (even taking ballroom dancing classes!) – and luckily, I could keep up with her in those days.

Dad Reaves died in the 1980’s while I was in Georgia, and I heard about it second-hand and too late to be present for my friend, but when we reconnected in June of 1988, she told me story after story of their time together, of his death, of how she was surrounded by friends and family during that time: it made me sad that I had missed it, but we certainly made up for it during the 90’s and early 2000’s. Thomas Keating once told me that real friends can go for years and not see or hear from each other, then suddenly meet and pick up where they left off; this proved true for us.

Gramma’s greatest gift was to see the good in the worst campers. If I complained about someone’s behavior, she would tell me something good they did. If she knew I was having a problem with a person, she wasted no time reminding me of how sweet he or she had been to someone, and she knew the campers better than I ever would. Sometimes, I said that the only reason that the high school campers loved me at all (especially in the late 90’s) was because Gramma saw something good in me.

Things I remember: sneaking whisky sours at 5 PM; “Madonna’s Gramma,” her skit every year at our camp talent show (something to be seen: I do not have the descriptive powers to begin to tell you about that Madonna-esque performance, but there were definitely some shocked campers every year when she strutted out and sang her song!); long theological discussions that surprised me with the depth of her questions; making her mad by changing the format of the camp newsletter (I am grateful that she forgave me!); and her always-open house (I have no memory of ever being turned away!).

It took me ten years to quit calling her “Mom Reaves” in the 90’s, and I finally told her I was giving in: she would be Gramma, and I would join the thousands – at least it seems like thousands – of those who were who devoted family. I believe she was pleased.

The last time she was at a youth event without her new husband, Marshall Grant, she asked if she could hold my arm while we walked, to steady her. It’s the first time I ever noticed that she was getting older. But I was escorting my friend, and the thought quickly passed as we started talking about the event, the different youth who were just becoming her friends, and how much she hated that she would probably not get to do this too much longer.

She picked a good second husband: Marshall Grant was as nice as she was, as patient with her passion for young people, and they – we – all loved him, because she did. He is one of the kindest people around, and she loved him. That was good enough for me.

I realize this is rambling, and for those of you who did not know her, there’s probably nothing here that will enlighten you. For those of you who did: remember that she loved you. It wasn’t a dream: there really was Gramma Reaves, and she embodied the love of God in ways no one else ever has!

Rest in the arms of the One you loved, Gramma. Meanwhile, we will miss you, and love you still.

It was 1976, and I had somehow had thrust upon me, at age 22 and armed with a brand-new BA degree, the adult leader’s position of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in North Carolina high school gathering. About a year before this, I had realized that I had attained that social status known in those days as “hippy.” Long hair, partial beard (my church did not want me to have a beard, but my tenure there was over with my college graduation, so I had quit shaving and was growing my Old Testament prophet facial hair!), skinnier than an emaciated snake, living in  what are now called “Chuck Trainors,” a-month-since-they’ve-been-washed blue jeans, and some variety of t-shirt, flannel shirt, or blue work shirt: this was my daily disguise, the bain of every parent whose child spoke in reverent tones about the group of “cool” youth ministers of which I was part. And now, in the summer of ’76, birth year of our still-young nation, I was going to be the responsible adult for about 250 high schoolers and their (real) adult leaders.

The meeting to plan this event was attended by about 13 youth, a couple of other adults, and the long-suffering and most patient human being I have ever known (the Reverend Alex Mooty, father of my dear friend, Bob). Alex was the Associate Regional Minister for the Christian Church in NC who had responsibility for youth ministry, and he had put up with me for longer than he ever bargained for: I moved from being a “state officer” when I was in high school to being a “district adult advisor” while a youth minister in college, and poor Alex seemed stuck with me (I write this in retrospect: one of the things I learned from his generation of clergy – something I have tried to emulate in my own ministry – was to accept the next generation of clergy as full-blown pastors sprung from their own clam shells the moment they declared their calling, a Alex bestowed on me and my young peers as though we had been part of the club forever).

I digress (surprise! surprise!), as usual. The meeting had the youth throwing  ideas left and right, my own craziness joining in the slow process of deciding on a theme. Finally, someone said something about love, maybe, “Why don’t we just make LOVE the theme?” Alex and I both balked a little, but it seemed to be the only topic that everyone kind of agreed on. Love. Like we had just invented it. they started filling in the blanks, and we ended up with this theme: IF YOU DON’T HAVE LOVE, EVERYTHING ELSE IS BULL CRAP. We decided to drop “crap” from the title, and there we were with our theme.

My memory of the event is sketchy now: I’ve attended what seems like hundreds of this kind of thing, so they do tend to run together. I do recall that it was held about three weeks before I was going off to live in a monastery for four months – and no, I did not last anywhere near that long – so my mind wasn’t really on the event at all. But everything we did was supposed to be focused on love. I suppose we did it.

What made me think of this was the royal wedding this past weekend. The Most Reverend Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, preached a powerful message during the wedding: it was for many of us the best part of the whole thing. Come Monday morning, though, and he was on the news shows. You would have thought his sermon and its message of love was the most original thing ever spoken. You would have thought that the commentators had never heard of Christianity, too. The mixture of surprise and adulation they poured on him was, to me, well, shocking. Hadn’t these folks ever heard of Christianity’s message of God’s love? Hell, hadn’t they even heard of the Beatle’s message, “All You Need is Love?” My goodness, you’d have thought that Curry had preached the most unique, unusual message since, well, the Sermon on the Mount.

Then I remembered: these days, Christians don’t talk about love, they talk about guns, about America, about the Bible (as a book, but nothing about the actual things the Bible contains, like, for instance, maybe “love”). I’m talking now about the TV Christians, not the real ones. I’m talking about the Politician Christians, not the ones who have compassion for the poor, hungry, homeless, emotionally wrecked, addicted, beaten-down of the world. I keep forgetting that the message of Jesus, the one I mistakenly think is about love and kindness and acceptance and equality, is not the same thing that a local politician means when he says he is a “Christian businessman.”

Many of us looked at the newscasts, and the shocked – what, hope? – in the faces of some of the commentators, and thought, “Duh.” Because we weren’t surprised by a truly Christian message. It wasn’t nationalistic; it didn’t cater to one social class (although basically only one social class was present in the room with him, mostly); it crossed cultural lines sa well. It was beautiful, intelligent (both Dr. King AND Teilhard de Chardin!), sane, hopeful, kind: not much like these reporters have seen and heard much of for many years.

Michael Curry’s Christianity is why I am still doing what I do. It’s why my friends have been marching in Poor People’s Marches the past few weeks. It’s why my teacher friends have been standing with their students outside of classrooms and schools and in the halls of the rulers, begging for real solutions to our pandemic of violence and the absolute love of it in this nation. It’s why I loved a blogpost I read today about loving those in the pews next to you who don’t agree with you politically.

You may not feel the same way I do about religion, and that’s okay. If you haven’t lost hope, if you are working against the powers of despair and outright evil in the world, and if you remember that your “enemies” are still your brothers and sisters, we’re not so far apart. Ideologies and our allegiance to them is part of our problem anyway.

You see, love is the answer. Quite simply (simply stated, that is: love is never an easy road). Michael Curry just reminded us that God is love. The surprise came when he said it out loud to power, and to a world that  needed to be reminded.

If you don’t have love, everything else is bull.

Stephen Stills’ first solo album, appropriately named “Stephen Stills,” contained songs that have become part of his concert repertoire, both solo and in various bands.  This little song’s title is more important to me than the song itself, but I saw the title the other day. It’s been dogging me ever since, so I have to wonder, does it matter?

I’m a church guy. We were brought up as part of the last generation (for a while) that was taken to church on  Sundays for basically two and half hours in the morning and as much as three and a half to four hours on Sunday evenings (youth group, youth supper, and evening service!). We went to church camp. I overdosed on Sunday School (thank God I was not of a sect that offered me fake gold pins to wear for attendance – I had a better record at church than I did at school, and I usually only missed about five days of school each year!

Church was cool, though. We had ministers who liked kids. My favorite minister was a guy fresh out of seminary who rode a BMW motorcycle. He had a Captain America helmet that he wore with his suit to go visit at the hospital. When I moved to Georgia to pastor the only full-time church I ever served, I moved with only a motorcycle, my backpack filled with a week’s worth of clothes, a rolled-up robe, and a sleeping bag. Role models: go figure.

When I was 18, Old Weird Bob came to town, VW camper carrying us everywhere. He was a great distraction while my girlfriend was away for the summer. I lived every minute that I was not at work at his house until it was time for her to return and me to go to college. He introduced me to The Giving Tree, The Velveteen Rabbit, and Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. Strange, educational summer. Certainly church, but very different.

It took me about four hours of college to make me change my major from psychology (thanks, Dr. Fromm) to religion (kudos, Fr. Louie/Thomas Merton).

With Pentecost coming faster than my sermon-writing, I’ve been thinking about church. My best friends have always been church people, or people who spent a lot of time being anti-church (church gets in your veins and even if you are against it, it’s part of you).  Someone has said in the past twenty years, that we are in a situation, church-wise, that is as challenging as the first generation of Christians. We are, like them, creating church from day-to-day. No longer is church status quo in America.  All the things I learned in seminary and college aren’t very relevant. At least at the organizational level.

Wisdom-wise, I wouldn’t give up anything about my education. I was introduced to – tasted and saw, as it were – great souls who thought great thoughts. I still suggest to my camp staffers and older campers that they sit under a tree from time to time, stare off into the ionosphere, and think the great thoughts. Our wisdom needs to catch up with our  technology so we don’t become one of those Star Trek-ish societies whose bodies can no longer function because we let our technology take over for us.

If church did nothing else for me, it helped me think. We were challenged never to take anything at face value, not even the Bible. God made our brains, I was told, and God is not afraid of our minds. Used well, with practice, our God-made brains will perhaps solve some of these damned things our technology cannot: racism, hunger, hatred, warmongering, nationalism (yeah, it’s a problem, what my faith calls a sin), class-ism, and all those other “isms” that my generation was going to do away with.

Church is part of someone – part of this someone – and frankly, I’m glad it’s changing. Interestingly, lots of the emergent church movement leaders are looking, of all places, to the wisdom of the past to find wisdom for the future. We’re getting rid of the business model, the Robert’s Rules of Order model, the balanced budget or I quit model, and moving towards the Jesus model, the love the world and those in it that God created model, the willingness to see our brothers and sisters – even in different faith traditions – model.

Yeah, church matters. Not the crazy ones who want to rinse you off – or soak you – and then make you a prejudiced bastard, but the ones who insist that God, whoever that is, wants us to get along, love each other and the planet we’re on, and use our brains for something other than growing hair.

Yeah.

It’s Holy Saturday. For Christians, we wait. But for the first followers of Jesus, the whole thing was over. 

I’ve wondered how to recapture that. 

So I go watch the news. 

There it is! A total loss of hope. 

Whether we like to admit it or not, the truth is we know this hopelessness daily. This is all there is. Conservative or Liberal, news is bad, fear rules. 

Let’s leave it there. 

Holy Saturday really isn’t so holy. Just very, very real. 

We are the hands and feet of Jesus in the world.

Where are we, as those hands and feet?

With starving children around the world?

With refugees seeking home?

With school children afraid of their places of education?

With ethnic groups who are not allowed to fit in this society?

With the homeless?

With those in prison?

With the sick?

With those who are judged because they are somehow “different” from what the majority defines as “normal?”

The old song “Were You There” is a favorite that will be sung in many worship places over the next few days. It is a powerful song whose meaning is sometimes lost in a sentimentality that occurs to some Christians during this time of year, only to be forgotten as soon as worship is over on Sunday. A tear may be shed today during a prayer vigil or quiet worship in a sanctuary stripped of all its decoration. The return of the “Alleluia” to the liturgy may carry with it a sigh of relief in a couple of days, but not yet.

Trying to “be there” as in the song is a mental exercise I no longer do. However, all the elements of the song are still a part of my spiritual memory, something embedded in my spiritual DNA that doesn’t have to have me present in whatever month and year Jesus actually suffered. It’s part of my faith, part of our faith.

I do remember that we are still crucifying God on a daily basis. When we are not there with the starving children, the refugees and immigrants, the victims of racial injustice, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the mentally ill, the differently abled, the terrified, we are not where Jesus is, and I believe, sadly, that he still feels the nails in his palm, still has trouble taking enough breath into his lungs that he continues to die a long, slow death. He is suffering a crucifixion of our making, of our choosing.

All of this is too much to take in, I realize. So, I want to wrap myself in the mystery and the mysticism of the day, to pray, to read Psalm 51 and hear it read and chanted and considered from the pulpit. I want to remember that in the end, no matter where I fall on the theological correctness spectrum, that what Jesus’ death means cannot be explained by a liberal or conservative or evangelical or fundamentalist perspective.

I want Jesus’ death to be something that helps liberate the suffering of humankind. I want all Christians to love each other and those that God loves (the marginalized, the suffering, the poor, and especially, the children, everywhere the children). I want Jesus’ life and death to transform me into a person of compassion, not a person of selfishness.

I want those things for you, too.