Anything but the rain

When I went on my very first round of pastoral visits, wayyyy back in the summer after my freshman year of college, in Atlanta, I visited this one very nice old lady. "Come back and see me," she said, "and we'll talk about anything but the rain." I like that phrase, mainly because it sounds pretty, and says a lot about Southern avoidance techniques.

In the past two weeks, I've managed to do pretty well for myself here, back in the South. (It's funny--when people ask me where I live, I say NYC, then they kinda glaze over, and I have to hastily add that I grew up here in Newport News, in order for them to snap back into friendly conversation--Yes, Virginia, I am one of you.) I'm running an adult education series on Wednesday evenings, showing a movie, and discussing faith-based elements in it. So far, we've talked about O Brother, Where Art Thou? which is happily full of stuff. It's all about baptism. Really. Watch it, and see if I'm lying to you. Next up, I think, will be Romero. Because I think it makes perfect logical sense to move from George Clooney acting like a Southern Depression-era fool to Mr. Addams dressed up as a Salvadoran martyr in the 1980s.
This week I've also participated in two Eucharists with deacons (real ones!) at local nursing homes. One of the deacons went through discernment with me, many moons ago, and now is finally a deacon herownself, so I get a kick out of seeing her all done up in a collar, and stole, and doing diaconal things. I also preached the sermon today--and managed to get some sort of response from a group of about 30 very old people, mostly suffering from various stages of dementia. (this I consider to be a positive thing. It makes them more fun to have in church--though less willing to sing along with hymns.) It was an index-card sermon, and one of those cases where I completely forgot to look down at my index card, in my concern to say what I wanted to say, and in my waving of my arms around. I think I even turned a bit Baptist there for a bit--though my emphasis was 'follow Christ' rather than 'follow Jesus'. My evangelical vocab still needs tweaking.

In any case, here's the sermon I preached on Sunday. Bear in mind the remarkable counter-scheduling: the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown was occuring the same day. At the same time. With the Presiding Bishop, and every other Episcopal and Anglican dignitary in the Commonwealth present. I lose!
Lectionary was this

Monday was my first day off since I’ve been here working at Emmanuel, and I went to the beach. And I confess to you, here and now, that I haven’t been to the beach in years. Last summer I was working as a hospital chaplain, and never found time to go, and before that, it seemed like I was busy with other things. So I was looking forward to Monday.
So I drove down to the beach, all excited about my day of relaxation. And? I promptly got lost. Horribly lost. I ended up, not on 87th street like I wanted, but hurtling rapidly down Rt 60, and I ended up at First Landing National Park.
Oops.
It wasn’t too bad, though. I got myself turned around, and headed back, and got myself on the right fork in the road. And I eventually found my friend.
Getting lost, though, that was an interesting way to start my day. I realized, as I sat there on the beach, that I was sitting pretty close to where everything started for us about 400 years ago. All those people, coming into the unknown, all with their varied reasons, setting into motion such a huge story. Walking onto the beach that first time, those hundred or so Englishmen surely had no idea what they would find here. They didn’t know about the current inhabitants of this land, or how their interactions with them would color our story for generations. They didn’t know that the very act of holding Anglican worship on that beach would set the precedent for the Anglican Communion that we belong to today. They didn’t know hardly anything--This was wilderness for them, in every sense of the word. And the wilderness is not particularly warm and relaxing, despite my plans. It’s where a person can get lost.

In our reading this morning, Elijah is having a rough time of it. The life of a prophet is generally not an easy one, but Elijah is having an especially hard time. The current queen of Israel wants him dead, after he had publicly embarrassed her and killed about seventy of her closest personal friends and religious confidants.
Oops.
It was probably not the smartest political move Elijah had ever made in his life as a Prophet of the God of Israel, the taunting and slaughter of the prophets and priests of Baal, but so be it. Now they were dead. Killed on Mt. Carmel, after Baal had mysteriously declined to answer their prayers and ignite their offering to them. Queen Jezebel was displeased about their deaths, since she was a Canaanite, and devoted to Baal herself. King Ahab was also less than thrilled about the situation because he wasn’t the strongest king in Israel’s history and Jezebel basically dictated policy, both public and religious. And here Elijah goes, taunting her favorite religious advisors and then killing them on one of the Canaanite holy places.
So he gets in trouble.
He gets in big trouble, actually, and flees. He runs all the way from Mt. Carmel, way in the north of the country to Beer-sheeba. In the southern tip. He runs out of the kingdom of Israel. Today, this is about a four-and-a-half hour car ride on modern highways. Lest we underestimate the fleeing powers of Elijah when he panics—let the hearer understand: the man runs as far away from Jezebel and her death sentence as he can physically get.
So he ends up in the desert, basically. Out in one of the Hebrew scripture’s favorite places—the wilderness—and doing another time-honored tradition of the prophet: he sulks at God. The prophet job was not working out. He had done the right thing—he had fought against idolatry and the enemies of God, and things had not turned out correctly at all! So, he hits the panic button and heads for the wilderness. And waits for something to shift.
Out in a similar place is the demoniac we meet in today’s gospel. Like Elijah, he’s in the wilderness, but with an important difference. Elijah fled to the wilderness, and the demon-possessed man was thrown there by others. He’s kept in chains because he’s so violent. He’s too dangerous to be around other people. He doesn’t wear any clothes and he scares anyone who comes near him. Society has kicked him out, and he ends up living in the tombs—absolutely forsaken with his problems. He’s not in Israel either—Jesus and his disciples leave Galilee, notice, and cross to the country of the Geresenes. Jesus is leaving his country. We’re out beyond the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ people. This demoniac is an outcast among outcasts.
And now, Like Elijah, he is Another one in the wilderness, in the very midst of death, waiting for something to change.
No matter how we get there, the wilderness is that place where we end up when nothing else is working. It’s the realm of spiritual chaos; it’s where everything is falling apart and we’ve thrown in the towel. It’s where we get lost.
It’s not an easy place to be. There are tombs. There is heat. Rocks. Scorpions. No water. The Hebrew Scriptures line up the wilderness with the desert, and just think about all the time the Israelites spent wandering around in the desert wilderness before reaching Canaan after the Exodus. All the stuff that happens out there. It’s a tough place to be.
And yet….the wilderness has a redemption. Out in the wilderness, moping in a cave, Elijah hears a voice: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”. Promptly, Elijah spills out the whole story: “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away!" the people of Israel have messed up! Now they are angry at him! And it’s really not his fault! He did the right thing!
Then God passes by. Not in the way you’d expect maybe. Not in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but in the sheer silence.
Now the prophet of God has met God, has seen God, but not in the way he expected.
This is a prophet who called down fire from the sky in the name of Yahweh, who slaughtered the prophets of Baal in the name of Adonai. That was his experience of God. This silence, this quiet. This was not that. This God was something else. This was a wilderness God.
For the demoniac, raging about the tombs all day, the relationship with God was off the table. When Jesus appears, the man expects pain, suffering, torture. After all, he had been cast out of his village. He had been thrown out of his family, and also, he’s not even the right nationality :”What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God…I beg you, do not torment me.” Even the demons within him react with fear to the Divine in Jesus, expecting punishment, or revenge. {Luke’s in good Greek dualism mode here.}
But that’s not what he gets. Jesus responds with mercy, even for spirits of questionable character. When the demons ask not to be sent back into the abyss, Jesus sends them into a herd of pigs—bad for the pigs, good for the demons, who would rank higher for a Jewish Messiah than pigs anyway. Like Elijah, the Gerasene man gets a wilderness God who doesn’t do what he’s expected to. This God confounds expectations. This God is merciful even to demons.
The wilderness, as messy as it is, is a place of last resort. And we run there looking for something, after everything else collapses and we have no other choice. Sometimes we’re even cast there, by other people. But that thing that we find out there is usually not what we thought that we would.
The God of the wilderness, our God, is wild. The God of the wilderness talks to the wrong people, uses the wrong languages, acts in completely inappropriate ways, and asks us extremely difficult questions. When we come out to the wilderness looking for something, looking for relief, looking for God, When we end up there, we should be prepared, because there’s no guarantee that we’ll be comfortable with what we’ll find. In fact, we probably won’t be.
The wilderness is a place of uncomfortable revelation, disturbing restoration. It’s a place that fulfills the Rolling Stone’s lyric ‘You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.’ God brings us healing and relief in the wilderness, just not in the expected way.
But we don’t get to leave it there. As my seminary librarian once commented, “No one gets to live in the wilderness. If they did, we’d call it something else. We’d call it suburbia.” Once we are ransomed healed, restored forgiven, in all those new and unnerving wilderness-like ways, we get turned around again. We get sent back to civilization that needs a bit of wildness to it.
After his healing, the demoniac wants to stay with Jesus to be a disciple. He wants to stay as he was, in a sense, cut off from his community and the person that he was before his wilderness experience.
Jesus says no.
He sends him back, to his hometown, to those people who knew him to be damaged, to be broken. Those people who now needed to see a healed, renewed person with good news to share, and a new life to lead. Those very people who cast him out in the first place, because those people needed to see him back again. They needed a revelation of the Wild Divine themselves.
And Elijah, up in his Cave of Sulking, after his epiphany of the wind, the earthquake and the fire, then the silence, hears the same question once more: “Elijah, what are you doing here?”
Poor Elijah, mind really blown now, gives the same answer he did before, probably in a more subdued tone of voice this time, and hears the response: Go back. Go back to a new place, to a new people, and a new strategy. Your work is not finished yet, and we’ll give it another try. But go back. We aren’t done yet.
We are healed for a purpose. We are restored for a calling. We get what we need in the wilderness, but we get it in order to share with the world, which needs to experience the rush of God as we have. The reasons we ran to the wilderness are still back there; we were restored in order to return to them. Our healing is not just for us, it is for everyone in our communities that we are sent to.
I have a plaque, hanging on the wall of my apartment in New York, just as you walk in the door. It’s up over the light switch in the hall, so it’s the first thing I see as I walk in, and the last thing I see as I leave. I bought it on my first trip to Jerusalem—it’s a copy of a drawing found underneath the current Church of the Holy Sepulchre, dated back to the 2nd or 3rd cent. CE., done by some of the first pilgrims who came to the site, because it was then, and still is, tradition among pilgrims to inscribe a cross, or some other sacred sign on the site that you made pilgrimage to in Jerusalem, among the Orthodox. The ancient pilgrim drew a boat, and wrote an enigmatic phrase in Koine Greek, which loosely translates, ‘Lord, we are here.’ It also could read ‘Lord, we will be going.’ What a perfect way to sum up a wilderness pilgrimage. Our flight out into the wild places, waiting for the restoration, however it might come, and our returns back into the civilization, never one without the other.
Lord we are here. Lord, we will be going. Amen.

Where is Megan?

I have a post for all of you, who, no doubt, have been huddled breathlessly over your computers, waiting anxiously for a new update on me. I am in Virginia Beach. Working at my summer internship parish, which is fabulous. Or at least, has been fabulous for the past week in which I have been working here. The people are nice, they charge up to me without provocation and yell, "You must be Megan! Our Seminarian! Hi!" and shake my hand vigorously, and try to feed me things with much sugar, fearing for my health. My introverted self appreciates this greatly, since it reduces the amount of energy I have to expend in the transaction.
However, the trip down here was less pleasant. Those of you who know me, are aquainted with The Saga of The Car. It is a sad tale, known to many as a tale of Woe, Weeping and Grief, provoking anger among several, and mirth among few.
There have been casualties, in this Saga.
The most recent chapter begins on my trip down to Virginia, on Friday. I was driving the exalted 1989 blue Ford Tempo, celebrated in saga and song, and owner of 200,000 miles. It had been purchased for me by my parents, from a friend of a friend, who was a mechanic. Earlier, let the reader understand, the car had died in Trenton, in the middle of an intersection. Earlier, it has also ceased to function several times on one simple trip to church. Earlier, judging from these, and other experiences, we had replaced the distributor, and hoped for the best. I had now had the car for a week.
I stopped for a soda (because the AC had also ceased to function, joining the fuel tank lid, the rear window and the gas gauge) and the car decided that it would travel no farther. It would not start. Here the cursing begins.
I found the mechanic at the rest stop's gas station, who tried to jump the car. "It's interesting," he said. "Y'know, the starter's not even trying to fire. How long have you had this thing?" "About a week." I said. He looked at me, the way one looks at a horse with a broken leg, and tries to remember where one left the shotgun. "Ah. See, you got a couple options. You say you just replaced the distributor? Either on the drive over here you broke the distributor again, or the car's junked." "Ah," I replied. "Fuck." "Yeah," he said.
So I called AAA, and my father. AAA came, after 4 hours of sitting with the car, in the lovely environs of the I-95 Delaware Turnpike rest stop. After this extended period of time, the man got the car to start up again. His advice? "Don't turn off the car again."
"But I kinda think that I might need to, at some point." I said.
"Well, how far you gotta go?"
"Virginia Beach."
He scratched his chin. "Yeah, ok. When you gotta get gas, or somethin', just leave the car runnin'. Cause if you turn it off, it ain't gonna turn back on."
"What happens when I get to the beach?"
"Yeah, then you gonna have a problem."
Luckily (or not) then my father arrived, with the red minivan. The Tempo still running (and Al Gore still weeping for the fossil fuel I was wasting), he helpfully advised me on how I should be showing more gratitude for the car (Tempo!) I had been given, since we were going for 'minimal functionality,' something evidently not including the power to stop or start at will, or to follow any of the Fire Marshal's regulations regarding how to safely fuel a vehicle. He did, however, agree to exchange cars with me for the duration of the trip, until such time as the Tempo's temper was soothed somewhat. This was possibly prompted by my assertion that I was not leaving the Damn State of Delaware with that Damn Car, because I feared it would try to kill me in my sleep. Or something. Dad has Decided The Car Will Work, and who, after all, is the car to argue back?
So I continued on to Virginia Beach, where I now operate a large red Ford Windstar. It starts. It stops. It has AC. It has operational brakes. Opening the fuel tank doesn't require pulling on free hanging wires in the trunk....I LOVE THIS CAR.

Preaching Camp

I'm at preaching camp! Did you even know they had such things? Preaching camp, or the Preaching Excellence Program, closely resembles boot camp with sermons. We bring a prepared sermon to preach to a small group and get feedback, then write another sermon while we're here. It's a really good program, and I feel like I am learning a great deal. From the things that people are actually attempting to teach me. Also? The preaching at GTS? Utterly wonderful, and I have a new-found appreciation for it. We rock anew!
So I'm spending my days sitting in small groups and giving feedback, and laughing inappropriately at the hideous (HIDEOUS) Vatican II art in Villanova's chapel, where the conference is being held. My God. I appreciate the theology of that period in the RCC's history, but man oh man. Did you put all your energy into reform and neglect asthetics?! There is a giant white limestone crucifix hanging at one end of the room, on a Gold. Shiny. Mosaic. Backdrop.
I am talking HUGE. I have named him Shiny Happy Jesus, and he has adventures, mainly with Shiny Happy Mary to his right and Shiny Happy Joseph (to the Left, to the Left). Together, they are.....Shiny Happy Holy Family!!!! TV show coming soon.
Also, I preached this sermon. This was my 'prepared' sermon, which I wrote one afternoon at Starbucks. We were supposed to write something on reconciliation (with no lectionary texts given?!? Who does that?!?!) And I went Colossians 1:11-20, because I wanted to talk about knitting. The sermon actually went really well, despite my huge misgivings about the large spectrum I was crossing in one 10 minute span. See what you think.

Prepared Sermon #1:

Recently in seminary, I’ve gotten back into an old hobby of mine. I taught myself to knit in college, for reasons I can’t remember any more, though I’m sure they were extremely important. And now I’m back into it.
It’s a good seminary hobby: it doesn’t take much abstract thought, I don’t have to exert pastoral authority over the yarn, the yarn doesn’t ask deep probing questions of the nature of God or the universe of me, and doesn’t ask that I remember what occurred at the Council of Nicea or Constantinople. All that is required is that I sit there and play with the pretty pretty yarn and the two sticks. And make loops. Lots and lots of little loops. Loops and loops and loops and loops. And at the end, I have a nice, concrete end product that I can prove exists. This is no small feat.
There is a catch though.
The magic of knitting is also its downside. The magic is that You get to turn one solitary piece of string into a three-dimensional object, and feel like the smartest magician-like person in the world. However, should you make a mistake at the beginning, all the way at the bottom of your lovely sweater, your perfect scarf, should you drop a stitch and make a hole in the toe of your sock…..
You’re completely screwed.
You have to unravel everything, all the way back to the problem and fix it. All the way back. All those rows. All that work. Because the problem with knitting is that you’re working with one piece of string to make all those loops. All those loops are connected, in ways you can’t see until you mess up. That one piece of yarn is a tight rope. It’s either a great performance or a disaster. Everything is connected. What you do in one place will affect the entire piece. So it really is a lot more complicated than you’d think.
In our church recently, we talk a lot about reconciliation. But as with many things, reconciliation is possibly one of those words we use without explaining what we mean. It looks great on a bumper sticker, but try to go past that, and we get confused.
For my part, I’d say reconciliation is much like fixing a dropped stitch. Reconciliation is getting back to that common thread that held you together in the first place. It’s remembering that something, in fact, did! hold you together in the first place. Some common experience maybe, some link, some common heritage. Or maybe just common humanity.
We forget that link exists. We pretend that it’s us versus them. That there are ‘other people’, and that God is divvying us all up on some huge gameboard somewhere. In the letter to the Colossians, the author pulls us back from that: Christ “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him al things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together…for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” (Col. 1:15-20) In Christ all things hold together, are knit together. –if you want to play around with the Greek a bit-- All creation holds together in Christ, and we come together in him. When we break apart, when we cause division and separation, when we throw up walls, we deny this. We act like it’s not true.
Reconciliation is a remembering of what we truly are. It’s a remembering of who we are, where we are. It’s coming home.
It’s not like it’s easy. It’s not like it’s painless. Lord only knows the problems in the church, in the world, are real, and they aren’t over small matters. They are emotional and heart-felt, and people are hurting for real. They aren’t going to go away any time soon. (Though, to be fair, it’s not like going home is always easy in reality either…)
Reconciliation, though, isn’t about shoving things under the carpet, or hugging it out, or singing Kumbaya in a happy circle til the endorphins flow. I’m not even sure it’s about fixing the problem. Reconciliation looks across the chasm and sees another child of God as an equal. Sees another creature beloved of God, just as you are. It’s just a change of perspective.
But, at the same time, that’s massive. It’s a huge change, to recognize someone you thought was the enemy, the Other, as someone who could be you, had circumstances been different. They are human, all of a sudden. They are like you. They are reconciled.
Three years ago this week, I went to live in East Jerusalem for a few months. Towards the end of my stay there, I decided to take a day trip back into Bethlehem with two friends, fellow American women. We took the normal route into the nearby city, via two taxis and an Israeli military checkpoint: less thorough for us because we were Americans. On the way into the city, I saw three Palestinian boys selling gum. We stopped, and I bought gum from them, and learned that they were from D’heisha Refugee camp: the eldest was 9, the youngest was 7. We kept going, and I didn’t think anything else about it—everyone’s poor, lots of people sold stuff, and we were busy. The day passed, and we saw the sights: the Nativity church, the Milk Grotto, the Olive wood carving shops, and everything, and then it was time to leave. On our way back to the checkpoint, there were the boys again.
The youngest wanted me to buy gum again. I did, and kept walking. We had to meet our taxi on the other side. He kept following, demanding that I pay him more. Now I had run out of money, and we were approaching the checkpoint. The soldiers started yelling.
The problem with being a refugee, or raised by refugee parents, or in a camp is that you don’t have identification papers. You can’t pass a checkpoint. The children couldn’t pass the checkpoint, and now they were too close.
The soldiers yelled for us to get in the metal chute to the side of the road, and one young soldier ran in front of us, ran to the center , dropped down behind a pile of sand-bag pile and aimed his machine gun back down the road where we had just come. I kept my eyes on him, because I kept thinking that I couldn’t imagine what happens to a person when they watch a child shot. I didn’t know I could deal with that. It was happening too quickly and all I could think of was those three boys, selling their gum, and getting too close to a metal shack on a dirt road.
The soldier released the safety and that’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.
Then something else,
The soldier suddenly got up, ran back to the side of the road, and ran back with his helmet.
He yelled something in Arabic, back down the road, and I suddenly thought of his mother, sending her son off to a horrible, dangerous job. I thought of her telling him to remember to wear his helmet, because it was the least she could do, this nameless woman sitting somewhere worrying about her teenaged son, barely done being a kid himself.
The soldiers gave us the all-clear, and waved us through. Apparently it was over.
But not really. It was the kind of experience that takes the snow globe of your life and shakes it firmly. You don’t know which way is up anymore, and start to strongly suspect that maybe no way is permanently up.
There are those little kids, with no way out of Bethlehem, and at the wrong end of a machine gun. All because they sold me Arabic Chiclets. And there’s that young soldier, who looked the same age as my younger brother. Who ran back in the middle of a stand-off to get his helmet, like he was remembering someone’s advice to stay safe. And he did the best he knew how. I don’t think there was any enemy that day; it was boys shooting boys. The only thing that placed one on one side of the gun was an accident of birth. A twist of circumstance.
In the end, we ended up in the same place. All of us standing on a dusty road in Bethlehem, the four boys, the three women. All beloved by God. All bound together in Christ. All equal. Everything else fades into the background.
That’s what reconciliation is—it’s that chaos of the dusty road. It’s that flipping around of everything you thought you knew. All those neat assumptions I thought I had about right and wrong and in-between that day got tossed out the window. Reconciliation reminds us that, in the end, we’re all there. We’re all human, vulnerable, and standing on the same road. Holding onto the same rope. Bound up in the same God. And once we get up enough courage to look around and see everyone else here with us, everything else will follow.