POSTLUDE

PRELUDE

The Lord said:

Because these people draw near me

with their mouths and honor me with their lips,

while their hearts are far from me,

and their worship of me is a human commandment

learned by rote;

so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing.

– Isaiah 29:13-14b

GATHERING

Still the god remains an ever-growing

wholeness we have irritably burst.

We are sharp, for we insist on knowing,

But he exists serenely and dispersed.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Still the God Remains”

One of the greatest gatherings in the New Testament is described in the feeding of the five thousand. Certainly there was a large crowd gathered, over five thousand. But even more than the gathered crowd, the gathering of the leftover crumbs gives testament to the miraculous. The disciples were growing irritable that day. Long on the road, wearied from the crowds, ready for a good night’s rest, hungry, they encouraged Christ to send the crowd gathered to the surrounding villages to find provisions. Christ would not be swayed by sensibility. “You give them something to eat,” he calmly replied. With irritability, about to burst, the disciples cried, “But... we have just five loaves and two fish!” We know the end of the story.

Some people try to take the miracle out of the story. Maybe they only started with five loaves and two fish, and in the sharing those gathered felt moved to open up their picnic baskets and share as well. Perhaps the Gospel writer got caught up in the miracle himself. Maybe he exaggerated a little, some commentators suggest. Personally, I don’t know why we have a problem believing this miracle story. If we claim Christ as Lord and Savior, acknowledging his teaching and healing ministry, then we better be ready to embrace all of his

miracles as well. I know five thousand were fed that day by five loaves and two fish. In my years in the ministry, I’ve seen such miracles of provision and multiplication take place.

The detail in the story that leaves me scratching my head comes at the very end. The disciples are irritable, understandably. Feet dusty and blistered, they are tired and ready for rest. On top of the physical strain is this whirlwind spiritual journey. They’ve been caught in Christ’s net and haven’t had time to stop and think about all the wonder that had transpired. In the midst of the demands of discipleship, when did they have time to stop and reflect? Pray? Worship?

Knowing a deeper need than their physical need, Christ ignores their pleas for rest and gives them one last task before a break. Those who had gathered had eaten their fill. After the feast, not one single bread crumb was left for the birds, because the disciples were asked by Christ to gather them up by hand. As Luke 9:17 confirms, “What was left was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces.” The Gospels of Matthew and Mark agree in this important detail.

Anyone who has gathered crumbs knows that it is backbreaking work. Bent over, legs aching, minds dizzy, crumb by crumb filling a basket would take an hour of work. Why gather the crumbs? Certainly those birds at home on the Sea of Galilee would have loved a late night snack. Certainly the next hungry crowd wouldn’t be fed by leftovers; they too deserved the abundance of the miracle. Maybe Christ was concerned with order, but wasn’t he the guy who healed on the Sabbath and spit into the mud? These crumbs and their gathering is an important detail in this miracle story.

Maybe Christ knew that gathering crumbs is an act of worship. Perhaps he understood that in the repetitive motions of bending, grasping, lifting, a prayerful frame of mind emerges even amid the weariness and irritability. Here in the midst of one of the greatest gatherings depicted in the biblical witness, Christ shows us a new way of understanding our call as disciples to pick up the crumbs.

My days are filled with crumbs. As a mother of an eighteen-month-old, life is all about graham cracker crumbs, peanut butter and jelly crumbs, Goldfish crumbs. It’s easy to get irritable day in and day out as I pick up the crumbs over and over again. Mind numb as I bend, grasp, lift over and over again, it’s easy to forget a miracle has taken place. Some people look at the crumbs and simply see a mess. What do these have to do with God, faith or worship, they ask. Others look at those fragmented pieces and know that somehow they say something about God. Practicing worship by picking up crumbs is about having the eyes to see, if not the miracle, at least the Maker in the hand of our day-to-day lives. When we see that hand, we are called to worship.

Christ’s call to gather the crumbs was a call to worship. It was a call to remember what had taken place that day—the gathering of thousands, the proclaiming that all will be fed, the responding of one willing to share five loaves and two fish, the sealing by the Holy Spirit in the blessing and breaking and giving it out aplenty to those gathered, the bearing out into the world of five thousand fed and filled people. Bend, grasp, lift, place in the basket. A miracle took place this evening. Bend, grasp, lift, place in the basket. Five thousand were nourished by five loaves and two fish. In this repetitive act, worship happened as the disciples gathered around the Word and gathered up his crumbs.

We might feel as if we need to walk into worship free of crumbs— cleaned up, pressed and dressed—ready for the service of God. But God asks us to gather up the crumbs and carry them in with us. Don’t brush them off or leave them behind. Gather up the crumbs of your life; stuff them into your pockets if you don’t have a basket nearby. Haul them in with a wagon; just don’t leave them behind. Pastor Fred Wood invites, “The reason we have thick legs on our Communion table is so that it can handle the weight of all the stuff we carry in. What a shame it would be if we carried the weight of it all the way to church and then carried the weight of it all home with us again. We’ve got to leave it here at the table.”

In worship we gather up the crumbs, and in our gathering we are reminded that a miracle has taken place. We pick up the day-to-day-ness of our lives and give it to God as an offering. “Transform this, bless this, use this,” we plead. We haul in our calendars, report cards, financial statements, grocery lists and to-do lists. We carry our palm pilots, daytimers, calendars and appointment books. We bring in the stuff we have done and the stuff we have left undone. Whether we know it or not, we carry in our family stories and histories and secrets and sadness. We bring in our preoccupations and our occupations, our hopes and our failures. Life can feel pretty crummy sometimes, and yet we are still called to worship. We are called to this gathering that somehow helps put the pieces back together. If God exists, as Rilke writes, somewhat serenely and dispersed, then isn’t part of our task as believers gathering it all up so that somehow in the midst of the pieces coming together God might be revealed?

In the movie One True Thing, Meryl Streep plays Katherine, a mother battling cancer. Early in the movie she is excited for a fall family gathering. Golden leaves blanket the sidewalks that welcome home her daughter, Ellen, who is coming home for her father’s birthday. The invitation is to come dressed in costume. Ellen, however, comes dressed in black, clearly having given no thought to a costume. Not even the red shoes of the mother’s Dorothy costume from The Wizard of Oz can click away the disappointment she feels. From the beginning, this gathering isn’t going as planned. As Katherine sets aside her disappointment and continues the party preparations, it is clear there is tension between mother and daughter. In Ellen’s halfhearted attempt to help her mother, a plate goes flying off the counter and breaks into many pieces. Its shattering is a reminder that the gathering isn’t going well.

This could be the picture of almost any family or church supper scene. Expectations abound. Hopes are high. There is an eagerness to gather and connect. Yet we live with those shattering reminders that all is not perfect. We are human. We let other people down. We fail to live up to the invitation and the expectation. Things shatter. And yet we worship.

In the movie, Katherine doesn’t just sweep the broken pieces of the plate into the trash. She asks her daughter to pick them up and save them. For Katherine there is something important about these pieces. Later in the film we see that Katherine has a vision for these broken pieces. Weak from radiation treatment, she picks up the pieces and arranges them into a mosaic. This is clearly a prayerful time.

Our worship is about picking up the pieces, whether the pieces are soft and crumbly or jagged and sharp. These are the broken pieces of the body of Christ, and they need rearranging. We build these pieces into one and offer them up to the one and only true thing. In picking up the pieces, we know unfailingly that a miracle has taken place. We worship because we know life can feel crummy. We worship because we live amid crumbs. We worship because we know in God there is a wholeness greater than the pieces of our lives. We worship because we are sharp and life can be shattered, and yet God’s serene nature beckons us in. In our worship we pick up all of this stuff, set it at the table and know that God alone is the one true thing.

The gathering isn’t just about us and our crumbs. We gather in community around the Word of God. That Word is Christ himself, the one who became crumbs so we could have a foretaste of God’s kingdom. That Word is also the Scripture giving witness to the life of Christ, from the gathering of crumbs in the manna in the wilderness to Paul’s proclamation that he feels like a crumb himself; we gather around these words and are filled and fed.

We gather to muster up the courage to confess. We gather to join voices with others when ours are lacking, to sing praise and sing lament. We gather to be strengthened to go out into the world and live a life faithful to the gospel. We gather to be challenged to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God. We gather to be assured that we are forgiven and loved. We gather to bless, confess and address the injustices of our world. We gather because life is hard and we find strength in community and hope in our faith.

Several years ago a young college student died suddenly in a car accident. Her roommate Sarah worshiped in the congregation of a pastor named John. Sarah expressed her grief to her pastor, who wrote her a letter. “Dear Sarah,” he began, “I know you must be feeling pretty angry at God. Why did this happen? Why did my best friend have to die? I know you must have a thousand questions and I am sure you have shed even more tears. God did not want your friend to die. God is there crying and asking why with you.” He sent the letter and never heard back from Sarah. He wondered if it had made a difference.

A decade later, John died in a car crash. His wife, shattered by the loss of her best friend and crushed by facing the future alone, slowly tried to pick up the pieces. Anne arranged the funeral, took care of the finances and maintained a stoic face through it all. Finally she sat down one day to sort the junk mail, pay the bills and read the growing stack of cards. She was surprised when she opened up one card and a carefully folded letter fell out from its fold. You might say it even looked like a crumb. As she unfolded the letter, Anne gasped when she realized it was John’s handwriting.

The card said, “I received this letter from your husband ten years ago when my college roommate died. You can see from its tears and stains I have read this letter many times. I thought this letter should be in your hands now. It gave me hope then, I hope it gives you comfort now.” And then Anne read again, “Why did my best friend have to die?”

There are times in our lives when all we can see are the broken pieces, and yet the miracle is there. Worship calls us to gather the crumbs prayerfully, attend to Christ’s presence in the gathering, offer them to God and see what is proclaimed from there.

The disciples were irritable about having to gather up the crumbs. They were exhausted and ready to rest their weary feet. Twelve baskets later, the land once filled with bread crumbs was clear again. As the disciples gathered those crumbs, they had no idea of the crumbs they would be called to pick up just a few years down the line. They too would lose their best friend. Hopes of a kingdom would be shattered. Their visions of peace would be in pieces. The crumbs they had to pick up after the death of Jesus were much more than a clearing littered with bread crumbs. They had to pick up the crumbs of shattered hopes and a misunderstood Messiah. They had lost not only their friend, but more importantly, their teacher, master, savior, and Lord. Yet they were called to worship, to build the church piece by piece from this point on. Their gathering paved the way for our worship. Are we ready to gather the crumbs and begin the worshiping life?

CALL TO WORSHIP

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

– Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Last fall, in the midst of the peak season, I invited a friend for a walk to soak in the last of the fall leaves. She in turn invited a friend, an artist and gallery owner. We set out on a street, busier than we normally liked to walk on, but this particular street was canopied in light-soaked leaves of yellow, red and orange. We walked with our heads up, trying to carry on a conversation, but lost in the beauty of the late afternoon. It was the time of day in October when the sun shines down at just the right angle and everything glows in protracted light. We watched birds fly in drunken mobs, as if they imbibed too much light and color in the trees that they flocked to over and over again. Then, above the spinning of the wheels around us, we heard the cries of the wild geese. Flying in V formation, focused in direction, familiar with the routines of the season, their cries made us stop in our tracks.

I was overwhelmed by the perfection of the late afternoon. All creation was joining together in praise and in glory. But I stood there like a stolid Presbyterian. No leaping or dancing, just an earth-bound pedestrian. It was the artist, the gallery owner, who responded to the call. She raised her arms, cupped her hands, tilted her head back and drank it all in. She couldn’t get enough, nor could she offer up enough thanksgiving for that moment. Her uninhibited praise, the beauty of the day and the cry of the wild geese called me to worship. In that moment I knew my place in this family of things – it was to glorify God and enjoy God forever.

The first time the world offered itself so much to my imagination that it sparked a call to worship was in high school. It was a school trip with the drama class to the local theater company, a much needed break from the roar of the routine at the high school. The play was called “The Diviners.” As the curtains opened, a teenaged boy stumbled across the stage with a divining stick searching for water. I couldn’t tell you the whole story today. I can only remember the boy with the stick searching for water and my response. As the curtain closed and the audience clapped, tears flowed down my face. Embarrassed by the outpouring of emotion splashed across my face, I grew nervous as the houselights flickered on. Yet that moment was a moment where I was called to worship. I understood the boy’s search for that life-giving water. And I recognized the tremble in his stick. I was called to worship because I knew his thirst.

Most days the call to worship isn’t quite so clear and I’m not quite so open. Days become routine and habits ingrained. My daytimer doesn’t leave much space to be called out of what needs to be done. Does the routine create space for God to break in, or does the routine attempt to block God out? My need for control and my own self-centeredness aren’t really conducive to being called away from them to another form of worship. Are the interruptions to our schedules God’s call, or do we merely see them as inconvenience?

Recently I set out on a hike hoping to reach the top of the mountain and to have refection away from routine, but that moment of peace lasted only as long as the bugs stayed away. A few bites and I was back down the mountain. I can’t remember the last time I was so called to worship that I was able to forget the distractions and focus solely on God. I need a call so loud that it drowns out the murmurs of what needs to be done that constantly echo in m y head. I need a call that isn’t just printed words or routine litanies, but an embodied expression of expectation that God might move and we will tremble in the presence of the movement.

Instead of allowing ourselves the opportunity to be called to worship in any time and place, we will call upon God to meet us on our time lines. We want God to move within our guidelines. In his book Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks comments firsthand on the predicament of the twenty-first-century seeker:

I’m sitting on a rock in the Big Blackfoot River in western Montana. The sun is glistening off the water, and the grasses on the banks are ablaze in their final glory. The air is crisp and silent and I am utterly alone . . . This is the spot where Norman Maclean set and Robert Redford filmed “A River Runs Through It,” and I’m sitting here waiting for one of those perfect moments when time stops and I feel myself achieving a mystical communion with nature. But nothing’s happening. I’ve been hanging around this magnificent setting for 30 minutes and I haven’t had one moment of elevated consciousness. The ageless rhythms of creation are happening all around me. The crisp air whispers. The branches sway. The ducks wing by silently . . . I look at my watch and realize I had better start feeling serene oneness with God’s creation pretty soon. I’ve got dinner reservations back in Missoula at six.

Our reservations limit much more than the possibility of encountering God – they prevent us from being called to a new and exciting place, a new way of worship where both in and out of the sanctuary we sense the movement of God.

We gather for worship because each of us hopes to be called out of our stuck places and into a new way of living. We want to worship without reservations. We come seeking a sip of that life-giving water. We come with divining sticks in hand hoping they will tremble and tell us where to dig deep. We come, some of us, with arms raised ready to receive what is offered, while others come clenched but hopeful. We come hoping our imaginations will be sparked. We come in our loneliness. We come with our despair, some ready to tell and others ready to listen. We come repenting. We come wanting to know how we fit into this family of things.

The call to worship, offered in the service of worship, gathers all of these disparate elements together and sets us all before God. The call to worship has the difficult task of gathering us all together from our individual preoccupations and calling to mind that we are here for God, not for ourselves. The call to worship must excite and enlarge, invoke and impress. Its task is paradoxical. It anchors and propels. It must acknowledge where we are at, and at the same time refuse our remaining in that place. It is simultaneously an invitation and a rejection. The call to worship must break both the silence of our aloneness and the giddy chatter of our eagerness to connect. And it must acknowledge loudly and clearly that many things call to us for our worship, but it is God alone to whom we ultimately bow.

More days than not, I feel like the birds that fly chaotically through the sky—this way and that—rather than purposefully like the geese. Ordered and directed, the goal of the geese is clear and their movements succinct. They are headed home. I flit around from this to that because so many things call out for my worship. I need a call that is decisive and loud. It might even need to sound harsh in challenging the status quo of the day. I need it to order my life with the structure of liturgy and direct my thoughts to the only one worthy of my worship. Gather us in perfect V formation, God, and lead us home to you.

Luke, Hannah and Chris, three middle-schoolers, offered one of the most undeniable calls to worship I have ever heard. It was “spontaneous” worship night—a favorite activity in middle-school fellowship. It was a favorite for me as well because it required only the imagination of the group gathered. We would divide into varying groups to prepare the call to worship, prayers of confession, sermon, prayers of the people and the offering. Each group was given a Scripture verse, the theme for the evening and a creative prop that might be used.

One night during Epiphany, using the call of Isaiah, “Arise, shine, for your light has come!” and using glow-in-the-dark stars, balloons, neon glow sticks and crepe streamers, we broke up into groups to put together the worship service. Twenty minutes later, we gathered in the sanctuary not knowing exactly what would take place. Luke stood in the pulpit. “Arise, shine, your light has come!” he proclaimed with all of his might. We all smiled at his earnestness and energy. Then, out from under the pulpit, surprising us all, jumped Chris. “Go God!” he exclaimed while throwing and unrolling crepe streamers.

Luke went on with the call to worship: “See darkness covers the earth and thick darkness the people.” Then came another surprise from behind the pulpit, but this time it was a whisper. Hannah, with black crepe streamers, rose up and whispered, “We know the darkness.” With such words of truth uttered by young tongues, we couldn’t help but be drawn to worship. After a moment of strange silence, we looked up, and there in the balcony was the rest of their group rising up from their hiding places and lifting their arms up over their heads. Streamers in hand, they shook them with all their might and yelled in unison, “God, we’re here to worship. Now show us the way.”

If all calls to worship both in worship and in our lives had such an urgency to them, there would be no way we could remain stolid, stiff and separated. In no way would we remain pedestrian or reserved; we would be provoked to praise. We know the darkness, but we’re here. We carry despair, mine and yours, but we’ve come to worship. We know we are part of a bigger family of things, though we don’t know how to embrace it; but we gather together and try. Show us the way, Lord, whether it’s by unrolling streamers, exciting our imaginations, screaming into our ears or whispering gently. Yank our hands, Lord, and drag us past our reservations toward a revelation of the way you call us to worship this very day.

PRAYER OF INVOCATION

Upon adventure promised seas

Sailed unfurled the mariners’pride

Trojan ship of surpassing speed

As siren before a salt shroud bride

Resplendent were her prow and masts

Adorned by captive hearts of men

Honored she, Poseidon’s Queen

So fair the minstrel musings rang

Yet in the swell one star lit eve

As waters danced celestial gold

The seamen’s eyes wandered deep

And foundered upon light untold

Out of legion’s yawning night

Drew sight, ere else grew dim

And voice of gentle, primordial speak

Filled the mind and heart within

“Come My own, forsake the lee

And brave the leviathan quest.

Dive! Into My quenching fathomless sea

Which is my pierc’ed breast.”

– Elizabeth Clark Thasiah, “ Upon Adventure “

The primordial is at the very depths of the worshiping life. A voice gentle and primal calls us to something beyond ourselves, invoking worship and prompting praise. We listen, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, for that whisper which calls us to jump into the deep. “Dive!” it says, and we can either hold our breath and plunge into the depths or stay in the boat. We whisper back to that gentle voice, praying for courage and direction. When we sense its absence, we pray to invoke the very presence of God. When we sense its presence, we pray for courage to face the challenge that the voice of God invokes within us. Our prayers of invocation are prayers that stir up the primordial deep, asking the voice of God to speak and to fill our minds and hearts within.

Often we Christians do not take prayers of invocation seriously. We say it’s because we as humans do not have the power to do any work that might bring grace, but I think that’s an excuse. Invoking the presence of God means inviting God’s Spirit to be turned loose upon us. God on the loose might demand us to change, challenge us to reprioritize, call us to true repentance. Do we really want to leave worship different than we came in? We are much more comfortable with adoration rather than invocation. Ascribing lofty words of adoration and exaltation acknowledges, yes, that we are creatures. But it affirms even more so that we are cowards. Give Christianity a real try ? Are we ready for that? God on the loose, God’s presence truly invoked, might mean we dive into the depths of our days a little differently.

A prayer of invocation is offered to summon the presence of God in the worship service. This is tricky territory because it isn’t a wave of a magic wand, a hocus-pocus abracadabra: POW! God is magically present. God isn’t a vision we can conjure up with mirrors and smoke and sleight of hand. Nor does God depend on us to be invited to the party. God is the guest of honor whether invited or not. Some might even deem the prayer of invocation unnecessary because “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20). Yet out of honor for God and humility as creatures, we pray for invocation. We pray for invocation because we are all too capable of revoking God’s presence—we retract from worship, rescind our invitations for God’s presence in our lives and repel any notion that we depend on God. It is because of this tendency to revoke that we invoke: God, speak from the depths and draw us out of ourselves.

Most might not even recognize the difference between a prayer of adoration and a prayer of invocation. They are both about God—isn’t that enough? But in my day-to-day life, there is a big difference. Each day when I am faced with the challenge of the day—with the depths that call out for me to dive into, the ledge that awaits my leap, the setting forth in faith to serve as I might—each time I am faced with those areas of darkness I want to avoid, I am much more apt to ask for God’s Spirit to be set loose rather than going on about how great God is.

As a pastor, the times I most often find myself saying a prayer of invocation are when I knock on a hospital door. This past spring, a rattlesnake in the canyon near our home bit a young girl of four, who was out for a special day with her mom. The day drew grim in the fearful moments of finding a phone in the wilderness, awaiting the ambulance and praying the anti-venom would be at the hospital. Anti-venom is a precious thing and at times difficult to find. Not all hospitals are able to stock it. After arriving at the hospital, the girl was given the anti-venom and then given it again and again. A normal dose of anti-venom for an adult bitten by a snake is eight to ten vials. The severity of this snakebite was so great it required forty-eight vials. Needless to say, young Emma’s life was at stake as they waited to see if the serum would work.

I had seen the story unfold on the midday news, but I was surprised when the phone rang and I found out that Emma was the granddaughter of members of my former church across the country in New Jersey. “Would you go and visit the family in the hospital? She is in critical condition.”

Now, my husband, also a pastor, is at his best in these kinds of situations. But for me, responding to a crisis like this is like jumping into the deep. I have to muster up all the courage I can and call upon the resources of past dives. It is in that moment of absolute fear of the unknown where I whisper those words of invocation, “Turn yourself loose here, Lord. I cannot do it alone. I cannot do it at all, not without you by my side.” It’s not a grand prayer, but it’s an honest invoking.

As we cry out in worship in need of God’s invocation, we open ourselves to the evocation and provocation that can arise only from God: to be inspired, reawakened, called out from our preoccupation with ourselves. In that evocation, we are reminded of our earliest memories of God’s love and trust. At the same time we ask to be provoked so that something within us might be stirred to action, perhaps even angered by the state of the world, and from there we might be called forth to a new way of living. The prayers of invocation are prayers for God’s presence right here and now in this time and place in this moment of eternal now. Buttressing that prayer are the past and the future—-an evocation of our past knowledge and a provocation that our future world might be different due to a change in our actions. These waves of time lap at our toes—past knowledge, present need, future change—and invite us in.

A prayer of invocation is a jump into those waves. It is not a passive, distant pastime, but a willingness to jump into the current of God’s activity in the world. It is this prayer of invocation, uttered from the very beginning of our worship, that asks that God be unleashed not just in our worship, but in our very life of prayer itself. Here we are warming up, mustering up the courage to dive in. The most important question that buoys the invocation is whether we are ready for the consequences. If we dare invoke the presence of God, we need to be ready and willing to honor God’s arrival. If we are not ready to be swept into the waves, then why pray for invocation? If the sanctuary were a log ride at an amusement park, the majority of the congregation would not get splashed in the front seats of the ride. If we are more comfortable in the back seats where we barely get a dribble of that refreshing water, are we really ready to invoke the presence of God? Annie Dillard is often quoted:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

When I pray for invocation, I pray that the waking God might draw me out so that I wouldn’t be lashed to the pew or those places of fear in my life, but that I might be called to a new way of living out the gospel. At its root, “invocation” comes from vocare, meaning “to call.” In the prayer of invocation, we call God into our game of life. We are saying we don’t want a passive God on the sidelines, but a God who plays offense and defense on our team.

It was in the calling into being of the generations, beginning with Adam and Eve, that the name of God was first invoked. In the birth of generations, “people began to invoke the name of the Lord” (Gen. 4:26). There was the darkness of death in those days as well, Abel at the hand of Cain, and yet people began to summon the name of the Lord. We call upon the name of God because God is the one who “invokes” us—God is the one who calls us into being. As the waves of the generations ebb and flow, as the tides of tender love and awful bloodshed crash together, people continue to invoke the name of the Lord.

Last summer my husband and I were enjoying a quintessential summer day—a day at the Jersey shore. There at Spring Lake, in between rocky jetties, is the perfect place to ride the waves. After a day enjoying coasting in on the current, we were waterlogged and exhausted. Taking one last ride on a wave, we collapsed on the beach. If we had not rested then we would have missed what happened next. A man of about ninety, suited up in bright yellow swim trunks, eagerly approached the water accompanied by what appeared to be his two sons helping him balance on either side. He did not look strong, and it was clear from the gasps on the beach that many were concerned as he walked out into the strong waves. He and his sons waded into the water, all the time looking ahead at the waves crashing in front of them. All of a sudden, as a wave came crashing at their chests, the man dove headfirst into it. Those watching as he disappeared anxiously awaited his reappearance. We wondered how his sons could let him go under. After those lengthy seconds of concern, his head popped out of the water and he turned around to face his sons. There on his face was the largest smile I have ever seen on a person of any age.

Because we must find our way through the darkness, because every decision is a ledge and our beings are always on the precipice of death, we have no other whisper within us that is capable of salvation but that whispered prayer of invocation. Once we have let it escape from our lips, then we sit and wait for the signs. We sit and wait for our emergence from the waves and the emergent smile in discovering their joy. Life can be cold and black and tumultuous, yet there is always the God who draws us up from the deep. Our toes touch that cold, black wave and often we retreat. Yet God calls us, invokes us, to dive in and emerge smiling.

Once he emerged, it was clear that if the man’s sons had denied his desire to dive in, they would have revoked his invocation. His jumping in, diving in headfirst, was a sign of trust. But it was his emergence from the deep with such joy that I will always remember. He invoked for me the presence of God through his joy and his trust. What a starting place for prayer. What a diving into worship. We may not have yellow swim trunks, but we do have the deep waves surrounding us. Do we dare dive into the primordial deep?

OPENING HYMN

“The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and unstringing my instrument.”

– Rabindranath Tagore, “The song that I came to sing”

What if Mary had waited until she found perfect pitch to sing the Magnificat? What if David had been so busy stringing and unstringing his lyre that there were no such thing as the book of Psalms? What if Zechariah, Elizabeth’s husband, had been unable to sing? Mute at the sound of the angel’s prophecy, a song certainly wouldn’t come easily. But what if when his tongue was loosed, he had been so self-consumed he had forgotten to pause and offer a song of thanksgiving? Certainly the biblical page would become more linear and less lyrical, but even more so the biblical story would lose some of its panache and transcendence. These songs are verses that magnify God’s glory because there is truth in Augustine’s words, “Whoever sings, prays twice.” The amplification comes from the embodiment of the prayer, and we know without a doubt that the God who comes in the form of Jesus Christ likes stuff made in the flesh. A verse reverberates in the nerve endings that otherwise are untapped. A note knows a different part of us than a simple word does.

No one knows this better than the writer of Luke’s Gospel. Who needs Broadway or community theater when we have this in our hands? Strike up the band; here come Mary and Zechariah, the angel chorus and Simeon too. These folks aren’t sitting around stringing their instruments; they are ready when the Spirit moves to belt their hearts out. “Start spreading the news,” they practically sing out; take note that something new is happening here. The writer of the Gospel of Mark started a new genre—the Gospel. What kind of genre is the book of Luke? It’s a story told in song.

So if the story strikes up a tune, why am I so hesitant to sing it out sometimes? Certainly I don’t have the best voice. The folks who suffered the most at the sound of my voice were in the wedding party at which I officiated when the organist started the chords for the first hymn to sing, and no one picked up their hymnals. There in the front of the sanctuary, miked so all could hear, I had my first karaoke experience, my first live, on-stage solo act. Nothing unsung here; they heard every off-key note. The reason I hesitate to sing is really because I hesitate to be transformed. Singing transforms word into wonder, and there are days when I would much rather sit around stringing and unstringing my instrument than face transformation.

Sundays after church, even after worship had ended, my mom would keep singing. Fixing lunch in the kitchen, running errands that afternoon, working out in the yard, the hymns continued. “Surely it is God who saves me,” she would sing as she diced onions and peppers for jambalaya. “And he will raise me up on eagle’s wings,” she would hum as she pruned the bushes in our backyard. On those Sundays growing up, I was more caught up in adolescent anxieties than a new tune. I fretted about guys; I was consumed by my appearance. I’d rather be out at the mall with my allowance looking for the next best thing to buy. In other words, there was a lot about me that was unsung. The counterpoint to my song was my mom’s voice, which brought joy and prayer to our home. Mary may have sung the Magnificat, but my mom’s song seemed to proclaim, “I like my life a lot.” I learned from her tune.

The writer of Luke holds the microphone up to folks like my mom who sing out in their lives. The first solo is Mary’s song: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.” The listener knows that this last verse is the most unbelievable of all. For her to believe that other generations might remember this pregnant teen is inconceivable.

Countless musicians over the centuries have tried to put a tune to Mary’s song. All of the greatest composers like Bach, Vivaldi, Schubert, Mozart, Tallis and Pachelbel tried. Discovering an ancient text with the chords actually recorded would be an unbelievable find. Until then, musicians are left to exegete the meaning of the text through chord and instrument. Their challenge is greater than that of the theologians who try to exegete the text as well. It is hard to even imagine what the true tune would add to this text because even in just the words themselves Mary expresses an inner harmony over and against the outer discord of her situation and her world. No stringing and unstringing for Mary; she didn’t have the luxury of time or the relaxation of a settled place to do so. No time for adolescent anxiety. Mary belted out the Magnificat, in full voice, because whether or not she was ready, an even greater song was about to be born.

What the Gospel of Luke says is to listen to voices like these, the marginalized and forgotten, and to listen deeply to their voices. In the novel Bell Canto, Roxanne Coss is an opera singer of exquisite pitch and inconceivable range. A birthday party is thrown for a powerful Japanese businessman, and dignitaries around the world have gathered to witness his gift, an aria sung by Roxanne herself. In the course of the party, the unthinkable happens when revolutionaries seize hold of the home and hold the guests hostage. The story unfolds to examine how this beautiful song finds text and tune in the community formed by dignitaries and radical revolutionaries.

While it would be easy to assume that it is her beautiful voice that gives the book its title, there is one voice, marginalized and forgotten, that sings out midway through the book. Having listened to and observed Roxanne for months, one young terrorist enters the gathering and starts to sing. Suddenly it’s unclear whose voice gives the title its name. What is poignant about the book and his beautiful voice is that we know that once the hostages are released this voice could easily be lost due to circumstance and lack of privilege. It is unfathomable that this song could go unsung, not because of his preoccupation with stringing and unstringing his instrument, but because of the unfair ways the world has been strung together.

Then Luke tells us, singing at times, that the world is going to be restrung. “Start spreading the news”—someone is coming who will hold a microphone up to all those voices that have gone unheard. It is these voices that will be the instruments God will use in the ongoing chorus of redemption. When we hear that chord of God’s grace, the discord of God’s world becomes more resonant, but at the same time we are challenged to bring the world into accord with God’s vision of a new kingdom.

The band U2 is one of the best bands of our time. Born out of broken Northern Ireland, their music longs for reconciliation and peace. Bono, the lead singer, has the wonderful life of success and the luxury of fortune. He has the time and the resources to spend as much time stringing and unstringing his guitar as he could ever want. But instead of sitting stagnant, Bono has taken up the task of working to do a little repairing of our world. Raising awareness for AIDS in Africa he has met with people of power and fortune to draw their attention to the growing crisis. I wonder if, working diligently, he has gained strength and courage from Psalm 40. He and his band do a version of this song as a closing benediction at their concerts. It has become a prayer and anthem for many: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, and out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.”

In a recent cover article in Time, Bono said, “When you sing, you make people vulnerable to change in their lives. You make yourself vulnerable to change in your life. But in the end, you’ve got to become the change you want to see in the world.”² In other words, stop stringing yourself and the world along and start singing a new song as you lead a changed life.

Mary sings in the Magnificat a new song, to a child yet unseen, yet to be born, yet to change the world. In the meantime, she sings on. Friends of ours were expecting their first child to be born around Christmas. Shortly after conception, in those warm early summer days of June, the father began singing a Christmas carol to his child each night. “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright, round yon virgin, mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild, sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace,” he would sing each evening as he rested his cheek on the growing tummy of his wife. As she would turn in early, exhausted from the physical labor of growing a child and preparing to give birth, the father would pick up his guitar and play. He played through the summer, through the fall and into the Advent season. When contractions began, he had the presence of mind to put his guitar in the car with them.

After delivery, their child cried immediately, as would be expected. They were a little distraught when he continued to cry. The noise of the delivery room, the roar of the doctors and nurses weighing him, were not the music he wanted to hear. His mom tried to comfort him with the lull of her voice, but the crying continued. So his dad pulled out the guitar and began quietly to sing, “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright,...” and the newborn settled into life in this world.

Whether we sing at Advent or in ordinary time, whether we sing in tune or out of tune, no matter if we sing in worship or at the kitchen sink or along with the radios in our cars, we sing to a child, Jesus Christ, yet to be born again into the world. That child will be born into the noise of this earth that is much more ear shattering than a delivery room. There is the noise of violence in Iraq and Liberia; there is the din of children crying themselves to sleep malnourished at the hand of human ineptitude. Christ will be born into the noise of people who speak constantly instead of putting their words into actions.

It is our task to stop stringing and unstringing our instruments and thereby procrastinating what needs to be done. It is not our instruments that are broken; it is our world that needs fixing. The need is for no song to go unsung and for our voices to join the voices of others in singing this newborn child to still his soul. We are called to sing on and sing on, over and above the noise of this world, a new song to a new child who will ultimately restring the world.

Peter Gomes, chaplain at Harvard University, reminds us, “In [Mary’s] call from God and her response to that call, she becomes the mother not only of Jesus but of our vocation, and of our calling as well.”³ Mary sang out. We don’t have to be in tune, it might even sound better if we aren’t, but we do need to be attuned to the other voices God would have us sing along with. It is the world that is broken, not our instruments; will you procrastinate or will you sing?

CONFESSION

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

– Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

Cacti are a quirky curiosity to me, being new to the desert. From the window of my study I can see the stately saguaro, a tubby barrel cactus and an abundance of prickly pear. For some reason, those cacti call to mind a phrase ingrained in childhood. “Give each other warm fuzzies, not cold pricklies.” I am not sure if it was taught in Sunday school or used to promote kindheartedness in kindergarten. But I do remember the fuzzy creatures that went with the catchy phrase and the fear of receiving a cold prickly. Those cacti call to mind all those cold pricklies in my life. Though a cactus is anything but cold, its prickly thorns remind me of those moments I have been standoffish, prickly, sinful. The meditation on the cactus thorns is transformed, though, when I pray through those prickly prayers. “Forgive me, God, for the way I . . . and when I . . . and how I. . . . It’s funny how the overabundance of “I” begins to look a little prickly.

Cold pricklies may seem inconsequential, but anyone who is familiar with the effect of sin on our lives knows that it is all of the little sins, the countless little lies and the innumerable moments that add up to a whole lot of sin. So comfortable are we with these little imbalances of our lives that we are at a loss when one day they tip over and tumble heavily into our hearts, surprising us when they do begin to prick and poke. I am the wrong person. I don’t feel like myself. I am not the person God created me to be. The world might be a better place if I was able to get beyond myself and next to the stranger in my midst. There is something within us that doesn’t feel warm, fuzzy, or even cold and prickly—that something feels dead.

Several years ago there was a large and destructive fire at Sabino Canyon, a nature reserve near my home. The fire raged for days, destroying wildlife and plant life alike. Though years later the full damage done is yet to be revealed, the reason so is surprising. The strong saguaro cacti do not die immediately. It takes ten years or more for them to reveal any signs of death. When it does realize its death, as much as a cactus realizes anything, it will slowly begin to shed its skin. Once its skin has been stripped, all that will remain of the cactus are its bare ribs.

Death at times is slow in coming. We wake up one day and realize we are not who we once were. Having experienced three of those moments of recognition in the past few years, I figure I have averaged one death for every ten years of my life. For me those moments come when I am profoundly aware of a place of sin in my life. Sin deadens and kills. It hurts us and those who have to deal with the results of our sin.

Those moments of recognition don’t just happen on the individual level; they are corporate as well. The desert landscape is pierced by thorns and so is the landscape of the world. As a church, a nation, a global community, we wake up at times and realize we have died. Corporate dishonesty—a long and slow death. Corruption and abuse in the church—a long and slow death. Communities separated from one another by suburbs stretching out beyond the needs of the inner cities—a long and slow death. Stripped down and ribs beheld bare, our sins are all too apparent, so apparent that we begin to think it is the norm.

There are also the moments when the church wakes up and realizes it doesn’t know who it is anymore. This can happen when the church is not able, ready or willing to hear prayers of honest confession. Are we really able to hear and be present to the prayers of confession uttered in absolute honesty? The church is so afraid of hearing and honoring true confession that we limit the ways in which we confess our sin. A call to confession is usually a paragraph-long printed prayer of confession to be read in unison with the corporate body and sixty seconds (the pastor is timing it) of silence to gather your thoughts, name your confessions and be honest about them before God. What if the gathered body had a few minutes of silence to sit in honest conversation before God? The prayer of confession intends to pierce the well-protected skin of our sin, to needle us toward honest reflection. But more often than not, this prayer can feel repetitive, rote. It requires an act of the imagination and a deed of courage to take those words and the silence and bring our lives honestly to them. What if the gathered body had a blank section of the bulletin and a pen in hand where the printed prayer had once been? “During this time of confession, write down the places in your life, the actions you have done, the things you have left undone, the people you have harmed. Write these down and then pray over them in a time of silence.” In so doing, we might actually internalize our sins, naming them with a sense of ownership for what we have done.

The danger, of course, is that this makes the confession too individual and not a shared corporate prayer. The printed corporate prayers are important because they call to our attention sins we were not even aware we were committing. Recently a local church printed a unison prayer of confession that asked congregants to join together in stating their culpability in these kinds of institutional sins. A woman incensed came up to the pastor after the service: “I didn’t come to church to confess those sins—I am not a part of all of that!” But we are. Whether we believe it or not, the institutional sins of racism and economic greed and sexism are all areas we are involved in, and we do need to be reminded of that from week to week. That is why we are called to corporate confession so that we name sins beyond our own consuming “I’s.”

Our prayers of confession need to pierce our hearts and poke our consciences so we can acknowledge the places where we have become the wrong person, and those places where our world has become the wrong world. Big sins and little sins, individual sin and institutional sin—we as human beings are part of it all. We need prayers of confessions that force us to think, that make us honestly evaluate our lives, that call us to confess those sins of commission and the sins of omission. We need prayers of confession with integrity and intentionality because we need something that will call us beyond ourselves. We do not want to admit our own culpability, our own death at times. Annie Dillard tells the story of an Eskimo hunter who went to see the local missionary who had been preaching in his village. “I want to ask you something,” the hunter said. “What’s that?” responded the missionary. “If I did not know about God and sin,” the hunter inquired, “would I go to hell?” “Well no,” said the missionary, “not if you did not know!” “Then why,” retorted the hunter, “did you tell me?”

We don’t want to be told about sin, and we don’t want to confess our sins—not in church, not in our daily lives. Yet each Sunday morning at 11:00, like clockwork, we are called to confession for the sin in our lives. Where have you become the wrong person? Where are you dead? What are the small actions you pursue in the day-to-day existence that bring about that cumulative death?

In the movie Changing Lanes, two men, played by Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson, have a collision of cars and character that causes a deep need for confession. On one ordinary day, the two are headed separately for appearances before a judge in court. Affleck is to present documents sealing a questionable Wall Street dealing, and Jackson is to argue for custody of his sons. Both are delayed when they crash while changing lanes. Affleck is so hurried that he accidentally drops his important papers, which Jackson finds. The movie unfolds as Affleck seeks to regain the papers. Because Jackson was waylaid by the accident, he was unable to convince the judge of his worthiness to receive partial custody. Angered by the consequences of the crash, Jackson refuses to return the documents. Obstinance turns to revenge, and soon both men are caught up in a cycle of destructive decisions that doesn’t take ten years but one terrible day to make them realize they are not who they once were.

In a pivotal scene, Affleck seeks refuge in a church and finds himself in a confessional. Even though the audience sees clearly that he has become the wrong person, he has not owned that for himself. When given an invitation by the priest to confess, he refuses. “No thanks,” he says, “I came here for meaning.” Yet it is clear to all viewing that Affleck is not going to find any meaning until he opens himself up to the kind of confession that names the places he has gone awry.

The scenes of Affleck in the church are juxtaposed with powerful counterpoint scenes of Jackson in real confession. In a confession even more intimate than with a priest in a confessional, Jackson goes face-to-face with his ex-wife to name before her the places of sin in his life. He acknowledges how his decisions big and small have caused him to become the wrong person and caused their relationship to die. In this scene, meaning is found through honest confession, the kind of face-to-face confession that is found in a truly worshiping life.

Our prayers of confession call us to open ourselves to the intimacy and vulnerability of real confession. They poke us from our comfort zones and prickle our consciences. In these prayers, we name the places we have died, perhaps not even realizing the long slow death until the prayer names it for us. In confession we go face-to-face with ourselves, our neighbors, our God to say where we have died and caused death to others.

While there have been moments of recognition, those days when, like the cactus losing its skin, I finally realize my death, my sin most often is sin with the skin still on. It is the prickly sin that pierces and pokes those around me that I most often confess on a Sunday morning. It is the sin that needles and barbs my husband, my daughter, my driving, my living. It is the cold and prickly stuff of the day-to-day existence. It is the sin that keeps loved ones and strangers at arm’s length instead of welcoming them in. It’s not sin with ribs beheld bare, not deadened, but strangely alive, the sin that perks up in the wrong places and draws energy from the destructive. There is so much sin in the world this shouldn’t just be a chapter on sin, but a book about sin. It would be as broad as our egos, as deep as our pockets, as wide as our appetites, and as high as our ambition. It would be a big book—but in no way could it ever possibly be as honest about the sin in our lives as it needed to be. Our sin is too dark, too repressed, too deadly even to be put into words.

It is Christ on the cross who combats our sin and calls us to a new confession—the confession of Christ himself. We turn in worship from confession of sin to the confession that Jesus Christ alone is Lord and Savior. The writer of Philippians describes this movement poetically as he prods us away from our sin and toward a confession of Christ as Lord: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus ... so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Phil. 2:3-5, 10-11). Just as Sunday morning worship moves from our confession of sin to our confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, a worshiping life is constantly seeking to change lanes from our confession of sin to a confession of Christ as Lord that is made manifest in real ways in our day-to-day lives.

While we are constantly navigating between these two lanes, the cross stands as a clear road sign. So powerful is the cross’s confession of Christ that it is only during the period of Eastertide that we do not even need to utter a prayer of confession. Christ has taken it upon himself. No Kyrie Eleison, no corporate prayers of confession, no calls to confession or times for silent reflection—at Easter we are called to confess Jesus Christ as Lord, and in place of the confession we offer prayers of adoration instead.

Those dead cactus in the desert, with skin stripped down and ribs bare, call me to a moment of confession to reflect on the sin and the places of death in my life. There are times when in a moment of grace, the dead cactus with its arms outstretched looks exactly like a cross. The ribs of the cactus fade and the image of the cross becomes clear. With arms outstretched, it embraces our confessions, hugs us in the midst of our prickliness, draws us in despite our sinful ways. In those moments I confess my sin and then I pray that my sin will recede and my life instead will become a clear witness to the cross in its confession of Christ alone as Lord and Savior.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”

If that happens to us, we experience grace.

After such an experience we may not be better than before,

And we may not believe more than before.

But everything is transformed.

– Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted”

Treading these words from Paul Tillich’s sermon, “You Are Accepted,” one gets the feeling that Tillich wants to reach out from beyond the pulpit and beyond the page to grab the listeners and give them a little shaking. The italics are his. “Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” In the sermon, he says it over and over again, in every paragraph, in a myriad of ways. He wants us to hear anew and be changed by the unbelievable fact that not only are we accepted, we are assured of God’s pardon. Sin abounds, yes. But so much more so is the abounding, confounding, astounding grace of God.

It is unfortunate that in most services of worship the assurance of pardon is the most rote and ritualized element of all. Shrunk down to a two-line litany, it’s easy to blink, yawn or daydream through the most pivotal point of the worship service. “In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven.” Six words later it’s over. How is it possible that everything is transformed in that moment? Yet we know the constraints of the time and place.

The assurance of pardon is the axis upon which all of worship revolves. We are left spinning without a center, caught up in the endless revolutions of sin and self unless we allow ourselves to be held together by this astounding axis. We come rolling into worship from all of our circles of life without God. Within minutes of our gathering, we are asked to name those places in our lives as individuals and as a corporate body that we need to confess. Thoughts spin to all of the sins of omission and sins of commission we have perpetrated throughout the week. Sixty seconds of confession? We could use an hour. Unison prayers written by somebody else? I have my own list to go by. Only one paragraph to express it all? I have pages to get off my chest. Give me a pen and paper so I might write a few letters of apology. Some confessions change dramatically from week to week; other sins are so ingrained that the confession is always the same, and yet we always come back around to the same centering point, “In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven.”

Once we have stopped spinning and have centered in, grabbing onto this axis for dear life, we are freed to hear the Word of God proclaimed and to offer in return our response to this good news. Worship revolves around our hearing and receiving these words of forgiveness. Yet why are these words so hard to receive? Tillich knew all our “buts” to this response: “But I’m not good enough.” “But I’m still a sinner.” “But God couldn’t love someone like me.”

At a youth conference last summer I met a sixteen-year-old boy, Peter, who had heard a lot of “buts” in his life. He knew the power and control that the word had over him. Having grown up in a home where acceptance didn’t come easily, he struggled to feel good about himself. He was the most likable guy in the small group — funny and outgoing, handsome and warm. His charisma was both attractive and safe. Everyone felt comfortable around his easygoing, likable nature. Yet when he spoke about his family, his life, his self-doubts and fears, it was clear that he struggled with self-acceptance. Over the course of the week his ease in sharing helped the small group open up to safe sharing. At the end of the week, all in the group shared their highlights—their God moments—from the week. Many spoke of new friends, the small group, connections made in their own youth groups. Highlights were centered mostly in the development of relationships. A few spoke of moments in a worship service or keynote talk that challenged or transformed them. Peter’s highlight stood out as wholly unique. “The highlight of my week? It was proclaiming God’s glorious pardon to everybody at the outdoor worship service.” While most would add “an assurance of,” for Peter it was uniquely “God’s glorious” pardon. While we might breeze through the assurance of pardon on any given Sunday morning, for Peter the highlight of his week was being able to say to a gathered crowd of senior high students, “You might feel worthless, you might feel like nobody cares, you might feel unaccepted, but. ..”

Perhaps one of the best words in the Bible is “but,” along with “peace” and “love,” “justice,” and “mercy,” even “God” or “Christ.” One of the most gracious and awe-inspiring words upon which so much of scripture balances is this word “but.” It’s the word that grounds the Scripture seen on bumper stickers around the world— John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that we should not perish but have eternal life.” Over five thousand times in the NRSV this astounding word appears. “But” abounds in the Bible. In the Bible “but” isn’t the basis for an excuse as we so often use the word in daily life. “But” is the foundation for receiving God’s grace. As Psalm 86:15 says, “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” “But” is an opposition to all of our enemies: “O Lord, how many are my foes. Many are rising against me, but you, O Lord, are a shield around me” (Ps. 3:3). “But” is the only thing that endures: “The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isa. 40:7).

In the assurance of pardon, we announce God’s glorious “but.” Perhaps those will be the words that grab our attention in worship. The assurance of pardon is the axis upon which all of worship, all of life, revolves. Tillich recognizes that “but” by saying, “We may not be better than before . . . but everything is transformed.” With a sure and hearty acceptance of God’s pardon, all of life is held together centered in God’s grace and mercy. And this, according to Peter, is glorious.

Years ago I heard an activist in education reform recall his early days of teaching after graduation from a prestigious university. His parents thought he was crazy to accept a postgraduation position teaching in the public school system of South Boston. Why pay for a top-notch education to accept such a low-paying, meaningless job? His parents were unsupportive, and for a time, uncommunicative. In the meantime, the young teacher struggled through the school system. Eager to empower and excite the imagination, he drew on the poetry of Langston Hughes. The administration of the school, angered by his dismissal of the accepted curriculum and threatened by his empowerment of the students, fired him. The firing caused an uproar in the community. Teachers, parents, students and members of the community marched in protest toward the city hall. The young teacher, embarrassed by the publicity, wanted to stay home that day. Arriving late he saw the parade of people marching toward the town center. What he didn’t expect to see were the two people leading the parade, carrying a banner in support of him—his parents, thereby shouting out their pardon of his actions, showing their love for their son. One might say that the pardon is held up as a banner over our worship and lives.

God’s banner over us is as bold as these words, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that we might not perish but have eternal life.” In worship, how can we depict the magnitude of these words? How can we honor their glorious telling of Christ’s death for our sins without scaling it down to a six-word size? The assurance of pardon is the axis upon which all of worship holds, it is glorious in its telling of Christ’s sacrifice for our sins; it is a banner in boldly proclaiming God’s acceptance of us no matter what. Because of these very things, it forms the praxis of our ministry. Because we are pardoned, we must pardon others, forgiving debts, forgoing hurts, forbidding retaliation. God is for us and so in turn we are for others. In that moment, everything is transformed. We may be sinners, but God’s banner over us is love.

PROCLAIMING

          I am large; I contain multitudes.

– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

On the corner of 29th and Wharton streets in central Philadelphia, a bold vision of peace is artfully proclaimed. Anyone who knows Philadelphia knows that the corner of 29th and Wharton is an unlikely place for peace to exist. Known to residents as Gray’s Ferry, the area has long been troubled by racial tension. White flight in the 1960s, riots born of economic collapse in the 1970s, competitive backlash of a white basketball team against several black basketball teams in the 1980s all led to national attention in the 1990s when a teenager was shot after escalating violence. As one resident said, “You learned quickly around here where you belonged, and where you didn’t.”

It was precisely in the midst of this troubled area that the founders of the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia envisioned a bold proclamation of peace. The Mural Arts Program was developed in 1984 as an antigraffiti effort. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars each year repainting city walls, a few concerned citizens pictured walls covered not with graffiti but with murals, and youth not serving time in detention centers but time as artists. The folks of the Mural Arts Program (M.A.P.) had a new map for the city, one laid out with new visions for a community once known only for violence and decay. Within a few years, the graffiti problem had been turned around and Philadelphia was quickly becoming known as “the mural capital of the United States.” Thousands of murals enlivened street corners once known only for gang violence, drug sales and murder. Hundreds of people called with offers to paint the walls on their homes or in their neighborhoods with a new vision. Once a wall was chosen, volunteers from the Mural Arts Program would work with the community to discern a new vision for their neighborhood to be proclaimed through a mural.

Even with this history of success, coming up with a consensus for the corner of 29th and Wharton proved to be problematic. Community members thought the money could be better spent; others thought the idea was hypocritical; some felt as if a mural of unity would be imposed on them. Others thought the mural would simply be a reminder of the problems that continued to plague their community.

Community members of all beliefs gathered to discuss the potential project. They talked about the tragedies that had marked their community. From there, they began a process to determine a vision for peace in the community. After many proposals, one stood out among all others: eleven hands laid one upon another, five black, six white, and these words: “Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.” It was clear that this was the consensus of the community.

After choosing eleven hands and sketching a preliminary drawing, the artists got to work. Carefully charting out every crease and wrinkle in each hand, the artists laid out the vision. But the vision proclaimed was more than eleven hands and a verse from the Bible projected onto a city wall. The vision proclaimed spoke multitudes as black artists and white artists worked side by side, night after night, for six weeks. Each evening, when residents used to shut themselves safely in their homes to avoid any violence, they instead came out to watch and share snacks. Children from the community volunteered to help and even began painting other walls in the surrounding area. Here the “Peace Wall” was born.

Those charged with getting into the pulpit each Sunday know that they face a similar challenge. A mural is to be painted—one that honors suffering, claims the heart of the community and boldly paints a new vision. Any preacher who has taken a homiletics class has heard the professor say, “Every person out there in the pew has a broken heart. How are you going to preach to him and her?” So many tragedies told and untold sit in the pew that any preacher wonders upon occasion two things: “Who am I that I should proclaim the good news?” and “Even given the gospel message, what shall I say to them?”

These were the first questions on the mind of Moses when he encountered the Holy One of Israel at Horeb (Exodus 3). The most indescribable of murals was painted before him out of the simplest of elements—flames of fire and an unconsumed bush. The largeness of God was proclaimed in that moment—God’s presence, “Here I am”; God’s past, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”; and God’s future yet to be proclaimed, “I have observed the misery of my people. ... So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

In that all-encompassing moment, Moses trembled and balked. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? ... If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

In response to these huge questions of proclamation and the most basic of human instincts, to recoil, God offered the most perplexing and profound answer: “I am who I am.” God responded with a play on the verb “to be,” and with that the Holy One of Israel sent Hebrew scholars to scratch their heads and turn some pages. Certainly this Holy One of Israel was having some fun being punny, but so also was Yahweh offering the most basic of truths. When asked, “What shall I proclaim?” God answers, “I have been there, I am there, and I will be there.” Rolling all senses of the verb “to be” into one enigmatic phrase, God puns on God’s own divine name “Yahweh.” With that, Yahweh calls on Moses and his listeners to remember all of the “I ams” in which God has revealed God’s very self until this point. “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” is only a small fraction of the story. This Holy One of Israel is the God of Dinah and Sarah, of Hagar and Tamar, God of the ark and the idol, God of Leah and Rachel. This Holy One of Israel could very well utter, “I am chaos and creation. I am darkness, I am light. I am a ladder and a stone. I am food and I am famine.” These names and images evoke the very presence of Yahweh. “I am what I am,” Yahweh says to Moses. In so doing God sparks our imagination to consider the multitude of possibilities.

For those who need help considering the multitude of possibilities God intended in the utterance of the divine name, Christ comes along with a paintbrush in hand. The multitude of possibilities are condensed into seven images, but the possibilities within those seven images for our imagination and our spiritual nourishment are endless. “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35); “I am the light of the world” (8:12); “I am the gate for the sheep” (10:7); “I am the good shepherd” (10:11); “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25); “I am the way and the truth and the life” (14:6); “I am the true vine” (15:1).

Standing on any street corner in the United States, the mural Christ paints of the true vine is a vivid reminder that so many other things call us to tap into them for nourishment. On any decrepit wall that needs rebuilding, “I am the light of the world” speaks volumes. For any community that needs to work through a process of understanding and reconciliation, “I am the good shepherd” is the picture to paint. These seven “I am” statements develop our understanding of the true nature of Christ. A solid Christology could be formed just from these seven statements. Yet they do so much more than show the true nature of Christ; they open our imagination and they tap into that deep part of ourselves that is hungry and thirsty for more than words. These images paint pictures of Christ all around us.

A group of scholars led by Sharon Daloz Parks interviewed one hundred young adults working to make a difference for the common good. Parks wanted to know what sparks within these young people ignited that fire for fighting. What had gotten them past the balking that Moses began with? Comparing the one hundred interviewed, Parks and her colleagues determined that the answer was deceptively simple. The young adults shared three things in common. First, each had a strong sense of self-identity. They all knew clearly their gifts and their weaknesses. Second, each had a strong vision for what the world should be like and the barriers inherent in the institutional structures that prevented that vision from becoming reality. The third characteristic this group shared was surprising, Parks and her colleagues noted that each of the individuals referred to a symbol or image, something beyond themselves and somewhat transcendent in nature, that guided them in their thinking.³ A burning bush unconsumed by fire, hands clasped on a mural unconsumed by violence or graffiti, and a vision of creation unconsumed by chaos are all examples of proclamation that stimulate the imagination and challenge the individual to design bold new ways of taking that vision to new places and to people in need.

Preacher and layperson alike are challenged to paint the gospel message. Standing on our street corners, looking around at a world in need, we grapple with what tools to use and what message to proclaim. Our paintbrushes are held in the minds of those who hear our words and see our actions. With a dapple and a brush stroke, a picture is painted whether we intend to do so or not. The paid staff of the Mural Arts Program struggle with the same issue. Once the community decides the vision for the mural, one of the paid staff members designs a preliminary drawing that becomes the basis for the mural. But then the mural is turned back to the community, where volunteers, including children and former graffiti artists, pick up their brushes and begin to work side by side with the professional staff. The mural becomes a collaborative effort. So too does preaching. For any artist or preacher intent on perfection, the ideal becomes an elusive goal. But for those open to the kind of perfection that the Holy Spirit brings through collaboration in community, then a truly perfect proclamation can be offered. Fred Rogers writes, “The space between [the preacher] and the needy listener is holy ground. The Holy Spirit uses that space in marvelously, wonderful ways.”⁴1 see that space as a blank canvas.

My favorite mural in Philadelphia was recently demolished at the corner of 40th Street and Powelton Avenue to make room for new construction. The famous artist Sidney Goodman collaborated with the program and other volunteers to paint “Boy with Raised Arm.” In the mural a young African American boy stands against a dark background. With decrepit walls shadowed behind him, he gracefully raises one arm with a clenched fist. The mural conveys the need of this young boy to be just a tad bit taller, just a little larger than he is. This was all the mural contained, and then the Holy Spirit moved along that canvas and words from a Walt Whitman poem were added. “I am large,” the mural proclaims for the boy and all others who need the same encouragement. “I contain multitudes.”

Those of us in the pew and the pulpit need the same enlargement. “I am large,” Yahweh says in a way to Moses as God utters the divine name. “I contain multitudes.” “I am large,” Christ claims when he says, “I am the bread of life.” If you think you’ve heard it proclaimed before, listen again. “I am large enough to feed five thousand with just five loaves of bread and two fish.” “I am large enough for billions of people over the centuries to keep picking up those crumbs of bread and doing this in remembrance of me.” “I am large enough to feed the hungry in body and in spirit.” The Spirit whispers, “Before me lies a blank canvas. You may say one word, but through me people will hear that word in multitudes of ways.”

Jane Kenyon refers to the multitudes the Trinity can proclaim in her poem, “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks.”

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper . . .

When the young girl who starves

sits down to a table

she will sit beside me .. .

I am food on the prisoner’s plate.

These words enlarge for us a God who makes the world, a Christ who loves the world, and the Spirit that keeps the world, while at the same time framing for us particular ways of seeing the Trinity at work among us. She paints a picture of maker, lover and keeper. She paints a picture of bread on a plate. For those who would dismiss her interpretation of the Trinity as a reduction to functionality, much is lost. Kenyon gives fresh words to the gospel and a new picture of how we might see it at work in the world.

The challenge to preachers is to place food on the plate. We face critical yet hungry ears. We hope to enlarge the kingdom, but also to frame barriers and problems. We try to get people to pause briefly in the places and situations that desperately need more than a moment’s notice. How can we paint over and over again new pictures that proclaim the maker, the lover and the keeper who is at work as the Trinity among us and through us and beside us? How can we set out that loaf of homemade bread that will feed the hungry?

In the movie Wit, Emma Thompson plays Vivian Bearing, a professor of English, dying of cancer. Academia has been her life’s ambition; she has lost friendships and family in pursuit of achievement.

Now, as her life comes to a close, she is surrounded not by books, students, papers or journal articles, but by the lonely walls of a hospital room. The movie is almost a one-woman show as it chronicles her personal battle with the worst of evils. Our pain for her grows as her loneliness increases. One nurse befriends her. Though caught between the demands she faces in her job, the nurse slows down to be with Vivian. One day she pulls out hand lotion and gives Vivian a hand massage. Another day she offers a popsicle to share. “I am bread on a prisoner’s plate,” Kenyon offers, and the movie begs to add, “I am a popsicle shared.” The sharing becomes pure sacrament.

Near the end of the movie, a mentor tracks Vivian down. She offers a reading first of the poetry of John Donne. At any other point in life this would have been a divine offering. But here Vivian dismisses it for simple closeness with her friend. The mentor calls out her name and climbs into the hospital bed. “Let me read you a story then,” she offers. So begins the reading of The Runaway Bunny: “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, I am running away.’ ‘If you run away,’ said his mother, I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.’”

So begins the gospel truth. Her proclamation is as gentle as the touch of their bodies in the bed, as genuine as the simple utterance of Vivian’s name and as truth-filled as the story told. I am what I am. I am the runaway bunny. I am her mother. I am the questions the toddler asks endlessly. I am the bush unconsumed by fire. I am a sermon preached not perfectly, but with ears open to hearing and the spirit ready to intervene. I am the sacred ground between pulpit and listener. I am canvas and paintbrush. I am the maker. I am the lover. I am the keeper. I am a mural painted on a street corner, eleven hands clasped. I am a hand massage. I am a popsicle. I am a children’s story read aloud. I am touch and taste. I am food on the prisoner’s plate. I am the bread of life. I am large. I contain multitudes. I am proclaimed in all of these things and so much more.

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

The hen flings a single pebble aside

with her yellow, reptilian foot.

Never in eternity the same sound –

a small stone falling on a red leaf.

The juncture of twig and branch,

scarred with lichen, is a gate

we might enter, singing.

Things: simply lasting, then

failing to last: water, a blue heron’s

eye, and the light passing

between them: into light all things

must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

– Jane Kenyon, “Things”

A poet’s day is a constant prayer for illumination, observing daily life incessantly, taking note of the small details that illumine and inspire. Some days are dark. Some days are dull. Some days no poems call out. Then, when a hen flings a single pebble, the recognition that this sound will never again be repeated inspires a poem. The poet knows the arduous task of waiting and looking thousands of days and ways for that cast of light passing to illumine the blue heron, the twig and the branch, the yellow reptilian foot. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye calls these moments of illumination “the gleam of particulars.”

We look for the gleam of particulars in this world God created because we cannot manufacture that gleam of light ourselves. We like to think we can. With the advent of industrial light, with the turning of the clock for daylight savings time, with the glow of neon advertising things to claim our souls, we believe we can manufacture light and its powerful glow. The irony of this day and age is that there are so many things flashing at us, it makes finding true light an even more difficult task.

James Turrell, a Quaker, is so angered by the overabundance of manufactured light in our culture that he has dedicated his career as an artist to getting his viewers to experience light in a new way. Inspired by the Quaker prayer spoken on the way to a gathering, “Go inside and greet the light,” he invites his viewers to do the same as they enter a museum housing his creations. Rothko-like canvases apparent to the viewer’s eyes are facades created by the cast of light. One of his works, an entire room, pitch black, is an invitation for the viewer to sit—twenty minutes or more to achieve the effect of a glimmer of light that comes in the midst of the darkness. The wait in the dark makes the viewer uncomfortable. Sit in the dark with strangers? No thank you. Devote twenty minutes of my lunch hour at the museum squeezed into an already-too-busy day to wait for light to dawn? I’ll walk on to the next exhibit. We don’t have the patience to look for illumination that brightens not by the glow of a lamp but by the effort of truly looking to see.

If we don’t have the twenty minutes of patience needed to see this light in a museum exhibit, how then can we sit through Scripture and a sermon and wait for illumination? Thorny texts, dry preaching, a baby’s cry. We don’t have the patience or desire to sit and wait. With a dark world at our fingertips, we want the flick of a switch to make it brighter. Who can wait for someone to ignite a real fire?

In the desert, there is a plant that blooms fiery sparks of red. This fire occurs at the tips of one of the most lifeless plants in the desert, the ocotillo. Most of the year the ocotillo looks hopeless, like a spray of sticks and thorns. Standing six feet tall or higher, the plant consists of ten to twenty long sticks gathered at its base, spread open at the ends of the branches. It doesn’t have the kitschiness of a cactus, or the personality of a prickly pear. It looks dead, lifeless and downright dismal most days of the year. Then the winter snowmelt brings just enough hydration and the spring sun brings just enough light to call the ocotillo out of death and into life. Slowly small leaves creep up its branches and then ignite at the top into a fiery red glow of feathery flowers. These red flowers guide the hummingbirds on their spring trek north.

Sometimes what we see in our lives or in the Scripture texts for the day looks a lot like those sticks and thorns. As one congregation member asked upon hearing the Scripture one Sunday, “I came to church to hear this?” We don’t want to hear about the thorny side of judgment or the sticky texts of terror. The fire that ignites isn’t the passion within us to hear and to serve, but the fiery anger of the truth of being known. So scared are we of hearing and knowing, we retreat. We aren’t willing to put ourselves into the darkness of a Scripture text because its shadows can at times be more apparent than its light. We don’t have the patience to wait for the fiery flowers to bloom.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York City offered a retrospective show of the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg. Known for their immense and colorful collages, one painting stood out as entirely different. It was one of those paintings that begs the complaint “I could have painted that!” Yet its simplicity was deceptive. Painted entirely black, it had a single slice of light piercing the center of the canvas. The title of the painting didn’t give much hint to its meaning: Untitled. But then, an apparent afterthought, there in parentheses was another thought almost scribbled in. Untitled (Nightblooming) was the title in its entirety. Was the night blooming into further darkness overtaking the light? Or was the night slowly blooming and unfolding into light?

This is the question the church faces each week as the pastor and congregation stand before the dark canvas of the world with the small sliver of illumination held between the covers of our Bible. We pray for illumination that the words of Scripture might unfold and bloom, light into light, light out of darkness, dead sticks into fiery flowers so that all the world might witness the glory of God. Darkness will not have the last word. Night will not bloom even darker and deeper into night. Christ pierces the darkness. His life stands like a small sliver against the dark canvas of injustice, against the inability to accept God’s grace revealed. Through his life, light overtakes the darkness.

Recently the Catholic Church realized it had not fully emphasized the light shed into the world by the life of Christ. Its rosary prayers consisted of the joyful mysteries of the annunciation, the sorrowful mysteries of the passion and the glorious mysteries of the resurrection. But what about his healing and teaching? What about the light cast at the table of the Eucharist and the glow of the transfiguration? In an effort to illuminate even more fully the life of Christ, the church added “the luminous mysteries” of Christ’s life—his baptism, the wedding at Cana, his proclamation in parables, the transfiguration and the Eucharist.

These luminous mysteries reveal another artist at work painting streaks of light across the dark canvas of the world. We pray for illumination that we might see this hand at work. As I walk through the desert, my prayer, like the poet’s, is to see something new, that some wildflower, creature, stone or mountain might be illumined in a new light, in a new way.

We don’t just go inside to greet the light; we go outside to the everyday street corners to look for illumination. In the movie Smoke, the owner of a Brooklyn tobacco shop, Auggie Wren, prays for illumination by taking a single photograph each day. You would think that the subject of the photograph would be different each day, but he takes a picture of the same street corner every day at the same time, 8 a.m. One day a customer notices the camera and asks about it. Auggie pulls out his photograph album filled with four thousand pictures of the same street corner. The customer, seemingly surprised, shrugs and Auggie responds, “This is my life’s work. It’s my corner. A record of my little spot in the world. But things happen here too.” The customer begins flipping through the pictures quickly and Auggie retorts, “Slow down. You’ll never get it unless you slow down, my friend.” The customer does, but he still doesn’t get it. “They’re all the same,” he dismisses. Auggie explains further, “But each one is different. . . there is summer light and autumn light.