Lent 3: Digging in the Dirt

3-24-19

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

The news has felt pretty heavy the last few weeks…. And then our Gospel this week start out with two big awful events that happened lately “in the news,” so to speak.

Historians honestly don’t have any idea about either of the events described at the beginning of this chapter. But neither of these types of events are unfamiliar to us. Jesus was told about the tragic murder of some Galilean worshippers who were murdered by Pontius Pilate during their worship service, killing who-knows-how-many while they prayed – and by now, who hasn’t heard of the horrendous shooting killing fifty people in the mosque in New Zealand? Jesus then brings up a second tragedy – a terrible accident on a grand scale, where eighteen more innocent people were caught underneath the rubble with a building collapsed on top of them. When reading about this, it’s hard not to think about the flooding happening in the Midwest which has already claimed the lives of three people, and many more who died in floods around the world. Or the thousands of people killed by the cyclone this last week in Mozambique.

History doesn’t remember, but people have always wondered why bad things happen, especially to people who just seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Philosophers, scholars, theologians, and pastors throughout the ages have spilled so much ink trying to reconcile the idea of a good and gracious God with the reality of suffering and the existence of evil in the world. And, spoiler alert, we haven’t solved it yet. Bad things in a good world seem like a design flaw on God’s part.

At this time, the belief that people were to blame when bad things happened to them was very strong. It’s no wonder that people are asking Jesus about this “problem of evil,” as people much smarter than me have called it. I mean, if you had a chance to talk to the son of God, wouldn’t you too ask him, if God created this world good… why do bad things happen in it?

Jesus’s answer seems pretty unsatisfying, or at least, startling: “Repent or die!” Yikes, Jesus! What a thing to say in the face of the suffering of innocent people.

Perhaps it would be pretty insensitive if Jesus did indeed mean that in order to live, we should feel sorry for the bad things we do. Remorse is not actually the feeling that Jesus is going for. The word he uses is “metanoia”, a word that is better translated “conversion, reformation, or transformation.”

As we learned a few weeks ago during one of our Thursday night “Eat, Pray, Learn” meals, sometimes translation are limited, and don’t always give us the full, nuanced meaning of the biblical narrative. A better revelation of what’s going on might come from a different translation, the Common English Bible, where the first few verses of chapter 13 read: “Some who were present on that occasion told Jesus about the Galileans whom Pilate had killed while they were offering sacrifices. He replied, “Do you think the suffering of these Galileans proves that they were more sinful than all the other Galileans? No, I tell you, but unless you change your hearts and lives, you will die just as they did ….”

“Change your hearts and lives” is way different thank simply feeling sorry about our sins. Metanoia literally means “to turn around and head in another direction.” Feeling sorry can be part of it and is probably where it starts… but repentance is not where it ends by any means. Metanoia is starting to do something different than what we have been doing in the past.

Some people seem to be capable of instantiations change. I think we all have friends like that annoyingly fit this description. They go on a diet and appear to immediately lose 20 pounds, or they instantly adjust to daylight savings. But the rest of us, most of us I think, change takes time. Change for us is more like sailing across an ocean against the wind – there is a technique called “tacking,” where instead of going directly into the wind, which would be exhausting, sail boats go on the diagonal, like this… it might take you more time, but it gets you there without exhausting yourself. Or if you have ever driving through the Appalachians or the Rockies… the road don’t go straight up the mountain... because your poor little car couldn’t handle it. Instead, the roads wind around, and double back as they progress, slowly but surely up the incline. 

Much like the poor tree in this parable that Jesus then tells. A parable is a type of storytelling that you will learn more about next week Buckingham Pizza as we talk about the Bible. But today, I give you a bit of an advanced peek. A parable is a story that has a meaning and a moral, often subverts our expectations, uses natural imagery that the people in Jesus’ time would be familiar with…but it is INTO the same as an allegory! In an allegory, every character and plot point has a one-to-one meaning. For example, Aslan is clearly Jesus in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Things are not so simple in parables. Is God the owner of the garden? Is God the gardener? Are WE the gardener? Who or what is the TREE… it is US? It is God’s people? Is it the church? Is it this congregation? Yes, maybe? We are left on our own to make meaning out of this story.

We know that the tree is not producing fruit, and the owner is frustrated. We know that the gardener has advocated one more year and will take special care to till and fertilize the tree. The tree doesn’t get one more day, or one more month… it gets another full cycle of seasons – fall, winter, winter, spring, summer. Because it’s probably going to take that long to know if all of that hard work and TLC is going to, literally, come to fruition. Transformation takes time. Metanoia takes time. It does not happen overnight.

Pastor Katya Ouchakof reflects, “I like to think that God shows up to us in the way that the gardener showed up for the fig tree... When we are at the very end of our endurance, when it appears that we no longer serve any purpose, God intervenes and gives us another chance.”

The tree in the story got another chance. But we don’t know the ending of the story – did the tree bear fruit eventually? Did the owner of the vineyard come and cut it down? We don’t know. And we don’t always know the outcome of our own stories, especially when we are in a particularly manure-filled part of the story, or when the wind is blowing particularly strongly as we are trying to cross an ocean, or we worry whether or not our little car is going to make it up the mountain. But we do know one thing from this parable – the “same old, same old” is just not going to get the job done.

Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” The good news is that God is doing a new thing, rather than “the same thing” …. But are we following along with that new thing? repenting… or rather, metanoia-ing? Are we reorienting, are we turning toward the new things God has planned? Are we allowing the transformation to happen? Do we dare to let God dig around our roots and throw some smelly but nutritious manure on us? Or are we doing the same old, same old… and expecting the different results?

So, the question we much ask ourselves – are we as a congregation taking up precious resources that could be used for the Kingdom of God? We say to ourselves, that we want to grow as a congregation. But are we ready to welcome those who might not look or act like us, even if they are part of the community we are asked to cultivate? Where are we putting our energy that is not producing a lot of growth? Our time…. Our money… our resources… our mental energy…. Are they producing the fruit that Jesus wants to see?

Transformation doesn’t happen overnight. But it does happen eventually. And sometimes it takes s a little digging, and a more than a little manure. That is both good news and maybe some challenging news. Perhaps our challenges at this moment are merely fertilizer for our us in this time in this place. God is digging around us as tilling our soil. And we will just have to see if God gives the growth…. Amen.

Lent 2: Chicks in the Roost of God

3-17-19

Grace and peace to you from God our creator and our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.

My friend from college has a parrot has a favorite phrase: “Where’re Daddy?”         

One night when my friend and I were chatting on skype, I could hear her two parrots in the background. On this particular evening, my friend’s husband, a Lutheran pastor, was away at a meeting, and her parrot, who is named Checkers, was not happy about it.

“Where’s Daddy?” “Daddy’s not HERE!” My friend answered.

“Where’s Daddy?” “Daddy’s at a MEETING!"

“Where’s Daddy?” “Still not here… seriously, stop asking!” (That one never works).

Last summer I got to visit them in Illinois and meet Checkers for myself finally. And apparently, according to my friend, Checkers really really likes me. So maybe he’ll be asking where I am next!

We all want something – sometimes they are little things, like wanting your parrot to stop talking for five minutes. But sometimes we long for things that are bigger than the names that we have for them – love, belonging, safety, community. Things that will make us feel whole, wanted, and at peace. 

Last week, on the first Sunday in Lent, we learned what Jesus didn’t want in the wilderness. This week, the second Sunday of Lent, we fast forward to Jesus setting his feet and his determination toward Jerusalem and the completion of his ministry - one step closer to the hour of his death.

Herod, bad ruler in a long line of bad rulers, wants to kill Jesus, like he did to John the Baptist. John criticized Herod and paid with his life. And, like John, this Jesus is ruffling too many feathers.

By now in Jesus’ ministry, he has gone through “one town and village after another, teaching as he made his way to Jerusalem” (Luke 13: 22) causing all kinds of “trouble.” He’s been healing on the Sabbath. He’s been casing out demons. He has fed over five thousand people. He has been hanging out with sinful people, healing women, and teaching things like “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” while boldly making his way closer and closer to Jerusalem, into the very den of the foxes like Herod and the religious authorities.

Jesus, as the face of the love God has for us, longs to comfort those who cast him out. He longs to reach out to those who reject him.  He longs to embrace those who abandon him. He longs to gather the most stubborn of us underneath the outstretched protection of his wings, like a mother hen. He longs for us to return to God, the source that gave us life. And he spread his arms in order to gather us, ALL of us - spreads his wings so far out to receive us. All are welcome in the embrace of Jesus.

Julian of Norwich once wrote a beautiful prayer and often quoted prayer, “In you, Christ, we have our restoring and our saving. You are our mother, brother, and Savior. In you, our Lord the Holy Spirit, is marvelous and plenteous grace. You are our clothing; for love you wrap us and embrace us… “

This scares Herod and the powers of the world to death. Because they can never have ENOUGH. Enough power, enough control, enough riches, enough influences. And so, slyly and sneakily, the rest of us scared, lost chicks are manipulated in every image we see, movie we watch, store we visit, song we hear, every click and ever page we scroll through. Algorithms, advertisements, everything is telling us, need more, want more, get this and then you will be whole and valued.

And so, we are caught between the fox and the hen. If you listen to the fox, you might believe that only certain types of people have value, and some have more value than others, based on the color of your skin, your physical and mental capabilities, your age, your gender identity, who you love, and how you present yourself to the world.

But the hen tells us that a different world is possible. After all, a hen is a mom who would lay down her life for her chicks. And if you haven’t noticed, Moms can be fierce. And when they get together in the name of God and children and justice, they beat the fox at his own game.

Have you heard of Leymah Gbowee? (No relation to David, her's is spelled with a G) She’s a pretty famous Lutheran who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 and spoke at the 2012 ELCA youth gathering in New Orleans. She is a Liberian citizen who almost singlehandedly brought an end to fourteen years of civil war in Liberia. Liberia had been in the throws of a civil war when she gathered together both Christian and Muslim women to protest for peace every day for years - and they did this along the commute of Liberia’s president.

Peace talks finally started between opposition leaders, but soon stalled when the men got distracted enjoying the fancy hotel rather than what they were there to do – negotiate peace.  Gbowee and a few hundred women marched into the hotel and actually trapped the men inside the conference room where the talks were supposed to happen – literally laying down their own bodies to barricade them in. The women stayed there for days, singing and demanding to be heard.

Because of their protest, the war ended a few weeks later. This all came about because one woman loved her three children too much to give them a future filled with violence and death. So, she put her body on the line in order to fight for a better future. And she and her “mom posse” got it done.

A mother’s love for her children, biological or and chosen, is uncompromising and unconditional. You better not mess with the mom posse, because this club has some mighty members. Mary, mother of Jesus. Hagar, the mother of Ishmael. Rebecca, mother of Jacob and Esau. Hannah, Mother of Samuel. Every day, everywhere, mothers feed, clothe, and care for their children whether their children are naughty or nice, whether they are happy or sad, whether they will become the next president of the United States or the next in line at the unemployment office.

So, it is only natural that so often in the Old Testament, God’s love is described to be as powerful as the love a mother has for her child. God’s love for us is like a nursing mother for her baby, like a mother bear protecting her cubs at all costs, like a mother hen extending her wings of safety over her wayward young chicks. It is a beautifully tender image, marred only by the fact that these chicks do NOT want to be gathered under the wings of their mother hen. These chicks not only refuse the love offered to them, they seek to kill the very one who wants to protect them. But still, the mother hen continues to love her chicks, even her rebellious ones, whether they are from first century Jerusalem or twenty-first Buckingham.

In a world that wants “Daddy,” We are under the mothering and comforting protection of Jesus, who, through the giving up and laying down of HIS body, we are saved, healed, and given a future with hope.

And so, as followers of Jesus we too are called to seek out the lost chicks, because we are lost chicks ourselves. We are called to but our bodies on the line for the sake of others. And it might cause us to get a little bit out of our comfort zones and might just makes us give something up, which is why Lenten “practice” can be a good practice for life. It may not feel like we have skin in the game, but we all do. We are all children of God, siblings of the family of God everywhere. When one of us chicks suffers, we all do.  

In our own journeys through the season of Lent, we remember that we too are on our way to die – to die to the ways of sin and death at work in the world, to die to the way of the Fox. But because we follow the crucified and risen Jesus, we can find hope in the face of suffering; we see life in a tool of death. What was done on the cross needs never to be repeated, but today, tomorrow, and the next day we all continue the work that Jesus began. When the world tells us to leave the way because it is too hard, we can press on - because there are still demons to be cast out and cures to be given. There are Jerusalems to be saved and chicks to gather. And hopefully we will find that day by day we too are being transformed into instruments of life and hope. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Lent 1: After the Desert, Comes Dessert

3-10-19

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Surprise! Pop Quiz! Question 1: Where was Jesus tempted? (the wilderness)

Question 2: How long was he there? (40 days)

Question 3: Who was doing the tempting? (the devil)

Question 4: How many temptations did the devil present to Jesus? (3)

Now here’s a hard one, for extra credit… does anyone know from where, or what Jesus had just done right before the temptation in the wilderness? (Baptized) Very good! A Plus to all of you!!!

Now, I bet you didn’t expect to be getting a quiz from the pulpit today, and many of you probably started to feel more than a little “test anxiety.” Your heart rate increase, your stomach got butterflies, and your palm felt clammy. It’s not fun to be surprised by a test like this, and it was mean of me to do it.

Fortunately, the test that I gave you this morning was (mostly) open notes – you could find most answers by reading in your bulletin, or you could rely on one another. Much like the big Confirmation Exam – for that one, you can use a lot of different resources to help, including the Bible, Luther’s Small Catechism, any ELCA website, and my past sermons. There are still plenty of tests left on the Confirmation bulletin board!

Lent sometimes feels like one big 40-day long exam. Especially if you are a pastor. One of my non-pastor friends noticed that all of her pastor friends are WAY more excited by Ash Wednesday than they are about Easter and Christmas. My hunch is that this has something to do with Easter being at the END of Holy Week and Lent, and Christmas is at the end of Advent. We always have so much more energy at the beginning of Lent than we do at the end. Because there is always so much TO do.

Do you ever get stress dreams when facing big test or task is looming? I do! And most of the time for me, they come during Lent, starting right before Transfiguration Sunday. I dreamed many times where I am at a strange church, and I can’t find the last page of my sermon, or the right page in the book, or the communion elements are completely missing. I think I get these dreams probably because there is so much bubbling in my brain during Lent – plan and organize for Holy Week and Easter, lead our “Eat, Pray, Learn” series on the Bible, go to all of the events that inevitably get planned for March, plus, as a pastor, I should have an extra-holy Lenten discipline, right?

But this year at least I didn’t have to write an Ash Wednesday Sermon! Instead, I asked around to different people if they were giving up anything interesting for Lent. And what I got was the usual responses: sugar, cake, ice cream, sweets. After all, that was one of the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness, right? Didn’t the devil try to give Jesus some cake, and Jesus said no way, we can’t live on cake alone? No? Well, not quite.

How many of you remember that process of defragmenting a hard drive? We really don’t do it anymore. It’s is the process of getting rid of the unnecessary junk in your computer and rearranging the programs to fill in the gaps, kind of like arranging your bookshelves by height and size for fit. Once someone shared with me that it took an entire week to defragment his computer. A WEEK! Seven whole days without a computer! And this was before smart phones.  Can you imagine?

But defragmenting life is still a much longer process. Letting God defragment your personal hard drive takes an entire Lent, if not longer. But that’s pretty much Lent in a nutshell. God taking our fragments and putting them back together to make a whole that is much better than the cobbled-together mess we’ve come up with; God making something beautiful out of the confusion of our lives, and our Lenten discipline is aimed to help with this process by removing from our lives what is taking up space unnecessarily, so that this space can be filled with something else. I’m not entirely sure God has in mind that this would mean I should give up sugar.

On the evening of Ash Wednesday, Pastor Matthew Simpson, one of the pastors over at Trinity next door, talk about how Lenten fasting is not about “trying to lose the freshman 15 he gained 15 years ago.” He reminded us that our Lenten practices are not intended to be for just us alone, as individuals. Our Lenten practices exist in order to benefit our community, not just for increasing our own personal piety.

When the devil tempted Jesus with the idea of using his power to satisfy his own hunger in the moment, Jesus refused. Jesus told him, “a person does not live by bread alone,” which he quotes from Deuteronomy 8:3: “…one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. “

But a person also does not live by bread… alone. Just like we do not live our lives here on earth … alone. We all need one another to look out for us, pray for us, advocate for us, and support us. We all need a posse. Jesus faced his wilderness alone, but we don’t have to.

Lent has been described in many ways: a journey, a disciple, a time of testing, and a wilderness. But Lent is not the only time in our lives where we feel ask though we’ve lost our way in a wilderness. In those wilderness times, what got you through? Or, if your 

wilderness time also coincides with Lent 2019, what is helping out through right now?

For me, I was fed and sustained through my most difficult times through seeing the love of Jesus through the posse of people who loved me and took care of me. At my lowest time in my life so far, when I was going through a divorce, I was with a community of faithful people who loved me and shared communion with me every single week, who ministered to me even though it was my job to minister to them. I had people who gave me shelter and made sure I had a meal on the table and didn’t let me eat alone in my most low times. And after the final hearing with the judge about my divorce, a friend took me to lunch at IHOP, where we cried and ate stuffed French toast. At the end of a desert, came dessert.

We do not live by bread alone. Because even if we don’t have as many people as we need around us to walk through our dark times with us, we have Jesus. Jesus, whose body was broken and who died alone on a cross rather than use his identity as God’s son to his own personal advantage. In fact, later on in Luke, Jesus DOES miraculously multiply bread… not for himself, but for well over five thousand people.

If you find yourself a slave to ice cream and cookies, and want to use Lent as an opportunity to lessen their influence in order to increase your health, please, by all means, choose this as your Lenten practice. If Facebook has taken up time you would rather spend nurturing relationships or serving your neighbors, then please, delete that app from your phone. But there are plenty of other things that we can also choose to fast from.  We can fast from hurtful words, from resentment, from judgment, from spending money on non-essentials, or from single-use plastic, or from reading voices that have been privileged in favor of those who are not white, male, heterosexual or cis-gender, as I’m doing. These kinds of fast can help create room for healthier living for yourself and others, much like defragmenting a computer does.

Or you can choose to add something for Lent instead of removing something. You can start a prayer journal, commit to calling someone each day, write letters of gratitude to people in your life who have helped you through your wilderness times, write letters to our representatives on issues of justice that you care about,  drinking more water, more time with your family, more time spent helping people in need, the possibilities are endless.

Or, it can be nothing at all and that’s ok too. Jesus loves us whether we have a challenging Lent practice, or none at all, whether we keep it up for all of Lent or whether we don’t. Lent is not a test. And even if it were, it’s still open book and cooperative. Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Jesus is Not Special

3-3-19

Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, amen.

One Saturday when I was in middle school, my youth group carpooled out to Devils Lake State Park, about an hour north of Madison. It was a gorgeous fall day as we trekked up and down the hills around Devil’s Lake and enjoying the spectacular view. After a while, though, I noticed that my knees were starting to feel sore – not from going UP the steep hills, but more from going DOWN them. This is apparently a common phenomenon among people who do a lot of climbing – it often takes MORE energy to get DOWN a mountain than to go UP… and sometimes climbers get into trouble when they use up ALL their energy on the way UP, and don’t have enough strength to get back down again.

It’s sort of a wonder, then, that Jesus came down the mountain at all. After all, who would not want to just hang out with Moses and Elijah, with just your 3 closest friends, and keep your clothes dazzling white when you lived in a dusty climate WAY before TIDE was invented. Jesus COULD have taken Peter’s suggestion of building some tents for Moses and Elijah too, so they would be tempted to stick around for an extended camping vacation. It sounds like heaven for an introvert like me. Just set up shop and make people come to YOU. Especially knowing what would happen to Jesus after he came down.

But if Jesus HAD stayed up there on the mountain forever here in Chapter 9, where would that leave the rest of us? Sure, Jesus would remain shiny and nice, flanked by the Big-League Prophets and Peter, James, and John. But then, Jesus would never have taught us the Lord’s prayer, which doesn’t happen until chapter 11. Jesus would not have taught his parables about God’s kingdom. Jesus would never have healed the sick and blessed children or encountered Zacchaeus “the wee little man.” Jesus would not have his last supper, and he would not have suffered, died, and risen again.

We can’t live up on the mountain, and neither can Jesus. Jesus obviously did come down the mountain, the very next day, and just in time too.  Almost immediately from the crowd that was following Jesus, a father comes forward begging for help. It sounds to our modern ears that his son is suffering from some kind of epileptic fit. Whatever the cause, this helpless child is suffering, and no on else but Jesus can help.

As Jesus approached the boy, the illness cast the poor kid down to the ground yet again, which must have been terrifying to witness. But Jesus got closer, and so his pristine, dazzling white clothes became covered in the dust that the convulsing boy must have invariably kicked up. And, both still covered in that dust, Jesus healed the child and gave him back to his father, who I’m sure was too overjoyed to notice all the dirt. His boy was whole again, and that’s all that mattered. I’m sure that father was glad Jesus came down the mountain.

Peter didn’t want Jesus to come down the mountain. Perhaps he was afraid that Jesus’s shiny special-ness might wear off if he didn’t stay up there. But what Peter didn’t know yet is that Jesus is for everyday use, not just for special occasions. He didn’t know yet that Jesus was serious about getting involved with the messiness of being human, and that meant getting a little bit dusty sometimes… and other times it meant staining his face with tears or even bleeding from a cross. But this is how we know that the love of God is real – real love gets dirty. Real love gets shabby and threadbare from use.

In that favorite children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit, the stuffed toy that became so well-loved by his boy that all his fur rubbed of, his whiskers fell out, and his lovely brown coat had faded to a dull grey. This boy too became sick, and the velveteen rabbit stayed by his side as he got well again.

But when the boy was better, all his things – which were thought to be “germy” - were packed up to be thrown away, including the rabbit. As the rabbit sat out with the rest of the garbage that night, The Nursery-Magic fairy came to visit him. The rabbit’s scruffy and well-worn appearance proved that the boy had loved him very much. Love had already made the toy rabbit real to the boy… and so the fairy simply completed the process of becoming real by changing the toy rabbit into a real one.

I love what the Skin Horse says to the velveteen rabbit early in the “becoming real” process: “Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you…You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily…  or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off… and you get … very shabby. But these things don't matter at all.”

Being real is being a little rough around the edges, a little dusty and mundane. Because that is where we live MOST of the moments of our lives – up the mountain but also down it. 

As some of my United Methodist women clergy friends wrote in a devotional (We Pray With Her), “Life has those big, beautiful moments, but mostly it’s made up of mundane things…  The good news is that God is in the business of making mundane things holy.” (page 65) Another friend said to me, “Jesus is not birthday cake… Jesus is our daily bread.”

Jesus is not special and doesn’t have to be put away up on a mountain to be kept safe to be used only on special occasions, like breakable fine china. Jesus also uses very “non-special” things for his work. Water and a promise become the means we are called beloved Children of God in our baptisms. Ordinary bread and wine become the means we are welcomed and fed by Jesus’s presence so that we don’t lose the strength to keep going down the mountain and survive and thrive in this dusty world. Jesus is with us every moment, in the breaking of bread, in the dust and in our tears, in our sweat as we work for justice.

We are about to embark on the season of Lent, which begins on Wednesday with a smudge of ash on our foreheads and a reminder that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. Jesus gets down there in the dust of life, and next week he’ll be spending 40 days in the dust of a barren wilderness. But we’ll take more about that next week.

For now, Jesus is both up on the mountain, shiny and savoring the glory of his identity of be the Beloved of his Father, before descending into the dust that makes up our daily realities. Jesus is up there on the mountain, but Jesus is also down here on the flat places as well – as he preached last week in his sermon on the plain. He is down here where real love gets a bit messy, and love might get revealed in the ordinary things, hidden in plain sight.

One of my favorite poems is called “To be of Use,” and part of it goes like this:

“The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.”

Real Love is not about the big birthday parties or cakes you got on your birthday – you saw their love every time your parents kissed your booboos better, or changed your diaper, or taught you how to tie your shoe. Real Love is not about the vows that you made on your wedding day in a white dress or immaculate tux, but it’s every time you said “I love you” before leaving the house, every time your spouse folded the laundry or loaded the dishwasher. Real Love is being present in all the little moments, not just the big ones. Real Love was made to be… useful. And it was made to be used OFTEN… every moment of every day.

This means that we might get a little dinged up on this journey called life. When follow Jesus’ example, WE are likely going to get dusty, smudged, faded, or even broken. Like one of our communion chalices – it came apart right at the seam. But we glued it back together, and we will be using it again. Jesus does the same – healing our broken and loved-off bits, so that we can continue to be vessels of the Real Love of God in the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.