Sermon Series: Doorways and Threshholds
Coming in or out, over or through, we continually encounter doorways and decide whether or not to cross the threshhold. This series offers some of the lessons learned as we have navigated these passages together.
Or, “The Preposition Series”
Here’s a link to the series. March 4 message is posted in text and audio. Others will follow, all in good time.
Blessings to all!
Suggest a name for this series, the last of my sermons at Live Oak . . .
Over the next couple of months there is method to my madness. It’s this “bully pulpit” from which I want to cover a few foundational aspects of my ministry and that of the church. After all, I gave myself the title “Minister of Congregational Life.” Five sermons, five themes:
1) Mar. 4: How do we welcome people who come to Live Oak? It’s not enough just to have a comfortable place for ourselves, though of course we want that. We also have to make room for about 10 visitors every Sunday—to welcome them, share with them who we are, and invite them into further participation.
2) Mar. 25: How do we move from this sanctuary and oasis of the spirit into the bigger world out there? We need to find our voice and we need to take it out into the market square.
3) Apr. 1: This has to be fun! On April Fool’s Day we’ll take a lighter look at ourselves and how this can be an absolutely, positively delightful place to grow in mind, body, and spirit.
4) Apr. 8: On Easter Sunday we’ll have our traditional Flower Communion. For us, Easter is indeed about resurrection, but it is a resurrection of nature, a resurrection of spring, and a resurrection of community. The use of ritual and a lovely exchange of flowers is an important aspect of congregational life.
5) Apr. 29: Finally, we’ll look at departures and other journeys. I can’t help but think of the people whose homes, offices, and schools were completely wiped out in this week’s tornadoes. Departures can be sudden and devastating, or they can be well anticipated and prepared. Still, no matter how much preparation is done, the departure comes in the middle of the story and no one knows the ending. . . . Maybe good, maybe bad, too soon to tell.
It’s weird. I am “hurtling” north on Interstate 35 yet it seems as though I’m going back in time.
Memory triggers for me included Bruceville-Eddy, home of Greene Family Camp where I studied world religions with students from 4 different seminaries; Lorena, where a friend used to live and we studied together; Waco, where I lived and worked for 3 1/2 years and have gone back as a Board workshop facilitator and as a consultant; Elm Mott, where a pair of sisters grew up and each became UU; Lake Whitney, where I know someone who used to be UU in membership but is still UU in practice.
I approached Dallas where I attended Perkins School of Theology and taught classes at First Unitarian-Dallas, then veered off toward Ft. Worth and Arlington, where I was a student minister. These were all places where I taught and served and learned ever so much. Memories of those I married, those I buried, those I blessed, and those I left behind.
Back in time. All these thoughts were mixed with the knowledge of leave-taking from my current ministry and with the personal growth and setbacks and losses and gains I’ve experienced over these years. Oh, the places I’ve been!
So I was moving forward and backward in time and space, watching 20-25 years pass before my eyes–not in a flash as is told regarding near-death experiences, but in slow motion. Visions included spirals up and down through multiple experiences and lessons I’ve had to learn more than once.
Weird, but wonderful to drive alone in a car listening over and over to Terri Hendrix, who sings, “Moon on the water, help me to rise.” In so-called “ordinary time” (if we’re lucky) there sometimes comes an unusual confluence of ideas and insights, opportunities and options. Oh, the places I’ll go!
All this has contributed to who I am today, for good or ill. I have gifts as well as blind spots. There have been times of trauma, challenge, conflict, and betrayal. There have been dreams come true, successes, triumphs, and joy. I am reminded of Bruce Findlow’s lyrics in hymn #128, Singing the Living Tradition:
“For all that is our life we sing our thanks and praise; for all life is a gift which we are called to use to build the common good and make our own days glad.”
Kairos has found me at last in this time, this space, this moment of reflection. Cool morning, warm sun streaming through my favorite window.
Having moved non-stop it seems from holidays, son’s wedding, conference, sister-time, ministers’ retreat (with work to fill “spare time”), pastoral care, a couple of sermons squeezed in, meetings, plans, and more, means that personal time has been limited at best. Not a half day off with no work that had to be done, to the point that it did not qualify as true rest–just another thing to wedge between A & B and on toward Z. I have not had/blocked out enough time to give my soul a chance to catch up.
So I pause without agenda–except to let everything go–for the next few hours. Let this sunshine recharge my weakened batteries for a spell. The battery warning light was not glowing orange but red. Reserves have been tapped frequently to get through specific tasks or responsibilities only to leave me depleted at the end. Complete a task–barely–and move on before taking time to sweep my spirit clean. Float free like wind and water.
So let my spirit clear up with these blue skies after a gray day; let this breeze flow through me; let this poem speak to my heart; let this walk bring me down to earth; let this music dance for me until I can dance, too.
“Where is God in all this for you now?” It’s a typical question posed by my spiritual director. Here is today’s answer, as always subject to change!
For me God is in my heart along with all the joy and sorrow and especially with the confusion, trying to fan a flame of certainty or certitude or clarity. Then if God is within me and all beings and the universe and bigger than the cosmos, God is the heartbeat of it all; the electrical impulse that keeps us going (until it doesn’t–but then, it’s still pulsing), and of course God is linked to the breath–breath of life and cessation of breath (yet it is still flowing all around us).
In the flow . . . let it all go . . . breathe in peace / God . . . breathe out love / God . . . “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well” (Julian of Norwich).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.” When I pay attention to the breath of life and the heartbeat within everything I believe in the power of God and I believe in everlasting love that powers and sustains us all. Rest in that love.
Yes!
While I might enjoy playing a role with New Directions on “Glee,” my title actually refers to new directions in ministry.
I don’t actually know what direction I’ll be heading, but various options have been flitting through my head.
I asked friends for advice about what to do. First response: raise chickens! My friend said a person can learn a lot from chickens. True enough: there’s the fowl-like fear of change, development of pecking order, best conditions for egg laying. Hmm. That doesn’t seem quite right, though it would be rather entertaining.
Meanwhile I am looking over the questions posed in the ministerial search process. It is high time for me to update my answers and see what opportunities might be available.
Meanwhile I’m still in my current setting until May and there’s lots of ministry still to do…loving the people and also wanting more for all of us. I’m here until I’m not here. Isn’t that profound? But I intend to do my best through this winter and spring. I’ll be looking for allies to help us all along the way.
Days and weeks of drought affect so many residents of this country, trapped under a heat dome held firmly in place. Sunlight and drought are too much with us. Soothing, refreshing rain is too distant a memory. We are grateful, most of us, that we live in homes with fans and air conditioning. We drive in cool cars on our way to another cool place. Meanwhile, construction and farming, soldiering, policing, firefighting, and emergency work go on as best they can. Ranchers struggle to draw water from deep wells or dig trenches to irrigate. This is merely a taste, a test of solidarity with desert dwellers.
Rain (and drought) fall on the just and the unjust alike. God, is it in your power to send rain to the thirsty, to dry up flooded lands and homes, to extinguish raging wildfires, to keep all living things safe from harm?
No, it is not. It is for all of us to help one another cope. We can’t fix the weather though we can be smart about energy and water use. Some say to pray for rain. I say, pray for life in hard times and good.
Yet now we know about Somalia, where so many are dying of thirst, hunger, and warfare. Thousands have walked for 10 days or more to relatively safe camps in Kenya. Many have been attacked on the way and everything they carried was taken away by thieves. Many have died on the way, especially children. There is no time to grieve; only time to save the living. Dust to dust, bones to dry bones, wind where there is nothing to tame it.
We struggle with problems of our own—keeping ourselves cool and nourished, watching billionaires fight for every dime they can control, indulging our children with possessions, desperately trying to find and keep jobs, cutting budgets at home, and in all levels of government, into the very marrow, averting our eyes.
Slowly we ourselves become the dry bones, the dust, then nothing but the wind.
Let us instead become the rain.
. . . And there’s more:
A terror attack in downtown Oslo and a related shooting at a youth camp there has taken at least 92 lives. Massive damage to buildings around downtown by the car/truck bomb and a horrific shooting at an annual political camp for young adults has shattered Norway’s peaceful existence. We are saddened, angered, and discouraged about the state of the world and the latest unfolding tragedies.
All these we hold in our hearts with compassion, blessings, and healing prayers.
Amen
Thanks to Karl, I’ve started a prayer journal. On a recent Sunday he mentioned having done this for a couple of years, once a week, and sent me samples from his book. Since I keep a journal and I regularly meditate or pray, why not combine the practices? The idea is to spend some time (perhaps an hour) once a week to write to whatever/whoever seems appropriate: Spirit of Life; Mystery of the Universe; Holy One; My Higher Self . . . and just put your inner needs or desires into words. I started with a different journal from my usual one. It had been given to participants of a yoga retreat in April, and seemed just right for my new purpose.
Here’s a sample prayer, fresh off the keyboard:
Mystery Beyond My Understanding,
Be with my friends and parishioners who are hospitalized, in rehab, under Hospice care, and recently deceased. Each of them has been a teacher to me and continues to teach me without a single lesson plan.
They show me that we are frail vessels who might suddenly become ill or injured or in need of surgery. I particularly pray for my neighbor Ken, whose surgery is very soon. He is afraid and anxious, not just of the surgery but of the aggressive cancer. Another neighbor, a nurse, has been a steadfast companion.
They show me what it means to live and die with dignity, how dying brings out both the best and the worst of patients, family members, and friends. That we will die is not a mystery, but we prefer to ignore that fact.
Mystery of Life, Mystery of Death, open my eyes and let compassion guide me into good ministry and loving friendship.
Shanti, Peace, Aloha
Here’s a link to How to Keep a Prayer Journal. It suggests keeping a Bible at hand, but any scripture or book of poetry might be your preference. Let me know if you decide to try this–and check with me to make sure I keep it up!
Keeping a Prayer Journal
Sermon delivered June 5, 2011
Today marks the beginning of our summer of proverbs! Children, youth, and adults will be engaged in the same topics each week.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” certainly gets a lot of traction! saying is attributed to Lao Tzu, who lived over 2500 years ago. Confucius also got credited, though he was born 20 years after Lao Tzu died. And we keep on saying it because it applies to just about every person and every new venture that is ever undertaken.
Consider this morning’s parable. Tony went to summer camp as an art student. His bunkmate Andy attended as a drama student. Each boy helped the other one overcome obstacles so that Tony could participate in a play in spite of his fear of forgetting lines, and Andy learned how to use a potter’s wheel in spite of having only one arm. It just happened that they met each other and coaxed something new from a new friend. You can probably remember a time when someone said just the right thing to point you in an unexpected direction.
The title “Journey of a Thousand Miles” shows up all over the internet. I found it on a personal finance blog that said if you want to get out of debt, start with a list of everything you spend for a month. There’s also a wedding blog, Journey of a Thousand Miles, that tracks a bride and groom’s journey from their engagement to a destination wedding and honeymoon. An autobiography, Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story, shares the life of a boy in China who eventually travels to Europe then America then on the world stage through piano performance.
Life itself is a journey. All of us could tell a story about a truly significant turning point or moment when something new began. A new baby, an empty nest, a graduation, a new job—are common experiences that occur only after a period of preparation. David Brooks had a good message for recent college graduates when he said, “It’s not about you.” Brooks says, “Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. . . . The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself”[i] in something that calls to you.
That resonates with a phone conversation I had with Ruth Chatfield, our eldest Live Oak member. For her, the reason to do something comes from an urge to be of use and to make a contribution. She has just come home from the hospital and doesn’t know what contribution she can make any more. She wanted me to tell you that there are some Very Good People at Live Oak and she wouldn’t know what to do without you. She couldn’t come to church today because a home health nurse will be visiting her every morning for 30 days to help her with medication and other needs. During Ruth’s 92 years she has undertaken countless journeys, especially in the world of art and music. She was a dancer, then a violinist, then an artist, then a potter—redirected each time because of a specific medical challenge. If anyone knows about journeys, Ruth certainly does!
Sometimes a journey gets kick started when you feel lower than a snake’s belly or lost in the slough of despond. My friend Jim, who spent 3 ½ years in a federal prison, said the journey to hell also begins with a single step. He is out of prison now and after a few years of struggle he is finally ready to move on. His youngest son graduated from high school this year. The sense of completion seems to have provided the incentive Jim needs to refocus on his own life.
An organization that was born out of the pain of a daughter’s death grew to become “For the Love of Christi.” Hundreds of families like Live Oak’s MacIntoshes and Von Alts have been helped through enormous grief. Now they, in turn, provide support to other families who suffer the death of a child. No one understands better than someone who has shared that experience. Yesterday an addition to the Christi House was dedicated. Christi’s parents Don and Susan Cox were there with gratitude for generous donations of time, money, and in-kind donations ranging from the concrete slab to the living room couches. A moving prayer was offered by the Rev. Dale Schultz, senior pastor of St. Phillips United Methodist Church in Round Rock.
Whether it’s a gradual decision or a devastating event, there finally comes a moment to act. Mary Oliver in her poem “The Journey. ” [Here’s an excerpt. Entire poem easily found online.]
One day you finally knew
what you had to do and began,
. . .
determined to dothe only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
What makes us decide to embark on a journey of any sort? A tragedy, a chance encounter, a suggestion, thoughtful consideration?
Fifty years ago the first Freedom Riders got on buses in Washington D.C. and headed south with a determination to raise the issue of unfair racial laws while remaining non-violent no matter what happened. They were indeed met with violence, especially in Alabama and Mississippi. Brutal beatings, fire bombing one of the buses, and prison time for hundreds. After the first group of a dozen or so were forced to return home, more waves of young adults, black and white, boarded other buses. Non-violent protest stood in stark contrast to public brutality until finally the Kennedy administration was forced to uphold federal laws of equal rights. We continue to challenge injustice wherever it occurs.
Thirty years ago odd cancers and pneumonia began showing up among young gay men in New York and California. These were the first harbingers of a catastrophic pandemic that has infected over 60 million people and killed at least 30 million. In 1981 no one knew whether it was a new disease, what caused it, how it spread, how to treat it, or even a name for it. AIDS research has been a long journey full of trial and error to achieve today’s better treatment and education about prevention, but there is no vaccine yet and the trials and errors will continue for a long time to come.
What makes us decide to embark on a journey of any sort? I like to believe that it’s a combination of fact, context, and intuition. But apparently there’s a lot more to decision-making before it even reaches a conscious level.
Some of you probably heard Dr. David Eagleman on Fresh Air this week[ii] or saw him on TV or read about him in the New Yorker magazine. He is a neuroscientist at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine and a writer and speaker. His latest book Incognito explores the neurons and brain activity that compete for attention and influence how we act, what attracts us, and what we think. Eagleman says that all of this happens after an internal lightning storm of electrical impulses that operate quite without our conscious awareness.
Brain cells make up the 3-pounds of gray matter we each carry around in our skulls. The cells are made of hundreds of billions of neurons and glia that are as complicated as a city. Electrical pulses to other cells measure up to hundreds of times per second. That means, Eagleman says, that there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
It boggles my mind—in a happy way! Conscious thoughts in making a decision cannot even begin to capture that level of connectivity. Behavior, thoughts, and actions might seem to appear out of the blue, but we don’t even have a way to describe what’s happening. You could damage your little finger and still be you, but if you damage that much brain, it might affect your ability to speak, to understand music, to avoid a hot stove, or to recognize yourself in a mirror. When the brain changes, so do we. Most of its function is below conscious level but ultimately it controls our journey of thousands of miles.
Having been introduced to Dr. Eagleman, I kept reading interviews with him and watching his videos. His previous book Sum is a journey of possibilities. After all, he calls himself a Possibilian. For this book he selected 40 possible “reasons for our existence and the meaning of life and death.” In various stories, maybe “God is a married couple,” or “God is the size of a bacterium,” or “life runs backwards after the expansion of the universe reverses and you get to see all the details you mis-remembered.” [iii] When he made up the word possibilian in a lecture, hundreds of people had emailed him by the time he got back to his office, so he did the modern first thing: launched the website possibilian.com. Check it out!
As a Possibilian, Eagleman rivals the late great Carl Sagan in his ability to fascinate audiences about science and its creative process. So much scientific knowledge has been gained over the past 400 years! “We reached the moon and eradicated smallpox and built the Net and tripled life spans.” It’s like we are building a pier out into the ocean or out into space. One by one we add planks of knowledge to the end of the pier for new generations to follow. But eventually, standing at the end of the pier, all you can see in the distance is mystery. Eagleman describes mystery as “The equivalence of mass and energy, dark matter, multiple spatial dimensions, how to build consciousness from pieces and parts, what life and death are about, and so on. I have no doubt that we will continue to build the pier out, several new slats in each generation, but we have no guarantee how far we’ll get. [iv]
From the depths of one of those nematodes found deep in a South African cave to the outer reaches of space, the frontier beckons. Enjoy this time lapse view from four Very Large Telescopes in Chile. Let your mind soar on a journey through space and time.
We are a part of this! We may not know where we’re going, but we are on the journey!
Amen
[i] A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 31, 2011, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Not About You.
[ii] http://www.npr.org/2011/05/31/136495499/incognito-whats-hiding-in-the-unconscious-mind?ft=1&f=13&sc=17
[iv] Ibid.
KaleidoscopE 