Messages

"We began this morning with a passage by the preacher and theologian Howard Thurman in which Thurman alludes to how difficult it is for us to be vulnerable, to allow ourselves to be seen when we are overwhelmed, or damaged, outsmarted or paralyzed, or simply in physical or emotional pain so great it diminishes our ability to think. One of our defensive mechanisms to being in that position of diminishment is to deny that we are. To make light of our pain, to make light of our confusion, to make light of not knowing what to do. We deny these things because they point to our human vulnerability. When we acknowledge them, we seem weak to ourselves, unable to meet the responsibilities of personhood and our responsibilities to those for whom we care. We would rather give to God, and probably even to those closest to us, a less than complete version of ourselves than to include within the picture the part of us that stands quivering and unknowing, pained and panic stricken."

The reason I keep thinking about this particular little story is that it is such a useful image to me of the virtue of faithfulness, of doing what we are called to do no matter whether we see the results or not. I don’t want to suggest that Jim was following the Spirit’s leading when he brought that water up here in the first place; he may have been, or it may have been something less, I don’t know. But I think of this story as an analogy of what we do for faithfulness: we try to follow our leadings, try to act on the motions of love that are given to us—and try to free ourselves from measuring the results."

"So what I love about the shepherd’s voice, in Buechner’s story, is the way he suddenly comes to realize that God’s love is all around him—and really always has been, but something has broken through the daze of the everyday, and now he can suddenly see it, feel it, receive it: 'The air wasn’t just empty, it was alive. Brightness everywhere, dipping and wheeling like a flock of birds...We ran through a sea of wings and moonlight and the silvery wool of the sheep.'”

"Perhaps we cannot understand what it is to light the world until, as Christ says, we have learned to lose our life. But perhaps the losing is another way of speaking of re-orienting, an overturning in ourselves of what our world revolves around, a substitution of care for judgement, of agape love for our sense of how the world ought to be, of communities looking out for each other rather than individuals caring first for themselves."

"Advent, really, is about throwing out the ash of our lives—bitterness, resentments, recriminations. The behaviors that no longer protect us, the anger that is no longer a sign that something has gone wrong, but has become the wrong thing. Where once it signaled that something was harming the love in a relationship, now it has become an obstacle to love. Advent, with its inventory and confession of sin, and its repentance—which means, to turn back, so that when we repent, we turn back from the course we’re on and choose another, better course—the Advent season is our call to shovel out all the ash of our lives so that air can get through, so that the spark of God within us can become the fire of God’s love that warms us, and with which we warm the icy world."