Image Description: Two hands are cupped together in the shape of a heart to frame the sun in the sky. Public domain image.
This week, all of my pieces have been based on the theme of light.
Keeping that theme going, my good friend, the Rev. Allison Becker, has been writing a lot of poetry lately that I find to be touching and powerful. I shared one of her pieces a couple weeks ago, and with her permission, I’m sharing this one as well. You can find more of her work at Light the Lamp.
Image Description: A candle is burning in a glass holder.
Spontaneously, we turned off the lights and began passing around a single candle in a glass jar. We had time to kill as we waited for the last person in our group to arrive at the house, so we sat at the kitchen table and passed this candle around. We giggled as it illumined faces, and when the candle came to them, each person added a phase to a story we were building.
And it was so silly.
Goodness, as I recall this, there were so many goofy themes that became a part of this story, which we built for a long time. Our other member had to come late, so we just kept going.
By the time she arrived, we had all planned to stay in the dark, silent, just sitting there with this candle burning, so she would think, “Wait… what are you doing…?”
But of course when she arrived, we tried that and just started laughing.
These are the silly moments of belonging — mundane, yet spontaneous, yet memory-making. These are the moments of having an expansive sense of household. These young adults have become a chosen family group, and I get to house that experience every time they come over. With gratitude, we’re building that bit by bit too.
Image Description: Three lit candles are on top of a table. Two of the candles are blue, and the other is white. There is also a blue and white plate and small, flat, ceramic piece with a painting of a yellow and orange flower.
Twice a week, I join students and my friend and colleague Matthew in moving around the room and lighting as many candles as possible. This includes the corners of the room.
We turn off the lights at Canterbury House and then enjoy the small flames of light shining and flickering from a variety of directions.
“Grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end,” we say together as an act of prayer at the beginning. Then we begin to sing.
This is all very restful. This semi-weekly gathering on Sunday and Wednesday nights is called Compline. Alongside the light and the singing, we talk with one another in reflection. At the beginning, we all check in with one another and ask how the week is going. Once we’ve sung and read some sacred texts, we reflect and share from our lives. Often, this goes deep, and it really feels like a privilege.
These little flames of light help to summon this depth from us. Last night, I found myself wondering if this is a bit like gathering around a campfire. We can be real and vulnerable. We can laugh. We can mess up the songs when it’s getting dark outside and it’s harder to see the words. We can know we belong.
This is lovely.
Light summons all of this, and it’s a prelude to the semi-weekly meal that follows.
It’s good to campfire together.
“Grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.”
Image Description: A single, yellow candle burns in the darkness. Public domain image.
A single candle burned with light in the middle of my living room. We had placed it there as a reminder that our conversation with one another was sacred.
People from the Michigan Nones and Dones community sat on my couch and in the rocking chairs. We faced one another. It was the evening after the 2016 election, and people needed some space to process it, along with an entire year that revealed challenging rhetoric and marginalization.
Together, we wept.
It was a time of grief. The feelings were painful, and we needed the comfort of one another.
Quakers have a beautiful phrase to express prayer and connection. When people are going through a challenging time, they say, “Holding you in the light.”
There are times when that very light and holding cultivate the gift of release. Light can hold grief. Community can hold sorrow. We can hold one another in pain, release, growth, and possibility.
Image Description: Sunlight shines on stalks of wheat. The sun is low in the sky.
In his lovely book, Being Peace, Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hahn says this,
“Interbeing: If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. ‘Interbeing’ is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix ‘inter–‘ with the verb ‘to be,’ we have a new verb, inter-be.
“If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.”
“Independence is a myth,” I said yesterday over the phone. I shared this to encourage someone who felt pressure to stand alone and keep their needs quiet and totally out of view.
Afraid that we will be — culturalshudder — a burden, we have been taught to believe that we are all solitary units and that there is high value in needing as little as possible. Some have been socialized to take up as little space as possible. Some have been socialized to wear a mask of invulnerability and show strength only, carrying an internalized message that it is acceptable to provide for others but completely unacceptable to receive care from others.
“Independence is a myth,” I said. “If we think about it, we all depend upon each other. Every single one of us has needs that are unique to who we are and how we move in the world. And every single one of us has gifts and strengths unique to who we are that allow us to care and provide for others.”
Then looking at my meal on my desk and remembering Thich Nhat Hanh, I added, “I have a bowl of pasta in front of me. If I slow down and think just about this one meal which is sustaining me today, how many people have been involved in bringing this bowl of pasta to me? People grew the wheat. People grew the zucchini, bell peppers, and onions, and likely in different places. How much sunshine, water, and soil participated in growing all of these? How many farmers participated in bringing this to me, and in how many locations? How many workers harvested these foods? Who canned the tomato sauce? Who drove the elements of this food to distribution centers? Who displayed these vegetables in the grocery store? How did my own coworkers provide funding for me to purchase these items?”
Even a bowl of pasta reveals that independence is a myth.
Interdependence is a reality. It is also our greatest possibility to grow and distribute care so no one is standing solitary, isolated, and without what they deserve to need.
Image Description: A beam of light shines in from a window, and there are particles of dust in the light. There is also a wooden door with a metal handle. Public Domain image.
In my early elementary school years, I was the youngest member of a small Southern Baptist Church.
After the Vacation Bible School summer when I “accepted Jesus into my heart,” I was baptized at the ripe old age of 6. This is a very young age for a growing Southern Baptist to be baptized. On the day of that baptism, I remember getting scolded for climbing a tree on the church property before the worship service began. They didn’t want me to get my white dress dirty. But I suppose this is what happens when you make a kindergartner your youngest member.
And I really was the youngest… member. As I mentioned above, this was a small Southern Baptist Church, and since they had a commission to grow (from Jesus even!) they always seemed to have a complex about how small they were.
When we had business meetings, the whole congregation would gather to vote, and sometimes, I, the youngest member who didn’t give a flip about paying the bills or the next new idea to grow the church, would have to stop playing in the foyer and come sit in the meeting because they needed one more member to make a quorum. Harrumph.
But when I think about my very early days in that very small church, I also remember a sense of rest and belonging. In a seminary class nearly twenty years later, a professor asked us to write down all the sense memory details we could recall from one of our earliest memories of worship. Mine was from this church. I remember lying down on a pew, not sitting, but lying down and cuddling. My head was resting on of the pillows they kept for children, and that pillow was on my Mom’s lap. And I remember hearing the words of the Epistle to the Romans while curiously watching dust particles move around in a beam of light that was coming through one of the windows.
Later in life, my theology would depart from these roots. The other members of the quorum probably didn’t know they were raising a young girl to be a preacher, and very likely, they wouldn’t have approved of that in the end.
But in that beginning, I was the youngest member. I belonged, and I rested.
Image Description: People are placing long, white candles into shallow pools of water. There are holes to hold the candles.
Today’s piece is a repost from April 2017. I love this story.
These days, I pray to the God between us.
Not to a distant God far away off in the sky somewhere. Not to a mechanistic God, constantly making things happen with the push of a “save” or “smite” button, reminiscent of some old Far Side cartoon.
I pray to the God between us.
Beyond us, yes, but only in the sense of being greater than any one of us. That, and calling us to transformative realities beyond what we typically allow ourselves to imagine. Never far away.
Between us.
With us.
Among us.
A couple days ago, I found myself reflecting upon one of the most powerful experiences I ever had in a worship service. It was 10 years ago at Mo Ranch, a camp and conference center in Hunt, TX. I was there with a couple hundred college students at a conference aptly called College Connection.
That night, we were together around 9 PM. The beginnings of a warm summer were just beyond the door of the building, and the space was filled with hundreds of candles. Students sat on the floor in close proximity. Together, we sang a lot of beautiful choruses, music with rich meaning.
Midway through that time together, we began to sing a powerful song called “Prayers of the People.” Already, we could hear the tinkling of rain on the metal roof.
The song is by Ben Johnston-Krase. He was there with us, leading us on the piano as we sang it together. We sang these words, not necessarily about ourselves, but about humanity at large. . .
We are hungry, whoa, we are hungry, We are hungry, whoa, we are hungry, We are man, woman, we are children, whoa, we are hungry. . .
And that’s when it happened. We moved onto the main part of the chorus:
So let the rains go, let the healing river flow. Let justice roll like waters. Let the days begin when new life enters in, and let your kingdom come.
Right then, a deluge of water poured from the sky onto that tinny sounding roof. And not only that. It began to flood the space where we were sitting!
Thankfully, this was not from the roof above us, but it did come through the door onto the floor. Some of us got up quickly to move and cover electric cables, but other that, we just let it happen. As we continue to sing those words, we let that water flow right to the tables that held our candles.
The imagery and the synchronicity was not lost on us. We wanted justice to roll like waters, and in that moment, we even believed it possible.
So what happened that night? Did a far away God, off somewhere in the sky, push a “rain” button and mechanistically make that happen? Certainly, if there’s a God, we might say that God made the glories of rain. But if there’s a mechanistic process to everything that happens, I have to start worrying that there’s a cancer button, and a tomahawk missile button, and a school shooting button. I don’t believe that everything that happens is destined to happen.
But I pray to the God between us. Because when that glorious rain happened, I think God was between us, waking us up to the sacred moment as we recognized beauty and sensed a real calling to justice.
I think God is always between us, constantly inspiring us to act in transformative ways, sometimes beyond what we can easily imagine if we will notice what is around us and who is around us.
And without question, the God between us turns us toward one another, so we can marvel at the shared humanity around us.
Image Description: Edwin Lear’s painting, Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, Sunrise. Wikipedia Commons.
When Jesus walked up the Mount of Olives and sat down, his disciples followed him and joined him there. A crowd watched all of this happen.
Then, at the base of the mountain, that crowd listened to Jesus speak the Sermon on the Mount. The particular configuration of above and below likely allowed the Mount of Olives to serve as a natural amphitheater.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
I didn’t notice this for a long time, and I thank Dietrich Bonhoeffer for this observation*: Jesus is putting his disciples on display before that crowd quite purposefully. He is speaking to them, about them, in front of that group of people.
These people right here are poor in spirit, mourners, and meek. They are invited to hunger and thirst for righteousness, practice mercy, live purely, and make peace. You, crowd at the base of this mountain, will see them be filled with the Kingdom of God, comfort, and the earth itself. (And you, the readers of this text, will see it as Matthew configures it.)
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
You will see them persecuted, reviled, and maligned with evil words and false testimony. At times, they will also fail and fall short. But make no mistake — they will be Prophets. When you practice love, justice, and the way of peace, power is threatened and unleashed. But the ways of love, justice, and peace have the final word. The Beatitudes are a prelude of an unfolding story.
Image Description: The entrance to the Strasbourg Cathedral. It is gothic architecture with a round stained glass window. Public domain.
This sermon was preached at Northside Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan and was focused upon Isaiah 49:1-7. An audio recording is above and a written manuscript is below.
“It is too light a thing…” these words of prophesy say. Too small. If there’s anything that the people of Judah felt – the people of Judah from the Southern Kingdom of Israel – I’m sure it involved a day-to-day reality of feeling ‘too small.’ We’re distanced in time from the people who are addressed in this passage, distant in culture, distant in experience, so it’s hard to wrap our minds around the suffering these people were enduring. Too small: It would have been easy for the people of Judah to feel like the nobodies of their world.
This is connected to trauma. It’s connected to the utter upheaval of the year 587 BC. To us, that’s just a number, but to the people of Judah, that year was the watershed moment. It wasn’t the beginning of their conflict with the Babylonians, but 587 was the year that solidified Judah’s defeat. The Kingdom of Babylon was a force to be reckoned with, not only in Judah but in the entire region of the near-east. With Babylon on the prowl as an ever-expanding empire, the other kingdoms of that region were terrified, fearing that their own destruction was imminent.
And this brings us to a quick history lesson: In 597, ten years before the final defeat of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar II, the King of Babylon, led an army to Jerusalem and put the city under siege, cutting the people off from food and safe access in and outside the city. The Babylonians weakened the city to the point that they eventually broke through the walls, and when they did, they wreaked havoc on Jerusalem. They plundered the city and the temple, the most sacred place of worship and self-identity for the people of Judah, and they deported the King of Judah along with 10,000 others, prominent leaders in the government and the religious establishment. The people of Judah were left with a sweeping void of leadership. And as difficult as that was, it was only a taste, only the beginning of the end concerning the life that the people knew in Judah.
And then ten years later, in 587 BC – the watershed moment – Babylon left nothing untouched. For two years the Babylonians put Jerusalem under another siege, cutting the people off from the outside world, and in 587, they broke through the walls, destroyed the city for a second round – homes, fields, lives – and made captives of nearly all the survivors. But before they moved the captives of Judah into the foreign land of Babylon, the Babylonians gave them a searing, final, ghastly image to take with them. The Babylonian army burned the temple to the ground – made dust of it, destroying the most sacred place of these people – destroying the house where they believed their God dwelt with them. Can you imagine the sorrow of that moment? Can you imagine the fear? The confusion?
And so the people of Judah were taken to live in a foreign land – a place they had never lived with foreign customs, a different language, a worldview not their own, and ways of worshipping gods that weren’t their own. They were a disenfranchised, defeated, second-class group of captive exiles. And they were put into spiritual confusion too: Where was their God? Had God abandoned them? Is it any wonder that the people of Judah believed they were too small in their world? They had lost almost everything. Too small. Too small for this world to care. And perhaps, they wondered, too small for their God to care.
But God had something to say about that. In the Book of Isaiah, a prophet arrives with a Word for the people, a Word of Hope from their God, a Word of Identity. In effect, these prophetic words are flying in the face of all the heartache that the Judeans are witnessing in their lives. The words seem to say, “Don’t you know Whose you are? And since you belong to a God who loves, a God who saves, and a God who claims, don’t you know who you are called to be? Don’t you know Whose you are?” The words from our passage today seem to rise up out of the ashes, creating an alternative vision for the future of Judah, for the future of the Jewish people, and the future of all those who put their faith, trust, and hope in God.
Too small for this world? No. Through the words of the prophet, God has something to say about that self-understanding. In these words, God turns that self-understanding on its head. “Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb God named me. . . And God said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.’
Too small an identity? No. Here’s what’s too small: “And now the Lord says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him. . . God says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” It is too light a thing – too small a thing – for you Judah, people of Israel, to gather up your own tribes and restore your survivors. That’s huge, but it’s too small. You are a light to the nations, that salvation may reach everywhere! Do you know Whose you are?
What a message. The prophet’s message seems to rise out of the ashes. Babylonian dust will not be the last word. And it wasn’t. Without God’s pledge of love toward the people of Judah, we wouldn’t even have a Hebrew Bible to hear these words this morning – to know about the heartache of exile and the eventual return to the homeland. Nearly 70 years later, people of Judah did leave Babylon and return to their homeland, and our identity is connected to theirs. Our faith is sustained upon their convictions. When they returned, they assembled the texts of the Hebrew Bible. Apart from their testimony, we would not be who we are. A disenfranchised, defeated, second-class group of captive exiles, empowered by God, articulated a faith that sustains people in every corner in our world. The Judeans returned to their homeland, something nearly unthinkable. And then people of Judah spoke hope to the entire world.
Sometimes it takes going to a different place to perceive home in a new way. Ten years ago, I took a meaningful trip to Germany. It was an incredible time, filled with gorgeous views, and interesting history. And while on that journey, we took an impromptu day-trip to France. We crossed the border between Germany and France and stayed one night in Strasbourg. There were many points of interest in Strasbourg – including a church where John Calvin, the influential theologian of the Presbyterian tradition, was pastor for three years, and we just unexpectedly stumbled upon it when we turned a corner on a Sunday morning. There was much to see, but without a doubt, the most awe-inspiring place we visited was the Strasbourg Cathedral. It’s really an understatement to say it’s awe inspiring. The Strasbourg Cathedral is a masterpiece of Gothic architecture. Construction for the building began in the 1100s. Now that’s old! And it was completed in the 1400s. For three hundred years, eight generations of people created a sacred monument which is more intricate than anything I’ve ever seen. Everywhere you look, there’s a carving here, a statue there, stained-glass windows towering everywhere. It’s as if everything has significance in this cathedral – all the details — and as I stood in awe of it, all the intricate parts seemed to point in a unified direction toward God, toward what’s most ultimate.
And I’m enough of a realist to know that when a city spends three hundred years building a cathedral, part of the reasoning behind it is to flex a muscle toward other cities. But that being said, the vision for this cathedral seemed to be large, and I would even say cosmic. The structure is built in the shape of a huge cross, and signs in the cathedral said that it was created to represent a ship to bring all of humanity to God. All humanity. There’s nothing ‘too small’ about that.
But even if this cathedral was built in part to flex a very large muscle, I have to say that as I looked around, I found myself in complete awe, reflecting upon how much faith it must have taken to build this structure, this cathedral for all of humanity. After all, only a strong faith in God’s presence would be worth this much time, and this much effort, and this much money. Perhaps the builders of the Strasbourg Cathedral felt connected to Whose they are.
And it must have taken so much faith in one another as well. It would have been difficult to put that much wealth, and time, and talent, and sweat into such an endeavor, only to know that you wouldn’t see it completed in your lifetime. Eight generations of lives, of individuals and communities, created this beautiful church. I wonder, did the innumerable people who contributed to this work feel that their part – no matter how small, no matter how detailed – was infinitely larger than themselves? I wonder, were they in any way aware that they were not too small for this world, that they were part of something larger than they could imagine? Today that Cathedral speaks to innumerable tourists who visit the city of Strasbourg. Nine hundred years later, a structure which was begun in a very different time period, acts as a witness, pointing toward God and community for the benefit of the entire world. Anything less would be too small.
And here we are together on an ordinary Sunday morning, but if our vision for this moment is mundane, we’re playing our faith too small. Much too small. Northside Presbyterian Church hasn’t experienced anything close to a Babylonian exile – though I’m sure if we reflected deeply enough, we might all discover that we’ve felt internally exiled in one form or another throughout our lives.
And we remember people in our community and beyond our community whose ancestors have experienced trauma and upheaval. During this holiday weekend in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., we remember African-American people along with their ancestors who have experienced slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and disenfranchisement. We remember refugees and migrants who are viewed with suspicion and treated as second-class people.
We are called to proclaim hope, and we are called to enact hope and justice in the face of these wrongs.
Though we’re grateful for this sanctuary where we worship, Northside Presbyterian Church isn’t housed in a masterpiece of Gothic architecture. But we would be missing something on this ordinary morning together if we forgot to remind ourselves in this moment of Whose we are. And we would be missing something if we forgot who we are, who we are in light of the amazing pledge and claim of God in our lives.
And so I turn the question to this church today– this holy, beloved community of God. Do you know Whose you are? Do you know how you’ve been claimed? Do you know who you’re called to be? Do you know that it would be too small a thing if we viewed ourselves as simple sanctuary dwellers this morning? No, it would be too small a thing for us to sit in these chairs and miss the mystery of God’s Spirit in one another. You are surrounded by a holy community – neighbors, and friends. And they contain worlds – yes, actual worlds within themselves. Have you ever thought about how every person is a community of worlds – how they represent people, and places, and memories, and experiences? Do you know that you represent people, and places, and memories, and experiences? Because of Whose you are, you bring all of that to this place. You bring all the worlds you carry within you – yes, to this moment.
And as we do it, we too are pointing to God’s presence. We bring our worlds – our people, and places, and memories, and experiences – and we share them with one another. It would be too small a thing for them to serve our own salvation and healing. Friends, let Northside Presbyterian Church be a community, a monument, and a nexus of relationships created for the wholeness also beyond this community, this building, and this nexus of relationships. May all our worlds serve this larger world. This expansive world. This beyond-our-world world.
Nothing you do is insignificant because of Whose you are. Nothing is insignificant.
Image Description: Five candles and a bowl of chili are on top of a table, and the table has a tablecloth that is red with white stripes. All five candles are lined up across the table. The outer two candles are long and red. The inner three candles are tea light candles.
This week, I’m pondering the word metanoia, the ancient Greek word often translated as ‘repent.’ Among other things, it means a turn, an expansion of the mind, an opening of new possibilities.
My friends are initiating a new tradition in their household, and I love it. On Thursday nights, they are opening their home to the community, and together, we’re practicing hygge — a Danish tradition of keeping cozy, warm, and relaxed inside during the cold of winter.
And you betcha I went to the first one wearing pajamas.
I did so assuming that I would initiate a new trend for future hygge nights. And yes, that is true. Many of us will come jammified next week. (Winning!)
I was thinking about how important it is to have moments of calm and coziness. We’re all deserving of this, and we can create this for ourselves, our families, and the expansive chosen family we find in our community.
This is important for moments of change and transformation, both personal or communal. We need moments of restoration. Our relationships need this. Our bodies need this.
Very specifically, our nervous systems need this.
Particularly in times of stress, trauma, or upheaval, our nervous systems need calm. Within that calm, we can respond rather than react. We can feel internally that we have choices. We can move in new directions — metanoia — with less anxiety.
I’m so grateful that my friends are doing this weekly through April. I plan to be there a lot.
And… am I writing this post right now in a lovely nook in the house, sitting on a couch under cozy blankets, sipping coffee, enjoying the scent of a burning candle, and wearing pajamas?
Smuggling Grace 
