Rumble Strips

They’re called rumble strips.

They are those deep grooves on the pavement that alert you, for example, when you have swerved onto the shoulder.

Or they appear on exit ramps to tell you to slow down as a warning that there is a serious curve/turn up ahead.

I hate them.  And I hate them for the reason that makes them so effective.  I hate the sound.  I hate that I don’t just hear, I feel it in my bones, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

But, as I said, they serve a purpose.

Earlier this year, during my Morning Prayer reflections, I spoke often about stumbling blocks, about those little things that pop up in our lives and just ruin our day, get us off track.  And even if the stumbling blocks are small, they compound, they build on each other.  One little thing added on top of a thousand little things can break us.

This past month or two has been a trial for me as I’ve dealt with broken teeth, tooth infections and most recently two root canals done at the same time.  Physically, I am spent.  Emotionally, I am spent.  And when I saw yesterday that I had a brake light out, all I wanted to do was sob.  I know, it’s just a bulb.  I know.  But my goodness, I’m tired.

I’m know I’m not tired like Jesus was tired after 40 days and 40 nights fasting and wandering in the wilderness.  It was during this time that Jesus was tempted by Satan.  We don’t know all the ways Jesus was tempted.  We don’t have a calendar that shows us on Day 20, this happened.  But we do know, from today’s reading that at the end of the 40 days, Jesus was tempted in three very specific and intense ways.

And what I want to point out is that Jesus faced these temptations when He was at His weakest.  Not on Day 1 when He was still basking in the joy of His baptism.  And yes, I think baptism was a joyful moment for Jesus.  So not then, but on Day 40 when He had absolutely nothing left but His spirit, the spirit that in His fasting and prayer had been honed and sharpened and strengthened.  Jesus passed those tests not because He was physically strong, or emotionally strong, but because He was spiritually strong.

We tend to neglect our spiritual selves a lot in this world.  We know the value of eating well.  We know the value of taking mental health days or breaks, watching for signs that burn out may be coming.  We’re pretty good at hearing those rumble strips warning us to slow down.

Whether we listen to those warnings … well that’s where our spiritual health comes into play.

Because our spirit knows us better than anyone or anything.

Slow down.

Watch for God.

I told you last week that no matter what happened at my root canal, I would have a story.  I also promised not to give a sermon this Sunday on root canals, but I made no promise about Morning Prayer.  So here it is.

This was going to be my first root canal.  I had two teeth that were in trouble, but told initially that only one would need the root canal.  Unfortunately, when I got there, they did those special 3d x-rays and told me I needed two root canals.  Both teeth were infected.  Trust me when I say this, that was the only time in the hour and a half I was there that I was in tears.  The procedure didn’t hurt.  The bill did.

And it was around that time that they decided to take my blood pressure right before administering the nerve block.

For the record, I was 160/100.

“Wow, that’s high,” I said to the dental assistant.

She laughed.  “We call that normal.”

So they numbed me, they leaned me back, and right then everything was quiet enough that I could hear the music they were playing.

It was Zach Williams, “Old Church Choir.”

It’s one of my favorite songs, specifically the line, “There ain’t nothin’ gonna steal my joy.”

And I was like, thank you God, for that song.  I mean that was so weird that a Christian song would play.

And then, another Christian pop song began to play, followed by another and another—it was a playlist of my most favorite songs that only God and I know.

So, now I’m laying there thinking did I stumble on a Christian endodontist?  Did he market himself as that?  Did I miss something?  I mean the Cincinnati area is technically at the northern edge of the Bible Belt, but that was a lot of Christian music.

After the endodontist was finished, I was left alone with the dental assistant as she prepared to cement my one crown that had fallen off during the procedure.  I don’t remember how exactly we got started on this conversation, but she mentioned that this was a second career for her, and I asked her what she had done before.

She mentioned office work, bookkeeping and then mentioned she had been a bookkeeper for a church.

Well, when she said “church,” I figured she opened the door, I might as well walk on right through that.  I told her I enjoyed the music that had played during my root canals, that I appreciated the music in fact.  She told me that the music is curated by the staff.  I told her how I went to St. Barnabas down the street and that I would be preaching in a couple weeks.  She played for me some other Christian music that I didn’t know.  She told me how she had prayed with patients in the past, and I thought if I had known that I would have asked her to pray with me.

People, when they’re hurting, when they’re struggling, tend to ask for signs from God and here’s what I’ve learned over the years—God doesn’t provide a sign “on demand.”  He doesn’t provide signs at all.  What we identify as signs are the things that God is doing in our lives all the time, constantly.  It’s just that sometimes we catch a brief glimpse and we say, “Thank you, God for that reminder.  Thank you, God for that sign.”

When in fact, He is always there.

Rumble strips.

That’s how I started this reflection.

Rumble strips.

The strips that say, “Watch out!  Slow down!  Be careful!”  The strips that say, “Hey someone put us here because they care about you and don’t want you crashing the car!”

God is our rumble strip and more.

So much more.

He’s not with us only when we’re approaching life’s biggest obstacles or challenges, He is with us all the time.  You do not need to ask for a sign.

You need to open your eyes.

You need to listen with your heart.

You need to feel with your spirit.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

My Turn in the Ant Pile

Twenty-two years ago, I noticed some pain on the left side of my jaw.  I had been a teeth grinder all my life.  I still remember my dad waking me up in the middle of the night when I was a kid and we were at a hotel for a night on a road trip.

“You’re grinding your teeth,” he said to me.

Not that there was anything I could do about it.

So I imagine when that pain started twenty-plus years ago, that I thought it was TMJ.  It probably also occurred to me that I had a wisdom tooth back there that had been giving me problems since I was sixteen.  Every now and then it would decide that it was time for it to push through and fully erupt and I’d be in pain for a while until it realized it wasn’t happening and chilled back down.

But this particular pain in 2004 continued to build over the days until I woke one morning with pain radiating down my jaw and something about that—the radiating—told me I probably needed to see the dentist sooner rather than later.

I got an emergency appointment, and he led me back to a room I had never seen before and looked like something they only used for prisoners.  He sat me back in the chair and took out a metal pick and then barely brushed the top of my wisdom tooth, the part you could see hiding in the gum tissue.

I about hit the ceiling.

Long story short—the tooth was infected.  He put me on amoxicillin and handed me off to an oral surgeon who said yes that tooth and my other two wisdom teeth needed to come out.  I made plans to take off that day from work, enlisted my grandmother to drive to and from the appointment and stay with me that day while the twilight sleep wore off.

You can have everything planned and then, almost a literal act of God happens. 

This was Florida, 2004.  It was a heck of a year for hurricanes.  About two days before my scheduled surgery, Brevard County issued mandatory evacuation orders for everyone living on the barrier islands where Hurricane Frances was predicted to make landfall.  I lived in Cape Canaveral, about a block from the beach.  My oral surgeon was on Merritt Island, also a barrier island.  I called their office and told them we needed to reschedule.

And then I evacuated to my uncle’s house in Orlando.

Hurricane Frances made landfall near Vero Beach, Florida as a Category 2 hurricane.  When it was safe to do so, I headed home.

My new appointment to have my wisdom teeth out was scheduled for a few weeks later.

Meteorologists began watching a new disturbance in the Atlantic, a storm that would become known as Hurricane Jeanne.  She was headed in the exact same direction as Frances.

Fortunately, I was able to get my wisdom teeth out a few days before evacuating for Jeanne.  Jeanne wound up making landfall almost exactly where Frances had, but as a Category 3 storm.

I remember sitting in my uncle’s house, eating my post-surgery meal of crackers and cheese in a can.

Tomorrow morning, I will be having a root canal on the tooth that used to be neighbors with that impacted wisdom tooth.  I feel like apologizing to my teeth.  I’m sorry I have a small mouth.  I’m sorry you don’t fit.  I’m sorry I grind my teeth.  I’m sorry you’re always hurting.

I am fairly confident that no hurricane will disrupt the procedure.

But as I tell everyone, no matter what happens, you know I will have a story to tell.  Stories are how I make meaning out of my life.  Stories are how I try and share that meaning with you.  I am actually preaching on Sunday the 27^th and I have joked that if I can do a sermon on finding God in root canals then I will have won sermon-giving (as if sermons were a competition.)

But as I get older, one thing I am learning as Job had to learn in today’s “epilogue” to his story, sometimes meaning is hard to find.  Sometimes, like with Job, you never find meaning.  Job got his chance to address God and demand answers for his suffering and he was rebuffed, with God saying basically, “Hey, where were you when I created the world?”

Despite His lack of answers, God does restore Job’s life, restore it in ways, we are led to believe, were much better than his already good life from before. 

But I don’t know that Job ever figured out why so many bad things happened to him.  What was the point to all that suffering?

I am reminded of a story I love telling people about the time a friend of mine had her little children with her at the soccer field and her daughter sat in a pile of ants.  This was Florida, so the pile of ants was a pile of fire ants.  Interestingly, just the day before, her son had also sat in a pile of fire ants.  (I’m telling you I lived in Florida for twenty-five years and after I was bit by a fire ant pumping gas one day, I never wore flipflops again.)

So my friend is furiously trying to brush the ants off her daughter and her daughter, remembering her brother from the day before, says to her mom, “It’s okay.  It was my turn in the ant pile.”

There was no great meaning behind her suffering.  Everyone suffers.  And at the age of five or so, she already understood that.  It wasn’t her fault.  It wasn’t her mom’s fault.  Probably wasn’t even the ant’s fault.  It was just her turn in the ant pile.

Look, I titled my memoir, “A Genesis 50:20 Girl.”  I am all about God using bad things that happen to us to work good things in our lives.  God doesn’t cause bad things.  But He will use them.  But sometimes we can become so focused on finding meaning in our lives that we fail to take the time to grieve for the people and things we’ve lost.

Yeah, suffering happens to everyone, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t really hurt when bad things happen to us.

And so, it is okay to sit with our pain whether physical or emotional or spiritual and listen to it and acknowledge it but also recognize that in our pain we are not alone, that God is with us. 

Sometimes meaning doesn’t come.

But that doesn’t mean that we are ever alone.

Amen.

P.S. I’m probably not going to preach on my root canal on Sunday the 27^th, but this probably isn’t the last time you’ll hear me talk about Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.

Lazarus Come Out

On Monday, we gathered at the church for Part 2 of my contemplative photography workshop.  I will always miss my days of walking the property Hope Episcopal Church in Florida and how there was truly something amazing to see every day from bobcats to hawks to herons to otters to osprey.  I was spoiled.

But what I have loved in leading this contemplative photography workshop at my new church in Ohio is that even though it doesn’t have the wild, untamed woods like Hope, there is always something to see, both inside and outside of the church.

Even on a busy road in a busy area of an otherwise bucolic, small town, there is wildlife, primarily deer.  Deer are everywhere in Ohio.  They are Florida’s version of Sandhill Cranes.  If you are driving down a side street and traffic suddenly comes to a stop, chances are, there are deer crossing the road up ahead.

The grounds of St. Barnabas are filled with wildflowers, even now as the summer season is winding down and leaves are beginning to fall. 

Out behind the church is an enormous rose stalk.  The stalk has reached nearly nine feet and at its pinnacle is a perfectly formed, deep-red rose blossom.

So, on Monday at the contemplative photography workshop, I made sure to head out back to check on the rose.  I was carrying my camera.  It was not turned on.  I didn’t anticipate having to take any quick shots like I would if I was taking pictures of bees.  There was a little wind, so I knew the rose might be swaying, but I wasn’t worried about getting a good picture.

As soon as I turned the corner, a tiny hummingbird flew through the air in front of me, alighting on the rose bloom.  I blinked and it was gone again, not to return.

I looked up at the sky and groaned very loudly.  “Gah!” I said.  You see, the hummingbird is on my bird bucket list.  It’s not that I don’t see hummingbirds.  I do.  It’s that I’ve never gotten a picture of one before.  Same with the goldfinch.  Plenty of them around, but I have no pictures of anything other than a yellow blob.

I groaned again.  A hummingbird on top of an enormous, almost record-breaking rose would have been the ultimate picture and I had missed it.

Today’s reading is the story of Jesus telling the disciples that they must go and attend to Lazarus who has died.  We all know the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, but I love in today’s reading, we get to see the disciples acting like the disciples, confused as to what Jesus is talking about and taking him far too literally.

Jesus tells them that Lazarus is asleep and he is going there to wake him up.

The disciples are like well, if he’s asleep, we’re sure he’ll be okay.

To which I imagine Jesus closing his eyes briefly and letting out a long sigh, like any middle school teacher, before reframing his statement explaining that Lazarus is dead.

Today’s reading ends with Thomas saying, “Yeah, let’s go.”

We all know the story of Lazarus.  We know about Mary and Martha.  We know that verse 35 “Jesus wept,” in multiple translations is the shortest verse in the Bible.  We know that when Jesus tells them to remove the stone in front of the tomb that Martha protests because of the smell.  We know they remove the stone anyway and Jesus says these words, “Lazarus come out!”

There is a pause, a dramatic pause.

And then, a man appears, still wrapped in his grave clothes—linen strips we are told, so if you need to picture an Egyptian mummy here, go ahead.  But the mummy is Lazarus.  He is no monster.  He is alive.

There is rejoicing.  The crowd gathers around Lazarus, removing his grave clothes, presumably hugging him and kissing him.  Mary and Martha are most likely in tears.  They are all praising God.  Someone slaps Jesus on the shoulder.  “Yeah,” they say, “we knew you could do it!”  The party lasts for days.

Or at least that’s what I imagine, because in the Bible the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead ends with Jesus commanding that they unbind him and let him go.

But I also got to thinking about my missed opportunity with the hummingbird and rose the other day and I thought what if you were the person who missed the moment Lazarus walks out of the tomb by a minute?  What if you were Thomas—and I use Thomas as an example here because he is the disciple who misses the first appearance of the risen Jesus in the upper room—what if you are Thomas and you’re running a little behind the group.  Maybe you got a stone in your sandal and stopped to dislodge it.  What if you needed to work out a cramp in your hamstring?  What if you just needed a drink of water?  I’ll catch up, you say to yourself.

And then you miss seeing a miracle.

“What’s going on?” you ask as you come up on the crowd gathered outside the tomb.

Peter grabs your shoulders and shakes you.  “I can’t believe you missed it!”

“What did I miss?” you ask.

Peter points to the man in the center of the crowd with linen strips hanging off of him.  “Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead?”

“I thought he was just sleeping,” you say.

“No, man,” Peter explains.  “He was dead, like dead-dead, like you can still smell the death coming from that tomb.  And now he’s alive.”

“He wants something to eat!” someone shouts from the crowd.

Martha races past you, shoving you to one side so she can get some figs and bread from inside the house.

And then you begin to see just what you missed, perhaps the greatest of miracles.

And much like me, you raise your fists to the sky and groan, “Gah!”

The point of contemplative photography to me is to train yourself to pay attention, to not miss the miracles that are happening in your world every day—not on the other side of the world—not on the other side of state, closer to you than the other side of the street, right there in front of you as you move throughout your day.

Be more discerning.

Walk slower.

Hurry less.

Prayer is about intention.

Make finding God your intention every day.

Amen.

 

IT'S OKAY TO BOTHER JESUS

Monday morning, I had an appointment with the dentist to put on my permanent crown.  The appointment was for 8 am and because of the distance I had to travel during rush hour traffic, I left early and got to the dentist at 7:40.  I checked in and sat down with a book.  I admit to being a little tense.  I had asked several friends to pray for me.  The tooth that was getting this new crown was very fragile.

Several times, I put down my book and looked up at the large screen TV they had on the wall.  It showed one scene, a mountain scene with a flowing stream.  I wondered if anything else happened or if it was just the same mountain stream flowing endlessly.

It was hypnotic which was probably the point.

Other people came and checked in for their appointments—they were quickly called back.  My appointment time came and went.  I looked at my watch at 8:08 wondering why they were running behind.  Normally they are right on time.  8:15 came along and I thought okay I’ll give them to 8:30 and then I’ll go up and ask them.

At 8:20, my phone rang.  It was the dentist office asking if I planned on coming to my appointment.

Now, I’m going to pause there because if this story sounds familiar to you, there’s a reason for that. 

This is not the first time this has happened to me.  It’s not even the first time it’s happened at the dentist office, though the last time it was a different dentist.

I explained to the woman that I was in fact sitting in their lobby, that I had checked in at 7:40.

If you’re thinking this added to my anxiety or made me cranky—it didn’t.  I was actually laughing about it.  So they took me back and the young woman assigned to take care of my crown fitting, got to work in removing my temporary crown.

Bless her heart, she could not get that crown off.  The irony being that I was only there because my original crown had popped off and a piece of the tooth broke off, so I needed a new crown. 

So she called in another woman who really got into it, to the point where I was starting make some uncomfortable noises and she pulled back and asked me if I would like to be numbed.  “Yes,” I said, “if we’re going to keep doing it this way.  It will probably be easier on you if I’m numbed.”

So then I had to be numbed and back to work she went rocking that crown back and forth, trying to loosen it.  At this point I’m thinking the tooth is not that strong and it may be a race as to which fails first, the crown or the tooth.

Finally, they got the temporary crown off.

And I was laughing.  Because if you know me, you know how much I love a good story.

Every week here at Morning Prayer, we take time for intercessory prayer.  We take time to offer up ourselves, our friends, our families, anyone we love to God in prayer.  But in doing so, we often find ourselves praying for strangers.  And what a beautiful thing that is to pray for strangers, what an amazing act of love to pray for someone not because they mean something to us, not because they mean something to someone else, but to pray for them with a Godly love because we know we are all children of God.

Years ago, at a friend’s church, I met a woman who liked putting puzzles together so much, she turned it into a contemplative activity.  As she put the puzzle together, she would pray for a certain individual.  And when she was done, she would preserve the finished project and frame it and give it to the person she had prayed for when she was making it.

She did that for me, someone she barely knew.

For however long it took her to put that puzzle together, an hour, two hours more, she thought about me.  She lifted me up to God.  For all those minutes, all those hours, she released my name into the cosmos and left God a very long voicemail about me. 

I did not know she was doing this, until after the fact.

And that’s how it generally works for me.  I don’t know that someone has prayed for me until after they have done so.

I’ve told the story before about my priest friend who told me one morning that she had prayed for me for a whole mile on the way to work.

And I wondered to myself if that was a “school-zone” mile or a “highway” mile because one of those means she was praying for me for considerably longer than the other.

But here is something I was thinking about the other day in regards to intercessory prayer—I have asked you here at Morning Prayer to pray for people who have no idea that they are being prayed for. 

Think about that for a second because I am willing to bet (and I don’t gamble) that everyone in this room, everyone reading or listening to these words, has been prayed for and not known.  They have been prayed for unaware.

Sit with that for a second.

Listen.

Listen with your heart, with your soul.  Do you hear it?  Someone has prayed for you.  Someone is praying for you.  Someone’s prayer for you when you were struggling through a rough period twenty years ago is still echoing through the universe.  It’s still good.  Prayers age well.  They don’t go bad, and a prayer said for you decades ago I promise is still working.

Monday morning, before I went to the dentist, I had texted several friends asking them to pray for me.  And you might say, “How did that prayer work out for you, Kendra?”

I mean, they took me back late—I had turned invisible apparently in the waiting room.  I will say that invisibility does seem to be my superpower.  When they finally got me back, they couldn’t the temporary crown off.  When they finally got it off, it took them about a dozen tries to get the new crown filed and polished down enough so that I could close my mouth properly.  At one point I told them, “Hey, with the way I grind my teeth at night, I’m sure I’ll have that crown filed down real quick.”

When they finally got the tooth in place, they sent me back to the woman I had checked in with at the reception desk earlier—the one who had forgotten me and she offered me a $10 gift card as an apology.  I didn’t need the gift card and in the end, I think I wound up taking it just to make her feel better.

And now that I’ve told you the whole story, let me ask you.  Were my friends’ prayers for me that morning ignored?  Were they unanswered?

I went to the dentist for a crown.  I spent the morning laughing and without being given nitrous oxide.  I got a story to tell.  And in that story was a message to give to you about intercessory prayers. 

And one more thought.  Please don’t ever be afraid to ask for prayers for yourself.  Please don’t ever think that your problems aren’t bad enough or serious enough compared to other people.  Look, our reading today was from Job.  He is the poster child for suffering.  But please don’t ever think that you shouldn’t bother God with your problems.

God wants to be bothered.

He wants to hear from you.

I was watching the comedian Kathleen Madigan the other day on Netflix.  She is an American comedian of Irish heritage who went to a Catholic school.

And she said that when she was a kid, she heard from her protestant friends how they all had a personal relationship with Jesus and when she questioned the nuns about this personal relationship with Jesus, they basically said, “Oh, no, don’t go bothering Jesus.  Here’s a list of who you should bother first.  First your guardian angel.  They are there for you.  Second, you can ask the saint who is in charge of your particular problem.  You can also go to Mary, Jesus’ mother and ask her to intercede on your behalf.  But don’t go bothering Jesus.”

And what I would say to you today is this.

It’s okay to bother Jesus.

That is my prayer for you.

Amen.

YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH JESUS

I was at Target the other morning (and if you think a good number of my Morning Prayer reflections seem to begin with a trip to Target—you are right—the life lessons a trip to Target provides).  I had a cart and a list and on that list was hand soap.  Found the aisle, found the shelves and there greeting me was empty shelf after empty shelf after empty shelf.

I stared at it for a minute.  Then I took a picture and sent it to a friend.  “Is there a pandemic going on that I’m not aware of?”

We all remember those first weeks of the Covid lockdown, when people everywhere suddenly realized that hand washing was important, and the shelves were empty.  My local Target brought all the bottled water and whatever Clorox wipes they had to the front of the store so that no one would fall and break their neck trying to outsprint their neighbors to the back of the store.

Those were crazy times.  Toilet paper shortages meant that bidet sales were suddenly through the roof.

As someone who lived in Florida for twenty-five years, I can tell you that the Covid shortages were not unlike the shortages we faced with hurricanes.

Scarcity happens when people are afraid and they hoard whatever they have.

This past Sunday, our gospel reading from Matthew told the story of the Canaanite woman who is desperate for Jesus to heal her daughter who is stricken with a demon. 

As Rev. Greg pointed out in his sermon, first Jesus ignores the woman, then He tells her He’s not there for her and then He says something which should make anyone who loves Jesus feel extremely uncomfortable.  He compares the woman to a dog saying it’s not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.

But the woman is persistent and tells Him that even the dogs are free to eat the crumbs that fall from the table.

At that, Jesus tells the woman He will help her.  “How great is your faith,” He says to her, and instantly her daughter is healed.  You see, when He ignored her, when He rebuffed her, He was purposely echoing what the woman had been told her whole life to set up the contrast with what He was offering.

Rev. Greg’s sermon made me think about scarcity in our world today.  How the idea that something is rare, or exclusive or scarce makes us want to hoard whatever we have and once we’ve done that, race into the world to gather up what we don’t have out of fear of missing out.

We are driven and manipulated by the idea of scarcity.

In today’s reading from John, we see Jesus feeding the five thousand.  Now, people generally view this story in one of two ways.  Either Jesus supernaturally created the food to feed the crowd, or people were motivated to put whatever they had with them in the baskets, and their goodwill and generosity is what fed the people.

I can tell you I am in the camp of this being a supernatural miracle.

But in the end, whatever you believe, the message turns out to be the same.

With Jesus there is abundance.  In John 10:10, Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

There is no scarcity with Jesus.

There is no reason to fear, no reason to hoard.  God provides and He provides it abundantly.

With the Canaanite woman, why would Jesus ever withhold His love and grace and healing from anyone?  He’s never going to run out of miracles.  He doesn’t have a limit.  There are no bounced checks with Jesus.  Jesus is the one who pays our debts.  He doesn’t go into debt.

He is the one in Ephesians 3:20 who can provide us with more than we can ever ask for or even imagine.

I keep thinking about my old church, when I made the decision to attend both Sunday services, but asked the pastor if it was okay to get communion twice and her response was, “You can never have too much Jesus.”

She said it again some years later, when a little boy loved the communion bread we used on Christmas Eve so much that he came back around so he could get seconds.

“You can never have too much Jesus,” Pastor Debbie said.

Jesus is abundance.

The first can be made last and the last made first because in the end everyone eats.

The shelves at Target the other day weren’t completely empty.  There were two bottles left.  I needed one, so I took one.  I left the other one there. 

Where in your life can you see God’s abundance?

Where in your life have you been tricked into believing in scarcity?

How might you live your life abundantly in the love of Jesus today?

Amen.

 

TRY NOT TO SNEEZE ON THE ELEVATOR

The other day, I was in the elevator when I noticed a woman hurrying to catch it just as the doors were beginning to close.  Quickly, I hit the open doors button and the woman squeezed in just in time.  She immediately turned to face the door and put her face into her elbow.

“Oh, you’re going to regret that,” she said to me, “because I’m about to sneeze.”

Yesterday I was working on updating the cover to my book Prayers in the Pandemic which I wrote during 2020, during lockdowns and quarantines, during mask-wearing and one-way aisles in the grocery store.  I wrote a prayer a day for many days and posted them on Facebook, hoping they might provide some comfort.

It’s been six years, but Covid and what happened in 2020 have changed our lives forever.  Not just in the self-checkout lanes that are ubiquitous now in every grocery store, not just in our children being attached to a screen everywhere from home to school and everywhere in between. 

Covid changed how we communicate with each other, in good ways and in bad.  In those early days of the lockdown, I shared a virtual lunch with a friend as she and I Facetimed each other and ate our lunches in front of each other.  At church, we took advantage of the beautiful Florida weather and gathered outside for Morning Prayer.  Every Tuesday, I met a friend of mine at her church, and we walked her church’s prayer labyrinth and prayed.  Somedays, I gathered with friends in the front yard of our former pastor’s house for fellowship, for communion, for reminders that God was indeed present everywhere.

But the truth is that Covid enabled the digital world to become the primary method of communication in the world.  Younger generations now date less, hang out with friends less.  They are content to just message each other on their phones.  There’s a certain safety there.

On Monday, I received my very first iron infusion.  It was not a private room.  And shortly after they brought me back and started to get me hooked up, they brought another woman, an older woman back for her infusion.  I don’t know what she was there for.  I’m always hesitant to ask in those situations because your health information should be private.  You shouldn’t feel like you need to share that.

We didn’t speak to each other at first, even after the nurses left us and the only reason we wound up speaking at all was because when the nurse came in to hook me up to my bag of iron, the bag of iron looked like blood.  It looked like I was getting a blood transfusion and so I commented to the nurse about that and when he left, the other patient spoke up commenting on my blood-colored medicine.  And so I wound up sharing a bit of my story.

Since it was my first infusion, she gave me some tips—she told me not to be afraid to tell them you needed to use the restroom.  And I was a little afraid because the way you communicated that you needed help with something was to ring a little bell they gave you, like I was some kind of Downton Abbey dowager summoning the servants.

In today’s reading, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at the well.  It’s a story we are all probably familiar with.  Jesus asks the woman for some water.  She comments on how their two people are not on exactly water-getting terms.  Jesus mentions the living water he can give her.  The woman totally misses the point and scoffs telling Him, “You don’t even have a bucket.”

Here is the interesting thing about the gospels.  Virtually every story is an encounter story.  We see little of Jesus’ interior life, His thoughts, His hopes, His doubts.  We see a little bit of it at Gethsemane.  We are told sometimes that Jesus went off by Himself to pray.  I call Jesus the extroverted introvert.  He loves people, but He needs time to recharge alone.  But most of what happens with Jesus happens in conversation. 

And it’s why His words on the cross, “My God, my God why have You forsaken me?” are so devastating.  He is, in the end, alone, but that’s a sermon for another day given by someone far more knowledgeable about the context and the meaning of those words.

But today’s reading is about encounter.  And it only happens because the Samaritan woman is at the well at the wrong time.  She is there in the heat of the day.  It’s the worst possible time to go get water.  But she chooses that time because she hopes she will be alone.  She is a pariah because of her fluid relationships with men.  And she’s tired of it.  She’s tired of the judgement and gossip and the hate.

So she comes to the well to get water and instead finds there is a Jewish man already there waiting for her.

She might have turned around, but she needed the water.

She did not need conversation, but Jesus spoke anyway.

And note this—He didn’t start by declaring Himself the Messiah and sermonizing.

He began with small talk.  “Could I have some water?”

And that small talk opened a door so wide, that the Samaritan woman abandoned her water, and ran off back to town, back to the people who ridiculed her and became an evangelist.

I personally am horrible at small talk.  When I would visit people in the hospital as a chaplain.  I knew I couldn’t just walk into a stranger’s room and lead with, “So, what shall we pray for today?”  I knew I needed to make small talk, ask them why they were there, who was there with them, who they had at home, what kind of community they could expect to help them. 

It was not easy for me.  My first question was “What brought you to the hospital,” and after multiple people answered with a grin, “the ambulance,” I reworded that question.

It is not necessary for us to have a spiritual epiphany with every stranger we meet on the elevator, but I do think that engaging with people, encountering people in their moment, can open the doors where spiritual epiphanies can happen, not just for the strangers we speak to but for us.  I can’t tell you the number of times God has appeared to me as a stranger.

So this reflection this morning is one for me too.  I’m asking you to do something, but I’m reminding myself that I need to do it more, to engage more, to not be afraid to share the same breath with people even if they have just walked into your elevator and sneezed.

Amen.

 

 

COME AND SEE

Come and see, 

I have great hope

this morning,

 

after all the sun rose,

didn’t it?

 

And I got out of bed,

with a little groan,

with an “ugh”

and a sigh,

 

because this is the language

of middle-age, right?

 

And how I got out of bed,

with a roll and a twist

and a hand grabbing

my back;

 

this is the dance

of middle-age, isn’t it?

 

Come closer.

Listen carefully.

 

Because I want you to see

the hope that every day

brings to me,

 

even on the days,

when I have to mow

the lawn,

 

how even when the wet grass

clogs the mower,

 

and I speak

the language

of middle-age

 

and dance the dance,

squatting down to

scoop and toss

the wet green clumps,

aside, how even then,

 

I relish that smell

of grass, that clean smell,

that earthy smell, that

Genesis 1-third-day-

of-creation smell.

 

And when I head inside,

and grab the edge

of the countertop

and stretch out my back,

I am not just doing

some strange yoga pose,

 

I am bowing.

This is called

middle-age prayer.

 

And oh the stretch is good,

and oh the prayer is answered.

 

Outside the house finch

that fled her nest

while I mowed,

 

has returned, nestled

down into her spot

and started singing

to her eggs.

 

This is the language of birds,

the anthem of all flying creatures,

of angels even, dare I say,

of anything that speaks or sings

from soul to soul.

 

Come and see.

God is good, today.

God is good, every day.

 

God is good to me.

I woke up.

I let my spirit feast,

 

as I sat down to write

these words.

 

Come and see.

Where will you see

God today?

 

Amen.