Hide and Seek With God

My mom used to say it was the sun that made Florida people crazy.  Having lived in Florida for twenty-five years, I would argue that actually it was the lack of sun that made Florida people crazy.  We were used to short bursts of rain, storms that rolled in and out in minutes.  But if it rained all day, or goodness if it rained two consecutive days, that was when Florida people went crazy.

But my mom was right in one way, because the Florida sun is intense.  Try walking outside in the summer without eye protection and you will feel the sun burning itself on your retinas.  The Florida sun is intense and violent.  It smacks you in the face as soon as you step out your front door.

Everything in Florida is in your face.  Everything is large and demanding of attention.  In the wintertime, if it gets too cold, Iguanas in South Florida fall from the trees.  When it gets a little chilly, manatees flood the canals, dozens if not hundreds of them huddled in just a few feet of water, trying to get warm. 

The boardwalk at the park where I used to take walks was frequently inundated with invasive tree frogs, frogs that I had nicknamed booger frogs because they were so tiny and so green as to look like a piece of snot.  There would sometimes be so many of them, you had to hopscotch your way down the boardwalk, trying desperately to avoid becoming the fourth horseman of the apocalypse to those poor frogs.

In Florida, the natural world appears in ways that are constantly jaw-dropping.  A bobcat once walked by the church window during communion.  I ran outside with my camera to chase it down.  And if you think that sounds strange that I would bring my camera to church—how could I not—that was how often something amazing happened.

One time, I stepped outside to check my mail, and a three-legged bobcat walked past me without a second look, leaping into the canal, swimming a few feet before jumping out and disappearing into the wetlands on the other side.

Twice a year, when the birds migrated, the white pelicans appeared in such huge numbers, there seemed to be a parade of them, a flotilla in the various retention ponds in the neighborhood where they joined cormorants and Great Blue Herons and egrets in fishing.  Osprey soared overhead, joined even by a Bald Eagle once. 

Nature was so awe-inspiring, I would stand there, mouth agape, laughing, while I rubbed the goosebumps from my arms.

And if the natural world wasn’t enough to convince you of a divine creator, there were the rocket launches.  You see I lived on the Space Coast and rockets, especially in the last few years I lived there were such regular occurrences that I completely forgot about the last launch before I moved.

I was sitting in the recliner in the living room when I heard the telltale rumble.  I was so used to rocket launches, I didn’t even get up.  I just leaned over, pulled back the curtain and watched that intense pinprick of light shooting up into the sky.  That’s what rocket launches look like from a distance like someone has pricked the sky with a needle and the light of God has shown through from the other side.  To fly into space is to chase the divine.

Now that I am in Ohio, I can tell you that Ohio is different from Florida.  It is not as in your face.  What little we seem to see of the sun is mostly filtered and diluted from the clouds.  Yes, occasionally, I walk outside and WOW there’s a deer right there just chewing on some clover and pooping in the weeds.

But most days, if I want to find those awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, natural world God moments, I have to actively search for them.

And that I believe is actually a good thing.

The other day I was out for my walk when I noticed that across the street from the Catholic church, a bunch of a new flowers had suddenly bloomed.  This is one difference between Florida and Ohio that I am enjoying.  Yes, flowers bloom all year round in Florida, but in Ohio, there is a cycle of blooms.  Each particular flower bloom may only last a couple of weeks, but there’s always a new, different flower waiting in the wings, bouncing with excitement, ready for their chance to see the sun and greet the pollinators. 

So I had noticed these flowers the other day, but I only had my phone with me and it was cloudy out and what I really wanted was my camera and some sun.  When I got home, I checked the weather report and saw that we might see some filtered sun for a few hours later that morning.  And sure enough, an hour or so later, I noticed shadows on my floor as the sun peeked in the window.  I was getting ready to run some errands, but moments like these are often fleeting, so I grabbed my camera and walked the block  back to the Catholic church and those wildflowers. 

I got so many good pictures that morning.  This past Sunday in my sermon, I talked about how incredible the universe is, both the universe that exists outside of us, the impossibly large planets and stars and galaxies, but also the universe that exists inside of us, the impossibly small atoms and quantum landscapes. 

And both big and small are equally amazing.

In Florida, I was frequently in awe of the big things—those are easy to find and love, but here in Ohio, I am learning to also be in awe of the small things, the things that might otherwise go unnoticed by everyone except, of course, God.

And so that other morning, as I took pictures of those wildflowers, I have to say my favorite picture was of a bumblebee.  I love bumblebees, not just because they’re the cutest of the bees, the bee least likely to make you freak out when it flies close—I mean, for Pete’s sake, they’re furry.  And seem to openly defy all laws of physics that something that rotund, could fly at all with such fragile, tiny wings. 

Jeremiah 29:13 tells us, “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”

Even in Florida, when I held contemplative photography workshops, yes, I wanted people to have amazing moments, like the time wild parrots appeared at one of my workshops, as if on cue, as if I had paid them to be there—I wanted people to have those moments, but I also wanted them to actively search, to look for things they might otherwise have ignored.

Sometimes God is in our face and we think, “Oh there He is!” and we miss the fact that He has been there the whole time.  He has not suddenly appeared.  Yes, He’s there in the bobcat, walking by the church window during communion.  But He’s also in the tree frog I found once curled up inside a rose bloom.

And those moments truly bring a smile to my face.

It’s like playing Hide and Seek with God without the stress of thinking you might never find Him. 

He’s everywhere.

Amen.

Powers of Ten

When I was a kid, growing up in a small town in upstate New York in the 1980s, there wasn’t a lot to do on a Saturday afternoon.  After the morning cartoons were over, the only options on TV were watching Pete Weber bowl or Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.  Frequently, if we were home on a Saturday afternoon, I wound up sitting on the floor in the living room, parked not in front of the TV, but in front of my dad’s bookshelves.

He didn’t have any kids’ books, but he did subscribe to one of those book-of-the-month clubs, in this case one offered by Scientific American.  They were all very flippable books—meaning, even if the words were above my reading level, the pictures said even more. 

My favorite book in this series was called Powers of Ten.  It’s a book of mostly pictures, and you can start anywhere in the book.  You don’t have to start at page one.  The book actually encourages you to start about halfway in, with a picture of a man napping on a picnic blanket.  When you turn the page, the view zooms out—by a power of ten, hence the book title—and your view is now hovering some ten meters over him, and you see he is not alone.  A woman is sitting next to him, reading a book. 

On the next page, the view again zooms out, this time so far you can’t see the couple at all.  All you see is a large, green field, bordered by a highway on one side and a marina on the other.  Page after page, the pictures zoom out and out, until eventually you’re looking at the planet earth from space, and then the solar system, and then the galaxy.

It was captivating to me as a child.  I was hooked, unable to look away, going through the book over and over.

Every kid seems to go through a dinosaur phase or a space phase or both, I think because both dinosaurs and space challenge our perceptions of the world in which we live.  We begin to realize there is something so much bigger and so much more amazing than we could have ever imagined on our own.

For the first time, we look at dinosaurs and the universe, separately, and we feel small, not just in physical size, but in our relationship to the whole of creation.

It’s something the psalmist understood.  Listen again to today’s reading, specifically, Psalm 8:3-4 which reads, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”

From our earliest age, we tend to view God as being somewhere far away, somewhere apart from us.  When I was a kid in CCD—that’s a Catholic catechism class—I remember that we were asked one day to draw what Heaven looked like to us.  You might expect a child to draw a picture of the sky, of the clouds, with God, that bearded old man, a white-haired Bob Ross, majestically sitting on a happy little cloud-like throne.

But my picture of Heaven looked like something from the cartoon, The Jetsons.  My Heaven wasn’t in the clouds—it was in the stars.

Unfortunately, this idea of God existing somewhere far apart from us, frequently persists into adulthood.  And it can lead to spiritual hunger.  Maybe we don’t even know it’s a spiritual hunger; all we know is that there’s something going on within us.  It’s like when you were a kid, standing in front of a completely full refrigerator, your mother shouting for you to shut the door, and all you can yell back is, “I’m hungry and there’s nothing to eat!”

That’s what spiritual hunger can feel like.  We know we’re hungry but nothing we eat seems to fill us.

In her book of sermons, entitled, When God is Silent, Episcopal priest, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, "Very few people come to see me because they want to discuss something God said to them last night. The large majority come because they cannot get God to say anything at all.”

For a lot of us, God is still far out there, deep among the stars.  And we are stuck in a Psalm 8 mindset.  Who are we that God should care about us at all?

The answer is in our first reading from today, in Proverbs 8:22-31, which describe Creation.  The poetry of the Bible is beautiful, but I want us to focus on just one word from today’s Proverbs reading.  And that word is “delight.”  It’s there in verses 30 and 31. 

But before we dive into that, we need to address something else first.  I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to give it serious thought.  Okay?

Do you believe that God loves you?

Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, yeah, of course I believe that.  Maybe you one hundred percent totally believe that. Or maybe you have your doubts.

And if that is the case, let me assuage your fears.

God loves you.

God loves each one of you and He loves every bit of each one of you.

When I was volunteering as a hospital chaplain some years ago, I discovered that the most healing words I could say to someone were, “God loves you.”  No matter who they were.  No matter what their situation.  God loves you.  Period.

It’s very important you understand this.

That God loves you.

Because I’m about to take it up a notch—by a power of ten—if you will.

It is not just that God loves us.  Proverbs 8 tells us that God delights in us.  We make God happy.  We bring God joy.  When we walk into a room, God’s face lights up.  Suddenly the room is brighter because we are there and God’s love for us shines as bright as the light of the sun.

God doesn’t love us from afar.

God’s love extends through all space and time.  He loves us now.  He is already loving us tomorrow and He is walking with us, standing with us, running the race with us in every moment of our lives.

God’s greatness doesn’t separate us from Him; rather God’s greatness draws us even nearer to Him.  We are caught up in the gravity of His presence.

God loves us.

God delights in us.

He created us.  He made us.  His brushstrokes are on our hearts.  His fingerprints on our souls.   

God loves because He is love.  And because He made us in His image, we are love, too, even if we sometimes forget it.

That book Powers of Ten that I mentioned earlier—there is a certain magic to the book.  Because if you flip the pages one way, you zoom out from the man on the picnic blanket to the farthest reaches of the universe, but if you flip the other direction, you zoom in on the man, to his hand, his skin cells, his DNA, the atoms and the quantum landscape deep within each of us.

And you discover that the universe within us is just as incredible as the universe outside of us.

That the smallest part of us is just as great as any star or quasar or black hole in the known and unknown universe.

That all of God’s creation is magnificent and worthy.

Yes, sometimes God feels so distant.  And sometimes we feel so small and insignificant. 

There were so many times, as a chaplain, that I would walk into a patient’s room, listen to what was always a tragic story and yet, when I would ask them if they wanted prayer, they would say, “No, that’s okay.  God has more important things to worry about.”

But that’s not true.  You are more important to God than you know.  You are His everything.  You are His reason.  To say that God does not have time for you is to say that God’s love is finite, that God’s love can run out.

But God’s love can never run out.  The well of His living water never runs dry.

In today’s second reading from Romans 5:5, we are told that God has poured His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Key word … poured … He has poured His love into us.  He has fed us.  He has nourished us.  He has filled us.  God’s love is light and life.  Both are inextinguishable.

Believing that God loves us is the foundation of our faith.  Because if we don’t believe God loves us, then nothing in the Bible makes sense, not the crucifixion, not the resurrection, not Pentecost, not Creation itself, not even our reading from Romans today. 

Let’s look again at Romans 5:1-5.  That whole part about suffering producing endurance and endurance producing character and character producing hope … it all sounds good except when you’re knee deep in the worst moment of your life.

It’s the next part that shows the extent of God’s love.  Hope does not disappoint, we are told, because God does not disappoint.  God’s love doesn’t disappoint.  Even in the midst of suffering, God’s love surrounds us and holds us close.

Today is Father’s Day and I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my dad’s role in inspiring this sermon.  It’s not just that I pulled the book Powers of Ten off his bookshelf that day more than 35 years ago because I was bored.  Books are so important.  Every book is a seed.  Every book we read is a seed planted, a seed that may take years to bloom, but even dormant remains something filled with potential.

But again, it’s not just the book on my dad’s shelf.  I have spent the last few minutes talking to you about God’s love and I can tell you, personally, I can’t remember a time I didn’t know God’s love.  And that has a lot to do with my dad.

Let me share a story.  When I was a toddler, my dad would make audio recordings of interviews or chats he had with me.  Mostly, it was just a good opportunity for me to sound very cute and sing songs from the movie Grease.

In one of these recordings, though, my dad asks me this question … “Who loves you?”

Now, my dad is right there in front of me, you’d think I would have giggled—I was a giggler—and then said, “Daddy!” 

But no, when my dad asks me, “Who loves you?” I don’t hesitate.  I say, “Jesus.”

I didn’t just come up with that on my own.  My dad had taught me that.  And I believed it not simply because he told me, but because he showed me.  From the time I was a baby, and he read to me the Bible while I was in the crib, my dad showed me God’s love, by showing me his love, by showering me with attention, by showing me that he didn’t just love me, he delighted in me.  His face lit up each time I toddled into the room.

So who, in your life, has shown you God’s love?

How have you shown God’s love to others?

Who will you show God’s love to today?

Amen.

 

Encouragement

The first House Finch this spring built her nest in under a day.

From start to finish, less than twenty-four hours.

It was impressive.

She worked all alone and she worked fast.  The nest looked strong if not a bit lopsided, and I worried that it just wasn’t balanced well up under the porch eave.

The House Finch was jumpy.  Not just when I opened the front door to check the mail, but anytime someone walked by the house or another bird flew too close.  The House Finch would flee her nest before returning a short time later.

I worried more about her, because she was all alone.

But days passed and I crossed my fingers that all would be well.

But all was not well.  One day, I looked out the window and saw the nest hanging off the side of the post.  I stepped out onto the porch, dreading what I would find.  The house finch flew around my head, flapping her wings and screeching.

The eggs had fallen out of the nest.

There were five of them.

They had been close to hatching.

But the fall and the premature birth were not survivable.

I ducked back inside the house and cried before pulling myself together and disposing of the fallen nest and cleaning up the porch.

In the springtime in Florida, I loved nesting season.  I loved walking the wetlands and watching Great Blue Herons, Anhingas, Snowy Egrets and Roseate Spoonbills building their nests and then caring for their young.

There were also Sandhill Cranes just down the road from me who always nested at the same time each year.  Every spring, I was treated to Sandhill Crane babies.

And when the swans that lived in the development next to me, made their nest by the main road, they attracted enough paparazzi you’d think they were royalty.

But not every baby bird lives.  One week there were two Sandhill Crane babies following their parents around and the next week there would just be one.

One day, a Great Blue Heron nest perched high on a palm tree, had two babies screaming for their mother, but in one summer of drought, she couldn’t find any fish and tried desperately to get them to eat a snake, and then one day the nest was empty.

I have learned, over the years, to never name any of the baby birds.

But even nameless, their deaths still moved me.

And then to have it happen right on my porch … what can I say … I have a sensitive, tender soul, a sensitive, tender soul that I have come to cherish and view as a strength, even if it means, crying with a House Finch who has lost her nest.

I thought maybe the House Finch might return, might rebuild and try again.  I even bought a bird house that I thought I might hang on the back porch where I knew the finches sometimes slept at night and which was safer and less hectic than the front of the house.

But before I could do any of that, a few weeks after the nest fell, two new House Finches began scouting my front porch.

A male and female House Finch flew immediately to the spot where the last nest had been built.  They pecked at it a little and then were ready to close.  The female began almost immediately building the nest, while the male stayed nearby, sitting on the rain gutter and singing to her.

In one scenario, I imagine her talking back to him and telling him to be quiet, she’s working, and then him arguing with her, telling her she missed a spot, and her finally getting so upset, she stops, stares at him and asks him if he wants to build the nest.

He raises his wings.  “No, I’m good—you’re good, keep going.”

That’s one scenario.

I prefer the scenario where the male is doing exactly what it sounds like he’s doing.  He’s singing to her as she works.  And in that song are notes of encouragement.  His song tells her she’s not alone.  She doesn’t have to do this by herself.

I think this female is different from the one who lost her nest.  She seems different.  She works slower.  As I write this, they are on day 3 of their build—I say “they” even though the female does all the actual building.  But she is taking her time, making sure she is getting it right.

This morning, when I stepped outside, neither bird flew away immediately.  They weren’t jumpy.  I introduced myself.  I don’t want them to panic every time they see me because they will see a lot of me in the next few weeks.

They gave me a few seconds and then flew away, but not in a fearful way.

I like to think they’re not afraid because they have each other.

Recently, if I’m remembering correctly, both Zig and Jane’s Sunday sermons discussed the importance of community.  Though we celebrated our church’s namesake, St. Barnabas day this past Sunday, it is actually today that is officially St. Barnabas day and we see in our reading from Acts 4:32-37 that Barnabas was a man named Joseph from Cyprus who had sold his field and laid the money at the apostles’ feet.  He was given the name Barnabas which means, “son of encouragement.”

And I imagine that is why we call ourselves here at St. Barnabas a community of encouragement.

“Look to the birds of the air,” Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:26.  That particular lesson was on worry and anxiety, but keep looking.  Look at the birds.  Look at what the House Finches on my porch can teach us about the importance of community and encouragement. 

I have no idea how this nest will turn out.

But every morning I wake up to the sound of the House Finches singing.

And I am encouraged—and I am hopeful.

Amen.

 

Postscript: The House Finch is now nesting.  I’m assuming her mate is nearby but no longer guarding her.  He is no longer singing to her.  Now she is the one who is singing to her eggs.  The cycle of love continues.

Heart of Flesh, Heart of Stone

Today’s reading is from Ezekiel 11:14-25 

I have a firm belief that you can find God everywhere.

Everywhere.

And you should see that in these reflections I write, mostly because every week, I seem to include something I have learned from the garbage truck.

I feel like the garbage truck driver and I have been at war since the week I moved in.  It was that week that he drove so close to my house down the alley that he clipped the cable wire from my house and sent it whipping out into the street, like an angry snake that had been sleeping and now found itself dangling and stuck from a high place.  Not completely sure it was the cable wire, I had to call 911 so that the firemen could check to see if it was a livewire and then move it from the street.

It was my welcome to the neighborhood.

In defense of the garbagemen, my house is a new house and before it was built, the land was a vacant, overgrown, forlorn lot and so they saw no problem with driving over the grass to help them get a better angle when they turned from the alley onto the street.

I get it.  Old habits.

I still get confused birds clunking into my windows because they too are not quite used to a building being here.

Every week, though, I wait to see how much of my lawn, the garbage truck will claim.  It was a little dicey this winter when snow covered the alley.  It was then the truck almost took out my Little Free Library which stands about ten feet from the actual alley.

Since spring began, I have been trying to reclaim my property.  There is a six foot wide strip of dirt and rocks between the grass and the alley and that strip of barren earth is actually mine, but as long as it remains dirt and rocks, the garbage truck will continue to drive over it.  And slowly, my property will erode, disappearing a little bit more with each tire rut and subsequent rain storm. 

I have tried planting the world’s tiniest boxwood and then seeding the dirt with grass and straw, but still I hold my breath each garbage day. 

The other morning as I was out walking, I discovered I was not the only property owner battling the garbage truck.

You see each block in the neighborhood has an alleyway bisecting it.  And it is in this alleyway that people put out their trashcans for collection.

The other day, I noticed the alleyway one block over was having the same issue with the garbage truck.  There were deep tire ruts, massive earth gouges, where the truck exited the alley.  The property owner affected had tried something that I had considered, namely putting up some found, flat rocks as a makeshift retaining wall.

It did not appear to be working.

But then, a few days later, they tried something different, this time erecting a DIY concrete block (complete with concrete) wall at the edge of the property.  It was a hideous looking wall. 

The Japanese have an art called Kintsugi where broken pottery is mended with gold, highlighting the cracks, rather than hiding them and creating something beautiful in the process.

This concrete wall, thrown into the existing cracks in the earth, was not beautiful.  It was awful.  It was sloppy.  It wasn’t level.  It looked like a Kindergartener had put it together with no tools but their fingers.

It had a sharp ninety-degree angle to it.  It was a wall that sent a message.  Cut this corner at your own risk.  The next day, they added some yellow spray paint to one end because apparently they weren’t monsters—they didn’t want the garbage truck, or any other vehicle to hit it, they just wanted the wall as a warning.

I couldn’t help but think about the differences in their approach and my approach to the same problem.

And that made me think about today’s reading from Ezekiel.  Specifically, Ezekiel 11:19 which reads, “I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.” 

It’s one of those poetic verses that I feel comfortable taking on its own without context.

Because I believe building a concrete wall is a “heart of stone” approach, while planting seed and other living things is a “heart of flesh” approach.

And let me explain why with as little judgement against my neighbor down the block as possible.

My neighbor built a concrete wall hoping that the garbage truck driver would value the property he, himself, is responsible for—namely his truck.  My neighbor is appealing to the driver’s self-centeredness.  He is assuming the driver may not care about others, but will care about himself.

I planted grass and a boxwood.  The garbage truck driver is not responsible for what I have planted.  He has no stake in my plant-life.  I am appealing to his empathy.  I am praying that he sees something beautiful and decides to do what he can NOT to kill it.  I am hoping he is looking outside of himself and sees value in things that don’t belong to him.

Now let’s be realistic here.  If you ran this experiment a hundred times, I am guessing the concrete wall keeps the garbage truck driver away from my neighbor’s property every time.

Whereas in my situation, I am guessing, you might see a 50% success rate.

So why not build the concrete wall?

Because having a “heart of flesh” means sowing love into the world even if it makes us vulnerable in the process. 

Because walls send one message and living things send another.

Love begets love.

And life begets life.

And walls do nothing but divide.

No living thing will grow where the wall is.

Having a “heart of flesh” is not supposed to be easy.  As I said, having a “heart of flesh” makes us vulnerable.  It is unconditional love in its purest form.

You will be called naïve.  People will listen to your story and roll their eyes and shake their heads.  People will pity you.

And you will sometimes wonder if they are right.

A few days ago, out on my walk, I discovered one of the brand-new picture books I had placed in the Little Free Library on the sidewalk, around the block from my house.  There were ripped pages littering the ground.  The book looked like it had been attacked.  I found the cover in someone’s yard further up the street.

It was heartbreaking to me because picture books are not cheap, they are luxury books for anyone, but with their art and their poetry, I think they are the most valuable books, regardless of monetary value. 

I picked up the book and cover and carried it with me on my walk.

When I got home, I set it outside on my patio table and then went to think about things for a bit.

The book was not salvageable.  It wound up in the trash.

It was disappointing to see a book treated that way, but that won’t stop me from putting books in the Little Free Library.  It won’t stop me from investing in my neighborhood.  It won’t stop me from sowing love—from sowing unconditional love.

It takes a lot of spiritual fortitude to have a “heart of flesh,” but love cannot grow in a “heart of stone.”

In the meantime, I have more plans for that alley corner and the strip of grass that one might generously call a side yard that runs the length of my house on that alley, plans for life and for beauty.

Amen.