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. 

Do Not Worry

A few weeks ago, I put out a mixture of grass seed and straw and fertilizer, primarily along the strip of my property that borders the alleyway.  That particular strip had been just dirt, stones and a few weeds and so the garbagemen saw no problem with driving their truck over it each week, slowly eroding my already tiny lot.  So, most of the grass seed went there, and it is, somewhat shockingly, thriving considering how little it has to work with.

But I also scattered some seed and straw over a bare patch in the front yard.  Most of the yard is spotty, but this bare patch was quite large, so I thought, let’s give it a go and see what happens.

The good news is the grass that has grown there is lush and beautiful, the type of grass you want to run your fingers through, the type of grass you used to play in when you were a kid, the type of grass that made you unafraid to roll down the hill in it.  This new grass is so new and so amazing looking that the other day when I mowed it for the first time and left wheel marks, I went out right after and fluffed up the grass that had been squashed.  I am babying that baby grass.  I don’t water it with a hose; I use a watering can.  I am gentle.

The bad news about that new grass is that it makes the rest of the yard look horrible in comparison.

The rest of the yard is filled with what I call “spite” grass, that’s grass that grows out of spite and meanness.  It’s moody teenager grass.  It doesn’t want to share space with the rocks and scabby dirt.    It has always been jealous of the greener grass on the other side of the fence.  It is definitely jealous of the new plush patch of grass that has sprung up in the middle of it—the grass that I water and protect with straw and speak kind words of encouragement to.  The spite grass doesn’t want to be in my yard at all, but since it has no choice, it might as well grow—a little.

If you stand in my yard and listen, that’s not the wind you hear, it’s all that spite grass sighing bitterly over its life.

Every day, it seems that God gives me something to do outside in the yard.  It’s a challenge to find something for me to do that won’t leave me bedridden in pain.  But God gives me little things.  Water the grass.  One watering can a day.  Fill it only half full.  Spread it out evenly over the seedlings. 

Tomorrow my task will be to blow the shells, the ghosts of their former selves, that the cicadas have left behind on the back patio.  I wish I could complain about the cicadas—I don’t mind them but my physical therapist is getting married next week and has an outdoor wedding she is terrified will be overcome by cicadas. 

I want to share with her verses from today’s reading in Luke 12:22-24 where Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!”

I want to tell her not to worry about the cicadas.  God takes care of the birds and, in least in my neighborhood, that means about 10,000 birds have descended upon us to eat the cicadas.  Don’t worry about the cicadas.  Worry about the birds and nasty things they let drop from the sky.

I’m guessing she would find that neither comforting nor amusing, and it’s best not to upset the woman who’s sticking needles in your back.

What I have always found interesting about these verses from Luke is that we, as human beings, are clearly wired to worry because nothing has changed in two thousand years. 

No matter how the day goes, at some point during the day we will find ourselves ruminating on something.  We will find something to puzzle on, something to chew on, worry about, get our stomachs all fluttery.  We will dig canyons of worry-lines across our foreheads.  And honestly, the biggest problem I have is that I worry about everything, equally. 

I have no ability to discern what is important in life—we are told by society that everything is important—everything is breaking news even though it happened yesterday and no one died and everyone is fine. 

I read a meme once that said, “I wish someone would explain to my body that the fight or flight response is only for life-or-death situations.”

And here is Jesus in Luke, speaking to us directly from across the millennia, saying, “Don’t worry about life, what you eat or what you wear—God’s got it.”

And then God will point me to the hedge clippers and say, “That honeysuckle needs to be cut back.”

And I’ll sigh—trying not to sound bitter like that scraggly spite grass out front—but I’ll sigh because I will cut that honeysuckle back like a foot and that will be all I can manage and tomorrow it will have seemingly grown back a foot and then some and now its tendrils are curling around the vinyl siding on the house. 

But when I finish with the honeysuckle, God will say, “How do you feel?  Still worried?”

And I’ll have to think about it.  “Give me a minute,” I’ll say, “I’m sure I can think of something.”

And God will point out back to the weed-like tree that’s three feet tall, and he’ll say, “That died over the winter.”

I will sigh again because I had noticed that it looked dead-ish—it certainly hadn’t sprung to life like the honeysuckle that was now crashing over it like a wave.

God will again point to the dead weed.  “You can probably just break it off.  You won’t even need that saw you bought on Amazon and haven’t used.”

I think this is why we are told to pray without ceasing because God knows if we’re in constant conversation with Him, we won’t have time to worry.  God knows when we are in constant conversation with Him, our faith is enriched.  We are like that new patch of grass in my front yard.  We thrive when we are shown attention and love.  We improve mentally, physically and spiritually.  The more time we spend with God, the more our own spirit grows, the more our souls settle, curling up to God as if we were a child, His child, and He was about to read us the most perfect, breathtaking and wonderful story.

It's our story, He’s reading to us by the way.

In the meantime, I take care of the tiny bit of earth that God has seen fit to name me caretaker of, that means the new grass, but also the weeds and the rocks and, yes, the spite grass.  They need love too.

We all do.

Amen.

Lessons From the Cicada

The other morning, I was out for my walk when I noticed something strange on my neighbor’s chain-link fence.

I’m used to seeing various vines and flowers growing through the fence, but on this particular morning, there was something new.

Dozens of molting cicadas.

The cicadas have been on the news lately because of a certain brood that is hatching this year.  I’m actually used to cicadas, having lived 25 years in Florida.  The hum of the cicada is Florida’s soundtrack, always playing in the background.

Florida cicadas also seem a lot larger than these in Ohio, but I have never seen so many cicadas appearing all at once, and I was entranced by the molting cicadas perched on the fence.

The newly hatched winged cicada was pale, like a ghost, clutching at its former shell.  The cicada was naked and vulnerable and all I could say as I leaned in closer—not too close—was, “You are beautiful in a very gross way.”

When we talk about ourselves, about the various changes we all undergo in our lives, we frequently use the metamorphosis of the butterfly as a metaphor for transformation.  And it’s a very good metaphor, cute little caterpillar devolving into a little cocooned glop of goo before finally emerging this glorious, winged creation.

I mean, who among us can’t identify with the glop of goo stage.

But the cicada, especially these periodical cicadas, deserve so much respect when it comes to transformation.  Because we only see them as nymphs, emerging from the ground and then molting.  What we don’t see is the 13-17 years they have spent underground in darkness before emerging into the light of day.

You have to respect that level of commitment to change.

Change does not happen overnight.

Sometimes change, transformation, metamorphosis takes decades.

When I take my walks each morning, these last few weeks of spring, I am often left amazed at the beauty of emerging life.

A week and a half ago, I spread grass seed and straw, and the grass is now starting to appear, as fine as baby’s hair, as fragile as a whisper.

On my porch, the house finch has settled down for what I presume is egg-sitting and not just her being lazy.  Although, she worked hard to build that nest and deserves a time to just chill.

Over the course of the spring this year, I have seen flowers bloom and then fade.  Blink and you miss the crocus and will have to wait a whole year to see it again.  The peonies, with blooms so robust, you feel like you can dive into them—the peonies are already wilting.  And the irises grow too heavy in the rain and collapse to the ground.

In Florida, with no seasons but wet and dry, most everything living, lasts forever.

But in more northern states, with seasons, you learn to appreciate the fleeting nature of life.  You never mourn what is lost, because you acknowledge its presence and its beauty at the time, and you know that it will return and, in the meantime, something else fantastic and amazing is just around the corner.

This is how we must embrace all change in our lives.

With confidence and faith that while the old ways fade away, God always replaces things with something new and dare I say even more amazing.  We may not know what is coming.  But with enough faith, we can become what author, Leonard Sweet called, “pneumonauts”—otherwise known as sailors of the Spirit.

In today’s reading from Luke 8:16-25, we really get enough material for three sermons.  In the first part, there’s the whole bit about not hiding a lit lamp under a jar—hint it’s a metaphor.  In the second part, we see Jesus’s mother and brothers looking for Him, and He is somewhat dismissive of them—that would be a whole other sermon and then you have the part I want to focus on which is the account of Jesus sleeping on the boat during a storm while the water is swamping the boat.

The disciples panic, because of course they do.  They call out to Jesus.  Jesus wakes up, rebukes the wind and waves and there is calm.  What I love about this is that the wind and waves are raging in the storm.  They are violent and deadly things, but when Jesus speaks, they listen.  Meanwhile, Jesus asks the disciples where their faith is.  Have they been listening?

This life and all the changes it has brought us and is bringing us and will continue to bring us is best survived by sailing with the Holy Spirit, riding the Holy Winds and knowing—not believing, but knowing—that God has us and the ride is going to be something amazing.

The world’s tiniest boxwood I planted a few weeks ago is still living.

And last week, the grass seed and straw seemed to physically repel the garbage truck as it made its way down the alley.  It didn’t even come close.  We’ll see what happens today, but I do believe that love multiplies—that that straw and seed shows that someone cares about that ground and maybe the garbagemen should too.

I believe that positive changes come when the seeds of love are sown.

Just yesterday, I was grabbing a package off the front porch, when the little girl who knocks always asking for books, started riding a bike past my house, but stopped suddenly when she saw me.  She dropped the bike—which was too big for her, and as I would learn a few minutes later, not hers—but she dropped the bike and said to me, “Oh hi.  I have some books for you at my house.”

“You have some books for me?” I said to her.

She nodded.  “If you want them.”

“Well, bring them over and let’s take a look at them.”

She ran off and returned a couple of minutes later with an armful of books.  She put them down on my bistro table and the first thing I did was ask her which were her favorites.  She pointed out her favorites and I said, “Are you sure you don’t want to hold onto those?”

She thought for a moment and then finally she managed to split the pile into two, books that she would donate to the little free library, which she did that very minute, carefully tucking them inside and the rest of the books that she would take back home.

I cannot stress enough what a beautiful thing it was that she did.

I have always made the books in my library completely free with no expectations.

For her to decide on her own to contribute back to the library—that my friends is the Holy Spirit at work. 

And the Holy Spirit always brings with her new life.

Amen.

 

Let Me Sow Love

My cat Pippin is an excellent spider catcher.  He will chase after a spider a millimeter wide … across the kitchen floor … in complete darkness.

Recently, though, I noticed that a spider, a medium-size spider about an inch wide—and if you’re thinking that sounds like a large spider, let me just warn you it’s all about perspective—but this particular spider was hanging out under my bathroom cabinets, just in front of the toe kick, and she was fast, too fast for Pippin—too fast for me even.

I had resigned myself to having to live with this spider and hope it didn’t have babies.

But then last week, it disappeared.  I thought maybe Pippin had finally caught it or chased it out.

Finally, though, my bathroom was spider-free.

And then Monday night, I noticed something under the bathroom cabinets.  It was large and brown and about the size of a small mouse—only it wasn’t a mouse; I would have preferred a mouse—it was the largest spider I have seen since moving back to Ohio.  And it was busy eating something—I don’t know what, but perhaps we know what happened to the previous spider.

I didn’t waste any time—I killed that sucker.   I squeezed it tight in a paper towel and then I unrolled about half a roll of paper towels and wrapped the dead spider in all of that, and then I put it in a Ziploc bag and then I threw it away in the kitchen garbage.

And then, I confronted Pippin.

“Where have you been?  How did you miss that spider?  How did it even get in here without you seeing it?”

And Pippin looked at me as if to say, “You mean that tarantula in the bathroom?  I don’t do those.”

I have a complicated relationship with the natural world.  Anyone who knows me knows how much I love nature photography, how contemplative photography in the natural world has made some dark days more than just bearable—the natural world has reminded me how to breathe, not just to breathe—but how to breathe.

And so some days ago, a friend of mine sent me pictures of the redwoods and the ocean from a trip she was on.  And recently, a Florida friend, sent me pictures of Sandhill Cranes and their baby.  That particular friend actually made her husband turn the car around so she could go back and get those pictures just for me.

But as much as I love the natural world, I don’t want it crawling through my bathroom in the middle of the night.  Even when I’m outside, I don’t even want to touch nature.  My primary camera has a long enough lens to see the rings of Saturn, literally. 

Lately, though, I have been trying new things.  Last week, I told you I had planted the world’s tiniest boxwood—after two weeks, I can tell you it’s still living.  And last weekend, I spread grass seed and straw over barren patches in my yard.  Before I spread the seed, I first tilled the soil, which mostly involved excavating what little dirt there was and bringing it to the surface above all the rocks.

As I was doing this, I chuckled to myself, thinking that in that moment, I was a living, breathing, walking incarnation of Jesus’s Parable of the Sower.

There are four parts to the Parable of the Sower if you remember.  First the farmer goes to sow his seeds, but drops some on the path where the seeds are quickly eaten by the birds.  Some seeds fall on rocky ground.  The seeds sprout quickly but with little soil the roots are not deep, and the plants wither in the sun.  Still other seeds fall among the thorns and the plants are later choked by the thorns.

And then, of course, some seed falls on good soil and produces a good crop.

Like many parables, Jesus then has to explain to His disciples what He’s talking about in Matthew 13:19-23 saying, “When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This is the seed sown along the path. The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

Here's what’s interesting to me—if this parable was only about the seed, wouldn’t it be called the Parable of the Seed?  Or if it were only about the soil in which the seed is thrown, wouldn’t it be called the Parable of the Soil or the Parable of the Seed and Soil?

But no, it’s called the Parable of the Sower because it is about the power and agency the sower has in spreading the Word of God.  We are the sower. 

If we tell someone we are Christian and then we behave in horrible and ghastly ways, the Word of God cannot grow and spread and take root in healthy ways.

We are the sower and we must prepare the land to take the seed.  To sow the Word of God is to sow love.  Today’s reading from Luke 6:27-38 is all about love.  Loving when it is hard to love.  Doing good.  Showing mercy.  These things create the perfect environment for the Word of God to take root and grow. 

I love my little house and the little plot of land it is built on.  In a neighborhood that is sometimes filled with the sound of gunfire, I have committed myself to sowing love.  And sometimes that is as simple as picking up the trash from the yard.  It is planting the world’s tiniest boxwood.  It is scattering literal seed on literally rocky ground with the hope that the figurative seed of God’s word will take root.  It is speaking to the house finch once again nesting on my front porch and speaking softly to her and encouraging her.  It is answering the door to the children who knock and giving them books to read.

We must sow love.  It’s the prayer of St. Francis, right? 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

 

Amen.

 

 

 

What's In Your Anxiety Toolbox?

A couple of weeks ago, Kristi Noem, the Secretary for Homeland Security, had her purse stolen while she was out eating with friends and family.

Like many people, when I first heard the news, I immediately had questions.

My first question was where was Kristi Noem’s Secret Service detail?  Letting someone close enough to steal a purse seems like a major failure.

My second question was the same as many people’s.  Why was she carrying $3000 in cash?  Who carries cash these days anyway?  The other day when the little girls rang the doorbell trying to sell me a flower they had plucked from the neighbor’s yard for a dollar, I had to search for four quarters to give them.

But perhaps even more bizarre than the $3000 in cash was that she was carrying around blank checks.  Kristi Noem is a few years older than me, but she and I are both considered Generation X and she is giving our generation a horrible name by not only carrying around cash, but also checks.

All of this, though, got me thinking about what I carry in my bag.  For the record, I don’t carry a purse or own a purse.  My grandmother used to have a purse to match every pair of shoes she had.  I consider myself low maintenance.  So I have an LL Bean backpack that I generally only carry to Morning Prayer.  It holds my Book of Common Prayer, printed copies of my reflection and the Bible readings for today and also my prayer journal.

But in the pockets, I also carry some “in case of emergency items” including hand sanitizer, cough drops, Advil, a Super Mario handheld game, and of course, a book.

And I swear to you that I didn’t plant this book in my bag just for this reflection.  I try and always have a book with me just in case I get stuck somewhere for a while and I make the book pocket size so I can carry it in my pocket if need be.

So what’s the book in my bag?

“The WORST-CASE SCENARIO Little Book for Survival.”

This series of books came out more than twenty years ago and they were written to be dry and humorous but also somehow dead serious at the same time.

The topics covered in this particular book include “How to Escape from a Bear,” and “How to Survive an Avalanche” and “How to Deliver a Baby in a Taxicab.”

What made these books so funny is the simple fact that most of us will never be in these situations.  I don’t carry around the book because I think I might have to deliver a baby in an Uber, I carry it for entertainment.

And for nostalgia reasons, wasn’t it nice, twenty-thirty years ago, when we didn’t live in a constant state of anxiety, bombarded by news 24/7 telling us that everything … everything was a worst-case scenario. 

A few weeks ago, I said that everyone these days is an overstimulated cat with nothing or no one to bite to make it stop.

I told my dad last week that I’d be lying if I said the recent shooting near my house and the incident with the man who came to my door and wouldn’t leave weren’t starting to get to me.  I’m tense.  Every time I hear the slightest sound from out front of the house, I pull out my phone and quickly check the Ring doorbell camera—which is why last night I caught something seemingly so scary, I swear I held my breath, and my heart stopped beating for a few seconds.

A car pulled up and stopped in the alley by my house.  A man got out, a white man with a scraggly beard.  He pulled a long wood pole/stick out of the back of his car and began to walk across my front yard to my door.  He was walking with a purpose and for a moment, I thought that purpose was to swing that stick at my house, to do massive vandalism, to cause pure mayhem.

For what reason would he do that?

Who knows?  The world is a crazy place these days.

But right as he got to the front porch, I remembered something.

I had ordered a rake from Walmart that morning.

He was delivering my rake.

In my defense, Ring doorbell cameras are not high definition.

The world these days is so stressful, every one of us should have a figurative anxiety toolbox that we can reach into, as needed, to pull out specific tools to deal with stress in a healthy manner.

For example, my toolbox contains tools like “take a walk” or “snuggle with the cat” or “eat some chocolate (not the whole bar).”  The truth is I have been having to dig deep into the toolbox lately.  A couple of days ago, I remembered “watch an episode of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting” was in my toolbox.  I now go to sleep each night, listening to Bob Ross’s soft, calming voice.

Even Jesus had a toolbox—I think the metaphor would have worked well for the son of a carpenter, but Jesus knew when He was being overstimulated—when He needed a break.  He never pushed through life.

In today’s reading from Luke 4:38-44, we see Jesus very, very busy, healing Simon’s mother-in-law from a fever, healing others with sicknesses and driving out demons and then we read, “At daybreak he departed and went into a deserted place.”

This was Jesus.  Whether He is asleep in a boat during a storm, or going off by Himself to pray, Jesus frequently understands the importance of sleep and rest and time with God the Father in prayer.

Last week, I added a new tool to my toolbox.  I was waiting for the trash to come and the longer I waited, the more apparent it became that, for whatever reason, the trash was not coming.  I was growing more and more anxious, but then I decided to do something I had only ever done one other time in my life.

I decided to plant something.

I had bought the world’s tiniest boxwood to plant out by my Little Free Library with the hope that the world’s tiniest boxwood would grow into something that could keep the garbage truck from continuing to run over my front yard.

The ground should have been soft from all the rain, but I only made it about three inches down before I hit rock and tree roots.  The area where my house had been built used to be a vacant lot and before that another house had stood there before being torn down.  The old house and the old trees that once lived there are not completely gone if you dig just a little bit.

Three inches would have to be enough for the world’s tiniest boxwood.  I gathered loose dirt around it and scattered some mulch to blanket it—I tucked in the world’s tiniest boxwood, hoping I had not dug it a shallow grave, but instead was giving it time to grow and dig its roots in.  I looked around and found large flat rocks to place around the plant and then I said a prayer, hoping that the world’s tiniest boxwood would live.

The answer to the world we live in these days, this soul-crushing, soul-sucking, soul-curdling world, I think is life.  It’s green things and forest bathing (as the Japanese call it).  It’s time spent breathing in the natural world.  It’s being surrounded by things that are raw and real.  And planting, gardening is something that brings us even closer to God the Creator.  The story of the human species begins in a garden after all. 

Incidentally, the garbage truck didn’t come that day.  I had to file a service request and make a phone call and then wait obsessively over the next 48 hours to see if my garbage bin would be emptied.  It was, finally, Friday morning.

In the meantime, the world’s tiniest boxwood continues to live and I will be using my new garden rake to help till the soil a bit around the boxwood, to lay out straw filled with fertilizer and seed to help the area by the alleyway to put down roots, to become something more than mud that gets washed away and instead become something with its own purpose, to help the grass grow—quite frankly to help anything grow at this point.  I will take even weeds.

So, think today, about what’s in your anxiety toolbox.  Is there anything in there that brings you closer to God, that gives you real purpose and hope in a crazy world?

Amen.