Sit and Eat

Earth's Dirt, God's Breath

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, August 29, 2010.  The text is Genesis 2:4-17.  Read it here.  For more context on the passage, go to the St. Lydia's blog. 

Sometimes Christians like to talk about this story as if humanity was the result of one big mistake.  God made this great world with this beautiful garden and only gave us ONE RULE to follow, and what did we do?

We broke it. 

That’s right. 

 

And everything that’s bad or evil in world extends from our inability to follow the rules.

I think, though, reading this story, we can find something quite different.

 

 

I imagine God squatting down close to the earth and scooping together a little pile of damp dirt and kind of patting it and forming it into something that God sort of likes.  And then bending down and taking a big breath, and breathing life into this mud creature.  I can see the lungs suddenly rise as the air enters them.  The creature is animated by God: given life and soul.

 

From the very beginning humanity is constructed as fragile, fallible, nothing perfect.  Just a clay figure, made with hands.  And into that clay, God breathes life.

 

 

What does this say about who humans are?

 

 

It says that we’re fundamentally tied to the earth, made from the earth.  But we’re also stretched between two realms, because as much as we’re tied to the earth, we’re also tied to God through God’s breath.

We’re part dirt and part breath.

We’re both earthly and of God.

We’re a melding of two impulses that are both fundamentally good, but also fundamentally different.  There’s tension and dissonance in that, but the tension and dissonance was part of the design from the very beginning.

 

Tension and dissonance is also part of the architecture (or landscape architecture!) of this garden God has planted, for it in, we are told, are two trees.  One is the tree of life, the other, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  And God says that the human, the ‘adam, should not eat from the second one.

 

It’s a little bit like that old rule of playwriting, that if there’s a stage with two doors, and one of the doors hasn’t been used, somebody’s going to come out that second door by the end of the play.  That tree is there for a reason.  It's been planted there with purpose.  Not to tempt humanity into a fatal mistake, but to reprsent the two realms we live between: of life and death.

 

Eating the fruit is part of the architecture of this story.  It tells us that we’re blanced between two poles.  Eden isn’t enough.  Life and death are richer.

 

 

The notion of trees as a source of life and death is not limited to this story.  In the story we tell each week at St. Lydia’s, a single tree encompasses both.  Jesus is hung on a tree, a tree that is the tool of death but the doorway to life.  In the midst of suffering, he hangs between the two.  As God’s children, God’s creatures, we find our whole lives hanging between the two realms: life and death. 

 

We were made that way. 

Made of dirt and breath.

Made of earth and God.

 

 

I’ve often found it painful to look into the eyes of someone I love dearly and see reflected back a mixture of dirt and breath.  I see glimpses of God in that person I love, but I also see all the rest. 

I see someone who is both holy and broken,

perfect and cracked,

God’s child and earth’s ancestor.

 

And all of it, the dirt and the clay and the cracks, is good.

We were brought up from the ground to go back to the ground,

shaped by God’s hands,

enlivened by God’s breath.

This is the stuff of this creation story – just one of the stories that we tell about who we are.

 

 

We share the sermon at St. Lydia’s, and so I invite you to share a story from your experience that was brought up by the text or my words.

On Seasons

I think the seasons are changing.  As a little girl I got a new pair of shoes with each new school year.  We went to the shoe store in my town where the man would put my foot in a silver measure.  He would do both feet just to be sure they were the same size.  I remember a feeling of being attended to as he remarked on how much I had grown.

 

The first Sunday in September St. Lydia’s will mark our one year anniversary.  The year has been one of incredible growth for St. Lydia’s and for me, personally, professionally and emotionally.  I’ve felt a bit like a neatly tended garden, suddenly left to grow wild and rampant for a season.  Vines climbing walls with abandon, flowers blooming recklessly, trees dropping fruit, grasses tangled and overgrown.  It was a year to ignore the voice of fear and the threat of pain, to be undone and exposed.

 

But I think the seasons are changing.  The light is shorter, the shadows longer.  There’s a smell of change in the air.  Wherever the gardener went, he’s on his way back now, and ready to restore order to this garden, clipping and pruning, cutting away what’s unneeded.  With him, safely has returned, but there’s a sense of loss as well.  A sense of exchanging raw, unadulterated growth for a quieter place of imperceptible change.

 

The garden remembers, though.  Even in the dead of winter it remembers a season that came and will come again, of burdened branches releasing the ripe fruit they carry to fall, and roll, and lay untouched amid the grasses.

When God Lets Go

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, August 22.  The text is Genesis 1:25-2:4; read it here.  Click on the link for more information on the book of Genesis and the creation stories. 

 

*

So God created humankind in God’s image, in the image of God they were created; male and female God created them.

 

This weekend I rolled up my sleeping bag and sleeping mat and stuck and few things in a bag and got on a train and made my way up to Vermont, where I met a whole bunch of really wonderful friends from graduate school for a little annual camping weekend we’ve held since our last year in Divinity School.

 

Every year we get together, and every year I marvel at the change that can take place in a year. We’re all getting a little mellower and growing into ourselves a little more.  We’ve

moved in and out of relationships, and the cast of characters has grown to include

new partners, a couple new dogs, and, for the first time this year, a baby named Allie who’s going to be two years old on September 6.

 

This was Allie’s first time camping, and he was a total champ.  He was excited about everything.  He got to toast his first marshmallow, and go swimming in the lake, and sleep in a tent, and sing songs with the grownups.  There were nine of us there camping,  so Allie was the center of a LOT of attention, which he handled pretty much like a professional.

 

Allie’s also a really verbal little guy and he’s been learning words and stringing together sentences like crazy.  It was amazing to watch him learn by imitating the adults around him, and it was amazing to watch the adults all drawn into that process.  Allie would hear us say, “delicious!” when we were eating, and he’d shout out “delicious!” and all nine of us would immediately chorus back, “delicious!”  And then he’d say it again, and then we’d say it again…

 

Children learn primarily through imitation: through mimicking the adults around them,  copying words and then phrases, dipping spoons into bowls, tying shoes, and bigger things too, like expressing emotions or dealing with conflict.  So much of what we learn we absorb, modeling ourselves almost unknowingly after the people around us.

 

Working with choreographers and dancers, I’ve watched them copy one another, mimic one another’s movements, learning, without language, how to move in unison.

 

A good part of the role of a music teacher is simply to play a line well and have the student play it back how you did, the student improving not through explanation,but imitation.

 

We become who we are by modeling ourselves after others, knowingly or unknowingly,   practicing patterns and imitating rhythms that will mold us and shape us.  And in the same way, God molds us and shapes us in God’s image, creating us as reflections, as shadows of God’s self.

 

 

So God created humankind in God’s image…

male and female God created them.

 

 

In this story of creation we are told explicitly that humans are created by God, to be like God, that, just like Allie is a reflection of his mom and dad, we’re reflections of God.  Children of God, whose needs and desires and impulses and bodies are not sinful or errant, but Godly.

 

And just like Allie imitates his mom and dad, picking up words and phrases and ways of being, we have God as our model.

 

So who is God in this story?

If our genesis is divine, with God as our model, how do we pattern our lives after God?

 

In this story, God is a creator and a teacher: a skilled craftsperson who takes humanity on as an apprentice, showing us with time and patience, how to be creators ourselves.  God has made a world that is dynamic, in constant motion, and decided not to retain control over that world, but to give ownership and authority away in a divine collaboration with humanity and creation. 

 

God creates an earth, and asks the earth to bring forth animals.

God creates the sea and asks the sea to bring forth sea creatures.

God creates humanity and says,

It’s not me who will rule over this creation,

it’s you.

I give you authority over the world,

over the plants and the animals.

I’ve made you to be like me,

to create, to care,

to be in relationship with the earth

and in collaboration with one another.

And if you’re attentive, you can learn from me,

learn from the way in which I’ve created.

 

God wants to see what will happen when God lets go.

 

This is a divine pattern of creation and release that we’re imitating here at St. Lydia’s in a multitude of ways.

 

I’ve you’ve been around a few months, you may have noticed that the leadership has shifted from the services being led mostly by Rachel and me, to being led by many of you.  As we grow, Rachel and I are letting go, giving away ownership when the right time comes, sharing the creative process and the authority with the entire community.

 

Or what happens when we sing together?  A leader begins, singing a melody that all of us learn.  Then, as the community learns,  the leader steps back, and allows the community to do the leading.

 

We’re engaged in building something here that’s modeled after God’s creative act in this story.

It’s evolving slowly over time,

it’s made in collaboration with an entire community,

it pulls people together

into relationship with and care for one another.

It’s designed to continue to grow and change,

and it’s designed to continue to flower

as the creators see what happens when they let go,

and the world we’ve made together spins along on its own.

 

 

 

We share the sermon at St. Lydia’s, and so I invite you to share a story from your experience that was brought up by the text or my words.

Fear and the Act of Making

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, August 15.  The text is Genesis 1:1-25.  Read it here.

*

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

My religion teacher in college once told me a story about the night his first son was born.   That night he woke up in a sweat, from a dream he had, that somehow this child of his, this tiny, new baby, had grown up to be a murderer.  Had grown up to an evil and sinister person.  And he went over and looked at this new baby in his crib and thought, I have idea who this person is.

 

The experience of creating, of making something, crafting something,

is primarily an experience of fear.

 

Before all of this, the story tells us,

before people and animals

and fish and birds

and trees and plants and oceans,

before even the sun and the moon and the stars,

before there was a difference between light and darkness,

the earth was a formless void.

 

Tohu wa bohu.

The set of Hebrew words that appear just a few times in the bible, and always in reference to this moment of creation.  They mean, emptiness, nothingness, waste, chaos.

 

There is only this void, and the breath of God, passing over the deep.

 

 

Artists have a reputation for being intense.

I went to college with a bunch of intense artists,

and continue to hang out with some intense artists,

and every so often I even count myself as an intense artist,

if you can count a dinner church as a work of art,

which I think you can.

 

I think the reason artists can be intense, have to be intense, is that they spend a lot of time  staring straight into the face of tohu wa bohu.  Staring into the void, looking straight into the nothing, and wondering what you could possibly hope to draw out of it.

 

To create is an experience of fear:

of the clean, unmarked sheet of paper,

of the blinking cursor,

of the unblemished canvas,

or the infant so perfect and new that you fear

all you’ll be able to do is somehow screw her up.

It’s the fear of the hugeness of all that you hope to express,

and reality of your inability to ever find the words.

 

 

To create is an experience of fear.

 

 

If God experienced the fear we do as we stand on the brink of creation, the text doesn’t tell us.  But the text does speak of darkness, of emptiness, of chaos that existed for a long, lonely time.  And God lived and breathed in the midst of that chaos before ever daring to speak a word.

 

When creation comes, when God finally speaks, the chaos does not disappear, is not vanquished or banished, but instead becomes an active and living part of creation.  God takes the watery darkness and pierces it through with light, then makes a place for it:

the ocean, and the sky.  Eventually, we’ll live between the two, the waters around us and the sky above us, both drawn from the void that was once all there was.

 

Many creation stories from this time period are of cosmic warfare, of Gods who kill chaos monsters, cut them in half and make the world on their remains.  The Hebrew story is different.  It turns out tohu wa bohu, the formless void, is with us for good.

 

It’s the materials we work with and the fodder for our imaginations, its face can keep us up at night or keep us transfixed, wondering what we might pull from its depths if we’re brave enough.

Thanks to Steve Hassett, who's teaching on chaos and artistic practice is woven through this sermon.

Sermon: Deeper and Wider

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, July 18 (right before I went on vacation!).  The text is the story of the road to Emmaus, Luke 24:13-35.  Read it here. 

I wonder if you’ve ever had the experience of returning to your childhood home.  Or a place you loved in a different time in your life.  Everything looks just the same.  But somehow, everything looks completely different.

 

With time, we can see the movement in what seemed to be standing still. 

 

We can see the trees have been growing.  We can see that the porch has been sagging, the paint fading. 

 

 

This weekend, some of the congregants from St. Lydia’ s went on retreat.  And we spent a lot of time with the text we just read: the story of two men on the road from Jerusalem who meet Jesus, and don’t see that it’s him.

 

Every time we read the story, it got deeper.  It opened wider.  We read it through different lenses.  We saw how it resonated with our community, with the experience of walking a labyrinth, with our own experience.  And the text just kept on giving. 

 

I could talk a lot about what we discovered n this story: the rich images and symbols we find in it.  But tonight, I’m drawn to the end. 

The moment where,

after meeting Jesus on the road,

after he opens the scriptures to them,

after their hearts burn with longing,

after they sit down at the table and break bread,

and after that startling moment of recognition,

of seeing him,

after he vanishes,

 

they go home.

 

 

They go home,

and everything is different,

but everything’s just the same.

 

 

I’ve spoken before of the time I spend living in the Netherlands.  After about three years after leaving the country and moving home, I went back for a visit.  And I landed at the airport I remembered so well, and got of at the train station where I used to get off, and biked through the streets, and it was almost as if I was riding next to this girl who existed three years ago.  A version of myself who was entirely familiar, but also entirely changed. 

 

I had grown deeper, opened wider.

 

I could see the movement in what seemed to be standing still.

 

 

For our retreat this weekend, we met at the clock at Grand Central.  After we got off the train at the end of the weekend, that’s where we said goodbye.  We were the same people with the same luggage, maybe a little more rumpled and a little more sleep deprived, but something else was different too. 

 

We had grown deeper.  Our hearts had expanded wider.

 

 

The two disciples in our story do what all of us do when we go home.  They tell stories of what happened on their journey. 

They tell stories of how, as they walked and talked, God came and walked with them. 

And how, as they read scripture, God opened their eyes, opened their hearts. 

And of how, as they broke bread together, God was revealed, unveiled, and then gone,

as quickly as she had come.

 

These are the stories we tell every week at St. Lydia’s.  And every week we come back to this place, and break this loaf of bread, we know that what seems to be standing still is really in motion.  Because God is making us deeper and wider, even when we can’t feel it at all.

 

Sometimes it takes wandering away and coming back to the same place to know we’ve been transformed.

 

 

The word conversion means “to turn.”

Stand in the center of Grand Central Station as the rush of humanity speeds recklessly toward whatever destination they’ve laid out for themselves. 

Stand in the center and watch the hands of the clock turn, slowly and steadily.

Just as slowly and steadily, God is converting you. 

Turning you.

Moving you,

drawing you deeper,

pulling you wider.

 

 

We share the sermons at St. Lydia’s, and so I ask you to share a story from your experience that’s been brought up by the text or my words.  

On Choices or the Lack Thereof

One of the most frustrating things about God is that, there's this strange way in which you don't get to choose.  This makes me angry.  And over the last six months or so, I've been pretty annoyed about it.  Mad at God in a "you can't make me" sort of a way.

I've spent a good deal of my life preparing, unknowingly, for a role I claimed I would never step into.  I was so completely sure all through Divinity School that I would never be ordained, all the while unwittingly and quite specifically preparing myself for the work I'm doing at St. Lydia's.  It's been a bit like that moment at the end of a murder mystery, when suddenly a the pieces come together and the truth is revealed.  There is a sense of incredible joy at finally discovering what I'm being asked to do, and actually doing it.  There is also a sense of unnerving finality.  This is where I've been heading all along, without even knowing it, and now it's time to really set to work.  I can fight it as much as I want: this is what God has set out for me, and I don't really get to choose.

I've been speaking with a friend who's also in the process to be ordained about the particular difficulty of the life that's been set before us.  It's a life that's all about being at the hub of a community.  But as the person in the center, you are also set apart in a very particular way, separate.  I'm discovering that it can be enormously isolating, and there are moments when I'm so frustrated with God for putting me here.  I didn't ask for it, and it's not easy.  At the same time, I'm realizing that finally plunging in means a life that is challenging and fulfilling in a way that is more rich than I could have ever imagined. 

I suppose I share all of this because I believe so wholeheartedly in its universality.  I think we all have a compass located somewhere in our gut pointing us toward something God's got in mind for us.  Following it means giving up control over where we end up, and even how we end up there.  The whole venture can be pretty daunting, I think because it means acknowledging the incredible potential that exists in each of us.  Recognizing the bigness of what God's asking of us is overwhelming, seems too much.  But the thing about a compass is, if you follow it, you'll end up in the right place.