Sit and Eat

Learning to Pray: Faith and Belief

I'm making my way through Harvey Cox's latest book, "The Future of Faith" at the moment.  He uses this story to begin a conversation about the difference between faith and belief, which he believes to be a hallmark of the religious age we're carving out:

"The Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno (1864-1936) dramatizes the radical dissimilarity of faith and belief in his short story "Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr," in which a young man returns from the city to his native village in Spain because his mother is dying.  In the presence of the local priest she clutches his hand and asks him to pray for her.  The son does not answer, but as they leave the room, he tells the priest that, much as he would like to, he cannot pray for him mother because he does not believe in God.  "That's nonsense," the priest replies.  "You don't have to believe in God to pray."
"The priest in Unamuno's story recognized the distinction between faith and belief.  He know that prayer, like faith, is more primordial than belief."

We believe with our heads.  Faith lives in our gut.  Whether we feel God to be present or absent, we can always return to ritual: to breaking bread, sitting quiet and still, retreating into the rhythm of our breath, singing one phrase, and then the next.  The practice leads.  Everything else follows. 

Sermon: Partial Pentecost

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 23 as we celebrated Pentecost at St. Lydia's.  The text is Acts 2:1-13.  Read it here.

 

The bible is full of theophanies.  It’s a Greek word for a moment when God is shown, made visible:

 

Moses stands in front of the burning bush.

Mt. Sinai is wrapped in a thick cloud with thunder and lightning.

Isaiah speaks of God “coming in fire, in chariots like the whirlwind.”

These are theophanies.

 

It seems like whenever God shows up, it’s with a lot of show, and often a lot of sparks and flame and fire.  The face of God is terrifying, but filled with wonder, and ecstasy.

 

Pentecost is about difference, and about unity.  It’s also about communication: about speaking, and hearing and listening.  I’m going to tell you a story that’s about all of these things.

 

When I was living in New Haven, I worked for a summer as a community organizer.  We worked with neighborhood groups to plant street trees and reclaim abandoned lots and turn them into parks.  A lot of what I learned that summer is employed at St. Lydia’s: that people care about things more if they put work into them.

 

As a Yale student, that summer was about being keenly aware of difference.  I was working in the poorest neighborhoods and projects in the city and I looked different, spoke differently, and acted differently from everyone I was working with.

 

To my surprise, the neighbors weren’t always that concerned with how different I was (they were used to Yale students) but with the difference among the neighbors.  The homeowners resented the renters and the Italians didn’t like the African Americans, and the old people didn’t like the young people.

 

I spent my days trying to translate.  Trying to figure out how to change and manipulate my language to get across a message about how, if we planted more trees, fewer windows would be broken, and cars would slow down, and the neighborhood would improve.  Trying to figure out how to talk about planting and changing the neighborhood together, as a community, renters and homeowners and Italians and African Americans, even though everybody was suspicious of one another, and I was a complete outsider.  It felt like the most naïve message in the world, and I often felt really distanced from the people I was working with, as if there was nothing that held us together.

 

One of the neighbors that I worked with lived near a busy road with a steep hill covered in litter and plants overgrowing the sidewalks.  He worked in the landscaping business by trade, so it was pretty hard to convince him that we should invite everyone in the neighborhood to come help clean up the area.

 

“It will be faster if I just get a chain saw and a weed whacker and take care of it,” he told me.”  “But, it will bring the neighborhood together if we all work on the project,” I would say, “and then people will be less likely to litter!”  He looked at me like I was crazy, but dutifully helped me pass out fliers.

 

Despite his aversion to community organizing, he was the only neighbor I ever worked with who invited me to eat with him.  He and his wife insisted that I come early to every planting session and share dinner.  His daughter took a shine to me, and she would always want to show me her room (which was very frilly and very pink) and afterward I’d come downstairs and they’d give me a burger from the grill and we’d sit on the couch with TV trays and he would say very formally, “Emily, you are our guest.  So what would you like to watch on television?”

 

This was a moment of difference, and of unity.

 

I felt more welcomed, more included in this house than I had in anyone’s home the entire summer.  At the same time, there was this distance, like a gulf between my experience and the experience of this very dear, very lovely family.  I still felt like I was translating, using words that weren’t my own.  But I also felt that I had been able to hear the incredible generosity and hospitality that was behind this man welcoming me into his home, even though the language he used was one that I didn’t speak.

 

It was a partial Pentecost.  A communication that hinted at a deep well of shared humanity.

 

When God moves in wind and fire on Pentecost, enters the heart of everyone present, God burns away translation.  And in its place, inspired by the flames of God’s spirit, is pure listening, pure hearing.  Each person speaks the language of another, and rather than having to translate, is understood.  Is heard.

 

The neighbor in New Haven spoke in a language that I needed to translate.  He offered me burgers and the remote control to his television as a way of communicating,  “Look, we are the same.  We can share this.”

 

And I accepted his burgers and the remote control and sat silently and awkwardly watching television with his family because I knew that, despite our different native languages, he was right.  We were the same, both God’s children, and there was plenty for us to share, despite the fumbling method of our communication.

 

A partial Pentecost.

 

 

We come to this table each week hoping for Pentecost.

We translate, yes.  We’ll always have some of that.

But we also make space for Pentecostal moments. 

Moments when we reach past translation: to hearing and understanding what we hold in common: that deep well of humanity.

 

What God did on Pentecost through wind and fire, we invite into this gathering of souls, whoever shows up, praying that God’s Spirit might ignite in us, flare up in us, push us beyond difference to the place where suddenly we can see that we are the same, our common humanity transgressing the differences of its expression.

 

There’s a spark of the divine in each of us.

An ember glowing with the heart of God in each of us.

The gulf that we look across, that divides us from one another is real:

difference is real, and needed, and good.

But the spark of humanity we share is stronger,

more important,

more true.

And there are rare moments, Pentecostal moments, when we feel it in our bones,

as God’s refining fire does its work in us.

 

 

We finish the sermon together at St. Lydia’s.  Please share a story from your experience that was brought up by the text or my words.

On Feasting and Fressing

Thank you to my friend Dale for sending along these quotes from this week's New Yorker (May 24) from an article called "What Did Jesus Do?: Reading and Unreading the Gospels," by Adam Gopnik.  The article is a critical review of several recent works by various authors regarding the "historic" Jesus.  The links to what we're up to at St. Lydia's are wonderful!

"The sharpest opposition in the Gospels...is between John the Faster and Jesus the Feaster. Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine.

"The table is his altar in every sense. Crossan...makes a persuasive case that Jesus' fressing* was perhaps the most radical element in his life--that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on "commensality," would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal alliances, which would have shocked most Jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim, is 'What goes into a man's mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean." Jesus isn't a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn't an ascetic, either: he feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He's interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves." pp. 74-75

*from the Yiddish, to eat a lot, and without restraint

On Tradition and Oceans

The word “tradition” gets thrown around a lot, especially among folks like me who hang out at church.  Sometimes people like to talk about “traditional” versus “contemporary” worship, or “traditional” versus “emergent” or “creative” worship. 

 

The words can function as helpful shorthand, but they also create dichotomies.  "Traditional” is a tricky word.  Sometimes when we say “traditional,” what we really mean is “it looks like what I’m used to.”  Every once in a while, someone will talk about what we do at St. Lydia’s as “non traditional” worship, and I’ll note that our rituals are rooted in the earliest traditions of the church.  What we’re doing may not look like Sunday morning in most of the United States, but it’s a practice that dates back to the second century.  It’s really traditional. 

 

On top of our traditions around worship, there are also traditions around church culture: how we make decisions, how we organize ourselves, how we’re structured.  There are vestries and councils and conferences and pastors and rectors and elders and deacons and all the different ways we’ve come up with to be church, to function as a body.  This too is part of “The Tradition,” and sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s weighty.

 

A new-ish congregant and I were discussing all of this over a beer in an outdoor café near Grand Central last night, and came up with a bit of imagery that I found helpful.  I’m invested in St. Lydia’s doing something new while being in a deep and sustaining relationship with the larger church, and I think these images can help us think about that.

 

Tradition is not a ball and chain that we’re trying to loose ourselves of.

It is not a trap that we’re stuck in

or garbage that we’re trying to throw away.

 

Tradition is not a net that’s pinning us down,

or a weight that’s holding us back.

It’s also not necessarily a foundation that we’ve decided to build on.

 

It’s not an object that we’re here to replicate.

We’re not building a factory where tradition will be produced or fabricated.

It’s not an heirloom we’d like to pass down to a future generation.  

 

Rather, tradition is an ocean we are floating in.

We are held up by it, and informed by it,

effected by its nature and character,

drawn into its tides and currents.

Our job is to be buoyant,

to allow ourselves to float weightlessly in a vast sea of heritage.

Sermon: Enough

I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, May 16 as part of our exploration of the Psalms.  The text is Psalm 131.  Read it here.

 

 

I was agitated all week.  I felt jittery and not quite myself, and like I couldn’t really focus on anything properly.

 

One of the big things happening this week, which sort of feels like it shouldn’t be a big thing, but really sort of is, is that I submitted my profile and had my picture taken to be in the Time Out New York singles issue which is coming out in a few weeks.

 

It’s something that really should be sort of fun and silly, and it has been, but it’s also been strangely unnerving.  I feel really exposed already, and the magazine isn’t even out. 

 

The process of putting together my profile was illuminating and had me thinking a lot this week about who I am, who others see me to be, and how I present myself to the world.  And, to be honest, it had me comparing myself to everybody else.  Which I try not to do, but there I was doing it.

 

Something about this process of trying to boil down my character to a few lines and picture, and feeling like there was so much to communicate about who I am and who I’m not, and feeling, as a single woman, that there is a very dominant expectation out there  about who I should be.  An image or perception that I’m constantly being measured against.

 

As a woman, I apparently should be

Smart but not too intellectual,

Sexy but not too slutty,

Innocent but not too virginal,

Put together but not too high maintenance,

Sporty but not too butch,

Successful but not too aggressive…

 

Whether I buy into it or not (and I try not to), it’s still a lot of expectation, and it can get you pretty agitated pretty quickly.

 

Whether you buy into it or not, there’s a whole industry out there, a whole culture out there, based on telling us that we’re somehow not enough, and that a product will fill that ugly hole of our not-enough-ness.

 

The other day Heather and her fiancé Mike and I were chatting about the Singles issue, and about Time Out, and about other New York publications.  We got into talking about the sort of rivalry that exists between Time Out New York and New York Magazine.  Mike said something like, “Time Out is pretty happy just to be who they are, but I feel like New York Magazine sort of wishes it was the New Yorker.”  And I said, “They’re never gonna be the New Yorker…they should just be themselves.  They’re fine how they are.”

 

Then suddenly it struck me that this is excellent (and age old) advice.  Really good advice.  That’s really hard to follow.  Everybody thinks New York Magazine is just fine...except for New York Magazine.  And maybe they’d be a lot happier if they just owned up to who they are.

 

The psalmist writes:

 

Oh Lord, I am not proud;

I have no haughty looks.

I do not occupy myself

With great matters,

That are too hard for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

Like a child upon its mother’s breast.

 

I want you to think for a moment, of the last time you were calm.

 

 

Really calm.

 

 

The last time your soul was quiet, like a child upon its mother’s breast.

 

I don’t know where or when that moment was for you, but for me, it was marked by a sense of wholeness, and completion.  Of being 100% myself, and knowing that it was 100% enough.

 

Like a child, I was warm, and fed,

and loved, and supported,

and I knew with certainty,

that I had no need

and that I was good.

I was enough.

 

We are enough. 

 

To live in light of that realization

is to live with a quiet soul,

to live like a child on its mother’s breast.

 

We are enough.

 

To live in light of that realization

is to allow the din of voices

telling us who we should be

to fade slowly into silence.

 

We are enough.

And we need only concern ourselves

with just today, in front of us.

Tomorrow, we can worry about tomorrow.

 

I am learning to trust God, not to make an idol of all those voices that have something to say about who they think I should be.  I’m learning that every moment has the possibility to be that moment of calm assurance of a quieted soul.  That we are who God made us, and that is enough.

 

 

We finish the sermon together at St. Lydia’s.  Please share a story from your experience that’s been brought up by the text or my words.

Sermon: Keeper of Change

I preached this sermon on May 9 at St. Lydia's as part of our exploration of the Psalms.  The text is Psalm 121; read it here.

 

 

A few weeks ago I heard that two very dear friends, friends who have been together for five very good years, have decided to end their relationship.

 

I’ve known Patrick and Chad since they got together, and I remember the unbound glee that seemed to inhabit Patrick in the very first days of their relationship.  He was completely twitterpated.  We’d be having a planning meeting in the chapel, and he’d be practically dancing around the room with joy.

 

Patrick and Chad have been clear with friends and colleagues that moving into this new phase in their relationship has been the right and good thing to do, and that they’ve made that decision together.  So I think it’s very possible that I’m more traumatized  by the end of their partnership then they are…  For some reason, the wonderfulness of their togetherness, it turns out, was really important to me, and it makes me strangely sad that such a beautiful, solid, lovely thing should come to an end.

 

Psalm 121 uses the word “keep” 6 times:

God is your keeper.

The word in Hebrew is shamar, and it’s connected to the word for “watchman”

 

God will keep you from all evil.

God will keep your going out and your coming in.

God will keep you life, your soul.

 

There’s this funny thing that happens to me, every time I tell someone that everything’s going to be okay.  It might be a small child, or a troubled friend, but so often those words,  “everything’s going to be okay,” come out of my mouth.  I say them because I believe it. I really do, deep down in my gut.  And as soon as I say it, a voice in my head whispers,

“will it?”

 

People bear pain that should be unbearable.
Humans commit acts of unspeakable evil.

 

Yet there’s this impulse, this faith, deep in me that says, “It will be okay.”  God will keep you.  And I know that somehow it’s true, even through that sense of struggle and resistance.

 

If you had told Patrick and Chad four years ago that in the Spring of 2010, they would make a mutual decision to end their relationship, I’m not sure what they would have said.  But I imagine they wouldn’t have liked that idea very much.  Time can be a terrifying thing and the changes that it brings overwhelming.  But Patrick and Chad, in their love and through their lives are living testimony to the rhythm, the going out and the coming in, that constitute our existence: the tide that bears us along, sometimes gently and sometimes violently, according to the rhythms of the planet.

 

God is the keeper of change.

 

Perhaps my instinct to say, “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be alright,” is less a prediction about what the future holds, and more an assurance that God will watch over what ever it brings.

 

I think of what is was like to be a small child, going to sleep at night.  Most of us had probably had a blanket or a stuffed animal that we kept with us as children.  A security blanket.  As a kid, you know that a toy or a blanket won’t protect you.  But what’s important is that it’s with you.

The world changes, quickly.

Partnerships end. 

Relationships shift and change.

We get through things we never thought we could.

We change, if we let ourselves.

 

Sometimes we go to sleep at the end of the day, exhausted, hoping for a fresh start in the morning, or wondering how we might possibly see a way out of the situation we’re stuck in.  It really is going to be okay.  God may not protect us, won’t keep bad things from happening, but God will be with us.  And God, the keeper of our lives, never slumbers.

A Poem for You

I'm late posting my sermon this week because I'm waiting for permission for two folks who are mentioned in it.  It should be up soon, but to tide you over, here's a lovely little something from Jane Hirshfield.

Three Times My Life Has Opened

Jane Hirshfield

Three times my life has opened.

Once, into darkness and rain.

Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and starts

     to remember each time it enters the act of love.

Once, to the fire that holds all.

These three were not different.

You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.

But outside my window all day a maple has stepped from her leaves

     like a woman in love with winter, dropping the colored silks.

Neither are we different in what we know.

There is a door.  It opens.  Then it is closed.  But a slip of light

     stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,

     or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

There's a funky little community garden on the corner near St. Lydia's.  Sometimes I go there and sit for a while before things get started up.  Sunday it was cold and windy, but I sat there shivering and talking to a friend who I hadn't spoken with in much too long.  Thank goodness for community gardens, for homemade, handmade places maintained, but just barely.

A Poem for You

Rachel found this poem in last week's New Yorker and we read it at Dinner Church.  I've fallen head over heels for it.  Read it aloud and it will pray you.

The Lightkeeper

Carolyn Forche

A night without ships.  Foghorns called into walled cloud, and you

still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,

darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.

Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool

you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:

the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,

there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow-wick lamps,

whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,

the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.

You say to me stay awake, be like the lensmaker who died with his

lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be

their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.

In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,

seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out

for a long time.  Also when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,

and a star appeared, our only heaven.  You taught me to live like this.

That after death it would be as it was before we were born.  Nothing

to be afraid.  Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread

from which it comes.  Go toward the light always, be without ships.

Sermon: 110 Stories Up

I preched this sermon on Sunday, May 2 at St. Lydia's.  The text is Psalm 30; you can read it here.

 

This is a psalm of Thanksgiving: the kind of thanksgiving that comes only after things have gotten really, really bad.  It’s the kind of thanksgiving that comes after staring right into the darkness, and realizing, with great and irreversible finality, that you do not have control over your own life.  There is nothing below you but God.

 

This kind of thanksgiving comes only after great fear, and often, great risk.  For the psalmist, it’s staring into the face of death, staring into an illness that threatens to steal the psalmists’ life.

It looks different for each of us, but the stark realization is the same: it’s not up to us.  We don’t get to choose.

 

My first year in graduate school I ended a relationship with a man who I loved, and who very much wanted to be with me.  This man represented security in every way.  He was older, stable, wise, and kind.  He could take care of me, he would be a good partner.  I was, in many ways, dependent on him.  And as I contemplated something that seemed next to impossible at the time: ending our partnership, I felt as if I was about to jump over the edge of something very, very high.  And into something very, very dark.  Not being with him meant being alone in the world.  And being alone in the world was an awfully scary thing.

 

Philippe Petit was 24 years old when he, with a number of accomplices, strung a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and stepped out into the void.  This is what he said later about that moment, 110 stories high:

 

I had to make a decision of shifting my weight from one foot anchored to the building, to the foot anchored on the wire.  This was probably the end of my life, to step on that wire, and, on the other hand, something that I could not resist called me upon that cable.

And death is very close.

 

There are these moments in our lives, moments of risk, moments of illness, moments of suffering, when we discover, whether we like it or not, that security, that safety, is an illusion.  Our houses and incomes and jobs and routines are all part of the trick, part of the magic that keeps us from seeing that in reality, we’re balanced on a wire, with death very close.

 

And the wire is God.

 

The moments when it all gets stripped away, as we turn to face death: these are full of terror and beauty, full of the grace and impossibility of a man balanced on a wire 110 stories up.

 

Petit’s friend said this:

I saw his face changing.  He was very tense, and all of a sudden there was something, like a relief in him.  And from that time, I thought, that’s it, he’s secure.

 

And then he begins to weep.

 

 

I want to live my life on that wire.

 

I want to do everything I can to remember that security is an illusion,

that in the end, it’s just me and a wire and the whistle of the wind.

 

Like Petit, we start onto that wire tense, testing, longing for the security of the building that was once beneath our feet.  And then, 110 stories up, we find our footing.  And we feel release.  We exchange an illusion for reality, and we do something beautiful.

 

 

We finish the sermon together, and so I invite you to share a story from your experience that’s been brought up by the text or my words.